A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent on arriving
Lao-tzu
Yosemite — The Mist Trail — Winter 1998. The closest I’ve ever come to having hypothermia. When I started up to Vernal Falls the afternoon was warm, and the trail was mostly in the sun. I kept a leisurely pace stopping often to listen to the river and watch jays and ravens. I figured to be gone about two hours. In winter the trail is sometimes closed just above the bridge where a monitor measures the flow of the Merced. But today it wasn’t. It’s been a mild season with very little snow and the path was clear. I passed a few people coming down, but I mostly had the trail up to myself.
At that spot where you pass through a small cave, the rocks were slick from the famous mist that blows off the top of the falls. Today the sun is low and there is no rainbow. The trail itself is a small stream. I plod upward thinking to make it to the top. Once I get a little past the overhang a wind blows down from the river, the mist gets thick and I am suddenly soaked. I stop and drink some water as the sun moves behind the rocks and now I’m in the shade as the late afternoon air cools quickly. I’m wearing jeans and a cotton tee and even worse, all I have is a chamois shirt in my pack. I am ill prepared, no fleece or down. What would Pak say? “Cotton kills!” I admit I should know better. I start to shiver and turn back to the truck which is about three miles away at Curry Village. Even though I’m moving briskly I’m cold and the shivering gets more uncontrollable. As usual, I’m too stupid to be scared. But I suspect I’m experiencing the first stages of hypothermia. Worst case scenario is I faint on the trail and someone finds me pretty quickly. Even though nobody knows where I am, there are a few hours of daylight left and the odds are pretty good that there are still people on the trail. I in fact do not see another person until I’m past Happy Isle and less than a mile from the parking lot. I am shivering viciously.
I start the truck and blast the heat as I pull off my two wet shirts, dry myself with a beach towel and put on my purple fleece. My skin is ice. Where is Heather when I need her warm little body?
My next move should be predictable to anyone who knows me. Five minutes later I’m at the Ahwahnee bar with a generous pour of whiskey while waiting for my vegetarian chili. I’m comfortable and safe and happy. Yet another tragedy narrowly averted. I often can’t believe my luck! Back at the lodge I enjoy a long steaming shower. I read Gary Snyder and then sleep a solid eight hours.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3/2012 ~~ At the Sea Ranch Chapel I do not pray. I don’t ask for anything. I do, sometimes, acknowledge my good fortune. Lucky Antoni. For years now, every March, I get up one morning before sunrise and walk the short path from our rented house through the mist, past purple irises and little excited yellow birds. I cut through a patch of pine trees and cross a small stream before coming out on Highway One across from the sloping field where the chapel sits at the edge of deeper woods. Its curved roof reminds me of the ocean waves or a small mystery ship drifting away to return to whatever enchanted island it came from. It is that rarely designed structure that also looks like it belongs exactly where it is. It complements its surroundings.
This early in the morning I am the only one here. As is my ritual I let myself into the small room and sit on the far back hardwood bench. The first light of the day filters through stained glass with a calming opaqueness. I catch my breath and think. And think some more. The silence is beautiful, something I never get enough of. I think about the people I love the most. Some of them just a mile away, still sleeping in the big grey house enveloped in fog. Some of them very far away and one, not knowing where she is, I miss with a savage ferocity. And it wouldn’t be real life if some now only live on in my heart. I wonder how it is possible that we endure the endless cruelties of existence.
This small room is a nondenominational place where everyone is welcome to pray, meditate, worship or, like me, an old atheist, just let my mind drift. In a moment of buddhist reflection, I admit to myself that I haven’t quite conquered my desires and cravings. Perhaps it will ultimately prove to be an impossible task.
As time goes by my un-winnable struggle with entropy keeps keeps me occupied, I find myself on another foggy predawn ramble walking to the chapel from the Stabbin’ Cabin, aptly named by the late Mike Carpenter back in our friskier days. It’s chilly inside the unheated room and I’m bundled up in fleece. It is the clicheic morning after the night before. A three hour, five course, seven wine dinner. I shuffled up the stairs to the Cabin only a few hours ago. My mind is as foggy as the view toward the sea cliffs. This early morning lack of clarity is a small price to pay for last evening’s conversation and company. Going to bed early was out of the equation. To neglect friendship is on my short list of deadly sins. (Sloth and, apparently, gluttony are not. Nor do I consider patience a true virtue.)
There are some things that at the time seemed incredibly important. But in reflection I can’t honestly remember what the fuss was all about. And the reverse, brief moments of everyday normal life now have a resonance that makes my heart quiver. Their importance went unnoticed at the time, but this grey morning, years later, I am baffled at the raw emotion these memories have triggered. Of course it all has to do with love.
More recently, I spread some of Mide’s ashes here in the flowers that face the ocean.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone — Joni Mitchell
“It just happens that people disappear for a little while, you know?”
Olga Tokarczuk
Celebrating my Jeep’s twentieth birthday I am on the road, alone again, for reasons not unlike Jim Harrison’s or Santoka Taneda’s or John Steinbeck’s. Maybe even Ishmael’s. I’m not quite as in need of healing as Neal Peart, but I may be looking for some amount of clarity. There is, of course, a shadow on my heart. Nothing unique about that. Although some of my reasons are opaque even to me. Melancholy and cafard are, however, relative. And I would never claim my inner turmoil is any worse, or any easier to comprehend, than anyone else’s. Individual levels of pain or heartache are not only impossible to measure, they are even harder to compare. Each to her or his own.
I haven’t always traveled alone. I’ve many good companions on my travels. Los, Cori, Pak, Brenna, Reilly, to name just a few. But lately its just me. I am lured on by the road, aimlessly.
Alone, I say, except for the 5000 songs on my iPod, a canvas satchel full of books and this laptop that connects me to the rest of the world.
Different versions of Joni’s song Hejira have been popping up randomly on the old iPod all week. First from the live album, Shadows And Light, recorded in Santa Barbara with Pat Metheny playing guitar, and then the rendition from Travelogue. And finally the studio cut, three takes in five days! Do I take this as a sign? Even though I don’t believe in potents or omens I say to myself, “Mights as wells!”
The city has been getting to me anyway, summer is here along with the wave of tourists. UCSB just graduated 6000 students and their proud families all showed up to clog the downtown restaurants and bars, Trattoria Vittoria particularly. It was an exhausting week. No doubt Joni was telling me to get on the road. She’s never steered me wrong yet. I am reminded that I saw her sing Hejira at a folk festival back when she still toured. She was captivating that evening, her fingers cold from the night’s chill but her voice, as always, so beautiful to me.
Walking over to the beach to watch the full moon rise an owl lands on a branch near the path. A great horned is my guess, but it seems a bit small. Perhaps a juvenile. A minute later it flies off across the grass and lands on a pine tree closer to the cliff. I walk over and I as do another owl flies over my head and perches next to it on a higher limb. It’s a bigger bird, two feet tall, no doubt a great horned. It gives a slight, almost imperceptible throaty hoot. I watch them both for a while until all I can see is their silhouettes. They are backlit by the orange moon. They fly off in different directions.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Very like leaves
upon the earth are the generations of men —
old leaves cast on the ground by wind, young leaves
the greening forest bares when spring comes in.
So mortals pass; one generation flowers
even as others pass away.” Homer
I’m at an old motel, the kind I used to find everywhere, back on my first cross-country drives. In those days I never made a reservation because I was never quite sure where I might end up when the sun went down. Hopefully we would find a place near a restaurant that served liquor, or, next best scenario like in Wakeeney, Kansas, a family diner and a package store. These old motels are becoming more and more rare. The difference, I learned when I worked for Holiday Inn, between a hotel and a motel is that a hotel has a lobby and you enter your room from inside the building and at a motel you park in front of your room and enter from the outside. Another thing I learned was that you could always count on Holiday Inns and Best Westerns to have food and a bar. A very important consideration after twelve hours of driving. Especially the bar.
Often there were lawn chairs at the front door where you could enjoy a drink and chat with your neighbors while facing the road and watching the traffic flow by and the sun set. A friend I used to drive around with a lot considered these bare minimum rooms a slight step above camping. She wasn’t complaining. They were always clean and family owned so there was some pride in appearances and friendliness, now called hospitality by the corporations that run most of the motels these days. I’ve also noticed that you are looked at oddly if you walk in without a reservation.
Lately, I try to take the long way. Today the backroads yielded much less traffic, magpies on the shoulder, miles of vineyards with dangling clusters and great brown, dried fields. Warm desiccating winds, few clouds, vultures, a long plume of dust from a tractor a mile away on a hillside and Cachuma Lake at the lowest level that I have ever seen. It’s scary, but apparent, that we are running out of water here in the west. And there’s nothing that can be done, I fear, except go through one of humanities periodic calamities where overwhelming devastation and suffering last for a generation. A huge population shift will occur and the world will be a very different place. My hope is that I will make an exit, gracefully, moments before the final collapse. It’s Ellie and Juliette, Marcus and Sebastian, Roux and Mae, that I worry about. They will have challenges far greater than anything that I ever had to worry about. It seems, oddly, that over the years I have had a perfect window, or vantage point, to view my personal vistas. Speaking of my overall story? Oeuvre? Experience? — I have been luckier than most. However, it ain’t over yet, not even close, I hope. So there’s still time to be involved in the massive collapse that is surely in the future. (Perhaps a personal one as well.)
Bob Weir sings, “Yes theres a price for being free.”
But here today, the end of July and back along the coast, cool foggy air slithers inland to where the sun evaporates the fragile tendrils. The ocean is as grey as the sky and the waves of high tide crash against the black, craggy rocks that are ever so slowly wearing smooth from the eons of friction. With my eyes, it seems more and more, that no matter which direction I look, entropy is apparent. It has shaded my outlook for, I think, the better. It helps me to see, and understand, just how temporary everything truly is which inspires me to be grateful for what I have; health (for now), sincere relationships, love, curiosity..
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stuck in Denver, again, on a cold and rainy night. It smells like winter already. I check in to the Marriott and see a sports bar across the street from the lobby. Braving the squalls I hurry over stepping ankle deep in a curbside puddle soaking the only shoes I have with me. A whiskey warms my heart as I answer some texts and emails and listen to nonsense bar talk. The trials of stranded travelers. I take my flight delay in stride thinking that those who curse, or defy, the Fates will be dragged along by them nevertheless. I have a mediocre burger, the signature of sports bars the world over.
On my way back to the hotel I, unsurprisingly, step again in the puddle by the sidewalk. This time, of course, with the other foot. Heraclitus famously wrote that you cannot step in the same river twice. Jim Harrison maintains you can’t even step into the same river once. Food for thought indeed. Neither, I note, ever mentioned mud puddles.
Autumn — early October. The foliage is mostly yellow this year, the reds may indeed peak later because the maples and oaks are still green. But the leaf-rain of yellow/orange is breathtaking as the afternoon winds from the west pick up. The clouds are white on top and grayer underneath and are spaced so to look ordered but that’s just an illusion brought about by the chaotic breezes. The sun slants through illuminating patches of the fields and woods surrounding Arrowhead as I saunter the grounds. It is here that Melville wrote:
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
Mount Greylock to the north, where I stood yesterday, does indeed, if I take off my glasses, look like a whale just about to spout. Especially if your dreams are often of the sea, like Melville’s. The day is warm, perfect Berkshire Fall weather. An influx of tourists is expected for this three day weekend that starts tomorrow. I walk up path and then a little ways into the trees before turning around and sitting on a bench for a while.
In his story, The Piazza, Melville wrote about looking toward Massachusetts’s highest mountain and seeing a cabin at the end of a rainbow, the light from the sun reflecting off a far away window. After wondering about the possibilities of what may be up there he makes the long journey to where he has seen his vision. Upon arriving he meets a woman doing chores, weaving and knitting, who spends her time gazing in the direction from which he came. She, too, sees a house and imagines what rich man would live in such a place. When Melville’s narrator looks down the valley he recognizes the dwelling as his own humble farm. As often the case with Melville’s stories the lessons are ambiguous. He also wrote;
— yet what is there perfect in this world?
Driving back toward Ridge Ave I listen to the Keith Jarrett Trio live from The Blue Note. Very appropriate for the season and the weather. A steady falling of yellow and orange leaves accompanies me as I navigate the back roads. Stopping at the causeway on Onota Lake I notice as many spotting scopes as I do fishing poles. The birdwatchers hoping for a bald eagle sighting. There is a nesting pair nearby. In the shallows on the north side are mallards, Canada geese and a lone great blue heron so still I almost miss her. I remember years ago watching my Uncle Joe here gracefully casting his fly rod a seemingly impossible distance, his back cast crossing the street behind him.
Early flight tomorrow. I tried to change my ticket but there are no flights available until Monday, five days from now. I almost want to get stuck again in Denver so to prolong my absence from Santa Barbara.
Well my flights went smoothly. I’m back on Barranca Ave sitting with a glass of wine and musing on the last two weeks in the Berkshires. 2000 years ago Virgil wrote;
Optima dies…prima fugit
Bibliography
Collected Poems — Gary Snyder
Occidental Mythology — Joseph Campbell
I and My Chimney — Herman Melville
Lost Sailor — Weir
Autumn Leaves — Keith Jarrett Trio
Hejira — Joni Mitchell
Travels — Pat Metheny Group
Urge For Goin — Mary Black
24 Hours at a Time — Marshall Tucker Band
Freeways — Bachman Turner Overdrive
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