Wild West

It’s been almost two weeks since I left for California but the novelty of the trip is still fresh. It’s kind of like the riding of fumes into the gas station after a long day on my feet. I didn’t bring my computer on the trip with me. At the very last moment, I decided to leave it home and packed my moleskin notebook in my carry on. These days, I rarely write with a pen… I pride myself on superb typing skills…my fingers on the keys can almost keep up with the thoughts in my head….so I didn’t think I’d even write all that much. But there is something so unbelievably stimulating about airports and window seats and hazardous waste explosions on the highway (I’ll get to that) that I ended up writing way more than I thought and I’m so glad that I did because now, after two weeks of being back to the grind… the trip itself and all those sweet details are starting to drift out to horizon on the rickety raft of bad memory.

Below are some blips from the trip…


The Way There…..

I sat in seat 17D on the first flight from Burlington to Chicago. It was the economy sedan
of airplanes… which means that 17D, being the last row of seats, was the loudest, bumpiest and most brutal.
I made it to O’Hare without hurling and even made my connecting flight without a hitch. I refused
to break a twenty for a pack of gum.

I love flying. I love packing suitcases, love taking off, love all the monopoly houses below. Those little
boxes make me think of the Malveena Reynolds folk song:
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
And they’re all just little boxes
And they all look just the same.”
Pete Seeger said that Malveena Reynolds wrote a song every morning before drinking
her morning coffee.

Every weekday morning I wake Ella at 7am. She and I slumber into the bathroom and
sit in front of the funny little electric heater that’s plumbed into the wall. We sit for a few
minutes, waking up, before we take on the challenge of dressing and
brushing our hair. This morning, she wanted a play-by-play of my travels.
“Where will you be when I’m in math class?”
“Where will you be when I’m in lunch?”
“When will you call us?”
I told her my plane would be leaving the ground in Burlington while she was eating lunch. As I sat in that back row, my head exploding and gut vibrating, I thought of her sitting at those long funny elementary school lunch tables… the kind that fold in half and have those funny little plastic circles for tiny little elementary school sized behinds. I hoped she wasn’t eating some god forsaken school lunch like Salisbury steaks or chicken patties. While waiting for my connecting flight in Chicago, I got a voicemail from Ella. She had just gotten home from school and told me that she thought of me at lunch time and that she loved me and missed me already. It was like a sweet, protective traveling talisman that I wore for the rest of my travels.

In Chicago, on the ground, the skies were gray and it was raining. Up here, above the clouds, the sun is strong and bright. Up here I’m reminded that somewhere between the storm and the sun lies clear skies. Somewhere. I think I could use that reminder on a daily basis. I imagine this white plateau up here must resemble the Arctic-looking like something between meringue and soft cotton-all sun struck and subtle shadow. Off in the distance, the clouds rise up like compressed glaciers.

I’ve determined on this flight that when traveling, I should always be the one assigned to a window seat. Chances are, I will, more than anyone else on any given flight, see way more magic out that window. I’m thirty three, with crows feet and bad knees, and you plop me in a window seat on a plane, thousands of feet above sea level, and I’m instantly transformed into a gawking, dreaming, star-struck child. I put my book down to take a look outside and my chest seizes with the absolute beauty of what I found out later to be the Sierra Nevada mountain range. I think I’m going to cry because they are just so fucking beautiful. How can anyone on this place actually be watching Ugly Betty with that mountain range just outside?


There….

When Brandi called me with directions from the airport to her house, I deliberately waited to post the adjectives she used to describe the conditions of that drive. Words like curvy, careful, dangerous, possible mudslides, landslides, boulders in the road, steep drop-offs, no guard-rails…. The list went on and on. My mother reads this blog and I knew she’d be getting little enough sleep with one of her children traveling in a plane across the country. I’d try and let her believe that my perils ended once the plane landed.
But while I waited for my baggage on the conveyer belt, Brandi rang my cell phone to tell me that the two hour mountain pass through the Trinity and Shasta State Forest was expecting “weather” that night. The reason for her call was to let me know that when the mountain passes get “weather”, police block off the roads and only allow 4WD vehicles or 2WD vehicles with chains. If you don’t have chains they turn you around to find some.
So, I upgraded my rental car to a Jeep Liberty.
I found it terribly ironic that the last time I was in Arcada, California, I was hitchhiking and practically barefoot with only a backpack and now, in this clean, green town, a singular person, there I was driving an f’n SUV. We called it the “I’m an asshole” ride all weekend.

So, I arrived in Sacramento at 6pm (9pm my biological time) and proceeded to drive five hours north. I drove through towns with names like Esposito, Yuba and Yolo. Gone were the New Englandy town names of Hyde Park and York and Woodstock. There was one rural highway named Improved Order of the Red Man. What?

I arrived at Brandi’s at midnight (3am my biological time) and we drank some wine and caught up on life while sitting on the rug in front of her woodstove. We crawled into bed after a couple of hours and then giggled like little girls till 3:30am (6:30 my biological time). The weekend proceeded like that. Late nights, wine, beautiful misty California mountain mornings… and me…. Trying to figure out how the hell I was awake and what the hell time I was really operating on.

We spent a day driving along the coast…visiting Patrick’s Point and the South Fork trail in the Redwood State Forest. I got up close and personal with a herd of two dozen elk. I collected leaves and berries and took pictures. I kept stopping my “I’m an asshole” ride on the side of the road, like a good little tourist, so I could hop out and stand there, camera over my shoulder, awe struck, soaking it all in… the magnitude and the beauty.

After our day of soaking in the elements, we played dress up and hit the town. We shopped, shopped some more, got me a bit of a haircut and then ate some California sushi. We finished the night with a killer band at a friendly bar and danced till 3am (6am my biological time?)

We woke after a late night of organic pinot and hemp ale (it was Humbolt County after all) to Brandi sprinting to the john. With the possible exception of shopping, Brandi does nothing to excess, so it would have been surprising for her to be strung with a hangover… especially since she drank less than me.
Twenty minutes after her thirty minute stretch on the john, she gets a call from Chris, her daughter Aida’s daddy, that Aida has been barfing all night with a fever.

So Brandi’s 30th birthday went from a rolling boil of a weekend to a simmering and slow and sickly Sunday afternoon of puking and shitting and forcing down tea.

Unless it’s Ella, I don’t usually make a habit of cuddling and kissing and loving on sickly kids but it was my only day to spend with Aida, who is my most adorable and loving little goddaughter. She calls me Aunty Meg and firmly believes that I am a true fairy god mother. I totally encourage this belief. If I had little pointy ears, I’d wear them.
And so we spent the day reading books, playing with the Rosie the Rivetor action figure I brought her, rubbing her back and sharing her germs. We wore newspaper made party hats for Brandi’s birthday and walked around the house quietly while one or the other of them slept. Chris made some food for those of us with appetites and he took me for a lovely walk down to the Trinity River. I took a one hour nap before I hit the road at 11pm for my five hour drive south to Sacramento. Next time, I think I’ll plan the time of my flight a little better.


The Way Home…

The trip from Arcata to Sacramento is split into two segments. The first half is mountain passes and the second half is straight interstate. It’s easy enough to stay awake while driving over mountain passes. It’s either stay awake or hurl yourself over a cliff. The options are sobering enough.
Just a few minutes on the highway though, and still two and a half hours till Sacramento, I slowed down to a she-cop lighting flares and stopping traffic. Further down the interstate an 18-wheeler full of hazardous waste exploded and all traffic south of that point was absolutely prohibited.

“Like how prohibited?”
“Like, this-is-for-your-health-prohibited.”
“Are there alternate routes I can take to make my flight in Sacramento?”
“NO. ALL TRAFFIC SOUTH OF THIS POINT ON ALL ROADS IS PROHIBITED. You can only turn around and head north.”
“Any idea how long the road’s gonna be closed?”
“HOURS, at least.”

I found a small truck stop two exits north and called the airline from my car. There were no later flights that day. My only option would be to fly out the following day with a fee of almost two hundred dollars. So I cried for about thirty seconds in my pimpin “I’m an asshole” ride and felt sorry for myself because I was stuck in this jam and it was almost 3am and I couldn’t even call anyone for sympathy.

Then I put on my big-girl pants and went in to hang out with the truckers. I borrowed a more detailed map from the guy at the counter, determined to find an alternate route, and got a hold of a number to call for road conditions. The only other route south was still open and while I was doing this leg work, a female trucker came in and joined me. We met a local who was in buying beer and seemed excited to get in on all the commotion and commraderie. He was able to give us back woods directions through farms and over train tracks and flooded bridges… about forty minutes around absolutely nothing…to find this alternate route, or, as it turned out, hop back on the interstate. So, I followed her PG&E flatbed truck and was ever grateful to have found a female to do this with. I’ve met enough truckers in my travels to know that I wouldn’t have followed a man through these back roads. We got spit out back on Route 5 and it was south enough of the explosion. I don’t know how close we actually came to it. I’ll have to check occasionally to make sure that I’m not sprouting any strange growths.

And back at the airport….. the flight was a flight. Not quite as novel now that I knew what lay ahead. I made a friend on my first flight and spent some quality time at O’Hare. On the connecting flight to Burlington I ended up again with the lame, bumpy back seat but this time I had the whole row to myself so after finishing my book, I spread out and pretended to sleep.

Flying over Burlington, the city was all lit up among the surrounding darkness, it’s center thick and concentrated in orange light and then thinning out at the edges… like veins. All the orange light looked like crevices in the earth that had been filled in with fiery lava….like that last scene in Mordor in Lord of the Rings…..with Frodo and Samwise, before the eagle butterfly creature comes to airlift them from imminent death.

I was home. And after a long trip I felt a little like Frodo and Samwise in that last scene. I was eager to be dropped down on my memory foam mattress pad and curl in under my down comforter and get some real sleep.

Turns out, that wasn’t really going to happen. But that’s the next post.