"Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance as the sign . . . that sawing wood is what he was intended for." — Mark Twain


Sawing Wood chronicles the travels and artistic ventures of a young family as they move from San Francisco to Boise to Boulder, CO in pursuit of a place to call home.


Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Bus Ride to Los Angeles


The five hundred miles of irrigated fields and orchards that is the Central Valley comes to a stark finish at it's southern end, enclosed in brushy sunbaked mountains. The highway planks upwards: the bus groans in low gear. At the side of the road a man fans his hat at a steaming radiator while two women talk into their cell phones. The bus climbs and passengers sleep, worn by the long ride from San Francisco, the heat, memories of a fog-fringed coast. Evening light streams ruddy through the windows, casts deep shadows into the high, gouged ridges. Over Tejan Pass (4100'): the reservoir brim-full with snowmelt pumped across valley from the Sierra Nevada: a king's table set before starved mountains.

The bus ride has made us family, our wandering lives braided together for eight hours of travel. Sharing a mini-table, sitting hip to hip: an elderly black woman in knitted green headscarf talks on a cellphone to her reflection in the window; an Asian woman in designer sunglasses chats across isle to a young woman that could be her daughter; a young white guy with purple hair and painted toe nails, purple legwarmers cut away to allow his feet into flip-flops, sketches in his oversized notebook, endearing himself to the other women with his feminine, eccentric, yet good-boy ways. They want to see what he's drawing. They adore his nails. He responds with a joke: “Oh, I just love your nails,” an older woman says to a young woman, “But I'm too old for that whore look.”

The women laugh. They share the gummy bears he's brought with him. He's the white weird son they never had. Then, slowly, they go their separate ways. He slouches into his drawing, the mother returns to her daughter, the black woman closes her eyes and falls deeply asleep, mouth agape, under waves of weak light.

Beside me sits a young woman from Wisconsin who's returning from a weekend in San Francisco to her masters in composition courses at UCLA. “David Lang,” she offers when I ask her for a must-know contemporary composer. “Post-minimalism; space, but musical.” She's a touch awkward; hunched at the shoulders as though forever at a piano, at study, at ease only in solitude. She accepts a piece of chocolate only after I insist. I imagine the verdant fields and gentle cows of her home state – not these barren ridges, a harsh overture to the urban counterpart that awaits her. I imagine a tenderness, a sensitivity which forces a degree of escapism of her, a retreat into the formal abstractions of music, the constrained geometries of the heart.

Two toughs in punk-skate décor sit near the driver. Black trucker hats bearing Thrasher in electric green thread. Black Levi jackets, sleeves cut off at shoulders, studded with pins, stitched with appliques, one of which directs the observer to Fuck Off. The bigger tough pulls out his Gameboy. His olive skin glows in screen light, his dark eyes go pliant, soft, human. The other tough yelps into his cellphone: “We barbequed and shit. Man, I heard you hurling in the bathroom.” Life in LA has roughened them. The city wears you down, yet to matter at all you must declare yourself, usually in the most conspicuous way of all: fashion and attitude. You must show how much you don't care by how much you do.

And eventually they too fall asleep, adrift in the dream wagon where we are all brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, angry and shy, disfigured and beautiful, suspended from our lives, entrusting our homecoming to the orange-haired benevolent butch at the wheel. The big woman reaches overhead, throws a switch, then barks into a microphone. She wants to thank us for being such good riders. She wants us to be safe. She wants us to know it's been a pleasure. And by her frank voice, we know she means it.


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