Road trip weather
Also: Trust, sapsuckers, and two dogs, one of them a trickster
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Trust
Trust that if you fall down, you can get up. If you can’t get up, somebody will be there to help. Trust that all will be well, Even as we live through rocky times. Trust that someone will feed the cat.
Loneliness loves company
Last week, I included a photo of a single shoe, left lonely on a curb.
This week, I found a companion, a single sock.
The shoe had a certain nobility, a rugged insouciance, but the sock is tired and sad. Defeated, deflated, forgotten.
It will be there until the street sweepers spin it away. That may be months. I don’t have it in me to pick it up (I’d use my reacher) and give it a decent burial.
So I leave it to mourn, alone, unwanted.
Sapsucker
I’m indebted to Nicky Dunbar of Foster Trees, LLC, for setting me straight on the holes in this tree near a Rose Schnitzer Manor parking lot. I thought the holes were made by woodpeckers.
Not so, Dunbar says. They are the work of a sapsucker, which is still a member of the woodpecker family.
Dunbar explained that the sapsucker drills series of holes in a tree, then revisits when sap has started oozing from the wounds. Bugs get caught in the sap, and the sapsucker lives up to its name by sucking it all up.
Strange, though. I’ve recorded* the songs of 44 birds so far on Rose Schnitzer Manor’s 27 acres, including a downy woodpecker and a pileated woodpecker, but my app has never heard a sapsucker.
Maybe these holes are from a different era.
*Merlin Bird ID is a nifty little—free!—app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y. I’m especially indebted to it for identifying the complex birdsong near my building as house finches, as they hide so successfully in the foliage that I never see them.
Easy advice
When I call Kaiser, my HMO, a disembodied voice instructs me to enter my member number “one digit at a time.”
How else would I enter it?
Poem: turn a twist into an affirmation
Remember that our concentration for May is our bodies. Some things about my body are uncomfortable —a lot, actually, as I deal with multiple sclerosis. But any disability can be twisted into an asset. Just keep twisting till something positive pops out.
Scoliosis blues
Sitting sideways One shoulder inching toward the ground. This spinal twisting is something I can’t stop. Scoliosis. Ugly word For something that is making me ugly Little old lady with the twisted back. Oh, stop whining. Twisting is essential, after all. My mind is always twisted, Twining around ideas, Making crazy connections, And I am comfortable with that. Come, rest the back on a chair, Lie in bed. The back will always be there, Twisted or not. Twirl, twirl, twist and sing. The song of my body, Imperfect Yet wholly owned. Body rhythm. Garbage in, garbage out All wrapped up in the biggest organ: skin. I can be present and love my body. Why ever not? Let me go on with life Working with whatever Tools, tricks and twists I can wrest out of the Universe.
Driving
My disability makes it unlikely I’ll ever make another road trip. I won’t be able to drive long distances, even with hand controls. My husband is supremely uninterested in the concept. And finally, climate change requires us all to limit driving.
It’s been three years now since I drove myself anywhere. Do I miss it? Yes, but . . . I don’t have time to be driving places. I spend a lot of time writing Becoming, for one thing, and reading. Some goes to puzzles and video solitaire. Then there are face-to-face time and phone time with friends, and the occasional excursion on a Trimet bus.
And, most magnificently (I was going to type “malignantly” but let’s stay positive), MS slows every task. Just getting to the bathroom takes minutes instead of seconds. Throw in advancing age, and it all adds up. Time is running out.
The right equipment
What if I had a van, someplace where I could drive my power chair on board, something with hand controls?
I had hand controls added to my Subaru Outback several years ago. But they took away so much legroom that I had to labor to get in and out of the car.
And the equipment required me to keep my right hand on the throttle/brake continually. Fatigue and pain in the right arm and shoulder are part of my MS experience. I couldn’t drive for hundreds, or even scores, of miles like that.
So I gave the equipment up.
The memory’s the thing
I have such rich memories of the places I’ve been in my car. I would continually explore new neighborhoods, new routes to get to the same old places.
Now Robert drives me, and he is very good about it. But he does not love exploring. He sees no need to find new routes. Driving has become a chore for this poetic and intuitive man. He once enjoyed driving but now sees it as purely utilitarian.
Separate vacations
Because of my disability, and because we had different ideas of what a vacation might be, we most often traveled separately.
Robert went to Poland and the Balkans, learning Polish before he went, to see where his ancestors had come from and to visit some old Jewish cemeteries.
Then he learned Turkish to travel to Turkey—twice. He brought home beautiful handmade rugs for our home, and beautiful wool challis headscarves for me.
Road trips
Meanwhile, I went on road trips. I took my old blue scooter, which I could take apart and stow, but I never got the scooter out of the back of the Outback. I just used the walker. It was slow, painfully slow, and limited, but I could manage.
Sacramento Delta
My first husband and I lived in Sacramento for a time in the early ’70s while he commuted to Berkeley to finish up his last few classes and I found work as a computer typesetter. (Such an improvement on typing, because you could correct your errors as you typed. So obvious now, but so revolutionary then.)
We explored the delta of the Sacramento River, mysterious and fascinating, a place for long quiet drives and roadhouses with good food.
September 2010
I didn’t know what I expected. It had been 27 years since that magical summer when we lived close to the Sacramento River and drove in the evenings, along the levees.
We probably toured only a handful of times, but the memory was indelible. Misty, mysterious waters. A pervasive calm. It touched my soul, and I never forgot.
For years, I had been thinking about going back, stymied by disability, fears, an inability to plan. How would I get there, where would I stay, how would I get around?
But now, finally, I had a car I trusted and liked to drive and a husband who was perfectly content to stay home while I drove away.
Just me and the Subaru
I drove down I-5 to California and explored the delta again on my own. It was every bit as magical as I remembered, a place where water and agriculture marry, a place of levies and misty, tree-lined waterways.
I took ferries and ate in local eateries. I visited a precious little local library in Isleton, where the librarians arrayed the books on the shelves perfectly. That love touched my heart. It touched my soul.
It was a short trip. I drove 300 miles a day to get there, stopping overnight in Northern California at the cutest old-timey motels, now run by East Indians. The rooms were basic and authentic, without the execrable art and overstuffed decor of the more expensive chains.
I planned on being in the delta for two hazy mornings, two quiet evenings. A cosmic sandwich. I could stay an extra day if I wished. Or not. It was wonderful to be able to plan this way.
What happened to boring?
The beginning was magical. The usually dull, flat passage down I-5 from Salem toward Eugene was transformed this day.
Who knew the air could be so clear, the colors so saturated, the sky so interesting? Fir forests ranged black against red-brown hills. Rocky outcroppings; sheep, cows, shadows. Looming gray clouds giving way to an impossible, cerulean blue—pure, enameled color.
How could I ever have dreaded this drive? Something new was presented every moment, a fresh dish from the feast of the Universe.
I had never driven this long by myself. In college, I would drive five hours to visit my family in Tulare from Berkeley, listening to the tinny radio in blue VW bug I had inherited from my father. I valued the time by myself.
Now, on this trip, on the same I-5 in a different state, I still have that feeling of peaceful solitude. But it’s overlaid with my wonder at being in the moment, finding every vista fresh, loving even the other cars on the road, not frustrated with traffic, not resisting the endless wasted energy of solitary travel.
Staying cool
On that trip, unusual for me, I even enjoyed traveling on the freeway. I followed the clouds. The weather was very warm, so I wore my cooling vest. It has pockets that you stuff with packs containing a chemical that is not as cold as ice but that keeps your body at a comfortable temperature. I bought mine from a company called Polar.
It only takes 20 minutes or so in an ice bath (or a few hours in a refrigerator) to restore them to solidity once they are depleted. I had two sets of ice packs, and I would stop periodically at a rest stop to change the packets in my vest. I used a small cooler that a stranger had given me at a gas station. He saw me buying ice and offered.
I didn’t use my cooling vest on any other road trips. I went to Montana, toured Minnesota and drove from Boston to Chester in rural Vermont.
But I am out of space and energy, so I’ll write about those some other time.
Dogs and coyotes
I still haven’t watched any cat videos. And I’m not inclined to cute pictures of animals in general. But I’m including this dog because she’s the companion of an old friend and Oregonian colleague, Merle Alexander. She (the dog, not Merle) is a minipoo and her name is Lexi.
Merle lives in Atlanta now, with her daughter, Beth.
Merle sent me some of her photos after reading my discussion of “Noticing” on April 29, 2023. Here’s an example:
Canine verse
I ran a dog poem on May 5. Here’s another. It was published in Wordgathering, the online journal of disability writing, in 2009.
Coyote
Coyote is coming now, the trickster, Yellow pelt tangled in purple streamers Wrapped in a comet trail, full flash and glimmer, Ready to trip me. But I’ve tripped already, too many times To welcome another scraped knee. I can make my own tricks, Coyote. I, too, can howl at the moon. What’s more, I can turn my back on it, Let the silver wash down my hair. But first I hold my hand, fingers spread, palm outward, Supplicating, before the full disk. Warm. No longer can the moon trick me, give me False hopes, strength with no purpose. No, neither may you nip at my tendons, Or bear me up to the chariot— I draw a card: Temperance, a water sign, Forbearance and abstinence, nothing out of nothing. I make my tricks, but I keep your gift, Coyote, Laughing at the craziness of it all, Sparrows aligned on a wire, the moon behind them Round in feeding and intemperate in love. Just give me a little time, will you? Soon I’ll put my head upon your breast.
Check out
All this writing about car travel: it starts with traffic. It stops with traffic
I’ve touched on this idea before, but it’s such a powerful one that I want to revisit it.
One of the earliest spiritual practices I undertook was to stop being obsessive in traffic. I used to fret if other drivers didn’t act the way I wished they would, didn’t go right away when the light turned green, didn’t pull up as close as possible to the vehicle in front of them when traffic was bunched up.
Then one day, I stopped trying to squeeze every drop of advantage from the dry lemon of other drivers’ traffic habits. I stopped trying to rush red lights, to mine every advantage, to worry about whether I would show up on time.
And the miraculous thing is, I did show up on time. Or not. At least I showed up. And the world did not crash because I was a few minutes late. By the next day, the next hour, I wouldn’t even recall the frustration of not arriving exactly on the dot.
A certain serenity
Later, as I learned, or relearned, how to notice my surrounding, how to be in the now, I began to enjoy the pauses that traffic brings. Stopped at a red light, I notice the quirks of pedestrians, the arrangement of leaves on street trees, the color of the sky on that particular day.
When a drawbridge is raised, as is often the case in Portland (sometimes known as River City), people take the time to exit their cars, wander to the railing and enjoy the river view.
A bit of serendipity—and the next day the memory of how the seagulls arced through the air will be greater than any recollection of the delay.
The river rushes onward
Thank you for reading. Please, keep writing, or drawing, or cooking—wherever your creativity takes you. I have brave plans for next week already!
—30—
Poignant, Fran. So much here, but the poem on twisting is especially beautiful and tender. I am glad I am not the first to comment. I am glad there are readers - and I am glad you are a writer and are writing. Thank you.
Reading this made m not alone as I twist towards the left,.
Remember especially road trips and camping especially over a fire
Item list road trips in my blue Volkswagen camper.