One last post of photos from our September roadtrip through the Wild West. After Monument Valley, we headed south to Canyon de Chelly, pronounced like Canyon du Shay. You can find links to the complete set of Wild West posts here.

Canyon de Chelly is what you might call a box canyon, in that you can walk or drive in from the lower, open end, and its about a thousand feet deep at the upper end, which is maybe twenty miles in.

Unlike the kind of canyon that has a river in a rocky gorge at the bottom, the Canyon de Chelly is fairly flat at the bottom; it floods every year, and there’s a smooth later of rich soil. People have lived and farmed in there for a very long time—in fact this may be the oldest continuously inhabited spot in the US.

The present inhabitants tend to move out during the spring months when it floods, but in the old times, the natives dealt with this by putting their homes in big cracks of the sheer cliffs.

We stayed at the nearby Thunderbird Lodge—a nice thick-walled motel built around a former trading post. The Lodge runs tours into the canyon, but they didn’t look too comfortable; you sit in a chair on the back of a large flatbed truck with no shade. For about the same price, we got a Navaho guide to take us on a jeep tour, just her and Sylvia and me.

She was a lively, talkative sort, and told a lot of interesting things. She’d been off the rez for many years, but was back now, and living with the Navajo owner of the small tour company.

The canyon reminded me very much of the fictional “Hormiga Canyon” that I wrote about in 2007 with Bruce Sterling in 2007. This story made the cover of Asimov’s SF Magazine, even though the text itself isn’t online. I told the guide a little about the story, and said I was hoping we might come across some giant ants. She appreciated the idea.

As we got deeper into the canyon, it started feeling ever-heavier and more spiritual. As we looked at the ruins of some cliff-dwellings, a big raven coasted past. It was so quiet in the canyon that I could hear the air on the feathers of his wings.

I’d heard that the Navajos are still into taking peyote, and I asked our guide about it. She said, yes, it was common, more among the men, and that the man she lived with was in fact a psychic guide, what they call a peyote road man. There’s even a legal exemption that allows Navajos to possess and use peyote, based on membership in the Oklevueha Native American Church.

Our guide mentioned that they have go down to Texas in order to get the peyote, which grows wild along the banks of the Rio Grande River, and this can be problematic, as the legal exemption isn’t necessarily honored by the Texas state authorities.

This all reminded me of the fall of 1965—forty-five years earlier—when I myself had taken peyote. I mentioned this to our guide, but she didn’t want to have that conversation.

The sun was setting as we drove back out the mouth of the Canyon de Chelly. Some wild dogs appeared by the jeep barking at us. The guide said, “I’ve never seen those guys before.” The sun was shining into my eyes, lighting up the crannies of my brain.

“This has been great,” I said. “We saw the giant ants, the dwellings of the Old Ones, the Magic Raven, and the Secret Dog Guardians are ushering us out!” She laughed. It was an amazing trip.

Rooting around today as I make this blog post, I found the manuscript of a memoir I wrote in 1983, All the Visions, typing it in a continuous session in one giant paragraph on an eighty-foot-long roll of paper. The book appeared from a small press in 1991, and is still available on Amazon, mostly in used editions. I might do an e-book release of it sometime this year. Anyway, here’s an excerpt of the parts about my peyote trip in 1965, when I was a junior at Swarthmore College.

This upperclassman Freddy had these round steel-rimmed glasses, and always an unbuttoned button-down collar shirt with the sleeves rolled high up over his elbows, the elbows jerking out to the sides make room, make room, chuckling and working on incomprehensible letters to like the FBI to leave him alone, or studying, frame by frame, a Marvel Comic. “This one is about a trip, man, you see how the guy gets on the abandoned subway and it’s full of monsters?” That was indeed the trip I got one morning in 1965 when I fell by Freddy’s room, looking for excitement, and he gets out a cardboard box of peyote buds.

“These come from Texas, the Wild Zag Ranch, you send off for them, they’re still legal. Spit out the hairs when you chew, the hairs have strychnine.” I’m chewing the stuff, feeling myself passing through another interface, this is real. Freddy was making me nervous, jerking his elbows and peering at me, so I went down to the lobby to phone Sylvia, off at grad-school in Connecticut. But I took some wrong turn and I’m on that subway with the monsters, right in the front watching the ropey tooth-monsters coming at me in waves, brown and yellow all down the sides of a black-green tunnel. And waves of like contraction are sweeping over me, waves and monsters.

At some point I realize that what I’m doing is throwing up into a waste basket and staring at the vomit patterns, I’ve been throwing up for like a half hour maybe. “You have to get help,” I think, and the thought repeats in my head in tiny speed-up voices, help help help, then shatters into wicked laughter, it’s just like the nightmare I had over and over when I was tiny: A circus lit up by darkly smoldering torches. High overhead fly the acrobats, creatures of light, devils. I run up stairs and hide behind a pile of doors. There’s no pile of doors now, though just the empty midday street, college-town empty, and the leafless leaning trees are clawed hands over the street. “Relax, Rudy, it’s just the drug.” Relax, pipe the head-voices, relaxlaxlalahahahahahahaaaaaaa! Nobody in my room, I still room with Kenny Turan, we have a double this year, and everything…looks like a face, the sink chuckle chuckle, the wall snf snf, the door helloooo.

I run out and find finally a house with friends, three or four of them, trying to explain, but they soon get the picture, and now everything is all cut up, memories from the past and future, suddenly I’m already a college professor lecturing on relativity, sitting at the table talking or making noises as my friends solemnly watch, how I love them! Then into the living room, this shit is like being shot out of a cannon, if I close my eyes I’m a pinball in a high-score game, and if I open them, “I’m in a Renoir!” My voice sounds sweet and sticky, but I have to tell it. “I’ve always loved Renoir, and now everything looks like one of his paintings!” “Where did you get this stuff, Rudy?”

My friends Rob Lewine and Don Marritz escort me back to my room, and I sit on a chair in my room, looking as Rob’s face changes click-click-click the whole history of western art, primitive, cubist, impressionist, comic, click. Outside some trees still have their leaves, red and yellow, I close my eyes, I’m in my head with flecks of blue red yellow, a big balloon of color floating up higher and higher from the earth, a thinner and thinner tube connecting me back to earth and “It’s going to break!” I cry in panic, the thread is going to break and I’ll be dead. “No, no, just relax,” says Don. “Promise me that if I stop breathing you’ll wake me up.”

Later my keepers tire of me and set me loose again, I go up to my friend Greg Gibson’s room and try to tell him about it. “You been freaking out?” he muses, looking at me, then hunches over like an evil caveman to snarl and threaten. “Don’t,” I scream, “My brain will pop!” He relents and we go to supper. The next day I go to New York to visit with Sylvia at the apartment of one of her friends—who’s idea of a fun thing is that we all get on the subway and…run up to the front car and stare out (oh no) at the black tunnel ahead with the ropey tooth-monsters only I can see. Coming back to my dorm after the weekend, I keep looking at my hands to see the flesh fall off and the bones, the skeleton. Wow. There’s no trip like that first one, not that I was real eager to take peyote again.

Peace, brother.

I got some new Adobe software this week, including a copy of Lightroom, which I’m just now figuring out how to use. It’s funny about software, there used to be this notion of reading a book about how to use it, but now it’s more common that you just dig in and fool with it. The real trick is always that you need to get a mental image of what the software is doing, and once you have that, you can get somewhere.

The Lightroom Help menu has this one option, I like, “The Five Rules…” which takes about two minutes to read, and the fifth rule is “Enjoy.” Photographers often aren’t the most text-oriented kinds of people, so this is the kind of help they like.

This summer my nephew, Embry Rucker III, a great professional photographer, convinced me to start using Lightroom.

The first few of today’s pictures were taken at Rudy Jr.’s house, and in his Berkeley neighborhood. I shot them as JPG files.

But the main thing I want to mention today is this great book I just finished, Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier.

Travels in Siberia grew out of a three-part article that Frazier wrote for the New Yorker. It’s grown into a massive, white Siberia-sized book, describing five different trips that Frazier took. The most dramatic trip is a long August roadtrip driving a van from St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok on the Pacific. And a close second is the trip through the deep Siberian snows north of Yakutsk one March—temperatures still at 20 and 40 F below zero.

“I asked if I should buy a travel directory of Siberian campgrounds, and Victor laughed. He said I would understand better what Siberia was like once I got there.”

The last three of today’s pictures were shot in Santa Cruz as RAW files (with the same camera). Lightroom makes easier to handle RAW files, and to develop a smooth workflow that saves the 16-bit RAW as a kind of digital “negative.” Shooting in 16-bit RAW files instead of the 8-bit JPG files lets you maybe get a richer color. And then you save it as a JPG anyway, for something like posting on a blog. Embry III explained this to me.

We saw a band of street musicians in Santa Cruz who call themselves Alien Vomit, kind of a good name. They use an accordian. It’s the old Camper Van Beethoven heritage.

The fun thing about the Siberia book is just how different things are in Russia. The author insists on seatbelts in the van, and learns that nobody in Russia ever wears seatbelts. The only time he ever saw anyone use a seatbelt was when they took it out of their car and used it to connect the rear bumper to the front bumper of another car so they could tow it.

Humongous sunset in Cruz today. On the campus radio station they were playing reggae and calling the town “Rasta Cruz.”

I’m sorry to have finished my Siberia book, it was fun to live inside it for a week. Highly recommended.

In the course of my work on Turing & Burroughs, I’m thinking of a scene in which Alan Turing, disguised as William Burroughs goes to the Burroughs parents in Palm Beach, Florida, in January, 1955. And I’m trying to visualize what this would be like.

I found a photo of Mortimer Burroughs with Billy, Jr., on a memorial page, apparently made by a fan or by some people who make a living of creating memorial pages. Mote, as he was called, was born in St. Louis in 1885. So he was seventy in 1955. He lived ten more years.

Mote’s wife Laura Lee Burroughs was three years younger, and from Georgia. I found Laura Lee’s photo in this cool article, “Like Mother, Like Son,” about some books on flower-arranging that she wrote for the Coca-Cola company!

I also learned that the Burroughs home was at 202 Sanford Ave in Palm Beach, here’s a satellite view. I’ve been using the street-view mode on this page to walk around near the house. Palm Beach is this narrow strip of sand with water on the inland side as well.

I’d forgotten that Bill’s son William Burroughs, Jr., known as Billy, may have living with the grandparents, which complicates things.

Billy was born in 1947, so he’d be eight in 1955. Our Burroughs did visit his parents in Palm Beach in October, 1954, according to Ted Morgan’s biography, Literary Outlaw, p. 251. Wikipedia indicates that Billy Jr. only moved there with grandparents when he was 10, or in 1957, but I’m guessing this is an error.

In any case, I got the location of the house from Billy’s third (and posthumous) book, Cursed from Birth, available new and used online. I have his earlier autobiographical novels, Speed and Kentucky Ham. It’s kind of a sad story, he died young. Here’s a bit from Cursed from Birth about the Palm Beach home.

Mote and Laura moved to Palm Beach so I could grow up wholesome. For ten years, we lived at 202 Sanford Avenue, a street lined with royal palm trees where the houses get smaller and some of them have no servants. My grandparents ran an antique-furniture business on Worth Avenue, Cobblestone Gardens, where they sold elegant antiques to the very rich, and always met them at the door. The house was full of the creaking stuff. Some of the rooms were furnished according to different historical periods, but after Mote was gone, my grandmother sold a lot of it and scrambled up the rest. We had a lot of old Victorian articles with taloned paws carved on the legs; one coffee table actually had wings.

On Friday we had the opening of my art show at the Borderlands Café on Valencia Street in San Francisco. We got about 20 guests for the opening, and the place was full in any case, with a steady flow of hipsters. My artist friends Paul Mavrides and Hal Robbins showed up with some of Hal’s fractal-freak friends from NYC, R. U. Sirius was there with a “blotter artist,” my son Rudy Jr. was there with his family, fellow Flurb writer Charlie Jane Anders of io9 (and frequent contributor to Flurb) showed up, and my freestyle SF-writer pal Michael Blumlein appeared with his wife and we had dinner together. I shot a video right after hanging the pictures, for what it’s worth, here it is.

Borderlands has a pretty good supply of signed prints of my paintings right now, with more coming into stock later this week. I’ve been making them at home on highest quality Museum Etching paper, 19 x 13 inches, using a Canon Pro9500 inkjet printer with ten colors of ink. Just the paper and ink cost me about $10 per print, and right now we’re selling them at Borderlands for, I think, $35 each. You can also buy unsigned prints of my paintings online for a comparable price at rudy.imagekind.com, where you can select various sizes, paper grades and possible frames.

On Halloween, Sylvia and I went walking on Tate Avenue in Los Gatos, which has come, over the years, to be a really popular holiday street. The people who live there go all out with the decorations, and ton of trick-or-treaters turn up. Dig this light-up zombie rising from the grave as a little girl darts past.

Halloween is an odd holiday, kind of unique to the US—it’s not exactly like All Saints Day or the Day of the Dead. It’s more about facing your most horrible fears and somehow finding them funny, or at least thrilling. And getting candy.

I liked this topical icon of Brian “The Beard” Wilson, the SF Giants’ closer pitcher. Though we rarely watch sports, we got into viewing the whole Series. It’s surprising how many really close and somewhat arbitrary calls the umps have to make, and interesting that there seems to be no movement towards using instant replays to check the calls on the field. Maybe that would slow things down too much. As it stands, there’s an element of “psych” in the calls. It also surprised me how often there are tiny little-known sub-codicils of the rules that come into sway.

After California beat Texas in the series, I was hoping it would be a good omen for the congressional elections. Oh well!

When all else fails, I always like to take a walk in the woods. I’m making good progress on on Turing & Burroughs, I have Alan Turing at the Burroughs family house in Palm Beach right now. Shapeshifter that he is, he’s wearing Bill Burroughs’s body-form and is trying to tell the Burroughs parents that he’s not really Bill, and of course they think he’s insane. I think he’ll have to bail from there quite soon.