Alaska is known for its beautiful
and rugged landscape, a fierce (and sometimes violent) history of gold and
lumber-pillaging and is still the choice setting for much fishing, hunting, and
the famous Iditarod. It also boasts a compelling wildness tipping point that is
more fluid than most other places in the United States: bears that wander
through grocery parking lots and moose whose hulking bodies mist morning
backyards.
The natural environment offers
challenges in weather, accessibility, fierce beauty and formidability. It might
be one of the reasons why the people that I’ve met who have lived there are
some of the most interesting individuals I have ever run into. I’ve met them on
dance floors and midnight at a hotel hot tub, at motorcycle bars and video
arcades. They are vibrant, friendly, and in the chorus of the universe their
voices are probably the most bold (and possibly slightly off-key). Perhaps this is why I would like to go
to Alaska someday: to be away from the things of man, to be close to people who
affably clash with expectation, and to encounter a place that is still a little
wild. I’m jealous of my friends’ summer sojourn there.
But right now I live in
California, which is perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is the
land of Neptune High School, celebrity politicians, and people who have never
even heard of salt damage to their cars. Flowers bloom year round here:
Godetias, miniature hollyhocks, baby blue eyes. The bodies here are well-yoga'd,
creative, vegan restaurants abound, and a motorcycle can be a practical
commuter vehicle. I admit that I
read my friend’s warnings on Facebook about possible pipe freezes this winter
with a certain degree of smugness, as though I, personally, had discovered this
coastal paradise, like my arrival here was a badge of some sort of achievement that
I had earned by clocking time over the past three decades in soggy or more
gloomy climes.
But life has a way of
straightening you out, reminding you that no matter how extravagant the sunset
or how well-lit the highways are by banks of rippling, golden mustard flowers,
that you are just as foolish as you have ever been. I will admit: this has been
an unwieldy year for me so far.
I purchased a motorcycle: a red
2006 Kawasaki Vulcan, a great starter bike. It is like falling in love, it is
like the first few months of college, I am having an undeniable romance with
motorcycles: reading poems and books about them, listening to stories from
older, more weathered motorcyclists at my coffeeshop as though they are handing
down legend, smiling at the cheeky motorcycle quotes that I find:
“Four wheels move the body. Two wheels move the soul.”
“The perfect man? A poet on a motorcycle.”
Lucinda Williams
“Life may begin at 30, but it
doesn't get interesting until about 150.”
note: I don’t think I’ve gone
over 40 yet on my motorcycle yet. I haven’t even taken it on the freeway
A few weeks ago, I went on a short
weekend motorcycle road trip with my boyfriend and another couple (not on my
bike). It was so hot that my female counterpart wore a bright pink tank top
while she was on the bike for that entire first day – no jacket required (note:
Phil Collins reference intentional and would also like to acknowledge for my
parents that this is not the safest choice – I won’t do that, Mom). We drove
North through Anderson Valley, a less populated and less commercial wine
country where the tastings are free and there are no corkage fees, we stayed
overnight in Boonville (a remarkably small town, but with enough personality to
merit its own language). Over the course of about 36 hours together we tasted more
than five bottles of wine and ended the day in a garden drinking down cold hard
cider from a nearby farm. We tramped through high-grassed meadows in our
motorcycle gear only to strip down to our bikini bodies by the river. We
traveled back
to the Bay area down the coast in the booming sunlight: the
beaches of the Mendocino coast are an odd mix of West Coast and East coast:
slightly gray and weathered, foggy bogs creating dunes of cherry brush and
large rock outcroppings that offer dramatic coastal viewpoints. We
parted ways after we broke up a chocolate chip cookie that we ate at the delta
of the Russian River while an outdoor jazz band played covers of “We’ve Got the
Funk.” It was a weekend full of stampeding herds of pleasures.
And yet, I had spent
the better part of the Spring in distress, feeling stunted in many of my
pursuits, incredibly cut-off (even left behind) from some of my best friends
and most of my recent history, and a whole host of other unhelpful reflections.
No one tells you what a hard thing surviving your own
mediocrity can be.
This was me in the Run For Your Lives Zombie 5K Obstacle Course (but is also a pretty good approximation of my springtime emotional state, too). |
I asked my friends to forgive me: “forgive me if I am too
glum, too concentrated on our inevitable self-destruction as a species, on
talking about how we’re trampling the planet, or talking about my own failings
and sadness.”
Suffice to say that I spent a few months under water, trying
to convince the people close to me that “yeah, I was bummed, but things were
manageable, that I was fine.” This, in some part, was a lie. For the most part, I’d be more comfortable being
naked in public than I would be letting you see just how much I resemble a
sobby, red-eyed, greasy sloth on a bad day. But stay with me here for a moment
and you’ll see why I'm going to bother to mention it this time around.
I’ve spent a lot of time diagnosing that feeling when it’s
cropped up throughout my life: the wrong blend of chemicals in my body,
childhood experiences, new birth control, a need more exercise, less sugar,
terrible jobs (past tense), terrible relationships (also past tense), maybe I
needed to create a list of daily affirmations and say them to myself in the
mirror, maybe I needed to get out and make some new friends, maybe I needed to
get back in touch with old friends, too much TV, not enough TV. The list of
things that you are doing wrong or could be doing better for your own good is
seemingly endless, but there is one thing that has unswervingly paralleled with
a better mood.
When I am writing. Even if it’s just in my journal or on
this blog or a few lines of poetry, I realize that I am healthier when I am
organizing my thoughts line by line progressively down a page. In the months in which my journal is full and my blog is updated and I’ve spent some time
researching and typing, I spend less time at the bottom of my own well. It had not been happening enough.
Which
is why I rebooted an old pledge that a friend and I had made to each other: one
poem a week. Each week, I send a poem to a friend of mine and she sends one to
me and (if nothing else). In this way, I’ve made some room for creative productivity in
the middle of the rest of the business in my life. And the difference has been remarkable.
I also started doing yoga four
time a week, drastically improved my diet, and bought a motorcycle and the
change has been remarkable.
That is the dramatic montage version of making all
these choices: it does not show my grumpiness over giving up my morning coffee
or the withering looks I’ve come to give scales, but I am happy to report that
all of these things have set me up for a very promising summer where I am
looking forward to motorcycle adventures, road trips and reunions with some of my
favorite people back East.
On the eve of my birthday I took a ride through the rolling headlands
that boulder right into the Pacific ocean. It is glorious to be at the edge of
America with the surf that comes in threatening undertow to humans and their
dogs alike: a bit tumultuous. It is also wondrous to be in the month of April and lie on a black sand
beach in the 80 degree heat. Generally I associate my birthday with damp, cold
mornings and sunshine threatening to break through the clouds, but not beaches
and motorcycle rides. It’s a feeling that I could get used to.
They say that smell is one of the most powerful generators
of memory and not just sense memory, but emotional memory. In April, I woke up on
a Monday morning and rode through the streets of waking Oakland (men in blue
overalls constructing yet another watchtower-like hospital building, an officer
uncommonly casual and reading the paper in his car) and was overwhelmed by how
much the heat of the streets and the coming day smelled like Rome in the throws
of summer. Whatever pall had been on me slipped off just a little as my sense
memory catapulted into hot weather and the perspective offered by history.
It was the same thing hiking down the hill to the beach the day before my birthday,
invited by Jason* whose talent are many. But surprise, recreational botany is
such an underrated and unexpected talent that it takes a special prize in my heart.
Down we go on perilously, ready-to-tip log steps laid into the cliffside and
with each step, he reaches his hand back behind him, handing me small crumbles of
leaves and ferns that he’s crushed between his thumb and forefinger and telling
me to smell, illustrating the landscape not just with information, but with perfume:
He invites me to reach out and touch a bud of orange
bouncing in the hillside breeze and I pull back my hands to find them strangely tacky. He smiles
and says “sticky monkey flower.”
I don’t identify much with my astrological sign, but one
quality of Taurus that has always seemed embarrassingly accurate is their
sensuality, an almost feline love of tactile pleasure. In this way, a ride down
to the ocean is a riot of delight. It is ocean spray, citrusy perfume, the
crash of waves, some hazy horn sound like a dial tone on the water in the
distance, the hot sand in comedic avalanches under my bare feet – an
unstoppable collision of sense after sense.
It is almost healing and I am convinced that this is part of
what appeals to we Taureans – it makes the flinty, sparking neuroses of intellect
go quiet for awhile. Of course, no great insight or philosophy is achieved in
this time, but it is a welcome pause from a lifetime rooted in self (even
selfishness). One is more a part of the slippery cave water coming down the
bluffs, the roar of wind along the highway, or the rush of clean, sugared smell
of opening fresia blossoms. Sometimes it is better this way.
###
*"Wait! What? Who's this Jason person?" you ask.
"Oh yeah," I reply, "I'm dating a man named Jason."