Occidental
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Occidental
The Temporal Trip of Joy
Britney and I just returned late last night from a three day, two night epic adventure. Amazing the way time shifts depending on where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re with.
This was a celebration of Britney’s 37th birthday. She’s three years younger than me. (As you all know I just turned 40 on NYE.) Thirty-seven still seems “young” to me. Anyway. We had a 5.5 hour drive from Lompoc. We’d originally considered leaving Friday night after she got off work, but in the end we were both drained from the week and decided to shove out Saturday morning.
I’d been looking forward to the trip, but I have to admit I was also fretting the short amount of time compared to the time driving. Much of it would at least be along my hallowed, golden Highway 101, symbol of my eternal lurid youth. We’d be driving through the Bay Area on the east side, along 880/580, so we’d be in that area together for the first time. The game-plan is for the two of us to move to a small house I own in El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, in June, 2024, when her son is 18 and out of high school. She’s always craved the idea of living in the Bay Area and, ironically, I lived there for ten years (2008-2019) and have always known I’d eventually move back. The key fits the lock, right?
We also had light rain on and off to worry about. Well, for me to worry about. I don’t mind rain, I just don’t like it while driving, especially if it’s heavy.
The trip started bumpily. Her front tires were very low. We’d meant to get new tires but it hadn’t worked out that week. We figured we’d stop every few hours and add air. But that Saturday morning—three days ago—the tires were really low. So we called a couple places. One place said to just drive over and try. I took her car there and, ten minutes before opening, there was already a long line. We tried another place. It was 8:15am. They said they could do it. Ninety bucks per tire. While putting the new (used) tires on the front, the guy found a screw three inches deep in the back tire. All the tires were ancient. So I told the guy to just put four new (used) tires on. Done and done. I paid the guy.
By 10am we were on the road. Not too bad all things considered. Britney and I travel well. We learned that during my own birthday trip back in early January when we went to Joshua Tree for a couple days. (Read about that trip here: ) I love this Highway 101 North drive. It feels safe, warm, sensual, familiar. Like being with a lover. And since I actually was with my real-life lover, it felt even better. We listened to mellow music, rolled the windows down a bit, and relaxed. We talked. We smiled. We in turn watched either the twisting road or else the green mountains and flat fields.
Around 3:30/4pm (we’d stopped briefly a few times) we arrived in the Bay Area. Downtown Oakland to our east, the sparkling bay (half covered in fog like gray gauze) and San Francisco to our west. The Bay Bridge, stunning. Minute shafts of late sunlight chinking through the gray clouds.
It felt special and strange being here with Britney. Like pushing through some temporal portal, going through the 4th dimension. For a whole decade I’d lived there, longer than anywhere else since leaving my parents’ house when I was 19, in 2002. The Bay Area had always meant, for me, a magisterial realism—the Manhattan of the West Coast, so to speak. (Though very different culturally and aesthetically and geographically.)
And on a deeper, more personal level: It had meant My Thirties. It had meant being with my ex, who I’d bought my El Cerrito house with in 2015. It had meant, before that, early sobriety, early publication of my first short stories, submitting my novels to literary agents, in fact interning in Sausalito with a literary agent. And still further back it had meant crashing into a figurative wall and getting sober in 2010, at age 27, and even beyond that, my own personal Big Bang explosion, it had meant alcoholism and anarchy circa 2008-2010, and first moving to San Francisco with yet another ex. Long, dated history. But deep history nonetheless.
So it was with these metaphorical goggles on that I showed her the outside of my little house on Lawrence Street. She loved it, which thrilled me beyond explanation. She owns her house in Lompoc. I own mine in El Cerrito. (Which means Little Hill.) We both want to leave Lompoc. So if she didn’t like my house we’d be in trouble. (Then again we’ve considered moving to all manner of cities, including Boston, NYC, or Europe.) I showed her the nearby epic views of the bay and S.F. We got Peruvian food half a mile from the house. After stuffing our mouths with Peruvian corn-chips, and gazing curiously at the early twenties couple sitting completely alone outside with masks on (they of course removed the masks when the food arrived), we hit the road once more.
*
A little before dark on Saturday night we arrived at the place. It was basically a “tree house” up in the hills a little ways in a tiny town an hour north of the Bay Area called Occidental. A tiny, narrow strip of road with semi-fancy Italian restaurants and coffee shops. Two grocery stores. A smattering of bars. Wood smoke rose up curling out of red-brick or stone chimneys. The smell was delicious. Redwood and Douglas-Fir-covered forest surrounded us. Bright green moss was omnipresent. Thick, jutting trees hundreds if not thousands of years old rose up like organic skyscrapers. It was cold out. Moisture slinked everywhere, in all the psychic and geographical cracks. Everything carried a slick wetness. Drizzle yawned against the car’s windshield as we drove slowly down that road. The sounds of big wet truck tires lazily rolling came to us. A woodsy, Northern California paradise.
We brought Frankie, Britney’s cute-as-hell 13.5-year-old Border Collie. (Sixty-seven percent Border Collie, anyway.) He mostly slept in the back of the car surrounded by way too much gear for the short time we had. When we got to the place the old hippie guy—tall, wide, gray-haired, pony-tail, handlebar mustache, big goofy grin, strong vibes—came out and greeted us. We chatted for a couple minutes. He told us briefly how to use the sauna. There was a whole area downstairs which included a tiny little sauna; a hot-tub; a pool (with a cover on it); a “cantina” area with a rain-resistant corrugated tin roof under which sat a couch, chairs, a little kitchen, a bathroom (toilet paper went in a small blue container, not the toilet); a second couch; guest books; an electric jug for heating water; etc.
Upstairs sat one thing: Our tiny treehouse. It was perfect. Two beds. About five square feet beyond that. Windows. An old gun and an even older canoe paddle sat perched above the bed, souvenirs of another era. There was an electric radiator/heater. Standing on the top of the stairs, looking down, you saw the mass of tangled green forest, wood smoke rising from those chimneys. Dusk. It looked like the Wild West. Serene. Splendid. Magical. Startling. Transcendent. Untouched by man. Like the very edge of the world somehow, isolated and compact, filled with natural beauty and timelessness.
We spent that night reading, talking, getting warm and smiling under that downstairs cantina. The rain pattered lightly (and sometimes hard as hell) against the corrugated tin roof. We felt safe and warm and happy. Joyous. Frankie explored the perimeter, walking sketchily along the edges of the pool. We kept a close eye on him; if he fell in he’d get caught in the cover and likely drown. I wasn’t too worried. I was fast. But still.
*
The next day we got up and spent the morning in the Cantina again. The rain had finished. It was silent all around us. We had tea and coffee and we read. Inspired by my recent reread of it, Britney was slowly machete-ying her way through Crime and Punishment. I had moved on to Milan Kundera’s Slowness (1995). I’d never read the Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But since two friends had recently (over the past 18 months) bequeathed me many of their classic books, I basically have a library and could pick any book at random. I had picked Kundera, and I was very glad I had. He is a consummate stylist; a literary genius. Where Dostoevsky is not so much in love with language as he is with plot, depth of characters and interiority and philosophy, Kundera (of a completely different generation and country) is a meaty lover of the written word. Diction; that is his true love. I couldn’t put the book down. Highlighters emerged; marginalia was produced. Intense concentration was aroused.
But then we went into the small town and got breakfast at a little local spot. A greasy spoon, as they call them. Delicious. Exactly what the doctor ordered. Eggs. Hashbrowns. Cheese. Avocado. More tea and coffee. The town reminded me of Ojai, where I grew up, only smaller and more isolated. Old buildings had dates plastered in big black letters going back to 1876. Plaques discussed the old Italian family who’d been a fixture in this place long ago. Big men in plaid shirts and tall women who seemed distracted and half-angry walked around (locals).
That night we ate Italian at a local spot. It was absolutely the best food I’ve had in years. Ravioli. Bread. Salad. And it was not expensive. There were black and white photographs of the local families and homes of yesteryear on the walls. It had a romantic feeling to it all. A bar was attached to the front of the restaurant. When we left we walked slowly by it. A woman in black dress and makeup eyed us as we passed. She spoke to a large, mid-forties man wearing a faded white sweater and with haggard, warn green eyes and a massive beard. The man was clearly drunk. We heard this line from him to her as we passed out the door:
“We’ve living in SiBEARDsia, population 420.”
Britney and I laughed our asses off as we slipped outside, the door shutting lightly behind us.
That night we repeated the evening before: Cantina; hanging in the hot-tub, gazing up at the stars above, hearing the little wandering creek down below the property, forgetting everything else, forgetting “real life.”
I felt like we got closer on this trip. I felt that way about Joshua Tree, too. There’s something about getting out of the pressure-cooker of daily life that bonds two people. I felt my love for her deepen even more, which is really something because my love for her was already deeper than the Grand Canyon. And yet still there was more depth to plumb. There will be for the rest of our lives, I’m sure. We discussed the past and the present and the future. My house in El Cerrito. Hers in Lompoc. Travel. Her son, slowly spreading his wings. Our cats. Frankie. Adulthood. Literature. Language. Media. Etc. She is my best friend, not only my lover.
In the hot tub I remembered vividly my father and I in our jacuzzi circa 1993, 1994, when I was 10, 11 years old, the two of us sitting in the hot tub in the cold of January, the brilliant white stars pulsating against the black sky of Ojai, Dad explaining to me what stars actually were, how many light years away their light was, the Milky Way, the Cosmos. These are warm memories.
*
Monday morning we got up and did the Cantina routine. Britney checked her emails for more birthday gifts and greetings, which had been slowly but steadily rolling in since Saturday. We read. Had caffeine. We took our time gathering our stuff and cleaning up and then we got into her white Prius and left. We were out by 11am. The place had reminded me of my paternal grandmother’s massive yet inexpensive “mansion” in coastal southern Oregon. I remembered being there when I was a boy, in the early nineties, staring out her massive floor-to-ceiling windows at the river and the bridge and the ocean, seeing those little cars down there like ants.
We ended up getting breakfast at the same little greasy spoon. Then we fled our little hidden paradise. An hour or so south we stopped in Mill Valley and did the Dipsea trail, with Frankie, a 4-mile loop which in the first 45 minutes included half a dozen sets of brutally steep staircases. I partially carried Frankie up half of them. The trail rose and rose and then flattened out into a narrow trail, moist and covered by thick dense forest. God: The gorgeous smells! The views! The beautiful, multimillion dollar homes! We fantasized about buying a house here. What a privilege that would be!
Two hours later we were back in the car. We stopped at the Mill Valley Whole Foods, nearly starving, ate, and then back at it. Britney wanted to drive through the city so we took 101 South over the Golden Gate Bridge and that old warm feeling came back, seeing the Pacific Ocean and the claw of the Marin Headlands and the city skyline and the Bay Bridge to our left. The Marina District. Lombard. I’d first moved to San Francisco when I’d just turned 25, after a six-week excursion with my ex around western Europe. Twenty-five. How many wild parties had there been? How many dingy, nasty bars in North Beach? How many coffee shops had I written at? What about my last drink, on September 24th, 2010, at The Saloon off Columbus Ave? How many shitty retail jobs, like one in Hayes Valley? How many BART rides, how many MUNI trips? How many hungover mornings in Oakland?
We cut back onto Van Ness and then through the city.
*
We didn’t get home until 9:30pm last night, Feb 6. Somehow, the trip had been three days, two nights but it had felt like two weeks, and not in a bad way. In a stupendous, wondrous way. That word again: transcendent. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t get internet the whole time (we had WiFi but I chose not to get on). This meant no texting, no emails, no Substack. We were incredibly present with each other. Perhaps it was also the reading I was doing; the ethereal otherworldly realm of Kundera. Or maybe it was simply the getting away from (the escaping from) the drudgery of the simple day to day. Probably it was a mix of all this. Either way, time seemed to have stretched and moved at its own unique pace, and this I adored and appreciated. Not like 2020 Covid lockdown time, where everything seemed to almost literally stop entirely and the clock felt truly broken. But good, slow, healthy time. Real time. As opposed to daily routine time.
Whatever it was—it was wonderful and I want more of it.
Good (I think) to be back among you all.
