17/18 September 2010
road: a pebbled blacktop mass fused in the forges of highway men and women, tar and sweat; those drumming rubber stilts separate the rubber soles and weary rubber souls paving progress. The original social network of us all, yet wears on melting away in gummy tar suns of the Southwest, snowy mountain passes and never ending, time stilled plains trots. Pass along yer progress trail at hundred or so miles to the hour, hell-driven fury of indifferent gas passing to blow all yer gas into the poetry drenched sea.
I see the Sea today after climbing a windy mountainous pass dotted with California mansions and for the first time I am aware of the infiniteness of the Highway. I rolled it away with my drumming tires, thinking it was another barrier ‘transcendable’ with enough octane and that the sea was our hero untamed and free; all the best poetry laid bare at her shores and lapped away frivolously by her surf. But I was wrong. Here at the top of a pass lined with hidden icons, I see the sea. And now, after a month of this study, solid and dotted line painted, paved black in a heat wave horizon and I see no difference between road and sea. Though, road is man’s. Whose is the sea?
Road is: winding tales twisting thru town and country, connecting each. An omnipresent promise of freedom reminding us that escape is at our gear box or thumb, a creatable destiny as tangible as the window glass guarding our eyes from God’s wind and surf, without which we might find the mundane unbearable, the ‘real life’ less real. That road sets us free.
So, I descend the pass as my friend guides me by phone to his Santa Cruz abode where I will be spending my final night of highway manning, one final couch and conversation. And I feel sad.
Santa Cruz looks like a city built by beatniks running from San Francisco’s skid row, their book dividends accumulating enough to support both their drug experimentation and owning a proper house. That is to say that it’s choke full of ‘academite’ book stores, latte laden cafés, and mod bars where I mistake the ‘book’ left behind by the couple next to us as an accident rather than them paying the bill. So I pay the bill for the gin and tonics and leave Whitman behind red in the face, but not from the alcohol. It is a delightful re-visitable coastal haven.
18 September
A clear calm morning for driving and the finale road is the 101 and there aren’t many, if any, that parallel it. More than a road it is the final finite feat of man before stepping off the continent into the celestial sea; like a humble ‘Bernini step’ (the architect that built Rome humbly buried under a simple step in one of his divine basilicas) on a cliff’s edge border of mortal and immortal.
Jack’s SEA:
Cherson!
Cherson !
You aint just whistling
Dixie, Sea—
Cherson! Cherson!
We calcimine fathers
here below!
Kitchen lights on—
Sea Engines from Russia
seabirding below—
When rocks outsea froth
I’ll know Hawaii
cracked up & scramble
up my doublelegged cliff
to the silt of
a million years—
Shoo—Shaw—Shirsh—
Go on die salt light
You billion yeared
rock knocker
Gavroom
Seabird
Gabroobird
Sad as wife & hill
Loved as mother & fog
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Sea! Osh!
Where’s yr little Neppytune
tonight?
My road, approximately:
Miles: 10,118 / Km: 16,283.342
Total $ amount of gas: $966.27
Gallons of gas: 353.458452955789
Average price per gallon: $2.734
Miles per $: 10.47
Average miles per gallon: 28.625749
This trip was ‘just’ an idea from a jacuzzi on a deck in the frozen Idaho January of 2010, now a past engram of summer musing realized. Fin.
.s.
