Diary

I have had an interesting couple of days. I was all set for my travels beginning in ten days, when I got an email from Viking asking me to fill in for a cancelation, two weeks going from Venice to Istanbul in early October. They’ve been interested since before Covid in having me lecture for their line, and indeed my first assignment was cancelled when the industry shut down in 2020. Since a number of places new to me were on the itinerary, I said yes, then began scrambling to redo all my travel plans, dust off and rework eight lectures I haven’t given for several years, and complete the paperwork for the assignment, all in ten days.

The pressure to add this to all the other prep associated with going away for an extended period was stressing me out, but I knew I could do it. My interchanges with Viking over whether one of their Covid-related rules for speaker travel could be waived since I couldn’t meet it, and how the financial impact to me of changed plans would be addressed, led them to understand that this was not a simple matter of flying me from home to the ship and back. They were more than willing to accommodate me, but in the midst of all that I got another email asking if I really wanted the assignment or would prefer to do something different at a later date that I (and they) would have more time and less hassle to prepare for. They said if I wanted to back out, they had another speaker who could step in.

For maybe five minutes I considered saying that I indeed wanted the assignment, but that little voice that helps me make the right decisions began whispering and I decided to back out. I am feeling such a flood of relief right now, but of course I have flickers of regret that I won’t have the experiences the assignment would have provided. No Istanbul, no Troy, not yet.

I will have other experiences instead, though, and I am soooo ready to begin the adventure. I am all set for travel in Montenegro, Croatia, and Slovenia, plus the northernmost points in Italy that despite the times I lived in northern Italy in the past, I have yet to see. A week in the Dolomites, plus visits to Bergamo and Locarno—all things I would have given up for this assignment.

This was already the biggest stretch of my life travel-wise (7 weeks on land, solo, one small suitcase, using public transportation almost exclusively). Funny how adding an assignment on a cruise line I haven’t worked with before, solo on a ship bigger than I’m used to, seemed more daunting to me than figuring out how to get a bus from point A to point B in a country where I don’t speak the language. Still, psychologically, that’s the way it felt.

Maybe it’s the greater opportunity for growth that that little voice is guiding me toward, some insight or experience I would have missed. The only way to find out is to go and discover what awaits.

For now, I have deleted all the things I needed to do that got added to my calendar. Today will be a normal day—a walk, a “swim and gym,” and a few little errands. No crazy. I like that.

I ran across this wonderful poem today. Mary Oliver left a few months back to see what lies beyond life in this world but she has left me s wth so much wisdom and beauty in her writing.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot,
or a few small stones; just
pay attention, and then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate; this isn’t
a contest, but the doorway

into thanks and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

–Mary Oliver

It’s a mixed bag having a blog. It makes me feel obligated to have something to say, and often I don’t. And then again, when I ask myself “don’t you have something to say about all this?” often I discover that I do. This poem reminds me that I am not entered into some significance contest with myself. I have nothing to try to top, no reason to judge whether my insights or experiences are worthy of words, no need to set a mental timer on how long it has been since I last wrote.

Mary Oliver thinks of her poems as prayers. Maybe that is the special nature of poetry, but even words far more prosaic, like mine here, are also doorways to gratitude. They take me to unintended places, they burnish rough thoughts, they tell me to pause for a moment before moving on. The thoughts I write down become smarter than I think I am. I thank my blog for that, and for the inner voice that it nurtures and challenges to speak.

It is significant to me that I ran across this poem today, on the first anniversary of the day I left San Diego to relocate to Canada. I had a conscious goal of reinvention, and I wanted my blog to reflect that. I have gone back through my entries for this year and I am overwhelmed by the words I did indeed find for the myriad kinds of growth I was undertaking. And here I am, ready to move on to the flurry of travel that will be my next adventure, but right now, I want to sit here and think about the fallen leaves underfoot, the snowflakes, the waterfalls, the sunrises and sunsets, the living water and all the other things that have been part of my growth and sustenance this year. I offer up my gratitude, which indeed is beyond words.

I dont know why, but I hate getting wet. I dont mind being wet; I just hate the experience of getting there Sure, I’ll wade ankle deep on a beach, or dangle my hand from the side of a sailboat, but immersion is something I avoid, and do not—I repeat NOT!—splash me, squirt me, or even drizzle me just because you think its fun. I may politely pretend I’m okay, but secretly I want to strangle you.

I have often wondered if I may have had a near-drowning incident that I was too young to remember, or—when I let my thoughts go this direction—whether something awful involving water happened to me in a past life. All I know is that most of my life—in Southern California, no less!—I have had to overcome reluctance to get into a pool (even a jacuzzi), or dash into the surf.

The weirdest part is that I even feel this way about taking showers. I work up a full sweat exercising and a few hours later I am still in my gym clothes. Then, even when the shower is nice and warm, I enter with a bit of a grimace. Then I am fine and enjoy the loveliness of it as much as anyone else. I have lived alone for most of Covid, and—-well maybe stories about personal grooming should remain secret.

In the past I was willing to get wet when it would lead to something I wanted. When I had a high school boyfriend who wanted to frolic in the surf , I would do it. When my children were young, I got in pools with them. For a while I even took up scuba diving, because I loved the otherworldliness of it. It’s not like getting wet was ever a phobia, it was a low drone that I could handle.

Around the time my first marriage was getting too toxic to endure, I also disliked my job immensely. The end result was that when I drove to and from work, I was miserable about where I was headed both coming and going. I took up lap swimming (yes, I hated getting in the pool) because the calming and meditative quality of it soothed my spirit and caressed my body in ways I was starved for. Besides, it was the only therapy I could afford.

I don’t remember why and when I stopped. All I know is that it was sometime between 25 and 30 years ago. Recently, here in my new life in Victoria, I got this urge out of the blue to start swimming again. I think it was because I have tried, as Thoreau put it, to live deliberately here, not to settle for sameness, and routines with mediocre returns. I joined an athletic club that has a lap pool,. I had to go buy a bathing suit because even with all my cruising, I didn’t have one. Then with a fair amount of anxiety, I went out and stood by my lane for the first time, looking at the water in this pool

I remember saying under my breath, “Okay, Laurel, only have real problems.” To view getting in that pool as a problem was utterly optional. There was no threat. There was no down side. Normally reason doesn’t work on anything irrational, but it did this time, I guess because I was ready for it. In I went.

The first day I could barely swim 3 laps because that visceral part of me that wasnt happy about what I was doing was making it hard to relax and just breath and feel my body move. That was about 6 weeks ago, and I am up to 15 laps in half an hour now, which is enough of a goal for me. It’s been a while since I gave any thought at all to getting in. I just do it. Just like in the past, I want something from getting wet. I want fitness, I want the full presentness of swimming, i want to feel my body working as a whole, I want the utter change from everything else I do, and I want the wonderful way I feel afterwards. What a loss it would be to let the nonsense about getting wet take all that from me.

My life is pretty carefree these days, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have tons of boring and frustrating must-dos, time sucks, and petty aggravations.There are phone calls to make, mistakes to rectify, appointments to keep, business to attend to. Even though each is small individually, they are real problems. And that pile is big enough. I’m going to do my best only to have real problems from now on.

Next up, that thing I have with heights….

When I am visiting an island by car, my attention is always drawn to roads that go all the way to the water’s edge at the island’s extremities. I don’t really much care if there is anything in particular to see when I pull up at that final stop sign. After all, it is the journey I’m focusing on, not the destination.

I had that kind of day, driving from the tiny village of Sturgies Bay at the southern end of Galiano Island to the northern end, where the road ends at the boundary of a marine reserve that can be accessed only by boat. Nice to do sometime, but today, no boat.

On the way up, I stopped at another regional park at Montague Bay (see photos below), and if that was all I did today I would have been pleased indeed. I sauntered along a beach made of crushed shells, some of them left from middens created thousands of years ago by indigenous people. But I had more island to explore, so I pushed on.

I noticed as I drove the narrow and winding road that i was going way below the speed limit (unusual for me), and I realized that my inner metronome had slowed. Maybe it was the record heat that took something out of me, but the car was air conditioned, so there goes that theory. I think it was that voice that seems to surface when I am surrounded by natural beauty, the voice that says “what matters is this moment. Savor it.”

So I did. When I got to the top of the island, there was a gravel road that let me go a little further, and when I reached the end, I saw a sign for Crystal Mountain Retreat, an east-meets-west center for Buddhist meditation and study, clearly deserted at the moment. The sign said people were welcome to walk the paths, so in I went. After a few minutes, I ran across this tiny clearing with a small statue of the Buddha and a few prayer flags so tattered and faded it took me a moment to see what they were.

A little further on, this beautiful banner marked the continuation of the trail.

And then, there i was, surrounded by strings of prayer flags along and above the path. A little further on were a few open-air buildings for meetings, but it didn’t look as if anyone had been there in quite a while. I was the only human in the woods.

I have always loved the Buddha. I love Buddhist temples. I love Buddhist countries. There is a Buddha presence that permeates these places and I find it instantly calming. I pressed my hands together, repeating the mantra I learned in Bhutan, and everything fell away except the moment. These woods. This day. This me.

I thought about sacredness, and its connection to the human will. This place was sacred in part because the Crystal Mountain founders decided to see it that way, but it was sacred before, and will be sacred when they abandon it, no different from all the land on this island, and everywhere.

But still, there is something about choosing to sanctify a place or a thing, or a time. Religions make a distinction between the sacred and the ordinary, and so many practices follow from this. Sometimes we put on a hat or take one off, sometimes we remove shoes, sometimes we don a robe. Sometimes we light candles, or blow them out. Some of us cross ourselves at the door of a church, or draw a sacred circle around a spot on the ground. It’s all to say, “that is one world; I am crossing into another.” I feel sorry for people who can’t related to sacredness, for without it, a lifetime is just one long stretch of the ordinary.

On my way back I drove right by the two remaining things I wanted to see.( Everything is very poorly marked here. I guess most people already know where things are.) When I realized my mistake, I was almost back at the other end of the island. I was momentarily disappointed, but then I thought that perhaps it was a good thing because the beautiful places I visited can stand by themselves in my memories without competition.

I went off in search of nothing today, and i found something precious. Perspective. And a little missing piece of myself. Both of those are roads without ends.

I moved yesterday to new lodgings in James Bay, the oldest part of Victoria.  Old Is a relative term here, since the city was founded only 160 years ago. Unlike San Diego, where I spent almost my entire adult life to date, here there aren’t even remnants, like the mission and Old Town, of anything earlier. Of course it isn’t true that there had been no one here, as I sit now on land that was home to the Lekwungen people, land that was never ceded and that they were pushed from when the value of the site as a trading post  became apparent to the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Yesterday afternoon I took a walk in the neighborhood, and found a street where every house had a plaque on the gate (yes, fences, gates, and front yard flower gardens!). The plaque said when the house was built and who the first occupants were (examples below)  They were all from the first decades of the 1900s, when population density caused a push in James Bay all the way out to the oceanfront. While mansions were cropping up on higher ground elsewhere, James Bay became the part of Victoria where those of modest means could build homes.  

The plaques on the gates also stated the occupation of the first resident. I was astonished, and sobered by the reckoning this invited. In those days a foreman,, or a carpenter, or a manager of a business could build a home for his family on only his income.  And these are large homes by today’s standards, although several look smaller in the photographs.

I stare at homes like these, thinking about how the families of workers like these live today. We hear a lot about the hollowing out of the middle class, and here we see it manifested.

I just can’t stop thinking about what this says about the trajectories of the two great democracies in North America.  In the mid-twentieth century, at least in urban settings, the key to upward mobility shifted from acquiring a skilled trade to getting higher education.  Since that wasn’t possible for most working class people, they began to fall behind. As the service economy grew, the value of labor became harder to measure. If you don’t actually produce anything, well, how much is your labor really worth?  

The answer is, not much. The same jobs that bought family homes now offer no such promise. An article in the Atlantic pointed out recently that television’s Simpsons represent a family norm that doesn’t exist for most—a working class man with a non-wage earning wife and kids, living in a  single-family home.  

The promise of the last decades has been tied to the college degree, with a subsequent, and I think tragic, undervaluing of skilled labor. The irony of this emphasis on higher education is not well known.  The GI Bill after World War II was designed not just as a reward for service, but to keep throngs of returning soldiers from immediately flooding the job market, undercutting wages and eroding livelihoods.  The net effect was to set in motion a sea change in that labor market, so that careers that could be had in the past without higher education now set a college degree as a job requirement. This is true for skilled tradespeople like electricians, all the way to middle managers in the public or private sectors. Mentorship by one generation to the next as a path to success just doesn’t cut it anymore.  Nor does it matter if anything you learned in college directly prepares you for a job. You simply must have the diploma.

Who owns these beautiful, historic homes today?  My guess is you will find very few without college degrees, and most, even with that, probably require two breadwinners. How many are owned by foremen or clerks?  Get real.

 I said in my last post that I had things to say about how quarantine has had a positive effect on my spirit and soul.  Of course, I now  feel obligated to say what that is, and i can’t.  

Lao Tse said of the Dao that the minute you try to describe it you have lost it, and I think the same can be said for trying to explain oneself. So I’m going to do something else instead.  I’m just going to let the random contents of my brain out for a little  spin without trying to force them to add up to anything.

Someone once said it’s not what you look at but what you see that matters, and the dock here has been a good place to practice. Here’s how that went this morning as I sat in the warm sunshine with my coffee.

The water is so calm, it makes perfect reflections of the trees

The movement of these reflections  reminds me of impressionist paintings

I wonder how they would paint this…

I wish I could paint

Could I learn to paint?

Where is my heron?  It’s high tide. It probably doesn’t like that

I wonder if it flew over and thought, “ oh, crap,  my shallows are gone. Maybe I should go back and take a nap.”

A nap sounds nice. Maybe after lunch…

Oh look! Two kayaks!

I wonder what it’s like to be out there right now…

The water just inches from you, the sound of the oars in the water…

I wonder what it’s like to be that duck over there…

I wonder what it’s like to be that puff of wind on the water…

Wow!  There’s a dog on that paddle board with that man!

I wonder what it’s like to be that dog…

I need a photo of the dog!

Do I really need a photo?

Nah.

There’s a man sitting on the dock on the other side of the inlet

Has he noticed me too?

I wonder what I look like to him….

Funny how we never actually see our own faces

If I cross my eyes I can see my nose.

Oh wow—a raccoon— no two! 

The smaller one is in front, turning to watch out for the other. 

What is the understanding they have?

Are those little squeaks coming from them?

Their world is perfectly in order.

It would be nice to see an otter

I can relate to otters…

Is that why I like them? Should that matter?

Quarantine is over tomorrow. I can’t believe I don’t really want to leave.

I should have put on sunscreen.

I should have put on more sunscreen my whole life

We used to call it suntan lotion, like a tan was the whole point

If I were young I’d be wearing a bathing suit and trying to get a good tan

Now I am out here because the sun feels good both where I’m  bare and where I’m not

Faint sounds of sirens, hammers and plane engines— people having days unlike mine…

I  have nothing at all to worry about.

Maybe I should go accomplish something…

Why? I’m good right here.

So that’s the report from inside my head. I am very far from Buddhist enlightenment with such a distractible mind, but it was nice to take a practice from meditation and just let my thoughts pass through without judgment, without thinking I have to do something about them. I have the affliction shared by most writers (and many others) to try to make everything mean something.  It’s nice to let that go for a while. 

The poet Archibald MacLeish said “a poem should not mean, but be,” I think that applies equally well to the poem I try to make of my life.   

This second week of being grounded ( i.e. in quarantine) has been an interesting transitional time for me. Being forced to curtail my usual distractions has given me an opportunity to get  in touch with myself in ways I think will be of lasting benefit to my body, mind and spirit. Since I have a few more days here, I will stick with the first one, my presently beleaguered corpus, and leave the other two for a subsequent post.. 

All this sitting is hard. Really, it’s the hardest part. Occasionally during my regular life I will veg for a day or two, a but typically I am out and about, and it is a rare day in which I don’t walk a few miles, if nothing more. I see now how much that affects my sense of my age. A few more weeks of this, and I will indeed feel my seventies in a way I normally don’t. 

Not being able to exercise is the best possible reminder of how important using my body is to my well being. I see going to the gym as a way of meet-and-greet with my body. Hello arms, hello shoulders, hello legs! Even on days when I have had to drag myself to the gym, I am always glad for that check-in with myself.Far more hellos to my abs and back are definitely in order when I am out of here!

Like so many people, I am not happy with my post-Covid body. I loathe tiny workout rooms, and I am not the type to get down on the floor and do crunches, so I have had long hiatuses from gyms while on cruises. Whenever I got back, I bemoaned how much ground I had lost, how little stamina I had, how much less weight I could handle on the equipment—the whole gamut of remorse. No more!  I am going to say, without judgment, “this is the baseline. Beloved body, let’s work on it from here.”

Fitness is one part of the toll Covid has taken on my body, but something I have learned over the decades is how aging redistributes weight. I kept enough clothing in the back of my closet over the years, as my weight fluctuated, to know that even when I got back to the point where a jacket or dress ought to fit, it just didn’t anymore.  I know some women who have managed to keep their shape from changing too much, through fanatical efforts at fitness, the help of hormone replacement drugs, and expensive nips and tucks, but I am not going there. I accept that this is my body at 71. I can make it fitter, but I can’t get back through diet and exercise the waist, flat belly, and tight upper arms I once had. I need to embrace this in the same way I do my six inches of gray hair. It’s what I really look like naturally now, and that’s fine. Aging gracefully..That’s the thing.

And speaking of weight, one of the things I tossed when I simplified my life was my scale. I don’t know how much I weigh, and I’m not going to find out, because I will bring unnecessary judgment on myself. It’s not so drastic that I have to replace my wardrobe. I just can’t wear some of my clothes anymore. 

Considering how much life changed with Covid, I have done fairly well, even if almost nothing with a button closure, top or bottom, still fits.  Even if  I hadn’t done this well, it would still be okay. I am working very hard right now on banishing self-judgment. I hadn’t realized how much the opinions of others about my appearance still mattered to me, or how narrow my parameters were for feeling good about how I looked. I still care.  That’s probably not going to change.  Still, now I think that when I look in the mirror I will notice more how I am taking care of myself, rather than how anyone else will judge me. And with that in mind, I took the photo at top today (wow, do I ever need a haircut!)

Thank you, body, for getting me through Covid. Enough of the horrified looks in the mirror. Enough of the fear of the bathing suit. You look just fine, and my guess is you will soon look better not because I am unhappy with you but because soon you will come more into line with the way I usually live. And if I don’t fit into all my clothes, I’ll let someone else have them.  Fitting into my life is far more important. 

 I have finished my vaccinations. i am nearing the halfway point in my quarantine with two negative tests behind me.  I am ready to burst out and be the post-lockdown Laurel when my fourteen days are up. And boy, do I have plans for her!

This feeling of bursting out is bigger than that, though. In the last year I have had an amazing run of creativity that I haven’t written much about, because…well, that’s just the way I am.  I feel ready to share a bit more now.

When I first started writing for mainstream adult audiences, my first book, Until Our Last Breath, was non-fiction.  I found that terribly frustrating because I had to strangle my desire to imagine stories beyond what were in the historical record.  What I really wanted to do, I decided, was exactly the opposite: write fiction, where I could make better use of my imagination.

What I loved most about historical fiction was the dialogue I was free to invent.  In fact, my first drafts of books are heavily weighted towards dialogue because that’s how I find out who the characters are.  I think my books in the end rely more heavily on dialogue than many authors, because that’s what I love writing most.

So last year, when I revisited my decision to quit writing historical fiction, I realized that my love of dialogue made me well suited to writing plays instead. Upon discovering the story of Alfred Loomis, a Wall Street tycoon who used his private fortune to fund some of the most critical research in World War II, I knew in my bones it needed to be a play.  And now it is.  The Glass House was written in the months before I left for British Columbia.

I loved writing a play, and immediately upon arriving in Victoria, I began writing another, about the city’s “favourite daughter,” Emily Carr.  I am pleased to say that, with the support of several people in the theatre community, EX3 (Emily Times Three) will be workshopped later this month in Victoria, and from there, I hope to get it placed for production.

Something about writing these plays reawakened my desire to tell stories, and I came across a wonderful one a few months back. Novelists are reluctant to talk too much about their plans for future books for fear of being scooped, so I won’t say more, except that in the next few days I hope to write the first pages of a novel about one of the most amazing female world explorers ever. This one is too complicated to be a play, but it would make the most amazing musical.  SInce that is probably beyond me, I’ll write a novel instead.  Then, who knows. Anyone out there looking for the next Hamilton?

Oh, and one more thing:  shortly before my husband Jim died in 2012, I finished the first draft of my fifth novel, The Intuitive.  I put it aside then because I had a far more important matter to pay undivided attention to.   I had lost all my enthusiasm for the publishing process, so after his death, I never opened the file on my computer. Actually, I didn’t write anything. For years. Another project since I moved to Victoria has been a huge revision of that work, and now it is sitting again, waiting for the time and circumstances to be right.

One novel rewirite and two plays in a year!  I guess you could say I am on a roll.  Add to that, I now have a number of cruise assignments from this fall into next summer.  The  idea of planning travel is exhilarating, and of course I have some great ideas for a few new lectures, also a major source of creativity for me. So, break out the champagne and the brass band—the girl is back in town! 

I am sitting on the dock in my place of quarantine, watching a heron prowling the shallows looking for a meal..  Yes, dock, —I’ve never had a dock!—which I get to across a grassy yard from an apartment on the lower level of a house in Victoria (view from house above)

This being my third quarantine, I am getting better at finding a place that will make isolating as light a burden as possible.  My first place was maybe slightly bigger, but it lacked even a balcony or a window with a view of much of anything.  The second was in a nice wooded suburb of Victoria, with a yard big enough for a bit of contact with the outdoors.  This one is a gem, and the first place I have stayed where I thought, “you know, I really could live here indefinitely.” Even weirder, I think of the friends I would like to invite over once quarantine ends, rather than dreaming of escape. My apartment is the lower level shown here looking up from the dock.

I must have been ready for some quiet time, as I settled right down to work on several writing projects.  I didn’t do a lick of work since I left Victoria almost a month ago, and in fact didnt even bring my laptop with me, so sure was I that I wouldn’t get anything accomplished.  What I did accomplish was a lot of quality time with friends, which was restorative beyond measure. I loved every minute, hopping from coffee date, to shopping, to al fresco dinners and lunches, to vegging on the couch with popcorn and Netflix at my host Annie’s condo.  I even fit in a two-night trip to the desert with my friend Jane, to see friends in the Palm Springs area (and play my first pickle ball).

My road trip back was everything I hoped for—beautiful scenery, doable daily drives, and many stops to see friends.  Crossing the border and getting on the ferry to Vancouver Island (limited to essential travel these days) went without a hitch.  In fact every last detail of the entire trip went without a glitch of any kind.  Lucky, lucky me!

I came home to a sudden deluge of offers for cruises.. Looks as if I will be very busy from the fall through next summer, and will probably have some more opportunities as well, taking me a far afield as Tonga and New Zealand on one assignment, to the Suez Canal and Dubai on another, with a heap of Mediterranean and Caribbean thrown in between October 2021 and next summer.

As I sit here in the warm sunshine thinking about my charmed life, I feel the familiar push-pull of the two sides of my personality.  I loved all the socializing on my trip, but I am so glad to have to speak to almost no one for the next two weeks.  A blessed retreat into solitude it is shaping up to be.  Still, the world of people is out there waiting for me, and I love that too.  For now, I’ll watch the heron be perfectly suited for its life as well.  Fellow creature, hail and well met.  

Forget memory lane. California Highway 101 from Santa Maria to Napa was one long blast from the past for me.  I lived as a child in Danville, a little town east of San Francisco, and every summer my mother, sister and I would make the trip south on 101 to visit my grandparents in Santa Barbara.  In the late 1950s, 101 was maybe two lanes each way and far more like a rural road than the freeways of today. Many of the spots along the way became landmarks for us, starting with Pismo Beach, where we caught either our first or last glimpse of the ocean. Little Pismo Beach was barely on the map back then, and I was flabbergasted to see that it now requires seven exits stretched across its sprawling length.  

A string of towns brought back associations as I headed north—Paso Robles ( which for some reason is pronounced Paso Robulls by Californians), Atascadero, and King City.  This last has special meaning because it was the halfway point in the trip between Santa Barbara and Danville. Either my sister or I would get to stretch out in the back seat of our station wagon and nap the endless miles away, and then we would change seats in King City. I remember pretending to be asleep and my sister complaining  about my fakery when my mother said we’d change when I woke up.  Ah, the inequities of childhood! King City is still very much the speck on the map it was back in the late 1950s when we were making these trips.  

I jumped forward to another time in my life as I passed through Salinas. It is in this part of the state that Cesar Chávez, Dolores Huerta and others mobilized the laborers in the fields into the new United Farmworkers Union (UFW).  Here El Teatro Campesino and others laid the groundwork for much of the vibrant Chicano culture that evolved. I remembered my college years when none of us would touch a table grape or drink Gallo wine, in solidarity with the movement. 

My mind went further back in history to a time far before I came on the scene when “Alta California” was part of Mexico, and this region was divided up into great encomiendas ruled over by Mexican grandees.  In this era, the church built the famous string of California missions, a day’s ride apart, so that now you pass the signs for them about every twenty minutes. Every once in awhile there’s a sign for a historic adobe, but little remains of what must have been at one time the most significant houses in the area. I am sure that foreigners must be fascinated by these signs of the past, but they make me cringe, recalling the terrible things that were done to indigenous people and Mexican laborers, in the name of imprinting the region wth the faith and power of Spain.  

I was making such good time that I decided to take a slightly longer route so I could stop in Danville to drive by my childhood home and take a drive up Mount Diablo ( see photo at top), which was the site of so many outings.  I’ve gone back to my neighborhood several times and with each passing year I remember fewer of our neighbor’s names and recognized fewer of the houses. One indelible sight remained—the huge oak tree a few houses down from us, and now sixty years older. Here it is.

After looking out on the valley from Mount Diablo, I decided to gird myself for a quick trip into downtown.  Danville, when I lived there, was a quiet little town with few pretensions. Now it has become very upscale and expensive, its streets  filled with trendy boutiques and chic restaurants. It was weird to look around and see so few people who were even alive to know it as I did. I had a good laugh when I looked a a sign pointing to the “historic district,” and wondered if that meant the way it was when I lived there (ouch!), but was surprised to see how many buildings were actually much older. I guess when you’re a kid the buildings are just not something you notice. 


One thing in town remained the same—a little dam that I have no idea the reason for, but which used to be the center of attention in the winter when it overflowed and created the most newsworthy story of the weekly paper. Behind it, there’s a peek of a stretch of bucolic wild creek ( see photo), which in my childhood extended up to our house and beyond, and became the playground of those years and the place where my imagination first began to run wild with stories.

Memory highway indeed. Our stretch of the creek was rockier and had banks we could access, but it’s gone now, channeled for flood control. There will never be a place as special to me as this creek, nor any place that played a more important role in the child I was and the person I became.