First Day Out -- Innocent Fool

I am on my journey!  Aren't we all?

April 10, 2008:

I tried to get going on Wednesday up to Oregon, but had an anxiety attack when I realized I could not fit my treadmill in my truck without sacrificing my large box of textbooks among other necessities.  So my treadmill addiction will have to recede and my exercise consist of long walks in cold Canada -- the land where summer never quite comes.  But I needed to rest Wednesday night and I did.  I took a bath in the bathhouse and watched the sun go down in the tops of pine trees and the cars woosh down 116 and Bloomfield.  I got into bed and could not even stay awake for South Park.  I woke up at 4:30 Thursday morning and did not want to get out of bed, a warm sleeping giant at my side and patches snoring on the beanbags.  I sported bedhead to Hardcore and sat for an hour or so and sipped the strongest coffee on the West Coast.  The best coffee I have ever had actually, and the best community I have known.  It took no more than a few weeks of getting coffee at Hardcore and dating a regular before some of the old wise men informed me that I was a part of the family.  I used to get confused by this and suspiciously ask myself how they could say this to me -- "They don't even know me..." but it was I that didn't know how powerful and loving community can be when people are allowed to be themselves and celebrated for it.  Regardless of the strangeness, or because of the strangeness authentic community can display, I feel at home at the mismatched compilation of furniture that adorns the supposed-to-be -coffee-drive-through that is really a dream like down to earth space for people to gather and share their experience with other wanderers. I will say this to all of you now -- You are a part of my family.  Thank you for teaching me about community.  It was hard to leave.

I made a scene outside my truck crying fresh mascara onto Greg's brown jacket.  How can I leave this little house and family where I feel so safe?  Why leave someone I love so much and love to live along side? I didn't want to go at all, but learning calls us to places we have never been -- to empty places, hard places, unforgiving and cold places, to deserts and oceans and forests and the square boxes of institutions called houses of learning. 

So I got gas at FLyers down the road, but could not turn left on 116 for the steady flow of traffic.  I gave up and turned right and decided to catch 101 from Cotati.  Then I realized I had to use a bathroom, any bathroom.  I stopped at the Valero on 116 and the lady inside shook her head and said she only had a port-o-potty, sighed and shook her head again -- "I can't let you use that.  Use my private bathroom."  I was grateful.  As I pulled out of the Valero, I tried to roll up my window and it collapsed into my door.  Frustrated and really wanting to go climb back under the down comforter, I pulled over on the old gravenstein hwy, fixed my window and ended up taking Todd road to Llano and finally to Highway 12 and then finally I hit 101 at about 9:30 in the morning.  I laughed at how difficult it was to physically leave and how my head felt empty and I was blindly hurdling myself in a metal object up to Oregon on the longest road in the Universe.  It took me thirteen hours and one speeding ticket (a 48 in a 45 in Port Orford) to get back to my family. 

Notable places and occurences on 101 North:

The Oriental Buffet in the shopping center off the last exit in Arcata - $6.75 for a big plate of decent, made-right-there sushi.

The Ocean big and terrible and kind bending over the edge of the earth

Orick, or Oreq, or Orec (the town obviously can't decide how to spell it)
is a little town north of Arcata, or is it north of Crescent City? that consists of a stretch of main street which is 101.  There was a sizable old theatre with a Marquis that read TONIGHT JAMES BROWN on one side and ORICK GOSSIP CONVENTION on the other.  I tried to imagine what a gossip convention in a town of three hundred people would look like and why anyone would submit themselves to this public torture.

The Redwoods -- I sat on the forest floor and found myself surrounded by medicine -- Angelica, Liver Wort, Trillium, WIld Ginger and of course Redwood itself is used at least by Micheal Moore as a mild anti-viral.

A Policeman telling me that he wasn't going to ding me for not having my insurance card, even though I presented him with proof of insurance my insurance company gave me to present to Policeman, and just ticket me $145 dollars for a 48 in a 45 because I sped up a little too fast as I was leaving the boudaries of Port Orford.

The amazing feeling that I was spinning my wheels at fifty miles an hour, making little progress, realizing I had been on the road for ten hours and was still three hours away.

HWY 38 from Reedsport to Cottage Grove.  Fabulous, empty, straight and gorgeous with old farm homes meadows and what I wanted to imagine was the pristine, unpolluted Umpqua flowing out to the sea.

The strange realization that land use laws and agricultural policies create separate worlds across invisible state lines.

I was back in Oregon.   Land of my birth. 

It is warm in the Willamette Valley.  I brought the sun with me and every one is half naked pretending it is eighty degrees outside not sixty-five.