13 August
Back in the oasis. I earned my evening eating peaches, figs and plums, purple and orange, by printing in the philosophy department computer room, hour after hour, trudging through heat on the ramparts back and forth to the computer center in the Quad. Had to pay $120 for acid-free paper. The department to deal with - Dennis, Phil in the corridor - Steven Davis - young men students - a couple of young women treating me like an honoured ancient - so young women. Didn't finish though I was there just after ten and didn't stop for breaks. Three stacks in a cardboard box, 450 pages each.
The last of the orange is fading on the wall.
I felt frail - not quite the word - today - nervous about the car - nervous about money - nervous noticing I was stressed - and then found there was nothing at all on the floppy I assumed had all my library copy prep on it. I could feel myself a bit helpless with the young women, as if I were eighty and in a strange place. I didn't have any keys, because I'd returned them for deposit. Steven Davis held out his small damp hand and said, Congratulations. I was peering through the mist of the meeting noticing I have somehow offended him.
This morning I saw the incandescent yellow above the mountains to the east, 5:30. Then I saw crows flying west, many shoals of crows. Now that the sun is down the sky is beginning to incandesce in the west. It's only a month since I left San Diego.
15
Cowles Desert journal on heat adaptation.
16
He held onto me with conviction because he didn't see his position clearly because he was stoned. So the entire relation was an illusion. So is all its beauty gone? It says no. We did real work. We get to keep that. This is the pain that was waiting for me. I hear another frisky little voice saying maybe.... Surprisingly frisky and fresh. The large dark pressure at the heart is what's near. I also hear Willst du dein herz mir schenken from the Magdalena notebooks. It has something of that springiness in it.
17
Daphne yesterday. Wearing pink, pink-faced, a pile of soft white hair. We met at Union Market. She was there with her dog and kept looking at other dogs. She said she has turned sixty. As often she begins with a concern - she is still that tall serious girl, absorbent and I want to say obedient.
She said abstract poetry is in style, Kootenay School and Coachhouse.
18
I notice that since Louie made me cry at the table a few evenings ago and I had waking hours feeling abandoned I am wanting Tom again. Mildly, but with a pang. Sexually, when I went there last night. Is that okay? NO, it says - don't allow it. Because it's weakness? No, to feel the quality of missing, to feel missing as itself.
Last night, squirming awake, a lot of remembering. Feeling 'a life' this collection of moments. (I don't like that way of saying it.) What I was remembering was for instance the afternoon of the Christmas Day I was saying goodbye to Frank, dazzling sun on the snow, the trampled straw around the straw stack as we walked out through the field south of the house. (That was the house on the La Glace road, when I was seventeen.)
'A life' the structure I am, that has been made through time that was my time. This structure can continue to make, and be made, itself, and it can sing as what it has become - I mean sing in the way it does when I am able to feel Frank and that day.
What else I am is worried about the car, money, my teeth which all ache faintly at their roots, hypertension and other little health things.
19
I wake in superstitious fear. I remember Louie saw Trudy and Rhoda walking past the house the other evening looking up at the orange room. I wondered whether they killed Joyce, Janeen, Frank. I remembered the dream of the broken pencil when I was driving to California last time. This fear was like that, a fear of evil power.
- Do they have shamanic power no
- Is it because of drugs I imagine it
- They did me great harm
- But by ordinary social means
- Did I survive fully
- I battled them correctly
- Was stoning them in the garden correct
- But it cost me my connection with the garden
- Is that true
- They intended me that harm
- And succeeded in it
- Did I have any option at that moment no
- If I leave will they feel they've won no
- I now have a horror of fucking women
- Because it is attached to that social harm
- Do I need to know more about what happened with them
- Heart of darkness
- The ugly reflection
- It's social harm I ran into earlier
- Will you say how they regard me now active
- The nightmare of social harm
- Which was possible because of my vulnerability
- Are they evil apart from that
- Am I as evil as they
- For the same reasons
- Am I being evil to anyone now no
- Was that harrowing time necessary
- I had to break a personality
- What I did was very dangerous
- But my instinct brought me through
- Now can I bring her alive again
- The way to think of symbolic force is that what happens is not magical/symbolic but it is felt as that
- By anyone? no
- By some
- I feel it that way whether I know it or not
- By 'artists'
- Do you want to say more about this no
- Olivia also did me that sort of harm
- Is it only women who can do that
- Have I done that sort of harm to anyone
- Michael no
- Louie
- It is harm to confidence no
- Can you say harm to what enterprise
- I was knocked into inaction for a number of years
- They did it mainly by lying
- Did they see the film book
- And Sandra's book
- They think of me as central and honoured
- And they are chagrinned
- Anything you want to say? something about aloneness
- What you have come through
- -
- I am no longer alone
- The way I was then
- They harmed enterprise by isolating me
- The next year is about contact with enterprise
- Contact with enterprise is what you mean
- Realness and more YES
- But do you want to say something about me conflict, community, search and loss
- List? YES
- On and on with this sad anxious lonely heart
- ? YES
- Because that's the real YES
- Please comment graduate, shatter the structure, slow growth, balance in the midst of change
- Is the ache always memory no, it's true
- As a human I do need attachment
- But he's the wrong person to be attached to YES
- Will there be a better person no
- So the ache is forever no
- For the rest of my life no
- For the next year no
- Will I stop needing attachment no
- Will I find better attachment no
- Please explain you can undo anger at the mother by processing
- Get angry at my actual mother
- And then attachment is possible
- Is it because of drugs I imagine it
20
Lonely discouragement - bleakness of the look of life in this state - I'm being careful not to say life without sexual attachment, though that is how I feel it - and worry about money. To that I'm saying use it to send yourself into the world, dig down with your paddle.
-
Emily [Carr] is so repulsive, in her way. She hates sex and thinks it dirty, she keeps howling to be free of her body and lifted into some imagined transcendent state, she keeps a rat in the front of her dress, and camps with four dogs and a monkey. Believes her dog's spirit is released into an afterlife. I hate the way she goes on about god. The cedar tree painting on this cover is a fine tight penis poked into a black bush of foliage. She makes nature-love suspect going on about the soul. She says she hates her good reviews, and yet is always moaning that no one understands her work.
And what else - she bakes, cleans, mends, visits - vigorously - paints, writes stories. She's squab though. Coarse-grained.
What's the question about Emily - her sort of aboutness. Yes, today I'll go to the VAG and see the Emily/Georgia show. I'll go on the bike.
First question - was Emily actually driven by ambition? And her dissatisfactions with praise were because it threatened her pose? And because it was never large enough. Hundreds and thousands was written in the period of VW's Volume III. VW in her 40s and Emily in her 60s. Alright, a difference of generation. She was eight years older than DR. She didn't leave her family, stayed in Christianity and cried when King Edward abdicated.
She and O'Keefe both went for strong simple forms. Emily researched something - what was it? She had to stay near Vancouver Island because it was her ground. In that, she's honest. She's not strong-minded, though. She's always begging to be a pure channel but she's greatly impure in her unwillingness to leave her community. It paid off for her, though. She got to be a beloved naif with the Governor General's for her first book.
Alright, but mind and land: was she actually learning to do something? Making pictures was one thing, but sitting in the forest another. She sat in the forest and said to herself, Let what is here make something of me. (Gordon Smith never said that, but it did.) And yet she always had the animals distracting her, her animal truth scurrying and yapping. - But it did make something of her. She tuned in. That's what I should look for - but her descriptions of it are very general. She doesn't want to register detail.
What's my question - the cognitive value of contact.
(I have more money suddenly - Margo said yes to Jody - 700 US a month, not 540.)
"Perfectly ordered disorder," "the great green ocean of growth," "a beautiful dumbness in the soul," "moments of pure joy."
22
It's a month since my day. The theme of this Thursday was money. Bought Rowen a ticket for $100. Took the car to an auto shop in the alley behind Dairy Queen, Pat Bushman, PV Auto Electric, specializing in old cars. He fixed it, $60. I was elated to have it done and rolled into Canadian Tire. Two new tires, $200. Camp stove and axe, $100. Deposited [the college] res cheque, with exchange came to $2110. The brakes are okay but the rotors are very thin. They could heat on a hill and warp.
I cleaned out the trunk this morning, waiting for Pat Bushman to open, so it's clean too. I'm happy. Camp stove! Axe!
And finished checking through the website links and illustrations.
23rd
The fit of loneliness went away. Students are writing. Rowen is arriving tonight.
25
"Phoned Sybil and Eve to say I won't come to dinner." I stared at that line thinking it was some sort of poetic attempt I wasn't getting. He ended by saying, I fucked up, forgive me, I'm begging.
I stare some more. Then I understand he is telling me some women have invited him and he has considered the invitation. The note depresses me.
What I want to hear is none of that. I want to hear that he is on his way to drive with me, or else that he has launched action that will make him able to like himself with me.
Last night I showed Trapline, Notes in origin, Current, Bright and dark, to Louie's friends, Louie's goodbye party.
I had liked milling with her, buying Rowen school clothes. (Good stuff, shoes, pants, shirts. Haircut. Beautiful jacket.)
There was a burst of liking for Bright and dark that I didn't expect. Parts of the films seemed extraordinarily fast, which puzzled me. Notes in origin was strong and simple, pink and glowing, but spoiled at the end by mold or some other complicated dirt on the film.
I'm so amazingly tired today, flattened, I haven't the emotional strength to write. It is as if I need Tom, I need to crawl into his arms. Is that it?
Paralyzing depression. Heart pain. It's quite wordless. I feel I have no platform and can't do anything. Marvel at the energy of other times.
- I'm extraordinarily tired
- Am I ill NO
- Do you have anything you want to say to me no
- Can I go back to him? no
- Will you comment you're a child
- In this feeling
- Do you want to lead me through something talk about success
- Fear of it?
- Am I in an agony because last night was not a success
- Was I frightened last night? hopeless
- Withheld
- I'm crushed today
- It was too much for me
- Would I have been better if Tom had been there
- Tom helps me energetically no
- Was I in despair because no one was my mother
- It was a success and not successful
- Why success doesn't succeed it's the young thing
- I'm in my hospital bed
- Am I ill NO
- Improve coming through betrayal into strength
- Achieve unconscious balance
- Graduation of sexual energy into action
- Process to graduate and come through partial loss
- Improve conflict to graduate into writing - conflict between active search and male suppression
- You are suppressed not deliberately but habitually. The energy of missing is stopped in you, search for what stops in it
- That sore heart like a half-formed chick embryo
- A quest for soul, which is that stricken embryo
- Processing, not evading withdrawn crisis
- You will persist in loss to learn truth
- Your action will organize success and slow growth
- Achieve unconscious balance
26th
Two specks from a night last week, after reading The other side of Eden among other things. One a line of speech, something like "the dots in the air" with an image of white specks in breath breathed into Arctic air, sunlit so there was rainbow iridescence. The second might have been from an instant of waking. The line was (not exactly) "my life has touched its destiny several times." I had a sense of occasions when that had happened. There was one I've forgotten. The one I thought of more deliberately was the joy on the hillside at Santa Ysabel in the fog.
Ran into Sheila in the park this morning dressed beautifully in black and white. I said I was jumping at a time when I'm on the downslope with my energy. She said don't be certain of that, she had low energy from her late 50s for about ten years and now has more. She's 72. She looked wonderful.
28
The Atlantic is running a three-part series called American ground: unbuilding the World Trade Center, by someone called William Langewiesche. This issue, with part 2, has extremely beautiful photos by Andrea Booher.
What is it about this piece. It's cutting-edge documentary writing. It's cutting-edge layout, it's cutting-edge photography. Even the ads are good. It's mind and land, in the sense that it's a story of intelligence dealing with physical reality. Langewiesche is good with the engineering particulars and similarly good with the personalities - this is the kind of person who was this sort of way in this circumstance, this was how things were and here is how organized response developed. Langewiesche's intelligent story of intelligence. He was someone who took the task of observing and reporting, as others took the task of putting out fires or barging debris.
Rowen's dream yesterday: he is in a cabin in the woods. There is a ghost who aims to harm him. He can keep safe by leaving all the lights on all the time. Later he goes outside and sees two ghosts walking into the water. They are carrying a living child. He can tell the adults are ghosts because they are covered with a film of dust and they do not ripple the water. They can't go further into the water because of the child. Rowen takes the child from them and goes back away from the shore. These ghosts are happy with each other and intend no harm.
There was a man living on an island where there was an eruption, a Pompeii situation, Rowen said. His house was covered with a layer of ash. It set a fire that had burned for fifty years. Something in national law prevented people on another island, who could see the fire, from crossing to put it out.
29
I took Rowen to the bus, Louie is out for the day, most of my files are in a box ready for the trunk. Library books in piles. It is the moment for saying how shall I manage the next five days. Where am I.
When we were having tea together this morning Rowen sat on the edge of the armchair and put his arms around Louie and said, Thank you for having me here, thank you for being such a lovely person. Two things about it, one was that we three had a good hour together before we had to pack up and get out the door, milky tea in glass cups, the balcony doors open. The other is that Rowen does not find me a lovely person. I don't really feel him. I am pragmatic, got him to the doctor and x-ray, made sure he has school clothes, bought his ticket here, gave him postdated emergency checks for Selina, packed his bag, taught him how to do a good job of putting the bed away, talked to him about homework strategy, asked about Charlotte when he came in defeated, got him an egg McMuffin in the station.
It is as if, having responsibilities, I don't have the energy to relate to people. I'm like that with Louie. We have good times almost always by her instigation. When she has one of her fits of hurt feelings over something, I freeze. I want to call it social blankness but it isn't exactly that. It is another form of my minimalist efficiency maybe. I mostly don't feel people as relevant.
- Is feeling people irrelevant hereditary
no
- Is that the analysis
- Is it withdrawal no
- Depression no
- Correct no
- It's giving up
- I don't get what I need
- Pathological
- This is the same thing that happens with Tom YES
- Lack of interest
- Do I need better people no
- Comment? you are acting from unconscious honesty of excluded child
- Who says none of you are the right person
- For a while I felt Tom was the right person
- There is only one right person
- Fifty-five years ago
- With Tom, on my side it's that loss of interest
- I'm going to be like this for the rest of my life no
- I can fake interest
- And often have
- Comment slow growth of child's practical persistence
- There can be
- If what if you complete unconscious decision persistently
- Feel the child saying, not this one
- I don't think this can be altered no
- But my dad is like this too no
- With him it's something else
- I'm loveless the way I feared I would be no
- I don't see a way out no, there is
- I would need Joyce no
- Leave it for now
- Is that the analysis
30
Louie out the door for three days. When she is here, even coming and going, it is as if I am always straining to contain myself. Knowing I have three days I let my edges go and diffuse into as much space as I need.
1st September
This morning I felt I was already there - what does that mean - I felt its air and light.
-
[Visiting my folks]
- Is there anything you want to say about this visit
no
- Is he still going to be alive next summer no
- Is there anything I should say to him
- Is my view of him correct
- If he'd had my advantages would he have been better no
- It's an evil streak
- Have I stopped him
- Does god love him no
- There's nothing in him that loves him
- Does M love him no
- Is there something in him that would have loved him no
- Evil Epp
- So what should I say to him a mystery
- That there is a mystery
- Am I as evil as he is no
- Say more about the mystery slow growth
- Tell him about you no
- Could anyone have rescued him YES
- A stronger woman
- Tell him he could have been rescued
- That time he showed me his child
- I didn't want to be the adult
- That is a story
- Is that the mystery YES
- So be the adult
- Being an adult is an excellent way of completing the child
- Is he still going to be alive next summer no
2nd
M had the broad spreading belly of an old woman, no longer the tight round pot of her middle years. When I began to talk about my work and plans at the lunch table Ed got up, unhooked his dialysis bag and went into the bedroom. Asshole, I said silently to his back. He was starting to re-emerge as I was leaving. I whisked away into the corridor to put my boots on. I didn't want to have to say goodbye to him.
On the way home from the bus on my bike I sat for a while in the garden. The silk tree near the greenhouse is spreading a lot of shade and has puffs of flowers this year.
Then I filled the tank with Premium, got Rob and went to see a surfer babe movie. Rob had his hair down and looked the way he always has. I liked his quiet engineer's remarks.
3rd
Labour Day morning. Rain. It will be raining tomorrow too. Rain on the freeway. But I have good tires. The first part will be the hardest, up to the Dalles.
About seeing M and E yesterday - two feelings - one is the comfort M and I recover effortlessly. She asked how Tom and I are doing and I told her candidly and exactly. She said she understood. She said it in her level considering way.
The other is being creeped out - it's the best description - by Ed. There he sat self absorbed eating their miserable Sunday dinner, fiddling with his dialysis tube. At the same time I notice his good bones. He's eighty-two. His shoulders are still square, his fingers still fine.
Mt Vernon WA, 4th
In the last stretch before the border there was a squall of hard rain. I had the wipers beating fast but still could hardly see. Was following the tail lights of the truck ahead, slowed down and groping. The bike was catching air and making the car weave. The steering is looser than it was, and the road seemed slick. Then the rain stopped, but on the slope up to the border I noticed I was accelerating though my foot was lifted off the pedal. Had to brake hard coming into the border lineup. The engine was racing. Shifted down, and then down again. The brake wasn't holding it. Turned off the engine. I was four or five cars back from the booth. No way to drive it through. Walked up the line with my passport and talked to the border guard, who looked carefully at my eyes. When he said his daughter had done an email course and allowed himself to smile I knew he'd let me through. He held up the line so I could walk around to the entrance and ask someone to phone me a tow truck. Crown Towing, the woman at the counter said. Dialed the number, handed me the phone. It was 6:30. The man said we didn't wake him. Wanted to know what kind of car it was. An old Fairmont, I said.
I go back and sit on the curb watching the line curving around my car, which is looking nice in the growing daylight. There is a crow on a power post. The shallows are shining on the far side of the road. There are pink clouds.
The tow truck comes in from the other side of the building. Pop your hood, he says. He pulls at the accelerator lever a few times. Unscrews the air filter. Turn it on, he says. It roars. He tweaks something. It was running wide open, he says.
He is a small man in a grimy baseball cap, fifty, jeans, good boots, big belt, glasses. He has found the cause. He's pointing with his penlight. Come around here and see how to do this so you'll know if it happens again. This screw got loosened so it was pressing down there instead of pushing on here. He has replaced the screw. Now start it.
Meet me in the parking lot, he says. He zips through an empty lane and I squeeze into the line, park next to him. He takes the bits apart again, uses a pliers to bend the screw so it won't work loose again. I am looking at him devoutly. He is exactly the man to have found. If it happens again, just take the screw out, he says.
Do you take Visa, I say. If not I'll follow you to an ATM. Visa's fine he says. He jumps up into his cab and fills out the slips. What's your license. He charges $35. You're going to California, he says. For a tow he'd charge $81. The guard who came out to say hello to him called him Lindell I think.
Onto I5. The car is fishtailing because of the bike. I'll have to leave it somewhere. I stop at a bagel shop in Bellingham and leave it with the bike carrier under a tree. Without it the car tracks better but at speed it is still jumping around in the lane.
Last night successive sleep waves hit not quite hard enough, four times. I watched them hit. But was sleeping when the alarm went at 5. Made tea, had a bath. Thought of the raw clean early leavings from 824. Was nervous wondering whether leaving from Louie's would damage subtle timing so that later I wouldn't be at the right place at the right time.
The meaning of a journey is death. I said that somewhere on the Westminster Highway and sighed. Sighed again as I wrote it. Here I am in a motel dining room that is playing soft rock to travelers. The speed of the highway, the fragility of car and body.
Beautiful things yesterday. I was smart to leave David to last. It was raining but his thought was that he'd show me his favorite houses. The second house was on a big corner lot, I have no idea where, and surrounded on all sides by a wall artfully built with home-made concrete blocks, the bottom four courses with horizontal slots, then a row of vertical, then horizontal with smaller slots. Native blackberries were growing over the top, a beautiful effect, the pointed leaves with the pebbled surfaces and grid of slots of the block wall. A good, square, plumb wall though 6' high. Beyond it the tops of fruit trees thick with pears, plums.
David was wearing his green plaid shirt and looked beautiful. We went for congee to the Kam Gok Yuen. His mum had cried a tear that I wasn't coming, he said. We could go, I said. Driving in the red car, David in his own country. We come into the house through the kitchen door and find Russell transformed from a thick-faced patriarch to a small sweet elf, big-eyed, pink-cheeked, sunk in a leatherette armchair under a blanket. He stands up to shake my hand and I feel his arm just bone in a sleeve. David goes to find Dorothy who is resting in the bedroom. He comes back and says she is putting in her teeth. There she is, surprising, much more a girl than she'd been, hair quite brown, cut off in a schoolgirl bob. She is wearing a red skirt. We sit with them in the dining room. They make a fuss of my doctorate. Dorothy wants to know what question the eminent external examiner asked. Russell suddenly pipes up clear and comprehending. Betweentimes he would put his head down on his hand. At some moment Dorothy begins to cry. All our work has been undone, she says.
Can I say how fluid and vivid they were. David's sort of vividness and fluidity. A kind of haplessness, the house stacked ever deeper in boxes. And yet they are 89, long survivors. I asked at what age they think old age begins. 85, Dorothy said.
9 PM. Days Inn Motel, The Dalles. Fifteen hours, 400 miles.
5
This morning I am here in the dry country. A fine day. My window looks past a parking lot to the dry buttes on both sides of the Columbia. Two men with beer guts stride toward a silver Tacoma standing proudly with a boat on a trailer. There is a street of high cirrus moving northeast above us. A crow shouting from a yard light. A hawk.
For some reason I feel the Dalles as a gate. I am not in a hurry to move on. There is a large sky. From here on I am where I want to be.
6th
Rim Rock Motel, Alturas, CA. The old moon almost on its back. We're on the north edge of town. There is a horse in a corral, a kitten crying on the forecourt. Just now I hear an engine start outside the curtained window. It is ten to six. ABC muted. They are replaying the twin towers spectacle, which seems to have become a celebration of American marvelousness.
Yesterday was the day of rabbitbrush. From Maupin, it was slopes beautifully spread with the vivid green of rabbitbrush just coming into yellow flower amid the other high desert colors: dry grass, juniper, sagebrush, volcanic red-brown rock, blue sky, white clouds. There were good farm buildings, slope-roof barns and sheds, often sheet metal over board and batten.
In Maupin at an old-style auto shop with one set of pumps, a tall mechanic in suspenders checked my steering. A long trip with an old car is kind of nerve-wracking, I said. Especially if you are on your own, he said.
There is a mirror opposite the bed. There I am in my dark green pyjamas, hair down my back, still dark in this light, silver at the bangs. I'm thin again. Square-shouldered. A little droopy at the base of the lines that bracket the mouth. I have eyelids.
I've opened the curtains. Daylight on the page. There are dawn clouds over the hills I rode out from last night. Peach-colored edges. There's my car, which has my same quality of old youngness. Even the matte faded dark red is like me. The car runs with heart morning and evening, when the air is cool. Heavily in the heat.
I stopped at the Silver Valley post office and mailed acknowledgement envelopes and then tried to eat at the café. Chile was a bowl of dry beans with chile powder mixed in for the reheating, chopped raw onions in a pile on top.
Between La Pine and Silver Lake it's fifty miles of light pine forest. Boring. At Summer Lake steam or is it alkali dust stood in a high curtain across the east. It was early afternoon. The whiteness intensified the light so trees and grass stood brightened, Russian olive silver, willow bright green, pine dark green, bullrushes in the ditches an orangey gold. When I stopped for roadwork wind was roaring in the towered leaves of a Lombardy poplar. The slopes to the west were recently burned, six inches of new growth at the base of some of the bushes.
How am I. Quite level. Mostly it's Louie I want to be able to show things. Does the level have to do with being flat on Tom? Or not being new to this road. Last time, seven years ago, I was a year into the doc, menopausal and emotional, making a leap, starved to be married. I rode at the full of the moon.
This time I am riding in the last few days of an old moon, I have the doc, I've left my house, I've left Vancouver, I seem to have left Tom. I know the road. So far I'm in motels, not risking the roadside. I have three credit cards and am a professor, though I have less money on the whole. Luke is no longer in Vancouver. Louie is rich, nested pink and black in her soft white bed.
My journal was well written then and is prosaic now. It's less well written because I'm flatter and maybe because thesis slog spoiled something in my writing brain.
But say what I've brought to completion. Being about is made and is lovely, wide, integral, and revolutionary. I have confidence in the bookwork and can teach it. There's something next. I've taken my fences. I've published Leaving the land, Brain and metaphor, Brain and imagining. I made Bright and dark. Nora's garden. I have a platform.
Sun full onto the bed. It's 8. When I open the window a smell of hay.
The man at the inspection station last night asked if I had any produce. Half a lettuce, some string beans, some carrots and a squash. Go on then, he said. He's the California gatekeeper and he forgave my vegetables.
Maybe I'll have breakfast at the store in Ravendale.
-
It's the Walker River. The beautiful bit is the ten miles on from Walker, which is past Topaz Lake. There has been a fire and flood since 1995, it isn't pink dusk with green and white water. It's five in the afternoon, blackbirds iridescing green. Red-bark pines standing dignified in the wind.
When I leave the car closed up in the sun I come back to the smell of juniper and artemisia baking on the dash.
In a mall in South Reno I bought a watermelon and sat with the car door open carving slices off it. That was to recover from the Reno freeway, double hell in a big wind that made the car seem to jump all over the lane if I drove faster than 55.
7
E-Z 8 Motel, Victorville. Long ago this morning I packed up a bed under two kinds of pine trees. It rained as I drove out on the gravel road. The foot of a rainbow kept pace alongside, melting through the scrub. A long slope, 8 miles, down into Bishop, which was an oasis, green. Yellow flowers in the ditches. An internet café. The Sierras without snow looked scoured, ashy. It was the Sierras on and on, color I didn't see. I drove. Even with the window open it was hot. It got hotter, flatter, dustier, windier. I drove steady at 55 and let them pile up behind me.
At Adelanto there were new tract houses in the dirty desert and traffic crawling in the heat of 4 o'clock. I looked for the campground. It was gravel pads tight-packed with RVs. They recommended a motel. I tried to buy gas at Chevron. The machine wouldn't accept my credit card. It demanded a zip code. Etc. I got angry at the Hispanic woman behind the counter and plucked my credit card out of her hand. Same problems across the street at Arco. Decided to be nice. Asked what I was doing wrong. She said, You have to lift the lever. Found this motel. Couldn't make the key turn. Hot dry wind continuously. In the room the TV zapper didn't work. The toilet tank had a leak so it would suddenly roar, refilling. I fixed it with my hair elastic. A bad zone for mechanical things but the woman at the desk gave me a double on the quiet side for the price of a single on the highway side. I left the curtain open and saw a fine sunset in a half-hearted way.
Don't know where to go from here. I'm a few hours from SD on the freeway. Don't want to be there tomorrow.
8th, Saturday Lake Henshaw
I'm arrived under some oaks with the green tent that has been molding in the trunk since 1997. There's a smell of eucalyptus bark. Water is heating for tea. Because it rained yesterday almost no one is here though it is the weekend. Downhill a large Mexican family with a cluster of tents. Modest trailers further down. I'm a mile from the Mesa Grande road. Where I had breakfast at the Lake Henshaw Café there were two tables with Indian ranchers, very broad very dark faces. One with a white moustache and bright black eyes was checking me out.
The hillside is coloring patchily. White puffy clouds flowing from the southwest. It's perfect here.
Gusts of wind, warm, scented.
When I woke in the motel room this morning and pressed the clock's button to see the time, it was 3:59. I'd thought of getting on 15 at 4 to make it through the freeway tangle before the traffic. There was more traffic than I thought, even then, but I got into the through lane and let the packs overtake me on both sides. I just rode my lane, steered between the lines of reflectors. The engine hit its tireless stride, curving up, curving down. We came over a pass and saw coastal south California an ocean of lights. The exit onto 76 Oceanside/Pala came before I expected it. When I stopped on the roadside it was just light. 6:30. Rock, dry buckwheat, trash. Pala, that shabby place, has a casino now.
9
Sunday. Second cup of tea at a picnic table the color of my car. The extensive Mexican family is awake, going for a walk. A bilingual teenager has the shawled grandmother by the hand. The two littlest kids are in red sweatsuits.
I discovered yesterday that I could be better uphill with a walking stick. It's a grey morning, cool, chirpy.
This dark red is the best color for human objects in the landscape, a dull dark red with a bit of orange, a bit of pink. The lower trunks of these oaks have thick bark very scarred, cracked and lichened. They emulate rock.
I drove the Mesa Grande road yesterday. There was a strong scent, not eucalyptus though like it. Hello chipmunk. And you whirring little jumpy birds grey like the oak bark. These are bit-leafed oaks. California oak or coast live oak, it says.
Looking back at the first day of this journey I notice I stopped being afraid after the first half day. The car can handle freeway washboard this time, since I replaced the front shocks. I figured out how to prevent a sore neck by driving with my left hand and turning my left foot sideways so it couldn't tense. I'm proud of the two new tires. There's more rust and new scrapes on both sides but the car is beautiful and strong.
I feel single. Yesterday falling into a nap in the tent I found myself angry. I was saying to Tom, Yes, I'm angry, and I don't want to discuss it with you. Money is the sticking point. You aren't going to come through on it. Money and the other thing, social currency. You squirm and cringe in relation to both, and don't do anything. Not dealing with them makes you cranky and punitive. You can't handle what I have to say about either.
That's where I am about Tom, and when I say it I feel myself rigid and scowling. Is that how I want to stay? Is there another voice? There hasn't seemed to be. Nothing wants to see him or be with him. Have I vanquished love woman? Or has she seen what he always was?
There is one moment that speaks for the other side. It is the last moment of the Christmas visit, where I was standing in line in the airport and Tom comes back and says he had seen me turn toward the counter and take my courage to go on alone. He had felt me in it and came back to say so.
To be fair I have to say also that he had very little from me in the last year or two. I went inert in his presence. But I was saying "secure attachment" for the six months before I came down last time.
Is this the way I should be thinking about it?
It is depressing to think of going on alone, but mildly so. What does the depression feel like. A squashing-down of the brow. A loss of springy hope. An inertness, loss of confidence.
Then look in the other direction, at the love in work and the freedom to follow it.
A tarantula was crossing the road yesterday.
10th, by the washers and dryers in the campground.
Its verdict is that there is no one for me and never will be. I will continue to want to be attached and not be attached. The depression is from wanting to be attached, but I don't have to always be depressed it says: balance the child.
In the night I saw the sky was clear and dragged my bed out of the tent. Stars were in the lacy canopy of the oaks. Orion on its side rose from behind a tree.
I didn't say that when I lay down to sleep in the pine forest I saw the Swan overhead.
When the sanitation truck woke me at dawn I saw horizon pink with oak lace against it. The oak canopy is very fine-textured and light. Its shadow also is a soft light lace on sandy earth.
Now that I've gone to the question of Tom I am muttering at it most of the time. That is unpleasant.
It is nice here, now. Warm and cool, a breeze. The car is packed. I've made my loop and now I start again. Seven-year loop.
The muttering is trying to prepare for the talk I will have to have with Tom. I am afraid he will argue and afraid I'll be weak. The book will help me.
-
Bird Rock
This is very wonderful. The moon is in its second night. I am in an upstairs room from which I could see a melting sky, apricot fading to pink, over ocean powdered blue. A woman is singing Mozart. There is a sleeping porch. The red plaid blanket, the gooseneck lamp, the red cloth with stars, are with me again, recovered from their hole in Island Storage. My car is at the curb. I have taken the screens off the windows, which are casements facing south and west. A cat turned on the sensor light and while I was looking down from the sleeping porch into its white flood a skunk came flowing and rippling black and white, the white in a V pointing forward on its back. Earlier six and then seven doves were set in a row on the neighbour's comb antenna.
I coasted to the curb across from Nora's with joy at the look of the front patch. The cassia is a graceful pile. Then the garden inside the gate, its scent, a steep of sages and other aromatics. The house and its cottageness. The sleek brown hollows this side of Cassidy's hip bones.
Being here, what I am feeling is that if I cut him loose and am not struggling in harness with him, I have affection for Tom, love and pleasure in his being. It solves my difficulty about talking to him. I'm ready now.
From Ramona I took Highland Valley Road and then got onto 15 in the heat and flew sweating to the Market Street exit, which took me to Island Storage so that I arrived here with all my goods. It was a pleasure easily to know the way.
11
Something about fairies or elves. Advice was that relations with the little girl would be better if I acted with attention to the presence of little spirits. Relations with the little boy need a change in position, standing differently toward him.
I was lying down in the late afternoon feeling whoozy. I suddenly thought, it's cool now, I could go and garden. Changed into work clothes, and was sitting on the front steps pulling tools out of a paper bag when a man with a bike appeared in front of me. It was Tom.
He said a lot of things of the sort he says. When I told him about the
trip or seeing my folks he did not lend his attention. I was thinking, this
is your best chance toward what you say you want, and you are ignoring it.
So then I hardened again.
next section 2002-2014: in america
- the golden west volume 25: 2002 may-september
- work & days: a lifetime journal project