On the Road Again (cont'd)

My dad made moonshine.
I grew pot, my son
cooks crystal meth.
A family history of law-breaking
is an indicator of guilt. The fruit
doesn't fall far from the tree.
Good thing law enforcement no longer needs
probable cause to get a search warrant or a wiretap.
The Patriot Act has made suspicion and educated guesses enough,
and if you are a foreigner, you can forget habeas corpus. It's just
No-Knock and Preventive Detention. Watergate lives. Instead of
pardoning Richard Nixon, someone should have driven a stake
through his heart. He's up there playing catch with Hunter S.
Thompson, instead of down in hell, where he belongs.

Nutall Rise is not along the coast.
The so-called Redneck Riviera.
But it's a part of the mullet culture.
We used to look forward to a mullet platter
as far inland as Perry, Florida, where Pouncey's
served guava jelly with a cornmeal hushpuppy.
Lager beer is the natural solvent of Bach,
H. L. Mencken said.

I think I found Nutall Rise.
I found a sinkhole and a dead end road.
No café. Plenty of trailers and fishing shacks.
Dead refrigerators on the porch. A Lear jet
up on cinder blocks, the head redneck.
There didn't used to be a sign. Now, it can be
overrun by tourists. I have ruined it. No more
unspoiled, off-the-beaten-path sight-seeing destination.
Next it will be goddamned birdwatchers in Bermuda shorts
with field glasses and copies of OLD FOLKS AT HOME
in their leather shell bags doubling as
an urban purse.

The curse of the pharaohs.
Bad, bad, bad.

I should call a book, or subtitle one,
"An American Writer's Reply
to Just Criticism." In it, I would
apologize for my errant ways. My decadent
formalism. "Mea culpa," I would say. "Fuck you
and the horse you rode in on, Kimo Sabe."
Shostakovich's 9th Symphony is a joke, a prank,
a thumbing of his nose at god, man, and hero.
Stalinist dictator, cultural commissar, the classical tradition.
An artist reports only to himself.

I dug up the mandible
of an Indian warrior
buried with his battle axe,
a piece of polished greenstone chert
that looked like a piece of jade, coming up
under my trowel. Jasper. Maybe that's
what has been dogging me. The curse of the pharaohs.
What kind of a right bastard disinters the dead, if he isn't
interested in performing some voodoo ritual with the bones of
a potent symbol in his heathern religion? Is science such a belief system?
What's the difference between an archeologist and a grave robber?
If they haven't been converted to Christianity by a missionary they are savages.
I'm no better than a conquistador. Torquemada. The Spanish Inquisition.
I called the site I dug in, 8JE57, the Slough of Despond, after Pilgrim's Progress.

The Perry Quarry is a going concern,
judging from the dump trucks going back and forth.
Martin Marietta Aggregates. Didn't they build
the F-22 Raptor? $85 million each, before
cost overruns. Global Power and Reach
for America. Everybody has a share,
Milo Minderbinder says. Strafe the troops.

Telling people how to find
Nutall Rise is like revealing
the location of the Wakulla Volcano.
Bad karma. Some things should be
kept secret. Known only to people
who have undergone initiation rites.
It's us versus outsiders. No wonder no one
would tell me anything and I had to go on
guesswork and defective memory. Navigate
by back azimuth. Looking for ghost towns
and forgotten vistas. It isn't vanishing, it never was.
I made it up. I imagined it. I think I don't remember.
How would I know? "How he gave the speech
at Gettysburg for Lincoln that day. I know that one so well."