Kari and I carried the boxes into the toy store. The owner was expecting me. I’d visited a few weeks earlier to let him know I had things for sale. After some obligatory chit-chat, he started arranging the boxes’ contents atop his long, glass display cases. Another employee, a teenager, took various items to a different counter and flipped through price guides, jotting notes and tabulating their value. In one case under my stuff, Star Trek the Next Generation figures stood in sealed packs. Kari looked over at me and offered a supportive smile.
The previous week, I’d driven to my parents’ house when they weren’t home. Alone, I crawled under the stairwell one last time. I pried open the wooden hatch and ducked into the dark warm womb of an enclosure. My flashlight beam cut through dust as I pushed aside the Christmas tree and started dragging boxes into the hall. Box after box of playsets, spaceships and tiny accessories collected in Ziploc bags. The black Darth Vader case, the gold C-3PO—I set them on the carpet in my old upstairs bedroom and sat down in the light. The latches clicked when I popped them, and I inhaled the smell of plastic, finding comfort in a scent my body registered as toxic.
One by one, I pulled out my favorites: Boba Fett, Jawas, R2. I peeled back one Jawa’s hood. Uncovered, his face looked like a withered fig, the ends twisted and front incised with the striations of a desiccated ancient. Without his cover, he seemed tense. I replaced the cape and looked around. There was the naked wall where my Revenge of the Jedi poster had hung. There was the corner where my cardboard C-3PO cut-out had stood. Continuity issues, my mom had explained, were mistakes. I squeezed the foam on 4-LOM’s robe and a strange indignity filled me, a mix of regret and offense, as if I had ignored my moral compass and done something taboo.
In 1999, my mother was in great physical condition from years of jogging and aerobics, but she worried about her mind: would it fail her? She’d started to forget things, and she wondered how much worse it would get. My dad was sixty. He had heart problems, the beginnings of diabetes, and he would soon have stints installed, an angioplasty, and suffer a cancer scare. My Grandpa Shapiro had died years earlier, leaving my mother devastated and forced to straighten out his disorganized finances. And the usually sharp comic mind of my dad’s dad, Granddad Gilbreath, was starting to show signs of age. Not long after the sale, doctors diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s.
Alone in my room, Death Star Droid’s limbs felt cold in my hand. No matter the air-temperature, the Droid’s limbs always felt cold. I set him on the carpet, as if he needed a rest. Looming above him like an uncaring god, I tried to find something in his blank bug eyes, some life or warmth or recognition, but those large unseeing lenses only absorbed light, their black paint applied by a Chinese factory worker to a small, helpless body unaware of how dwarfed it was by the world in which it lived.
TILLAGE
“I love you,” Kari said, steadying her voice from across the table. “But I’m no longer in love with you.”
She sat with folded hands, sushi spread in a colorful row across her plate, and deposited the news with a mechanical efficiency.
I tossed my napkin on the table and stomped out the door.
She slid into the passenger seat of her own car and broke my brooding silence.
“I’m sorry I stormed out.”
“It’s okay,” she said, and clutched my hand. I couldn’t look over. Labored exhalations and a pounding heart. “So.” She stared straight forward. “What do we do now?”
“Drive,” I said and started the car.
From room 210 of the Buttonwillow Motel 6, you can hear the sighs of sleeping semis returning to life. Surrounded by saltbush scrub and Interstate 5’s hum, feral dogs patrol the parking lot as I draft an application for a $2000 grant.
“I’ve been hiking and writing about California’s Central Valley for a decade,” I type, the fifth version of my project proposal since arriving yesterday. Calexico’s song “Windjammer” plays on my computer, a live version recorded June 21, 1998 at an in-store performance I’d attended. “Your generous funding would allow me to trace Frank Latta’s historic boat-trip from Bakersfield to Frisco Bay and pen the accompanying piece, which I have always imagined as part of a larger collection of literary nonfiction, travel pieces and environmental reportage.”
I replay the song and type the biographical statement: “Thirty-two, native of Phoenix, Arizona, studied Philosophy and Ecology.” Thirty-two, I think. Thirty-two and, should I add, living rent-free with his parents in order to write full-time after six years book-selling in Oregon and two internships in New York? Would the darker truth evince instability or determination? I get up from the table and open the door. A manurey compost smell rushes in, the rural aroma of nearby stockyards and tilled black earth. It’s the smell of promise, the smell of death, which itself smells of new life.
Latta’s story demands narrative devices and the impressionistic chop of a dissected Monet. How should I phrase this? “Latta’s route details an extinct, ghost landscape, illuminates the altered hydrology of the Valley’s vanished hydro- and ecological condition, provides the opportunity to educate folks about the beautiful necessity of remembering the past, and the avoidable dangers of forgetting.”
I slide my hands in my pocket and lean against the open door.
“I could live here,” Kari said in Sacramento one fall. We coasted the sycamore-lined streets in her Acura, with me navigating the historic Midtown neighborhood around 21st and G, and all its pruned rosebushes and clean white Victorians. She squeezed my knee. Low morning fog draped the yuccas and picket fences, creating a serene urban dreamscape I knew she would like.
It’d be easier to collect material, I figured, from the Central Valley’s center.
The aching neck roused me. My whole body, originally upright on the Bakersfield motel bed, had wilted like an iris, head folded over neck folded over chest folded over waist. I pulled myself back upright and leaned against the headboard, my heavy lids peeling apart from brown, pin-prick eyes.
Slick with sweat, my fingers lifted the cut straw from my lap and set it beside the lighter and spoon atop The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland. This book was my bible. When I bought it, I’d protected the dust jacket with some super strong Mylar. I’d read the whole thing, all 264 pages, without creasing a single one. Strung out, I couldn’t keep awake long enough to read it again.
Local news flickered on TV, and I smelled my moist fingers. It wasn’t sweat, but drool.
“And close along the water’s edge,” it said, “there was a fine jungle of tropical luxuriance, composed of wild-rose and bramble bushes and a great variety of climbing vines, wreathing and interlacing the branches of willows and alders, and swinging across from summit to summit in heavy festoons.” Upon first reading Muir’s passage, from The Mountains of California, in 1996, it confounded me. ‘Tropical luxuriance,’ I thought, in the place where, driving I-5 from Oregon to LA the previous year, Dean and I could only say “This place is a dump.” A basin now rank with manure and edges so hazy they erase the Sierras had presented scenes powerful enough to move Muir? It couldn’t be true. I read on.
“The Great Central Plain of California,” Muir wrote, “during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step.”
Honey-bloom, it said.
Honey-bloom.
Kari walked in holding two bags of groceries. “Still there, huh?” She stepped around my spot on the living room floor, dropping the bags on the kitchen counter with an intentional thunk.
“Been working on this essay for Sierra magazine’s contest,” I said, awaiting the applause.
Heavy paper crinkled from behind the wall.
Unshowered and unshaven, dressed only in boxers with a chest licked with sweat, I sat as still as a yoga instructor: back straight, muscular legs outstretched in a V. The Californi
a atlas sprawled before me, the routes of my four previous Valley explorations outlined and dated in thick black ink. Beside it, a ringed notebook filled with journal entries and drafts of “What if John Muir Had Fallen in Love with the Central Valley Instead of the Sierras?” After two weeks of work, Kari never asked to see it or what it was about, and I never submitted it. The essay seemed frozen in perpetual draft, all unfulfilled promise with no definite direction and only scattered hints of beauty. Who cares about what could have been? I thought. All that matters is what was.
I couldn’t figure out what she saw in me. Maybe my caring side attracted her, the side that pressed wildflowers in journals and saved spiders from the shower when she alerted me to their presence. Or maybe it was the side of me that served her perfect pots of oolong tea and could make silken tofu taste like scrambled eggs. My natural history knowledge might have appeared to hold the potential for a future profession, but I rarely talked about potential professions with any specificity, and she had to sense my instability. Who looked at a soiled hiker sleeping in his truck on a roadtrip and saw husband material?
“How was work?”
“Tiring,” Kair said, “but good.” Teaching rambunctious school kids was always “tiring,” her days spent working toward the release of nighttime TV. “I’d like you to come in soon and give an ecology lesson,” she said.
“That would be fun.”
Sweated coffee fumes rose from my skin. Calexico’s early song “Wash” played on the stereo: “Slip away the night/While the whole town’s asleep/Caught between the space/Where you wanted to be.”
Paper bags crinkled behind the wall.
As Kari slid onto the couch and lifted the remote, I put on the headphones.
The performance was intense. Calexico’s two members set up in the corner of Stinkweeds Records, atop a short wooden platform beside the magazine rack and wall of glass: four-piece drum set, mini-xylophone, tan vintage amp, cheapo mic. June 21, 1998—I’ll never forget that day.
Kari and I sat on the cement floor, backs against the store’s seven-inch record rack, feet against the stage. They played “Windjammer,” “Sanchez,” and “Fake Fur,” songs that accompanied me on all my Valley trips. Joey Burns’ guitar carried enough surf-tone and fuzz to tear a hole in the cosmos. His singing had feeling, and John Convertino’s jazzy brushwork—filamentaceous rolls and spins in soulful time signatures—synced perfectly, intuitively, with Joey’s playing. To my ears, they created true artistry, a spontaneous creative moment of undiluted self-expression. New musical directions, I thought, art that paid the bills.
One of the ten audience members plugged his four-track recorder into the band’s equipment. They were cool enough to let him, and as he rolled up his chords after the show, I offered to trade a copy of a recording I’d made for a copy of this one. “Sure,” he said and gave me his phone number. I called four times over the next two months. Left messages. Planned to attend one of his own band’s performances to prod him in person. But he never called back, and I finally gave up.
I’d practiced the lines out loud: “We want different things in life. I love you but we’re too different.”
TV played on mute on the Fresno motel television. I cleared my throat, finally released from its opiate croak, and revised my current draft: “What we want in life is just too different.” I was going to be the one to say what we both knew, me, the one who planned to somehow write books, who thrashed through miles of Arizona cactus flats and steely shrubs every weekend only to see how it felt to be in the middle of roadless heatstroke nowhere, to feel the thrill of accomplishment, the burn of exertion, and worry if I was lost. Plus, the sense that in nature the palpable cosmos’ mystifying riddles bore down on my over-thinking mind. “We hike to test death and slate desire and stare down the looming darkness,” I’d read somewhere, or maybe imagined in one of those vivid nod dreams. So a couple loaded months had clouded my memory, binding fantasy with reality in a Frankenstinian reconstruction. I’d been strong enough to kick heroin once. I could be strong enough to say it. Who was it, after all, who told tailgaters to fuck themselves with a tap of the breaks, rather than a demure shift into the slowest, furthest lane? The one who fell from that oak trying to photograph a birds-eye view of the Cosumnes River bottom? One who wanted to move to Sacramento to write a book? To Oregon? To anywhere?
Kari didn’t understand why I was so heartbroken about the live Calexico CD. “Because once something like this slips away,” I’d explained, “you’re likely never to get it back.”
“Aren’t studio recordings just as good?” she said.
I revised my speech further: “I’m not a nurturer. I don’t want kids. I hate sitting home on Saturdays. I get bored watching TV. I’m happiest outdoors, on the road, far from home. Happier than during most other activities, more than sleeping or eating, being with friends or family or even in love.” But you can’t say this stuff to people. Their feelings get crushed. You look inhuman. Because maybe, you are.
Sunlight poured through the towering oak canopy. My backpack, filled with trail food and bottled water, scraped against the wild grape vines as I pushed through the brush to the languid slough. The Cosumnes River Preserve was a flooded backwater that contained the Valley’s largest protected riparian forest. This was Muir’s tropical luxuriance, thankfully preserved, just as he’d described.
Spring trip, 1997: three nature preserves in two days. In the arid southern portions I jumped over arroyos, skirted mirrored vernal pools, laid like a drunk in fields of luminous poppies and perfumed purple lupines. Fresh-picked flowers decorated the inside of my truck as I drove back to Phoenix, the stems in the air-conditioning vents, petals hanging like garters from the dash.
When poppies were just flowers.
“Nothing turns me on more than a beautiful woman appreciating my brain.” It came out so much more fluidly in my 2004 journal than from my clumsy mouth. Writing it down, though, the painful awareness that I’d never had stung worse than the idea that I never would. Worse than the loneliness, the break-ups, the five years sobriety.
The ultimate idea: romance planted in a mutual appreciation of each other’s intellect and creativity. “I don’t want to be sexy,” I scribbled, “I want to be smart.” Then added, “No, I want a woman who thinks smart is sexy. Same way I do.”
The homeless man leaned toward our window from the median. I dropped change in his cup before the light turned green.
“That’s probably what you do on your trips,” Kari said, serious.
I wanted to scream, wanted to yell, wanted to cry my correction about the nature of research, the necessity of patience, the writer’s long haul, the staggering volume of material and experience I’d so far collected and hoped one day my brain would spit out in some beautiful form after this lengthy gestation, but how, then again, would she know a thing about that when I knew so little about her?
Instead, I laughed. “No, I’m not that clean.”
Stuffy, sterilized by chlorine, nightstands bearing brown melted divots from myriad smoking strangers, the universal mark of shared property, disposable moments, careless occupation, intoxication. I’d rented the same room—number 113—that I’d rented the previous year at the Merced Motel 6. Merced, far and away the middle San Joaquin’s ugliest “big” town.
The Gerald Haslam books I’d just bought—The Other California, Coming of Age in California, and Voices of a Place: Social and Literary Essays from the Other California—sat on the nightstand. I’d finished Voices of a Place, most of The Other California, read and reread The Great Central Valley four or five times and, now that I could keep awake while reading since I was off dope, made nearly as many notes as that thing had pages. Intending to start my new books, I instead sat there on the bed, leaning against the same wall, staring as I had the previous year out the same open door, trying to remember what it felt like that day. To be young, hopeful, naively optimistic, thinking I’d have my own book by now, a soulmate, a life.
The days when the Valley remained a vast unmapped notion felt then in 1999 a lifetime away. My future had been a block of wet clay to be sculpted, a series of cryptograms yet defined. During my first solo expedition in 1997, this land was the future: an immeasurable emptiness, sprawling and complex, filled with excitement and promise, adventure and discovery. A festooned canopy. A vernal pool.
It seemed to have slowly evaporated somehow.
Sitting upright, absorbing the pastel morning and view of Highway 99, I read the previous year’s journal entry, written right there leaning against that wall: “Morning light, powder blue and rosebush pink, streaks the eastern sky.” Pointless observations and atmospheric impressions—the lazy muted moans of a narcotized mind. A wasted mind. Wasted time.
I closed my eyes, recalling the way I once set the spoon, straw and balloons back into the Altoids tin where I kept them. How lone drops draining from my nostrils often landed on my knee below the hem of my favorite hiking shorts. How I’d stared out the window, heard the woosh of passing semis and wing beats of crows pecking the lot for crumbs, how songbirds lined up along electric lines silhouetted against that powder blue and rosebush light, as if it all meant something.
I wanted so badly to be high, loaded and dreamy. I could smell the heroin, feel the sour burn hanging like a gathering raindrop in my nose, lingering before draining down my inflamed throat. That Thai dressing smell, that caramel bile mixed with melted plastic and engine fluids. No one ever knew I’d once suffered withdrawal to kick the brief habit. Not my friends, my parents, and somehow, not Kari.
I should call Kari, I thought, tell her I made it okay, that the trip’s going well.
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