The Song Remains the Same

Earlier this month I published a post that I called "Self Explanatory", inspired by my expectation that I would soon be returning to the States. I had to remove the post a week later because it isn't going to happen - not soon, anyway. I was lifted off the ground, I felt, and carried aloft like I was in a hot air balloon. Rising and rising ever higher, only to be pulled back down to the ground, right back to the spot of my take off. The reason why is almost ridiculously simple: the friend of mine who wanted it to happen almost as much as I did (a true brother from another mother) miscalculated the depth of the hole I am in and hence the length of the lifeline that might save me. 

Perhaps I should've left the post where it was. I had committed errors of judgement on this blog before, usually pertaining to some political outcome, that didn't pan out. But I didn't remove the posts in which my errors were laid out for posterity, or try to edit them to look more presentable. I predicted, for example, in the spring of 2016 that Donald Trump would withdraw from the race for the Republican nomination after he lost the Iowa Caucus to Ted Cruz. I also predicted that Brett Kavanaugh's nomination for the vacant SCOTUS seat would be withdrawn. As Steve Allen once said, "I stand corrected. I should be, I'm wearing surgical hose."

But there was important information in the post I took down that needs to be known, about an incident that radically altered the course of my life twelve years ago, and because I am anxious about having to tell the story again (it seems to me that I've already told the story dozens of times to members of my family and my friends), I would like to officially put it out there in the ether. This is my story:

I created this blog on September 26, 2007. On November 7 of that year, I left my dear sister behind in Anchorage, Alaska aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to my destination and, because of the 16-hour time difference and 9 hours in the air, I landed here on November 8. In a blog post published two days later, I announced the move: 

Saturday, November 10, 2007
So There I Was
I've been using this blog as a pseudo-diary, so I may as well admit the latest event in my life at mid-way. 

Before the month was over, however, an event occurred that changed everything. A fellow American, whom I had enlisted to help me find a cheap apartment so that I could move out of my not-so-cheap hotel, stole my passport and demanded $200 for it's return. That was the amount he claimed that I owed him for holding an apartment for me. Having looked at the apartment, that was completely bare of furniture, and for which he was asking more than half my monthly pension as rent, I turned it down. Feeling cheated, since he was a friend of the owner of the hotel where I was staying, this fellow expat seized the opportunity to hold my passport for ransom. Knowing full well what answer I should give him, I asked another expat what I should do. Perhaps more experienced than I was in the precariousness of a foreigner's fate without a passport, he told me to pay the $200. But I did not. Instead, I contacted the American embassy on New Year's Eve and reported the passport had been stolen. I also informed the thief of what I'd done, to which he replied with threats of violence should he ever find me and with the news that the evidence against him - my passport - had been destroyed.

Taking his threats seriously, I got out of town early in 2008 and fled south to a tiny island where I have been living ever since. I finally got my replacement passport in 2016, since my pension was just barely enough for me to live from hand to mouth, with nothing to spare.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish by posting this information the first time was to sum something up, to tie this misadventure up into some more presentable condition, and try to make sense of it. At 61, I've become an old man since I first came here at the much tenderer age of 49. There is a scene in the marvelous Sam Peckinpah film, Ride the High Country, in which two old men, Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, played by old Joel McCrea and old Randolph Scott, haggle over the scant wisdom they've accrued in their lives.

Steve Judd: Would it surprise you to know that I was once a law-breaker?
Gil Westrum: Well! Bless my stars.
Steve Judd: About the age of that boy back there; skinny as a snake and just about as mean. Ran around with the Hole-in-the-Wall bunch; gun-happy, looking for trouble -- or a pretty ankle. Had the world by the tail, so to speak. Then one night Paul Staniford picked me up. He was Sheriff of Madera County then. There'd been a fight, and I was drunk; sicker than a damn dog. Well sir, he dried me out in jail, then we went out back and he proceeded to kick the bitter hell right out of me.
Gil Westrum: That took some doin'.
Steve Judd: Not much. You see, he was right and I was wrong. That makes a difference.
Gil Westrum: Who says so?
Steve Judd: Nobody; that's something you just know. Anyhow, when I was able to walk again, I realized I'd learned a lesson: the value of self-respect.
Gil Westrum: What's that worth on the open market?
Steve Judd: Nothing to some people; but a great deal to me. But I lost it. These last years, the only work I was able to get was in places like Kate's back there... bartender, stick man, bouncer, what have you. Not much to brag on. Now, I'm gettin' back a little respect for myself. I intend to keep it, with the help of you and that boy back there. Good to be workin' again, Gil.
Gil Westrum: Yeah. [Pause] Partner, you know what's on the back of a poor man when he dies? The clothes of pride. And they're not a bit warmer to him dead than they were when he was alive. [Pause] Is that all you want, Steve?
Steve Judd: [Considers] All I want is to enter my house justified.

That last line seems a bit stoic, but it has a ring to it.
In our era of identity politics, in which people are so busy defining themselves and searching out whatever tribe or category they belong in (the narrower the better), it's comforting to summon forth what a genuine individual had to say about himself when the time arrived for him to sum it up. In his last collection of poems, In the Clearing, from 1962, Robert Frost included some lyrics that have a somewhat more intentional ring to them, that sound as if Frost were trying to justify his long life and his poetry. One of them, "Escapist - Never," comes as close as any other of his poems to a kind of self-definition.

He is no fugitive – escaped, escaping.
No one has seen him stumble looking back.
His fear is not behind him but beside him
On either hand to make his course perhaps
A crooked straightness yet no less a straightness.
He runs face forward. He is a pursuer.
He seeks a seeker who in his turn seeks
Another still, lost far into the distance.
Any who seek him seek in him the seeker.
His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever.
It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing.

Well, Robert Frost needn't have tried to sum up anything - least of all his redoubtable work as one of the foremost American poets of the 20th century. But this late poem sends a shiver of recognition through me. A bit stoic, but it has a ring to it.