Journals (Part 1)

I toured the Rhododendron Garden for the first time and reveled in its immediate soothing effect on the various American disturbances unsettling my mind. After the tour, I bought an annual pass and knew I would return on a regular basis and sit on a bench under a 30-foot rhododendron and write or do nothing at all except gaze upon a lake and waterfowl.

What a fine morning and different walk, meaning not through my local homeless encampment, to begin it. Sometimes, I force myself to take a break from observing the New American Diaspora. You have to make a conscious effort to to avoid it and I was doing exactly that.

Out in the parking lot, I decided to keep walking down the boulevard and meet up with a creek that I suspected was laden with beaverwood.

The boulevard ran along a socialist golf course and I passed a kid teeing off on the 14th hole, a par four, dogleg left. He smacked it down the middle. I saw a concrete path to my left that paralleled the 14th hole and took it, while watching the kid hit his second shot. It faded to the right and hit some branches of an oak tree. He had 50 yards to the green to get up and down for par. Something down the path arrested my attention: a lone tent pitched off to the side near the creek. If I kept on my present course I would walk within inches of it. I wasn't really in the mood to observe, let alone interact with something related to the New American Diaspora, but this is how it always unfolds.

I stopped for a moment to watch the kid hit a wedge to within eight feet of the hole. I could watch him putt and then turn around. Or I could keep going to down the path. I kept going and soon found myself standing in front of the tent. I peered inside. How could I not? I had never seen the inside of a tent of a member of the New American Diaspora.

It was an expensive three-person model. The flap was wide open. No one was inside. There was water pooled on the floor. I saw a cot with an expensive sleeping bag strewn across it. I saw ear buds, a flashlight, a tiny propane stove, various toiletries, empty bottles of booze, cans of beans and other items I associated with someone living on the streets. The contents inside the tent exuded a definite male occupant and the condition of the interior and surrounding disarray of other items, including a bong, barbecue and bicycle parts, suggested strongly to me the tent had been abandoned. That's certainly nothing new. Tents, shanties, RVs and other makeshift domiciles are abandoned all the time.

I made a second visual inspection. I saw something else resting on the cot: two journals, a hard back Dickens-like red and black ledger and a pink softcover composition book with silver glitter encrusted into stars adoring the front.

Journals! A writer resided in this tent and kept a journal, possibly two! They were abandoned like the rest of gear. I had to read them. I had to know what was going on inside the mind of the writer. This was like finding gold and you weren't even looking for it. And these were nuggets gleaming in the crystalline stream, not flakes in the black sand.

There they were, five feet away. I could grab them and only put one foot inside. I was saving something important human from human ruination.

It all added up to an excellent rationalization for a writer who always remembers Joan Didion's priceless and true line: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

I couldn't do it. I couldn't step inside. It felt like an obvious violation. I resumed walking down the path, and my rationalizations resumed as well.