I spent most of my long, spare hours of youth sitting on the dorm stoop, eyes reddened by the incessant Albuquerque wind. I was a young girl on her own for the first time and by this wind I felt polished, as though I’d gone through a rock tumbler, sanded, but not clean—no, the dirt seemed to be in every pore and fell out in piles when I unrolled my pant cuffs. One day, a good-looking boy with the meaty, strong build of a Clydesdale approached my stoop. He told me that he’d just come from Ohio and made it sound like he’d hitchhiked across the country, which caught my interest, even though he later admitted to taking the Greyhound bus some of the trip. He was a Jack Kerouac. He smiled as he spoke, the words shaped behind gritted teeth in a way that reminded me of a tribe I’d just read about in an intro to anthropology class where the people die of kuru, the “smiling disease.” Bob the Drifter asked whether this university offered any free housing.
I said that he could stay with me if he liked.
He stayed with me for less than a week. He rolled his sleeping bag out along the dormitory’s concrete floor each night and re-rolled it each morning before showering on the boys’ floor. I stole additional food from the cafeteria for our dinner, wrapping up extra peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and apples for my guest. We had long chats about Eastern philosophy in the morning while I drank coffee and at night before the unrolling of the sleeping bag. He formed his sentences slowly, pausing frequently, weaving thoughts together. Bob the Drifter told me stories of his travels. The content and the delivery combined to create a past that, to me back then, sounded magical.
He told me about walking down a lonesome country road in West Virginia. Bob the Drifter noted the houses steeped in poverty, miles apart from one another. Dogs barked as he passed the plots, and each call excited another distant dog in the mountains, creating an offset echo. The breeze picked up, wind chimes and rusting bits of metal tinkled and clanged, adding tenor to the canine chorus. The steady contact of his boots on the road created the percussion. A whole symphony played for him alone. He spoke of simple connections, one movement exciting a chain of events, and chaos theory.
“A butterfly can flap its wings in China and weeks later, maybe a hurricane will form,” he said, and at the time, I thought this was the most magical thing anyone could say.
He spoke of another time when, hitchhiking through Alabama, a trucker offered him a ride. In the cab they chatted, and the truck driver decided to evangelize his passenger. The man said Jesus owned nothing, He might return, and He could embody any person. Jesus, like the drifter, would know the vast expanse of the earth, having measured its distance with his own feet. Bob the Drifter told me that the trucker seemed nervous as he glanced from the road ahead over to him. As the trucker lectured, he started to talk himself into the idea that maybe Bob the Drifter was a test from God, or even Jesus himself returned. Wanting to prove his faith and becoming paranoid, the trucker presented everything and anything he owned to help Bob the Drifter out along his journey. Noting the drifter’s worn boots, he offered his own shoes. Bob the Drifter politely declined and tried to tell the trucker that he wasn’t Jesus riding shotgun in the cab. However, he did tell the trucker that he was on a spiritual journey.
He tried to describe this journey to me, but I worried that a second person never comprehends the spiritual illumination of another. I had just read Siddhartha and understood from the book that the way to enlightenment could not be given to another person, that one must seek one’s own path. Spirituality is universal, but experiences are different, and the way we describe these experiences is also different. Bob the Drifter used terms I had never heard before, like “is-ness” and “The Moment.” These terms were not defined by any organized religion I knew. Bob the Drifter referred to his enlightenment as “complete mental clarity” or “separation of thought and awareness.” I liked how he called it a “still is-ness of simply being.”
Bob the Drifter returned for three consecutive springs. At the sight of the first tumbleweed crashing in the wind, a sure sign of spring, I expected to run into him along Route 66. When Bob the Drifter would return, we would go on small outings. I hardly left my one-mile radius around the university, where I had friends, work, a store, a park, and a post office. These outings delighted me. Once, we rode the bus to the outdoor flea market, where Bob the Drifter needed to buy a new blade for a blender. We ran into a beekeeper there, an older man who sold honey out of his truck bed and who knew Bob the Drifter. The beekeeper offered us stick samples of his finest jarred honey. My hair kept blowing onto the honey-dipped sticks, and when I finally got the samples into my mouth the honey was gritty with topsoil kicked up from the wind, but they were delicious.
On the bus ride back, I told Bob the Drifter about walking the 12 and a half miles from the university into the foothills of the Sandia Mountains so I could watch the sunset over the city. The walk had taken me three hours. The colors of the sunset had been particularly vibrant because the wind had blown more sediment into the air: water collected around the airborne sediment, creating a kind of prism effect that sharpened the warm colors. Bob the Drifter smiled. I was getting it. I had lived in The Moment.
He didn’t return to Albuquerque just to visit me—for him, I was only another pleasant part of the city’s landscape. Instead, he came back annually to see Don, who he had first seen on a morning TV show, when Don promoted his raw food diet. Later, Bob the Drifter sought out Don to learn that diet. To eat organically for under two dollars a day, one allows oats to soak in water until sprouted, and together with garlic puts them in a blender, and eats only that mush, nothing more.
Bob the Drifter had been strong before meeting Don, but he quickly transformed from a barrel-chested boy into a slender, starved man. Don was a type of Albuquerque legend. He wrote letters to the editor to promote his diet and lifestyle of living on less than four thousand dollars a year. Everyone had “Don sightings”: “I saw Don today all the way up on Central and Lomas,” or “Don was in the co-op this afternoon, picking through the apples for spotted ones.” He wore hot pants or a loincloth, and in the winter, a patchwork jacket, but he never wore a shirt. He was voted the city’s top nudist every year in the weekly alternative newspaper. I didn’t know anyone who had actually spoken to Don, except Bob the Drifter. When Bob the Drifter did not come to Albuquerque one year, I thought of seeking out Don, but I didn’t—I’d been to his house once before and decided that rather than sitting on Don’s floor and listening to him rant about food and taxes, a collage of gay porn behind him on the wall, rather than repeat that scene, I would wait.
I wanted to see Bob the Drifter and hear his stories about the boy who was afraid of the cops when they camped in a California park, a cold snap in Florida when iguanas froze and fell from the trees only to thaw out and reanimate when the temperature rose, or the unincorporated towns he traveled through while hiking the Appalachian Trail. I needed these stories. Bob the Drifter was making his own meaning out of life, living in the unbounded now—I needed to know it was possible. But he didn’t return that spring.
We had always exchanged sporadic e-mails while he traveled. I bought a camera, and I would see something interesting while walking around and taking photographs and write him as soon as I returned home.
Bob the Drifter had left Ohio for Florida for Santa Cruz. One afternoon, I was going through the abandoned ice house, where they used to ship slabs of ice and the shaved off bits for the old ice boxes into town on the railroad, and I found a quote—about carrying “redwerms” in a Maxwell coffee can to go fishing—on a boarded up window, written in yellow crayon and covered in cobwebs.
The find instantly reminded me of Bob the Drifter, and how I imagined his life during a period of easy-sounding homelessness in Santa Cruz or escaping a day of working the field at a community-supported agricultural hacienda. The sense of freedom in the quote, not just the idea that one could spend the day fishing, but that there might be several such days, appealed to me. A worry-free life in the sun, without work or bills—this is how I thought of Bob the Drifter’s days, because that was how he’d always described them.
But after I wrote, his reply told a different story than the ones I’d grown accustomed to—an undeniable sadness, a break from his lifestyle, and an intense loss. I wrote him again, and he e-mailed me back with just the lyrics to Forever Young. Depressions are strikingly similar, but I think that for a loner without the simplest attachments to the world—work, friends, family—it becomes a state almost impossible to change. He moved to Cincinnati. He gave up.
The seasons turned; sunflowers were deadheaded, ice slicked campus, a rush of winds fell off the mountains. I expected Bob the Drifter, and he didn’t show. He was still in Cincinnati. I made plans to visit him.
My next Christmas break, I went home to Kentucky and bought a bus ticket to Cincinnati. Bob the Drifter met me at the Greyhound station, though I didn’t recognize him before he recognized me. He had gained weight in that way where emotional stressors change the body. Whereas the last time I had seen him so thin, now he had thick fingers, pudgy cheeks and swells above his eyes that drooped, giving his eyes an almond shape.
We went to his efficiency apartment, a room smaller than some bathrooms. The walls were bare. He had a dresser, a sleeping bag, a chair, and a miniature refrigerator. He lived there free of rent, because he did maintenance work on a set of college apartments owned by an elderly invalid gentleman whom he fed breakfast each morning. Bob the Drifter sat in his chair. He sat in the way a beaten man sits, with shoulders slumped forward, head slightly down, and hands wringing his knit hat. He still had that quiet, soft-spoken way about him, where he listened as if I were saying something that could be very important and he must think it over for a moment before he wove his delicate response. And he tried to tell me about the complete mental clarity he once knew, about how he lost it on a visit home; his family hadn’t understood his quest, his father had Parkinson’s and had expected something else from Bob the Drifter’s life, since the boy had been a football hero and homecoming king and all the normal small town elements had been stacked. But Bob the Drifter didn’t really know why he’d lost the mental clarity, or why he lost it at that moment—his family had been saying these things for years. Maintaining his sedentary life was more than he could handle. He said his mind was jumbled, and he couldn’t articulate what had happened to create his spiritual crash. I wanted to know this cause more than any other thing, but I was realizing that I wouldn’t ever know exactly what his enlightenment had been like or what could create a loss of it. All I could know were my mythic, windy memories and what I could see now, in this hilly, rusty city. He hadn’t traveled in two years, not even to see his family in northern Ohio. Since quitting the raw food diet, he hardly heard from Don anymore. He didn’t leave his house much; he didn’t experience the city. Other than the invalid and a roofer who also worked on the property, I was the first person who Bob the Drifter had spoken to in almost two years. My visit was an event. He hardly left the property. Due to the jumble in his head, he sought mental silence by leaving CNN on. CNN was the most stimulating TV channel I knew; not content to just have the one talking head telling the news, there are two headline scrolling bars at the bottom of the screen, and three small boxes of news story footage stacked on the right side of the screen. My eyes couldn’t take this in all at once, so they leapt from clip to clip, always just missing something that sounded really important. I asked if we could go get a coffee so I could get away from the TV. When we returned, we ran into the roofer. He looked to be in his early fifties, with a graying goatee. He didn’t say hi. Instead, he said, “Oh-ho, Bob, is this your sister?” Bob the Drifter said no, a friend. And the roofer said, “Nope, must be Bob’s sister, because Bob doesn't have any friends.” I could see the pain play out on Bob the Drifter’s face, and I wanted to smack the guy because it was a nasty, mean thing to say. But Bob the Drifter slouched away, and I followed. When we were inside, I said, “Why would he say a thing like that?” And Bob the Drifter only shrugged. He sat in his chair, wrung his hat. I said that when I was 19, I thought that he was mystical. I always expected him in spring, even if it was just a coincidence. I wanted him to tell me about hitchhiking again, about West Virginia and chaos theory and the truck driver who thought Bob the Drifter was Jesus. So I told him about a winter when I camped in the back of the truck in the Ozarks and one morning, I woke to find the bed coated in frost. I described how my warm breath rose up in little clouds and stopped near the camper top, where it condensed and small snowflakes formed and fluttered back to me. I said I’d never seen anything like it—a self-contained weather system. I had focused on my breathing, my small cloud and its precipitation. I cultivated the stillness and snow. Is-ness, The Moment. And he said that he shook when he slept, that sometimes he woke himself screaming. His enlightenment had broken; he had post-traumatic stress. The easy homelessness in Santa Cruz could never again exist, not even in memory. I thought of Bob the Drifter writhing in his sleep, how terrible his dreams must be. I knew that next year, when the wind rose and the tumbleweeds collided with cars in the intersections and the long vistas disappeared in dirt and the people argued from their livers, that next windy season, I knew that Bob the Drifter wouldn’t be coming back to Albuquerque.