Suspicious Narratives from this Narrator

I am the fourth child of east Texas white trash (some might say), hailing as my family did from the "river bottom" and the "sticks" of the Big Thicket. My father married my Mom when she was 16 after her mother told him it was alright. He was ten years her elder and ruled her destiny for the rest of their married life. Mom never graduated from high school, although she was so smart she was triple promoted in elementary, so she could study material somewhat comparable to her level. By all accounts, her school could not keep up with her and had a hard time teaching her. She did not understand basic mathematics and so she memorized equations. She told me once that it wasn't until she was much older that they figured out she did not understand the mechanics of math--that she had, savant-like, memorized everything in math class instead. My parents had been concerned about me when I was four, for instead of reading, I did the same thing. I memorized books, rather than read. They knew it because the narratives were not entirely synced up with the pages as I turned them.

I am told also my Mom drew. She painted. She wrote poetry. I have pictures of her when she was younger. I know I see with fond eyes--but to me, she was beautiful. As beautiful as any of the Hollywood starlets she ever craved to look like. She also had a movie-star figure--with measurements she often recited, and she was perpetually on a diet to make sure she kept that body. And she--well, she never did anything much other than be a mother. A mother who went to hospitals and stayed around the house, caring for a huge family: cleaning, cooking, laundry, and sewing, hanging clothes on a clothes-line and waxing floors daily. She was also delusional, when she wasn't actually hallucinating. She terrified me in a way that is hard to describe to those who haven't been terrified by the reality of others. What's all this got to do with anything? With travel, with where I am? Why is this post here?

I don't know other than my last blog was dishonest. It was dishonest in the way that when you minimize your feelings, you're being dishonest. The truth is the loathing I feel for Texas is tied up with everything I hate about my mother's life, and my own. The truth is that west Texas actually stinks to me, that it seems polluted with dust, the smell of manure, with spoors of strange things that stick in my throat. I got sick the minute I entered Texas--not mildly sick, but can't-lift-your-head-off-the-pillow-with-fever-illness. Just in time to collapse in the sad, dirty house of my mother, so ill I couldn't even speak. And I hate it here and I hate the path here. I hate flying here, and I hate coming here. That post masked loathing that encompasses everything about Texas. I wouldn't be here--except for her.

The one bright spot in my Mom's neighborhood for me is gone. I used to go early in the morning to feed the ducks and geese. The creek and pond where they swam is all filled in with landfill. My one thought when i discovered this driving in was--It fucking figures. I have told my mother we are leaving tomorrow to go see the ocean. She's a bit miffed at me, but seems to have resigned herself to accepting this freakish inclination on my part. She has even accepted my plan to care for her beloved cat while we're gone. I am not sure what I wanted to say in this blog, other than I guess I've learned that stories are always suspicious. Maybe the Llano Estacado isn't really 800 miles into Texas--it only feels like it. Maybe bears are not the thing I'm most afraid of. In noticing that the ducks were gone, recalled this poem of Yeats...I'll close with it. I left this duck pond in October 6 years ago with my Mom crying like a baby that day....

THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

The Most Boring Drive in the World

I hit the Llano Estacado around noon today in eastern New Mexico, a part of the southern Great Plains that covers much of Texas and gives it some of its loathsome character. The Llano Estacado goes on and on and on deep into the panhandle and west Texas. It was a balmy 93 degrees when my drive changed today abruptly from enchanting to barely tolerable, a temperature I was grateful for because I have driven through west Texas in the past when it was unrelentingly over 100. Since noon today, I've traveled for around 300 miles with only trucks and cows and the shapes of clouds for distraction. I don't count Amarillo, since no one in their right mind would count Amarillo. And tomorrow shall be the same drive for approximately another, oh, 500 miles. The same is: hot, flat, airid, without trees, shrubs, relief, or any points of interest for the hapless traveler other than speculating whether or not a tumbleweed will break loose or a tornado will blow up. Mile after mile after mile.

But I don't want to paint with too broad a brush the banality. There are some high points around here. Some guy has Cadillacs buried in the ground in a row on a ranch off I40. (I didn't photograph this because I find it boring now...I've seen it so many times.) You can, however, if you choose to do so spray paint, mark-up, or otherwise deface a Cadillac buried on a ranch. Art. Yay. Another group of folks built a 250 foot aluminum cross with around 200 - 300 other crosses piled at the bottom on a big mound of red dirt. Folks like to make clear which side of the Christianity issue they're on around here, and it's quite plain which side Shamrock and Old Mobeetie, Texas are on. They are on Jesus' side alright. There's also roadhouses, where you can stop and get a tasty flat-iron steak (a rib-eye seared in butter in a cast iron pan the way they ought to be) and a Lone Star on Saturday nights. The waitresses will be friendly, and you won't go to hell for eating either the steak or drinking the beer probably.

You still might die of boredom, however. I swear if you ever make this drive once, you will have a new definition of hell. But don't take my word for it. Here's a couple quotes from Wikipedia about this place. I tried to take a fair picture that shows you just how flat 800 miles or so can be...just how bad a drive can become. The colors are nice...the sky is big...and the drive, eventually, will end. Tomorrow and not a moment too soon.

From Wikipedia:
Spanish conquistador Francisco Coronado, the first European to traverse this "sea of grass" in 1541, described it as follows: "I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I travelled over them for more than 300 leagues ... with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea ... there was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by." General Randolph Marcy, after his expedition to explore the headwaters of the Red and Colorado rivers in 1852, agreed: "[not] a tree, shrub, or any other herbage to intercept the vision... the almost total absence of water causes all animals to shun it: even the Indians do not venture to cross it except at two or three places."

Bright Angel Speaks Again

My life contains two peak experiences related to goals I achieved. One of them occurred in 2002 when I hiked to the floor of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River and back in one day on a trail called Bright Angel. It took me approximately 12 hours to do this (I started very early in the dark, cold morning and finished around five PM)--to descend 6000 feet and back up the same trail, through slogging switchbacks and temperatures that ranged from below freezing on the early AM rim to noon-day 110 plus. I was so keyed up after I did this--an event I trained for two years to do, I was sobbing on the phone to my boyfriend after I finished and shaking for almost two hours with exhaustion and happiness. I conquered fear of heights and my own lack of confidence in my abilities to do something few people will ever be able to do.

Now, if you peruse my interest list, you will notice several things I'm keen on related to this event, among them "hiking," "health," and "nutrition." Unfortunately, other interests in the years from that day to this have interfered with my ability to hike Bright Angel again, among them "cookies" and "cooking." Missing from this list is "eating like a horse when I want to and stopping exercise two years ago when I had surgery on my knee." I expected to be sad today when I swung by the canyon to say "hello" as I passed only 50 miles south of it on the way home to see my Mom, but even though I thought I would be depressed, I had to go. I love the Grand Canyon. I have loved it ever since I saw it first with my father's arm around my shoulders and heard him exclaim over its beauty in low, reverent tones. I have loved it the way it has symbolized for me and others "the most sublime spectacle on earth." You can tell I love it by the way I beg people to go see it. Please go see it, I tell them, don't die without seeing it. Please It's so beautiful.

But I wasn't sad today. Instead, I only recalled how happy I was that day on Bright Angel so long ago, staring my own fears in the face as I realized my vision. I only recalled the triumph I felt, not the fact that I'm in no shape to do it now. And mostly, I only felt the lack of comprehension of how someone could actually commit suicide last month by driving into the canyon near Bright Angel. How can such beauty make anyone feel like dying? The canyon, looking at it, only makes me feel so much like living, so grateful for the life I've had, I've got tears in my eyes recalling it now. I'd say, you know, everyone has a Bright Angel. And mine's still talking to me.

Luxe in Daggett, California

Welcome to my midlife crisis. It seems to have arrived just in time to rescue me. But how I can get fascinated by a dead town in the middle of the Mojave desert, I don't know, yet it happened this morning. Daggett, California is one of the sorriest places I have ever been, and that's saying something, since I have been to some crappy places. Daggett is located just off I40 past Barstow. Blink, you'd miss it. I would have missed it, too, but my car beeped at me--I needed gas, pulled off 40, and there it was. Daggett. The back of the beyond of nowhere, except hot. Most of the town's buildings--the ones that still exist as actual buildings--look like they are about to melt into themselves from the heat. Residents generally live in trailers. The main exception I found was an "apartment complex" called inexplicably "The Haven." The haven was located down a street barely wide enough to admit my car. It turned out to be a square of four double-wides shoved together and chopped up into separate units, with 4'x4' backyards that all contained various kinds of rusted junk. Although I didn't spot anyone, I could tell people were living in these. They had made patios with a central, shared barbeque pit out of bricks they'd piled in the center, which had been recently used.

Daggett also seems to have its own peculiar and noticeable conventions as a community, although I'd like to meet their zoning committee. "Beware of Dog" signs were universally posted on fences or in windows, even though I only saw one old yellow dog that looked up tiredly when I drove by. I didn't hear any dogs bark either even as I walked the ragged fences they were tacked on. Another universal residential habit were the curtains. These consisted of sheets tacked up outside the windows. Many of these were gayly colored, albeit a bit faded. The purple Dora the Explorer sheets in the window of a shotgun, single-room "house," made me quite sad--and I use the term house a bit loosely. What sort of little girl would live in such a house? And if it wasn't a little girl who lived there--I shudder to think of that as well.

So what was Daggett's charm that led me to circle the town repeatedly and even photograph it? Shock, mostly, I think, that or the 103 degree heat that had me panting like that early AM Yellowstone wolf I referred to below. I felt like I'd landed on Mars. I really could not understand why anyone in their right mind would live there. For Gods' sake, why? I kept asking myself. Why would such a place exist, why would anyone stay there voluntarily? Had they never been, you know, anywhere else to understand how much this place sucks? Are their brains fried on peyote or heat? Yet, signs of humor, signs of appreciation for life abounded. Right there in the desert next to the Marine Corps Logistics Center, the Santa Fe Railroad, old Route 66, population 200: Daggett, California. Go figure.

The picture is of the nicest house I saw in Daggett. If I've done a poor job of explaining this town, I think the picture will say it all for you. Pink flowered bushes, pink-painted..pipe of some kind that matches the trim on the house, and a pink, unrunning old car decorating the front yard...yeah, I dunno. It's the sort of place I can't understand, cannot describe, cannot even fathom. Daggett. Hoo-boy.

Waybread for my waywardness

I have some food rules when traveling, most of which I've already broken on this trip. One must eat local or one must eat cheap. A great bonus to find is cheap, good, and local. But if local isn't available, and cheap is the choice, you might as well eat cans of tuna and steal fruit off a motel breakfast bar to complete your lunch, which you can enjoy at the rest area of your choice. To the end of demonstrating my ideas, I had 3 pictures from which to choose to illustrate this blog. Picture 1 was from day one and called "Still life with tuna." This picture was taken at a rest area near Salem, Oregon, and was an unremarkable shot of six cans of tuna, an orange (smuggled in my purse from the Best Western breakfast bar earlier that morning), a package of saltines, and a can opener on a concrete picnic table. Dumb picture. Picture 2 is the picture I have chosen. It is called "Yahoo, local and cheap, I found tamales being sold out of a trunk in Chico, CA!" What a treat these homemade tamales were. I got 3 yummy, little beauties for 3 dollars. They were so good-stuffed with shredded, spiced pork moist in real corn husks. I haven't had tamales that good since I was a kid and my Aunt Domitilla (mentioned her below) made some. Those tamales, paired with a rootbeer and a Butterfinger (heh, blush), made a lunch for champions and one or two future heart attacks. Picture 3 was a picture, humorously, of the Donner Pass rest area, a place I ended up yesterday without intending to. I thought it was sorta funny, but I'll spare us.

Anyhow, five days into this trip and I haven't got very far towards Dallas at all. I blame my impulsive decision to go to South Lake Tahoe without knowing precisely where it was. Then, there was my second impulsive decision to go to San Francisco to meet A. and E., instead of heading south at Sacramento towards Joshua Tree National Park. Then, there was the third impulsive decision to stay at an expensive hotel, rather than leave the city. I ate at an expensive restaurant last night, rather than finding something cheap, and there was nothing remarkable about it other than the price tag--not "local" food, not particularly tasty, not anything other than spendy. In checking my feelings about all these decisions, however, I regret only the money spent--not the experiences, so that's good. Yesterday was heaven, although Lake Tahoe...to be discussed later, not so much. You'd think I wasn't eager to get to Texas or something.

Spain - Morocco - South Africa

When I was in the third grade I sat in Mrs. Neighbors' geography class and received my first research assignment in public school. My teacher explained we would write a report on an assigned country. I remember being mad that I got a country that I thought was a complete waste of time: Morocco. "What's Morocco?" I wondered vaguely to myself. I thought it had something to do with the maracas my aunt, Domitilla, had shown me. I raised my hand. "You mean Mexico?" I remember asking my teacher, sure she had just said the name of the country wrong. "No, I mean Morocco," she said. So through the next few weeks, I became interested in a country half-way around the world from where I sat in Casa View Elementary School, dutifully recording facts about it and drawing pictures of Berber goat-herders, still mad that I had not been assigned a cool country to write about like England or Mexico. (In my young mind, England and Mexico were the two other places one might consider going besides the United States.) But as I grew older, that mental journey begun so long ago is one which is finally (it took long enough) about to become a physical one.

Between third grade and now, Morocco has always enchanted me. You know it's a romantic place in the imagination, made more wild and exotic in popular novels from beat writers and poets, popular in the Hollywood movies about it which I adored unquestioningly (Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia, for example, just to name a few), all of the fantastic paintings by Matisse, who was fond of the light in Tangier. And now, I shall finally see these things and these places. I just paid out significant dollars for a long guided tour, something I never do and which I categorize as "protection money" to be able to go to this country unmolested. I will, however, be able finally to see places like the Atlas Mountains with a drive over them, along with a jeep tour of the Sahara. I will go take the boat from Spain to Tangiers, and I will travel along the Northwestern coast of Africa. I'm going to see Casablanca and Fez and Marrakesh and a hundred other places I've always wanted to see. You know, Spain and South Africa--well, they're just gravy! (And forget about Alaska--I can't do everything, a hard lesson to learn, and well, I just went there a year ago. That will have to do for the time being.)

Alaska

I am up early at my desk, looking at a driving map of the Seward Highway in Alaska, a road that crosses the Kenai Peninsula through a vast, diverse, complex wilderness. I'm also on the computer. In one Firefox window, I have up four tabs: a pdf of the route map of the Alaskan Marine Highway System, the route map of Alaska Airlines, the route map of Air Canada, and the fourth tab displays Map Quest driving directions to Prince Rupert, British Columbia. It is exactly 1048.27 miles to Prince Rupert from Seattle. I feel stranded.

I feel at ends/at odds not because of money, although better planning would have enabled this trip to be done more cheaply. I'm frustrated not because I don't know how to coordinate this--of course I do. Given enough time and leisure, one can coordinate almost any endeavor. People have gone to the moon. I can manage to get my ass to Anchorage. What I'm frustrated about is the type of trip that I want. Here is what I envisioned:

I am on a boat, bitch. (Imagine me smiling.) I'm going up the inside passage and I see, this time, much more than I saw on my last trip, which was lovely indeed. But this time, I have the hop on/hop off pass that encompasses the communities along the entire marine highway. I sleep on the deck in my sleeping bag, rather than waste money for an exhorbitantly priced cabin--exhorbitant for a lone traveler, that is. On the Alaskan ferries, you can rent showers and get hot coffee and decent food. Sleeping on the deck in a huge lawnchair can be done in relatively heated comfort with fans that blow warm air on you to mitigate the chill, while you can look at the stars overhead and wake as you chug past glaciers or wind your way through the Wrangell Narrows. I've done this before, but I loved it, so in this vision, I do all this again, and then somehow, I'm magically in Anchorage and can drive the highway and then, I fly home. Heh. Done, finished, through. A complete romance in two weeks with no aftertaste or regrets.

Well, that's not likely in the time I have left to do this. My time in Texas begins August 26th - September 16th. Some small planning is needed for this trip as well, as I would like to take my mother to see the sea. I don't believe she's ever been to the ocean. I would like to show her this one thing, just this one thing I love. Maybe this is selfish, I don't know. I only know I want to take her there and give her that. To do this, we will need to drive her approximately 600 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. I think about the course in coastal navigation I want to take this fall. I think about this or that thing, all the things I still need to do before I go, practical things, fanciful things, not-so-damned-smart-I-don't-give-a-care things. It's not logistics of getting anywhere, I've figured out--whether that's to the moon or just to Anchorage. It's the lack of time. It's so precious.

Deja Vu at Prismatic Spring

As I approached a hot spring three weeks ago, I was startled by the colours of the earth surrounding the saphire, sulphurous water. The closer I came to spring, the stronger the sensation became that this was a walk I'd made before. It was the merest, teasing memory, yet I knew it was not the first time I'd seen this water surrounded by terra-cotta orange, ferous earth. Maddening. Yet where had I seen this place that felt so alien, yet so familiar, I kept asking myself? Then bam, I retrieved finally the source of familiarity. Unnumbered years ago, I was looking at a book of photographs. I saw one which charmed me completely: Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone. I even remember how the photographer layed out the shot, from another angle than those I was about to take. I had found the photograph entrancing, returning again and again to the same page picturing a luminous, mysterious body of water: Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone.

Where did I get that book? I still wonder. Who did the book belong to? I do not know. Why did I have it and where is it now? I draw a blank. Was I in a library, sitting on the floor of a bookstore, looking through a coffee table book at a friend's house, rifling the shelves of the coffee room at the undergraduate Lit/Lang building...? I don't know. What else was in the book? I don't remember that. I only remember the fascination I felt for the single photograph. All I still remember, even after three weeks of trying, is that 10-15 years ago, I saw Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone in a book of photographs and loved it. Coming upon it again this way--by accident--felt like seeing the familiar face of a loved one in a crowd of strangers, decades after you last saw them. It felt like stumbling upon a joy I'd forgotten and suddenly grieved for.

What else do we lose, what joys do we forget, what images that once entranced us and gave us joy do we let slide away without ever acting on them? I was so lucky that day in Yellowstone--to find a simple pleasure that gave me joy so long ago, recovered, accidentally, on the way to somewhere else.