Dispatch 11: From Sea to Sea

I remember days ago sitting in the car in a parking lot in Carmel, my window open & my back to the ocean, three boys dozing behind me, one snoring to beat the waves crashing only a few yards beyond us. I remember thinking about how far from home we were at the end of the western world, nothing but sea for miles.

Since then, we have survived the kingdom of the mouse, crossed the western barrenness, hid away a night on sin city, slid through Utah's deathly slickrock & painted desert, climbed the Rocky passes, & rolled the ancient sea now filled with prairie grass, broken promise, & knee high wheat.

Something of the majesty of its open ocean past reared up as we crossed Kansas. A summer thunderstorm lit the sky for 200 miles, finally crashing upon us near the Capitol city. The last hour slid by as I sat, awake, alone again--with fragile sleeping cargo, in a car drunk on homesickness as it burst through rain & debris knowing the way, knowing rest was near, knowing we had survived another windswept journey.

Dispatch 10: For Mr. Muir

You walked, with a head full of bible, (balanced by Burns?) & an iron heart
that allowed no sentiment outside spirit matter communion, saving it all for the high Sierra, the tallest trees, & glacial loss. When you arrived here, you must have known immediately: this is the last place I'll ever need.

( I am still processing our trip through Muir's stomping grounds, but after Muir Woods I had to write something. More later.)

Dispatch 09: Of the Bay

I am not a lover of the big city, I prefer the tuckaway town, the hamlet, the burg of limited horses, but there are a few that get me at first glance, grab a hold of me somewhere deep, twang the strings a bit, elevate the blood pressure & settle in for a long relationship.

I remember this feeling years ago in a city that might not have been, the city below the waters, that exhilarated me with its smells, tastes & tendencies for debauchery. I was young & I was hooked. I have been back, an older man & loved it for better reasons, though some remained the same.

But that was a Southern city steeped in a beautiful & troubled past. This one is just as unique & nearly as varied. Its hills torment & thrill, its winds refresh & chill to the bone. It offers scent & sound & even its gimmicks deliver. It too is a city that might have been better left alone, placed somewhere less treacherous, but like its bayou counterpart, I am ever thankful for its dangerous beauty.

It has it's hold on me; I will see what it has to say, this hanging town nestled in its bay.

Dispatch 08: Glacier Point

I have no answer for the question of glacier & granite. From 8000 feet, the rest of Half Dome can be seen scattered along the carpetless floor where the ice giant worked its way down the hall its slow-time creep created.

The broken dome remains as a symbol of the power of ice; its shattered & scattered boulders that of fire.

Above all this, yet still below a clouded blue sky, the peaks of the Sierra smile at their capacity for violence. What they witnessed, their shadowy scars also retell.

Dispatch 07: Yosemite

The thing about all this is mindfulness. I am a driver; I drive miles a day, to & from, here to there, back again, mindlessly. Asleep at the wheel, auto-pilot, zoning, meditating, emptying.

But here, I am fully awake. Always alert, seeing things as they appear, reading landscape, learning geography, wishing for more geology, predicting road conditions, absorbing roadsigns, & always searching for those creatures more appropriate to place than this murder wagon rolling up & down these slopes.

This is a kind of prayer, this travel. Counting miles like prayer beads, changing devotions as elevation shifts. It says thank you, protect us, I'm sorry. But mostly it says I am alive, I am awake, I was mindfully here.

Dispatch 06: Kings Canyon

No words. See pictures.

(No signal at 7000 feet in the Sierra Nevadas, hence the delay.)

Dispatch 05: In the Valley

it's 4:30 in the morning,
i am standing in a hotel room
holding our 3 month old
composing this in my head,
i can feel his breathing,
his pulse quicken & slow:
his body is slowly re-relaxing,
he is going back to sleep
as we sway:
                   right
left              right,
left                         shuffle
(think early-teen slowdance).

earlier, yesterday:
i held our older boys up
into orange & lemon trees
in the backyard of cousins
in the valley we never visit
& there we were picking the perpetual fruit
so used to wasting on the boughs, unwanted,
stubbornly holding on to the branches
so that fruit & stem & leaf come off into their little hands
& into the sack & eventually into the car,
but first we sample the delicate oranges
whose rinds seem so hard but tear so easily:
we let the juice run down out wrists
as we squeeze out the sweetest drinks
(as the sixty year old cousin jokes that
that last time they were picked  it was his wife
who drank one of the trees for breakfast with vodka
& that was years ago).

it would be easiest to make this about the weight of children
as they age, getting heavier & more independent,
but that is not what connects this,
this is about lightness:
the way the heaviness of fruit is tossed away in the rind,
the way the heaviness of discomfort is danced away in sleep
the way the heaviness of parenthood is nestled away in hugs
the way the heaviness of dying is appeased by last visits to beloved aunts who live in valleys so far away from home
& worth all the miles.

Dispatch 04: LA

Dear Los Angeles,

I can't tell you I've missed you, but your eyes do shine so & your face is a million faces, each one as unfamiliar as the next & full of possibility.

I can't be sure if I'll see you again, and I can think of 405 reasons not to, but for now I'll remember the way you look from Mulholland in the late evening & smile through the nerves.

Dispatch 03: Goodbye Phoenix

What the sky promises,
The cactus delivers upon.

Dispatch 02: Arizona

Approaching Flagstaff

from the east, the white sun, shrouded, two hours low
above the San Francisco peaks
as they shift through all
five degrees of dimension:
color light shade distance & height.

There might be a better time to arrive at this place, on this road, at 7000 feet, but I find it hard to imagine. It's just too bad this car must keep moving and soon head south for a 6000 foot drop from ponderosa pine to saguaro and desert palm.

Dispatch 01: New Mexico

Something about the way red Oklahoma hills fall
into Texas cattle flats
makes me crave a cigarette.

To stop on the side of the road
& let the westbound sun burn
a bit of me as I burn just one,
smoke curling around me in the wind.

Of course the alternative is just as good, more rewarding even.
I remember this as I tell the boy in the backseat I love him with a simple sign
across a car of our sleeping loved ones.