The winds of chaos and indecision are blowing through my journey. I’m in a room at the Villa Hotel on Lincoln Ave. in San Rafael, with the Weather Channel playing and me trying to figure out what to do with my day. Our place to stay in Oakland fell through, so we could stay with friends in San Francisco, but they aren’t expecting us. So do I head for Oakland and hook up with that guy, or head for “The City” and hope for the best, when I might have to go all the way back to the meeting with my backpack, or do I sightsee—and how do I get to The City? Greyhound? Golden Gate Transit? A ferry? That would be cool, actually.
Anyway, I kind of fell out of the groove a little, but it’s fine. The bus here yesterday was PACKED, and the driver was losing it a little, but I found a place to get internet and guacamole, then I headed for the meeting, which turned out to be at an Alano Club, where they serve food! So that was a pleasant discovery. The meeting was small, just five of us, and we read a story from the book. There was a new guy with 90 days, so he got a 24-hour chip, a 15-day, a 30-day, a 60-day and a 90-day. It’s funny to be, on one night, in a room with 35 people, lots of sobriety, sponsors, people headed for the Convention, the whole thing ... and then the next night, less than an hour away, sit with five people, none of whom have a year, and they don’t even know about the Convention. It’s always a trip.
Afterwards, with no place to stay, I first walked down to the transit center, mainly to look into heading for SF, but that was going to be after 10:30 before I got downtown—much less over to my friends’ house. So then I figured I’d get a hotel room, and headed for the central area. Man, they’ve got everything going on along 4th Street: shops, restaurants, clubs, bars, movie theatres, the whole thing—except a hotel. I walked about 20 blocks, then headed back towards the street where the meeting was, since some people said there was a hotel up there. I walked about eight blocks up that road before I found this place, so I must have walked a couple miles, easy, after the meeting. It was one of those nights where—and I know this is a lot of info, but still—I came in hot, tired, and mildly frustrated, so I dropped all my stuff, took off all my clothes, turned on the TV, and didn’t move for about two hours. Then I slept for nine hours.
Somewhere in the back of my head is this voice saying, “Gosh, I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area, I should go DO something.” But I don’t feel like dragging my backpack all over the place, and I guess I’m just not into it. I mean, screw it. I’m okay with relaxing when I can, and besides, what I’ve learned on this trip is that I enjoy hanging out with people, not running around and playing tourist.
Anyway, nothing much to report today, if anybody’s even reading this. I think I’ll go back down to the restaurant with the WiFi, then figure out what comes next.
2/25/06
2/24/06
Cali: 2-24 Santa Rosa
US 101 south of Arcata is among the prettier drives in the U.S. – and also the goofiest. Whether it’s Confusion Hill where balls roll uphill and so on, or the Tree House, or the Drive-Thru Tree, Trees of Mystery, every sort of Bigfoot thing, and so on. And there’s also the headwaters of the Russian River, and a winding road through tree-covered hills, and the little town of Garberville that’s like dropping into a little eden of redwoods and cabins and smoke coming from chimneys. That’s where they have a thing alled Reggae on the River every year, and I always wonder what they locals must think when thousands of naked, stoned hippies and Rastafarians descend on their little patch of paradise.
As we dropped out of the mountains, the big trees and fishing holes and bigfoot statues gave way to oaks and pastures—and vineyards. We were getting into northern Sonoma County, aka Wine Country. Vineyards, wineries, winery supply places, tasting rooms, the whole thing.
As we rolled into Santa Rosa, I was thinking what a totally generic town it looked like, how all I wanted was a hotel room, some food, and the meeting, and that it offered me nothing else in the world – then I saw, on a sign, the words “Charles Shulz Museum.” It was one of those “no way!” moments where suddenly your whole perspective, and schedule, shifts. I knew I would go to that museum, and I did—more on that later.
The hotel had some funny quirks, like they asked me if I was okay with being on the second floor, then put me way in the back, and then there were like seven cars in the parking lot. Why am I in the back and on the second floor? They also had all these animal-themed signs around, like re-use the towels to help this snow owl, and turn off the lights when you leave to help this gorilla. My favorite was the toilet. They had a thing on there that explained it was a low-flow toilet, because of California water restrictions, and low-flow toilets are more susceptible to plugging, so please flush it more often. Again: please flush our low-flow toilet more often than you normally would. Only in America.
I did the classic Luggage Dump on the bed, hooked up the computer, walked next door to the Starbucks (Starbucks! Next door!) and sat down with my triple grande vanilla soy latte and went to work. I posted a trip photo gallery to my Club Photo site, wrote a lot of emails, and cranked out a Flyer travel column about the redwoods. I’ll post a link to it when it runs, but if you’ve read this blog, it will be quite familiar to you.
I also balanced my checkbook and looked at my budget, and soon thereafter got depressed. I’m spending a lot more money on this trip than I realized, or than I can really afford. Same old story: I’m much better at having fun than staying on budget. The $17 cab ride from the Santa Rosa bus station to the hotel didn’t help. From now on, it’s walking, public transit, and $5 meals. Well, this is California. $10 meals.
Eventually I set out for the meeting, and decided to find something cheaper and quicker than the Applebee’s across from the hotel. Then I just saw two fast-food places, and I had eaten Taco Bell during the lunch break on the bus. So then I decided to walk over to where the meeting was and find something there. Across the expressway I went, up the hill, and into—an office park. Now it’s 7, the meeting is at 8, and I don’t feel like walking back down the hill and across the expressway to choke down a Wendy’s. So I sit. Then I get halfway to a HALT situation: I’m hungry and lonely. So I call J, who’s back in Portland, and I call Mom, and I call my sponsor, who wasn’t around. It was nice talking to J.
The Santa Rosa meeting had 35 people! That’s more than all the other meetings I’ve been to put together. They did some things differently, too: no thanks after sharing, claps for newcomers, a short statement from a member about sponsoring (and then practically nobody, including the statement-maker, raised his hands to sponsor). There were lots of teenagers, some squirming, definitely a feel of the older people knowing each other; there was also a homecoming for a guy who moved off to Bend; I heard him say a few times, “Yeah, I got sober, and I finally got the wherewithal to make it happen.” He still participates in the email discussion about where to eat dinner before the meeting, though.
The size of the meeting, the location, the lack of pre-meeting contact with any members, the lack of dinner beforehand – all this made me feel more like an outsider than before. This is nobody’s fault but mine, and I’m not complaining, just noticing the difference. It’s probably a good transition for me, getting used to bigger meetings and bigger towns where my arrival is hardly noticed, much less an anticipated event. Poor ego!
I also wrote this, back at the hotel:
“Well, let’s see. I have felt tonight, for the first time this trip, the slipping of my writing compulsion. On every trip there’s a tendency to fall behind on the journals, and this one is no exception. I’m not behind yet, but tonight I felt the first twinges of “Well, I’ll do that tomorrow” – which is fine, but tomorrow I also have to write a travel article, make some phone calls for two or three other articles, and hopefully post some pictures to the Club Photo page, which for some reason I wasn’t able to do tonight.”
So you can see that every trip goes through ups and downs, and Thursday was a slight down. It was a good meeting, though—we read the “For the Newcomer” packet—and I had some nice talks with people afterwards. Then the guy who moved to Bend gave me a ride to the hotel, and I walked over to the Applebee’s, where I exercised my new Fiscal Restraint by having a half-size salad and no dessert.
Thursday I wrote the article for Memphis, made some calls for a Willamette Week sports piece, piled on a the continental breakfast while President Bush blathered on about Freedom being On The March (why do they even show this speech on TV?), then used the city bus system, thank you very much, to reach the Shulz Museum, and then the bus station, for $2. Not $17 like on the cab, but $2. The bus system in Santa Rosa runs until 8 p.m.; apparently, after that everybody is home? Also, the town is totally designed for cars. To get from the hotel to Starbucks, which is next door, there was no sidewalk, and I had to scramble over a grass embankment and cut through drive-through lane. Same for getting to Applebee’s – through a parking lot, dodge the Taco Bell drive-through.
The city bus, though, is always the same. You pay your fare, get a transfer, there’s somebody running to catch it, somebody else talking to himself, and so on. I arrived at an ice rink, which seemed odd for a while, since I was looking for the Shulz Museum. But it turns out he built the ice rink, then ate breakfast and lunch there every day. It was known as “Snoopy’s Home Ice,” and it was all done up in a Peanuts/Swiss Village theme with murals of frozen ponds, a Woodstock room, a Snoopy room in the Warm Puppy Cafe, and stained glass of snoopy playing hockey.
And my was meal was less than $8! Good job, Paul.
So, at this point, as I sit at the Broken Drum in San Rafael, sipping tea and making use of the WiFi, my battery is low, and I want to get some real dinner before the meeting. So I think what I’ll do right now is just post the notes I made at the somewhat chaotic Santa Rosa bus depot this afternoon. It was an odd scene, and the bus was so crowded it felt claustrophobic. Anyway, here you go, “live” from the Santa Rosa, California bus depot:
shulz museum: what a career! a whole world, thousands of pictures and observations. a simple, pure genius, like the human tendency to draw and make little observations found its purest form in one guy, along with a basic ability for observation of humanity – a guy who happened to live in Santa Rosa. Who knew? man of routine, sat at the same desk every day and said you need to be in the same place to let the creativity flow. I happen to feel the opposite, but hey. He wasn’t a man of the road. He had breakfast and lunch in the same place every day – they still reserve the table for him – which is in an ice rink which he designed and built, and which spurred a skating community in town. famous skaters came and signed their name in concrete, among them Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill. also, while I was in the warm puppy (as in, happiness is) cafe, i overheard a staffer saying “I don’t mean to be against America, but Sasha Cohen shouldn’t have won the Silver. I mean, she fell down twice, even though she landed all her other stuff.” Another woman, in a group at a table, I heard saying she looked forward to the “next evolution” of scoring in figure skating because of some objection she had. She said she liked what Scott Hamilton said about something this morning, the day after the ladies’ figure skating was handed out. All the media I saw was about how marketable Cohen and Tanith/Ben would be without the golds, but in this crowd it was about the skating.
apparently Schulz was also a golfer and hockey player. also built a baseball field. hosted hockey players, 1,000 sometimes, at big barbecues. said when he shot a bad round and came home feeling low, he'd "really give it to poor Charlie Brown. he'd feel low, too, because I did." a lifelong companion.
lady in the station is great. My bus is full (got the last seat—whew) and she’s been trying to help four people buy tickets for Corvallis for tomorrow. They have a (Spanish) translator who also helped an older couple. bus lady keeps saying somebody owes somebody some money, and when one guy left, she said, “Be here early—it’s better for you to wait for the driver than for him to wait for you, because he won’t.” Assured a northbounder that there’s not as many stops as there used to be, because “we don’t have a milk run anymore.” asked another, who asked for Long Beach, “California, right – not Florida?”
more Schulz: the American dream, in a way. He had a gift that reached its fullest potential. Wrote every day for 50 years! the drawing was so simple, so elegant, so humble and powerful. the writing so clean. his sketches (saved and ironed flat by a secretary) showed him changing words, making slight adjustments to a character’s facial expression. There was a video playing (in his reconstructed studio) showing his hands and pencil making drawings. so magical to watch those familiar forms emerge from emptiness! So easy looking, so clean. i can dig that, in a sense. writing is the same for me. I don’t even think about it – just get out of the way and let it happen. Some idea what I’m gonna do and how it’s gonna come out, but not in a way that I can state or explain. he was probably the same way, and that’s probably the one thing we had in common.
also interesting that on his timeline, it just said 1972 divorced, 1973 remarried. No explanation of that, of course. old-time polite history and journalism, like it’s none of our business. which it isn’t. whole town of Santa Rosa is sort of classic Americana town, with a lot of Spanish being spoken. everybody has a car, it’s sunny, lots of malls and nice parks. A town utterly without character, it seems. Purely, generically American, except it’s close to the wine country, and even then, I bet nobody who comes to the wine scene stays here, unless they have to. but a good sense of community, at least in the warm puppy.
now the bus lady is standing outside, smoking a cigarette, saying “You’re the pregnant one, right? How many bags ya got there, pregnant lady?” And everybody who walks up, she tells them, “Where ya goin’, honey?” Since most say San Francisco or thereabouts, she says, “Full today. Come back tomorrow right at 2 p.m. (or “a los dos”), when I get off lunch. It fills up early on the weekends.” And there’s this huge, freaky pile of boxes and luggage in the middle of the “station,” such as it is – a kiosk, really, in the parking lot of an auto shop and a taqueria. Lots of people chilling in the shade, smoking cigs, looking at their watches. The sounds of Frampton’s “I love your way” drifting out of the shop. Bus lady just told somebody that “this driver is real grouchy.”
trip is starting to feel crowded, hot and stressful. It was so easy up north, cool temps and half-full buses and people waiting for me. Right now I have work to catch up on in San Rafael, no idea where I’m staying tonight, don’t want to do the hotel thing and am uncomfortable bringing it up in the meeting. And the money thing. So it’s not as chilled as it was. But once I get into Oakland and hook up with people I know, I think it’ll chill again.
Now she’s berating somebody for showing up at 3, wanting to get on the bus. What’s interesting is that some people she offers to sell a ticket for tomorrow, some she doesn’t, one she referred to Golden Gate Transit for a bus to the SF Greyhound station ... so there’s no real consistency. Life on the bus!
And speaking of the bus, yonder it comes ...
As we dropped out of the mountains, the big trees and fishing holes and bigfoot statues gave way to oaks and pastures—and vineyards. We were getting into northern Sonoma County, aka Wine Country. Vineyards, wineries, winery supply places, tasting rooms, the whole thing.
As we rolled into Santa Rosa, I was thinking what a totally generic town it looked like, how all I wanted was a hotel room, some food, and the meeting, and that it offered me nothing else in the world – then I saw, on a sign, the words “Charles Shulz Museum.” It was one of those “no way!” moments where suddenly your whole perspective, and schedule, shifts. I knew I would go to that museum, and I did—more on that later.
The hotel had some funny quirks, like they asked me if I was okay with being on the second floor, then put me way in the back, and then there were like seven cars in the parking lot. Why am I in the back and on the second floor? They also had all these animal-themed signs around, like re-use the towels to help this snow owl, and turn off the lights when you leave to help this gorilla. My favorite was the toilet. They had a thing on there that explained it was a low-flow toilet, because of California water restrictions, and low-flow toilets are more susceptible to plugging, so please flush it more often. Again: please flush our low-flow toilet more often than you normally would. Only in America.
I did the classic Luggage Dump on the bed, hooked up the computer, walked next door to the Starbucks (Starbucks! Next door!) and sat down with my triple grande vanilla soy latte and went to work. I posted a trip photo gallery to my Club Photo site, wrote a lot of emails, and cranked out a Flyer travel column about the redwoods. I’ll post a link to it when it runs, but if you’ve read this blog, it will be quite familiar to you.
I also balanced my checkbook and looked at my budget, and soon thereafter got depressed. I’m spending a lot more money on this trip than I realized, or than I can really afford. Same old story: I’m much better at having fun than staying on budget. The $17 cab ride from the Santa Rosa bus station to the hotel didn’t help. From now on, it’s walking, public transit, and $5 meals. Well, this is California. $10 meals.
Eventually I set out for the meeting, and decided to find something cheaper and quicker than the Applebee’s across from the hotel. Then I just saw two fast-food places, and I had eaten Taco Bell during the lunch break on the bus. So then I decided to walk over to where the meeting was and find something there. Across the expressway I went, up the hill, and into—an office park. Now it’s 7, the meeting is at 8, and I don’t feel like walking back down the hill and across the expressway to choke down a Wendy’s. So I sit. Then I get halfway to a HALT situation: I’m hungry and lonely. So I call J, who’s back in Portland, and I call Mom, and I call my sponsor, who wasn’t around. It was nice talking to J.
The Santa Rosa meeting had 35 people! That’s more than all the other meetings I’ve been to put together. They did some things differently, too: no thanks after sharing, claps for newcomers, a short statement from a member about sponsoring (and then practically nobody, including the statement-maker, raised his hands to sponsor). There were lots of teenagers, some squirming, definitely a feel of the older people knowing each other; there was also a homecoming for a guy who moved off to Bend; I heard him say a few times, “Yeah, I got sober, and I finally got the wherewithal to make it happen.” He still participates in the email discussion about where to eat dinner before the meeting, though.
The size of the meeting, the location, the lack of pre-meeting contact with any members, the lack of dinner beforehand – all this made me feel more like an outsider than before. This is nobody’s fault but mine, and I’m not complaining, just noticing the difference. It’s probably a good transition for me, getting used to bigger meetings and bigger towns where my arrival is hardly noticed, much less an anticipated event. Poor ego!
I also wrote this, back at the hotel:
“Well, let’s see. I have felt tonight, for the first time this trip, the slipping of my writing compulsion. On every trip there’s a tendency to fall behind on the journals, and this one is no exception. I’m not behind yet, but tonight I felt the first twinges of “Well, I’ll do that tomorrow” – which is fine, but tomorrow I also have to write a travel article, make some phone calls for two or three other articles, and hopefully post some pictures to the Club Photo page, which for some reason I wasn’t able to do tonight.”
So you can see that every trip goes through ups and downs, and Thursday was a slight down. It was a good meeting, though—we read the “For the Newcomer” packet—and I had some nice talks with people afterwards. Then the guy who moved to Bend gave me a ride to the hotel, and I walked over to the Applebee’s, where I exercised my new Fiscal Restraint by having a half-size salad and no dessert.
Thursday I wrote the article for Memphis, made some calls for a Willamette Week sports piece, piled on a the continental breakfast while President Bush blathered on about Freedom being On The March (why do they even show this speech on TV?), then used the city bus system, thank you very much, to reach the Shulz Museum, and then the bus station, for $2. Not $17 like on the cab, but $2. The bus system in Santa Rosa runs until 8 p.m.; apparently, after that everybody is home? Also, the town is totally designed for cars. To get from the hotel to Starbucks, which is next door, there was no sidewalk, and I had to scramble over a grass embankment and cut through drive-through lane. Same for getting to Applebee’s – through a parking lot, dodge the Taco Bell drive-through.
The city bus, though, is always the same. You pay your fare, get a transfer, there’s somebody running to catch it, somebody else talking to himself, and so on. I arrived at an ice rink, which seemed odd for a while, since I was looking for the Shulz Museum. But it turns out he built the ice rink, then ate breakfast and lunch there every day. It was known as “Snoopy’s Home Ice,” and it was all done up in a Peanuts/Swiss Village theme with murals of frozen ponds, a Woodstock room, a Snoopy room in the Warm Puppy Cafe, and stained glass of snoopy playing hockey.
And my was meal was less than $8! Good job, Paul.
So, at this point, as I sit at the Broken Drum in San Rafael, sipping tea and making use of the WiFi, my battery is low, and I want to get some real dinner before the meeting. So I think what I’ll do right now is just post the notes I made at the somewhat chaotic Santa Rosa bus depot this afternoon. It was an odd scene, and the bus was so crowded it felt claustrophobic. Anyway, here you go, “live” from the Santa Rosa, California bus depot:
shulz museum: what a career! a whole world, thousands of pictures and observations. a simple, pure genius, like the human tendency to draw and make little observations found its purest form in one guy, along with a basic ability for observation of humanity – a guy who happened to live in Santa Rosa. Who knew? man of routine, sat at the same desk every day and said you need to be in the same place to let the creativity flow. I happen to feel the opposite, but hey. He wasn’t a man of the road. He had breakfast and lunch in the same place every day – they still reserve the table for him – which is in an ice rink which he designed and built, and which spurred a skating community in town. famous skaters came and signed their name in concrete, among them Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill. also, while I was in the warm puppy (as in, happiness is) cafe, i overheard a staffer saying “I don’t mean to be against America, but Sasha Cohen shouldn’t have won the Silver. I mean, she fell down twice, even though she landed all her other stuff.” Another woman, in a group at a table, I heard saying she looked forward to the “next evolution” of scoring in figure skating because of some objection she had. She said she liked what Scott Hamilton said about something this morning, the day after the ladies’ figure skating was handed out. All the media I saw was about how marketable Cohen and Tanith/Ben would be without the golds, but in this crowd it was about the skating.
apparently Schulz was also a golfer and hockey player. also built a baseball field. hosted hockey players, 1,000 sometimes, at big barbecues. said when he shot a bad round and came home feeling low, he'd "really give it to poor Charlie Brown. he'd feel low, too, because I did." a lifelong companion.
lady in the station is great. My bus is full (got the last seat—whew) and she’s been trying to help four people buy tickets for Corvallis for tomorrow. They have a (Spanish) translator who also helped an older couple. bus lady keeps saying somebody owes somebody some money, and when one guy left, she said, “Be here early—it’s better for you to wait for the driver than for him to wait for you, because he won’t.” Assured a northbounder that there’s not as many stops as there used to be, because “we don’t have a milk run anymore.” asked another, who asked for Long Beach, “California, right – not Florida?”
more Schulz: the American dream, in a way. He had a gift that reached its fullest potential. Wrote every day for 50 years! the drawing was so simple, so elegant, so humble and powerful. the writing so clean. his sketches (saved and ironed flat by a secretary) showed him changing words, making slight adjustments to a character’s facial expression. There was a video playing (in his reconstructed studio) showing his hands and pencil making drawings. so magical to watch those familiar forms emerge from emptiness! So easy looking, so clean. i can dig that, in a sense. writing is the same for me. I don’t even think about it – just get out of the way and let it happen. Some idea what I’m gonna do and how it’s gonna come out, but not in a way that I can state or explain. he was probably the same way, and that’s probably the one thing we had in common.
also interesting that on his timeline, it just said 1972 divorced, 1973 remarried. No explanation of that, of course. old-time polite history and journalism, like it’s none of our business. which it isn’t. whole town of Santa Rosa is sort of classic Americana town, with a lot of Spanish being spoken. everybody has a car, it’s sunny, lots of malls and nice parks. A town utterly without character, it seems. Purely, generically American, except it’s close to the wine country, and even then, I bet nobody who comes to the wine scene stays here, unless they have to. but a good sense of community, at least in the warm puppy.
now the bus lady is standing outside, smoking a cigarette, saying “You’re the pregnant one, right? How many bags ya got there, pregnant lady?” And everybody who walks up, she tells them, “Where ya goin’, honey?” Since most say San Francisco or thereabouts, she says, “Full today. Come back tomorrow right at 2 p.m. (or “a los dos”), when I get off lunch. It fills up early on the weekends.” And there’s this huge, freaky pile of boxes and luggage in the middle of the “station,” such as it is – a kiosk, really, in the parking lot of an auto shop and a taqueria. Lots of people chilling in the shade, smoking cigs, looking at their watches. The sounds of Frampton’s “I love your way” drifting out of the shop. Bus lady just told somebody that “this driver is real grouchy.”
trip is starting to feel crowded, hot and stressful. It was so easy up north, cool temps and half-full buses and people waiting for me. Right now I have work to catch up on in San Rafael, no idea where I’m staying tonight, don’t want to do the hotel thing and am uncomfortable bringing it up in the meeting. And the money thing. So it’s not as chilled as it was. But once I get into Oakland and hook up with people I know, I think it’ll chill again.
Now she’s berating somebody for showing up at 3, wanting to get on the bus. What’s interesting is that some people she offers to sell a ticket for tomorrow, some she doesn’t, one she referred to Golden Gate Transit for a bus to the SF Greyhound station ... so there’s no real consistency. Life on the bus!
And speaking of the bus, yonder it comes ...
2/23/06
Cali: 2-23 Arcata to Santa Rosa
We rolled out of Arcata on a foggy morning, with the bus a third full. A good cross-section of the population of Humboldt County, as I saw it. A couple of college kids, some hippies, a sketchy-lookin’ guy complaining that “tweakers” kept him up all night, some older folks, and one guy, even more clean-cut than me, who says he’s on his way to Tampa! That’s four days! He said he has a plane ticket from Seattle, but he didn’t want to take the bus all the way up there and then get killed in a plane crash. It’s logic like this that keeps the bus rolling!
We’ve got another Greyhound Archetype on board today, too: the cutie. She’s young, looks like she doesn’t ride the bus much, traveling alone, and looks quite nervous. We just picked her up at what looks like a city bus stop in Eureka, and she’s got a few people waving to her from the sidewalk. Cutie has on a Stanford sweatshirt, so she’s probably headed back to San Francisco.
A fine time in Humboldt County. When I last wrote, I was in the middle of a highly luxurious morning at D’s place outside Arcata. I had slept in, slammed coffee, written, showered, and then started out. I had s choice of going south to Humboldt Redwoods State Park – lots of big trees, no coastline – or north towards Redwoods National Park, which is actually smaller and has fewer big trees, but does have coastline. After consulting with the lady at the Visitors Bureau and loading up on brochures, I chose north. First stop: Trinidad, California.
Along the way, I stopped for an overlook at Houda Point, which seemed to be a hot surfer destination. I love surfers. It’s like they’re caricatures of themselves. I walked past a couple of them, and one was saying to the other, “So, like I told him we were coming to Houda, and he was all ‘Sweet, dude – you’re stoked. Catch one for me!’ ” I’m sure there are other types of surfers, but they’re a definite tribe, and wherever I went in Humboldt County, there was a strong sense that this is surfer/hippie/drifter/stoner country, and I am in the minority. Houda was pretty, though: the classic north coast beach, with a haystack rock and short beach at the foot of tree-lined cliffs. Probably 15 or 20 surfers kicking around.
Trinidad sits up on a cliff looking out over a rock-filled bay. A few boats sat at anchor, gulls drifted around, a cool breeze was coming in from the north, and a couple of crab boats were rounding the point, headed for a wharf that stuck out from behind a big rock. I was told there was a little seafood place on that pier, so I headed there for lunch. I wound down past the requisite gift shop, kite/surf shop, coffee shop, mom-and0pop market, and what loked like vacation homes, with rhododendrons and azaleas and perfectly-manicured lawns. Now, there’s two kinds of “seafood places” around here. One is the haughty place with white tablecloths and a name like Whalers Cove, where you can get fine California wines to go with your $17 ahi tuna steak. The other is the local spot where the fish-and-chips is $6 and made with cod, the clam chowder is “the best on the north coast,” there’s a laminated deal on the table with trivia questions, and the waitress wipes your wood table with a wet rag before you sit down. That’s the kind of place this was, and I was happy for it. Crabbers were coming in to use the bathroom, greeting the staff by name.
I had been told that since it’s crab season, I should get crab. Made sense. Who knows how Whalers Cove would have offered it, but this place had Grilled Cheese With Crab, a crab cocktail, and a Crab Salad Sandwich, all listed at “market price.” I asked about the Crab Salad Sandwich and was told it’s $15.95. I mean, looking back on it, what’s another 5 or 10 bucks, right? I probably should have gotten it, but a $16 sandwich is just against my principles. I got a cup of chowder and the small fish-and-chips. Both were fine, and both could have been served in about 537 other restaurants in America. The staff was nice, though, and I enjoyed watching the guys load crab pots out onto the pier. Commercial fishermen – there’s another tribe. These two guys walked by, both in Extra Tough rubber boots, Helly Hansen raingear, plaid shirts, baseball caps and thick beards, and both smoking cigarettes. It’s like there’s a manual for what to wear when you’re in a certain tribe. (And speaking of which, full disclosure: This Oregon boy has spent most of his trip in hiking boots, jeans, and a plaid flannel shirt. I’ve got some tie-dyes in the backpack, too.)
After lunch, I cruised up 101 to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, which I’ve had the pleasure of visiting before. There’s a big meadow there where you can usually see some elk—not this time, but I did stop on the way for some photos of a private herd, sharing a pasture with some horses. To the locals, I’m sure this is like people taking pictures of cows, but an elk is an impressive critter. Seeing them in the wild borders on the spiritual. Stopping along a US highway to snap some photos—not so much.
There’s a scenic drive through Prairie Creek Park that winds through about 15 miles of redwood groves, with little hiking trails going off in every direction. The thing about going to see the redwoods is that everything you hear about them is true—the primary one being that they are utterly beyond description. On top of that, when you’re looking at them, they are beyond comprehension. It’s like your eyes send this signal to the brain that reads, “Really big tree,” and your brain says, “Yep, got it – big tree.” But the eyes keep at it, like, “No, this is a really big tree,” and to deal with the info, the brain has to dumb it down, shrink it to something manageable. It’s like the first time I saw the Grand Canyon, my brain adjusted after a while, and then I saw a sign that said it’s 16 miles across the canyon, and that some of the stuff in there, that looks like it’s right next to each other, is actually like five miles apart. It’s like your brain loses its footing in reality at times like that; you realize that everything you were basing your perception on is false, and that actually have no concept of what you’re looking at.
It’s like that when you’re looking at a tree that’s, say, 20 feet thick at the base, and you can’t see the top of it. I mean, you can’t even see towards the top of it. It just sort of disappears up there in the canopy. The thing is so big, it makes a sound. Ever hear a really big clap of thunder, with no rumbling afterwards, like a big BOOM and then you can hear the echo in other places, the sound waves retreating from you? That’s what happens in my head when I see one of the really big redwoods. The sight of it makes such a big BOOM in my head that for a few moments afterwards there’s no thought, no feeling, not even perception—just an echoing emptiness, a psychic pause, a stillness. The same thing happened to me when I first walked into St. Peter’s Basilica at The Vatican. I was consciously aware that I had stopped thinking. BOOM!
The other aspect of the redwoods is that there’s so damn many of them. Miles of them. It’s tough to take a picture of them sometimes, because there’s so many others in the way. And besides, how do you take a picture of them? Do you go for the trunk angle, where you use another tree or a rhody to show how big the trunk is? Do you go for the looking-up angle, to show how tall they are? Do you go for the looking-through-the-grove angle, to show how many there are? Then there’s the light. Most of the time you’re in shadow, and the occasional shaft of light really confuses your camera. That’s why whenever you see a cool picture of redwoods or other big trees, it’s shady, or even better, foggy. That’s where you go back to some primordial state, looking at these trees in the fog and thinking this looked about the same 2,000 years ago.
And yet, the mind does things with the redwoods. I have been to this exact area before, and I somehow exaggerated it in my mind. I had the experience of thinking, “I remember these trees being bigger.” So which is it: did I exaggerate their size in my memory, or do I remember the feeling of the trees, which takes some time to get back into? My last time here I spent three days, camped among the trees, walked among them. This time I was a bit rushed, had to force myself to occasionally stop and try to be quiet, let the mystic soak through the moment. Other times I would see a particular angle or tree or play of light, take its picture and move on, then have to remind myself to sit with it for a minute, don’t just take the picture. See it. Be with it.
I spent a few hours among the trees, then headed back south. Had a meeting to get to. I got back on 101, headed for coffee in Trinidad, when something happened that I almost didn’t notice, but which I new recognize as one of the great coincidences of my life. I was cruising along, minding my own business, when I saw, going north on 101, a blue Honda Element with a surfboard and cargo container on top. Not an uncommon site in and of itself, but I know a guy who left Portland last summer, saying he was going to surf his way to Argentina, get away from some tough times in Portland, pull the plug and hit the road ... I’ve been following his blog (jmchandler.com), and the latest post was from someplace in Baja California, saying he was headed back north, and sounding like he was done with the trip and anxious to get home – and he drives a blue Honda Element. I flashed for a moment on the possibility that I had just seen him, that we happened to be on the same highway at the same time, miles and miles from home, going in opposite directions. I sort of wrote it off, but still .... So this morning, sitting on the bus in Arcata, I sent an email to some friends back home saying, “Do ya think?” And one of them, who lives in Newport and is close friends with “Surfer John” wrote back and said, “That was probably him; he’s due in Newport tonight.” I find this staggering! I’m traveling 1,000 miles, he went thousands, and we passed each other! Amazing.
In retrospect, the rest of my days wasn’t so interesting. I stopped at a beach, just on principle, but it wasn’t much of a beach, and it was windy. I did, however, want to spend my day sleeping in, seeing the Redwoods, walking on a beach, and checking out Arcata. With two of three under my belt, I got back on 101, headed for the home of Humboldt State.
Right in the middle of Arcata, there’s a plaza that captures the whole place perfectly. It’s quaint, historic (I assume), lovely. The old buildings have been redone, turned into boutique bookstores and cafes and galleries and antique stores. The ocean isn’t far away, and the scent on the breeze is intoxicating. There’s a statue in the middle of the plaza, and flowers, and the sun was out, and gulls were circling overheads ... and all over this plaza, sitting on the sidewalks and lounging on the corners and stretched out in the grass, was the biggest assortment of drifters, skateboarders, vagrants, dopers, dealers, and losers I’ve ever seen in one place. I know there’s a lot of judgment and arrogance in that, but there it is. When I get panhandled by people younger than me who appear to be in good health, and when I hear kids dropping f-bombs on the sidewalk, and see drug deals going down in the open, I tend to think “losers.” D was telling me that Arcata, as he put it, “Has all these ideas about people’s rights,” which I guess means they don’t bust folks for hanging out, so hangers-out come from all over the place. Meth sounds like a big problem here, and of course the place is legendary for having the killer green pot of lore. Put all that together, and you get what they call The Plazarians. I’m not sure the town wouldn’t benefit from a little of the Giuliani Treatment, like they got in New York.
I grabbed a slice of pizza and headed for the meeting, which was in an annex building of Humboldt State. Believe me, when the words “Humboldt” and “Marijuana Anonymous” first got put together, waves of joy and incredulity swept over our little community. People getting sober in MA in Humboldt is like people marching for workers’ rights in downtown Dallas. It all started a few years back with a woman named D, and now there’s four meetings around. and it seems to be sticking. The Wednesday group meets in this old building that used to be a hospital—C said she was born there, in fact—and now it’s a classroom for HSU. So we sat in schooldesks in a little room with flowers and fruit trees outside. The format is to pull a topic from a stack of index cards, and I pulled out “Respect.” We heard about respect for others, respect for ourselves, respect for the law and society, respect for sponsors (not taking suggestions as attacks) and the respect we show to each other, like when these folks took me in, a traveler they’d never met, and treated me kindly and respectfully and graciously, taking me into their homes and loaning me cars and sharing meals with me. It’s a mutual respect that’s based on the somewhat ironic fact that we al share in common a certain sickness that we’re trying to figure out. So our pain, and our common search for a solution, has brought us together.
On Wednesday, J took a 30-day chip, and F and another J announced that, respectively, they recently celebrated six and nine months, respectively. There was one newcomer, and a total attendance of seven—five of whom were together the night before in McKinleyville.
Man, we are cruising along a beautiful river valley on this bus right now! I’ll have to look up what river it is, but when crossed it in Rio Dell, and we’re coming into Garberville right now, and the country couldn’t be any prettier. Tall green trees, rocky outcroppings, some cherry trees starting to blossom, blue sky, turquoise water, white riffles, the bus whipping back on forth on the winding highway ... I need to pea, but I’ll be damned if I’m going back there in this kind of action. I’m having a hard enough time keeping my laptop in my lap.
After the meeting, D treated me to a burger at a local landmark, Toni’s. He used to go there when he was a kid, and it’s so old-school it almost hurts. Two pinballs in the back, tight wood booths, seating for about 20, the register person writing your order directly onto the baggie the burger will be in, teenage girls hauling plastic trays to your table, pictures of dairy farms on the wall. D told me it’s a big hangout for local dairy farmers in the morning, after they’ve milked the cows. The burger and fries and salad were 100 percent Pure Generic American, the kind you’ve been able to get for 100 years in 1,000 places. And they were pretty darn good, too.
Went back, did some laundry, crashed out early, got up early, had breakfast with C at a cute little place on the plaza—the loonies weren’t out yet—and then she gave me a quick driving tour of the marshy wildlife refuge on the south side of town, out by the bay, which is now silting up because so much of the Mad River’s flow is diverted, as they say, “down south.”
I got some internet at the bus station and managed to get some stuff out, and to download the latest super-cute photos of my newest nephew, Jack Gerald of Memphis, son of my brother Lee and his wife Lela. Perhaps I’ll post them, too. Big internet and work session on tap for tonight in Santa Rosa, where I have a room at the Holiday Inn Express and 24 hours with nothing on the schedule but an 8 p.m. meeting.
Right now, the battery is low, the scenery too good to not watch, and we’re about to get a break in Garberville. So until next time!
We’ve got another Greyhound Archetype on board today, too: the cutie. She’s young, looks like she doesn’t ride the bus much, traveling alone, and looks quite nervous. We just picked her up at what looks like a city bus stop in Eureka, and she’s got a few people waving to her from the sidewalk. Cutie has on a Stanford sweatshirt, so she’s probably headed back to San Francisco.
A fine time in Humboldt County. When I last wrote, I was in the middle of a highly luxurious morning at D’s place outside Arcata. I had slept in, slammed coffee, written, showered, and then started out. I had s choice of going south to Humboldt Redwoods State Park – lots of big trees, no coastline – or north towards Redwoods National Park, which is actually smaller and has fewer big trees, but does have coastline. After consulting with the lady at the Visitors Bureau and loading up on brochures, I chose north. First stop: Trinidad, California.
Along the way, I stopped for an overlook at Houda Point, which seemed to be a hot surfer destination. I love surfers. It’s like they’re caricatures of themselves. I walked past a couple of them, and one was saying to the other, “So, like I told him we were coming to Houda, and he was all ‘Sweet, dude – you’re stoked. Catch one for me!’ ” I’m sure there are other types of surfers, but they’re a definite tribe, and wherever I went in Humboldt County, there was a strong sense that this is surfer/hippie/drifter/stoner country, and I am in the minority. Houda was pretty, though: the classic north coast beach, with a haystack rock and short beach at the foot of tree-lined cliffs. Probably 15 or 20 surfers kicking around.
Trinidad sits up on a cliff looking out over a rock-filled bay. A few boats sat at anchor, gulls drifted around, a cool breeze was coming in from the north, and a couple of crab boats were rounding the point, headed for a wharf that stuck out from behind a big rock. I was told there was a little seafood place on that pier, so I headed there for lunch. I wound down past the requisite gift shop, kite/surf shop, coffee shop, mom-and0pop market, and what loked like vacation homes, with rhododendrons and azaleas and perfectly-manicured lawns. Now, there’s two kinds of “seafood places” around here. One is the haughty place with white tablecloths and a name like Whalers Cove, where you can get fine California wines to go with your $17 ahi tuna steak. The other is the local spot where the fish-and-chips is $6 and made with cod, the clam chowder is “the best on the north coast,” there’s a laminated deal on the table with trivia questions, and the waitress wipes your wood table with a wet rag before you sit down. That’s the kind of place this was, and I was happy for it. Crabbers were coming in to use the bathroom, greeting the staff by name.
I had been told that since it’s crab season, I should get crab. Made sense. Who knows how Whalers Cove would have offered it, but this place had Grilled Cheese With Crab, a crab cocktail, and a Crab Salad Sandwich, all listed at “market price.” I asked about the Crab Salad Sandwich and was told it’s $15.95. I mean, looking back on it, what’s another 5 or 10 bucks, right? I probably should have gotten it, but a $16 sandwich is just against my principles. I got a cup of chowder and the small fish-and-chips. Both were fine, and both could have been served in about 537 other restaurants in America. The staff was nice, though, and I enjoyed watching the guys load crab pots out onto the pier. Commercial fishermen – there’s another tribe. These two guys walked by, both in Extra Tough rubber boots, Helly Hansen raingear, plaid shirts, baseball caps and thick beards, and both smoking cigarettes. It’s like there’s a manual for what to wear when you’re in a certain tribe. (And speaking of which, full disclosure: This Oregon boy has spent most of his trip in hiking boots, jeans, and a plaid flannel shirt. I’ve got some tie-dyes in the backpack, too.)
After lunch, I cruised up 101 to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, which I’ve had the pleasure of visiting before. There’s a big meadow there where you can usually see some elk—not this time, but I did stop on the way for some photos of a private herd, sharing a pasture with some horses. To the locals, I’m sure this is like people taking pictures of cows, but an elk is an impressive critter. Seeing them in the wild borders on the spiritual. Stopping along a US highway to snap some photos—not so much.
There’s a scenic drive through Prairie Creek Park that winds through about 15 miles of redwood groves, with little hiking trails going off in every direction. The thing about going to see the redwoods is that everything you hear about them is true—the primary one being that they are utterly beyond description. On top of that, when you’re looking at them, they are beyond comprehension. It’s like your eyes send this signal to the brain that reads, “Really big tree,” and your brain says, “Yep, got it – big tree.” But the eyes keep at it, like, “No, this is a really big tree,” and to deal with the info, the brain has to dumb it down, shrink it to something manageable. It’s like the first time I saw the Grand Canyon, my brain adjusted after a while, and then I saw a sign that said it’s 16 miles across the canyon, and that some of the stuff in there, that looks like it’s right next to each other, is actually like five miles apart. It’s like your brain loses its footing in reality at times like that; you realize that everything you were basing your perception on is false, and that actually have no concept of what you’re looking at.
It’s like that when you’re looking at a tree that’s, say, 20 feet thick at the base, and you can’t see the top of it. I mean, you can’t even see towards the top of it. It just sort of disappears up there in the canopy. The thing is so big, it makes a sound. Ever hear a really big clap of thunder, with no rumbling afterwards, like a big BOOM and then you can hear the echo in other places, the sound waves retreating from you? That’s what happens in my head when I see one of the really big redwoods. The sight of it makes such a big BOOM in my head that for a few moments afterwards there’s no thought, no feeling, not even perception—just an echoing emptiness, a psychic pause, a stillness. The same thing happened to me when I first walked into St. Peter’s Basilica at The Vatican. I was consciously aware that I had stopped thinking. BOOM!
The other aspect of the redwoods is that there’s so damn many of them. Miles of them. It’s tough to take a picture of them sometimes, because there’s so many others in the way. And besides, how do you take a picture of them? Do you go for the trunk angle, where you use another tree or a rhody to show how big the trunk is? Do you go for the looking-up angle, to show how tall they are? Do you go for the looking-through-the-grove angle, to show how many there are? Then there’s the light. Most of the time you’re in shadow, and the occasional shaft of light really confuses your camera. That’s why whenever you see a cool picture of redwoods or other big trees, it’s shady, or even better, foggy. That’s where you go back to some primordial state, looking at these trees in the fog and thinking this looked about the same 2,000 years ago.
And yet, the mind does things with the redwoods. I have been to this exact area before, and I somehow exaggerated it in my mind. I had the experience of thinking, “I remember these trees being bigger.” So which is it: did I exaggerate their size in my memory, or do I remember the feeling of the trees, which takes some time to get back into? My last time here I spent three days, camped among the trees, walked among them. This time I was a bit rushed, had to force myself to occasionally stop and try to be quiet, let the mystic soak through the moment. Other times I would see a particular angle or tree or play of light, take its picture and move on, then have to remind myself to sit with it for a minute, don’t just take the picture. See it. Be with it.
I spent a few hours among the trees, then headed back south. Had a meeting to get to. I got back on 101, headed for coffee in Trinidad, when something happened that I almost didn’t notice, but which I new recognize as one of the great coincidences of my life. I was cruising along, minding my own business, when I saw, going north on 101, a blue Honda Element with a surfboard and cargo container on top. Not an uncommon site in and of itself, but I know a guy who left Portland last summer, saying he was going to surf his way to Argentina, get away from some tough times in Portland, pull the plug and hit the road ... I’ve been following his blog (jmchandler.com), and the latest post was from someplace in Baja California, saying he was headed back north, and sounding like he was done with the trip and anxious to get home – and he drives a blue Honda Element. I flashed for a moment on the possibility that I had just seen him, that we happened to be on the same highway at the same time, miles and miles from home, going in opposite directions. I sort of wrote it off, but still .... So this morning, sitting on the bus in Arcata, I sent an email to some friends back home saying, “Do ya think?” And one of them, who lives in Newport and is close friends with “Surfer John” wrote back and said, “That was probably him; he’s due in Newport tonight.” I find this staggering! I’m traveling 1,000 miles, he went thousands, and we passed each other! Amazing.
In retrospect, the rest of my days wasn’t so interesting. I stopped at a beach, just on principle, but it wasn’t much of a beach, and it was windy. I did, however, want to spend my day sleeping in, seeing the Redwoods, walking on a beach, and checking out Arcata. With two of three under my belt, I got back on 101, headed for the home of Humboldt State.
Right in the middle of Arcata, there’s a plaza that captures the whole place perfectly. It’s quaint, historic (I assume), lovely. The old buildings have been redone, turned into boutique bookstores and cafes and galleries and antique stores. The ocean isn’t far away, and the scent on the breeze is intoxicating. There’s a statue in the middle of the plaza, and flowers, and the sun was out, and gulls were circling overheads ... and all over this plaza, sitting on the sidewalks and lounging on the corners and stretched out in the grass, was the biggest assortment of drifters, skateboarders, vagrants, dopers, dealers, and losers I’ve ever seen in one place. I know there’s a lot of judgment and arrogance in that, but there it is. When I get panhandled by people younger than me who appear to be in good health, and when I hear kids dropping f-bombs on the sidewalk, and see drug deals going down in the open, I tend to think “losers.” D was telling me that Arcata, as he put it, “Has all these ideas about people’s rights,” which I guess means they don’t bust folks for hanging out, so hangers-out come from all over the place. Meth sounds like a big problem here, and of course the place is legendary for having the killer green pot of lore. Put all that together, and you get what they call The Plazarians. I’m not sure the town wouldn’t benefit from a little of the Giuliani Treatment, like they got in New York.
I grabbed a slice of pizza and headed for the meeting, which was in an annex building of Humboldt State. Believe me, when the words “Humboldt” and “Marijuana Anonymous” first got put together, waves of joy and incredulity swept over our little community. People getting sober in MA in Humboldt is like people marching for workers’ rights in downtown Dallas. It all started a few years back with a woman named D, and now there’s four meetings around. and it seems to be sticking. The Wednesday group meets in this old building that used to be a hospital—C said she was born there, in fact—and now it’s a classroom for HSU. So we sat in schooldesks in a little room with flowers and fruit trees outside. The format is to pull a topic from a stack of index cards, and I pulled out “Respect.” We heard about respect for others, respect for ourselves, respect for the law and society, respect for sponsors (not taking suggestions as attacks) and the respect we show to each other, like when these folks took me in, a traveler they’d never met, and treated me kindly and respectfully and graciously, taking me into their homes and loaning me cars and sharing meals with me. It’s a mutual respect that’s based on the somewhat ironic fact that we al share in common a certain sickness that we’re trying to figure out. So our pain, and our common search for a solution, has brought us together.
On Wednesday, J took a 30-day chip, and F and another J announced that, respectively, they recently celebrated six and nine months, respectively. There was one newcomer, and a total attendance of seven—five of whom were together the night before in McKinleyville.
Man, we are cruising along a beautiful river valley on this bus right now! I’ll have to look up what river it is, but when crossed it in Rio Dell, and we’re coming into Garberville right now, and the country couldn’t be any prettier. Tall green trees, rocky outcroppings, some cherry trees starting to blossom, blue sky, turquoise water, white riffles, the bus whipping back on forth on the winding highway ... I need to pea, but I’ll be damned if I’m going back there in this kind of action. I’m having a hard enough time keeping my laptop in my lap.
After the meeting, D treated me to a burger at a local landmark, Toni’s. He used to go there when he was a kid, and it’s so old-school it almost hurts. Two pinballs in the back, tight wood booths, seating for about 20, the register person writing your order directly onto the baggie the burger will be in, teenage girls hauling plastic trays to your table, pictures of dairy farms on the wall. D told me it’s a big hangout for local dairy farmers in the morning, after they’ve milked the cows. The burger and fries and salad were 100 percent Pure Generic American, the kind you’ve been able to get for 100 years in 1,000 places. And they were pretty darn good, too.
Went back, did some laundry, crashed out early, got up early, had breakfast with C at a cute little place on the plaza—the loonies weren’t out yet—and then she gave me a quick driving tour of the marshy wildlife refuge on the south side of town, out by the bay, which is now silting up because so much of the Mad River’s flow is diverted, as they say, “down south.”
I got some internet at the bus station and managed to get some stuff out, and to download the latest super-cute photos of my newest nephew, Jack Gerald of Memphis, son of my brother Lee and his wife Lela. Perhaps I’ll post them, too. Big internet and work session on tap for tonight in Santa Rosa, where I have a room at the Holiday Inn Express and 24 hours with nothing on the schedule but an 8 p.m. meeting.
Right now, the battery is low, the scenery too good to not watch, and we’re about to get a break in Garberville. So until next time!
2/22/06
Cali: 2-22 Humboldt County
Chillin’ at D’s place ...
Every trip needs a break, and this morning has been one for me. I think I should be out seeing the sites of Humboldt County, however, so I’ll make this one a little more brief than usual
Our Greyhound driver continued his commentary yesterday as we rolled out of the Siskiyous and into the upper Sacramento Valley. He informed us that Shasta Lake has hundreds of miles of shoreline and that some of the houseboats rent for $4,000 a week. (I was later told the actual high figure is $11,000!) I was reminded of a more low-budget excursion I went on there, during a frightful return to Portland after a Dead show in San Francisco. We were in a VW bus (of course) and it was breaking down (of course) and we were highly intoxicated (of course). And it was July, so it was miserably hot (ditto). I recall it being 107 in Medford, for example. We decided to stop at Shasta Lake for a dip, but being hippies we refused to go anywhere near the established, pay areas. So we drove around looking for a spot, scrambled down a brushy shore, and jumped in the warm, muddy water. Yummy. Then we went back to smoking, sweating and fighting with each other. Great trip.
This one was much better. I was 80% napping as we went by the lake in air-conditioned comfort. And a few minutes after that I was at the bus station in downtown Redding, enjoying the California sun and waiting for my ride.
I am, you see, a professional travel writer. I forget this sometimes, since what I write for the Memphis Flyer is so personal and so random, and the readership is so far removed from my everyday world. And yet, I am a man who gets paid to write travel-oriented stories for a newspaper. And as such, I can occasionally be entertained by the nice people at various Convention and Visitors Bureaus, people such as the one who came to pick me up in Redding. The plan was this: She would show me the sites of Redding, especially the new Sundial Bridge of which they are quite proud, and then deliver me to Turtle Bay Exploration Park, which is a kind of interactive museum/zoo along the Sacramento River. It’s also the lynchpin in their Big Plan to “grow” their tourism trade. So she gets me, takes me to a few sites, like the surreal but still cool Big League Dreams, where a company has built three-quarter-size replicas of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium, for people to use and play ball in. After that, the plan was for her to deliver me to the PR person at Turtle Bay, but she decided to rent me a car on the city’s tab so I could be free to roam—but then her credit card bounced. Apparently she maxed it out on a recent convention trip. So she calls a co-worker, who comes over to save the day. But while I’m filling out a massive references form to be the “additional” driver, she gets a call from the Turtle Bay PR person, saying the place is closed on Tuesdays. Go figure. She announces that this is “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” and I tell her she must have had a magical life. So no Turtle Bay, no car, no Big Plan, and she had a meeting to get to. So she left me near a restaurant and an internet place, and by that time I was relieved to be back on my own. She was still horrified, I think, that The Big Plan didn’t work out, but I had fun tooling around Redding, hearing about the place, seeing the bridge, and gathering up enough info for two or three articles—because, really, The Plan is that I get free stuff and special treatment, and Redding gets publicity.
I should mention that when my host showed up at the station, we had two very standard conversations:
#1:
Her: “You know, I’ve never come to pick up anybody at the bus station!”
Me: “I get that everywhere I go.”
Her: “In fact, I hardly even knew where it was!”
Me: “Ditto.”
Her: “Was the trip ... okay?”
Me: “Oh, yeah, I love riding the bus. You see the country, relax, and encounter fascinating people.”
Her: “Well, I’ve never ridden it.”
Me: “I get that everywhere I go.”
#2:
Her: “So let me get this straight: You live in Portland and work for the Memphis newspaper”?
Me: “Right. I was on staff there, then I moved to Oregon, and around that time they decided they wanted a regular travel column, and asked if I would do it.”
Her: “Don’t you get tired of all this travel?”
Me: “Nah, I make it all up (wait for laugh) ... Actually, I just write about places I would have gone to, anyway, or places I went to.”
Anyway, by the time the chaos had passed and she had figured out where the internet place was—that it was across the street from the cigar place, not next to it, and the cigar place was closed, anyway—and after she got through apologizing and I got through trying to convince her that I was not a typical travel writer and getting a ride around town was just fine, I was, like I said, ready to be on my own again. I found a restaurant, chose a quiet table in the corner, ordered a chicken ceasar and tea, and got fleeced for $17 plus the tip. Welcome to California.
After lunch, I went to the internet place, where I cranked out emails to various employers and potential employers, filed the last blog entry and so on, and a crazy dude at another computer was telling somebody on the phone, loudly, that “nobody cares about Kashmir except Allah and Me,” because they say there’s no war there, but it’s been going on for hundreds of years, and people call it Pakistan when it’s actually India. “Thousands of years, this war’s been going on. Nobody wants peace. But nobody cares because it’s not Iraq or Israel or Palestine ... Well, you can call me that if you want, but I don’t care. I care about Kashmir.” Good times at the internet place—and free coffee.
I went to a hotel, where another bit of California lore made itself plain: I walked up the counter to ask the woman there to get me a cab to the airport, and the sight of her made me miss a few breaths. It was the whole blond hair, blue eyes, tan, eight-feet-tall thing. Yikes.
Twenty-five bucks later, the cab dropped me at the airport, where they had free wireless internet. So I could have skipped the whole internet place, but it did have free coffee and loud insanity. I read the latest from The Sports Guy and thought to myself, you know, we’re doing the same thing, except nobody reads mine and nobody pays me. And he’s funnier. And he’s at the NBA All-Star Game. I’m in Redding, not getting into the zoo for free because it’s closed and instead being dropped off at an internet place where a lunatic is ranting about Kashmir. Otherwise, it’s just the same.
I shot some pictures during the flight to the coast, but they didn’t come out too good, which is a shame. We flew right between the Trinity Alps and the Marble Mountains, and both were frosted with snow, with Shasta looming in the background. I sat next to a teenager from Eureka who said he liked sitting in the back because you get more turbulence, and that coming into Redding the pilot had done a really cool, steep turn.
D picked me up at the airport in Arcata, where the sun was setting over the ocean and there was a palm tree right outside the parking lot. It’s like I’m in a stereotype of California. I commented on the palm tree, and D said, “I don’t know why they planted that there.” And I said, “It’s so goofball tourists like me can come out and say, ‘Hey, look – it’s a palm tree!’ ” Still, I have officially arrived on The Coast, and it feels great. The meeting had about six people last night, in a little Methodist church in McKinleyville; one woman took a nine-month chip, a guy had 29 days, and another guy had celebrated 24 years earlier in the month. He stuck around for another meeting afterwards, in the same room. The fellowship here seems to be growing. It just started up a few years ago, and now they have four meetings and are talking about being a District. I could easily talk them out of this by describing a District Business Meeting, a Treasurer’s Report, and attending the World Services Conference. But I’ll let them walk their own path.
Went out for a massive Mexican dinner afterwards, and then D put me up in my own bedroom, showed me where all the food and coffee lives, introduced me to the four dogs and the cat, handed me keys to the car, and said he’ll see me at the meeting Wednesday night. The generosity and openness of recovery people astounds me!
So right now I think I’ll quit this foolishness. The sun is shining in Humboldt County, and I’m surrounded by redwoods, beaches and history.
Every trip needs a break, and this morning has been one for me. I think I should be out seeing the sites of Humboldt County, however, so I’ll make this one a little more brief than usual
Our Greyhound driver continued his commentary yesterday as we rolled out of the Siskiyous and into the upper Sacramento Valley. He informed us that Shasta Lake has hundreds of miles of shoreline and that some of the houseboats rent for $4,000 a week. (I was later told the actual high figure is $11,000!) I was reminded of a more low-budget excursion I went on there, during a frightful return to Portland after a Dead show in San Francisco. We were in a VW bus (of course) and it was breaking down (of course) and we were highly intoxicated (of course). And it was July, so it was miserably hot (ditto). I recall it being 107 in Medford, for example. We decided to stop at Shasta Lake for a dip, but being hippies we refused to go anywhere near the established, pay areas. So we drove around looking for a spot, scrambled down a brushy shore, and jumped in the warm, muddy water. Yummy. Then we went back to smoking, sweating and fighting with each other. Great trip.
This one was much better. I was 80% napping as we went by the lake in air-conditioned comfort. And a few minutes after that I was at the bus station in downtown Redding, enjoying the California sun and waiting for my ride.
I am, you see, a professional travel writer. I forget this sometimes, since what I write for the Memphis Flyer is so personal and so random, and the readership is so far removed from my everyday world. And yet, I am a man who gets paid to write travel-oriented stories for a newspaper. And as such, I can occasionally be entertained by the nice people at various Convention and Visitors Bureaus, people such as the one who came to pick me up in Redding. The plan was this: She would show me the sites of Redding, especially the new Sundial Bridge of which they are quite proud, and then deliver me to Turtle Bay Exploration Park, which is a kind of interactive museum/zoo along the Sacramento River. It’s also the lynchpin in their Big Plan to “grow” their tourism trade. So she gets me, takes me to a few sites, like the surreal but still cool Big League Dreams, where a company has built three-quarter-size replicas of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium, for people to use and play ball in. After that, the plan was for her to deliver me to the PR person at Turtle Bay, but she decided to rent me a car on the city’s tab so I could be free to roam—but then her credit card bounced. Apparently she maxed it out on a recent convention trip. So she calls a co-worker, who comes over to save the day. But while I’m filling out a massive references form to be the “additional” driver, she gets a call from the Turtle Bay PR person, saying the place is closed on Tuesdays. Go figure. She announces that this is “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” and I tell her she must have had a magical life. So no Turtle Bay, no car, no Big Plan, and she had a meeting to get to. So she left me near a restaurant and an internet place, and by that time I was relieved to be back on my own. She was still horrified, I think, that The Big Plan didn’t work out, but I had fun tooling around Redding, hearing about the place, seeing the bridge, and gathering up enough info for two or three articles—because, really, The Plan is that I get free stuff and special treatment, and Redding gets publicity.
I should mention that when my host showed up at the station, we had two very standard conversations:
#1:
Her: “You know, I’ve never come to pick up anybody at the bus station!”
Me: “I get that everywhere I go.”
Her: “In fact, I hardly even knew where it was!”
Me: “Ditto.”
Her: “Was the trip ... okay?”
Me: “Oh, yeah, I love riding the bus. You see the country, relax, and encounter fascinating people.”
Her: “Well, I’ve never ridden it.”
Me: “I get that everywhere I go.”
#2:
Her: “So let me get this straight: You live in Portland and work for the Memphis newspaper”?
Me: “Right. I was on staff there, then I moved to Oregon, and around that time they decided they wanted a regular travel column, and asked if I would do it.”
Her: “Don’t you get tired of all this travel?”
Me: “Nah, I make it all up (wait for laugh) ... Actually, I just write about places I would have gone to, anyway, or places I went to.”
Anyway, by the time the chaos had passed and she had figured out where the internet place was—that it was across the street from the cigar place, not next to it, and the cigar place was closed, anyway—and after she got through apologizing and I got through trying to convince her that I was not a typical travel writer and getting a ride around town was just fine, I was, like I said, ready to be on my own again. I found a restaurant, chose a quiet table in the corner, ordered a chicken ceasar and tea, and got fleeced for $17 plus the tip. Welcome to California.
After lunch, I went to the internet place, where I cranked out emails to various employers and potential employers, filed the last blog entry and so on, and a crazy dude at another computer was telling somebody on the phone, loudly, that “nobody cares about Kashmir except Allah and Me,” because they say there’s no war there, but it’s been going on for hundreds of years, and people call it Pakistan when it’s actually India. “Thousands of years, this war’s been going on. Nobody wants peace. But nobody cares because it’s not Iraq or Israel or Palestine ... Well, you can call me that if you want, but I don’t care. I care about Kashmir.” Good times at the internet place—and free coffee.
I went to a hotel, where another bit of California lore made itself plain: I walked up the counter to ask the woman there to get me a cab to the airport, and the sight of her made me miss a few breaths. It was the whole blond hair, blue eyes, tan, eight-feet-tall thing. Yikes.
Twenty-five bucks later, the cab dropped me at the airport, where they had free wireless internet. So I could have skipped the whole internet place, but it did have free coffee and loud insanity. I read the latest from The Sports Guy and thought to myself, you know, we’re doing the same thing, except nobody reads mine and nobody pays me. And he’s funnier. And he’s at the NBA All-Star Game. I’m in Redding, not getting into the zoo for free because it’s closed and instead being dropped off at an internet place where a lunatic is ranting about Kashmir. Otherwise, it’s just the same.
I shot some pictures during the flight to the coast, but they didn’t come out too good, which is a shame. We flew right between the Trinity Alps and the Marble Mountains, and both were frosted with snow, with Shasta looming in the background. I sat next to a teenager from Eureka who said he liked sitting in the back because you get more turbulence, and that coming into Redding the pilot had done a really cool, steep turn.
D picked me up at the airport in Arcata, where the sun was setting over the ocean and there was a palm tree right outside the parking lot. It’s like I’m in a stereotype of California. I commented on the palm tree, and D said, “I don’t know why they planted that there.” And I said, “It’s so goofball tourists like me can come out and say, ‘Hey, look – it’s a palm tree!’ ” Still, I have officially arrived on The Coast, and it feels great. The meeting had about six people last night, in a little Methodist church in McKinleyville; one woman took a nine-month chip, a guy had 29 days, and another guy had celebrated 24 years earlier in the month. He stuck around for another meeting afterwards, in the same room. The fellowship here seems to be growing. It just started up a few years ago, and now they have four meetings and are talking about being a District. I could easily talk them out of this by describing a District Business Meeting, a Treasurer’s Report, and attending the World Services Conference. But I’ll let them walk their own path.
Went out for a massive Mexican dinner afterwards, and then D put me up in my own bedroom, showed me where all the food and coffee lives, introduced me to the four dogs and the cat, handed me keys to the car, and said he’ll see me at the meeting Wednesday night. The generosity and openness of recovery people astounds me!
So right now I think I’ll quit this foolishness. The sun is shining in Humboldt County, and I’m surrounded by redwoods, beaches and history.
2/21/06
Cali: 2-21 Redding
Back on the Dog ...
A fine departure from Medford this morning, after a wonderful day and night. I got up via cell-phone alarm at 5:30, was out the door at 5:45, and walked the truck-filled streets of Medford to the bus station. I was holding out hope that along the way I might score food, coffee, and internet access, and by golly, the travel gods took care of me. There was a cafe on the way that was closed, and didn’t say anything about WiFi, but I plopped my laptop down on top of a newspaper box outside and bingo, off to the Web. Sent some emails that I wrote yesterday on the bus, downloaded 19 new ones, and posted the last entry to the blog. Also gave directions to a guy looking for the bus station; he said he’d been asking people all over town and getting nowhere, which is perfectly typical. Most people don’t know where the Greyhound station in their hometown is; even M, my friend in Medford, only knew because it’s close to her community college.
I hit the station, checked in, walked over to the Red Lion for some bad coffee in a styrofoam cup, got some pop-tarts in the vending machine at the station, and we’re back on the road.
Our driver this morning is one of the Tour Guide types. He was yucking it up with another passenger, told us on the way out of town that we were passing a theatre where they filmed a recent “Dancing with the Stars” episode featuring a Medford resident, and then informed us that we’d be crossing the Siskiyou Mountains at 4,300 feet, the highest point on I-5’s Mexico-to-Canada route.
This morning that trip is being made is the bright, beautiful light of a rising sun, which is sending horizontal shafts of light across the mountaintops, above the lights of the tiny towns below. The only sign of winter is the occasional roadside pocket of snow or patch of ice on a rock.
My mind is wandering back to my last trip here, when I was on another Mexico-to-Canada route, the Pacific Crest Trail. We also crossed the Siskiyous, and in fact, as I type this, we’re approaching the point where the Trail crosses I-5 – at the lovely and much-appreciated Callahan’s Lodge. C and I hit that place on our fourth day of walking, and never has a place been finer to see. We were tired, hot, in pain, had one broken backpack (mine) and two messed-up feet (his). We showered often, ate much, and lounged hard. And now I’m back, whipping through going south at 60 mph, listening to two girls compare drug stories and usage (dude, that oxycontin messed me up!) and complain that this driver stops too often.
So, when last I wrote I was arriving in Medford, and now I’m leaving. What did I do there? Well, it started with the lovely smile and charming nature of J, a friend from Portland who was in town visiting her brother, his wife, and their brand-new baby girl. J and I have been spending a lot of time together in Portland lately, and seeing her in Medford was a thrill. We drove over to historic Jacksonville for a coffee and a walkaround, ducked into some gift shops that started to run together after a while (how many variations on “carved lazy Susan” are there?) and then had dinner at the apartment. A rousing game of “Settlers of Catan” was followed by Olympics watching and the focusing of much attention on the baby, who responded by staring blankly around, hiccuping, burping, and looking really cute.
The next morning it was off to Crater Lake for J and me. It was another sunny, beautiful day. To put this in perspective, a week of sunny weather in Oregon in February would be like a frost in Georgia in July. It just isn’t supposed to happen, and when it does, it’s all people talk about. Throughout the day, about every 15 minutes, J and I would look at each other and say, “This weather is just unbelievable.” And indeed it was. We were at Crater Lake on February 20th, with sunshine, no clouds, almost no wind, and the temperature around 40.
Even without that, Crater Lake is a magic place. To the natives, it was a place only shamen could go see. It was literally heaven on earth, I would assume. At least two major rivers, the Klamath and the Rogue, start near there, and the beauty of the place staggers even the modern mind. What it must have looked like to the natives I can’t imagine, nor can I comprehend the reaction of the first white folks to see it, since they had no idea it was up there. The natives didn’t tell them about it! So the first time somebody walked over the hill and looked down at a six-mile-wide lake, bluer than the sky, surrounded by cliffs more than a thousand feet high ... well, I bet it changed their life.
When we saw it, it was ringed with snow, and when I get a chance I’ll put some photos on my ClubPhoto site, then link to it from my blog. We rented snowshoes in Medford and headed east from the parking lot. I should mention how much snow there was. There’s none in Medford, and none for the first half-hour or so as you drive up. Then you start to see a little, just patches among the trees or in shady spots on the roadside. Then it covers the ground. Then it’s about two feet deep. And then, over a period of about 20 minutes of driving, it becomes like the walls of a canyon, 15 feet on both sides, till you can hardly see out of it. It is a truly staggering amount of snow—and no snow has come down for over a week!
The top was mostly crusty, with a couple inches of powder in spots, so it was perfect for snowshoeing. J and I had each hiked the PCT through here, so we’d been west of the lodge. Heading east for some variety, we first visited the Crater Lake Lodge, which is closed for the season and now hosts some spectacular icicles. With all the snow around it, we were walking on the level of the third floor, and could have fairly easily walked onto the roof. We kept going east to a little rocky point looking over the lake; Crater Lake possesses the kind of beauty that seems to change every 10 feet or so. You see it from one side of a rock, then walk around the rock and have to see it again from the other side, then you stand there and look at it with the same dumb expression as before. It’s like the Grand Canyon—probably beyond human comprehension.
From our rocky point we couldn’t go further east, so we headed back, and J stopped in a meadow where she made a perfect snow angel. Then we decided to make a snowman, which neither of us had done in years. We gave him stick arms and bark eyes and a curved-stick smile, then topped him off with a crown of pine boughs and dubbed him Craterus Augustus.
We had to cut the walk short because one of my cheap-o, GI Joe’s rental snowshoes broke, but we gorged supremely on crackers and cheese and yogurt pretzels, then headed down the hill and arrived right on schedule – except we were locked out of the apartment. Long story, but J worked it out, then I had to hustle through a shower so J could take me to meet M at her place before the meeting. Such hustling often occurs on a trip like this, and it gets frustrating, not because you have to go fast but because it doesn’t seem to leave time for proper thanks, goodbyes and hellos. J’s family was incredibly nice to put me up, J is a total sweetheart, and I’m missing her already. But then it’s boom and you’re in a new place, with a new person, back on the Meeting Vibe.
A trip like this goes through stages. Leaving Portland for Eugene felt fairly normal, crashing there with a meeting person was entertaining and relaxing, and then you’re back on the bus, then hanging with non-meeting people and doing outdoors stuff. Then it’s back to the meeting thing, and you exchange the snows of Crater Lake for a room in a church, where four people have come together to stay sober another day. It’s a challenging and magical thing, this kind of travel, because you never get a chance to be comfortable in the sense of being in your own place, doing your own thing, eating and drinking and getting online and showering whenever you want (note the order there!). So two things happen: you notice that lack of comfort and how much you desire it (which teaches you about yourself) AND your definition of comfort changes. Take last night, for example. When M and I got home from dinner after the meeting, she chilled out with the Olympics, and I realized that all I needed to settle down was a few minutes with my backpack, plug in various battery chargers, lay out my clothes for the next day, throw out garbage, make sure receipts and tickets are in the right place, get the dirty laundry to the bottom of the pack, check my notes and contacts for tomorrow, take a few breaths .. and then I can go watch the ice dancing.
The meeting was good—and also comforting in its way. It soothes me to know that where I go, I can walk into a meeting and see the same literature, the same cheap coffee machine, the same styrofoam cups, the same uncomfortable chairs, the same message, and the same people, whether they’ve got a day or a year or whatever. They—we—have come to this place for the same reason: to stay sober and help each other do the same thing. And during that time, in that place, nothing else matters. It’s much easier, by the way, to experience this when you’re in a meeting away from home. At home, I look around the room and get into all the judgments I use to supposedly make myself feel comfortable: I’ve heard this guy’s story, this one isn’t working steps, this one’s only here to entertain people, this one uses it as a social club ... But on the road, I don’t know anybody and they don’t know me, and I am better at putting that other stuff aside and just letting the meeting happen.
So Monday night in Medford, a kid named A took a seven-day chip. Got a possession charge, is doing treatment, has nine days sober, and says he’s irritable as hell. Makes sense: you use the same thing for years, thing to calm down and not feel anything, and when you quit that one thing, it’s hard. There’s an old recovery saying that says something like, “Life gets better, but first it just gets different.” It’s a subtle way of saying that cleaning up sucks. I compare it to using a gym to get in shape: it hurts, it’s hard to do, you’re sore, you don’t immediately see any results ... but in the long run, it works. It’s a good idea, and it will pan out if you “stick and stay,” as the fishermen say. “It works if you work it,” the 12-steppers say.
Since I was the new guy, the chairperson asked me to share my story. I gladly did so, because we try to be of service and spread the message, and because I love to hear myself talk. The other three folks shared, I sipped black tea from a cup, then we held hands and said the Serenity Prayer. Whenever I do that, I think of how much my life has changed, and that all over the world, in rooms just like this, people like us are doing the same thing, in much the same way, for the same reason. We’re like a tribe whose homeland is everywhere.
Right now this little brave is heading from one tribal gathering to another. Tonight I’ll be in Eureka, California, or somewhere thereabouts. When I started planning this trip (follow the Flyer link on my blog and read “Surfing South”) today represented the “hole” in the plans. There’s no bus, you see, from Medford or anywhere on I-5 to anywhere on the coast – at least nowhere between Portland and San Francisco. When I put “Medford to Eureka” in the Greyhound website – it’s about a three-hour drive – it showed up as a 20-hour trip, with a change in Oakland. If you’re not familiar with the geography of the west coast, trust me: Only in the world of the Grey Dog is Oakland between Southern Oregon and Northern California. Also, the one person I know in Eureka won’t be in town. So, how do you get there, and where do you stay? A little persistence from me, and some help from the Travel Gods, and I got myself an airplane ticket from Redding, California (on I-5) to Eureka, where my plane lands 25 minutes before the Tuesday night meeting. And the partner of the person I know is picking me up, taking me to the meeting, putting me up in his place for two nights, and offering me the use of his car while I’m there. God bless the people of this tribe!
As an update, we are now sitting in, believe it not, Weed. It’s a little town in California (of course), sitting at the base of Mount Shasta, which is silhouetted in the rising sun and looks absolutely bigger than life. I don’t know, but I suspect Weed is the blue-collar antithesis of nearby Shasta, which is about as hippied-out and new-agey as a place could possibly be. There’s enough monasteries, retreat centers, yoga shambalas and “energy” there to enlighten half the state, but I suspect most of the state, and especially the folks in Weed, consider it a tad goofy. Of course, I am dealing this morning entirely in clichés and stereotypes, and I must apologize.
The Greyhound station, such as it is, in Weed is a classic spot: a wood shack at the end of a snow-covered driveway that the bus backs into. I’m sure the neighbors love all this, especially at 8:30 in the morning. I picked up some fig bars, more bad coffee in a styrofoam cup, and listened to the driver and the station guy laugh about that series of photos where first a car goes in the water, then they get a crane and THAT goes in the water, then they get a bigger crane and THAT goes in the water. Throughout all of this, the station guy was telling Rudy, his rottweiler, to “git on back in the back – g’awn! Git!” I could have bought a shirt that said, in big letters, “Enjoy Weed,” and under that, in little letters, “California.” Kind of regret not getting it now.
Now we’re rolling south again, due in Redding in about an hour. There, I’m supposedly hooking up with the local Convention and Visitors Bureau for a day of playing Travel Writer. I’ve got seven hours until my plane leaves, so I called them up, and the nice lady at the CVB will pick me up at the station, take me over to their new zoo, or somesuch, set me up with some interviews, then hopefully somebody will run me over to the airport, or to an internet coffee shop – my eternal quest.
Right now I’m looking out the left side of the bus at Mount Shasta, which has to be one of the prettiest mountains in America. It’s over 14,000 feet high, with several peaks, dramatic ridges and canyons, and sits out there all by itself. You can see it for 100 miles in every direction. Out the right side of the bus are some lower hills. with trees sticking out of snow, and a half-moon above them. And right in front of me are two things telling me it’s time to stop writing for a while: a battery meter that says 27%, and a word-count-o-meter that says 2,692. I think that means I’ve written 2,700 words (“words” was #2700) in less than two hours. Amazing what you can do when you don’t stop to think about it.
So I’ll post this when I can, in case anybody’s reading. And it doesn’t really matter. I do this for myself, really. It’s fun. I’d rather write than read, when it comes down to it.
A fine departure from Medford this morning, after a wonderful day and night. I got up via cell-phone alarm at 5:30, was out the door at 5:45, and walked the truck-filled streets of Medford to the bus station. I was holding out hope that along the way I might score food, coffee, and internet access, and by golly, the travel gods took care of me. There was a cafe on the way that was closed, and didn’t say anything about WiFi, but I plopped my laptop down on top of a newspaper box outside and bingo, off to the Web. Sent some emails that I wrote yesterday on the bus, downloaded 19 new ones, and posted the last entry to the blog. Also gave directions to a guy looking for the bus station; he said he’d been asking people all over town and getting nowhere, which is perfectly typical. Most people don’t know where the Greyhound station in their hometown is; even M, my friend in Medford, only knew because it’s close to her community college.
I hit the station, checked in, walked over to the Red Lion for some bad coffee in a styrofoam cup, got some pop-tarts in the vending machine at the station, and we’re back on the road.
Our driver this morning is one of the Tour Guide types. He was yucking it up with another passenger, told us on the way out of town that we were passing a theatre where they filmed a recent “Dancing with the Stars” episode featuring a Medford resident, and then informed us that we’d be crossing the Siskiyou Mountains at 4,300 feet, the highest point on I-5’s Mexico-to-Canada route.
This morning that trip is being made is the bright, beautiful light of a rising sun, which is sending horizontal shafts of light across the mountaintops, above the lights of the tiny towns below. The only sign of winter is the occasional roadside pocket of snow or patch of ice on a rock.
My mind is wandering back to my last trip here, when I was on another Mexico-to-Canada route, the Pacific Crest Trail. We also crossed the Siskiyous, and in fact, as I type this, we’re approaching the point where the Trail crosses I-5 – at the lovely and much-appreciated Callahan’s Lodge. C and I hit that place on our fourth day of walking, and never has a place been finer to see. We were tired, hot, in pain, had one broken backpack (mine) and two messed-up feet (his). We showered often, ate much, and lounged hard. And now I’m back, whipping through going south at 60 mph, listening to two girls compare drug stories and usage (dude, that oxycontin messed me up!) and complain that this driver stops too often.
So, when last I wrote I was arriving in Medford, and now I’m leaving. What did I do there? Well, it started with the lovely smile and charming nature of J, a friend from Portland who was in town visiting her brother, his wife, and their brand-new baby girl. J and I have been spending a lot of time together in Portland lately, and seeing her in Medford was a thrill. We drove over to historic Jacksonville for a coffee and a walkaround, ducked into some gift shops that started to run together after a while (how many variations on “carved lazy Susan” are there?) and then had dinner at the apartment. A rousing game of “Settlers of Catan” was followed by Olympics watching and the focusing of much attention on the baby, who responded by staring blankly around, hiccuping, burping, and looking really cute.
The next morning it was off to Crater Lake for J and me. It was another sunny, beautiful day. To put this in perspective, a week of sunny weather in Oregon in February would be like a frost in Georgia in July. It just isn’t supposed to happen, and when it does, it’s all people talk about. Throughout the day, about every 15 minutes, J and I would look at each other and say, “This weather is just unbelievable.” And indeed it was. We were at Crater Lake on February 20th, with sunshine, no clouds, almost no wind, and the temperature around 40.
Even without that, Crater Lake is a magic place. To the natives, it was a place only shamen could go see. It was literally heaven on earth, I would assume. At least two major rivers, the Klamath and the Rogue, start near there, and the beauty of the place staggers even the modern mind. What it must have looked like to the natives I can’t imagine, nor can I comprehend the reaction of the first white folks to see it, since they had no idea it was up there. The natives didn’t tell them about it! So the first time somebody walked over the hill and looked down at a six-mile-wide lake, bluer than the sky, surrounded by cliffs more than a thousand feet high ... well, I bet it changed their life.
When we saw it, it was ringed with snow, and when I get a chance I’ll put some photos on my ClubPhoto site, then link to it from my blog. We rented snowshoes in Medford and headed east from the parking lot. I should mention how much snow there was. There’s none in Medford, and none for the first half-hour or so as you drive up. Then you start to see a little, just patches among the trees or in shady spots on the roadside. Then it covers the ground. Then it’s about two feet deep. And then, over a period of about 20 minutes of driving, it becomes like the walls of a canyon, 15 feet on both sides, till you can hardly see out of it. It is a truly staggering amount of snow—and no snow has come down for over a week!
The top was mostly crusty, with a couple inches of powder in spots, so it was perfect for snowshoeing. J and I had each hiked the PCT through here, so we’d been west of the lodge. Heading east for some variety, we first visited the Crater Lake Lodge, which is closed for the season and now hosts some spectacular icicles. With all the snow around it, we were walking on the level of the third floor, and could have fairly easily walked onto the roof. We kept going east to a little rocky point looking over the lake; Crater Lake possesses the kind of beauty that seems to change every 10 feet or so. You see it from one side of a rock, then walk around the rock and have to see it again from the other side, then you stand there and look at it with the same dumb expression as before. It’s like the Grand Canyon—probably beyond human comprehension.
From our rocky point we couldn’t go further east, so we headed back, and J stopped in a meadow where she made a perfect snow angel. Then we decided to make a snowman, which neither of us had done in years. We gave him stick arms and bark eyes and a curved-stick smile, then topped him off with a crown of pine boughs and dubbed him Craterus Augustus.
We had to cut the walk short because one of my cheap-o, GI Joe’s rental snowshoes broke, but we gorged supremely on crackers and cheese and yogurt pretzels, then headed down the hill and arrived right on schedule – except we were locked out of the apartment. Long story, but J worked it out, then I had to hustle through a shower so J could take me to meet M at her place before the meeting. Such hustling often occurs on a trip like this, and it gets frustrating, not because you have to go fast but because it doesn’t seem to leave time for proper thanks, goodbyes and hellos. J’s family was incredibly nice to put me up, J is a total sweetheart, and I’m missing her already. But then it’s boom and you’re in a new place, with a new person, back on the Meeting Vibe.
A trip like this goes through stages. Leaving Portland for Eugene felt fairly normal, crashing there with a meeting person was entertaining and relaxing, and then you’re back on the bus, then hanging with non-meeting people and doing outdoors stuff. Then it’s back to the meeting thing, and you exchange the snows of Crater Lake for a room in a church, where four people have come together to stay sober another day. It’s a challenging and magical thing, this kind of travel, because you never get a chance to be comfortable in the sense of being in your own place, doing your own thing, eating and drinking and getting online and showering whenever you want (note the order there!). So two things happen: you notice that lack of comfort and how much you desire it (which teaches you about yourself) AND your definition of comfort changes. Take last night, for example. When M and I got home from dinner after the meeting, she chilled out with the Olympics, and I realized that all I needed to settle down was a few minutes with my backpack, plug in various battery chargers, lay out my clothes for the next day, throw out garbage, make sure receipts and tickets are in the right place, get the dirty laundry to the bottom of the pack, check my notes and contacts for tomorrow, take a few breaths .. and then I can go watch the ice dancing.
The meeting was good—and also comforting in its way. It soothes me to know that where I go, I can walk into a meeting and see the same literature, the same cheap coffee machine, the same styrofoam cups, the same uncomfortable chairs, the same message, and the same people, whether they’ve got a day or a year or whatever. They—we—have come to this place for the same reason: to stay sober and help each other do the same thing. And during that time, in that place, nothing else matters. It’s much easier, by the way, to experience this when you’re in a meeting away from home. At home, I look around the room and get into all the judgments I use to supposedly make myself feel comfortable: I’ve heard this guy’s story, this one isn’t working steps, this one’s only here to entertain people, this one uses it as a social club ... But on the road, I don’t know anybody and they don’t know me, and I am better at putting that other stuff aside and just letting the meeting happen.
So Monday night in Medford, a kid named A took a seven-day chip. Got a possession charge, is doing treatment, has nine days sober, and says he’s irritable as hell. Makes sense: you use the same thing for years, thing to calm down and not feel anything, and when you quit that one thing, it’s hard. There’s an old recovery saying that says something like, “Life gets better, but first it just gets different.” It’s a subtle way of saying that cleaning up sucks. I compare it to using a gym to get in shape: it hurts, it’s hard to do, you’re sore, you don’t immediately see any results ... but in the long run, it works. It’s a good idea, and it will pan out if you “stick and stay,” as the fishermen say. “It works if you work it,” the 12-steppers say.
Since I was the new guy, the chairperson asked me to share my story. I gladly did so, because we try to be of service and spread the message, and because I love to hear myself talk. The other three folks shared, I sipped black tea from a cup, then we held hands and said the Serenity Prayer. Whenever I do that, I think of how much my life has changed, and that all over the world, in rooms just like this, people like us are doing the same thing, in much the same way, for the same reason. We’re like a tribe whose homeland is everywhere.
Right now this little brave is heading from one tribal gathering to another. Tonight I’ll be in Eureka, California, or somewhere thereabouts. When I started planning this trip (follow the Flyer link on my blog and read “Surfing South”) today represented the “hole” in the plans. There’s no bus, you see, from Medford or anywhere on I-5 to anywhere on the coast – at least nowhere between Portland and San Francisco. When I put “Medford to Eureka” in the Greyhound website – it’s about a three-hour drive – it showed up as a 20-hour trip, with a change in Oakland. If you’re not familiar with the geography of the west coast, trust me: Only in the world of the Grey Dog is Oakland between Southern Oregon and Northern California. Also, the one person I know in Eureka won’t be in town. So, how do you get there, and where do you stay? A little persistence from me, and some help from the Travel Gods, and I got myself an airplane ticket from Redding, California (on I-5) to Eureka, where my plane lands 25 minutes before the Tuesday night meeting. And the partner of the person I know is picking me up, taking me to the meeting, putting me up in his place for two nights, and offering me the use of his car while I’m there. God bless the people of this tribe!
As an update, we are now sitting in, believe it not, Weed. It’s a little town in California (of course), sitting at the base of Mount Shasta, which is silhouetted in the rising sun and looks absolutely bigger than life. I don’t know, but I suspect Weed is the blue-collar antithesis of nearby Shasta, which is about as hippied-out and new-agey as a place could possibly be. There’s enough monasteries, retreat centers, yoga shambalas and “energy” there to enlighten half the state, but I suspect most of the state, and especially the folks in Weed, consider it a tad goofy. Of course, I am dealing this morning entirely in clichés and stereotypes, and I must apologize.
The Greyhound station, such as it is, in Weed is a classic spot: a wood shack at the end of a snow-covered driveway that the bus backs into. I’m sure the neighbors love all this, especially at 8:30 in the morning. I picked up some fig bars, more bad coffee in a styrofoam cup, and listened to the driver and the station guy laugh about that series of photos where first a car goes in the water, then they get a crane and THAT goes in the water, then they get a bigger crane and THAT goes in the water. Throughout all of this, the station guy was telling Rudy, his rottweiler, to “git on back in the back – g’awn! Git!” I could have bought a shirt that said, in big letters, “Enjoy Weed,” and under that, in little letters, “California.” Kind of regret not getting it now.
Now we’re rolling south again, due in Redding in about an hour. There, I’m supposedly hooking up with the local Convention and Visitors Bureau for a day of playing Travel Writer. I’ve got seven hours until my plane leaves, so I called them up, and the nice lady at the CVB will pick me up at the station, take me over to their new zoo, or somesuch, set me up with some interviews, then hopefully somebody will run me over to the airport, or to an internet coffee shop – my eternal quest.
Right now I’m looking out the left side of the bus at Mount Shasta, which has to be one of the prettiest mountains in America. It’s over 14,000 feet high, with several peaks, dramatic ridges and canyons, and sits out there all by itself. You can see it for 100 miles in every direction. Out the right side of the bus are some lower hills. with trees sticking out of snow, and a half-moon above them. And right in front of me are two things telling me it’s time to stop writing for a while: a battery meter that says 27%, and a word-count-o-meter that says 2,692. I think that means I’ve written 2,700 words (“words” was #2700) in less than two hours. Amazing what you can do when you don’t stop to think about it.
So I’ll post this when I can, in case anybody’s reading. And it doesn’t really matter. I do this for myself, really. It’s fun. I’d rather write than read, when it comes down to it.
Cali: 2-19 Eugene
We’ve got wireless internet on the morning local out of Eugene this morning. Don’t know where it’s coming from, and it wasn’t available in the station, but when I got on the bus my computer asked if I’d like to join the open network called “diablos.” Why, yes, I would, thanks. I’ll gladly tap into the great stream of airborne information long enough to download a few emails before the bus rolls out of town. And then I’ll write my responses, store them for later, and see if there just happens to be wireless somewhere else down the road.
Times have sure changed. The first time I ever used a laptop to write on the road was in Texas someplace, and to send it out I had to arrive in the next place, go to my friend’s house, haul out the modem and the phone cable, wait a few minutes while AOL buzzed and beeped, then hope nobody called and the connection lasted long enough to get the email out. In fact, it just occurred to me that that was almost exactly 10 years ago. It’s on my website under “Just-for-fun-writing,” and when I can, I’ll try to make a link.
So, breakfast in Eugene. I bought for K, who put me up for the night after A failed to respond to phone messages. I never worry about these things, and sure enough, not only did I get a place to stay, I got to sleep in the warm, cozy loft of a hand-made, book-filled home with a wood stove, countless nooks and trinkets, and a pleasant evening and morning of talk about books, recovery, spirituality, Tolkein, women, the Olympics, and politics. I slept on a couch next to a wall of books. The upstairs library, he explained, are the books he’s read. At the base of the ladder, on shelves and in boxes, that’s the “store,” which he sells on Ebay. (I think his storefront name is Deliberate Innocence.) Next to the armchair, the one facing the bunny-eared TV set, the shelf unit there is the ones he’s reading right now. Under the loft, the fancier-looking hardbacks, those are the favorite authors, including Tolkein. And did you know that Lord of the Rings is just a part of the world he created? It covers a two-year period in one age of Middle Earth, which had four ages. Tolkien wrote volumes of backstory, entire appendices of timelines and family trees. He created languages!
T he magic of books, of stories, filled K’s place like the comforting warmth of his stove. He’s a man of the road, as well. I asked how long he’d been in Eugene, and he said, “30 years, with some sojourns here and there, a year, six months.” He goes to Ireland every year for a Rory Gallagher festival; I asked if his family is Irish and he said with a laugh, “No, just me.” I even grabbed a book of Irish stories from his “current reading” shelf and had time to finish a seven-page story. K is also a man of wood -- collects it, works with it, burns it, used to haul it out of the forests -- and his home is made of every kind of wood there is, I suppose. He casually mentioned that the kitchen walls are some exotic wood from east Asia, or something. The pieces holding up my loft were of two different kinds of wood, held up by two or three kinds of joists. I took some pictures and will put them in my photo album; I could have spent hours looking for little nooks and angles to shoot. There wasn’t much light, so the pictures are fuzzy and perhaps a little out of focus, but that’s appropriate.
So there were about a dozen people at the meeting, and the topic was Step 1. W took nine months and chaired, and D took six months. A couple of newcomers. I found that in Eugene the recovery community is small enough that everybody kind of knows each other. Must make dating interesting. K was able to state how many of each group exists in town. We drove by a coffee shop and A told me, “There’s an AA group that goes there for coffee after their meeting,” and when we went to the Glenwood for dinner, we bumped into another (perhaps Al-Anon) group celebrating a bellybutton birthday. They had lots of cake and gave some away, too.
Yesterday I wrote about bus archetypes, and I remembered during the meeting that recovery has archetypes, too. There’s the new guy, with about 60 days, whose whole life is so great, and he’s so happy, and everything is wonderful, thanks to this program. There’s the super-enthusiastic one who’s been around long enough to know a lot of phrases; generally this one has about a year, does service work, shares a lot, and says he needs to get working on his 4th Step. There’s the Codependent, generally a female, who always seems to be having a hard time, is glad to have our support, and is hyper-encouraging to others. There’s the old-timer, generally male and often crusty, who has the ability to laugh at madness and always has a funny story to tell, and who exudes a certain mythology, like “whew boy, back when I was usin’ ...” There’s also the Depressed Guy, and it doesn’t matter how long he’s been around; he’s depressed, and something bad has recently happened. There’s the people who don’t say a word during the meeting but come to life afterwards. People who nod a lot. People who seem to listen, people who seem to be somewhere else, people who say they hate all the “God stuff,” people who talk about the Steps, people who seem genuinely grateful to be alive and sitting in that room ...
So now I’m on the bus, headed for the next place. Medford today and tomorrow. The Woman With Too Much Baggage was in the terminal this morning, having to unpack and get rid of some stuff right there in front of the ticket counter to make the 10:40 southbound local. She’s on every bus. So is the Tie-Dyed Hippie Lady, who’s with us this morning. I’m in my usual spot, half-way back on the starboard side, enjoying the sights of sheep grazing in green fields, firs giving way to oaks and open spaces, lumber mills with logs stacked up like matchsticks, falling-down fences lined with blackberry, and the hills getting closer and closer to the road. I’ve seen several hawks in trees. We went over a pass a while back, and there was a whitewater stream just this side of it. We’re down in a rolling-hills valley now, the kind of country where you can see the whole train at once. We just crossed the South Umpqua; two guys were standing on the shore next to a driftboat. There was also Club 71, which sat in the middle of woodsy nowhere and advertised “high-quality adult entertainment.” And I mean it was nowhere. (My Medford friend would later explain to me that the town’s tried everything to get rid of it).
K and I were talking this morning about knee-jerk liberalism, of which there is much to be found in Eugene. Perfect example that we both chuckled at: A “Hummers Kill Salmon” sticker on a Volvo. Apparently Volvos don’t Kill Salmon. I showed him a book that my sponsor loves, called “Our Many Selves,” written by a Christian woman and from that perspective, but drawing on many traditions, both spiritual and intellectual. He looked at one chapter called “Observe in yourself what you criticize in others,” and said it was “pure program.” Then he said, and I agreed, that a lot of people would reject that book outright, just because it’s “Christian.” He said it was like people saying they reject everything their parents told them because half of it turned out to be not true. People reject a 2,000-year-old religious, spiritual and intellectual tradition because when they were growing up their preacher told them not to drink or fuck.
We’re in Roseburg now. We went right by the Roseburg Rescue Mission. There’s a Pepsi sign on the wall, the kind you’d see on a little snack shop. This one says, “God is Love.”
When we stopped at the station for a smoke break, a guy got up, whacked his head on the bus thing over his head, and “Ah, bastard -- again!”
The restaurant we ate at this morning was called the Keystone Cafe. Looked and felt very much like a family-run place that’s been there a while, and K said it hasósince 1979. I overheard the lady greet one guy by name and say, “You don’t need a menu, do you?” Much healthy, happy food on the menu. I had wheat-free buckwheat-barley pancakes, and had them add walnuts and bananas. Could have also had corn-rice pancakes or oatmeal-sesame pancakes, and could have also added blueberries, real butter, organic pure maple syrup, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, coconut (unsulfated), raisins (organically produced), or yogurt/no better butter. I have no idea what “no better butter” is, nor what unsulfated means, nor the difference between “organically produced” and “organic.” However, my pancake was extremely good, hanging off every edge of the plate, with just the right combination of crunchy and creamy. K, who has obviously done this before, ordered with hardly a glance at the menu a Vegan Powerhouse with homefries, house-made tempeh, spinach, grilled mushrooms, and nutritional yeast gravy.
By the way, Microsoft Word does not recognize the words unsulfated, homefries or tempeh.
Anyway, the Keystone had paintings on the wall with happy children and glitter waterfalls and unicorns. Pictures of staff or regulars on the billboard. A berry picker hanging on the wall. Home-made breads. Lard-free tortilla chips. Men with long beards sitting in booths with laughing little kids. Hippie girls with flower tattoos just above the beltline. Couples reading the paper and not talking. A guy in leather. One in hiking boots, jeans, and a red plaid flannel shirt, stuffing a backpack in a spare chair -- actually, that was me. Knee-jerk liberals, the lot of us.
And yet there’s another vibe, exemplified by K, a kind of Everyman working-class leave-me-alone politick. We abused waffling politicians (a wishy-washy Democrat and a scoundrel Republican) and the modern-day libs (vegan and wearing leather) and the incompetence of government, but we also mourned how it seems like cops can just shoot anybody and nobody calls them on it. A perfect line: “You know, they have a memorial park for police killed in the line of duty. How many loggers have died? How many fishermen?” There’s a clear sense that the government has some very important purposes, but that using Imminent Domain to take somebody’s land so you can expand the tax base ... well, that ain’t one of them. And last night I saw a promo for a new show about young prosecutors, all of whom seem to be attractive, neurotic, arrogant and horny. It’s called “Conviction.”
Anyway, the battery is running low, and so am I. I think I’ll get out “Our Many Selves,” read for a while, and take a nap. Or I’ll kick back and listen to another classic Greyhound archetype, The Talker. He (it’s always a he) always sits in the back, always has more stories to tell than the rest of the bus put together, and always holds court to a devoted audience. I wrote an article about The Talker once; go over to the Flyer’s homepage and read “Rollin’ Party.” In this case, The Talker is a former longliner up in Dutch Harbor, Alaska – and a carpenter, and a roofer, and who knows what else, but a storyteller and a cusser above all else. He drops about seven f-bombs per sentence and goes on and on about making piles of money on the Bering Sea, winning big poker hands when the boats all tie up in town, 300 crabbers in the Elbow Room – which he informs us is the “second-roughest bar in the country, after some place in North Dakota, but I don’t know they rate those things.” I wished I had my tape recorder with me so I could just get this guy in his own words.
I’ll post this thing to the web at some point. I’ve been going through withdrawals about not having internet access, but it is nice to be writing on the road again. The bus this morning is less than half-full, which is nice. We’re climbing a winding-road hill right now, with ever-more-bare hills on both sides, stands of madrone trees, and now down the other side into an oak-filled pocket valley. Gosh, I love riding the bus. Leave the driving to us, they used to say. And so I shall.
Times have sure changed. The first time I ever used a laptop to write on the road was in Texas someplace, and to send it out I had to arrive in the next place, go to my friend’s house, haul out the modem and the phone cable, wait a few minutes while AOL buzzed and beeped, then hope nobody called and the connection lasted long enough to get the email out. In fact, it just occurred to me that that was almost exactly 10 years ago. It’s on my website under “Just-for-fun-writing,” and when I can, I’ll try to make a link.
So, breakfast in Eugene. I bought for K, who put me up for the night after A failed to respond to phone messages. I never worry about these things, and sure enough, not only did I get a place to stay, I got to sleep in the warm, cozy loft of a hand-made, book-filled home with a wood stove, countless nooks and trinkets, and a pleasant evening and morning of talk about books, recovery, spirituality, Tolkein, women, the Olympics, and politics. I slept on a couch next to a wall of books. The upstairs library, he explained, are the books he’s read. At the base of the ladder, on shelves and in boxes, that’s the “store,” which he sells on Ebay. (I think his storefront name is Deliberate Innocence.) Next to the armchair, the one facing the bunny-eared TV set, the shelf unit there is the ones he’s reading right now. Under the loft, the fancier-looking hardbacks, those are the favorite authors, including Tolkein. And did you know that Lord of the Rings is just a part of the world he created? It covers a two-year period in one age of Middle Earth, which had four ages. Tolkien wrote volumes of backstory, entire appendices of timelines and family trees. He created languages!
T he magic of books, of stories, filled K’s place like the comforting warmth of his stove. He’s a man of the road, as well. I asked how long he’d been in Eugene, and he said, “30 years, with some sojourns here and there, a year, six months.” He goes to Ireland every year for a Rory Gallagher festival; I asked if his family is Irish and he said with a laugh, “No, just me.” I even grabbed a book of Irish stories from his “current reading” shelf and had time to finish a seven-page story. K is also a man of wood -- collects it, works with it, burns it, used to haul it out of the forests -- and his home is made of every kind of wood there is, I suppose. He casually mentioned that the kitchen walls are some exotic wood from east Asia, or something. The pieces holding up my loft were of two different kinds of wood, held up by two or three kinds of joists. I took some pictures and will put them in my photo album; I could have spent hours looking for little nooks and angles to shoot. There wasn’t much light, so the pictures are fuzzy and perhaps a little out of focus, but that’s appropriate.
So there were about a dozen people at the meeting, and the topic was Step 1. W took nine months and chaired, and D took six months. A couple of newcomers. I found that in Eugene the recovery community is small enough that everybody kind of knows each other. Must make dating interesting. K was able to state how many of each group exists in town. We drove by a coffee shop and A told me, “There’s an AA group that goes there for coffee after their meeting,” and when we went to the Glenwood for dinner, we bumped into another (perhaps Al-Anon) group celebrating a bellybutton birthday. They had lots of cake and gave some away, too.
Yesterday I wrote about bus archetypes, and I remembered during the meeting that recovery has archetypes, too. There’s the new guy, with about 60 days, whose whole life is so great, and he’s so happy, and everything is wonderful, thanks to this program. There’s the super-enthusiastic one who’s been around long enough to know a lot of phrases; generally this one has about a year, does service work, shares a lot, and says he needs to get working on his 4th Step. There’s the Codependent, generally a female, who always seems to be having a hard time, is glad to have our support, and is hyper-encouraging to others. There’s the old-timer, generally male and often crusty, who has the ability to laugh at madness and always has a funny story to tell, and who exudes a certain mythology, like “whew boy, back when I was usin’ ...” There’s also the Depressed Guy, and it doesn’t matter how long he’s been around; he’s depressed, and something bad has recently happened. There’s the people who don’t say a word during the meeting but come to life afterwards. People who nod a lot. People who seem to listen, people who seem to be somewhere else, people who say they hate all the “God stuff,” people who talk about the Steps, people who seem genuinely grateful to be alive and sitting in that room ...
So now I’m on the bus, headed for the next place. Medford today and tomorrow. The Woman With Too Much Baggage was in the terminal this morning, having to unpack and get rid of some stuff right there in front of the ticket counter to make the 10:40 southbound local. She’s on every bus. So is the Tie-Dyed Hippie Lady, who’s with us this morning. I’m in my usual spot, half-way back on the starboard side, enjoying the sights of sheep grazing in green fields, firs giving way to oaks and open spaces, lumber mills with logs stacked up like matchsticks, falling-down fences lined with blackberry, and the hills getting closer and closer to the road. I’ve seen several hawks in trees. We went over a pass a while back, and there was a whitewater stream just this side of it. We’re down in a rolling-hills valley now, the kind of country where you can see the whole train at once. We just crossed the South Umpqua; two guys were standing on the shore next to a driftboat. There was also Club 71, which sat in the middle of woodsy nowhere and advertised “high-quality adult entertainment.” And I mean it was nowhere. (My Medford friend would later explain to me that the town’s tried everything to get rid of it).
K and I were talking this morning about knee-jerk liberalism, of which there is much to be found in Eugene. Perfect example that we both chuckled at: A “Hummers Kill Salmon” sticker on a Volvo. Apparently Volvos don’t Kill Salmon. I showed him a book that my sponsor loves, called “Our Many Selves,” written by a Christian woman and from that perspective, but drawing on many traditions, both spiritual and intellectual. He looked at one chapter called “Observe in yourself what you criticize in others,” and said it was “pure program.” Then he said, and I agreed, that a lot of people would reject that book outright, just because it’s “Christian.” He said it was like people saying they reject everything their parents told them because half of it turned out to be not true. People reject a 2,000-year-old religious, spiritual and intellectual tradition because when they were growing up their preacher told them not to drink or fuck.
We’re in Roseburg now. We went right by the Roseburg Rescue Mission. There’s a Pepsi sign on the wall, the kind you’d see on a little snack shop. This one says, “God is Love.”
When we stopped at the station for a smoke break, a guy got up, whacked his head on the bus thing over his head, and “Ah, bastard -- again!”
The restaurant we ate at this morning was called the Keystone Cafe. Looked and felt very much like a family-run place that’s been there a while, and K said it hasósince 1979. I overheard the lady greet one guy by name and say, “You don’t need a menu, do you?” Much healthy, happy food on the menu. I had wheat-free buckwheat-barley pancakes, and had them add walnuts and bananas. Could have also had corn-rice pancakes or oatmeal-sesame pancakes, and could have also added blueberries, real butter, organic pure maple syrup, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, coconut (unsulfated), raisins (organically produced), or yogurt/no better butter. I have no idea what “no better butter” is, nor what unsulfated means, nor the difference between “organically produced” and “organic.” However, my pancake was extremely good, hanging off every edge of the plate, with just the right combination of crunchy and creamy. K, who has obviously done this before, ordered with hardly a glance at the menu a Vegan Powerhouse with homefries, house-made tempeh, spinach, grilled mushrooms, and nutritional yeast gravy.
By the way, Microsoft Word does not recognize the words unsulfated, homefries or tempeh.
Anyway, the Keystone had paintings on the wall with happy children and glitter waterfalls and unicorns. Pictures of staff or regulars on the billboard. A berry picker hanging on the wall. Home-made breads. Lard-free tortilla chips. Men with long beards sitting in booths with laughing little kids. Hippie girls with flower tattoos just above the beltline. Couples reading the paper and not talking. A guy in leather. One in hiking boots, jeans, and a red plaid flannel shirt, stuffing a backpack in a spare chair -- actually, that was me. Knee-jerk liberals, the lot of us.
And yet there’s another vibe, exemplified by K, a kind of Everyman working-class leave-me-alone politick. We abused waffling politicians (a wishy-washy Democrat and a scoundrel Republican) and the modern-day libs (vegan and wearing leather) and the incompetence of government, but we also mourned how it seems like cops can just shoot anybody and nobody calls them on it. A perfect line: “You know, they have a memorial park for police killed in the line of duty. How many loggers have died? How many fishermen?” There’s a clear sense that the government has some very important purposes, but that using Imminent Domain to take somebody’s land so you can expand the tax base ... well, that ain’t one of them. And last night I saw a promo for a new show about young prosecutors, all of whom seem to be attractive, neurotic, arrogant and horny. It’s called “Conviction.”
Anyway, the battery is running low, and so am I. I think I’ll get out “Our Many Selves,” read for a while, and take a nap. Or I’ll kick back and listen to another classic Greyhound archetype, The Talker. He (it’s always a he) always sits in the back, always has more stories to tell than the rest of the bus put together, and always holds court to a devoted audience. I wrote an article about The Talker once; go over to the Flyer’s homepage and read “Rollin’ Party.” In this case, The Talker is a former longliner up in Dutch Harbor, Alaska – and a carpenter, and a roofer, and who knows what else, but a storyteller and a cusser above all else. He drops about seven f-bombs per sentence and goes on and on about making piles of money on the Bering Sea, winning big poker hands when the boats all tie up in town, 300 crabbers in the Elbow Room – which he informs us is the “second-roughest bar in the country, after some place in North Dakota, but I don’t know they rate those things.” I wished I had my tape recorder with me so I could just get this guy in his own words.
I’ll post this thing to the web at some point. I’ve been going through withdrawals about not having internet access, but it is nice to be writing on the road again. The bus this morning is less than half-full, which is nice. We’re climbing a winding-road hill right now, with ever-more-bare hills on both sides, stands of madrone trees, and now down the other side into an oak-filled pocket valley. Gosh, I love riding the bus. Leave the driving to us, they used to say. And so I shall.
2/18/06
Cali: 2-18 Eugene
Well, if I'm gonna take notes, might as well blog 'em.
Here's a slice of a wandering writer's life: I woke up crazy early this morning to try to meet a deadline for a fishing guidebook -- not that I know anything about fishing, but I know something about guidebooks, and I can surf the net and read a map, so I'm helping a fishing friend with the logistics on his guidebook. This is because his deadline looms, and he's in Sri Lanka. Long story, some of which you can read elsewhere on Blogspot (username craigsuvenicamille).
So I crank on that for a few hours, then realize the jig is up and I ain't gonna make the deadline in full, so I send what I've got, then finish packing for a two-week pilgrimmage to the MA Convention in Burbank, Calif. Today is Day 1, and it's always satisfying to see plans becoming reality. I Mapquested my way to Indira's Internet Lounge, also the home of Books Without Boarders and a pizza place, and here I sit. Along the way, I've emailed an old college friend who wants to host my website, traded religious/philosophical ramblings with a guy I hiked with on the A.T. about 15 years ago, checked the weather for tomorrow in Medford and checked in with my contact there, who happens to be a real cute gal I've had the pleasure of spending time with in Portland lately.
This trip is something like -- going back to Thursday in Portland -- 24 meetings in 22 days, most of it on the Grey Dog. That portion of the trip started today in Portland, and many of the Dog Archetypes were around. The two guys on leave from some kind of treatment center or work camp, talking about how if they fail the test they're back on the street; the woman who seems way too young to have those two kids and can barely keep them quiet; hispanic dudes in cowboy hats; strung-out-lookin' dudes, women with eight pieces of luggage, a woman who could barely fit in the bus, a guy looking for somebody to talk at, another one with headphones too loud, and next to me a very dignified-looking couple of Asian/Indian descent in matching blue and black jackets.
This place is a big room, which an hour ago was the scene of multiple chess matches and is now filling up with a younger crowd -- computers, books, cappucinos, hippie outfits. Couldn't have drawn up a Eugene, Oregon coffee shop any better if I'd tried.
A slice of the recovery life: last night S, who moved to Philly a year ago, came to the Friday meeting in P-Town to get a two-year chip, and my long-addled, self-centered brain looked right at here and DID NOT REGISTER that I hadn't seen her in a year. It was just "Hey S, wassup?" ... followed by a gradual realization that, wait, she lives in Philly now, right? Anyway, did the meeting, now I'm down here waiting for J, who was cyber-introduced to me by T in Portland, who also hooked me up with A from the group here and with another A (from AA) who's gonna let me crash at his place. Interesting note: I've never met any of these peopl! Tuesday I'm flying from Redding, California to Eureka, California (another long story -- cruise over to http://www.memphisflyer.com, click on Travel, and read "Surfing South"), and in Eureka I'm being picked up by D, whom I've also never met, and who will let me crash at his place Tuesday and Wednesday nights and borrow his truck Wednesday while he's in class. C has also been in touch (DD, whom I actually have met, is out of town), and we'll do some hanging out, as well. And I get to actually attend a meeting at Humboldt State University, which strikes me as similar to hitting a Limit Corporate Power workshop in Houston.
So it's a grand life out here -- always seems to be, on the road. Now I think I'll publish this thing before the battery checks out.
Here's a slice of a wandering writer's life: I woke up crazy early this morning to try to meet a deadline for a fishing guidebook -- not that I know anything about fishing, but I know something about guidebooks, and I can surf the net and read a map, so I'm helping a fishing friend with the logistics on his guidebook. This is because his deadline looms, and he's in Sri Lanka. Long story, some of which you can read elsewhere on Blogspot (username craigsuvenicamille).
So I crank on that for a few hours, then realize the jig is up and I ain't gonna make the deadline in full, so I send what I've got, then finish packing for a two-week pilgrimmage to the MA Convention in Burbank, Calif. Today is Day 1, and it's always satisfying to see plans becoming reality. I Mapquested my way to Indira's Internet Lounge, also the home of Books Without Boarders and a pizza place, and here I sit. Along the way, I've emailed an old college friend who wants to host my website, traded religious/philosophical ramblings with a guy I hiked with on the A.T. about 15 years ago, checked the weather for tomorrow in Medford and checked in with my contact there, who happens to be a real cute gal I've had the pleasure of spending time with in Portland lately.
This trip is something like -- going back to Thursday in Portland -- 24 meetings in 22 days, most of it on the Grey Dog. That portion of the trip started today in Portland, and many of the Dog Archetypes were around. The two guys on leave from some kind of treatment center or work camp, talking about how if they fail the test they're back on the street; the woman who seems way too young to have those two kids and can barely keep them quiet; hispanic dudes in cowboy hats; strung-out-lookin' dudes, women with eight pieces of luggage, a woman who could barely fit in the bus, a guy looking for somebody to talk at, another one with headphones too loud, and next to me a very dignified-looking couple of Asian/Indian descent in matching blue and black jackets.
This place is a big room, which an hour ago was the scene of multiple chess matches and is now filling up with a younger crowd -- computers, books, cappucinos, hippie outfits. Couldn't have drawn up a Eugene, Oregon coffee shop any better if I'd tried.
A slice of the recovery life: last night S, who moved to Philly a year ago, came to the Friday meeting in P-Town to get a two-year chip, and my long-addled, self-centered brain looked right at here and DID NOT REGISTER that I hadn't seen her in a year. It was just "Hey S, wassup?" ... followed by a gradual realization that, wait, she lives in Philly now, right? Anyway, did the meeting, now I'm down here waiting for J, who was cyber-introduced to me by T in Portland, who also hooked me up with A from the group here and with another A (from AA) who's gonna let me crash at his place. Interesting note: I've never met any of these peopl! Tuesday I'm flying from Redding, California to Eureka, California (another long story -- cruise over to http://www.memphisflyer.com, click on Travel, and read "Surfing South"), and in Eureka I'm being picked up by D, whom I've also never met, and who will let me crash at his place Tuesday and Wednesday nights and borrow his truck Wednesday while he's in class. C has also been in touch (DD, whom I actually have met, is out of town), and we'll do some hanging out, as well. And I get to actually attend a meeting at Humboldt State University, which strikes me as similar to hitting a Limit Corporate Power workshop in Houston.
So it's a grand life out here -- always seems to be, on the road. Now I think I'll publish this thing before the battery checks out.
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