What the Next Moment Might Bring: Tales from the Road to High Adventure

By Jeff L. Howe

From the limited perspective of the present, the path weve chosen in life may often seem random or of little consequence. But when we examine our journey from the vantage of hindsight, we find that we have participated in life-changing moments and have been witness to singularly remarkable things.

This is a collection of moments and stories from the life of one man. Some are humorous, some are poignant, and some are terrifying. Some moments are as brief as the wink of a firefly or the exact instant of death. Others last the time it takes for a rumor to spread or for a penny to fall from a tall building. Still others take millions of years and are still happening.

Enjoy a climb to the top of a peak in central Idaho, a babys first bowel movement, or a silent drive through the redwoods. Look deeply into the eyes of a diving hawk, a profoundly retarded fifteen-year-old girl, or an aging stripper in Montana. Listen to the sounds of cold Canadian wind slipping under a warm Pennsylvania door. Smell the burning embers of a city on fire. Taste the exhaust of a jet.

Take a moment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466995772

Jeff L. Howe

Jeff L. Howe is an expatriate Michigan-American living in exile among the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he teaches science to college art students. His work has appeared in Open Salon, Our Salon, Adobe Soup, Rocks and Minerals, This Lake Alive!, Vermont History, Milwaukee Reader, and his website at jeff-howe.net.

Book preview

Copyright 2013 Jeff L. Howe.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

isbn: 978-1-4669-9576-5 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-9577-2 (e)

Trafford rev. 05/29/2013

7-Copyright-Trafford_Logo.ai www.trafford.com

North America & international

toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

phone: [phone] * fax: [phone]

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Best Ten Cents

Mountain Cabin With A Tin Roof

A Firefly Flash Mob

A Boy In A Wheelchair Waits For A Bus

I Witnessed A Murder

When The Last Girl Leaves The Nudie Pond

When The Baby Exploded

What Does A Man Who Looks Like He’d Have A Pen Look Like?

A Single Steel Paper Clip

The Skinny Kid And The Hometown Boy

The 1967 Detroit Riots From A Rooftop In Walled Lake

A Stripper Bar In Baker, Montana

The Unorthodox Church Of The Holy Moly

Dead Lady Rockin’

A Cowboy Hat Goes To Milwaukee

A Young Man’s Encounter With A Hawk

The Perfect Ice

The Darkest Age Of My Mother

Beneath The Coastal Redwoods

A Geologist And A Botanist Go Hiking In Vermont

Reverse Engineering A Rock

The Distracted Mind Of Benjamina Rae

The Invention Of Sex: An Evolutionary Tale Of Tail

The Five Yard Punt

Damn You, Canadian Wind

What The Next Moment Might Bring

Acknowledgements

The energy behind this book and any wisdom that is found within it is dedicated to my daughter Hyla, whose tireless free spirit is a constant inspiration to me. Do what you love Sweet Pea.

Thanks Mom… you’d have loved this…

Author’s Note: The Road to High Adventure has always been my informal working title for life’s various travels and experiences.

"Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."—Steven Jobs

INTRODUCTION

Art, like science, is an elegant process of discovery. Those of us who write, write to discover. We write to discover things that we already know and things that we had no idea we knew. We also write to create little spaces for ourselves within which we’ve never been, or sometimes which we’ve only been in once—long ago and far away.

But part of the discovery is that there are things within us, beautiful and ugly things that we’ll never know unless we attempt to draw them out. Some we coax and cajole. Some we trick. Some come spilling out by themselves and need to be stuffed back in. And some, we have no alternative but to reach in and grab them by the scruffs of their necks and yank them free—whining, complaining, laughing to themselves.

Art requires confidence and a certain daring-do. Part of the deal is that you have to be willing to fail. You never know what you’ll pull out when you reach in there. But I firmly believe that, with music: if you can hear it, you can play it. With art: if you can see it, you can draw it. With writing: if you can imagine it, if you can describe it, if you can feel it—you can write it.

I buttress life with words. I thank writing for giving me the opportunity to pack words gently around things to support them—like a game of sticks—and then slowly remove the things. Sometimes the words come crashing down… but sometimes they remain standing on their own.

But in either case, I discover something new.

THE BEST TEN CENTS

The sound of distorted music being played much too loudly reverberated from inside a parked car, escaped through open windows, and swirled upwards from the narrow alley below. Two automobiles in a chance meeting were parked at 3:00 a.m., their windows open, their occupants shouting, boasting and laughing loudly.

Seven stories above, in a small apartment, a man had been sleeping. The noise coming in his window was only mildly annoying at first and the man awoke only partially. It was just another sound of the city he reasoned, the type of minor disturbance that happens 24/7 here in San Francisco or in any other city of any size. At least they weren’t gun shots. The man rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but the noise persisted, piercing upwards through the late Monday night/early Tuesday morning transition.

It was an old building on Fell Street, on the cross town route, heading towards Golden Gate Park. It buttressed the last hillside facing downtown before you traversed a small crest and began the long gradual downhill through the Avenues and out towards the Pacific Ocean. The neighborhood was on the edge of a regentrification zone, where new money, primarily gay money, was buying up beaten up old properties and refurbishing them. He had chosen this apartment because it was far enough from downtown to have what passed for reasonable rent in San Francisco. Out each of his two windows he owned a million-dollar view of downtown, a mile or so away, that glowed like a jewel when not obscured by fog.

But there was also a down side. Although new money was coming into the surrounding area, none of it had yet reached this particular building. The neighborhood remained a scary one. It was situated just a block from a large public housing project and the streets beyond the locked lobby door on the first floor crawled with an assortment of winos, derelicts and major scary dudes. Just a few months before, Chris Pirsig, the son of author Robert Pirsig, and a major character is his father’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, had been senselessly murdered while waiting for a bus just three blocks away. Three weeks ago, the man himself had been held up and robbed at knife-point and then thrown into a stinking trash dumpster while walking home with two bags of groceries. He waited there until he saw an old women peering into the dumpster to see if he was OK.

*

Still fearful and angry from the dumpster incident, the man went to the window and looked down. The fog obscured his view of the cars but he could see the eerie glow of headlights, each pointing in opposite directions. The cars had stopped in the middle of the alley, directly below his window, driver’s sides facing in. Engines had been shut off but stereos were left blasting, and ‘you dudes were being loudly exchanged. A glass bottle smashed and someone laughed hysterically. A fresh round of name-calling ensued, another bottle exploded, and the music was turned up.

The man leaned out the window. Hey, shut up down there! he hollered in the direction of the parked cars, his vitriol accelerating at the rate of 32 feet per second/per second, as it plummeted downward. The music dimmed for just a second. Well, that was easy, he thought to himself. But then the clamor resumed with the music turned up even louder.

He hollered again, peppering it with the appropriate expletives. But this time there was no response. The din continued unabated. The man knew he would never get back to sleep as long as the ruckus continued below. Unlike the occupants of the cars, he had to get up in just a few hours and begin the 30 minute walk to his job in a small lithography shop south of Market Street.