Free David's Inferno by David Blistein Page B

wards.
    Still, it was quite a walk on the wild side. And while we spent a lot of the time laughing at ourselves, we were dealing with something that was bigger than the both of us.
    It’s true that none of the human figures I saw in those petroglyphs looked particularly sad to me. (Although it did feel that some of them seemed to be having a hard time expressing themselves … coulda been kids doodling for all I know.) Certainly people in other ancient cultures—Egypt, Hindu, Chinese, etc.—weren’t strangers to depression. They suspected it was caused by everything from sorcery and bad humors to being forsaken by gods. One God in particular … Job was even a less happy camper than I am.
    Back then, they tried the same kind of cures we do today—magical spells, hallucinogens, acupuncture, herbs, strange potions, and trepanation (that’s the drilling into your brain thing).
    So, who knows what subtle changes in my brain chemistry we effected or demons we exorcised?
    April 6, 2006: Albuquerque, New Mexico to Pratt, Kansas. 552 Miles
. I spend 200 miles on US Route 50, which is known as “America’s Loneliest Road.” Obviously, they haven’t traveled my neural pathways. I left Vermont three weeks ago. And while I had various places to go and people to meet, and have passed through or stayed in ±20 states, my real destination wasn’t on any map. It was a place where some Taos juju, Roswell alien, California healer, Las Vegas strangeness, or beatific vision of the Goddess of Sanity (
Beiwe
) appearing in a Toto-esque Kansas windstorm (or some combination of these) would inspire my neurons to do the job they were made for. Although my van is blown hither and yon in those vicious Kansas whirlwinds, my mind and heart stay stubbornly true to course. The hellish smell of sulfur fertilizer says it all. Purgatory would definitely be an improvement.
    April 7th, 2006: Pratt, Kansas to Marion, Illinois. 659 Miles
. A year before this trip, while driving in northern Michigan, I picked up a 24-year-old flashback of a 1960s hitchhiker. He was on his way to the annual Gathering of the Rainbow Family which describes itself as “the largest non-organization of non-members in the world.” In the course of our conversation, he spoke glowingly of his base commune back in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
    I’d thought back on this conversation occasionally over the last year until—through the miracle of mad mental alchemy—this, to me, obscure town on the Mississippi had been transformed in my imagination into a cross between Cambridge, Berkeley and Lourdes; and was filled with people who combine the authenticity of Huck Finn with the wisdom of the Dalai Lama and the healing power of Mother Teresa.
    Throughout this trip, I’ve been secretly plotting how to make an innocent detour to this Valhalla. By the time I leave Pratt, it has become an obsession. I’m certain I’ll soon be surrounded by laid-back aging hippies and their young acolytes, dancing to live music, trailed by hints of marijuana and incense. I’m convinced that my enlightened spirit and tortured heart will prove irresistible to their every healing desire. I picture a comfortable futon. Maybe a massage. Cool, healing unguents (whatever they are) gently rubbed into my third eye. At the very least, some wine, tofu, and cute girls … or, as he put it, “righteous women.”
    All I know is that the ephemeral hitchhiker was clearly an incarnation of some powerful Native American medicine man, and my encounter with him was a sign that something magical will happen to me in Cape Girardeau.
    Arriving on its outskirts, I blast through the commercial strip and soon reach the heart of the city where I begin slowly driving around looking for the countercultural hub of this heaven-on-earth.
    But there’s nothing going on. A huge mural blocks the Mississippi. The few people wandering