Solitude, stars and maps

Travel becomes a symphony, and tires pull songs from the pavement

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread. 
John Muir, The Yosemite, quoted in The Salt Path, by Raynor Winn

A place to sit in solitude, with or without a companion, in southern Vermont. The orderly lines of fence and the trees’ shifting color soothe the eye and calm the heart. Fran Gardner photo

Check in:

Solitude

In We Should Not Be Friends: the Story of a Friendship, Will Schwalbe writes of a friend who left everything to move to Japan:

When I’d asked him if he was going to be lonely, he said that that was exactly why he was going: to be lonely.

This kind of loneliness is not what I wrote about in the last few weeks, the absence of human contact and comfort. This is solitude: being by yourself, meeting yourself for the first time, over and over.

This is when you you reset your compass. When you put on a new wardrobe of fresh insights and intentions. You rest in the eye of the storm that is your life.

Silence and solitude

These twins are with us from the womb. They await patiently, at the edges of our busy lives, to succor and sustain us.

Try to spend some time each day being quiet and alone. Turn off the radio and cable news. Walk away from newspapers, books, catalogs, magazines.

Leave food till later. If you must drink, enjoy water.

Just be with your self. It doesn’t have to be long—start with ten minutes. Or five.

All alone, finding all

Sit in silence. Sit with yourself. I know many are skeptical of quietude, not ready to trust our own hearts.

If you can, though, listen to that heartbeat. Count your breaths. Close your eyes and ease into a state of comfort and calm. Meditate, if you can.

Just be quiet. Only ten minutes. You can do this. And you must. Your life, the better life that Spirit wants for you, depends on it.

Another lonely sock. I like this image because of the dramatic slashing black line, the shadow cast by a pole. Note the many diagonals. Fran Gardner photo.

American kanji

Kanji (Japanese words written in Chinese pictographs) isn’t the right term for what is usually known as an ideogram, but I like the sound of it.

Everyone instantly recognizes the smiley face. Funny, but this seemingly timeless figure only dates from the 1970s. This one was drawn in the dust on the window of a Trimet bus, a nice change from the usual “wash me.”

Fran Gardner photo

More common to my childhood was the Kilroy graffito left scrawled all over Europe by American GIs during World War II.

A personal journey

I wrote this travelogue in another June, a letter to Robert on a solo trip I took to be alone at the Oregon coast.

Dear Zalman (Robert’s Hebrew name),

I am having a glorious time at the beach, and I’ve only been here a couple of hours. The hotel is very nice, and right on the water.

I’ve opened the window (it’s on the ground floor) just a bit so that I can hear the surf, and a stiff sea breeze is blowing on my hands as I write in front of it.

It’s an old-fashioned wooden sash window. I’m surprised it opened because I thought it would be painted shut.

I have put my water glass on the sill so it can be chilled by the breeze. Windows are totemic with me lately. I took some pictures of windows and doors in Ireland and intend to continue over here.

You know how I hate the drive down here? Well today, the drive was fantastic. In the valley, the light was brilliant, and the summer foliage was flirting with the sun, flashing an infinite array of shades and shapes.

It was like a symphony: The grace notes were russet heads of grasses, the violin tremolo the shimmering of aspen leaves in the wind. Old oaks were the sturdy basses, and the dark green-black of solemn firs the low organ notes.

A tamarack overhanging the road was like the fresh sound of the high woodwinds, and the backlit forest called forth French horns.

In the mountains, the air became damper and the light grayer under low clouds. All the trees had their mutes on. The temperature in my car went from 94 to 58 in just a few minutes.

That somber, peaceful state lasted all the way to Pacific City.

Travels with Robert

My husband, Robert, and I have traveled to visit friends and relatives around the U.S., and we toured some of Europe, dropping in on my sister Catherine Sanborn, who lives in Cork, Ireland.

But we only took one road trip together. It was to the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state. It was very early in our relationship, before we were married, and besides the interesting conversation at the B&B breakfast table, we both remember how beautiful the night sky was, how we could see the entire Milky Way because there was no light pollution.

Stars , remember stars

It’s been years since I saw the Milky Way. I don’t know when I will again. I’m stuck in a city. I live in a quiet place, but there are always lights on around me.

I am wishing you the opportunity to experience the galaxy. Those scattered stars put us in contact with our ancestral past, with everyone on Earth who has seen those stars, now and before.

They remind us not of how insignificant we are, but how connected everything is. It’s a truism that we are made of stardust. But more than that, our souls are knit into the celestial pattern of the Universe.

Poetry of the road

Tire Choir

More than a hum,
Rolling the road,
Tires make music—
Just listen.

On wet pavement,
Eerie overtones,
Like train whistles
Heard far away.

Crunch on gravel, of course,
But notice the freeway tones—
Tires sing, sometimes in harmony,
Distance, songs on the radio, wheels,
Blending in joy.

You, solitary,
The radio, silent.
Hearing your tires 
Sing the arias
Of the open road.

Wayfinding, or the curse of GPS

One of my great joys in driving has been finding alternative routes—what William Least Heat Moon called “blue highways” in his book of that name. Those are the secondary routes, often drawn in blue on old maps.

There are few ways to bypass Interstate 5, the spinal column of freeway that runs from B.C. to Southern California. If you want to drive from Portland to Seattle, for instance, I-5 is the only route.

But in Oregon, you can get from Salem to Portland by other routes, the old U.S. 99, with eastern and western versions. I prefer 99W: more rural, fields and small towns, to 99E, which is housing and commercial for almost the whole way.

Bring them back

I miss maps. When I took a road trip in Minnesota, I had some trouble finding a paper map. It was at the bottom of the magazine rack of a convenience store. The last one.

I wish I had a new Thomas Guide to Portland, the one with scores of pages of minimaps that would allow me to plot a meandering route, say, through the curving streets of the West Hills.

To get from Rose Schnitzer Manor to downtown, no map app is going to suggest taking Southwest Scholls Ferry to Patton to Broadway, or Southwest Dosch Road to where Patton meets Broadway. Or even SW Humphrey Boulevard, up by the Sunset Highway, that also leads to Patton. I’ve done them all.

Of course, this is moot now that I don’t drive, but I saw so much when I took the alternative routes.

There’s a case, a good one, to be made for sticking to arteries and leaving smaller streets to local traffic. What can I say? I liked exploring.

Another dinosaur

And Thomas guides? GPS put an end to the bulky map books that were so useful to real estate agents, garage sale enthusiasts, salespersons and reporters.

The tradeoff is far from perfect. It’s so hard to get an idea of a place from the tiny slice you see in a map app. Zooming in and out is a creaky, unsatisfying process. Pinch out too hard, and you’re looking at a map of North America. Zoom in, and you often still can’t see all the street names.

My phone’s GPS app does have an option that instructs it to avoid highways, meaning freeways. That’s some comfort.

But the love of maps, the mental twist that translates the three-dimensional world to lines and symbols. . . . GPS has ruined that.

About blueprints

Portland used to have a map store, Pittmon Maps, on Southeast Hawthorne. But it closed a few years ago. A helpful man at Oregon Blue Print, which owned that store, suggested that I could buy a paper map at Powell's or Next Adventure.

Oregon Blue Print is still in business, largely doing signage.

Blueprints for boys only

In 1965, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, my brother Adam took drafting in high school. I so admired his little box of instruments, shiny precision steel calipers and compasses, nestled in blue velvet. I really, really wanted to learn how to use those. But this was 1965, and drafting was a class for boys. It never, ever occurred to me to take the class. It was another time.

Now of course, it’s all on computers, with high-end programs for CAD—computer-aided design. The pretty precision instruments have gone the way of the slide rule.

But I still admire the thought, inventiveness and craft that went into creating tools like those.

Check out

One late afternoon, I settled down with a laptop and an analog journal, and lit a candle. My purpose was to think about womanhood and write, and meditate, and listen, and pull deeply into myself.

I found a layer in the deep, but it turned out to be only the Continental Shelf. I knew there was so much more below. I want, I need, to go below, below, down to where the creatures live on the sulphuric fumes of hydrothermal vents. Deep, deep in the ocean, the magma from the earth’s core and seawater converge—but the water doesn’t boil because the pressure is so great.

That’s where the creativity comes from. Those depths, that take such concentrated effort to reach.And I know that, as deep as I dive, there will always be more, deeper vents that will be beyond my reach.

Never have I felt more human.

Takeaway

And going deep like that, dear reader, is what writing brings. Please start this practice. If you already have, I want to know how it changed you—because, of course, it did. Leave a comment or email me.

Till next time (June 17),

Your friend,

Fran