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.