LA to PDX: The Back Way

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Why don’t I just write the story? Why didn’t I just report each day’s journey? Why can’t the words come out straightforward?

I don’t even remember when I wrote this. Presumably it took shape some time in the past month, as I’ve done something akin to settling into a new home, while I’ve dragged out my move from Los Angeles to Portland, moving no longer across hundreds of miles and instead creeping slowly, randomly across my new home town.

For weeks I’ve been plotting maps, tweaking Google Earth settings, uploading and arranging photo slideshows, transcribing audio, adjusting WordPress themes, reinstalling broken databases, sorting notes, scrawling in journals, browsing help forums, maintaining computer files, arranging furniture, pitching stories, visiting labs, reporting, attending meetings, filing emails, postponing responses, mailing postcards, paying bills, signing leases, opening boxes and otherwise transitioning through life, both digesting and avoiding my recollection of my journey from Los Angeles to Portland.

It has been a mixed blessing. Sometimes I kick myself for not writing enough, not writing when the trip was fresh, not writing soon enough, early enough. Other times I realize something that K.C. Cole told my class of science writers at USC on more than one occasion, something I found incredibly encouraging. “Even when you’re not writing,” she’d say, “You’re writing.”

I wonder what I’ve written as I’ve not been writing, and as I’ve fretted each day about losing the memories that so recently burned themselves into me, that brought me, simply, from there to here. I don’t want to wonder about it too much, though, lest I get caught up in the pointless tedium of writing and reading about writing.

What I can recall distinctly is a sentiment I felt somewhere between Lassen and Modoc counties, when I emerged from a forest to see sunlight like I’d never seen before swirling across the tree tops. Then, I uttered the following into the digital voice recorder I babbled at throughout my journey:

I don’t know how quite to describe what I’m seeing and what I’m passing through and how to record it for permanence. I don’t know quite how to capture the sense of the sun on the line of trees up high with the trees still in shadow beneath, the changing landscape from thick fog and patches of snow to only small patches of snow and these, what I think are lava beds, pouring over the side now in a landscape becoming more rough bit by bit. I don’t know how to keep describing everything that I’m seeing, the complete emptiness of it all, the complete soloness of my drive at this moment.

I guess what I’ve written is what you see here. What I’ve produced is what you’ve found. What I’ve created is in front of you and, quite possibly, it is changing just as quickly, just as astoundingly as the light shifting and scattering and spreading across those treetops in a faraway corner of California.

The Mother Lode

I didn’t pan for gold.
I didn’t climb aboard a vintage railcar.
I didn’t sip local wine.
I didn’t read Mark Twain in Calaveras County.
I didn’t track every place I ate.
I didn’t always talk to strangers.
I didn’t program my route in a GPS.
I didn’t tag my coordinates.
I didn’t blog.
I didn’t care how many bars I had.
I didn’t log my miles.
I didn’t measure my footprint.
I didn’t keep this in order.

I wandered.

I listened.
I ate.
I visited old friends.
I overheard bartenders gossip with regulars about workplace drama.
I ate seafood in the mountains.
I stumbled upon the Mother Lode.
I gathered pretty rocks at turnouts.
I read about vanishing hotel investors in newspapers stacked on front desks of their erstwhile property.
I crossed the San Joaquin Valley.
I explored lava tubes.
I heard shotgun blasts and ducks quacking.
I listened to cows moo and sheep bleat in mist-enshrouded riverside farms.
I played blackjack with drunk Iraq war vets at tribal casinos
I ate freshly baked maple bars.
I got waylaid in fog.
I gripped my steering wheel on mountain passes with no one around.
I lost touch as I rose and fell into the gray, freezing blanket.
I got bad directions from teens but had fun trying to make sense of them.
I took an entire day to travel 100 miles and still felt like I was rushing.
I fell asleep to tales of California’s geology.
I kept the road ahead of me open.

I wandered.

“Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.”

Roger Waters’ voice floats through my car, settling among my backpack, torn bags full of clothes and piles of randomness stuffed on the backseat — as they have been for days and will be for weeks longer. The Pink Floyd bassist and singer’s first breath emerges from the stereo just as I turn from Highway 49 in Jackson, California, to Highway 88, headed toward Volcano, headed toward black chasms, headed toward forests and storm clouds, toward gravel roads, turkey flocks, store shelves groaning with ancient merchandise and through the valleys and hills of Gold Country.

By the time the ethereal opening of “Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI-IX”ends I realize how the first time I heard the song was 13 years earlier, in the dark kitchen of a lone cabin on a small island at one end of a lake in a landscape much like this. That earlier time, a mid-summer night, I relaxed with fellow trainee camp counselors, eating fresh-baked brownies covered in melting vanilla ice cream, savoring how well the music mixed with each sweet morsel (unaided, despite what the scene I’m painting might suggest, by chemical enhancement), feeling a sense of calm community and simple summer joy as our young charges slept on the island’s nearby beach.

Those early camp years helped first stoke the allure of the road when a treasured few of those summers included drives back from camp to Southern California. I remember descending from the Sierras into a landscape of rolling, golden hillsides dotted with oak trees. I fantasized about growing up to buy a home in a fold of one of the remote foothill valleys beneath us, about lazing in the summer sun in the high grasses spread out forever below, about the bluer than blue skies of those mountain summers. After the road flattened we’d skirt the monotonous cities of the Central Valley — still yet to explode with sprawling growth — and stop for lunch or a snack in quiet, tree-lined Downtowns I didn’t yet know were reminiscent of the Midwest towns I didn’t yet know I’d pass through on cross-country treks between California and Ohio while I was in College.

Though our route varied each time we took the journey, at least once we kept to the backroads and returned home by way of Highway 33. On that journey, we crossed the San Andreas fault and soon afterward found ourselves at a remote shack somewhere between Maricopa and Ventucopa, in the southwestern reaches of Kern County. We walked inside for a Coke or a burger or just a chance to use the restroom. My mom noticed the small rack of postcards and thought about buying a few for her step-father, who she knew collected postcards and, more importantly, was an avid student of Kern County history. Rather than just sell the cards and see us off on our way, the person working the counter (I don’t remember if it was a man or woman) invited us to see their “real” postcard collection.

We were led out of the small cafe to a barn behind the building. It may have been dark and dusty. It may have been bright, with sun piercing cracks between the beams of the building’s aging frame. Whatever the case, it held what seemed like generations of family keepsakes. Really, it felt just as you’d imagine a barn turned storage shed in the so-called middle-of-nowhere might feel.

We were allowed and encouraged to paw through boxes and boxes of old postcards the family had received over the years, no matter that they featured the sentiment of their relatives and friends. We were fascinated, and I was enthralled by the hospitality of strangers, really something I never experienced in the alternative universe that was my exurban childhood.

That moment of spontaneous welcome embedded itself deeply. All at once it was a moment of connection, a moment of wonder, and a moment of adventure. It sparked in me a realization that beneath the surface of society, beneath our expectations, beneath all the rules and mores and standard ways of being there is another current, another way to live, another world.

More immediately, the experience taught me that there was so much going on that I had no clue about so close to my home. There, less than 100 miles away, was this quiet out of the way gas station. There was a back country no one ever talked about in this state so focused on coastlines and the urban landscapes spilling out of its core and across the edges of our nation. I’d later learn that all of Ventura County’s 10 incorporated cities together fill only roughly half of its geographical area, all of them gathered south of the Los Padres National Forest, a theme of dichotomy echoed in other regions I’d later live, and a contrast characterized by this country, by much of this world as a whole.

These journeys from camp to home and back each summer weren’t my only experience traversing the unseen landscapes surrounding my erstwhile home.

When I was even younger, my parents often dangled a tantalizing possibility for my brothers and I on our journeys to our grandparents’ house in Northridge: The back way. Though I suppose the route wasn’t so much our choice as my parents’ interest in avoiding freeway traffic, the “back way” has taken shape in my memory as an adventure along country hills with butterfly-inducing dips and tree-shaded stretches of asphalt. Though I know Highway 118 and the communities along it exploded with the cancerous growth of 80s, 90s and early millenial exurban expansion, I imagine my recollection of the journey is a bit more fanciful than it might have been had I grown up two or three decades earlier. Nevertheless, I remember the “back way” with fondness, now more so after this other alternate route has carried me from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon.

Waking Darkness

It takes the darkness to wake me up, the uncertainty, the presentness of the road after a meal.

I eat my first road dinner in Dos Palos, California at a small diner where beefy men in overalls talk about gang executions and tell Portuguese jokes and a young, expectant mother joyfully exclaims, upon reading the menu “They have a chili-cheeseburger!”

After dinner I feel reinvigorated by getting on these roads where I don’t quite know where I’m going. Where the San Joaquin Valley was getting exhausting, its endlessness has been replaced by a darkness through which all I can see are two white lines, some yellow dashes over and over again and a ditch off to the side. The glow of my headlights makes this valley seem so much more interesting. I have no idea what’s around me, although I suspect it’s a lot of nothing.

I like to imagine it’s a lot of something.

I’ve come to understand that there is so much so-muchness of this state, and of this country by extension. These roads must crisscross forever in this country, in similar ways, in different amounts of repair, I’m sure. So many resources. So many things that we just don’t conceptualize in our everyday life.

Sometimes, the repetition really does feel like something. As I roll through the town of Newman, California I think it’s just another main street, just like all the others I’ve passed through today and just like all the others that fill this country. Two story buildings, a grid, and struggling businesses half-filling storefronts for blocks around. But here, the lights are on. People are strolling the streets. An old theater marquee downtown announces the next showing in somewhat cryptic language: “Sneeky Pete is the word on the street.”

Sometimes, the words just come out, as they do when, suddenly, the Yosemite Highway turns a corner and reveals Lake McClure below me. On a day when I woke on the opposite side of the San Joaquin valley, still uncertain what direction I’d head, I delight in the serendipity that led me to catch this sight. I utter the following into my voice recorder:

It’s the discovery of a lake clearing like this that makes the decisions to take random roads and wander all the more worthwhile, it’s the not knowing what you’ll show up to, it’s the uncertainty of endless miles of empty farmland and repeating grids and the hypnosis of the road to suddenly let it explode in geology and weather and climate and forest and all of it, to see it, to see it fall apart, to see it recreate, to see it evolve and rise from nothingness into somethingness, that’s why uncertainty works.

Later, I have other, similar revelations and as I listen to my tape recorder I find as the journey progresses the utterances become longer, more contemplative, far less about the every detail of what I saw and more about the what I experienced, what I felt. I catch a scent of pine needles as the sun sets while I walk to Lower Yosemite Falls on my very first visit to the national park. Thoughts take shape and I record them minutes later back at my car:

It’s days where the story is everything you see. It’s days where sight takes a back seat to sound and smell, and the way what you hear, and what you smell, and even still what you see changes so rapidly by having and not having people around.

I also contemplate the transformative effects of the road, as I do somewhere between Grass Valley and the once-secessionist settlement of Rough and Ready:

This is like a grand reboot of my brain. Like someone hit the Nintendo that is my body to make it get its picture again (though I know the preferred method of my childhood for fixing an NES was to blow on its connectors). That’s somewhat what I feel. Um. Anyway. Here I am and I probably missed a few turns on my little record, but whatever, that’s part of my journey too, not saying, not remembering to record everything.

Theroux and Friends

“All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission …”

-Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (As cited in Lapham’s Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 3, Summer 2009).

In the depth of winter, while the year is still an infant, I descend into a cave beneath Lava Beds National Monument. My footsteps echo across chilly cavern walls. In half a day at the park I’ve seen all of six or seven people and none for hours.

As I surround myself with quiet and rock, the thought cascading through my head without a name begins to leave its impression. I feel some inkling of what I imagine a walkabout to feel like. I know I am traveling in a car, but when I get out and about, as I have at the Lava Beds, or even when I wander the streets of some small, until-then-unknown-to-me, town, there is some sort of reconnection happening, a thought of the vastness of the world. My place in it is such a tiny part, but it’s just one mechanism, one moving mechanism, not in a hopeless “I feel tiny” way, but in a “this is all so grand” way.

First, I realize how grand and huge California is, and then I ponder the country, and how thoroughly so much there is in this place. Of course, then the how much there is in the world is my next thought, and then I consider the universe, and I find that constant constantness, the immensity of so much to be refreshing in a way. It’s not depressing. I don’t have a sense of ineffectiveness.

I wonder if that is an indication that I am losing some sort of need to have control, to have an impact on the world. Instead, I find myself accepting my impact as it is, at is now. I find myself accepting my place as it is now, that this is me and I will make the connection with the world that I will make with the world.

Though I’m rewriting this now, I was saying this to my tape recorder. One of the things I assure myself of — though it’s less a denial as it might seem if you are reading this — is that I’m not trying to convince myself of anything and I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. Of course, I know I’m not accurately capturing the definition of a walkabout. It is just a moment’s thought, but one stoking my curiosity.

Anyhow, I wonder whether the challenge for me, or the thought to consider when I finally arrive in Portland, is how to interpret the place, if it will feel like a big rushing city to me (it does). How can I both carry on the sense of peace that I have but also an acceptance of the city as it is and of my place in that city as what it will be, and not feel the need to somehow run to it, to run to this peace, to this sense of calm, to all of this.

I’m not trying to seek an answer to that, I’m just curious.

Meanwhile, I told my tape recorder, I’m very curious about my ability now to get this out here on this recorder without stopping, you know, and wondering what it would be like if I were trying to write these very same thoughts I’m trying to write at this moment, um, or trying to speak at this moment. If I was typing on a typewriter or if I was on a computer or by hand, would it be this stream of consciousness? I doubt it. It would most likely involve backslashes or deletions or scratchouts, depending on the medium I use. But, you know, I am speaking here openly. Then again, I’m speaking here, like on, you know, uncooked, or something, um, and, and, as much as I think I value honesty and openness and just stream of consciousness I do wonder though if, you know, just making a sea of words and thoughts that you haven’t contemplated also doesn’t work, but clearly I’ve been contemplating all of this for days now. Anyhow, that’s that.

I wonder what it is that changed my mood from recording the route to talking and thinking out loud and having ponderous thoughts later in the trip. What was it? Was it that they needed cultivation? Was it that it was more isolated? Was it that they had been cooking? Was it the landscape? Was it fatigue? Was I transitioning slowly in personality?

Sometimes you just roll through downtown. Sometimes you miss the downtowns, diverted by frontage roads and business bypasses while you’re not paying attention. Sometimes you miss entire towns. Sometimes you just don’t get to do everything you want.

Sometimes you speed through stories. Sometimes you forget to tell others. Sometimes you leave out the details. Sometimes you choose to keep them to yourself, simply because they are yours.

When a friend of mine recently wrote about her attempts to chronicle her own recent journey to Africa, she discovered she was:

“disappointed I couldn’t capture in real time all I was seeing and doing, so friends and family could travel vicariously alongside me … But a deeper, larger part of that disappointment came from the worry that without writing about them in a way that was publicly and immediately consumable, those experiences — my experiences — would somehow become more fleeting and less significant, something that could be put away, set aside, forgotten.

So really, it was about me, and my own fears.

And with that realization, the pressure evaporated. I traded my traveling companion‘s sleek MacBook for the solid, hard-bound journal a good friend gave me the day before I left. I was my only audience, the keeper of stories for the sake of memory, with no obligation to enlighten or entertain.”

Likewise, I was my only audience for my journey. I was the only one taking it, and this was the only time in my life I’d ever quite have this experience (though I did need a close friend’s reminder that this was the case, and that I needed to go easy on myself about what I’d write about it and that this was my story, mine to record how I saw fit).

A Sort of Homecoming

I traverse a mile or so of the rainy border between North and Northeast Portland, passing more buildings and more cars, and, presumably, more people than I had in a week on the road. I swing a gray coupe packed to the brim with bedding, boxes and unfolded maps into the last parking space of a former funeral chapel.

Now a pub, the building’s front room is quiet, somewhat eerily so for a Saturday evening here near one of Portland’s hipster hotbeds. I pass the empty bar on my way to a back room, where I find my brother and his wife in a crowd jointly celebrating her and a friend’s birthday. I greet my sister-in-law amidst a crush of mutual friends and beer and food and presents. Hungry and overwhelmed by the activity, I duck out to the main bar with her own brother. We try our luck ordering from a clearly overstretched wait staff, catch up over chocolate stouts, chicken wings and rice bowls until another friend of ours shows up and greets us. She steps close and hugs me warmly.

“Welcome home,” she says, echoing a sentiment others had already expressed to me.

“I told you you’d be back,” this friend continues.

Initially confused, I begin to recall how more than seven years ago, when I first left a temporary stay in Portland, she’d insisted how hard it would be to return to the city. As my memory of the conversation slowly returns I remember how I’d thought then that I wasn’t even certain I would come back. In the years since that first stay I’ve skirted the city, but barely been here, though I’ve really barely been anywhere.

Now, here I am. Home.

But the road, my other home — so often my home — still lingers. It’s not just the car packed to the gills. It’s the sensation that I’m still observing my surroundings. I’m still taking them in. I’m still thinking of how different I feel since I started my trip, how much slower my breathing is, how little I care about where I need to be when and how I’ll get there.

Later, when I leave the pub and pull into a rainy streetscape, the colors of an intersection’s traffic lights splash across my windshield. My radio is tuned to some random station I’d settled on as I drove to the pub earlier in the evening. A pop song about another city scatters through the night and into the corners of my car.

These streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you.”

As irritating as the repetition of Gotham’s sense of its own centrality may be, I detach myself from the geographical reference and think about how the song itself has bookended my trip. I first heard it in the staticy haze of a distant radio station, the sort of station you only listen to on the road, the kind so lost in static that, no matter what it plays, you strain to hear it struggle through the static, hope for even the most vapid pop to overcome the static and arrive intelligibly into the car, perhaps only because it’s seemingly unattainable.

That first time I heard it, on a dry straightaway stretch of Highway 33 in the Cuyama Valley, at the remotest of corners of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, I heard the song at the first moment of radio alienation. It’s a term I used for that moment I realized I was finally escaping Southern California’s gravitational pull (though not before I’d also hear, for the first mind-baffling time, the utter jaw dropper that is Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex”). I passed a shack referring to itself simply as “The Place” and advertising homemade pies and other homemade food and knew I was far from big lights and any streets but the one I sped across, though I was already starting to feel brand new.

Hello/Goodbye

When I made it to Portland I felt like I was stumbling into town. I knew the journey was over. I rushed around Mt. Hood, unfazed by the snowbanks after days in the Sierras on far smaller, far more remote roads. By then I was exhausted and didn’t really know how I’d enjoy it by myself for half an afternoon, and figured I’d be back soon enough to enjoy the mountain fully. I made one last meandering stop at Smith Rock, but I could see Mt. Hood and knew Portland and the rest of my life was on the other side. For the first time, I felt a bit frazzled, though there had been few calamities during the trip. I never locked myself out. I didn’t get pulled over. I had felt safe and unhurried throughout the trip.

That morning, though, I woke up in Bend at McMennamin’s Old St. Francis School with a strong sense the trip was over, even though I only arrived in Oregon the day before. It didn’t help that I’d lost my wallet (Though a housekeeper found it in my room, despite my numerous searches and additional help from an attentive front desk clerk). Though a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme, it felt so clearly like an indicator of the journey coming to a halt. Feeling a bit strung out from the road, I didn’t very much want to deal with the variety of hassles involved in replacing my wallet’s contents when my home address and other details were as up in the air as I was.

Really though, it was just time to get to Portland even after I had more and more slowly made my way out of California.

Where I set out thinking this trip would allow me to discover the remote parts of a state that I would soon be calling home, I arrived in Portland realizing that the drive was not my discovery of an Oregon new to me. It was a sendoff to California, even if that sendoff included discovering parts of the state that hadn’t been part of my life until this journey. As the world comes back into focus, I realize I have much more time to discover the rest of Oregon. This was my chance to say goodbye to California.