Adjusting

August 13, 2006

Day after my girls birthday. 37 years old. Amazing human that girl is. Always back to the same thing. I made her on purpose. I haven’t journaled in forever. Waay too long. I’ve lost my edge, my ability to write, my ability to put the feelings down in words. Maybe I have lost the need to do so. Wondering. And yet sometimes in the early mornings when I wake up I feel that I should be writing. That there are things to say that need saying. But now, on a late Sunday afternoon, I haven’t a clue what they are.

Where am I right now? I guess that’s always the place to start with. Where am I. I was full of dreams and excitement the last time I blogged, full of the move and the migration in the Klamath. And all the ideas that I had for being here in California seem to have migrated with the geese. Gone somewhere. Nowhere. I can’t find much to love about this place, although I keep trying to at least keep from saying I hate it.

I decided that yesterday I would take advantage of one of the good things about Sonora, the Blues Festival, but I was alone and didn’t want to pay the 40 bucks for the whole day and didn’t want to pay to park and deal with traffic, so I thought I would walk. So I cleaned up the house and decided to amble along slowly up the highway to the fairgrounds. Less than two miles. About as far as I used to walk to work back in Klamath, when it was 11 below zero. I remember looking at the temperature every morning as I passed the bank and wondering why it was always 11 below, not 12, not 9, always 11. So yesterday, walking up the highway on a sunny Saturday mid morning didn’t seem too threatening. Except it’s California. Well, of course.

But what the heck, I’m strong, it’s just two miles, it’s daytime. I can do this. So I packup a bottle of water and a camera in a bag and off I go.
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My mobile home park is right on Highway 108, but the nice part about this is that it is also on the other side of Wood’s Creek. An actual live creek with water in it even in August. I cross the little wooden bridge, under the shade of the valley oaks that are here and walk up to the highway. The sky was clear, a little bit smokey from the fires in the southern part of the county, but blue and warm, maybe 92 degrees. Sun high and bright. Grass is all brown, all annual grasses with their scratchy seeds and worn out lives. Grasses that have taken over brought in during the gold rush days from far away places, and like the people that brought them, opportunistic, ready to find an easy life. I guess they did that here in the hills, but in the process they killed out all the perennial grasses that once grew here. Trying not to hate the ugly dry annual grasses. Trespassers, maybe like me.

The cars are a thick line of bright colors passing me at 50 plus miles an hour. The highway is narrow, it is noisy. No big deal. There is plenty of room. Space to cross over as I take the turn from 108 onto the HWY 49 road, Stewart Road, somehow in my travels about town I don’t use this road very much. It’s narrow and winding and pretty in it’s own way, with cliffs that come straight down on both sides of the road, the shoulder maybe a foot wide, and curvy. Pretty cliffs except when I am flattening my body against them so cars coming around the curves on the shoulders don’t flatten me. Hmmm. Maybe I should have listened to my friend Tracy who thought I was nuts to walk the highway to town. Just two miles I remind myself.

I see a little trail, it looks well worn and well trodden so I take a break from the heat and the sun and walk down to what appears to be a dump hiding in the shadows. Then I see clothes, and pieces of mattress, lots of beer cans and some shopping carts. Hmmm. I back out and decide better of more exploration.

Finally I hear the music and in just a few more curves I am near the fairgrounds. I have decided that I am going to just walk around the neighborhoods and listen rather than go in. The creek here is wider, but the sound of traffic is ever present and the music is muffled by the sounds of Harleys in all their glory. I walk down a street past the park, looking through the fence at all the people sitting in the sun with friends, listen to the music a bit, which is good, but not good enough to make me shell out the 40 bucks and sit in the sun all afternoon. More walking and then I sit on a rock and call my girlfriend. Wish she was here. Call my daughter, the one who loves the blues. Wish she was here.

So what is the matter with me that I can’t just enjoy this on my own, listen to the music, shell out the bucks, spend the day there. I just don’t want to do it. I’m glad I came, glad I experienced what the Sonora Blues Festival is like, but want to go back home, past my little creek and my little wooden bridge. I want to put on my goggles, stop up my ears, and swim silently in the pool where I am usually alone in the afternoons. So I leave. I will go next year with Mo, or Deborah, or who knows who might come and share it with me, but a blues fest is really something to do with friends. Pretty boring all alone for me, at least on this day it was.

I walk back down toward my home. The sun is getting hotter and brighter, I am glad I am walking downhill. Another little path into the woods. This one looks as though it might be a really nice little trail to the creek. I walk down again, only to find another dump, bigger, with more stuff, and even a little old campfire. So much trash. So why do homeless people live with so much trash? It’s spooky down there, but I don’t see any sign of humans around so I keep exploring a bit. Trying to get down to the creek, but the brush gets thicker and thicker and I finally give up. Ah well. Back up to the hot road and fighting the cars.

I am appalled at the trash everywhere. Not just in the camps but all along the roads. When walking it’s even more visible than in the car. An old glove, cans, papers, pieces of foam, clothes, more paper, plastic, feathers. It’s horrendous really, are the roads back home in Oregon like this? Have I just missed it because I haven’t had to walk in tiny narrow road shoulders to get anywhere? Smells are there too, the smells they warned us of back in Spokane. The task force said, Don’t assume it’s an animal, it could be a person. Dead things. I keep smelling dead things.

I am almost home, and am turning down to my little creek just ready to get away from the highway and the noise when I almost step right on a very dead for a very long time cat. My heart jumps and I am one more time grateful that my cats are now house cats. I think of the person wondering where that cat disappeared to, never to be found in the dry dead grasses far off the highway, in the ditch. Someone loved that cat.

Home at last, to my clean house, my clean swimming pool. I lie in the sun, get in and swim slowly, it’s so clean. No bugs, no snakes. No flies landing on me as I like there in silence in the sun. The only sounds that come are the CDF bombers flying over carrying retardant to the fires. A breeze, perfect temperature, blue skies. What is there not to love about this place?

What do I feel here, what seeps in to my consciousness that doesn’t allow me to feel home, to feel comfortable, to love this place the way I loved Klamath when I first moved there? What am I feeling? 2200 homeless people all around me? Thousands of cars running up and down the highways frantically seeking recreation away from their cities and their traffic?

I visited my friend in Sacramento last week. There is a wonderful knitting store in Elk Grove, what used to be a 20 minute drive from where she lives now. She refused to go there. Said she just couldn’t deal with the traffic, that it could take up to 4 hours to try to get into Elk Grove. Truly. She insisted. 4 hours. 15 miles. So we didn’t go to the wonderful knitting store.

I guess that seems to be the gist of living here. There are great things around. After all, Yosemite is just 90 minutes away. But it’s too hot, and too crowded, and too much traffic and gas is too expensive to drive 45 minutes to go for a cool walk in the Big Trees at Calaveras State Park, so I haven’t been there yet. There was an article in the paper about all the swimming holes along the rivers around here, more driving, more competition with traffic, and so I haven’t explored them yet.

But I had my little adventure yesterday. I walked to town. I now know that I won’t walk to town again. There is no place to walk around here that doesn’t require a drive. I can walk around my trailer park on little roads and look at little trailers, but I can’t walk in the woods, or explore neighborhoods, or walk in the hills, or walk anywhere and feel like it’s something that is safe and pretty and enjoyable.

My daughter says I am complaining a lot. I am trying so very hard to stop that, and yet when I sit and write about this, what comes to mind is how it feels. My home feels good, it feels better all the time. My little patio feels nice, and when it’s only the 90’s as it was today, I can actually begin to enjoy it a bit. So that’ that I guess. Not much more to say about much at all. Is it worth blogging about? Is there anything at all that I want to say? Well, maybe, at least I can get some words up now that I have DSL. One good thing. I have DSL finally.