Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston

Author:Pam Houston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Moving from One Body

of Water to Another

THIS STORY BEGINS WITH Carlos Castaneda. In February, at LAX. I had missed the only plane I’d ever missed in my life, and let me tell you, I shave it finer than OJ, week in, week out. I do it for the adrenaline—these days I’m not out in the wilds as much as I’d like—but never before had a plane actually left without me.

That day the buses and taxis were gridlocked like I’d never seen them coming into the Loop, so I left my rent-a-car running by the curb at Terminal One and made a break for it across the parking lot to Terminal Three. I went screaming through security and along the moving sidewalk figuring I had it made. The gate agent admitted that the plane pushed back four minutes early.

It wasn’t like it mattered. I was going to New York City. There was another flight in less than an hour. I had no business there until the next day. But I was mad anyway. In those days I’d use any excuse to scowl, which is what I was doing when Carlos Castaneda walked up.

Now let me make it clear right off the bat that I was never a groupie. Sure I read the books when I was twenty. The first three anyway. But I don’t remember much.

I was living in those days from campground to campground in the national parks: Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef. The Grand Circle Tour is what they called it. Twelve national parks in ten warm Winnebago days.

My then boyfriend and I lived there a whole year, pulling up United States Department of the Interior survey stakes and digging out guardrails, moving camp every two weeks according to the rule book, going to town for groceries and a shower—that’s right—whether we needed it or not.

We didn’t have any peyote to test Castaneda’s theories but we found the next best thing: Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and homegrown marijuana. The combination made those big desert rocks get right up and stand in your path.

But that was ten years ago; the boyfriend is an attorney now, and I take pictures for adventure magazines, which doesn’t exactly make me an ecowarrior but it sure beats the hell out of law. What I’m trying to say is that it had been a long time since I’d even thought about Carlos Castaneda, and even if I had I’m not sure that what I thought would have been good.

“Excuse me,” he said, and I looked up into the face of a compact Chicano man with electric eyes and laugh lines deep as arroyos running away from them. “My name is Carlos Castaneda,” he said, “and I have one or two things to tell you.”

What everybody says now is, How do you know it was really him, like that is the pertinent question. It was him, I say, like I learned in graduate school, or another man by the same name. I mean, is it less interesting

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