“You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.” Uncle Ellis — No Country For Old Men
It’s not that bit of dialog from the Coen Brothers excellent adaptation of No Country For Old Men that wakes me up at 2:30 in the morning. Not even when it’s preceded by Tom Ed Bell’s brooding statement, “I feel overmatched.” It’s not even the scene in its entirety, being, as it is, one of the best about hard life in a hard country. But it is what I sometimes think about with my 3 AM coffee.
I do feel overmatched. And sometimes the stoic idea that you can’t stop what’s coming, and that it ain’t about you, isn’t all that comforting.
Last weekend I was running The Monsters. Some guy down in the wash had his pair of German shepherds off leash. They ran up on my dogs the way shepherds sometimes do: crouched, down on their haunches, hackles raised. I did not interpret this as friendly. So I got out my air horn and warned them off. This upset the owner. He began ranting at me that “my day was coming.” And, “whitey don’t run this no more.” “I’m sick of you white people.” At one point he picked up a river rock to heave at me. Fortunately he realized that he couldn’t throw it up the embankment and reverted to ranting. Eventually he began his world domination by re-leashing his dogs and we all went on our way.
Ignoring pending race wars, I also see that same river bed is now full of homeless camps. Where there were three or four last March, now there are dozens. The ghost river flows past one of the main retail arteries of our town’s south side. I’m not sure how long you can expect someone camped under a salt cedar to ignore the suburban excess of all-you-can-eat salad and breadsticks. But when the buffet is only 100 yards away it can’t be long. The suburbanites claim to be ready to defend. But the quiet hum of air conditioning is a poor atmosphere for preparation.
This all simmers in the stew pot of a pandemic, waiting to boil over. Yet as we approach the goal line on SARS-Cov-2, our governor has mysteriously spiked the ball on the five-yard line. He turned away FEMA’s help in getting more people vaccinated, all the while ending mask and distancing mandates. He believes that, “Arizonans will behave responsibly.” Maybe he knows better than me. Maybe the view from the rock he lives under is better than mine. One thing’s for sure. We’re going to find out. B.1.1.7 lurks.
I can’t stop what’s coming. I get it. It’s not about me. But let’s be real. It is disquieting. I’m not sure I’m ready to be buried in this hard caliche.
3/26/21
