Where The American Dream Went To Die.

More about Where The American Dream Went To Die.

One minute I was a dead sadhu lying in an alley in Madras, India, and the next I was hurtling down some supernatural freeway with no speed limit, no exit signs, and absolutely no explanation from management.

The Super Bardo Highway.

Was this reincarnation or some kind of astral booby trap? Had I been kidnapped by the Department of Karmic Immigration? Who authorized California?

There were plenty of respectable destinations available in the universe. Tibet. Benares. Another planet. Perhaps a pleasant dimension where nobody had invented compulsory education.

But no. California.

Nine months later I was born in Merced, a small agricultural town in the Central Valley, not far from Yosemite, where granite mountains rose above the valley like the petrified ambitions of dead gods.

My soul had apparently traded a begging bowl in Madras for a birth certificate in Merced.

An astonishingly bad exchange, depending on your understanding of liberation.

By the time I was four, I was wandering through Sacramento’s old Chinatown, a surviving fragment of Gold Rush California. One square block of China, paved with black basalt cobblestones, surrounded by a civilization that was busily demolishing its own memory.

The Gold Rush wasn’t ancient history. I had relatives who remembered people who had lived through it. History was still warm. You could almost smell the horses.

There was no Interstate 5 cutting through the valley. There was Highway 99, two lanes of American destiny running straight through the middle of every town.

Lodi! Stockton! Modesto!

Every week we went roaring down that highway in the family automobile, passing through Lodi, a town I rather liked. Years later Creedence Clearwater Revival would complain about being stuck there again.

I never understood the objection.

Lodi was perfectly respectable compared with Stockton, which always struck me as a place where the American Dream had stopped for gasoline and been robbed.

My grandmother lived in Modesto. The whole valley was a vast network of family connections, irrigation ditches, orchards, dusty streets, and towns that smelled of agriculture and gasoline.

Then my parents moved us from Elk Grove when I was six.

I was outraged.

Elk Grove was paradise! Open country! Bugs! Snakes! Lizards! Mice! Every square foot of ground contained something worth investigating.

I had been born with the nervous system of a small predatory mammal.

Give me an abandoned hay bale, a ditch, or a patch of grass and I would disappear into a state of absolute concentration.

People accused me of being spaced out.

Spaced out?

I was the only person paying attention!

The adults were wandering around discussing mortgages and dinner arrangements while I was conducting a full-scale biological investigation of the known universe.

Years later I watched my great-aunt scanning the ground in a field, looking for movement.

There it was!

The same instinct. The same concentration. The ancient neurological machinery of the hunter, operating beneath the civilized disguise.

I wondered whether the brain entered something resembling the theta rhythms researchers sometimes associate with particular states of attention.

Perhaps cats knew something we had forgotten.

Perhaps the dead sadhu had reincarnated as a California field mouse hunter.

And perhaps the booby trap had only just begun.