THAT MYSTERIOUS FEELING AGAIN

RIDING CIRCUITS OF COMPLETION ON THE MYSTERY ROAD

Photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash

There are moments in your life where you stop to take stock. Marvel at the weird-ass road that brought you to this place. Boggle at the fact you’ve survived this long. And ponder the unknowable, directly ahead.

Five years ago today, at almost precisely this time, I was luxuriating at a lovely Shakespeare- themed motel called Bard's Inn, maybe twenty miles from the Oregon border. The day before, I had freshly packed the last of my belongings into my old beat-to-shit Toyota (a tenacious 2002 Corolla named Scrappy, which I had purchased for two grand back in 2005), handed in my set of household keys, and said goodbye to my nearly-thirty-some years of living in and loving Los Angeles. 

Ah, L.A. It’s a town I’d never expected to live in, and then never expected to leave, right up until the point that it priced me out and squeezed me dry. Any longer, and I would have joined the homeless legions. 

So now I was headed to Portland, Oregon, where I stood to cut my cost of living by easily two-thirds. While I tried to optimistically figure out just what the fuck my future might be.

It took two days to cross all the way through California up the I-5 corridor, where the stench of Methane Alley (a trillion cows shitting, to provide our beef) mingled -- once we hit Fresno's latitude, but many many miles inland -- with the smoke from Northern California's devastating Camp Fire.

The I-5 corridor is where stench is held. And God, did it hold the smoke. Turning power lines and passing cars and every speck of landscape into reeking ghosts, fleeing the flames from the coast.

After spending a night at the Red Lion Inn in Sacramento – a grimy shitpit of despair where I suspect the motto was "Fuck You! These Carpets Will Never Be Cleaned!”  –  the Bard's Inn was like a little slice of heaven. Which I gladly accepted.

But the most breathtaking moment had come hours earlier, shortly after a bookstore stop and phenomenal brunch (at Cyd's Books and Humble Joe's, respectively), in Redding, CA. We'd been driving flatlands at roughly 75-80 MPH up till then.

When suddenly, we were in high mountains -- without ever having gone up steep grades -- and the whole topography changed.

I think it was the first time I realized I was really leaving one place to go to a drastically “other” one. From desert to forest, just for starters. 

And as my panic attack began -- looking at trillion-mile mountainous dropoffs to either side -- my kickass navigator and traveling companion Cody Goodfellow said, "Yeah, this is where you realize that you are going to the whole other side of the world."

I don't think I realized what a life-changing move this was until that moment. How where you are changes what you do, in the second-by-second of in-your-face experience.

My experience was to have a full-on panic attack, and need to pull over at the nearest rest stop. Sit there for five minutes. Then get out of the car and take stock of the new world I was about to enter. 

Directly below us was this weirdly-shaped and awkwardly-balanced slab of what appeared to have once been an island, now just a monument on a pedestal surrounded by the erosion where water once was. Locked off from dry land no more, but just hanging like a skeleton in the world’s biggest and emptiest closet.

Once I realized "Oh, yeah, this is where you're going," I relaxed a little. Drove a shitload slower than my previous 75. Got the hang of it. Started going, "Cool," instead of, "GAHHHHH!"

And then – after roughly an hour of what felt like going straight down the mountain, huge chunks of it to either side freshly blackened from its own recent fires – we hit a massive expanse of even-more-barren flatlands, From verdant green to sun-baked brown in what felt like nanoseconds. Again with the switcheroo, 

And suddenly, my deja vu started going off like crazy, though I felt virtually certain I’d never been there before. The topography was just too familiar. I told Cody, "It's like I’ve seen this in a dream."

And then, up ahead, I saw the cactus.

And it all came flooding back. 

Six years old. 1963. In the back of the family station wagon. Mom and Dad in the front. Dad behind the wheel. My sisters and cousin in the back seat. And me with the luggage, in the wagon section, staring out the windows at everything.

And I remembered the cactus. The very same cactus. The shape of it. The size of it. The way it occupied its space, well away from the road but inescapable as fate. As if it hadn’t changed a bit. Hadn’t grown, or aged, or been worn down. Like no time had passed. At least not here. Sure as hell not sixty years.

But it had marked me even then, I now remembered all at once. It had flooded me with something I couldn’t begin to understand. And the feeling I’d felt was the mirror of this. Was that pre-deja vu? Like, what was French for ‘predestination’? 

And I said to Cody, ”'Could I have gone down these roads as a kid, on the way to the Giant Redwood Forests?"

And before he could answer, we saw the sign.

Cuz sure as shit, this was the road my dad had driven, all those many years before. All the way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He’d decided it was time to “show us America”. Or maybe he just wanted to see it himself, little knowing (or maybe guessing) he’d be spending most of the rest of his life even further on the whole other side of the world. 

Whatever the case – and I’ll never know – there was no arguing this weird circuit of completion. Where his wholly unrelated choices overlapped with mine: two Venn diagrams with nothing but that same prickly X in common.

* * *

I bring this up because – five years ago tomorrow – I drove those last 290 miles to Portland, and landed in the house where I remain to this day. With the valiant Scrappy still transporting me to and fro.

And tomorrow, I begin a new phase of this adventure. The one that appears to have brought me here. Another circuit of completion, with precisely that much mysterious feeling echoing all the way through me once again. Not deja vu this time. But every bit as charged.

Like I said, it’s a time to take stock.

In a couple of hours, we roll.