journey into ixtlan

It’s funny how our journey through live brings us around in large circles to where we’ve been before. Jimbo’s journey today was with his girlfriend, but it was like some reminiscence into the past, kind of like how Charles Dickens might have imagined a father’s day story. You know, the ghost of father’s day’s past; and father’s day’s yet to come. But the spirits were more like what Carlos Castaneda may have imagined, so I stole his title.

Faithful readers of Castaneda are probably asking, “Oh, Jimbo, don’t tell us you started using peyote and psilocybin mushrooms and are learning from the mystic Don Juan?”

No, no. Nothing like that.

It was a journey into the past in that Jimbo’s girlfriend visited a piece of property she owns at Truman Reservoir in central Missouri. She hadn’t been there for eleven years, and it took a little while to find it, and when we did, we found that oak trees had taken over. It would require some work to clear the lot, although the white oaks were tall and healthy.

Anyone want to buy some resort property?

It was a nice drive. I had a chance to put a couple of hundred miles on my girlfriend’s new car. It was the first time I have driven it, and it drives well. We had a few hours to talk and she told me stories about the history of the property and how it got into her possession. There were ghosts moving in and out of the lines of succession. Decades before, my girlfriend’s grandfather had purchased the lot with the understanding that a dam would be built, the valley would turn into a lake and the water from the lake would create a vista of blue. And that a man could build a cabin on this lot that would overlook the sparkling water, and that a man could look with pride on what man, and God, had wrought. Unfortunately, the guy who sold him the lot neglected to mention that there were people who were willing to pay just a little more money and purchase the lots between his property and the sparkling water. And forever obstruct his view of the diamonds that sparkled like stardust on the surface of the cool aquamarine lake.

After we had the chance to talk to a number of very nice people, especially the extremely friendly couple who run the store at Angler’s Camp, MO., we had a chance to go to the Visitor’s Center at the dam at Truman Reservoir. That was where my ghost was. The Visitor’s Center sits on a rock bluff overlooking the dam and reservoir and there are large windows on a circular wall that allow one a 180-degree view of the water below. There were ski-boats, bass boats and pontoon boats below cris-crossing the lake. As I looked down at them and at the rock bluffs on which the building stood, I realized I had been here before. To make a long story just a little bit longer, I have attached a link to a blog I wrote last winter about a vacation in the Ozarks. Here it is.

http://jimboandhisfriends.blogspot.com/2005/01/summer-song-of-pine-cove.html

The guy who owned the cabin in the Ozarks where we stayed on that long ago vacation sold his cabin and bought a gas station, also in the Ozarks, so he could enjoy a year-round vacation by working every day. When I was about thirteen, my father went down to visit him at his gas station and took me along. We spent the night and drove back early the next morning. While entertaining myself behind the gas station the previous day, I had stepped on a board with a nail in it and had driven the nail through my foot. The pain kept me awake all night, so when we got up early in the morning and drove home, I fell asleep during the trip. I remember on the way home, my father drove up on a tall bluff that overlooked a valley and woke me up. Below us large earth moving equipment was being used to construct a dam. Dad told me that pretty soon the entire valley would be under water and that the dam would make another huge lake. He called it the Kaysinger Dam. Later, in honor of President Harry S. Truman, the name was changed.

Today, I realized the Visitor’s Center was located on the same bluff my father and I had looked over decades earlier, when it was just a gravel road, before the dam, before the lake and before the Visitor’s Center.

Who says you can’t go back? Today, we did a little time travel and we never left the comfort of the present.

It was a good day.

And we need every good day we can get here in Jimbo’s world.