Sequoia

Our brown car roared north up Highway 1, winding our way past gum trees and sheep until the 1 merged with the 101 and we were in redwood country. Straight into the midst of the California fog belt where during the summer the fog moved off the sea and on to the land. It hung above the black sand beaches like a white veil devouring the redwoods, as the trees in turn absorbed the fog and it dripped, dripped down from the foliage to the earth laden and made silent with the redwood needles. Sequoia sempervirens; the forever living, or the forever green. Unlike the Australian bush where noises sparkled, leaves shivered, birds swooped. In the redwood forest, the world was quiet, the branches reached up to the sunlight through the mist away from the unseeable, dark below. Up above at the sunlit crown, the needles were short and narrow and female, where the cone produced the flowers. While underneath, breathing the cool, dark air of the forest the needles were long and wide and male.  Reaching for the sunlight, turning the fog to water as they came into contact, majestic, immortal, physical manifestation of the vertical. We reach for the sun, turn our faces towards the sun, arms up in the silent forest, living above the ground.

We arrived in the late Sunday afternoon, in time for the volleyball match. We drove up to Cassidy’s yurt to see if the boys were still there. As we rounded the final bend in the old chevy nova, a jeep came bouncing round the corner, Raleigh’s grin out of a window -all smiles. Backs were slapped, cheeks grazed. Our wheels cracked the dirt, the gravel spat beneath the tyres as the car twisted and turned to follow them deeper into the forest. Our seats were low in our old car as the evening fell outside and the trunks turned to the opaque yellow of just before dusk. Our car parked in the mud. Out of the redwoods came people of all ages, from all countries. The noise of a generator grumbled and a volleyball court was lit up by great white lights, reflecting on the sand. I slung the bota bag around my neck, the goat skin heavy against my hip while Jacob grabbed his black guitar case and a bottle of whiskey hidden beneath  the seat. The game was on. Jacob could always hide behind his guitar, and immediately began tuning up with Raleigh. My old navy duffel coat was worn at the elbows and helped me contain myself as sofas lay strewn about and I stretched out, my legs long in front and rolled cigarettes.The game began, people rotated on either team, people changing on and off. I knew what I didn’t want. Jacob loved games of any sort, and he wanted me to play. He felt I would enjoy it if only I would let myself, but I did not want to feel loose, out there, on the open court, alone amidst the others, comfortable with others. So sat listening and smoking, stretching and unstretching on our first night. There. Those interactions, those expectations. I saw my face pull into a grimace as I lunged for a ball and stayed where I was.We had the music. And they came to us. People from all times. Any time. To keep to our time was irrelevant. To remember what time we were was to be too clear, to be conscious of where we were. Clothes traced decades, music traced centuries, minds were anywhere, everywhere. To own that moment to our time was selfish, it was all time and all music, and all gypsies and all transients, all travelers, those who don’t step into what is expected, those who do want they want, go where they feel. And play where the music is. Mandolins, guitars, mouth organs, harmonicas, and sweet georgia brown.The drive home was drunk, Jack Daniels drunk, with the red wine and beer and spliff, the car’s shocks cracked and bounced as the road was lit up, part of our world for a moment as we sped past and then left an inky peace as our lights already bright on the next bend. The road rose and fell the car bottoming out, the dirt scraping the side.The road, dirt dusty, curved, seemingly going nowhere, just endlessly following a trail through the dark trees to some light somewhere, deeper and deeper. Sometimes a gate lining the road, no cars at all for at least the whole half an hour.Car bouncing, airborne at moments, but we and the car were invincible, drunk and warm, cigarettes glowing, somehow holding the road, catapulting forward, I didn’t even know who was driving. Gravity pulled us on.

California

Raleigh and I decided to go on a fast. I think we were partly inspired by the Californian vibe and I also had a book that I had bought years ago filled with fasts for each season, and it seemed now was an opportunity to do one. Just water, mixed with lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup for the energy. You could drink as much as you wanted. A water fast, a spring fast, the master cleanse. I was trimming weed, so it was easy work, easy to work on nothing, so it seemed well timed.We started on a Thursday and the day before Raleigh cut out coffee, bread, most things other than fruit and vegetables. I didn’t, continuing to do things with a halfhearted measure, perhaps in order to protect myself from failure, as ‘I didn’t really try’. I ate all things I normally would. Brushing off Raleigh’s worry of preparing my body for what it was about to undergo. I was young, I was strong.We had met Anne and Francois at one of those outdoor events they have up there, some kind of fundraiser, but with great food and live music. I don’t know who had begun the conversation, in the whirl of beer and cigarettes, as the night had gone on into a swirl of people and dancing, she had approached us, I think, with her bright blue dress that matched her piercing eyes, and Francois, the Frenchman, had been there too, quietly he had asked to roll one or two of my cigarettes. And she was so warm, and knew Cassidy, and we were drunk, so we fell into each other, they were growers of course, and they would have work for us in a few weeks.  So we drove up to Anne and Francois’ for a session of trimming on the Friday. Their house was a mixture of additions and plans, wooden frame and with the ubiquitous Northern Californian shingles. They had built it room by room, and had lain in bed in the early days, with the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls, the bed piled high with quilts, drinking whiskey and reading books. It perched above their gardens, California valleys falling away to the horizon. They had a great long, hardwood table as they all did up there, and the vegetable garden was beautifully landscaped, the marijuana intermingling with the tomatoes. Anne offered the use of her washing machine and her shower. Before all the hot water was gone, I jumped in the shower to try to scrub off some of the lines of dirt, and then the laundry could go on. The work was set up outside. A long table piled high with stems. In the bright sunlight. I had taken to wearing gloves, to prevent any contact high, and just to save myself from the inevitable stickiness that came from handling marijuana buds for long periods of time.The laundry finished, I padded on bare feet through the airy house. I pulled the clothes out of the machine, and walked out the front door to where the line was strung between two trees overlooking the valley. I piled up the washing, the darker clothes on the dirt. The washing was bright and white, clean and wet, it flapped as I pegged it up, and the sun beat down on my head. The wind blew all the colours clear and cool. A simple job, such a pleasure it gave me. I felt the fast had heightened my senses. I couldn’t hear the others talking, just see the valley falling away, and hear the snapping of the clothes. I realised how good I felt. Such happiness I felt at such a simple job.Jacob came around the side of the house, still laughing, ‘Anne’s cooked some lunch, want any?...He swung his arms around my shoulders as I bent to pick up the last of the wet clothes, and his arms slid off. I said nothing, just pointed to my glass bottle half full with the maple syrup mixture.‘Oh, I forgot.’‘I’ll just finish hanging this out and then I’ll be there.’I had started to feel a certain lightness that morning, my stomach was flat, and I felt very in control of my body and myself. I felt focussed. Tighter. I felt released from the unnecessary. Emotionally and physically. This was only the second day but I remembered what it was like to be in control of one’s body. To hear one’s body. To listen. He was still loose out there. And I was not jealous. I did not want what he had. Unusual feeling for me. Focussed on what was important. Tight reins. But I was holding them. I enjoyed the feeling of control I had. Saying no was difficult to obtain, but once done, then all fell into place. They all drove back in the truck and I walked. I walked slowly the dusty road as it trailed through the dark redwoods, and then doubled back on itself along a ridge in the sun. My soul was light. As the road slipped down, back into the shade, a deer startled me. She was walking on the road towards me, a small one, I tried to stop breathing, and waited, my feet in the dirt in the sun, the deer in the quiet shade, she looked and looked, and I tried to hold her there with me on the dappled road. Her gentle eyes, and my human ones, and we wondered for, it seemed long, a long time, before finally I moved, and she bounded into the padded forest. I didn’t want to get back to the mess, the music, the noise. It was easy to walk what was left of the road, slowly, in my own life, to hold back the rest.

Drawbridges

Then he was outside with my friend Noel, with his bandana on now and they were smoking a joint, passing it back and forth and he was in the tree, the old gum, spot lights shining up the long trunk, turning it silver, while I sat inside with the others and didn’t care about trees and people who climbed them. He told me he had sailed here. And later he told me that he had been waiting tables where the curious customers had chatted and asked and asked, staring up at him, trapping him with empty glasses in his hands.

- And what now, Jacob, now that college is finished?

And he had thought of a place far from Vermont, a place where the seasons did not cut up the years, a place and a way of movement so unlikely they would be forced to look down to their full plates when he passed.

- I am going to Australia. I am going to hitchhike to Australia, hitchhike boats.

They snorted.

- Impossible. Can’t be done. 

They swallowed their rich food, swilling their wine around their mouths.

But he knew it could be done. He had done it.  As a younger man hanging from a bridge one night near Calais, late one night with his mate Jason-the-drummer, after playing three bars, and giving up on the dancing Virginias, they had decided to walk out of town and camp. The moon, of course, was full. They shared their last joint as they waited for the draw bridge. And Jacob impatient, could see nothing they were waiting for, no vessels, until he clambered over the barricade and saw a bobbing white yacht, small, about 28 feet long.

-Oy. And in jest had thrown his thumb up. The man in the dark let his engine idle and called up.

- Where you goin’ mate?

- England!

- Got any drugs on yer?

And truthfully, they had not, no longer.

- You’ll have to stay awake.

John Johnson steered the yacht over, pulled over to a place where the boys could drop onto the deck as light footed as any ship cats, while his family slept beneath. He had left them by England’s white cliffs in the new morning and the boy had understood that his road was not limited to land. The answer Jacob had given to those diners in New England had become his impetus. Once articulated, it was no longer far from real, as those things we say become true.   

The First Swim

We swam in the brackish water of a lake at the end of our seventh day.  I was by the passenger window, my skin burning with the heat of the road. The water came in flashes of light between the scrub. We got out further than we wanted, and dived straight into the bush before tramping back about five hundred metres to make our camp. The day was ending and the smell of dry grass rose as our feet, hot in tight boots, squashed it down. We crossed the road away from the water. Clouds of insects flew as he laid out the fly and I snapped the poles together, working silently, thinking about our swim. We threw our packs into the tent and again we darted across the road, and burst out of the scrub into the bright opening of the sun on the lake. My skin was stiff with dirt and filthy from the road and I didn’t care about the still water. The water changed from pale yellow to pink, and he smiled at me with the water up to his wrists and I knew I wanted to remember. Later in our tent we heard someone’s radio out there in the darkness and he got up, and unzipped the fly, and stomped about with a torch. I stayed crouching in the tent, listening, as Paul Kelly came on the invisible radio.  And I was living then, and my decision to  leave, mixed with the man I had to chosen to leave with, all fell in notes around me in the Australian dark and I loved him.

South West Corner

English Mick drove us across the desert in his van. He stopped at the Great Australian Bight, and we ran over the khaki scrub to the edge of the Bunda Cliffs, the wind from Antarctica beating us in the face. We were so small there, at the bottom of Australia, the great red land above us, hanging like a stretched out sail, the canvas pulled tight right down to the cliffs, where we stood with our toes hanging over the edge, and the waves like seals, darting and diving, spinning with the gummy sharks.  We stood and our eyes were blown dry, our lungs breathed it in, the sea, the sky, the desert, blew our physical away, blew us into souls, until just the shells were left, and we were whole again. Jacob told me, ‘I’ll never get tired of looking at you’ and I wondered what else he saw, as though there was nothing else to see, but I wanted him to see it. Time took us back into the metal van, where it was still, and the dust was waiting, and where we shook off the outside, turned the key and it all magically worked, and took us forward. It wasn’t hard to convince the motel in Eucla to hear him sing and we were spoiled with beds and beer while Mick slept in his van.Jacob’s energy drove us across the desert and we did it in two days, hitting Norseman on the third day. His narrow face behind the wheel of the Englishman’s van, the sky a dark grey towering over us as he steered us through the storms, dodging squalls like a sloop at sea, darting over the flat black road, the white line luminous, glowing in the electric light of the desert.  The red dust blew through the town and the front yards were laden with ochre coloured dirt. Jacob played the oldest hotel in town and a trucky offered him jaundiced coloured speed, but we slept early in a corner room, windows open to the sweeping verandah, a dark, old wardrobe against the walls. As the road turned to the south we said goodbye to Mick and the intensity of the desert’s burning orange turned to the green and blue of the south west corner of our map.