| the golden west volume 3 part 2 - 1995 october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
7th October 1995 Motel coffeeshop off I5. Bellingham, I think. I was awake at 3:30 and thought of how the roads would be clear, and got up. The car was packed. White workroom, green bathroom, blue bedroom, kitchen with the floor shining. I liked that I was leaving my clean house to Dave Carter. There's a guy in a suit across the room talking in an academic power voice (artificially pitched, suave, listening to itself) about systems neuroscience. When I opened the door there was a Rice Dream carton laid sideways on the sill - his way of packing - it rattles and is the small round flat stone with a ring marked on it. I guess it's a pledge. I have to feel whether to take it with me or leave it. I leave it next to slides in the workroom closet. A token doesn't make it so, David. I went to say goodbye in midafternoon when running around was done but not last cleaning and packing. He was under a lamp in his armchair, reading a pamphlet on ozone, wearing his denim farmer jacket and a beret. I was curled on his lap with my head on the chair back. You have starry eyes, I say - really he has a starry face. Pink blue white and starry. His eyes filled cos I was going away. I look at him fondly but there's a way I don't believe it. His feeling for me is something he is, it's not about me. - Here's my car in the dapple of a rusty - what is it? - an ash? It's pinnate and has keys, and is rusty because it's by the backwater bank of a wide slow mighty river. So many miles, so, so many miles. Some of those were hard miles. It was wet and I ached. The freeway was washboard, my windshield wiper squeaks, it was three lanes packed with people getting ready for the big games (he said), both the Seahawks and the Mariners this weekend. After Seattle there was glitter - the sky opened - the freeway opened - I swallowed vitamin C and didn't ache - was freeway driving, using all the lanes, staying ahead of the yellow transport truck, looking at the needle, checking the mirror, seeing the sweep of double curve far ahead in the flank of the hill. Now the blue campstove comes out. I haven't opened its case since last summer when I hurt for a mean guy and had not been found by David Birch of River Drive and had not written the perception paper. That time too my last phone call was Nathalie. I gave her my email name [elfreda]. "It means elf-teacher, and in fact there always seem to be elves coming wanting to be taught." "You are an elf yourself," she said, and I'm saying it again because it is sweet to me to be thought an elf not a dwarf or troll. Which those people on boats are. Light, she said. Cooking soup. Looking at freeway traffic it seemed possible that humans are starseeded from original robot stock. Why else would they find their way - through centuries that had to work toward metal via stone - like the lovely dome behind trees at Olympia - toward those motor-heart thin-carapaced transformer-body things they have such unnatural skill at making and then driving. I am saying they because there must be original animal blood in me. 8th Maupin, Oregon. Crossing the long orange bridge at The Dalles was like beginning the journey. 197 south is a perfect road, no one on it, simple land, humpy, treeless, grey fields newly cultivated (or I think I saw a seed drill - winter rye) in round-cornered concentric patches set anywhere a tractor can take the slope. Yellow short grass on turf so thin the brown shale under it lapses, marking slopes with lines and figures as if aboriginal billboards. It was evening. I could smell sage. A high humpy interior plateau, pale yellow and grey with a limitless pale blue sky. Mt Hood an incongruous triangle in the west. A few smears of cloud flamingo pink toward sundown. Blessed quiet. I have people with me - David Louie Rob Luke Rowen - Lis Rhodes last night - lightly. My midriff is peaceful tho I woke worrying that Louie would poach David while I'm gone. My book says not. I shouldn't be living on the wet coast. I'm happy as soon as the land dries out and lies open. That happened halfway between Portland and The Dalles on 14. The cut banks of the roadway had exquisite yellow light on fawn and oxblood spalted rock - that's what I need, my rock book. I wonder what makes light exquisite. Is there a difference of grain? There's something. Maybe the amount of cross-reflection. Learning about sound might tell me. Rest stop south of Susanville, 9th At 4 this morning I was stuck in deep gravel spinning my wheels in moon midday on a pipeline access road. It's California and the sky is open but it's not warm. It's October. When I stopped for gas in Litchfield I bought warm socks. At Alturas where I wanted to sleep because of the name, the motels were full. A girl with white-grey eyes and a face pillowy like risen dough said, It's deer-hunting season, it's goose-hunting season, and there's a pipeline going through. It gets dark early, six-thirty or seven. Traffic is sparse on 395. Logging trucks would sometimes rush up and catch me in sheets of white light off both mirrors. Approaching lights would be doubled or tripled on the blacktop. For fifty miles a line of moonlight ran swiftly alongside on the railway track. Switching to high beams makes me drive fast - it's like taking command of more space. I was tired but getting a second wind, the heater on warming my feet and the window rolled down to let the moonshine in. I put sprigs of juniper and sage on the defrost vents. Where I was looking for the unmarked turnoff to a campground, creeping forward trying to see off-side of the headlight beam, a big pale thing flapped low across the road, fast and silent. I made my bed next to a string marking the pipeline route. The moon was shining on junipers and pines, clumps of dry grass. Low mountains over beyond. When I woke later and the moon was high the place seemed to have changed. It had become more real. It was scentless and soundless, nothing but light, so quiet I could hear the system noise in my nerves. There was Orion, Sirius low, Casseopia overhead showing more lines than just the W. Something across the north that I thought was like a goose flying. When I lay down there was my friend the Swan. [Sometime in the night I decided to pack up and leave. That's when I got stuck in the gravel and knew I'd have to wait to be pulled out in the morning.] Made my bed in the backseat, pulled the cover over my head. I think I only dipped into sleep, a transport passing would wake me. I'd put the sleeping bag away in the trunk because its nylon side was wet - it had sparkled with frost in the moonlight - and the quilt by itself is too thin. I never warmed up. I knew it was morning tho still dark when there began to be a lot of going-to-work pickups. But I was surprised when I opened a corner of the blanket and saw the lovely dark red of the back of the seat in pink daylight. I should flag down one of these guys before they're all at work. I stand on the shoulder and wave my arm slowly up and down. Two guys in a truck from Mississippi. They aren't thrilled, but they pull me out backwards, pilot me through rocks and dust, push gently when I'm hung up on a rock. There is an earth mover starting up, thick brown-yellow smoke, as I get to the safe dangerous highway. The car is full of dust. I had to scrape the brush through my hair. Even at night, even in the cold, I felt the dryness, knowing I had only a bit of water in the Evian bottle. A piece of wood I picked up to try to dig myself out when I was stuck is pure perfume, it's like sandalwood. Is it only yesterday I had brunch in Bend, Oregon with the Sunday morning people? Time is quite stretched. Miles are long. Alright, see what time it is, pack up the car. There was a tourbus carrying gamblers to Reno stopped here for a cigarette break. A woman in a group said, passing me, I see you're catching up with your journal. I ignored her. Ma'am, I said: I see you're writing in your journal. North of Alturas: "Where are you coming from?" "Canada." "Are you carrying any agricultural produce?" "I have half a cabbage, half a beet and half a cucumber." "Have a nice day." 10th, above Mono Lake Logistic details: listening to the transmission as I drive. Letting go of the wheel on a straight stretch to check tire pressure and whatever it is about wheels. Remembering to look at the water level in the rad when the engine cools off. Stowing cooking and washing gear where it will be easy to take out. Spreading the towel over the bedding so it will be dry when I want it. Stream water in the small jug for tea. Deodorant stone and hairbrush in the glove compartment. Maps on my steel clipboard folded to show the route. Credit card and money buttoned in right jacket pocket. Clock in glove compartment too, with pencils, eraser and sharpener. Hot water bottle last night so there wasn't a cold hour before the bed warms. I stow my burro, test the cinches, make sure of water sources along the trail. I love my Visa card. At six-thirty in the rosy dawn in broad plain Bridgeport I was taking forty dollars from a bank machine. Years of logistic care of other kinds have given me this morning, here blowing my nose in a hanky with a smell of fine dust. The sky to the west is so clean so blue. Because these slopes don't travel, they make their arrangements without logistic effort - their material sorts itself by trickling all over, rocks find themselves at the surface, water feels its way grain by grain, and where it collects in any amount some color of plant, some texture of color, marks the place, marks the amount precisely. A cloud-shape of woolly shrub. These silky year-old willows where water percolates down from the viewpoint parking lot. Another kind of bush bright yellow in a draw further on. There are bare peaks with a few smooth snow patches shaped like the white spots on an orca. This is the highest spot on 395 which runs from Canada to Mexico, it says. The rabbitbrush everywhere is tansy yellow. What are these little things, nine inches tall and shaped like maiden trees. I'm saying Heya. The color everywhere is so finely sorted - I'm asking what its beauty is - every plant has its own minutely sorted colors. The sage with grey brown wood near the ground, silver green leaf, then rising lines of dried buff flower stalks that repeated over the hillsides give them a soft intensity. In fact they are the earth color as if with more light in it. And in amongst the sage is olive green - what is that? I want to say spinnifex, but it's not. Sage, rabbitbrush, the short creamy froth of wild oats, this little maiden-tree thing which further downslope is blooming purple, a sparse madcap simple gleaming straw-colored thing with lines catching light at all angles. I think that's the basic skin spread everywhere, finely grading down in the distance to merge with atmospheric powdery blue. Tourists saying heya mechanically with a little click. I see that where I slept last night is called the Sweetwater Mountains. It was pink fading fast, I had to make my bed and didn't see much, but there were white boulders, a fast green and white stream, pink-brown slopes with pine and what is that little hard-leaf tree. (Aiee, it's time for the grasshoppers to start to sound their little rattles.) I put my bed on powdery sand near the stream. It was only seven but too dark to write. I sat looking. The stream filled its pass with complicated clashing sound that I realized contained an almost constant boom of jets whose flashing triangles I could see crossing the stars always northwest to southeast. Much later the moon rose in a small notch on the other side of the stream. The spot got itself ready, very bright, but then nothing but the god itself, whose appearance was so commanding I sat up straight to take its force. A fantastic arrival. Now I could see the sand under my nearest tree worked back and forth with animal footprints. I could see the red of my shoes. Still, a hard night. I'm not letting myself sleep, I don't know why. It is as if a kind of logistic care is holding onto my thoughts. They don't soften. There was a moment when they did, and I had a hypnagogic flash of a man facing me at a distance - maybe Mexican. Not of this time, I think. I am not liking my road companions. I answer them with so much reserve they quickly turn away. Does that mean more than I know? "Hope you don't mind if I say, I don't mean to be perverted or nuthin', I think flannel looks good on a woman." 11th, Boron CA From a distance it was a little town, houses, businesses, motels, lights of a lot of little colors, but I arrived at a diesel fuel oasis, huge tradename light panels, a hamburger drive-through, a pink motel. There was a young East Indian girl walking into the office as I parked. A lovely person, the first lovely person I've seen in thirteen hundred miles (apart from the filling station boy who said what he did about my shirt). I smiled. The yardlight was shining through the windshield so she saw me and smiled back. As I filled out the form - it is always so strange to write my name and home address where it is so completely irrelevant - I could hear a lot of kids in a room behind her. Is this a lonesome place to live? I ask. No it's alright, I can stay with the children. She speaks with the softness of the l's that says she was raised in India. And those are her kids. She looks sixteen. She has a sweet, balanced face and mild eyes, she has young dignity. It is morning at the oasis. Beyond the few buildings and the crossroads there is a perimeter of rubbish some distance into the sandy flats that extend many miles toward rims of mountain almost erased by haze. The R&E Motel is pink-orange with blue-green trim and a white gravel roof. Pink dawn light suited it the way it suits the pink-buff color of the sand. The four watered pines in a wire fenced enclosure with the motel sign were full of birds, were concentrated twitter. They have stopped now. The last hour of night driving was hard. A narrow two-lane road with heavy truck traffic. Every set of lights was an ordeal - the ones I meet and the ones that overtake me. It's initiatory peril. I was praising my own ability to stay alive, to rocket through each clash of light and sound still safe between the white line and the dotted double row of orange reflectors. I've eaten and slept very little in four days. I've traveled through weeks of time. I'm maybe a hundred and fifty miles from San Diego and must begin to think of new kinds of strategy. For instance, my hair and skin got weathered in the dust, and where I'm going such things will make me seem primitive. Oh, but hello. Here I am. Yawning. There was an extraordinary sudden transition yesterday. In the morning I was in exquisite high basin land. The east slopes of the Sierra Nevada were blazoned with patches of aspen, orange, yellow and green of the cleanest brightest rightest primary shades. There was Mono Lake on the left, raggy-edged peaks on the right, watered foothills, desert sage. Then the road dropped off a rim, thousands of feet in a couple of miles. Bishop, in Round Valley, was the beginning of this flatland, not so much desert as wasteland. At first there were nearby hills that were like subtly made heaps of colored sand - many colors dropped individually in cones, with more cones dropped next to them and overtop them, on and on until the colors are both mixed and sorted - oxblood, pink, buff, sand, black, brown, tan, purple, the whole sprinkled at the tops with peppercorns and misted lightly with pale blue. There was heavy traffic. I flashed past. The car kept a steady 60. The engine sounded as if it was on its stride. A train passing whose red engines say Santa Fe. Flatcars carrying truck trailers. 12th San Jacinto A man is reaching through the tent's round door grabbing my hands. I am struggling to wake. I can feel what's happening but I can't move or speak. There's a harsh zipping sound. He has caught my hands tight in the door. I wake. My heart is beating fast. Sleeping under palms and eucalyptus, willows, poplars, in the little green tent. Unpacking it I noticed that it had been packed by someone other than me, carefully but differently. It was Luke on Read Island who knotted the string. Yesterday was another kind of ordeal. I made a mistake and it took all day to deal with. I somehow misremembered the route I planned and went up over a mountain completely needlessly. Hairpins, very steep. Switchback corners marked for 10 mph. At the top a nice forest incorporated as Dumbtown, a ski town like Whistler. And then a long brake-release brake-release loopy road into valley California so filled with white pollution or smoke I still haven't seen it. Coming down off the mountain I began to notice a clunking under my left foot. That mountain has cost me something. I risk the freeway. My route in this populated valley is confused - I'm trying to pick a way south that stays near the hills. The towns have four-way stops instead of lights. There's always a clunk now just before I stop. The freeway section is under construction, my side routed into a lane of the oncoming side. There are no shoulders. Heavy traffic is shooting through two extremely narrow lanes. I'm not sure the clunking doesn't mean the wheel will fall off suddenly. I'll have to have it checked. I shouldn't be risking speed at all. And so on. Looking for the campground yesterday I stopped a farm woman in a small truck: tanned, white-haired, maybe sixty-five, sharp, womanly, competent and private. When I walked up to her window she said "What do you need" just like that. The garage wants to do $700 in brake work and a couple of hundred more on this and that. The car wasn't clunking this morning. Two guys standing staring at the computers. They talk to the boss. He waves and shrugs. I have no idea. I'll leave it for now, I say. The inspection will be $69 he says. Didn't you say thirty-something? Oh, it doubled it, he says, I'll fix it. But now they have to put the wheel back and they can do it wrong. It's an ignorant unhappy dependency. The mechanic was fumbling for the hood's second latch. I reached in for it. He's got it, the second guy said. Please step outside, the mechanic says irritably. Here you are. I'm sorry, I know it's hard to find, I say and whisk outside. It's as if I'm in a valley of confusion. I don't know what road to leave by. I don't know whether the car's okay. I can't see more than a block up the road. I was scared of the guy camping beside a company truck who offered to help pitch my tent. The woman running the camp office was a hard old smoker who said of her pond, It's not for swimmin' honey, only fishin'. There are feedlots calling themselves ranchos. Huge tracts of construction next to what looks like a Los Angeles aqueduct. Motors all night, feedlot stench. On the road I'm in constant naïve wonder at the facts of engineering - what everyone is taking as the given landscape. The cant of the corners, the design of the turnlanes. Wonder and terror as there used to be for earthquakes and eclipses. I'm in the realm of a god who isn't mine and feel constant peril on account of it. Dealings. 13th San Diego Yesterday's stories later. My room at the end of this three storey motor inn. It's mid-morning. I see bougainvillea and hear a chirp. When I got in last night I gave my credit card number and called David. His voice. David, I say. How can it be true. How can the fact of the presence of his voice not indicate something esoteric. He is here, he is under his lamp at his desk, he is there not-there the way he is. Even the texture of his shock is present, even the way I can't reach through it. Even all I don't know and don't listen to. David exists at a distance of 2737 km every inch of which I touched - I mean the tires touched. They rolled out a continuous line from Pender Street to here - no, there were those street dips in San Jacinto where all four were off the pavement - but I traveled those miles, I saw those miles, I navigated them. My nerve, my body. 14th Golden West Hotel Have been fretting money, parking. In half an hour I have to go put two dollars in the meter. I'll start working today. I still don't need to eat. I'm kind of blank. This hotel - I know now why the west is called golden, I saw how the roadsides from Oregon down shine with dry grass, wheat, cream, palomino, blond - is built for a particular time, 1913, first cars. Three floors with big square rooms on the outside for gentry I suppose and then three interior corridors with small rooms on light wells - rooms like mine - where a lone man set his hat on the chair and lay down in his boots. The lobby is thrilling to cross, dramatic, two storeys high with opposed grand staircases that have landings overlooking the desk's corral. Somehow they've kept the space, which has old paintings, flowered red carpets, Mission armchairs, and perfectly beautiful lamps, brass posts my height with white glass bowls opening toward the ceiling. The day staff was interesting. There was a silver-haired man with a face so intelligent I wanted to know what he really does. And I got into the elevator last night with a lovely person, a drinker, I could see, but beautiful - getting old without succeeding, and succeeding. Many of the faces are quite soft. The men who sit hour after hour in the beautiful lobby benches look as if they are alright because of the grandeur of the space. Days ago I left San Jacinto by a county road that went up into round rocky hills that were burnt orange and black, some small shrub's fall color, the shrubs small and round like the dark rocks they were among. The road was very twisty, a bad surface, narrow, but wound through small farms. Olive trees. The clunking began again under my left foot, much worse, every bump. Those guys were useless. The road climbs. It's hot. I'm up out of the smog. I come to a junction settlement. An automotive shop and a trailer. There's a man with a sixties freak's woolly hair. I'll ask him. "Sounds like it's your stabilizer bar." He bounces the front end. "Yup, see that part is moving and that part isn't. I think it's your stabilizer bar." "Is it dangerous?" "You could get in a wreck." "What would you do if it was you?" "I'd go to San Diego, they've got lots of wrecking yards there." He's got a woolly beard but a beautiful lip. He's a real mechanic. My plan is I'll go to Julian which is on I8 into San Diego and also on the way into the desert. I'll look for a cabin. I spend the day trying to do that. It starts to be pink evening. Will I find a campsite. No - I turn around and drive west on 8. Half a red sun. On this sort of highway I seem to fly past the hills slightly above them - the road treats them as immaterial. It gets dark. We're into the bedroom communities. Three lanes, then four, then five and then six. Unspaced streams of cars merging from on-ramps at such speed I think I'd better get out of the right lane. I have no idea where to exit but as long as I'm going west I'm alright. I'm in a centre lane of six or seven. The pavement is ribbed. That's an ordeal but now I understand why I've hated it. The stabilizer bar being broken makes the car feel like it's going out of control on bumps. Faster than fifty-five on washboard feels dangerous, so I'm steady fifty-five in the centre lane where I can be sure I won't accidentally exit. I see packs of lights coming up fast behind me. They overtake on both sides. Where two lanes have exited on my left I find myself too far over and think I'd better switch lanes. It's clear in the mirror but when I shoulder check there's a sports car swooping through the gap at probably a hundred miles an hour. We're shooting down into the city. The road has been dropping since I got onto it. It's been like shooting rapids, if I relax for a second I'll be dead, there's no margin. I and some strangers will be dead. Meantime, I have to watch the signs and guess where to get off. It's saying 5 to Los Angeles. Stay off that. Here's a ramp I'm exiting on whether I want to or not. It's probably alright, I think I'm there. The clanking underfoot hasn't stopped, I can hear it now that it's quieter. Here I am among little houses and trees. Is there a streetlight where I can look at a map? Then I drive around and I find the motel and I phone David and in the morning I look at the kilometer indicator I last looked at driving out of Vancouver in the dark in the wet a week ago today. A couple of months ago. Here is a question for the perception people. I saw sixteen hundred miles
of world, I saw all around, I did it hardly eating and with very partial
sleep: what does it mean? And what next. Am I ready to work? And where will
I put my car for the day?
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