Another Place I've Been Before

Gualala, CA

Notes not from the underground but from California's Mendocino Coast... Kominksi recently described a diagonal descent to the southeast, and you should know that you can slice a different diagonal to the northwest and get just as far. My diagonal cuts out of the Valley and onto the coast--no hawks on signs but cows mingling precariously across Highway 1. Somewhere on the rocks below there must be a hefty bull carcass sustaining a Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his family.

I leave home planning to listen to my iPod's current audiobook selection History of Hitler's Empire (download for about $19 from The Teaching Company). But, when the iPod goes missing, I fall back to a CD of Paul Zarzyski, whom I have heard read thrice at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. When Zarzyski is done I start on the first of 4 Led Zeppelin CDs. Nearly 4 hours after leaving home, I'm greeted by a friend and a couple of borderline Border Collies, one of which is blind in its left eye like Jim Harrison, who writes wonderful novels and novellas, as well as essays about road-trips, cooking, and drinking. (I recommend the lengthy novel Dalva as a starting point, then work backward from there.) The dogs will come to tolerate me after a few hours; my friend has come to tolerate me over the span of nearly 20 years.

It is 2 days of, for me, basically nothing but watching someone else work. I prepare some classnotes in preparation of my next meeting with a classroom full of obnoxious, demanding, petulant, and angry students I have inherited and will spend 12 hours with over the next 3 Mondays. They might not know yet that I, too, lean toward obnoxious, demanding, petulant, and angry. A trip into town produces chicken and wine for dinner; a brief conversation and an exchange of money with one of the owner's of Noma, where I habitually buy artistic works and trinkets; and, from Four-Eyed Frog Books, Cormac McArthy's Child of God, the first sentence of which is about 70 words in length. Whoo-hoo: we got us a string of words here! After an afternoon hike, we drive to Pt. Arena for a bit of grub, and I'm shown where the town's working pier is--someplace where commercial fisherman still work. We don't linger in the cold wind, but I tell myself to return one day to see the fishermen in action.

The TV is not turned on the entire time. In fact, it's not even close to being excited. After evenings that include good food and samplings of whiskey, wine, and beer, we sleep in our respective tents each night, unmolested by skunks, raccoons, bats, coyotes, mountain lions, deer, bears, or ticks, all of which are known to pass through. I listen to the not-so-distant ocean, and I think of the nights I stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier listening to the radar antennae spinning and the ship's bow cutting through water.

I arrived on my birthday, and I left 2 days later. At home, I learn that my dog spent an unsupervised evening feasting on garbage and then depositing it on the carpet. He doesn't seem especially pleased to see me, perhaps because he knows he can no longer sleep in my bedroom: Alpha male displaces animal. It is the start of a new week--4 days of corporate work, 3 nights of teaching at 2 different colleges, then off to Portland for yet another 3-day misadventure.