Pilgrimage With the Technicolor Gypsy

There's a tree downtown from which, legend has it, the first humans were born. They were squeezed out, from a crevasse between two massive exposed roots, head first like most babies, but could crawl upon touching the earth. The tree nourished them and sheltered them; extending its branches downward with fruits rich in electrolytes and amino acids, and blocking the elements with thick foliage and its own subtle infrared energies. These people had no one to observe, no one to speak to them, so they created their own customs as the need arose, and called each thing what they felt it should be called. After growing to where they could walk tall under their own strength they ventured out from under the branches and called many things what they were. After all, they were those things. No one had ever said otherwise.

This morning I made a pilgrimage to the tree with a Technicolor Gypsy. She pulled over in her pickup truck as I was biking and through hand signals and sketches in the dirt we determined we were going to the same place. Somewhere off in the distance I could hear airplanes taking off. I threw my proverbial horse in the back of her truck and hopped in the passenger seat. She had neon turquoise hair and wore a bright pink bandanna. We each spoke of our homelands in our respective tongues. I told her of the forests with bark the color of fire hidden in valleys flowing with rivers of fog and the radical diviners who tore apart matter itself in their mountain hideout. Although I couldn't understand her language exactly I gathered she was from a place where a great desert met an even greater ocean.

Of these first people, some accounts say there were twelve, some say there were seven, some say it was a prime number between fifty and one hundred. There certainly were more than two. They set out, in a group, for the end of the universe, which they could see from the highest branches of the Mother Tree. But as they walked towards the horizon, naming things as they went, it receded into the distance with increasing speed, until they could no longer be sure it had an end. They wandered in this fashion until one of the women became pregnant and they decided that if more people were to be made, it was best to be stationary like the tree that birthed them.

Today there is no mention of what makes this tree special. It's the largest in the park, by far, but there is not even so much as a plaque to commemorate what happened here. Kids hide behind it to smoke pot and drink cheap beer. The Technicolor Gypsy and I sat cross-legged on the grass, staring at it, passing back and forth a thermos of tea. Tea that was black like delta soil.

This first child to be born did not grow up to name things. Some things he could not name, because his parents' generation had already called the things what they were. But there were new things, which no one had said were anything, left for the child to name, but he did not. They journeyed back to the Mother Tree to ask why. But they received no answer. That was, until they decided to climb the tree once again. After waiting for several days she provided them with fruit and soft canopies to rest on. By the time they reached the top they could see that the world still had an end. So they kept moving to push the universe outwards in all directions, so their children would come to know the joy in giving names.

Fog drifted in from the ocean and hit the mountains, coalescing into thick clouds which broke apart on the southern slopes. The Technicolor Gypsy said it was time for her to go. I grabbed my bike out of her truck and she drove off to chase the currents. I ate tacos from a taco truck with my ass leaning against my bike frame, standing under a street sign. I smiled at motorists who didn't smile back. The man running the taco truck gave me an extra cup of salsa. I tucked it into the side pouch of my backpack and started the ride back home, along dusty roads with semis spewing dust and diesel fumes. It's a long way to the edge of the universe but I may never need to go that far. Home is far enough from the Mother Tree.