The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--34. Here and There, Then and Now, Writing Highway 1 from 780 Miles and Two Years Away

Mailboxes, California 1, Steve Brown 2022

1.  Getting There

It's getting more difficult to get back there again.  Highway 1 is slowly slipping away.  Unfortunately, it's doing that literally--sliding off into the ocean at an ever-increasing rate due to landslides driven by wildfire-deforestation and high-precipitation storms, one more dream being devastated by climate change.  Yet here, I simply mean it's slipping away from me.  If remotely practical, I would hop in my car today and be on my way.  Instead, all I have at this moment is the sunlight on the oaks outside my living room window and Juniper-blobbed ridge behind still deep in shadow, an intensely bright lemon-white sky behind that.  It's stunning, but it isn't where I need my mind to go now.

I can access the events that day, just not the particulars.  Writing lives or dies in the details--and real or imagined, those details have to be experienced deeply by the writer while the words hit the page.  Otherwise, the narrative feels deeply contrived and sickly sentimental--a string of adjectives and overly written metaphors.  

I want to write sunlight on whitecaps below where the mountains suddenly climb down into the sea as real as if it were so for me now at this moment.  That is the only way for it to be that real for the reader also.  It isn't what words are on the page.  It is what is between the words on the page--an energy that is transferred from the writer to the reader--the description on the page intensified dramatically by what the writer leaves out because he's there so intensely he can get it right with just a few words.  That involves an honesty that can't be faked--a frozen daydream.  All great books are frozen daydreams--the churnings of the mind snap-shotted for the reader again and again until a narrative emerges from all of the intensely colored dots placed next to each other.

You have to be there before those rusty, colored mailboxes just off the highway--oh so close to the hillside dramatically dropping out of sight, jeweled whitecaps rushing in to where the waves break but cannot be seen.  You have to be there, in your head, snapping that picture, thinking, "Damn, can you believe, someone has to stop here each day to get their mail before heading up the gravel lane on the opposite side of the highway to a house somewhere on a hillside even higher, to look out always on that--on that!--where an entire continent crashes into the ocean with thundering majesty."

You have to be there in your head as you write it.  Or it's just sticky works on a page.

2.  There, Perhaps (After Going to and Returning Home from Church)

Once you know what it is you long for, you can usually get back.  I long to stand in that sodium light and look out at whitecaps almost as far as the eye can see--that magical line where ocean meets sky.  I long to feel the weight of the deep, to know unfathomable depths from the hard, choppy surface, that from up here, certainly appears to be stone.  True, if I fell, although it may kill me upon impact, the water would certainly give way before my body did, but from up here that seems almost impossible, so solid the sea seems, and yet also, at the same time, it tells of depths fully comprehensible only to God, stories as old as time that somehow radiate out in all those thousands and thousands of glints of light.

3.  There.  

I am there.  I have just fixed a tire after we drove through an intense downpour that brought down thousands of sharp rocks from the hillside, one of which must have caught my tire just right and split it open grandly.  Had such an event occurred six months ago, I would have sworn and fretted and cursed my God, and Marci would have sat in the car terrified by how unhinged I am.  But today is different.  My kidney disease, not yet fully diagnosed as to what particular type yet, has made it clear I might possibly have a limited time left on earth.  Now everything matters.  Even how well I keep my temper under control.  In my mind, this very well could be the last trip Marci and I ever take together.  With that knowledge, I am able to do what I've never been able to do before--sit in an unpleasant moment and see the glory in it.  I work on changing the tire fully satisfied to just be alive.  I listen to the swoosh of wet tires going by.  

And when I'm done, I cross the highway to where a bunch of rusted, colorful mailboxes stand before the glittering sea, and for now, that is all I need.

Then, 780 Miles and Two Years Away.

And now, 4:42, a.m., August 8, 2024.

Here.

Sometimes it's difficult to sit in a moment and be real.  The way we feel crushed by unrealized dreams or distracted by endless to-do lists.   Yet, the moments worth living are always the moments grounded in now, even if now is just doing dishes.  

I forget it, and yet I know it so well.  We are meant to exist fully in this moment--open, aware, not holding back from the simple awe of existence.

When I remember that, I am steady, and life is good.  When I don't, I quickly slide towards a deep ocean of fears and regrets, could-have's and should-have's--things that I have absolutely no control over now, and even if I did, I would simply have a different list of could-have's and should-have's because dissatisfaction has absolutely nothing to do with what you have or haven't accomplished over your life and everything to do with how removed you are from living now.

Dissatisfaction occurs when you're not fully there with your spouse watching TV, when you're not fully there with your kid playing Legos, when you're not fully there paying those monthly bills, when you're not fully there writing that book that you know needs to be written, and instead there you sit watching beach volleyball on the Olympics because you fear you can't get back to California Highway 1 the way you need to, and your deepest fear at this moment is that you've spent years working on a book that's going absolutely nowhere.

As if that mattered.  And it doesn't.  But that's how the mind keeps us from doing the hard work of living now.  Everything becomes important except this sacred movement where I'm totally free to choose my focus for the eternities.

I choose sunshine and spiderwebs.  Rainstorms and water dancing off the lake surface.  Waffles smothered in blueberries and whip cream.  When prompted by my God, I choose stopping for the hitchhiker to ease someone else's sucky day, knowing full well there is risk in that.  But also knowing the risk to the soul is even greater by ignoring the call to the soul now.