The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--28. Morro Strand Beach

Morro Rock from Morro Strand Beach, Steve Brown 2022

1.  Arrival

Marci and I pulled up to Morrow Strand Beach in the dark.  The campground is little more than a parking lot with tent sites just off the pavement, in the sand, before some low trees that shelter you somewhat from that constant wind and sound of the thundering sea.  Anywhere else, I'd snub my nose at such a campground.  But here, it is complete because all you need is the sand and the sea.

We set up camp in the dark, working mostly by the light of our neighbor's fire and lantern (which were quite near), and a couple of our own flashlights.  The sites were close enough together that I felt the obligation a couple of times to go over and apologize for opening and closing the trunk of the car so frequently, but each time the urge quickly fell away as the sounds of clanking dishes and laughter as our neighbors made dinner sounded so warm and unperturbed.  I decided they were having way too much fun to be annoyed by the closing of a trunk, no matter how close and often it was.

Still, I was filled with anxious anticipation, waiting for that moment when I could leave camp behind and walk out and meet that magical moonlit sea!

After I made a quick dinner and washed the dishes, I did eventually get that chance.  It was brief.  The wind was strong and cold, and I was incredibly tired, so I didn't stay long.  I can't remember if Marci walked out with me or if I was all alone.

I just remember seeing the moon and the distant grey whitecaps, which appeared large even that far away, although if I remember right, the tide was actually pulling out, and there was more wet sand than there usually is along a beach.  I don't know how much of this is true.  I just know it is accurate to what I see in my mind now.

What I do know for certain is that I was cold, I was tired, and so I didn't stay long.  I came back to camp, and Marci and I walked over to the restroom together, and as soon as we got back, we went to bed.

By then the neighbors were in bed also, and I was able to fall to sleep to nothing but the sound of the sea.  It was a distant drum, a low rumble, constant and soothing, but not threatening.  I soon slid into a deep sleep, and whether I dreamed of fishing boats, and storms, and of a Savior walking on water, I don't know.  I just know that as soon as I awoke, even though it was cold, all I wanted to do was get out of that tent and witness that great ocean once again.

2.  A Morning Walk Along the Beach

Normally, the first thing I do when I exit the tent in morning is make a mad dash to the restroom.  The second thing I do is light the stove and put on a pot of water to boil.  I warm my hands by the flame for few minutes, and then I gather wood and start a fire.  Everything is about getting heat first.  Taking in whatever stunning landscape surrounds me waits until I'm reasonably warm.  But because the California coast is not just another grand landscape, and because it was warmer than I expected, although still chilly, I skipped the whole getting warm bit and hit the beach as soon as my bladder was empty.

And was it stunning.  I've seen a lot of rocks off the west coast, but I've never seen anything remotely as majestic as Morro Rock rise out of the water.  I'd done my research, watched many videos about the area, but nothing prepared me for the real thing.  Seeing it out there, seemingly surrounded by waves, is astonishing.  I was totally unprepared for it.

Joy!  That is what the west coast is to me.  Walking along the sands, hearing the rhythm of the surf, taking in that sodium sunlight, everything constantly filtered by a mist that hovers along shore and thickens and thins and thickens again.  Everything rocking, waving, in and out of focus--the coastline constantly changes--a ridge once blotted now stands out in vivid clarity.

I was back to where I always belong.  By the sea!  I cannot describe how good it felt to soak in that weak, warm filtered sunlight and just be.

I rushed back to camp to make breakfast, wake Marci, so I could share how glorious it is to walk by the ocean and witness that rock shimmering even as it is softened around the edges by that magical mist that constantly moves along the coastline.  

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--27. Whatever an Apple Is, It Is Somehow Connected to Being an Apple

Spring Puddle, Steve Brown 2024

Pregnant spring clouds move behind the juniper ridge out the front window as the sky turns from gray to blue with the coming of the night.  Soon the reflected interior of the house will mingle with the outside for a brief magical time until the interior eventually takes over and the windows are reduced to mirrors.  

The natural world blotted out by artificial light.  Perhaps that is a metaphor for our times.   The observable universe has expanded greatly both telescopically and microscopically due to advances in technology, but the amount of time the average person encounters the natural world observable to the human eye has plummeted because the projected reality on the glass devices before us has replaced our direct interaction with nature.  We have access to almost everything, and yet we ignore our personal connection to life.  

This is also somewhat true for me.  I live on ninety acres of land with two creeks and the forest a very short walk away, and for much of the year, deer within a stone's throw from either my front or back door.  Yet, a hundred years ago, it is very likely I would have had more connection to the earth living in the center of town, even a fairly big town, because much of my food would have been grown in my garden, no matter how small, and sweltering summer nights would have been spent on the porch swing listening to the crickets sing instead of watching TV or clicking on an endless supply of videos on my phone.  I would most likely walk or ride a horse more than I commute by rail.  Travel would be slow and methodical--time for reflection on something big and grand, like God, or next to nothing, like that one tree on that otherwise bald hill before me, both equally important to knowing one's place in the universe the only way it counts--personal, unnamed, in the fabric of your soul.

Now, even the machines have intelligence, but man never really understands anything because most of his interactions with the world are done remotely with a screen between him and reality.  Spiritually, we are not meant to know the world this way.  It's damaging.  To understand how a tumbleweed takes seed, sprouts and grows and tumbles its posterity across a turned field through a time-lapse video is not to know a tumble weed.  It is facsimile reality.  To know a tumbleweed is to watch it slowly turn from green to dark red to dark brown to beige as one passes it each day as late summer slides slowly into fall and the last crop of alfalfa is cut, or you get the tumbleweed's nasty barbs in your skin, even with gloves, as you pull masses of them from the wire fence around the chicken run.  

It is only through direct, tangible connections to the world around us that we gain a sense of place, and a sense of who we are in relation to that place.  And yet we now spend hours daily in front of screens.  No wonder we are no longer sure about who we are.  Whatever meaning life has, it is impossible to think it is not somehow directly connected to life.  I know that seems obvious, like saying whatever an apple is, it is somehow connected to being an apple.  But we live as if we weren't people with an origin--rooted to the earth and sky.  What does a person made of flesh and bone have to do with a glass screen?  What in our cells would have any connection whatsoever to the pixels of light on our computer, let alone the plastics around it?  What unnamed dialog could possibly take place between the two at a cellular-memory level, where things really matter?  

But a cricket--that is quite a different thing.  How many generations have our ancestors heard their songs and passed some memory of that music onto us through our genetic memory?  

We are setting ourselves up for spiritual isolation on a mindboggling scale because all human origin narratives go back in time to a place where God moved upon the face of the deep.  That tangible unknown is glimpsed in flashes by staring up at the seemingly countless stars, or comprehended in the very cells of our skin as the smoothness of the inside of a conch shell glides along one's fingertip and speaks of universal unity stored deep down inside forever but not named in your mind until that mind-boggling ah-ha moment:  I and this conche shell are of one great design.   As good as Cosmos or any other show might be--it cannot get you there.  Only looking directly at those stars and personally feeling that shell can place you in that moment of direct instruction:  This is what it is to be human, here, now.

We are creating a world of constant stimulation and almost zero direct connection, and frankly, that's more frightening to me than even artificial intelligence.  The Metaverse can only lead to an ever-increasing sense of purposelessness because our purpose, like the purpose of all living things, is simply to exist between the dirt beneath our feet and below the sun and clouds in the sky and grow in that space the best we can amongst all other living things.  There is no man without the garden because the garden is the origin, that magic moment and place where God granted us life, and we were raised from the dust to be.  That type of knowing can't be comprehended before a screen.  A genuine sense of purpose cannot be learned, only experienced.  God is in the details because God is the details in a very real sense.  He is directly tangible everywhere through direct engagement of the senses, but He is tangible nowhere without some connection to what actually is.  We are creating a reality where we only experience the universe through projections of life, simulations of being replacing actually being.

Nothing could make Satan happier.  A spiritually displaced people can be led in any direction.

Getting to know this moment well enough to see it, taste it, and hear it breathe--that may well be the antivenom to serpent's final attempt to slither into the sinews of our being and sever us once and for all from the garden and any memory of who we are:  Sons and Daughters of God.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--26. Toes of the Sierra Nevada, No. 2

 

Marci and her Pinecone, Steve Brown 2022

One of the problems with writing a travelogue is that it takes time.   By the time you've finished writing the book you are very far removed in time from the actual trip.  Most of what I've seen is never lost to me.  I was reading from Steinbeck's The Red Pony this morning, and I was transported to a specific moment from my childhood.  It was a warm spring day, perhaps third grade.  The snow had melted off the basketball courts east of the old yellow brick school, and steam was rising off of the wet, black pavement in lemon whisps.   I could hear the sound of basketballs hitting the shallow puddles, hear the sound of the girls playing jump rope games, and my eyes were focused on the wonder of all that steam.  I pretended I was flying over clouds as I walked around in wonder.  

It was like no time had passed at all.  But here's the thing.  I did not sit down determined to get back to that moment.  Something about these words by Steinbeck tapped a memory:

He went on to the sagebrush line where the cold spring ran out of its pipe and fell into a round wooden tub.  He leaned over and drank close to the green mossy wood where the water tasted best.  Then he turned and looked back on the ranch, on the low, whitewashed house girded with red geraniums, and on the long bunkhouse by the cypress tree...

I lived on a ranch when I was in first grade.  It would have been logical for that paragraph above to tap into memories of days on the ranch.  But that's not how the mind works.  It's not organized by claims, supporting claims, and evidence.  It operates through connections we don't necessarily understand.  Perhaps my mind saw a light in that passage that was reminiscent of the light on the playground that spring day.   Maybe I saw a gold light on the water that flowed from the pipe that reminded me of the light reflected of that slick obsidian playground.  Or maybe I sensed a similar warmth in the air.  Who knows?  

So, the problem in writing about a trip now two years in the past isn't that I've forgotten the details.  I know from experience that they are still there somewhere in great precision.  It's more about figuring out how to trick the mind into experiencing it as if it were now.  What makes a daydream magical is not what you are remembering, but rather, that you are experiencing that moment as if it were now.   How to do that though on command is the question.  I've been training my mind to get into the current moment with some success.  The next trick is to learn to get the mind back to a specific now from the past on command.  That is a useful skill for a writer, and it is not the same as just remembering the narrative.  Telling your reader what happened is completely different than placing them in the event.

I am learning a lot about the philosophies that moved Steinbeck to write.  I enjoy that.  I think we are living a repeat of his times in many ways, and that his massages were never more important than they are today.   But what makes Steinbeck profoundly memorable is his ability to put a reader in a moment.  All I can do here is to try to do the same.

I remember being tired.  I remember the light moving towards afternoon.  I remember the sky being a warm mixture of white and blue, of grasses along the road long and gold, of the warm smell of pine, of the Kern River far down below pooled in bowls carved into granite.  I remember wanting to stop often, and doing so, but not nearly as much as I wanted to, because pullouts seem to be gone as soon as you see them, as the road twists this way, and then that way, monotonously for eternity--all this adding to the sleepiness and the desire to slip into eternal slumber--forcing the eyes wide open and saying to myself, It's way too early to be feeling that way now.

I remember thinking this is way too good to miss, remembering just enough of the Kern River from our honeymoon, that trip so long ago, to know I would regret it if I just went on through in some sort of dazed dream and did not stop again as much as I liked the slow methodical rhythm of the repeated sway from side to side as the car hugged the curves in the road, the light pouring through the pines and hitting the eyes with flashes of wonder and bewilderment, the eyes adjusting always to see between the dark and the light.  

So, I pull over.  We get out.  The river is quite far below, but the pools are magical, dark and deep in shadow.  The sound is loud for the distance.  Water pouring over stone.  I decide to climb down.

It reminds me of rivers from my childhood, the rivers north of here.  I am child again playing in the magic of water in the late afternoon, light dancing everywhere, blue dragonflies dazzling and darting.  Long, thick green grasses along the river's edge glistening, always the hard drops of shadow thrown by great pine interrupting that glorious light, and in the process, seeming to increase its intensity.

I don't know how long I am lost in the past down there.   But when I come up, I find Marci in warm light in a tomato red shirt and blue jeans holding a giant pinecone and smiling grandly.  She is amazed. 

  

I tell her, "Oh, that is nothing," and launch into tales of the enormous pinecones that can be found around the edges of a meadow by Eagle Lake.  I'm about to slip away back in time again, but she grabs me.  She knows she has found something magical, and she's not going to let me steal that away from her.  She insists you could not possibly find a grander pinecone than this.  She shoves it towards me to prove her point.

I agree.  Even if that may not be totally factually true--a grand find in this moment is always grander than the great finds of the past, if we will but slow down enough to see them.  For no moment can be as intense as the one here and now if we will but stop and let it be so.

I tell her to stand in the light and pose with her pinecone so that we can honor the glorious find that it is.

That pinecone now sits on the mantle of our fireplace.  It is grand--but not near as grand as the memory of seeing Marci consumed by joy at finding a grand pinecone during one stop as we crawled across the toes of the Sierra on what seemed like an endless journey one afternoon in April of 2022.  So, perhaps this now is not always as glorious as the nows of the past after all.