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I just recently drove out to the serene Appalachian outpost of Asheville, North Carolina.  Heather and I, two yankees in a Camry, pushed out from lowland tobacco fields of Chapel Hill environs, thru the first surprise snowfall of this mild southern winter, and found ourselves climbing round little Carolina hills upwards into the mountains.

Asheville is a tranquil, non-Starbucks kind of village.  Old angled streets hold together worn brick structures that house odd restaurants, damp pubs, and many antique shops.  All the taverns in the town sell Beamish stout. Some let you have a shot of local moonshine.  A peculiar town, more a city, and once a city.

Down in the crevices by the river that once fueled this town, rail tracks lead to storehouses and docks that continue to function.  The city contains no Gap or such, nor anything like them.  The only true presence of corporate white America are the many banks which center this city.  They are of course the largest structures in town.

The new industrial banking buildings, erected in the 1970s judging by their modern efficiency, are entirely out of place here, and like stark white bone, spine and spear the town through its center.  But the axis of penetration is inconsequential.  The only effect these structures has is to make the shadowed walk north of them a little chilly.  The rest of the town has settled into a calm sauntered pace, akin to more eastern and southern Carolina: folks sitting on benches laughing with paper bags full of drink.  Couples kissing in doorways.  An antique shop owner locking up with pizza box and waggy dog, ready to go home next door, upstairs. A damn nice town.

So out twenty miles on a sunny day, at Chimney Rock, I went up thru rock for stories and stories via an old crickety elevator, and stepped out up some stairways and trails up to the top of Chimney Rock, and asked Heather if she would marry me.  And she said yes after I could barely get the words out, stuttering and kneeling and crying and smiling.  Just damn glad for the blue sky and the cold air and just holding her hand beneath the sun.  We didn’t want to come down.  Other folks saw our wet cheeks and knew and smiled back.

How are we to those who have come before us, those who have tread the same surreal lands and cheered with wine and song.  This great shadowplay of ours is vast and illuminated.  We all have our own soundtracks, our own separate angles, glimpses of the sun.  And we all frolic in this new rococo reality of brilliant talkways and perfected machinery that makes up this end of century.

How are we different from those 100 years past?  Their internet was the new telegram system.  They like us were slammed with technology:  the light bulb, the auto, the telephone, the first recording of sound.

We are on the same cusp, coming around the bend towards the future, but are still merely in the rococo phase of the industrial revolution.

We are the twilight of the industrial revolution.

There is something else we must do, besides streamlining the physics of our industry.  There is a next step, there is a place after we perfect cell phones and credit cards and the internet.  A place beyond our fascinations with this magical technology.

Technology was magic to the flappers dancing to the new radio sound.  Magic to the boomer kid in 1962 constructing his own radio.  You’d tinker like a magician to make the magic.  And technology remains incredible as we create new sounds based on  pure mathematics, sounds never heard before, sounds Bach was pained to never have heard.  We forge the magic and forget that it is magical.  We miss the point, the spirit all drained out, as we commit to the final construction, the perfect device.  And then we discard it, and move on to next perfect device.

So where do we go??  What is the end point as we hone in on the calculus maximum of our industrial state??  What do you do when you have achieved perfection, when the last cut has been struck into the granite bust of our time??

We seem so close to somewhere else… post is post.

-Asheville, North Carolina, Autumn 1999

Bare means naked, but to bear is to carry something. A bear is also a brown furry animal, but most people keep that one straight. If you can‘t bear to remember it all, just imagine a lumbering grizzly carrying a heavy load, and you’ll bear this knowledge with glee! If a bear bares his teeth, though, run! – the internet

One true friend and man of Mystic, Connecticut is the Bear. His name does not mean to endure, you do not bear the Bear, although it might hint his attitude and constitution both reflective of the cool endurance he was capable of. I once implied to him in a conversation that his death was immenent. He scoffed at me and said he would outlive me, and I believed him. So, although the odds were on my side, I’m somehow surprised that he passed first, and saddened.

Once, he handed me a coaster and winked. It read, “There are those who know, and there are those who know the ones who know, and there are those who don’t know” He looked at me and said, “Think about it.” So I did.

Bear is a beloved of Mystic. He is never afraid to start a conversation with a beautiful person and can change a room with his ease. His name cannot be called enough or answered enough for the satisfaction of Mystic. The town will be satisfied of him when the bridge is too tired to go up.

I see him with cheeks are full of red streaked beer drinking whiskey veins, and his eyes are sunk in thought above them, they are sheltered in some barracks of a glance. His hair streams behind like old broom straws. He doesn’t sit as much as pillars on a barstool.

Bear is a man who knows sainthood can only be possessed by children and bodies of water, and has given himself to be part of that mad sweet easy life that is rarely partaken in. He has a charm that has lately become rare. To see him walking down Holmes or Pearl Streets is to see time confused at the edge of his footsteps, because his presence, so constant to Mystic, has become timeless.

Bear, he is called Bear. It is because of is indomitable beer built round tummy and unyielding posture. It is the result of courage and guile and expertise at being a spirited human. It is because he leads the old horse of his sweet soul one more time to the riverside to converse and walk and drink.

His confidence in the goodness of a city is contagious. Yes, it is the fine reassurance of a friend and a gentle ear at the pub that sways our attentions back to him year after year. He is not the neatly packaged turmoil of the modern soul, but a beautiful old Bear, a little mangy, heart pounding out a march of sweet cunning disposition. He is always ready for the proper fight. Yet, he is an expert pacifist and gentleman.

The days of drinking coffee with John Lowe and Goose and Bear at John’s are long since over. In those foggy nineties days Linda would stop by, walking in her soldierly way, smiling gently, and join the table before going off to cook at the Steak Loft. She is the Tuesday night bartender at John’s. She has never rushed and never will rush no matter how desperate some maniac gets for a fifth gin and tonic. But, while Linda was on watch, curating a pace for the place, Bear’s glass was never dry. Except, when she was lost in a dream watching over the pool table. I blame him for some of the good nature of John’s Cafe!

Now John Lowe is dead. They have paved the road three times since he died and will pave him deeper into the past every year, sequentially in no particular order. That is the untraceable burial ground of an old pub owner. It is no different than any man’s nor worse.

And one would never know any of this if you didn’t spend half a lifetime listening to whispers of Mystic. The few times the old men speak before you become one; it is worth listening. Before they get paved over and redone as fire hydrants and new mailboxes in your present and sidewalks, and lose all their humanity; it’s worth noticing a word or two that comes out of their mouths.

The bar, Johns Café, now gone, still holds the old energy. The energy of a place that has dealt and taken the blows of those who blew into Mystic or never left it to begin with. There was simply too much spirit there. It wouldn’t dissipate with something so commonplace as death or pavement. It is because, some of the old faces are still there.

There is a copy of Drifting, by Stephen Jones that paints the old river men of Mystic in their glorious golden past prime. It is a book that tells of rowing stoves down the river in john boats and placing them in huts and feeding them to keep warm.

The ridiculous impulses of the New England Yankee to row deep into the night are divine.

There is a particular story by Stephen Jones about rowing into downtown Westerly after drinking Narraganset Beer in a Watch Hill bar, and then setting out for the sloop and instead of going into a nice warm berth deciding to row all the way to Watch Hill. This trip, a splendid little Heart of Darkness Light, ends in spasms of dawn exhaustion, raw hands and heart. Jones is the rarest of local narrators. He is a subversive scholar of a grand sort. He is the soul mate of Bear whether they know one another or not.

Up on the wall at John’s, there is a post card from Saint John signed by the crew of the Argia, the ship whose sailors always report for duty at John’s after sunset. But more importantly, there is a window tinted dark for privacy and refuge from whatever forces seek to bend Mystic. On the dark glass there are gold letters emblazoned with the words: John’s Café. All, or most, or a good part of this may be held together by Bear.

To see Bear at The German Club, rather than John’s café is a rare occurrence for me. It can be akin to seeing a bear at a picnic table. He is a four-limbed larger version of a man. Yet, he is the bartender at the German Club on occasion. The German Club is certainly in Mystic, but it is on the way out. At the German Club, Mike and Reid and Jimmy will be sitting there smoking cigs, and seriously considering, as if it was going to be a life altering experience, whether to take a Jello shot or not, which once it has been brought up, is basically happening. Those men in their sweet generous spirits are the very teeth of life, he who bite into Jello shots with glorious expectations, believers in the miraculous curing power of alcohol, mouths full of premium tobacco smoke. They are the unheralded deacons of the glorious rotting apple of capitalism. They are the seeds of a strange new third way. It is precarious. They subvert the buying system by living cheaply and within the resource of their community

Bear is given to wanderings, and it is healthy to his spirit, because when he returns to John’s Café, then he is refreshed for having been away. The beer tastes lovelier there he thinks.

While I was putting my back into selling beer, he was putting his into being human. When you are around someone who is being an authentic human, you know it. You can learn from it. People don’t realize there are Bears in Mystic. In truth there is only one, as irreplaceable as they come.