My Red Wings are still dusty from a six day saunter in the Rocky Mountains as I walk into a Larimer Street bar in Denver where hipsters drink craft beer on weekday afternoons. I sit amid blurred faces and gaze into the eyes of the cultured youth. The men wear flowered shirts with slim jeans cutoff at the shins and the women are young and half-pretty and and they have dark tattoos on their skull white skin and their chats are filled with frivolous gossip that splash their burgeoning existence with a sense of significance. They are at odds now with everything they will one day become. The beers I sip help cope with the sights and sounds around me. It’s only been a few hours since I left behind the mountains and the vast meadows and the stars and moon and the untainted air that held me for the last few days, and I already feel like hell. I’d rather be on the trail, alone again, surrounded by wildflowers, instead, I’m in the city and the city demands compliance and submission and I’m not good at either. It’s hard to breathe here. It only takes a few nights sleeping beneath the stars, totally enshrouded in nature to realize how bounded we've become within the pages of a collective illusion, alienated and at odds with our primordial flame, wandering lost in a cold, desacralized world. We dwell in a fabricated reality, suffer afflictions of our own creation, and scramble after remedies spun from the same cloth. The daunting words of Emerson loom in my brain: The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. The drastic division, the tides of chaos, the cultural malaise we see today are the climactic echoes of an unhinged epoch approaching its inevitable fate. Blind obedience is a crutch for the weak-kneed. Security is hemlock to the spirit. The chains we carry around are about to get heavier. Just around the corner from where I sit is a row of tents lined on the sidewalks inhabited by demented vagrants. A man with no teeth and no shoes gives the middle finger to a light pole. A whore strides past the bar window with scarred heels and smeared lipstick across her cheek. The creatures of the night are alive looking for a small win. Across the street there’s a business party going on at an elegant bar where intoxicated hotshots with gaunt souls conversate on careers and the shape of the economy and the upcoming presidential election. I look out at the corner and see two policemen lingering over a double amputee man who is flailing on the pavement bellowing incoherent jargon under the street lights. It’s all too much. I want to flee to the mountains and lie down on the pine-needled floor of the forest in the sweet shade of a Douglas Fir like I did the day before. I want to sip cold creek water and reacquaint myself with the fragmented light of sunrise coming through the aspens at dawn. I want to be serenaded once again by the warbling of the ancient birds high up in the Ponderosa Pine. I want to remain where life is sacred and wild and devoid of the awful stench of an ailing culture. My flight leaves in the morning. I down my last sip of beer and walk out into the dark night as the sirens close in. Somewhere the Chrysanthemums are blooming in the late summer wind. It’s not here.
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Wow! I spent a year living in a pickup truck, long before van life was a thing. Returning to a "normal life" after hundreds of miles on foot in remote Rockies trails all over the US and Canada left me yearning for the reality clear mountain spaces. 40 plus years later I am retired to 40 acres in the Blue Ridge.
I was not wrong to yearn for this.
Rittenberry shines a light into the dark heart of who we have become.
40 years ago, I spent three summers backpacking in Colorado. I go back now via Google earth, and visit those places only to find whole stands of trees standing dead as climate change starts to devour the living world. Your impulse is right and true… worship what is worthy of reverence while you can, and let your poems stand as an indictment of the indifferent. Thank you.