I've heard about jobs that would enable that - working at national parks, where you are given a job to do and have to spend weeks in the wilderness carrying it out - marking paths, taking pictures, fixing things - ideal path for someone who doesn't want human contact, as there will be very little of it. The only question is if he would get it with his, now criminal, record.
What did I do? There was nothing that had to be done. I listened to the voices, the many voices, vague, distant, but astonishingly human, the Havasu Creek. I heard the doors creak open, the doors creak shut, the old forgotten cabins where no one with tangible substance or the property of reflecting light ever entered, ever returned. I went native and dreamed away days on the shore of the pool under the waterfall, wandered naked as Adam under the cottonwoods, inspecting my cactus gardens. The days became wild, strange, ambiguous --- a sinister element pervaded the flow of time. I lived narcotic hours in which like the Taoist Chuang-tse I worried about butterflies and who was dreaming what. There was a serpent, a red racer, living in the rocks of the spring where I filled my canteens; he was always there, slipping among the stones or pausing to mesmerize me with his suggestive tongue and cloudly haunted primeval eyes. Damn his eyes. We got to know each other rather too well, I think. I agonized over the girls I had known and over those I hoped were yet to come. I slipped by degrees into lunacy, me and the moon, and lost to a certain extent the power to distinguish between what was and what was not myself looking at my hand, I would see a leaf trembling on a branch. A green leaf. I thought of Debussy, of Keats and Blake and Andrew Marvell. I remembered Tom O'Bedlam. And all of those lost and never remembered. Who would return? To be lost again? I went for walks. I went for walks, and on one of these, the last, I took in Havasu, regained everything that seemed to be ebbing away.
