Sunday, March 11th, 2007
2007 February Tour Diary
101 out of town we leave behind Los Angeles busy with its morning bustle bump and grind, even at this hour that girl is still working. Like an existential concept in more ways than one, does it cease to exist when we turn our attention away?
Agoura, Thousand Oaks, Oxnard, Ventura, suddenly we have ocean at our left, sunny and cool. We drive in silence and the city disappears behind our backs. Tract houses nestled in between schools and factories. From door to door to death, they line the road like corridors in a Terry Gilliam landscape.
New houses on the hillside in Arroyo Grande, bad sign for the coastline, it's filling up around here, everywhere…
Sail boats silent in the distance, little slips of paper moving slow and hazy. Quiet and unassuming as progress fills in every inch of space.
From Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, San Luis to San Francisco, creeps a mold of modern American architecture, a modern American menagerie of stucco and teenage angst, corporate food and mini malls. Where is Tennessee Williams when we need him?
101 along the sunset we drive, a specter of days just like this one drifts above the rearview mirror, some say simpler days but really who knows if life was better then? When the roads were less traveled indeed. Every fifty miles or so we see floral memorials to the dead. Looks like someone won the brown derby, looks like a mad suitor full of 1940's carnations lost his nerve in the loose gravel, looks like it was a wild new years night. And for miles and miles we are reminded of all these people we will never know.
101 is Steinbeck country, Monterey, Salinas, Big Sur, here on this old black top, gold hills dotted with live oak, telephone poles and farm hand ghosts hang on the horizon like coat hooks and thread bare jackets.
Whisps of tall grass lay wind blown across gentle slopes. Reminds me of soft hair on a lovers arm, golden and pale, pure summer.
Atascadero is painted in a light fog. The sleepy morning fields become Monet, Seurat, Cezanne, primordial, impressionist, but remain a completely American landscape.
Black coal cows stand upon heather gray ground, white fences frame taupe meadows.
In this horse land on one lonely hill a white horse stands,
alone, facing south, the way back home.
While the others, brown and black, red and tan, crowd their fences, pushing toward escape. Pushing toward an unknown Edward Hopper light over a forbidden grade that engulfs the chaparral in a halo of irresistibility.
101 at San Anselmo we lose sight of the crazy red head who has been up and down the speedometer, up and down the coast over and over, forever driving, searching for someone, her story will remain a mystery and I'm sure it's better that way. These highways are full of the saddest stories, and hers is right next to me doing 75 with the windows rolled down.
Almonds give way to vineyards that march up lazy hills for vast distances.
Like regiments of dark soldiers, or rows of braids close to the ground, compact. Neat and tight like the teeth of a comb parting the sky and parting the earth, parting brown and gray blue.
101 to Higuera Street, downtown San Louis Obispo we play four sets. Drunken college students prowl and careen like bumper cars around the bar, crashing and laughing recklessly. The evening open-air market yields us fresh strawberries and apples, oranges and figs that in turn start small but covert strategies on how to get a taste for those of us who had no time for produce shopping. Bubble Gum Alley and Bicycle Boulevard, this is a town full of misspent youth and we like it. We play all night, people dance, people drink, and I blow out my voice, because it's cold, because it's loud and because I can.
101 neighborhoods outside Soledad, the correctional facility, resemble South African or Mexican shantytowns, peeling and faded bitter orange, small and sagging, cemented in and lifeless.
Artichokes announce the Northern California territory.
Estuaries stand a stones throw from this two-lane coastal road.
I can see ducks and seagulls, storks and cranes.
I can see crows in the Monterey pines that arch their backs and twist by the seaside, dramatic and improbable like Isadora Duncan, languidly reaching towards the horizon in the salty breeze.
101 Santa Cruz, Green Valley Road, Harkins Slough Road, Buena Vista Drive and Freedom Boulevard.
Mimosas yellow in the afternoon hang heavy flowered branches beside ashy eucalyptus. The dirt dry, caked and peeking through like a fleshy scalp grows more orange here and some trees still show their red leaves of fall in suburban landscapes off this road, which has now become freeway.
Things are getting greener as we climb the Santa Cruz Mountains. Tourist info next left, Sea Cliff Beach 3.2 miles ahead. Houses hide in the wooded hills and the oceanic afternoon light is pure Crosby Stills and Nash, is James Taylor, is Linda Ronstadt, is California gold, is nostalgia in 1970's, earthy, rich, safe, warm and beautiful.
101 to CA – 183, CA –1, CA – 17 takes us deep into the forest. Green and damp, bone chilled and ancient. Roadhouse restaurant and bar since 1930 something. Bikers and construction workers hippies and moms. $5.00 steak dinners and all the boys in the band spread their culinary conquests across the table, the scene strangely medieval. French fries, Guinness, dinner rolls, chicken soup, salad, mashed potatoes, coca cola and chili con carne surround brown grilled streaks with A1 sauce. We play on full bellies while wild women dance and cavort. A guy with a red Sam Elliot moustache and a blue bandana on his head barks like a seal while he arm-wrestles the invisible man. His gal pal Party Patty shimmies and shakes on the dance floor, violent with her hips and arms she marches to her own drum but tonight that drummer is played by one of our own, late into the evening.
CA- 87 We roll down the road listening to Kevin Gilbert long gone but still bright as ever, as the dark mountains turn to blanched suburbs and faceless anonymous towns in Anywhere USA.
San Jose was a seedy night. Our hotel rooms smelled like cat box and sanitary disinfectant, blue toilet cakes and polyester. Opening the window was as much for sanity as survival.
At the club we were greeted with flat line enthusiasm, oh joy. Lesbian girls doing meth in the bathroom, wearing matching denim, black and red as they kiss and close the western stall door short and creaky like a dank saloon. But there are no cowboys here to help us. Luckily we are saved by some friendly rockabilies who pack the house and make the creepy locals unsure of their territory.
Coppers cruise like hungry sharks down Santa Clara Street in the heart of downtown. We eat 1:00 am egg rolls on the street, our breath dragon hot steamy soy salty under the orange streetlights.
101 to Mission Street the signs read Chinatown, North Beach, Fisherman's Wharf.
This is the city of my birth full of fog and bad drivers, great poetry and dim sum. The Transamerica building like a thorn of a crown or the hilt of a dagger buried deep in the side of some smoking magic corpse appears as we make our way pass the airport.
We check in and find take out and used condoms in one of the hotel rooms. We go for coffee down the street and get sucked into a bookstore, naturally. We buy poetry and Dorothy Parker and later my love will read to me as I doze in the cool pale light that splits the room in halves, that paints a white line of light across my pillow, from the dark blue quilted curtains.
At dinner our table feels Salvador Dali long, stretching the length of the restaurant, a fish eyed view if I lean in I can see all our friends.
And like an abstract artist, our Thai chef creates a masterpiece of culinary colors and flavors, passing plates we ooo and ahh and can't wait for our next trip to San Francisco.
Next door we wait under twinkle lights and dark reds. Back of the bar, cozy booth, as people arrive and the previous band finishes. Photo booth and Space Invaders, beer and ginger ale, people sing along and as always, I am surprised by this. Sunrise at 6:45am under a cloudy skyline backlit with pink and red, last nights embers go ashy blue, I feed the parking meter in my pajamas.
880 to I-5 South towards Los Angeles. Across the bay bridge, and homeward bound we pass windmills and truck stops, busses and billboards. Quietly the sun on our right skirts golden ridges of industrial farm land as it leads us back to our daily lives. As it leads us back home, but not the way we came.
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