One necessary footnote to this period: although Halina Rodzinski and Louis differ on the course of events in these years, it seems to be not out of vindictiveness or rancor. She genuinely gave much of herself to Louis: she tried to get him into Juilliard (which was not equipped to handle handicapped students, he was told); she took him to a noted eye specialist in a vain attempt to appropriate the latest technology. But later on down the years she either snubbed or misunderstood him. In her book her tone in describing Moondog and his music is somewhat condescending. When she erroneously attributes the "jukebox hit" song "Nature Boy" to him (it was another New York street character altogether) it borders on the unintentionally humorous. Once, in the late fifties, after Artur had died, Louis was passing through Lake Placid, where he knew she had a vacation home. When he phoned, she told him only that she had no car and he moved quietly on. In 1969 they met on a Manhattan street, but she avoided his, admittedly lukewarm, attempt at rapprochment. It was, after all, Artur's visitation that opened the door for Louis and Louis himself, more than any other, who closed it. But not everyone saw him in the same light.

1947 was a momentous year for Louis. Now thirty-one years old, in New York four years, about to drift away from the Rodzinski's and soon to take off on a cross-country journey, he made a singular decision. Clearly, he was at another crossroads. Much taken with Omar Khayyam, as he was frequently impressed by exotic and original authors throughout his life, he set several dozen of the quatrains from The Rubaiyat to music; he wrote his first cycle of canons for two violins and violas which was performed for friends in Naila's studio. All of this music is lost. Although he was stepping out, independent as he was, he was still too closely allied to the past: unknown, except as an eccentric with musical talent, his future lacked shape and definition. What he would do, then, would be to give himself a new identity, thereby breaking the tyranny of names and at the same time becoming what he would always be known as: Moondog. One day, as he tells it, he mulled over the possibility of a pen-name for himself in his skylight room and finally hit on one suggested by an old friend: Lindy, the dog that came with the Hurley, Missouri farm, always howled at the moon. Quite a sight, hobbling about on three feet (one probably hurt in an early accident), running circles around Louis, Lindy was a meek, mild animal without pedigree. Calmly, with great self-assurance, he walked downstairs and told Naila, "I am Moondog." Although he would be Louis to his friends, it was as such that the world would come to know him. Only later did the full resonance of his "nom de guerre" emerge: to the Eskimos the moondog is is moonlight rainbow; in the Edda it is a fierce group of wolves with flaming tails of comets circling the earth; in the sagas it is a giant of tremendous power. There is even a whiskey in Kentucky called Moondog. In choosing such an identity, primitive, suggestive, melodic, combative, he began to shape the music he would make and the man he would become.

With the change of name came many changes in his life. It is as if once he assumed the appropriate posture he became more aggressive in asserting his place in the world. 1948 brought Moondog movement and 1949 brought him land. After the liesurely pace of the Rodzinski-Naila years (always so in retrospect), life changed more rapidly and Moondog was constantly innovating to keep up with it. When it was clear that he and Naila would not marry and that his long association with the Philharmonic had come to an end, though not necessarily as a result of these severings, he decided to leave New York for another life, an alternate route to his musical future. He cannot be accused of a half-hearted effort, yet his break with Gotham was rather short-lived and for a number of very good reasons. Much happened in a couple of years, each event a crucial ingredient in the recipe for his identity as a New York fixture and a serious musician.

In the spring of 1948 he left for the southwest, planning to live among the Indians. With a little hindsight he came to call this venture, which he didn't really complete until 1951, with interruptions, his Portland (Oregon) to Portland (Maine) trip. The main reason for the change was what he learned when he got to New Mexico and actually tried to make contact with a people he had always considered, in some way, blood or mystic kin. His childhood encounter had left an aura that the adult believed would illuminate his calling. When he left, he assumed he would leave behind the "cocacola culture" for one more primal, radical and essential. Upset, perhaps, disillusioned just slightly, motivated by an inner vision, Moondog would return to his past and discover the key to his future. It didn't turn out that way.

He was Moondog that day, in June of 1948, when he boarded the Greyhound bus for points west. As in all of his public acts from this time forward, the trip is well- documented: Moondog would always be a favorite with the press, not only because he looked different, but because whenever he opened his mouth something exciting came out; he was articulate as well as eccentric, intelligent as well as imposing. He would leave in his wake many friends and good memories, pleasant feelings and earned pleasures; he would impress public officials and important musicians; but he would not succeed in accomplishing what he went out there to do. There had been hints: his friends in New York had cautioned him that he really wasn't cut out to be a missionary (even those who were unaware of who his father was) and that he would be, inevitably, back; a woman in Texas, riding beside him on a bus across the panhandle, wished him well after he told her his destination, but also hoped that he wouldn't be disillusioned. In New Mexico, he camped outside the Navajo reservation by the highway, wrote some songs and made contact. If not hostile, his reception was certainly no better than lukewarm:

I couldn't reach the old ones who were suspicious
of me as a white, to say nothing of the language
barrier. The young could speak English but they
were looking over my shoulder at the culture I was
leaving and I was looking over their shoulders at the
primitive life they wanted to leave and forget, so
neither of us saw each other in the process.

He had been so "arrested" by their "out of doors concept of living" (which he would always practice as well as preach) and by the "dim and distant past" that had shaped them and their customs and their traditions and their language that he didn't understand, until it was quite late, that he was not welcome. Yes, he could play his flute at public performances, but he could get no nearer. To his dismay -- how could he have been so naive? -- he saw such marked internal discrimination, enforced by a rather cruel community pecking order (as he was to observe in the black ghettoes of Los Angeles), that he felt more than rejected: he felt "thrown back on his own ethnic past." The first murmurs from the old Norse in the man with the face of Christ, the "square" man with homemade clothes, sandals and beard, might have been perceived the day he was led out to an island in the highway by some peculiarly vindictive Indian youths and left there helplessly stranded between two busy streams of traffic. After his rescue, he left for Sante Fe.

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