All This Emptiness in Return

15 March 2010, SF to Boise

After a hellish two-day odyssey of trying to pick up a tow dolly for our Subaru, circling from one Uhaul center to another, from Daly City to SF to two different places in Sacramento, the big truck loaded and ready to go, yet each of the centers having their own perverse malfunction of equipment or incompetence which kept us from hooking up the dolly and moving on, my poor mom driving the Subaru behind me as we squandered two days and an eighty dollar taxi ride and an extra night spent in a Lovelock motel and no small amount of curse words, some in Italian, between us, we finally hit the road.

High snow pack at Donner Summit, blue skies and steely snow-covered granite peaks of Yuba Gap, the basalt ramparts of Castle Peak shouldering out of the white slope, the adjacent saddle where I took Anna on her first back-country ski to the Peter Grub Hut, remembering the next morning skiing the fine powder of Pyramid peak while Anna rested in the sun outside the hut, remembering all the gorgeous Sierra climbs that now seem so long ago, another world before baby Ada, the new summit in our lives;

The swift descent down the sun-baked backside of the Sierra Nevada into Reno, following the fast-running Truckee River, housing tracts terraced above the banks and far back into the brown hills, the valley pocked with cheap developments, the glittering boxy highrises of Reno, the freeway swooping through the carnival town like a roller coaster ride and then, past the reservoir and the storage lots, the road rising a little out of the valley, gaining the burnt-colored hills to the east, you’re suddenly in the high desert, the river still with you to your right, blue and charging, wispy cottonwoods along its green banks running through a narrow slip of a valley scattered with houses and ranches and here and there a cement factory or gas power plant;

And then if you’re not paying attention, the river is suddenly gone, having bowed away to the north, and you’re alone on the freeway crossing the basin flats, wide and alkalai-stained before the bare ridges that lope like mountain lions as they slide past the edges of the flats; and in the distance the taller ranges like lone islands, dusted with snow, serene against the desert blue sky; and nothing is on the radio out here, nothing but preacher programs and bad pop music, and you don’t want or need the radio anyhow, just the quiet of the country rolling over and under you, the city falling away from you with each mile, the rental truck groaning in high gear as you take a rise, a car or semi passing by, and from the rise a new panorama of flowing brown ridges powdered with snow, the ranges shifting in view as you glide down into the next basin, the long aproning hillsides dotted with sage and bitter brush, but little else, no livestock, few structures but the random lone treeless sun-flashed house on a terrace, a king’s view of no-man’s land;

With night a motel room in Lovelock, an acrid odor of a nearby feedlot on the chill air as you walk to the casino restaurant, take a booth and order a $7.99 sirloin steak and potatoes, nod at the old boys chatting at the counter, the casino floor empty yet spluttering away with trinket lights and nausea sounds, the waitress brings a bottle of Coors and a glass of white and your steak is surprisingly good, probably fresh from the feedlot and the cutting room floor, you muse;

And as you walk back to the motel room, across the wide silent street past a semi that’s pulled over into the adjacent lot, the black chill night above the street lamps and the brittle cottonwoods of town, tired, aching some in your lower back from the long drive, looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the cardboard mattress of the cheap room, you think ahead to the next day’s drive, how it gets better from here, the turn north away from the interstate at Winnemucca onto the slender highway, the country rising and becoming less barren, more intimate, rye grass in the hills and willows along the draws and pines higher up in the Steenes Mountains, towering as ice-blocks and chevroned with snow above the tan valley floor, blue forests wreathing the white ridgelines, and then the country seeming to change all-together as you cross the Oregon border, the desert harshness falling away, just a little, and greenery along the creeks, ranch houses set back under shade trees against the hills, cattle grazing about the brushy slopes and in the cool mini canyons of pink sandstone and heaped rhyolite, the country rising and buckling picturesqely with volcanic rock, cliffs and plateaus making maroon crescents in the tawny slopes, a rising undulant feeling that is in fact movement on a geologic scale, the country flowing to and from the Owyhee Mountains to the northeast, the pine-dotted highlands coming into view now, another island on the journey, yet this one you know is in Idaho, those mountains are Idaho!, and the steep climb and pass and the long grade down will put you on the Snake River Plain, the wide slate-dark river and the bridge crossing at Marsing, the farmlands and apple orchards that lead the way to Boise, a destination that feels so close now as you study the small clouds in the blue sky above that last mountain range;

And you slow the truck as you near the last desert town along the way, and stop for lunch at the J.V Café like you always do, and sit in a booth and order lunch and talk with the old gal at the counter and the still older gal waitressing about your long drive and your big move, a story you wouldn’t have brought up but they’ve coaxed it out of you, the story they want to hear because it’s also theirs in some way, as they too have made this crossing, they too it turns out have lived in San Francisco and have delicious memories of that far-away city, and they too now need this emptiness more than all the fullness of the coast, need this space for memories, for stories brought in from the highway, and the one at the counter becomes quiet, and the waitress leaves you alone after filling your cup, and you drink the thin coffee looking out the window at the gas station and the glinting tan hills going back and you think how easy it could be to not start that truck up again, how easy it would be to stay here, to let go of everything and have all this emptiness in return.

The Rigged Game

11 Aug 09, San Francisco

“To write, nine tenths of the problem/ is to live.”

– William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Monday morning, fog as thick as a winter snow drift (and colder because you can't ski it). A wind-swept weekend of chores: changed oil on Subaru, 3 loads of laundry washed, a hurried haircut from Anna, a walk to grocery store, a run on the hill. Only a little time for reading on porch and smooching with Anna and baby. (Did get in a Saturday afternoon bbq at K. and C.'s place, where I met the editor of Zoetrope magazine and had a good talk about what they’re looking for in fiction.)

But didn’t get a damn thing done with the agent search. I'm pathetic when it comes to online work. Like taking roundhouse swings in the pitchblack. If only the mission involved hammer and nails, then I'd build myself a mansion of a publishing house with yours truly as their keystone author, bust in the courtyard and all. But online research? That ghost-realm behind the screen evades me every time.

Another good tumble at soccer practice on Tuesday, which hasn't helped my back, slightly pulled from loading 5/8's sheetrock solo at the yard. The usual pain in forearms after a day of hammering rock back from door jambs yesterday. I'm getting nearly too old for this. I've got, I believe, enough brains to move up and become a foreman, but I don't want that. I want something else, yet it seems I'm not quite clever enough for that and so I'm stuck on the lower rung of a ladder I don't want to climb. Twain's quote, which heads this blog, darts to mind. Never have I dived right in for the three year test, though. Started with sawing wood and kept at it as a backup, but now I wonder if it the old block hasn't acted more as an anchor than a buoy.

There is this idea of progress, getting a little further along each day or week, whether it’s with writing or work or the household or life itself somehow. But life itself can’t be progressed, can it? The material things that make life more interesting or vivid can be tinkered with and accumulated, but even there, you’re dealing with the ephemeral nature of things. And if your objectives are strictly objects, then at the end of a measly two-day weekend all you’ll have to show for it is a laundry line of clothes flapping in the fog, four greasy quarts of used oil that need taking to the recycle center.

Maybe it's the idea of progress that's rigged. Isn't getting by enough? Isn't getting by with your family and friends, day by day together, enough? It should be. But here I am acting the stone-age romantic again, pining for simpler days, when around here the Ohlone natives fished the bay and strolled from village to village, doing more hanging-out together than anything else.

But the fact is I'm stuck with the modern, perhaps very American, belief that I should not only be getting something more done each day, I should also matter somehow in this world, be important. And I'm selfish and self-driven enough to believe that poison; to want for myself a role more distinct than merely as progenitor of the human condition.

So then I have to ask myself, what is this extra thing? If I get my novel published, will I have the extra in my hands then? Will the sight of poplar trees drifting against the sky be any more beautiful or any more mine then? The small things that move me won't be any different, but there's the very real danger that I will be, and not see those things anymore. The extra things are already with us, aren't they? What more extra do I need than Ada smiling in my arms, gazing right back into my eyes, making funny sounds as she tries to tell me something more important than I could ever write myself.

(And as proof of it: late that night, a little whiskey in me, holding Ada as I pace the bedroom, she quits crying and suddenly looks deeply into me with her sweet watchful eyes; the wise little creature, her soul still dewy from the other side, and she smiles and chawls out some sounds trying to talk, trying to tell me something, and she's saying, it's going to be all right, it's going to be okay, funny daddy.)

Pushing the River

9 Aug 09

Last night was Anna's art opening at Four Barrel, and a fine night it was. Ada was a perfect ladybug, too entranced by all the people and din of the cafe to cry or fall asleep, gazing away at the paintings on the walls. The paintings looked gorgeous, given the big space they deserve by the long, whitewashed walls. Suzanne, the curator, arranged the paintings so that as you walk into the cafe the first works are the less focused, closer-cropped scenes of the River Series, and as your eye travels down the wall, the distant panoramas become less obscured (the Plain Series), so that the effect is as if you were far-sighted and your view corrects as you look out over the deepening landscape. I was really proud of Anna and her work, and secretly don't want any of the pieces to sell, as I couldn't stand losing one of them. Don't know how artists can handle selling off their babes.

So it was a great evening and good to see so many friends and folks of the art world crowding in. Looking around at all the people there who were doing their thing — artists Paul, Jeff, Victoria, Craig, Noah and Kris, writers Gravity and Rebecca, furniture maker Luke, handy-man extraordinaire Justinian, magazine editor Miki, Susanne herself — I had a grand feeling of camaraderie. All of them good people, talented and with taste, yet not a snob among them, hard-working and with particular visions for what they want to achieve in their mediums, and all of them, if not having "big" success, having the real success of carrying on with their art, despite the myriad oppositions that come at you from self or society or economics.

All of us carrying on, carrying the arts and crafts on our backs if only by caring dearly for the arts and crafts, each of us a part of a larger stream of artists doing the same; and we wash up at art shows and readings and openings and are amazed to see so many others we haven't seen for awhile, all the others who've been working hard and alone and sometimes forgetfully of the greater river we belong to. After a few glasses of wine it's like we've been holding our breath underwater we're so lightheaded with talk and giddiness and the passing ideas that seem all the more clever as the bottles empty, yet some of them stick, the ideas and the connections made, and especially the camaraderie, the knowledge that you're out there together in the artless world, persevering and pushing that river on.

Was a great night for Anna, though little Ada might have stolen the show. I told Anna if the Ertnoose (that's 'peanut' in Geman) costs us a sale it's going to come out of her college fund. If she gets one, that is. (I worked and paid my way through college and I'll be damned if . . . oh, right, I'm reminded by Anna, it's not the Depression Era anymore. . .)

Fortunately the wine lasted right up to closing. Afterwards everyone wanted to go for a drink, the usual gleeful extension of the night.

"Get a drink?" I said to Jeff as I collected the baby bag. "I'll be lucky to get home and get some sleep."

"Right," he said, and trotted off with Rebecca of the Short Shorts on his arm.