Photo: Robyn Sadowski
I’ve been on the road for a month and a half. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon but the smoke is so thick that the tinted visor on my motorcycle helmet makes it too dark to see well. Ashfall stings the exposed skin on my neck as if I were riding through a sandstorm. I’m dizzy and a little nauseous. I’m worried I’ll get loopy and botch a corner or grey out.
That stuff is ash.
I'm on the west shore of Lake Almanor, making this the Dixie fire. Yesterday I rode through Paisley, twenty miles from Oregon's Bootleg fire, in similar conditions. The trees turn ghostly and then disappear in the dirty yellow haze within a half mile. I can’t see very far ahead, but it’s been nothing but smoke and ash for miles behind me so I might as well press on.
It was a hard winter for us as a couple, and the time seemed right to let it all go for a bit and just wander around the Pacific Northwest. For the first time in twelve years I was unemployed and untethered to the obligations of corporate communication expectations, and she can pick up and set down work whenever she likes. So I rode my motorcycle up to her in Truckee, we packed it along with a bunch of camping gear in the truck, and we set off.
We went to the Bay first and stayed on a friend’s fixer-upper sailboat. We sailed out to Angel Island and hiked to the top. I’ve never seen such an encompassing view of the place I lived for seven years, the place my family has been in and out of for most of the 20th century. My grandfathers and father spent time on Treasure Island while in the Navy in WW2 and then Vietnam. My great grandfather wrote about visiting San Francisco as a boy in 1908. My grandparents were married in Palo Alto on December 1, 1941. My brother and his husband live there now. My parents met at work in San Jose in the late 70’s, part of the first techie wave, when Silicon Valley got its name.
I feel nothing for the place, neither love nor hate. I don’t want to live there, but that’s just information. Housing prices, taxes, crowdedness, NIMBYism. A losing score in the decision matrix of where to put down roots, that’s all.
In the mountain towns some locals call people who come up and release balloons into the air, act entitled towards wait staff, and bring their housing prices with them Bayholes. It's pretty unfair to paint everyone from an area with the same brush, but it only takes a few visiting jerks to give a place a bad name. The irony is that most of the people “from” the Bay are no more from the Bay than I’m from that one mountain town, or the Mojave, or even Santa Cruz where I was born. We’re all just passing through. Travelers getting mad at each other for pooping on top of the dirt we laid claim to only yesterday. (But seriously: dig a hole, *then* poop into the hole, then cover it up. How hard is it?)
We got over to the coast, turned right, and camped in the National Forests along the way. Just go until you want to stop driving, hang a right up the nearest river canyon, and keep an eye out for national forest roads or BLM signs. Don’t get too close to any land that has an unusually high number of “Keep Out” signs, privacy tarps along the road, and rows of white vinyl covered greenhouses glimpsed between the trees. They’re doing their part to keep a multi-billion dollar industry going, but they don’t care much for drop-in visitors.
When we heard about the heat wave about to bring Mojave-style temperatures to Portland, which we were near, we figured folks would flee to the coast for relief. We snagged a spot in the forest just in time, and spent the next four days dipping in the river and watching people drive up and down the forest road, looking for a spot to camp. All full here, friend, sorry, keep moving. We got here first. This spot is ours.
The next weekend we hunkered down on the flank of Mt Hood for the Independence Day weekend and record crowds in National Parks. We don’t care much for crowds, which is more than a little hypocritical of us rootless ones, us without a place to call ours, we who look at each other and shrug when people ask us where we’re from. Who knows? Do you want the long confusing answer, or the short simple lie? We don’t know where we’re from, and we don’t know where we’re going, although we’d like to.
We tramped through ancient Redwood forests, watched Golden Eagles fish in pristine mountain lakes, hiked through rainforests that felt like a set from Jurassic Park, saw old and new friends, got contentedly lost in the most incredible used bookstores, and learned a new rhythm of life on the road. Robyn and I came closer together. It was a rich, worthwhile experience that I wouldn't have been able to pull off anytime in the past 12 years. I'm grateful for it.
And I’m done with this sort of thing. I’m going to sell my truck — I mean it this time. The invisible planet poison spewing out its tailpipe is not unrelated to the cinders stinging my throat skin, the vaporized forests coating the inside of my lungs, my idle plans to build an underground shelter on my parent’s land as a refuge from the terrible fucking heat. The wretched irony of whining about how climate change induced events are interfering with my internal-combustion-engine-powered road trip is not lost on me.
Yes I had fun, but I don’t need to be rolling along at 18mpg, capable of covering 500 miles in a day, to have fun. Militaries and firefighters need that sort of mobile power. I’m just looking for a good time, and am mostly indifferent to the means. Maybe the next time I want to wander around, I’ll have even more fun going slower and being forced to come up with creative solutions to “I’m here, and I want to get there, how can I pull that off?” Maybe I’ll ride a bike, or walk, or hitch, or rideshare. Or just not go, and fart around in the garden or make some art or cook a fancy meal. Instead of wandering for the purpose of connecting with different kinds of people, maybe I can just open my door to wanderers and share a meal with them, invite them into the garden to get our hands dirty together.
The speed of the trip dictated a very short amount of time to make decisions and to plan. A few times I got into a situation where the most responsible decision was to stop at a gas station and buy some bars so I wouldn’t bonk out in the forest on my motorcycle. I ate out a couple times. We rented an airbnb once, and paid for a campground twice. Those purchases were due to not having pre-solved rare and novel problems that have a tendency of cropping up with some frequency on fast road trips. I could invest effort into pre-solving those kinds of problems for future road trips, or I could read the writing on the wall and just not go on road trips like that anymore.
I still don’t know where I’m going to live, but I want to live somewhere. I don’t know how I’m going to pull it off or what it’s going to look like exactly, but this is a journey where preparation isn’t what’s called for: beginning is. There’s nothing to do but to get on with it.
We can't go back to where we came from, even if we could figure out where exactly that was, which we can't. It's on fire, it's underwater, there's no water there anymore, it's been paved over, it's someone else's now. I can’t see very far ahead, but behind me is a life on a world that doesn't exist anymore, so I might as well press on.
Photo: Robyn Sadowski