A place to lay your weary head? (It was a hard year)

We had packed the bed, but there was too much ambient pot and alcohol and sheer quantities of stuff, chaotic stuff. And the trailer was listing too far forward, or grinding it’s wheels against the wheel wells, and it would all have to be repacked, again. So we slept on the floor, in the empty house.

The night we left, after too much stress and too little sleep (and that on the hard floorboards), we could only make it so far before we had to pull off the road into a rest area and sleep, again, crammed in our cars in the cold of Oregon springtime.
And then we made it over that damned pass, into the California morning. Even as far north as Yreka it felt warmer, somehow.

We made it to Redding, and to Chico, into the Sierra foothills, into the almost-nowhere. And then it transpired that my clutch was shredded. We had to tow the truck and trailer the rest of the way to the land with a U-Haul truck and a tow hitch.

God I wept, that first night in California. Leaving Portland was like having a limb ripped away. Maybe every freedom feels like this?

I slept in the back of the truck for two weeks, and the rain poured down. All the stupid things I’d fought so hard to carry with me from my old life got damp, or waterlogged. I bathed in boiled creek water. I drowned my phone in the lake.

Spent a couple months in my uncle’s guest-room, a time full of fitful rest and ablutions and a sort of dreamy ennui. It was like camping on a cliff face: the respite was critical, view was impeccable, and it was impossible to forget the drop. Money dwindled, schemes failed, the thread ran out.

Then it was my mother’s unfinished house for several months, and my ancient, hard, moldy futon. No indoor plumbing (save the toilet, by the grace of God). And my father’s wine and weed, and my brother’s anger, and all the petty, biting cruelties of family life.

It’s so easy to get lost.

Friends, then, and sleeping on a couch. And some hard work that needed doing, and some money. A blessing, basically, and a kindness. And I returned to Watsonville alive again, after being nothinged almost to death, and I gathered my things. Batteries and free house paint from the Santa Cruz dump, and tools, and padlocks and wrecking bars. A cheap air bed and a 12 volt air pump, and a drying rack and sheets and towels.

Back to the land for the last things, the last days, and the send-off. Sleeping in a tent on the already-deflated air mattress on hot nights. The blistering days of foothill summer. Slathered in reeking herbal insect repellant, watching movies on my laptop while Dad’s NPR jazz and pot smoke sifted down from his ratty trailer.

And then I was on the road. Did I ever expect it to go well? Did I really think it could go right? I don’t know. I know that whatever contentment I may have felt in those driving hours had less to do with optimism about where I was going than with the simple fact of my own autonomy and forward motion.

Motel 6 in Eli, Nevada; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Omaha, Nebraska. Did I stay somewhere in Iowa? I can’t recall. Benton Harbor, MI.

And then I was there, again, in Detroit. And my house was, to my partial surprise and significant disappointment, someone else’s home. And so I moved in with these men, for several days. My air mattress was already questionable at this point, and my skin was sticky and the bathtub had been stolen. I padlocked myself into my bedroom on the first night.

There is of course more to say, but the short version is that I left. I was a colonist. I was alone. I was exhausted. I left. Stayed two nights at the Motel 6 in Farmington Hills, MI. A bottle of wine. A shower. A lot of emotional phone calls. The demise of my laptop’s hard drive.

Decided to see the South. Drove to Lexington, Kentucky. The Motel 6 was hosting the participants in a dog show. As I drove to my room I saw in the parking lot an average-sized man and a dwarf woman in deep, animated conversation. The man had a Great Dane on a leash. It was almost too much for me. I had drinks with an old lover. Replaced my hard drive.

Drove across Tennessee to visit friends in Memphis, and had some lovely conversation and cold beer to cut the incredible humidity. Stumbled into Arkansas trying to find my Motel 6. Went to the place where Dr. King was shot and then cried my way to Mississippi.

Found a cousin I barely knew in Atlanta and camped in her living room for several days of getting to know each other. By now the air mattress would stay inflated for about 45 minutes — long enough to fall asleep.

Saw New Orleans alone. Outside my Motel 6 there was an abandoned building with the words “Help we sick” spraypainted on the wall next to one of the balconies. I told the cops at the local McDonalds. They said the message had been there for months.

Drove across the grandeur of Texas in two days. By the time I made it to Phoenix, enduring the discomforts of the 108 degree heat and the zombified marriage of the friends I was visiting, the air mattress had completely given up and was almost entirely deflated after 20 minutes of rest.

Across the burning desert back to California I drove, through Los Angeles and up 101, returning to all of the inertia and uncertainty I had hoped to escape. Not to mention the dreadful futon. It took another two months to land a job in Berkeley, and I was again only able to swing this by the grace of my Berkeley friends. I slept on their kitchen floor for a month, on foam padding.

Found a place of my own in West Oakland. I slept on the floors for the first month. I’ve had a bed since February, with a curvy white metal frame from IKEA. Last weekend I was at Woody’s laundromat, in Oakland, doing my laundry. I was writing while I waited for a cycle to finish, and I realized that I felt like I lived here. Like this was my life now. Oakland. The laundromat. My apartment. I’m not thrilled with every detail of my circumstances, but at least for now, I’m not poised to take flight.

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