I've never felt alone in nature. Solitude has never seemed to me as something to be avoided, nor even truly possible, since I was always approaching something. Only a day out from Willits I was suddenly alone as I followed the rails that would lead me to Eureka. The trains hadn't run in decades. In parts it seemed the tracks need only be dusted off to again be in use. In other sections some archaeology may be required to exhume whats been buried in landslides.
Since the rails traced the Eel River, though usually some sixty to a hundred and twenty feet above it, I had imagined there would be more towns along the course of it. I have been told I have an imagination that makes the world better than it is, and so it was again here. For three days running I had only myself for company - not a fisherman, a kayaker, or a person just walking besides myself. Never had there been a day before when I had gone out into the world and seen no one. There were signs aplenty that there had been people - a shot up sign, a collapsed shack, a conspicuously intact bottle of crown royal, and always the rails - but no people themselves.
Each bend in the river meant either another tunnel to pass thru or another collapse to scramble over. One bend obliged me with both. Half of a tunnel had fallen in, bringing the mountain with it, creating a canted boulder hill, 45 degrees in pitch. None of the stone, however, was made of anything more solid than slate, clay, and mud, stuck together and dried. Too much pressure on one point, or sudden shifts, meant that the stone beneath could shatter and slip like segments of a peeled orange. Some sedges and grasses grew in the more stable places, but the banks of the river some 80 feet below held the shreds of brush that mountain was shucking off now that there was no longer some pestering machine to crawl over it each day.
As I made my way over, a deer jumped from the hollows between two boulders where it had crouched to avoid the heat of the day. His antlers were still coated in velvet. I've never thought of the blacktailed deer as a particularly agile creature, but he leapt from rock to rock sending only the barest ration of pebbles skittering with each hit of his hooves. Surely, I could not do so well as that, but slowly worked my way across, stepping over what I could avoid stepping on, stepping around where I could avoid stepping over. This got me only so far before I found myself at the edge of a scree patch. Any footing one could comfortably get was now in a configuration of a dot held between two dashes. That is, there was the boulder patch, then a single rock, and then after, the broken steel of the rails and the remaining length of tunnel. Separating the three were two scree patches - that is, loose stone not any larger than olives piled many feet thick that has about the solidity of playing dice. Moving over any patch of it must be done quickly and cautiously.
The smarter, though admittedly longer way, would have been to have followed the boulder field down to the river, take off my boots, and wade upstream till I could find a place to climb up again. Instead, without any space to gather speed, I jumped as far as I could, and made the rock, four limbs gripping. Then, I felt my pack slip, drawing me away, pulling my fingers into lengthened arches. I had a few moments to think, though really that's much to polite a word for it. I don't think my brain was much involved, though I knew there could be no way to get down the scree patch without some serious risk. There really wasn't much choice to it. So, I launched off what I could, sank one foot on the scree, and shot into the tunnel, running.
It was not a very long tunnel. In fact, I did not even have to run all the way thru it to make it to the other side in under a minute. I began walking again, with deliberation, so as to induce calm even if I myself was not. Above me swallows flew in an out of the standing arch as of the apse of a church, and they the frescoes come to life. I sat on the rails and lit a cigarette in the crown of my hat. I'm not of the habit of smoking, but certain situations require it.
I wouldn't mind dying out here, even by violent means provided it were done quickly. A lightning strike, or falling from a cliff and bursting like a bag of ripe strawberries, would not trouble me. Had I slipped and broken a leg, or my neck, I might have had to have waited some time for anyone to find me. Or even as has happened to others, dry out in my waiting as days cede to days. It's an inelegant way to go. That may not be likely in a place such as the Eel, but it was a new idea to me then, and may come with greater reason in other spaces. This was only the first.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Hybridity
After San Francisco, I went over the Marin Headlands, across Tamalpais, and down to Bolinas and Point Reyes before turning inland again. There is no nicer flower pasture than the headlands when in bloom. The setting sun makes the grass look all of strands of gold and mallow and mariposa lilies stick their heads up like buttons thru the thread. Swallows flew and turned in the air. I've recently learned that these birds get most of their water requirements from condensation on the grass. I can well understand why they might seem to fly for nothing but joy. Had I the swallow's wings these are fields over which I would gladly fly to drink the dew in flight.
So much of this is lately come here. Before the Spanish, the golden hills kept their green all the summer through. The perennial native grasses could not hold up against the annuals brought by the Europeans. When the land was overgrazed, the annuals came back the faster. Then the oaks were cut, and new trees brought in from Australia to fuel the need for railroad ties in the growing state. Foreign succulents from South Africa were imported for their use in stabilizing sand dunes. Exotics from the world over became the flowers of Victorian gardens of the bay, soon to rediscover the wilds themselves. And then there were any number of seeds that just happened to come, stuck to a boot, or burred to the hair of a cow, or dropped from a crate.
So it is that there forests of Australian blue gum eucalyptus growing across the hills. They rattle their sickle shaped leaves in the wind and give off a clean scent, but cover the soil with a thick layer of leaves that nothing but poison oak will grow through. The wood itself does not catch fire easily, but the bark and leaves do, meaning the forests burn with a fury that sterilizes hillsides, leaving behind a black that the eucalyptus is first to come back to.
At their fringe, pampas grass from Argentina grows in tangles too thick for the native rodents to hide in. Himalayan Blackberry, larger and more ferocious than its native cousin, wraps the eastern sides of the hills. At the ocean, south african ice plant smothers the dunes, choking native plants, a precaution thought necessary by the highway department to keep sand off the roads. While higher up, an ivy of the same country competes with ones from England and Japan to climb the ladders of the Douglass Firs till even those mighty trees have the light blocked, or break under the weight of the vines, or rot beneath the tangle. Then there are the usual European weeds, - cleavers, oatstraw, timothy, milk thistle - and that newcomer lately of the Black Sea, giant hogweed. To survive here, in this roiling jungle of weedy exotics, one must be savage oneself, as the poison oak, stinging nettle, and poison hemlock, or else innocuous enough to escape notice, as a woodland orchis. Only rarely will one be able to stop at an unexpected clump of kniphofia - red hot poker plant - a lily relative from South Africa, and appreciate how it has settled here, in one tidy clump amidst the native brush, and unlike so many other newcomers, behaved itself.
The people, the land. Everything seems to be from someplace else in this strange state. We are players to a land in flux. This is a world that is moving towards hybridity. The pot is being stirred, whether it desires or not, the dregs mix with the broth. I will not say it is a bad thing, but it is certainly not an easy thing, either to do or accept. And whatever the outcome, the emerging world is one to which the inhabitants of these hills will have to learn again to be native to.
Like ourselves, the plants clamor for the sunshine and sea air of California. Unlike ourselves, they present no lawsuit to stake their claim - or refute another's - and so might be more easily restrained. A shovel would do nice work. But since they are so abundant, and persistent, and so obvious as to be overlooked - so weedy - they are likely to remain quiet conquerors of a once perfect paradise. Which is something like ourselves after all.
So much of this is lately come here. Before the Spanish, the golden hills kept their green all the summer through. The perennial native grasses could not hold up against the annuals brought by the Europeans. When the land was overgrazed, the annuals came back the faster. Then the oaks were cut, and new trees brought in from Australia to fuel the need for railroad ties in the growing state. Foreign succulents from South Africa were imported for their use in stabilizing sand dunes. Exotics from the world over became the flowers of Victorian gardens of the bay, soon to rediscover the wilds themselves. And then there were any number of seeds that just happened to come, stuck to a boot, or burred to the hair of a cow, or dropped from a crate.
So it is that there forests of Australian blue gum eucalyptus growing across the hills. They rattle their sickle shaped leaves in the wind and give off a clean scent, but cover the soil with a thick layer of leaves that nothing but poison oak will grow through. The wood itself does not catch fire easily, but the bark and leaves do, meaning the forests burn with a fury that sterilizes hillsides, leaving behind a black that the eucalyptus is first to come back to.
At their fringe, pampas grass from Argentina grows in tangles too thick for the native rodents to hide in. Himalayan Blackberry, larger and more ferocious than its native cousin, wraps the eastern sides of the hills. At the ocean, south african ice plant smothers the dunes, choking native plants, a precaution thought necessary by the highway department to keep sand off the roads. While higher up, an ivy of the same country competes with ones from England and Japan to climb the ladders of the Douglass Firs till even those mighty trees have the light blocked, or break under the weight of the vines, or rot beneath the tangle. Then there are the usual European weeds, - cleavers, oatstraw, timothy, milk thistle - and that newcomer lately of the Black Sea, giant hogweed. To survive here, in this roiling jungle of weedy exotics, one must be savage oneself, as the poison oak, stinging nettle, and poison hemlock, or else innocuous enough to escape notice, as a woodland orchis. Only rarely will one be able to stop at an unexpected clump of kniphofia - red hot poker plant - a lily relative from South Africa, and appreciate how it has settled here, in one tidy clump amidst the native brush, and unlike so many other newcomers, behaved itself.
The people, the land. Everything seems to be from someplace else in this strange state. We are players to a land in flux. This is a world that is moving towards hybridity. The pot is being stirred, whether it desires or not, the dregs mix with the broth. I will not say it is a bad thing, but it is certainly not an easy thing, either to do or accept. And whatever the outcome, the emerging world is one to which the inhabitants of these hills will have to learn again to be native to.
Like ourselves, the plants clamor for the sunshine and sea air of California. Unlike ourselves, they present no lawsuit to stake their claim - or refute another's - and so might be more easily restrained. A shovel would do nice work. But since they are so abundant, and persistent, and so obvious as to be overlooked - so weedy - they are likely to remain quiet conquerors of a once perfect paradise. Which is something like ourselves after all.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Fog on the Bay
I have seen New York, and Paris, and Rome, and to my mind not a one of them can compare to San Francisco. Each of those others offered big culture, big history, or just big, and that's probably why I like the last so much. San Francisco is not a very large city, geography put some good limits to it - a thumb of land with a mountain to the south. Three sides moat, one side wall. There's not much place else to go, except across the bay. Had the land been more level it probably would have gotten much grander ideas, but then it would be Boston, or Philadelphia. Instead, being set on the hills leading up to Montara Mountain, the city sits as though the architects had sketched out the plan for a flatter town, then crumpled up the drawings, smoothed them out, and then crushed them up again. So now there is a city where crossing a street feels like mid-grade mountaineering.
Often I felt I was walking thru a garden where people lived. Each dip and rise of the land seemed to hold some strange spot of green that had perhaps at first been inaccessible, then overlooked, and finally preserved in palm and cypress. Twenty percent of the area of San Francisco is taken up by Golden Gate Park alone. That one patch is greater in size than Central Park, though addresses along it are not considered as desirable. But I prefer it. Manhattan likes to stay manicured, but Golden Gate is nature barely held. There are plenty of trees that have been left unpruned, creeping vines have slunk in, dark corners everywhere to explore, or avoid as you like. If Baron Von Hausman had gentrified Paris by consulting Maurice Sendak, this might have been the result. Wild things could live here, and do.
Mostly, I like the fog. Maybe it's because every region must take pride in something. No other city I know is so proximal to nature, it's finger on the pulse of day. A grey mist rises from the Pacific and drifts landward in a magic curtain, clothing the tops of broken trees, sinking the desperate and quiet corners both in a hush, softening smell. Things become calm not so much because of the dampening of sound, but because there is suddenly less imperative to make noise. Conversations become hushed, drivers less angry, perhaps not because they have suddenly become content or soothed, but only realized that whatever they had been worked up about was not really anything much. Not every day does this happen, but many. And it seems to me one of those daily acts of magic - like sunrise, like wind - that happens everywhere, is seen by everyone, and which consequently, nobody pays much attention to. Then something happens to shift the pull of air, and the whole cloud sluices out thru the Golden Gate and back out to sea, and there the city is once more, where from above there had been none. As secret as Avalon.
I've had the good fortune to always be able to travel either with friends or towards them. On my last day in the city, I called up a friend who had been living in Oakland for better than the past two years, and who, to my shame, I never visited. So, naturally I invited her to join my walk. She agreed, for a part of it. We met at the southern entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge. We spent the first quarter figuring out how we had lived so near each other yet always managed to miss meeting up, the middle half talking about the present goings on in our lives, and the last bit talking about where we were going. North is my easiest answer, but by no means most accurate. As for herself, she imagines she'll just be going back across the bay to Oakland. And I'll be looking forward to seeing her on my return. The 1.7 miles of the bridge was neither time, nor length enough to satisfy a friendship put on hold for more than 2 years. We stopped halfway across so I could look out at the bay, and the incredible fortune that allowed so many things to come together, land, sea, earth, sky, sunset, my friend, the bridge, and I. I don't find city views particularly scenic and don't see how a high rise apartment is really a deal since all windows still present grey and concrete, but this is a much better arrangement. Looking east over such a stretch of land, I can imagine why some folks might consider coming here to end their lives, but I wonder how, in looking at so nice a bay, they could not but change their mind. The fog was coming in and the sun going down, so my friend went the last bit with me, and walked me out of the city.
I went north, as has been the habit, up into the Headlands of Marin. From there if the fog is behaved, the whole bay becomes a pool of cloud, and it would seem that a rowboat would be craft enough to go across the surface, provided it were first inspected for leaks. On the slopes of Tamalpais I looked back at San Francisco, but it was gone now, sunk down in vapor, waiting to come out again some other time.
Often I felt I was walking thru a garden where people lived. Each dip and rise of the land seemed to hold some strange spot of green that had perhaps at first been inaccessible, then overlooked, and finally preserved in palm and cypress. Twenty percent of the area of San Francisco is taken up by Golden Gate Park alone. That one patch is greater in size than Central Park, though addresses along it are not considered as desirable. But I prefer it. Manhattan likes to stay manicured, but Golden Gate is nature barely held. There are plenty of trees that have been left unpruned, creeping vines have slunk in, dark corners everywhere to explore, or avoid as you like. If Baron Von Hausman had gentrified Paris by consulting Maurice Sendak, this might have been the result. Wild things could live here, and do.
Mostly, I like the fog. Maybe it's because every region must take pride in something. No other city I know is so proximal to nature, it's finger on the pulse of day. A grey mist rises from the Pacific and drifts landward in a magic curtain, clothing the tops of broken trees, sinking the desperate and quiet corners both in a hush, softening smell. Things become calm not so much because of the dampening of sound, but because there is suddenly less imperative to make noise. Conversations become hushed, drivers less angry, perhaps not because they have suddenly become content or soothed, but only realized that whatever they had been worked up about was not really anything much. Not every day does this happen, but many. And it seems to me one of those daily acts of magic - like sunrise, like wind - that happens everywhere, is seen by everyone, and which consequently, nobody pays much attention to. Then something happens to shift the pull of air, and the whole cloud sluices out thru the Golden Gate and back out to sea, and there the city is once more, where from above there had been none. As secret as Avalon.
I've had the good fortune to always be able to travel either with friends or towards them. On my last day in the city, I called up a friend who had been living in Oakland for better than the past two years, and who, to my shame, I never visited. So, naturally I invited her to join my walk. She agreed, for a part of it. We met at the southern entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge. We spent the first quarter figuring out how we had lived so near each other yet always managed to miss meeting up, the middle half talking about the present goings on in our lives, and the last bit talking about where we were going. North is my easiest answer, but by no means most accurate. As for herself, she imagines she'll just be going back across the bay to Oakland. And I'll be looking forward to seeing her on my return. The 1.7 miles of the bridge was neither time, nor length enough to satisfy a friendship put on hold for more than 2 years. We stopped halfway across so I could look out at the bay, and the incredible fortune that allowed so many things to come together, land, sea, earth, sky, sunset, my friend, the bridge, and I. I don't find city views particularly scenic and don't see how a high rise apartment is really a deal since all windows still present grey and concrete, but this is a much better arrangement. Looking east over such a stretch of land, I can imagine why some folks might consider coming here to end their lives, but I wonder how, in looking at so nice a bay, they could not but change their mind. The fog was coming in and the sun going down, so my friend went the last bit with me, and walked me out of the city.
I went north, as has been the habit, up into the Headlands of Marin. From there if the fog is behaved, the whole bay becomes a pool of cloud, and it would seem that a rowboat would be craft enough to go across the surface, provided it were first inspected for leaks. On the slopes of Tamalpais I looked back at San Francisco, but it was gone now, sunk down in vapor, waiting to come out again some other time.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Interview - San Francisco
If you scroll one third of the way thru this, you can hear an interview with me, held at Pirate Cat Radio on June 4th in San Francisco.
http://podcasts.dreamhosters.com/pcr/DiamondDave/DiamondDave-20100604.mp3
For some of it, I'm reading my first blog entry, but she did ask some good questions.
www.piratecatradio.com
http://podcasts.dreamhosters.com/pcr/DiamondDave/DiamondDave-20100604.mp3
For some of it, I'm reading my first blog entry, but she did ask some good questions.
www.piratecatradio.com
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Roots
My belongings were set – boxed for storage or stowed in my pack – my house cleaned to a state unrivalled since I had first entered, and my last paycheck deposited. But I did not leave immediately. It did not matter that I had reckoned everything as it should be, I did not feel it time to go. Rather, I had that latent feeling that must be held by all migratory creatures, when they reason not by calendar though by intuition. A few stray from the flock, pressing out the boundaries in short, tethered flights, till all at once some desire seizes all by the wings and it’s goodbye for other climes, other trees, other seasons. I would leave when the time was right and not press its arrival.
On a hillside, we spent a final night, I and my friends, camped out together. A few left that day, another at dawn. Late in the morning, the remainder of us, eight, went to breakfast and spoke words that would have no bearing on whatever followed. All talk was of inconsequential subjects that when had with strangers make up small talk and when shared with friends make conversation, the words pressed with significance when passed between. It was a good meal with good friends. Time was getting closer. The hour was there when I could feel my heart, like a flock of swallows, rise and swell within me, then spread out everywhere. This was the ending that I had wanted. I shouldered my pack and walked away.
Why the stubbornness? Why the solitude? Better asking why the clarity that comes from such doings? Why the movement of the swallows? Why does the agave plant spend a quarter century in thrift so as in a single season it might have a sparse blossom? Why the hard-pated determination of salmon to breed and die? Why consider this an ending that it is not? All my reasons previous, and all those to come, could be reduced to a single urge: a bare desire for commune. Like the Baptist. Like Whitman. Like Francis. I would walk to see, and let what I saw enter into me, to become me. To live my life by circle that would ripple outwards pressing back the walls of my world till they became my world, and to be outside was to be inside.
When I first came to California, and now in leaving where I had been, I had felt a shame. Was I not limiting my allegiance by giving up on a place? I had been around some years, though had spent many more growing up in New York, where my family still was. There they had lived – from Brooklyn and Long Island – for centuries it seemed. The Wood family name, it was rumored, went back to Dutch times, being among the first English to see the worth of this continent. Certainly by the proud portraits my parents displayed, there was a history at least to the early years of popular photography. A portion of the family, in the days before and during the Civil War, moved to Pennsylvania, but we remained by name and blood in the Northeast. Though I am not one to judge a person’s character by a name inherited, when families were first given names it was for suitable reasons. The ironworkers were named Smith. The wagon makers cartwrights. For my own family, the Woods were an unremarkable, sedentary forest people. And though my mother’s side claims some Italians, their family name of Silvestri – forest – is ironically suitable. As the names suggest, rooted.
But then, mine is a family richer in rumor than story. I had little proof of any family history before 1850. Even so, that was only the family name. That first Wood may have arrived early on, but still had given up on calling another place home. He had cut his roots to some old world turf and learned to love another land. Nor is this a tree of Wood alone. Grafted to the branch were Danes, Germans, French before it came to me. More than that, my Scottish-Italian mother had a family that was completely of the 20th century. Does this make me a third generation American? Or a fifth? Or an eighth? Or a twelfth? Or not at all? My past is populated with the restless vagabonds of Europe. And before, they too claimed lineages that had come, unrolled, to them by steps from some eastern relations. Out of Africa, out of Eden, they came walking. It is easy to see a tribe of footloose folks drop their packs and their children then set out again, till their heirs became footsore and dropped their own children on some new earth. By such was the world peopled, and whether it is from the earthly paradise, or Ethiopia, we come descended, the story is no less great, or less beautiful. This then, would be a retracing of family history, giving me the chance to relearn – or to make it up – as I go.
So, my roots were cut. For my own part, in the past 8 years I had moved 6 times, received a college degree, learned a foreign language, picked up 9 musical instruments, seen more of the planet than any relative I had ever met, made family where I could not find it. Had I stayed in the town where I had been a boy, I would work at the grocer’s, or a farm, or a truckstop, and my hours of freedom would be tedious recovery from work. I would trade my daylight hours for the right to a place to sleep. So much for roots.
On a hillside, we spent a final night, I and my friends, camped out together. A few left that day, another at dawn. Late in the morning, the remainder of us, eight, went to breakfast and spoke words that would have no bearing on whatever followed. All talk was of inconsequential subjects that when had with strangers make up small talk and when shared with friends make conversation, the words pressed with significance when passed between. It was a good meal with good friends. Time was getting closer. The hour was there when I could feel my heart, like a flock of swallows, rise and swell within me, then spread out everywhere. This was the ending that I had wanted. I shouldered my pack and walked away.
Why the stubbornness? Why the solitude? Better asking why the clarity that comes from such doings? Why the movement of the swallows? Why does the agave plant spend a quarter century in thrift so as in a single season it might have a sparse blossom? Why the hard-pated determination of salmon to breed and die? Why consider this an ending that it is not? All my reasons previous, and all those to come, could be reduced to a single urge: a bare desire for commune. Like the Baptist. Like Whitman. Like Francis. I would walk to see, and let what I saw enter into me, to become me. To live my life by circle that would ripple outwards pressing back the walls of my world till they became my world, and to be outside was to be inside.
When I first came to California, and now in leaving where I had been, I had felt a shame. Was I not limiting my allegiance by giving up on a place? I had been around some years, though had spent many more growing up in New York, where my family still was. There they had lived – from Brooklyn and Long Island – for centuries it seemed. The Wood family name, it was rumored, went back to Dutch times, being among the first English to see the worth of this continent. Certainly by the proud portraits my parents displayed, there was a history at least to the early years of popular photography. A portion of the family, in the days before and during the Civil War, moved to Pennsylvania, but we remained by name and blood in the Northeast. Though I am not one to judge a person’s character by a name inherited, when families were first given names it was for suitable reasons. The ironworkers were named Smith. The wagon makers cartwrights. For my own family, the Woods were an unremarkable, sedentary forest people. And though my mother’s side claims some Italians, their family name of Silvestri – forest – is ironically suitable. As the names suggest, rooted.
But then, mine is a family richer in rumor than story. I had little proof of any family history before 1850. Even so, that was only the family name. That first Wood may have arrived early on, but still had given up on calling another place home. He had cut his roots to some old world turf and learned to love another land. Nor is this a tree of Wood alone. Grafted to the branch were Danes, Germans, French before it came to me. More than that, my Scottish-Italian mother had a family that was completely of the 20th century. Does this make me a third generation American? Or a fifth? Or an eighth? Or a twelfth? Or not at all? My past is populated with the restless vagabonds of Europe. And before, they too claimed lineages that had come, unrolled, to them by steps from some eastern relations. Out of Africa, out of Eden, they came walking. It is easy to see a tribe of footloose folks drop their packs and their children then set out again, till their heirs became footsore and dropped their own children on some new earth. By such was the world peopled, and whether it is from the earthly paradise, or Ethiopia, we come descended, the story is no less great, or less beautiful. This then, would be a retracing of family history, giving me the chance to relearn – or to make it up – as I go.
So, my roots were cut. For my own part, in the past 8 years I had moved 6 times, received a college degree, learned a foreign language, picked up 9 musical instruments, seen more of the planet than any relative I had ever met, made family where I could not find it. Had I stayed in the town where I had been a boy, I would work at the grocer’s, or a farm, or a truckstop, and my hours of freedom would be tedious recovery from work. I would trade my daylight hours for the right to a place to sleep. So much for roots.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Preamble
I do my best thinking afoot, and I suppose that’s how this all came about. The idea was simple; left foot, right foot, repeat, all the way across the continent. Starting out from south of San Francisco, going north along the Pacific till it seemed time to turn east, against the mountains and what lay behind, and so again down to a different ocean. A walk from sea to sea.
I had thought by this point to have figured it all out. Now in my twenty-seventh year, it seemed I should be well settled to some job, some place, some calling, if you will - to be advancing towards my life's goal. I still haven't got any of that sorted, and expect, as times goes, to be even less sure of it. I've had my turns of feeling deficient, but I've come past it to this new endeavor.
Between San Francisco and the Atlantic lay an undiscovered country, the fabled land of fruited plains and purple mountains. I'd passed thru it, and over it, a number of times since coming to California from New York, but could not say I knew it. Places, if not blank spots on the map, were certainly little filled in my mind. I had no idea about a place with a name like Oregon. And Montana brought little up, but by the sound of it a place as powerful in beauty and silence as the land to which I had come. Minnesota meant the sound of water to me. I knew a few folks from Michigan, and so had vague associations. Idaho meant nothing. Thousands of miles - and years - of history and Lewis and Clark might as well have never left. It's an intimidating blankscape.
I spent hours looking over maps in astonishment at the places one could go, if there were time and inclination. Shasta. Olympic. Tetons. Glacier. Acadia. At first, I had wanted at first to see every state, and all places, but that idea had dimmed after California. I had arrived there at a point where I needed the community I found but didn't know it yet. The people I met accepted my character and behavior with enthusiasm and celebration. In the three years spent among them, they became the friends I could not replace. We lived, slept, ate, laughed, and loved together. I was perfectly happy. Naturally, I had to leave.
I could remain, contentedly, in California, and leave that whole middle section untouched and untroubled - a lost continent - or get out before I got too comfortable, before I gave up on wondering what else there was. That's how this idea came about, and the time come round for it. Signs seemed to be everywhere telling me to get up, go, move, do. The friends I love were moving on to other places, I decided to leave my own job for reasons that remain personal, I did not get accepted to any positions I had applied for, I still slept alone, I had no car. The time I had half-wished upon myself was now there in spades. But still, diminishing.
I fancy I am young yet, and plenty able, but can guess with fair accuracy it won't always be so. Middle age is now less than a decade away and the comforts I would care to enjoy then - a family, land, the satisfaction of youth well spent - I have made little progress towards. This may well be an opportunity not to come a second time.
Too, I was looking to experience that richness of spirit that comes with good living, with breathing good air and sleeping in the grass. I wanted to find again a joy I have touched, and always in nature. I have felt absolute quivering raptures up in a tree, beneath a manzanita bush, and under a lake, among other places. I have never felt rejected by nature. Always, nature has been a place of comfort, the understanding teacher, the loving relative, who takes me in when I can't make rent. I have felt the sweep of an overflowing gut rush that can only be love when in that great presence, amazed by all the ways a world can whisper its adoration.
This, also, hangs on time. I wanted to see it before its gone. I'd read from the great writers, and heard from those of elder generations, that the green space was greater, and there was more of it to be young in, when they were off having their own adventures. It was a continent not quite conquered, and perhaps still isn't, but there were more of those things wild then. The bison, the wolves, the bear, had gone not long after the people who put up their last defense. Then the forests were cleared, the towns came up, and roads, roads for everyone everywhere it seems, as a restless people got a notion to get up and move and go somewhere, anywhere for any reason. Even to see just how green that grass could get.
I was restless myself, but I wanted to go to places besides where the roads would lead me and I didn't want to sit around while the last of the good places were swept away. I didn't want to tell my grandchildren that there had been giants, but I never saw them, and nor would they. I didn't want to miss out. I wanted to see that other side.
For years I have wondered at the amazement of the Spanish explorers and the 19th century naturalists for the plenitude of life and majesty that splits and spreads itself over every acre of this land. What a sight it must have been to see the Appalachians go white with chestnut bloom, and big bluestem brush the bellies of the buffalo, and the Central Valley blossom as a lake of flowers. That's all gone now. Neither I nor anyone can see what they saw, but I can see as they saw.
Years have made me no smarter. I'm ever surprised by marks of time I find in the mirror, yet still feel as bewildered as an adolescent, just getting a hang on things. I am a 26 year old boy with no clue on how to be a man. I'm not sure where the division was supposed to lie, and I have as yet found no trace of it.
This then, would be that mark that splits my time in two. Years afterward would be reckoned as 'that had been before' and 'that had been after.' It would be the meridian beyond which I could claim to have done something worthwhile, that I could boast without shame, yet never need to. To have done it, or to have heard said "that one crossed the continent on foot" is enough. The doing of it is easy. You walk, you get tired, you rest, you get up and walk again. And so on to the sea. It's just a long way.
I had thought by this point to have figured it all out. Now in my twenty-seventh year, it seemed I should be well settled to some job, some place, some calling, if you will - to be advancing towards my life's goal. I still haven't got any of that sorted, and expect, as times goes, to be even less sure of it. I've had my turns of feeling deficient, but I've come past it to this new endeavor.
Between San Francisco and the Atlantic lay an undiscovered country, the fabled land of fruited plains and purple mountains. I'd passed thru it, and over it, a number of times since coming to California from New York, but could not say I knew it. Places, if not blank spots on the map, were certainly little filled in my mind. I had no idea about a place with a name like Oregon. And Montana brought little up, but by the sound of it a place as powerful in beauty and silence as the land to which I had come. Minnesota meant the sound of water to me. I knew a few folks from Michigan, and so had vague associations. Idaho meant nothing. Thousands of miles - and years - of history and Lewis and Clark might as well have never left. It's an intimidating blankscape.
I spent hours looking over maps in astonishment at the places one could go, if there were time and inclination. Shasta. Olympic. Tetons. Glacier. Acadia. At first, I had wanted at first to see every state, and all places, but that idea had dimmed after California. I had arrived there at a point where I needed the community I found but didn't know it yet. The people I met accepted my character and behavior with enthusiasm and celebration. In the three years spent among them, they became the friends I could not replace. We lived, slept, ate, laughed, and loved together. I was perfectly happy. Naturally, I had to leave.
I could remain, contentedly, in California, and leave that whole middle section untouched and untroubled - a lost continent - or get out before I got too comfortable, before I gave up on wondering what else there was. That's how this idea came about, and the time come round for it. Signs seemed to be everywhere telling me to get up, go, move, do. The friends I love were moving on to other places, I decided to leave my own job for reasons that remain personal, I did not get accepted to any positions I had applied for, I still slept alone, I had no car. The time I had half-wished upon myself was now there in spades. But still, diminishing.
I fancy I am young yet, and plenty able, but can guess with fair accuracy it won't always be so. Middle age is now less than a decade away and the comforts I would care to enjoy then - a family, land, the satisfaction of youth well spent - I have made little progress towards. This may well be an opportunity not to come a second time.
Too, I was looking to experience that richness of spirit that comes with good living, with breathing good air and sleeping in the grass. I wanted to find again a joy I have touched, and always in nature. I have felt absolute quivering raptures up in a tree, beneath a manzanita bush, and under a lake, among other places. I have never felt rejected by nature. Always, nature has been a place of comfort, the understanding teacher, the loving relative, who takes me in when I can't make rent. I have felt the sweep of an overflowing gut rush that can only be love when in that great presence, amazed by all the ways a world can whisper its adoration.
This, also, hangs on time. I wanted to see it before its gone. I'd read from the great writers, and heard from those of elder generations, that the green space was greater, and there was more of it to be young in, when they were off having their own adventures. It was a continent not quite conquered, and perhaps still isn't, but there were more of those things wild then. The bison, the wolves, the bear, had gone not long after the people who put up their last defense. Then the forests were cleared, the towns came up, and roads, roads for everyone everywhere it seems, as a restless people got a notion to get up and move and go somewhere, anywhere for any reason. Even to see just how green that grass could get.
I was restless myself, but I wanted to go to places besides where the roads would lead me and I didn't want to sit around while the last of the good places were swept away. I didn't want to tell my grandchildren that there had been giants, but I never saw them, and nor would they. I didn't want to miss out. I wanted to see that other side.
For years I have wondered at the amazement of the Spanish explorers and the 19th century naturalists for the plenitude of life and majesty that splits and spreads itself over every acre of this land. What a sight it must have been to see the Appalachians go white with chestnut bloom, and big bluestem brush the bellies of the buffalo, and the Central Valley blossom as a lake of flowers. That's all gone now. Neither I nor anyone can see what they saw, but I can see as they saw.
Years have made me no smarter. I'm ever surprised by marks of time I find in the mirror, yet still feel as bewildered as an adolescent, just getting a hang on things. I am a 26 year old boy with no clue on how to be a man. I'm not sure where the division was supposed to lie, and I have as yet found no trace of it.
This then, would be that mark that splits my time in two. Years afterward would be reckoned as 'that had been before' and 'that had been after.' It would be the meridian beyond which I could claim to have done something worthwhile, that I could boast without shame, yet never need to. To have done it, or to have heard said "that one crossed the continent on foot" is enough. The doing of it is easy. You walk, you get tired, you rest, you get up and walk again. And so on to the sea. It's just a long way.
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