HOT ON THE TRAIL

El Camino II

I’m spitting the mosquitos out of my mouth, a slight panic blurrying the edges of my vision, well from that and squinting to keep them out of my eyes. The trail is flooded, in great swaths a uniform beige color from where the Black Creek overran its banks. I wipe another gigantic cobweb from my face and wonder where the spider went, half-feel it crawling under my collar, as I shift the thirty pounds on my shoulders. I’m dong my best to tip-toe down a sharply angled bank when my boot spits out from beneath me and my right knee generates an immediate sproing feeling as the tip snaps off my hiking pole and I skid into the water below, the skeeters swarming.

New Mexico, Polaroid SX-70, 2026

I had planned to spend the night in Clovis but the vibes were off. There’s no other way to say it. I had monkeyed around too long in a truly tremendous second-hand store that spanned most of a city block, poking through stacks of wooden tennis racquets and backpacking cots and 1970s Playboys, admiring all but purchasing nothing.

I cannot pretend to know where that voice comes from but I have learned to listen to it, to amplify it, to pull off on the side of the road when it lights up and to fill the tank up and keep driving when it is buzzing low and away. And so I did, and that’s when I came across the church, just as the sun began its slow journey to the horizon.

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The first question was, could I walk. The knee said yes, with a little hesitation at first, then a growing enthusiasm, with a caution that tomorrow it wouldn’t want to work at all. I said okay, that’s good enough for right now, imagining Scotty hollering at Kirk that the engines cannae take it much longer, Cap’n! If I could leave the bugs behind, maybe I would have been able to go longer, but with the combination of a weakened knee plus downed trees and crushed-over-the-path brush and stickers, I had to make a decision.

Is this the angle, I ask the voice, ask myself, as I pad through the dust. I think with the sky—with those purples—you have to use color, it says, I say. Yeah but it looks so haunted, or like it wants to be haunted, and that would be cool in black & white, I respond. It’s not haunted, and you know it, the voice says back. That’s true. It doesn’t give off any kind of a feeling at all, actually. It’s been scoured clean by the wind and the sun, any good or bad spirits long gone. It’s been empty much longer than I’ve been alive.

But they won’t know that, I say back, and one day I’ll tell someone I went to a haunted church in De Baca County,

New Mexico, that I was

three miles from Stinking Springs,

when Pat Garrett pulled the trigger cuz he saw that sugarloaf with the verdant band, thinking it was The Kid, but ripping holes in old Charlie Bowdre, who

had shot when shot at, killed Buckshot because Buckshot was trying to kill him and but for the grace of a silver belt buckle would have gone down first at Blazer’s Mill.

I wish,

I wish,

I wish, the Regulator said to the Sheriff, as the hot red blood ran out of his body into the cold golden dirt of New Mexico on the day before Christmas Eve.

I walked out of the woods, and the voice said not to go back. By the time I was back to the main road the skeeters cleared. They’d wander back by the time I made my way back to the trailhead, and a few as fat as a pinky nail would still flit about in the car even after I was in Hattiesburg, but I would eventually shake them. I made it out, even though I had planned to spend the night on a sandbar and go nightswimming in the creek. Next time, I thought, next time.

I’d spend the night in an old camper trailer off old Highway 49, and have scrambled eggs at dawn at the first Waffle House I could make it to, empty save for me, listening to who made the most tips the past few days, who walked off their shift early, just listening.

GORJUS is a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. But for the foreseeable future, it will be devoted to EL CAMINO, a mostly black-and-white travelogue through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

If you ever woke up and weren’t quite sure if you were going to make it down that trail, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider forwarding this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.