Monday 14 October, continued
This is a poem I wrote about 20 years ago,
maybe more:
Autobiography
First I was born,
then developed
a propensity for
climbing
on rocks,
furniture, jungle
gyms, and walking
on walls
and fences.
Then there’s
water. Force only
restrains me. Robert says, “You like
to be high, and
wet.”
Just before
sunrise,
coming home down
hill, I flew
like an angel but
an angel still
apprentice.
Indeed, then there’s water.
I
used to bellydance, in my 20s and 30s, and one solstice or equinox or something
a few of my dance friends needed someone to fill in for a temporarily
unavailable troupe member as they performed an improvisational, four-part tribute
to the elements.
They thought I was the
logical choice to dance fire.
I thought
they were bonkers.
Fire?
Me?
Earth, okay – I think my astrological sign is
an earth sign, and I’m content at rest.
Air, obviously not.
Air is for
creative, dreamy types.
Fire is passion
and impulse and spontaneity, and I danced the piece (to
Peter Gabriel’s‘The Feeling Begins’) with only moderate conviction, after a week or two of striving to
get in touch with my fiery side, which was, as usual, screening calls.
Water is my favorite element.
Sensitivity, imagination, a willingness to go
over, under, around and through to get where I think I should be (not enough
sensitivity or imagination to figure out where I really should be, at least for
the first few decades).
Plus, of course,
an abiding love of getting wet.
Many writers and thinkers liken the ocean, and water more generally, to
the womb.
For me, as much as almost any
body of water feels nurturing, that sense of being uplifted and sustained is
more about revivification than retreat.
Swimming, floating, turning pencil rolls, treading water and diving are
liberating activities for me; I feel freed, and emerge refreshed.
There is nothing physically freeing about
water, though, that I can think.
It
takes away some of the weight of one’s body, but it’s much heavier to push
against, or through, than air is.
Gravity remains in force in water, and buoyancy is very much in force
for persons of my figure type.
Humans
absolutely cannot breathe in it, and asphyxiation is a long way from
liberation.
Nonetheless, water generally and the ocean especially have always
seemed welcoming, warm, benevolent forces to me.
I know they can be deadly.
When I was a very little girl, maybe three or
four, a neighbor kid died at the beach where I played, drowned in an unexpected
undertow.
My parents declined to bring
their children to the funeral, but Kevin’s death made an impact.
Several years later,
Jaws came out, and I had no interest in seeing it.
I could imagine every chomp, even while
swimming in a reservoir in college.
If
you did see that movie, and you ever got into so much as a hot tub again in
your life, you have my deepest respect.
More bad-water memories:
the
blizzard of ’78 washed away houses and one grandad in my hometown; my little
brother almost drowned in our backyard fishpond as a toddler (I, 18 months
older, held him up by his overall straps and hollered for Mum); my first dog,
old and blind, died in that same fishpond on a cold February night, and I
hauled her dead body out from among the ice chunks, and wept over it on my
knees in the snow and the mud.
 |
| Santa Barbara |
 |
| Gold Beach |
Respect, absolutely. But also an
abiding comfort. Lakes, rivers, beaches
are often pretty, more often beautiful, sometimes fierce. However, they have yet to evoke the terror
implicit to me in fire, nor the awe of hurricane winds. The idea of landslides and avalanches scares
me more than the thought of floods and tidal waves. So when the waves at Gold Beach knock me down
and try to send my struggling body and eventual corpse out to the deep-water
scavengers, I’m not 100% confident I’ll prevail, but I’m delighted to try. And when I get out safely (though bruised
around the soles of the feet), I don’t go back in. Warm and benevolent, sure, but not
necessarily all the time and everywhere.
 |
| San Simeon, California |
 |
| Also Gold Beach |
And when I say ‘warm,’ obviously I mean it in the emotional sense. Another of water’s physical properties is
that in nature it’s usually chilly at best, unless you’re close to or within
the tropical zone, and I rarely am. Even
in Santa Barbara, an earthly paradise, the ocean in October is refreshingly
brisk. The temperature reminds me of the
North Atlantic, near Boston, in July and August. When I was young, I never sunbathed to get
tan, I did it to get hot enough that I could endure 30 minutes or so in the
surf.
Pointing the car east, toward the desert, I’m astonished at
myself. There’s some kind of ghost pain around
my torso as I tear myself from the ocean.
Even the knowledge that I’m heading toward the Mighty Mo can’t make
sense of this decision.
Decision made and executed, though – and if you read through that long
screed on me and water, thanks and sorry.
Just a little bit inland, the residential zone ends and agriculture
begins again. There was a smell of
potatoes to me, and fields of something that looked like potatoes. But there can’t be potatoes here, right? They want to be cooler and wetter than
here. There were also large fields of
little, short trees that I’m fairly certain grow lemons. The fields, I noticed, though very large
indeed, were not vast like the Illinois and Iowa cornfields. That was somewhat comforting, like the balance
of nature is being better safeguarded here.
And I must safeguard my transport, so stopped for gas and a chance to sponge
away the coast-related schmutz. I still
don’t know what that film on the glass was.
I don’t know whether this is a sign of approaching desert, but in hot,
dry, windy Santa Paula, California, the windshield-washing fluid dried before I
could turn the squeege around. Working
super-quickly, I got the job done. I
chatted briefly with the clerk who gave me my receipt; she suggested it was
unusually hot and dry. She also liked my
earrings so much I wound up taking out one of them for her to look at it more
closely. Glass and copper, we
decided. Very nice indeed. (They were a gift.)
The California freeway system is slightly mysterious to me. For one thing, every few miles it seemed like
the freeway either ended or began again.
Why? Nothing seemed to change,
except that a sign appeared stating, “Freeway ends,” or “Freeway begins.” And another thing, State of California: 65mph speed limits + traffic lights = bad
mix. Just when I started getting snarky,
though, I would pass another CHP officer memorial sign. There are way too many police killed in the
line of duty.
Shortly after Santa Paula, the scenery shifted somewhat, so the great
verdant fields were spreading at the feet of big, bare, brown hills. Later, there were just the hills, with an
occasional industrial building perched on a hill, or something looking like a
research-facility. Very rarely there’s a
house. Somewhat less rarely, there would
be a cluster of houses and shops, low on the hills. I think of California as crowded, but it
is emphatically low-density around here.
 |
| Main Street (freeway? maybe), Pearblossom |
Pearblossom, California, has a population of 2,435 according to its
freeway sign.
(Or maybe just road
sign.
Who knows?)
I find it hard to imagine pears blossoming in
this dry, stark place; it looks like real desert to me.
As I typed this, weeks later, I realized maybe
the name comes from
prickly pear cacti.
That would make much more sense than the kind of pears most familiar to
me.
Perspective shift.
The town, according to another sign, is about
2,000 feet above sea level, and the mountains on the horizon show patches of
white.
There’s a sign for a
Devil’s Punch Bowl Park outside Pearblossom, and
at the park, managed by L.A. County, there are about half-a-dozen signs warning
visitors about heat stroke, exhaustion, burned dog paws, falling (“steep rocks and
cliffs”), break-ins and deer in the road.
My favorite is the one that advocates providing our friends the
rattlesnakes “respect and distance.”
There is no warning about not hugging cacti.
Maybe no one really does that.
 |
| I have got to learn about depth-of-field. This is a photo of a deep ravine. |
 |
| Ranger station taxidermy |
The ranger on duty seemed eager to chat. Apparently most visitors don’t come into her
station, though it’s full of information and alarming wildlife, both live
(mostly snakes) and stuffed. She is
another military kid, spent time in Arizona or New Mexico, and wound up
here. She ‘paints the desert,’ and one
of her pieces hangs above her workstation.
My hazy memory is that it was a watercolor; my entirely accurate memory
is that I thought it excellent. She also
suggested that, if I had time, I should stick around for a while. Apparently, anyone hanging out by the picnic
area as the sun begins its descent (or the earth continues its rotation) has a
good chance of seeing a desert fox come to raid the trash cans.
 |
| The desert at sunset |
I didn’t wait for the foxes, though the park also offers fantastic
views of a deep ravine, and under other circumstances I would have been happy
to stare for hours.
But I had a hotel
reservation lined up in Vegas...
Between
the dearth of signs or landmarks and the constant crackling of many fat utility
lines overhead, I feel like I was lucky to make it out of Pearblossom.
But I did, and the ground starting rising –
3,000 feet, per the roadsigns, 4,000 feet.
Literally touching the California border, there’s a small and
brightly-lit
complex of hotels, gas stations, restaurants and casinos.
Not too many miles further, there’s Las Vegas
– and oh, how I longed for Pearblossom.
 |
| The desert at night |
About ten years ago, I was vacationing in Amsterdam, and went to an
Indonesian restaurant for dinner. The
couple next to me struck up a conversation with the couple next to them, and I,
in the not-entirely-honorable tradition of solo travelers, eavesdropped. Couple One was an English man and an English
woman. Couple Two was a Dutch woman and
a mixed-nationalities man. They
discussed their travels in Europe (both) and Asia (Couple Two), and then Couple
Two asked about the Americas. Couple One
said oh, yes, they’d been to America, and they really would not recommend
it. It is not a very nice place. Very cheap, very touristy. They had been to Las Vegas for a week a few
years ago, and they had not liked America at all.
Y’know, if I ever overhear that conversation again, I shan’t sit by,
snickering quietly.
After three weeks of mostly quiet places, mostly rural environments,
time in tundra and prairies and oceans,
Las Vegas was a body slam to the
mat.
Every sense, every thought, every
nerve was curling up and trying to find somewhere to hide.
I didn’t gasp in awe or snicker in disbelief,
I just thought, ‘What?
Why?
How the... Where
am I?’
 |
| Not very nice. Gaudy, in fact. |
Have you ever been?
It is
deranged – a city on hallucinogens.
Entering at night, when all the neon is cycling through its millions of miles
of tubes, must be a joyous experience for some people.
I used to work with a woman who vacationed in
Las Vegas, not to gamble, but to walk around and look at everything.
She thought it was cool.
She was right, it is cool; but in way too aggressive,
indulgent and wasteful a way for my taste.
But it’s a great shock treatment for a psyche in repose.
