There are monsters under the lakes east of the Sierras. I think they are winter monsters; their bones creak and they moan low and mournful and they gulp at the shallow ceiling of ice. I hear them dissolving in the sun, which the waitress at Nicely’s Restaurant tells me has lately been unseasonably intimate, and enveloping.  Nicely’s is full of postcards of beautiful things with their names written on them in really ugly fonts. I take this to mean I probably don’t deserve Nicely’s, that Nicely’s is for people who wear cotton scrunchies and trainers and look like our moms did in the eighties or maybe for strangers smart enough not to be bothered by the word ‘tufa’ printed out a hundred odd times in Papyrus. It’s Christmas Eve and I’m eating steak and writing on one of the postcards, ‘I am a horrible snob’ and ‘I love you’ and sniffing furtively into my tea because of how I’m happy, and afraid.

And it’s very sunny. Christmas breakfast involves off-brand cereal in a styrofoam cup from the motel bathroom and tea that’s never cold enough to drink until someone else has drunk it all. We go off looking for one or another dirt road and mostly go back and forth, up and down 395, looking confused and slightly sick from the altitude. Mono, the shore, when we make it down there, is hoary and smells like Alviso smells, of saltwater, bird bones, the vast hoard of alkali flies and their larvae, and in the last few years this has been my favourite smell in the world. If I could harvest it and hide it in my pocket like I have done chamomile or lavender from the trails at Sibley and all those Rockridge front yards, I would maybe suffer the social fallout just to smell it everywhere.  A group of tourists strip off their winter jackets and bear their arms as if the unbroken blue of the sky will produce a dissonance with which their loved ones will not be able to cope, and we take so many pictures of them training their own faces out of laughter and into poise. I act like there are no pictures of me doing anything at all.

We drive to Nevada, at some point. It’s long enough ago now that I can’t remember when it happens. It’s weird how the land grows less captivating across the state line; the contours still impress, but the skin settles into its hues and refuses to ornament itself. We try to drive to Hawthorne but the way seems long and beige and daunting. It’s not far back to California. In California we climb into the big clean beds and try to return to real life, which I think is characterized mostly, these days, by playing scrabble on facebook and marveling at Verizon’s all-encompassing fist, how even in that crater motel we receive messages from the seaboard, and feel loved by them.

l get messed up about it sometimes, that I am romantic. That we kick up a cloud of dust on the way to Bodie and that I disappear up the hill on my own to look down at a town that isn’t there and feel moved by it, without actually understanding it. I try to imagine 10,000 people eating and fucking and exchanging money and meaningful glances in this place, once, and I cannot. There’s nothing but sage. There isn’t a single tree, but most all of the houses are made of wood. On the map the park ranger gives us there is labeled (without explanation): Dog-faced George’s House. About the only thing that makes sense to me about the place is the thought of poor George sitting on his porch, chewing jerky. I can imagine one person living here, alone, but in one of the buildings there is still a bathtub, and I guess that once there was such a thing even as opulence here, and pride, and that people shat in the same way we shit, pretending not to, and anyway when I come back down the hillside I’m very tired.  

This whole time I am trying to finish old songs and only really starting the same one over and over again.

We chase down some more tufa, and the lake eats our shoes, which have gone white and crusty. I feel, as I do in the best of places, like laying myself down and being swallowed, and I’ve taken more photographs than I need and I haven’t even bothered putting my headphones in for days; I could stay here and let the coyotes drag me into the bush like they’ve done all the little bird bodies, but I stumble back through the chaparral breathless and kind of strung-out to the car and lay instead on its warm green hood and don’t eat the Pemmican I’ve stashed in my jacket. (I ate it the last few days for breakfast back home, thinking of Elisha Kent Kane, who lived on it, and it is just about as easy to starve in Oakland as in the arctic, if you’re too lazy to go grocery shopping, but Pemmican solves all).

At Gull Lake we discover the monsters. We walk across and they moan at us. The lady at the post office is deathly ill, the sun is high, I’m sending those cards that all three say I love you in one way or another. I used always to write cards but never bothered to send them. Things mattered less, then.

And then we crawl back over the mountains. We eat lingenberry jam on crackers with a couple of strange men on our way through Tioga Pass, in the middle of Tenaya Lake, an interlude which makes the whole trip feel somehow very much like an American Holiday and about which I’ll want to tell you more, sometime soon.  It takes longer to get back not because of mileage, but because of the foothills. Though Tioga is a farther stretch than Sonora (I spend that weeping, because I’ve suddenly remembered the good sound of water running under ice, and I have needed, very badly, to think I am getting away from it all,) it’s really just that going west you have spend all your time looking back over rolling grass and cattle and trees washed a little red, softly, before evening turns the oaks to wild, shadowy men, and the cows all stop lowing and the grass loses its lustre. If you drive east, what happens is that you wind your way over and around these lovely things, and then you turn, suddenly, and realize you have just fallen a very long way, very quickly, and there is a great big spine jutting between you and those things you know, even as they’re calling you out, by name, over and over.

.

Since I have been back I’ve held a lot of people. I’ve been held.

I am unused to finding so much comfort in that.

I’m trying to be more brave.

Notes

  1. loscheiner said: As always, your writing drips and aches off the screen with all of the beautiful words it contains.
  2. pforu posted this