I'm still alive, and I'm in Berkeley! I was offline for four days of the ferry from Haines to Bellingham, then some serious driving, some wonderful hospitality, and catching up with dear, dear friends whom I haven't seen in way too long. Interesting that when I was in England last fall, I found myself telling people it wouldn't be so long until the next time I saw them (it had been three years that time). And now in the Bay Area, I've been saying the same thing to my friends here. Conceptually, AZ feels so much closer to everything/everywhere. My car has come down with a bunch of fairly serious issues. I'm so glad I caught it yesterday and so grateful that my friends have a mechanic they trust who is taking care of the issues today. In my first post from the road, my lesson 2, in part, was not to over-worry about noises or smells my car may or may not have been emitting, so it's interesting that the rider to that lesson now is to follow intuition. When the road pavement was washboarded and it sounded like a blown-out tire, I was glad to recognize that there was no need to worry along those lines. On the other hand, taking my car to the mechanic this morning because "it might be nothing but it's a specific noise that happens in a specific context that wasn't happening until last night" may have averted a breakdown in the middle of nowhere.
I'm sitting here with the atlas and trying to figure out the best route from here to Bryce Canyon, where I want to stop on my way to Tucson, preparing my spirit for the next reach.
In WA, OR, and CA the past four days have been full of torrential rain, with some thunder and lightning. Very different driving than in AK, very different flora. It was sweet to see my first palm tree a little ways north of Sacramento, my first prickly pears on the 405 west of Sacramento.
So much is different, of course. My conception of how many miles I can cover in a given time changes depending on the roads--the "220 miles = ca. 5 hours" based on Homer-to-Anchorage algorithm is gone. Stop-go traffic for over four hours in the Seattle area on Friday; three hundred miles in less than five hours on Saturday morning.
Different, too, being in an area with fruit trees everywhere, and produce stores everywhere. I'm so habituated to there being maybe three places in town where produce is available, and that's all for about seventy miles.
With all the friends I've visited, it's been as though no time had elapsed, although we hadn't seen each other for seven years. This gives me some hope and good feelings about preserving the precious friendships I just drove away from in AK. There is something so grounding about these enduring friendship connections: that they exist, that they continue even with nothing physical supporting them. As I pay attention to my own relationship with, orientation toward, connection with, the outside world, recently I've often become aware of being on autopilot; of looking at things and simply not knowing what I'm looking at. Without labeling, without judgment, I've been using my gift of language to put words, very very simple words, to what I'm seeing, using them as little mantras to bring myself to the present. Also, of understanding what I'm seeing to compare it to what I've seen elsewhere; to acknowledge and understand how one place differs from the next place. It is deepening my engagement with this transition, so that I'm inhabiting the place in which I currently am, rather than just blowing on through lost in my head.
Here are some pictures of what I've been seeing.
Snowy conifers from the boat:
