Eucalyptus trees clutch at a blue-ribboned sky where the dark shapes of falcons spiral, staring downwards, into the wet green fields
posted by jeremy on August 26, 2004
...& here I am, myself wrapped in one of these hideous machines, nervously sipping cheap sugary coffee, staring out at this human-tore world & too often considering what physics demands when an auto strikes something stationary at such speeds, the exact twistage of steel frame, shatter of plastic, fiberglass & glass, as the engine block is driven backwards into the passenger compartment, the mingling of bone, blood & machine; The common mangling of it. People die this way everyday, nearly every moment, somewhere... "Shit on this." I whisper, plea or curse & hang on, white-knuckled, scarred by ancient half-remembered accidents.
We're headed South & I'm reading, between fits of phobic reaction, The User's Guide to the Millenium by JG Ballard. Debby drives & music scratches from the two working speakers, Will Oldham or Low, some Cash, now cashed & in his grave. We cruise on, surrounded by monstrous semis, fucking demons I say, especially in the rain... & the low oil light blinks ominously.
I know that we will survive this road trip... But what if we don't?
A bright green sign tells us, 43 miles to Redding.
I rode into Arcata, California for the first time nearly seven years ago.
I was a different person then... dumber, braver. I had left Cincinnati 4 days previous, evacuated by Greyhound, a 72 hour journey cross the slow states, then a scary evening in San Francisco, then back on the bus to Arcata where I was to wait a week till a rendezvous with friends in a town we had picked arbitrarily off the map; Eureka... Picked more for the name than anything else. Eureka! It just sounded lucky... Little knew we then of such methish domains.
The bus pulled into Arcata & I unloaded my overloaded pack & I just sat down on the monster, paralyzed suddenly, scanning the perimeters of my existence, scared, tired & elated, nearly trembling, completely alone, utterly free. Then, with the fear finally fought back, I went & bought a huge bottle of cheap wine with a portion of my meager fortune ($130) & picked a promising direction & marched up into the hills, looking for a wooded respite, a place to camp, have a fire, swig some swill... & as I pushed into the forest, I think I understood something even then... That I was pushing forward into everything that's happened to me since.
I'm telling Debbie about some of these things as we drive into Arcata, spilling out the details, trying to imbue the story with some of the mythic status that that time of my life held for me at one point, though most of the fable has faded now, scoured clean with the pragmatism that time usually teaches.
I look back now & I think, How naive, you fucking shit-stupid punk, trusting that one drunken-freak ride, goof-ass moron, why did you carry so much shit in your pack, why did you spend your precious money on that bullshit, why did you take that ridiculous route? You dumb kid, I think, you dumb brave brat.
We walk circles thru Arcata, fending off petitioners & hippy cigarette-bummers alike, looking for lunch & a beer, discussing where & when to camp. Rainclouds hover threateningly in the distance. We grab some overpriced veggie burgers from a classy little brewpub & drive off, racing the rain.
Arcata, hello & goodbye, once again.
The Redwoods stand sentinel around us. Ancient organic spires, some 30 stories tall, weighing maybe 4000 tons... & many of these creatures, good-fuck, were young when paper was first invented in China, young when the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii, young when Tiberius seceded Caesar Augustus as emperor of Rome, young when when the Han Dynasty started the Great Wall, young when the Kingdoms of Korea sprang into existence, young when a certain quasi-religious political leader hung screaming on a rough cross atop a hill called Golgotha... & now these creatures stand imminitely threatened at the hands of busy corporate primates, busy hungry monkeys.
Awestruck & winsome, Deb stands beside me, elvin head thrown back, warm wet curls of hair of hair curving about her face, laughing as the rain drips down, hundreds of feet, thru the canopy. We push back thru the huge ferns, step carefully over delicate Trillium, just blossomed & we scramble, with dirty busy monkey hands, over fallen trunks the size of busses or whales, as sub-surface streams trickle, hidden but heard, thru all of this lushness. Furious chipmunks run from the sound of us. Somewhere, wrapped in this place, there are deer & elk, slipping thru & I imagine the lithe creep of the cougar, gorgeous predator, her beautifully serious yellow eyes, watching as we pass... But I know that we are too close to the road for this... & if only, if only we could be so lucky as to die by cat-attack.
"How could anyone ever cut these?" ask Deb & I picture those old sepia-toned images of loggers standing in the half-done cuts of a sequoia or redwood, men tired & worn. Prior to the advent of the chainsaw, it would take days of working in ten hour shifts, to take but one down... & millenia old, these trees would come down at the hands of loggers (one of the most dangerous occupations on the planet) paid but maybe 13 cents an hour... by other men who basked in millions of ill-earned dollars. Men who gave no more of a shit about the lives of their employees than the lives of these... near-gods.
A travesty born of a slavery born of poverty, an infinite economic loop, inescapable, so far. Who do we blame? The slaves? The masters of slaves? Men & women who allow themselves to become slaves?
I have no answers & a bluejay cries out, telling us to fuck the fuck off, I think...
& so we do, heading back to Deb's car.
Coming into San Francisco is always something beautiful for me. Bursting fucking starburst of a motherfucker, this vast humming beast. The frantic energy of nearly a million humans living & breathing & fucking & fighting & dying; It cannot be ignored or resisted. I am always consumed by the aliveness of it. I want to see everything, feel it, be it... & yet always, so far, I must escape it, overwhelmed, eventually.
We throw five dollars ($2.50 per axle) into the Golden Gate Bridge toll & pass, muttering, amazed at the cost: We did not know prices had risen so but fuck it, so things go. We drive on, swallowed up by the evening's confusion, feeling smalltown & lost, provincial. We are headed for Deb's friend's apartment somewhere in the Outer Mission district. After forty-five minutes of wrong turns & dazzling big-city lights we find the goddam place. We pull our backpacks from the back of her little white Ford station wagon & stagger to the door. Her friend opens & we say hello, hello...
We open beers, smoke weed, & talk late into the night. Eventually I beg pardon, stumble outside, pull a smoke... & smoke, staring at what I can of the city around me.
Even at 4AM, it hums & hums.
& Deb & I awake to the hum of the grow lights in the closet next to our skulls. Her friend has some serious botany going on in there, lush beautiful plants, intoxicating if illegal.
We fuck & rise & shower, brush our sad teeth, thinking of breakfast. An hour later finds us at nearly the coolest diner I've ever fucking had the pleasure of spending too much money at. A little Hispanic joint on the edge of the mission, an actual mariachai serenading our wondrous huevos rancheros. Cheers & buenos! all around & we stride, satiated into a day of exploration. We stand on a busy corner & debate options as the pedestrian flow breaks around us, cursing, laughing, ignoring. Her friends are intent on skating at a certain pro demo & we agree, fucking hey-ho, let's go...
& the BART is beast supreme... with fare machines that shred the simple minds of Portlanders, speeds that devour the mere piddling pace of the MAX, passengers that could offend satan herself. I find myself intoxicated with the complexity of such a transit system. I could ride for hours & hours. I could die happy here & yet, when Oakland flashes past, I have to resist the urge to throw myself out into its heavy streets. So much adventure to be found, I'm sure, in its racially-burnt divide... So much danger or so much fun. But alas, its Berkeley we are bound for, it's upper-class collegiate, if probably predictably radical antics.
At the Berkeley station, Deb's friend points out pro skater Mark Gonzalez, Powell-Peralta original, who looks like he's about three words away from throwing a punch at the transit cop with whom he's arguing. I'm a little boy suddenly, watching the Bonez Brigade for the very first time... I remember the Search for Animal Chin, Gonzalez thrashing it up, my friends & I so inspired, running outside with our boards trying to learn & learn, ollie varials, our first kickflips, ollie nose grabs, all of it mutating into the future... inspired by the true greats like this guy, standing right in front of me, after all these years.
& I've never seen Berkeley before this... Deb & walk around the campus, watch some students make fools of themselves in the process of filming some avant project or another. We sit in the commons for awhile as I smoke a cigarette & drink bad coffee. I remain unimpressed by the scurry of students, as much here as anywhere. This environment is anathema to what I want, what I need, how I learn.
The ramps are set up just down the street from the Amoeba records on Telegraph Avenue. After first browsing fruitlessly for some CDs we go watch the kids skate. The nostalgic fun of it all still burns in me... though, these days, I'd destroy myself fast if I tried anything on these huge ramps. Like the amazing pro-skater turned funny-ass actor Jason Lee said, "You either skate or you do not skate." We soon tire of the jostling 14-year-old crowd & slip away into Peoples Park where some kind of sad little hippy love fest is going on. There are speakers getting up & preaching passionately, saying something possibly profound, though because of the fuzzy PA, I cant hear exactly what. A few older nudist jiggle about & I find myself pondering the Summer of Love, picturing myself wrapped up in it all. I imagine myself doing free-form poetry, wearing bright beads & cheaply fucking myriad lovers. I eventually decide, for the most part, that I'm glad I missed it. Sounds more like a summer of STDs, as far as I can figure... & now it begins to rain, ruining everybodies fun & we take off, back to the City.
The next day we get up & hop the bus, not knowing really where we are going. The diversity of this city keeps astounding me though. From the Mission to China town, thru crowds of Japanese tourist & the eclectic locals, I, every-fucking-time, fall in deep-shit love with this busy multi-colored blur.
Eventually, we, but simple tourist, find ourselves at City Lights Books & we both admit upon ample browsing that nothing, nothing holds a torch to Powells City of Books. Hometown pride fills us like cheap balloons... & we shuffle next door to Vesuvios where over the door it proclaims "We are itching to get away from Portland, Oregon." We laugh & purchase $4.50 beers... & find ourselves suddenly not laughing, having just purchased the kind of beer that pisses you off. We quickly get over it, grab a seat upstairs & read the prostitute ads in the back of some boring San Fran weekly, make boob comparisons with the pdx escort crew & San fran... San fran wins this particular boob contest... for now.
Debby & I ask ourselves though, where can we find a dive, a good dive with cheap beers & a pool tables? Strangers here, we have no idea, so irritated, we simply order more ridiculously expensive beer.
Later, we straggle thru Chinatown, snapping photos, as I said, but simple tourist & I purchase an eggroll from a greasy little joint & it fills me with only the taste of grease & one long black hair. I nearly puke, spitting the remainder into an overflowing garbage can. Our legs are tired though our wallets have grown light & as we trudge back towards the apartment, we decide it is time to exit San Fran.
The next morning is inexcusably, sickengly beautiful & after a quick homo-liscious breakfast in the Castro district, we head out, driving east then north, hoping only for desert & wide open silence. We have decided to visit Lava Beds National Monument, having heard of them somehow, from somebody, somewhere. The desert opens up slowly, the lush countryside giving way to ponderosa/whitepine desert forest & finally to a hardscrabble sagebrush/bunchgrass ecosystem & the desolation is stunningly awesome.
So long have I lived in the claustrophobic confines of Portland, with tight grey sky over a tiny city that when I come to a place like this, I feel exposed, horribly, wonderfully naked. I greatly appreciate, if almost fear, this vast horizion. I could never be a desert rat, but for a moment, just a long millisecond, I hope that I might yet learn to be.
We stop in Tulelake for groceries & beer. Stalking about the small weird grocery store we are obviously strangers, just passing thru & the clerks openly talk to us about this. We laugh with them & chat, embarrassed yet feeling suddenly cosmopolitan. We've been places, been all over this continent & in Debbies case, all over this world. She has stood on the edge of the Sahara desert & laughed in awe... & now she stands before these people, simply looking for veggie dogs & finding nothing of the sort. We pick up an 18 pack of the Beast, some canned Mexican food & some vegetables...
& we git while the gitting is good.
We follow the thin road thru Tule Lake Sump, a shallow waterway, filled, I imagine, by seasonal rains & currently a hang out for thousands, hundreds of thousand of assorted migrating waterbirds. We pull over at one point just to watch the ducks & geese... Lo, the grebes, pelicans, egrets, eagles, herons, ibis, snipes, cormorants, gulls, terns, coots & avocets as they flutter & squawk about, ignoring our existence.
Farther on, the Lava Beds begin in earnest, a blasted desert of mostly Pahoehoe (smooth ropy balsatic lava-rock) as opposed to Aa (broken jagged death-to-your-feet lava-rock)... & some of these flows are as old as 2 million years, though most are from about 40,000 years ago, flowing out of the north flank of Medecine Lake Shield Volcano at a respectable temperature of 1800 degrees... & accompanied, of course, by a apocalyptic rain of pumice & ash. We drive thru this now, but strangers, monkeys visiting a place nearly older than our species... & pay our visitor fee to a government but just arrived. This somehow makes me angry, though I know that my logic is flawed on this one... So I keep my trap shut, mostly. We drive several miles in, to the designated campgrounds, though we both would rather camp someplace farther off... but luckily enough the campground is deserted except for a herd of foraging mule deer & we turn off the car & step out into the deep silence, just watching these beautiful beast shy away from our obtrusively bright bipedal selves.
We find the campsite most removed from the road & set up the tent, gather wood for the evening's fire. I open a can of the Beast & light a cigarette, pleased to be here, watching dusk settle in muted shades across this (to my eyes) strange environment. I sit & read the cultural observations of JG Ballard & Debbie reads her book & when the first of the stars begin to blaze, I light the fire & tell you again, glad to be here.
Morning wakes us & we both just lay silent for awhile, staring at the trembling white clouds that streak the blue sky. We didn't sleep in the tent, ever prefer not to; A thin nylon shell is but a good place to store food or escape potential midnite rain. We eventually get up, brush our teeth, spit in the ashes, tidy up camp. 20 minutes later finds us walking down a trail towards the first of the wormholes. Today we spelunk, explore the lava tubes. Supposably there are over 400 documented underground passages in this area & most likely there are many more, either blocked off from the above-world or the entrances are hidden in the desert, safe from but the eyes of jackrabbits or eagles.
We enter the first tube we come to, flashlights dim to our sun-blasted pupils. The darkness of caves is darker than anything & the total absence of light is hard to adjust to. Your mind projects things, images, flashes, fabricated light sources. We stumble thru maze after maze all afternoon long. We sqirm thru tight tight passages even as I discover a claustrophobia I did not know I even had. I imagine an earthquake rippling across Oregon, collapsing our escape route, trapping us here. I imagine the search parties working for days, moving from tube to tube, trying to find us, knowing from our car that we are here somewhere but never hearing our cut-off cries, increasingly desperate screams. I imagine us dying slowly, dehydrating or starving in this cold dark. Fuck... but we push on thru our fear, as curious & amazed as afraid.
These tubes were formed by hotter flows of lava flowing thru cooler strata, then emptying out, leaving smooth oval passages; Playgrounds for old lovers 40,000 years on. We find ourselves often just sitting in the total dark talking, or sometimes yelling, listening to slow reverb of our own voices. Sometimes I stop moving as Deb pushes on & then I hide, wait for her panicked realization of aloneness. I make scary bogey-beast sounds to soothe her frightened psyche.
Unsurprisingly, she doesn't find this nearly as funny as I do...
Our watches tell us eventually that the sun is setting & we make our way up & out to the bright bright world. We hike back to camp, start a fire from the coals of the old & talk idle simple talk. Tomorrow we push on, heading for somewhere else though we don't know where....
(to be continued...)
