by Don Hall

Vision Quest : a solitary vigil by an adolescent American Indian boy to seek spiritual power and learn through a vision the identity of his usually animal or bird guardian spirit

As far as I know, I'm neither adolescent (the exception being my sense of humor), nor an American Indian (although, like Elizabeth Warren, I have a bit of that ancestry somewhere in the genetic muttery embedded in my DNA). If I have a spirit animal it almost has to be a silver back gorilla. I have also, in the past three months, gone on a bona fide vision quest within the confines of the one bedroom apartment my ex-wife and I shared for the majority of the past three years. A solitary vigil. Each FaceTime call and remote podcast recording like having friends and family peek over the edge of an empty well to chat with the sad beast trapped at the bottom.

Sheesh. That sounds dismal, doesn’t it? Apart from the initial shock of having the carefully crafted life I enjoyed—married to the love of my life, making a living writing stuff, the brilliant and beautiful desert around me—blown away like playground equipment on Hiroshima, the journey from that life to a brand new existence without any easy answers has stripped away so many of my notions of myself and left me raw, bleeding, and with a sense of being discarded. Just after the pandemic, people who had adopted rescue dogs to keep them company during lockdown then later drove out to the desert and abandoned these canines. I am one of those dogs.

The past few months have been a time of grieving loss. I'm old enough to know that I will mourn the loss of my wife, my best friend, the comfort of having someone I chose to be in my corner for a good solid chunk of time but these few months were the heavy lifting of the process. In my bizarre stationary vision quest I've had the time to stuff my head straight up my ass and view my naval from the inside for which to gaze long and lovingly. I've asked the million questions one asks when chaos renders its impish head and disrupts the routine and the comfortable. How did this happen? Why did this unfold as it has? Am I broken and that's why I missed it for so long? What's wrong with her? What's wrong with me?

What the holy fuck am I supposed to do now?

I can't confess to having any in-depth answers to any of it but I can confide that the walkabout within the confines of this one bedroom has certainly provided some insight. One might call it spiritual power. Others might label it self reflective therapy. What the hell do I know?

I know that, in terms of my own culpability in the demise of my marriage, I’m a terrible judge of character. I went back and took a look at the lessons I learned in my 48th year (written exactly three months before meeting her) and the first lesson was “Beware the red flags for they tell you the future.” Ninety days later and the lesson had all but been forgotten. Plain and simple (because the reality is as sordid and fucked as in a Lars Von Trier film) I was taken for a ride. A sham marriage based on her need to escape and my need to be needed. Sure, we did better than fine until I was clued in on the deep reservoir of lies and duplicity but, once you see the crimes behind the smiles, the smiles feel dangerous.

I'm a goal-oriented type. My goal, if there is to be one, during this period of self isolation is to avoid becoming bitter. There's plenty of bitter out in the world and I'd prefer to not add to it. I have plenty of reasons to be bitter, to become brittle and angry, to stew in my own juices like a radish marinated in vinegar. A long term goal I'd set for myself decades ago was to learn to control my temper. I had the Hulk-rage always at the ready, a fire that could combust and explode at the slightest provocation, and it caused too much damage throughout my life. In a lot of ways, this trial by fire I'm enduring is cementing how successful I've been in achieving that goal.

Two days before the moving pod is scheduled to drop in the parking lot and I am to fill it up with the furniture and stuff I own and I'm shaken awake at 5:00am by the fire alarms in the apartment. Not quite cogent, I pop up and begin searching, looking for smoke in the dark. I cross to where I hear the ridiculous but necessarily loud double beeps and open the door to the water heater closet. I'm hit in the face with what I mistake for smoke but was in fact water. No fire. A pipe burst. A flood. A geyser of water shooting out and up. I scramble to find a way to shut the water off to no avail. Nothing I do works. Ten minutes of this and I'm standing in two-inches of water that has created a mini-swamp in the entire place. I call the maintenance line but it's pre-dawn and I'm getting through to the phone tree, the AI assuring me that help is on the way without the comfort of having someone to bark at in frustration.

It hits me like the water in my face. I'm not in control of anything in this situation.

I pause, soaking wet. I grab my pool shoes. I look around the apartment. I realize, because I am fully prepared to pack up that goddamned moving pod, most of my valuable stuff is already in plastic storage bins. I calmly start moving the few things that water will damage out to the patio. I control what is within my control. Then I wait. I make some coffee. I smoke. And I wait for the cavalry.

Just under two hours and the maintenance guy shows up. He apologizes. I tell him it's unnecessary but how do we shut the water off? He runs around to the side of the building and the water ceases its gush. He takes pictures and continues to apologize. I'm cool. What do we do about the water? He calls a crew to come vacuum out the water and leave huge industrial fans to dry the rest. He fixes the burst pipe and tells me I can shower and shit. The crew shows up.

Later, I can tell that the word had traveled among the rest of the maintenance crew that my apartment was completely flooded and that I was completely calm about it. I see a sense of surprise. One young guy tells me a story about a similar situation a few buildings south and how the occupant screamed at him, raging on the phone, losing his shit at his own helplessness. The young guy tells me they avoid him now and let his maintenance requests sit for as long as they can.

Again, later, I ask the head maintenance guy where I can have them park the pod so no one is inconvenienced. "Any where you want, Don. You've been through enough inconvenience with all that water."

Portents and signs. A flood during a drought in the desert? Definitely a sign Vegas wants me gone. The episode is also an apt metaphor for my third divorce. Chaos. Destruction. A complete and utter loss of any control over the situation. Then calm. Pragmatic observation of what I can control. No tantrums or outrage. Deal with the circumstance like an adult, breathe, find the silver linings, read the tea leaves, move on.

So much of my midlife has been about finding work that befits a man of my education and drive. Some of my good friends are on this path and are killing it financially and I’ll confess a strain of envy. In this journey of the mind, at a brand new ground zero, I ask myself if that is the track I want to continue running. Working for the sake of paying bills. It was the dichotomy I struggled with long before I met and married her. Artist or worker?

I read a letter from Vonnegut to a class of children:

I recall a van-life poet I heard read recently. He was a vagabond poet, a nomad who focused on the writing and doing manual labor to feed himself. "I want work that gives me a sense of daily accomplishment. Show up, do the work, clock out, get paid. No emails, no meetings. That leaves me the mental capacity to write."

My spirit animal grunts, fists to chest, and nods aggressively.