field notes:

8.30.2002

8.30.02
Inverness….

I’m a night driver. I drive amongst the trucks on I-5 between LA and San Francisco through the hot August night. The trucks, they comfort me. They line the edges of parking lots and fill the rest stops, engines idling as drivers sleep…or rest…their logs must show that they rest. Truck drivers spin out the nights doing the work of Atlas, keeping the stuff of life moving north and south along the valley corridor that is California. Like cowboys of lore mostly they travel alone, trading stories at truck stops and communicating in spare bursts via cb radios – technological cups to the wall.

When I was a teenager and began to travel the central valley path from my early LA home to what would become my adult homeland in the bay area, we used to find these books in truck stop lobbies along the route. They contained essays about truckers and the world of truckers. One in particular called ‘The Trucker’s Wife’ stands out. It begins “She’s the woman behind the man behind the wheel keeping America strong.”

But in truth, I’ve loved truckers since I was a little girl. I used to make the universal gesture out the window of my daddy’s Cadillac asking for the pull of their air horns as we sped past them on the highways of my childhood. Later, returning from Lake Tahoe, my girlfriend Gabriele flirted with a cute young driver as we passed him and he passed us in a game of tonage. We got a blast of reality when he approached our table in a coffee shop later. He asked us to go back to his truck with him and smoke a joint. I think his name was Rusty…we debated, but didn’t go. Years later I was driving from LA to my home in Nayarit, Mexico and found haven from a long windy, wet night at a trucker gathering place in Arizona off I-10. I must have been quite a sight. I was driving a ’69 Ranchero laden with bikes, hang glider and assorted other junk, sharing the front bench seat with my black lab Dinah. The exit led to a long road filled with trucks and cafes. I hesitated getting out of my overloaded car wondering if I would I be safe. But I’ll never forget the friendliness and lack of edge I was encountered with. It was like the social after-service part of church: we could have been standing around with styrofoam cups of red punch rather than steaming bad coffee. They gave me road tips and made me feel that my 3-day car-journey across Mexico was a rational thing to do – an idea not shared by many.

But I love truck drivers now because they have a code. In this mucked up world of grey ethics with leaders whose speech evokes cartoon bubbles over their heads, with half-truths weighing us down and often no clear “right thing to do” in the face of injustice, you gotta love guys with a code. They may not live by a code, but they do drive by one.

Trucks stay in the right lane on a two-lane road unless they’re passing. Of course that’s the law, but they do it. They let a faster truck pass them – they don’t speed up in a show of pride and feathers like motorists will. When there’s enough room for the passing truck to come back over to the right, they signal with their lights. Hmmm…downright neighborly, respectful even. Trucks move to the left lane if a truck or car is pulled over on the right. Ditto when passing on-ramps. You never know when somebody might need to use the right lane to get up to highway speed. Trucks blow their air horns when little kids, or grown women, gesture madly out the window.

In all these years of trucker worshipfulness I finally got to help a couple of them enforce their code last night. A highway sign warned that the right lane was closing in a couple of miles. When I saw brake lights up ahead, I pulled to the left lane and finally came to a stop behind a truck, warning lights flashing. The truck behind me put his flashers on to warn more trucks behind him. He turned off his headlights so they wouldn’t blind me. Kindly. All was right in truckerland. But soon there was trouble in the ranks. To our right, two trucks trying to cut in. They hadn’t veered into the left lane, but were using the right lane to outflank their brothers. How did the truckers ahead and behind me respond? By closing ranks. We held the line. The truck in front of me, my little truck’s nose to his tail and the truck behind me moved as one, inch by inch as traffic moved in staccatos of speed or noodled slowly, keeping those outcasts out. This was the code in action and I was helping to enforce it, at the risk of becoming a Mazda sandwich or burning up my clutch.

Afterwards, when we had successfully kept the errant trucks out of our lane, I wanted to invite them to pull over with me, to drink a hot coffee and a discuss of the code…but I thought they’d probably just want to smoke a joint with me, so I passed them, and left them flashing their lights, diminishing in my rear view mirror.

posted by Lisa on 6:01 PM link |

8.24.2002

8.24.02
san pedro

I got a dispatch from home yesterday. My friend Stuart said there’s a new deer in his yard. He appeared recently and was noticable for being a big young buck, healthy in every respect but one. He has no right foreleg and instead has a piece of bone where that leg should be. The wound is healed, the bone bleached and shiny. The buck carries himself -- leaps fences, pulls apples off low branches from his hind legs, runs – no differently than other deer.

Two things seem remarkable about this. One is the lack of infection. Aren’t we taught that a wound left untreated, unwashed will fester and infect? How did the deer manage to avoid that fate. Either it’s easier than we know or remember, or this is just one lucky buck.

Secondly, what must it have been like to drag around that leg until it finally fell off. Whatever happened – false step, a trap, hit by a car, mountain lion encounter (although then we’d have to say he’s an extremely lucky buck) – the leg, or part of it, presumably hung around awhile before it rotted off. Some summer. Some plucky lucky buck.

L.A. is hot. I’ve gotten used to the cooler weather of the bay area. The fog that drives temperatures down each evening or every few days would be welcome right now. I love being able to walk about in a summer dress, tan arms white with salt from a recent swim in the ocean, but I’m not always at the beach here. I have less energy at 5:00 in the afternoon when I’ve been in the heat all day. I need more caffeine. Naps are out of the question with kids around. Oh ...wait, it’s all coming together! I’ve been with kids all day. That’s why I feel like going to sleep belly down on the cool kitchen tiles like a dog.

I don’t know how parents do it and retain any poise. Parents I salute you. And as much as I sometimes feel that not having kids I’m missing an arm or quite possibly the meaning of life, I’m not sure I could do this, or do it well.

posted by Lisa on 7:03 PM link |

8.22.2002

8.22.2002

writing the blitz.
the ecstacy.

Annie Dillard says to find that one thing that is magic for you and that nobody else seems to notice – to write about. Find that thing, and write about it.
Back to the idea of threading. Follow the thread and go deeper.

I heard it calling me, that thread that thing, a week ago while driving as a passenger across the Richmond Bridge. The electric cool blue light glow in the sky, the blue steel stretch of the sea, the sky cut by girders into blue passing triangles. The conversation in the car slipped away and the ecstacy filled me up. Nobody noticed that I had gone. I attended to conversational flow but it didn’t interest me. Once on Alameda I watch the shadows of the band play against the bar’s back wall. The bow moves across the fiddle strings twice, once in color and again in grey. Tony’s mandolin shadow hauntingly distorted in the corner.
Here, nobody expects me to talk. It’s okay to stop talking here. Thank god it’s safe in this place to slip away. I should let my life be more about slipping away.
Living with others requires more of this conversational tick-tock. My time drizzles out the window while talking happens. Not how I want to live my life.
Now I live alone and spend a lot of time looking out the window.

posted by Lisa on 6:39 PM link |

8.21.2002

8.21.2002

First off I need to say this: my consistency has not been as promised. It’s about what I expected, though, so at least I’m meeting my own low standards.
I spent the last couple of days tying up the loose ends of this life of mine so that I could spend a week in southern California visiting my family. Too busy, too stressed to blog well. And dammit, if you’re not gonna blog well, don’t blog at all. So now I can see that my low standards really point to a higher standard and now I feel suddenly better about my damn self.
And really, isn’t that what all the fuss is about. If I can justify myself for only a moment, don’t I deserve to enjoy that moment. Like the poet said, the only sense of security is a false one. [Don’t ask who, I haven’t looked it up yet.] But lately, I’d rather revel in my unjustifiability. Yeah, I’m human, I’m weak and I’m wearing it like a badge. Michael Meade says to lead with your wounds, that your wounds are in the same place as your gifts, in fact maybe they are the gifts.
I listened to him for a couple hours while I drove this morning. The man is truly smart. He tells a story (I can’t remember from which culture it came) about the possibility that there are souls floating around in the universe, and that when a soul finds an image that it connects with in a powerful way, the soul is pulled back into time, into a body by the power of that image – by that imagination. So each of us is here and our calling, our purpose is tied to one image. We are threaded to it. If we follow that thread of what calls to us from our imagination, then we are living what we are here to live. That’s a very powerful idea. If it’s true, what is the image that you are holding in your core? Do you know? Are you pulling that thread?
If all that is true, then that image is the place that holds our gifts and our wounds. For me, the image has to do with waters: tidal waters, moving waters. I’m still looking, pulling that thread, beachcombing. I’ll let you know what I find.

posted by Lisa on 4:13 PM link |

8.18.2002

Welcome to my little part of the world....west marin. I live in a cabin on the shores of Tomales Bay in the heart of some of the most beautiful land and waters in the world. Some of the local highlights include the Point Reyes National Seashore, Heart's Desire State Beach, Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Samuel P. Taylor State Park. But of course those are just names.

I want to make them come alive here in these pages, day by day. I'm lucky to be here -- I know. It's a priveledge that I'm grateful for and I expect that one day soon there will be a knock on my door and I'll be out of my sweet rental deal and out into the harsh realities of high-prices and low availability. It's a cruel reality but it heightens my senses. Each morning when I walk down the path to the private beach I see everything more clearly because of it.

I'm greedily taking it all in: learning the names and behaviors of everything around me. I'm watching the barnacles and the sponges, the harbor seals and the bat rays, the blue heron and the belted kingfisher. I climb the oaks, stare up into the highest branches of the redwoods, marvel at the antics of dark-eyed juncos and stalk the flickers for a closer look. It's all sweet and I'm soaking it up.

I'll try to keep it entertaining and informative. I'll try to be consistent. I hope that once in awhile I can communicate the wonder.

welcome to my world.

posted by Lisa on 11:29 AM link |