Tuesday, October 22, 2013

a revelation at Jack in the Box

I wrote this back in February of 2012, after we knew Craig was dying but before he did. I never published it, I think because I couldn't get that description right about the fish hills and couldn't figure out how to end the piece. It just seemed to hang, rather like life was doing at the time. Anyway, I'm heading north again in a couple days, though in an airplane, and it felt right to let Rosie claim this.


Multitasking is what I do best in a car. Is it that the very act of driving is a lesson in doing lots of things at once – pressing the pedals, listening for engine sounds and squealing brakes and sirens, watching other cars and trucks and, god-help-us, motorcycles, what’s ahead and behind, blinking lights, freeway signs – that nudges me to add a few more, like putting on lipstick and eating lunch? Maybe. Or maybe it’s that it's just how I learned, how we all did it back when, in the days of four-on-the-floor and left-foot clutching and turn signals that you had to turn on and off.  The days of the first drive-thru fast food and hard-to-tune radios, just after the Beatles first U.S. tour and before The Beachboys. In Southern California, where everything connects to a car.

I only live in SoCal now because of Mr. North’s insistence that it’s paradise. If I’d grown up in freeze-your-ass Chicago winters, I might think so too. But my heart is in greener, cooler Northern California where many people I love moved long ago, so I drive from San Diego to San Francisco like some people drive to the beach for a weekend. Depending on the route and whether I’m going to Carmel or San Francisco, it’s between 425 and 550 miles, doable in half a day if you time it right getting through L.A. 

I’ve made the trip six or eight times a year for forty years, so it’s as familiar as going to the grocery store. I know the climbs and descents, the weirdness of the seasonal weather in a few places, some shortcuts and a couple longcuts, traffic chokepoints and why not to drive behind the tomato trucks. I know to stay on the interstate for speed, the state highway for better scenery, where the clean bathrooms are and the cops hide (in the shade of the overpasses).

Some people dislike the monotony of the freeways, but I like to drive fast and there are pockets of beauty along the way. The San Joaquin Valley in the center of California is massive, all ag land from north of Los Angeles almost to Oregon, nut tree orchards that run for miles, pink and white blooms as pretty as those in D.C.’s Tidal Basin, vast fields of cotton, grape vines and orange trees; its sister is the black-soil Salinas Valley one wide ridge of hills west, what we call the salad bowl: lettuce, cauliflower, spinach, broccoli, a rotating, year-long harvest. Many cities and towns have Spanish names: Paso Robles, Soledad, San Juan Bautista, Chualar, Gonzales. Templeton is a tiny place near Nacimiento; as I scoot by, I think of the rat in Charlotte’s Web whose voice in the movie was Paul Lynde’s. There are rolling hills all the way, odd smooth bumps covered in native short grass and sprinkled with oaks in the south that give way to pines at the coast near Monterey. The grass is green when the rains come in winter and spring, gold in the summer, platinum in the fall; it grows solidly and covers the hills like a lion’s coat; slumbering creatures, faces hidden, velvet pelts that darken in the creases, the folds.

Turning west at Tracy toward Oakland and the Bay Bridge takes you through the Altamont pass, very steep, very tall hills with lines of enormous freaky-modern, bright-white wind turbines planted in rows upon their shoulders, spaced as carefully as buttons on a shirt, their vanes turning slower than you’d think. It always feels like I’m driving through a Cristos installation: kinetic art for art’s sake on a huge scale, plus livestock. One wet April the grass was long, the green of Columbian emeralds, and standing in it up to their bellies were what we call Oreo cows, the black and white a contrast so high it looked impossible, fake; tiny bovine dominos below the huge white cylinders with their long, sharp spokes.

I’ve tried a hundred times to take pictures – at Altamont and many other places – without stopping (because I don’t stop except for gas or to pee), and it’s always a fail. That moment when a faraway thing in the landscape had the light perfectly on it clicks the shutter in your eyes, in your brain, but not in the camera. The car is moving too fast. Life moves too fast.

I was driving home, south on the interstate, last Sunday, up out of the bottom end of the San Joaquin on the switchback incline called the grapevine, into the Santa Clarita mountains that top out at a barely-mountainous 4,000 feet. In the springtime near a gas-stop town named Gorman the California poppies, orange as a Nehi soda, cover the south- and west-facing hillsides for a month as far as you can see in every direction. The most spectacular year was April 2001; I was driving to my daughter’s wedding, thinking about my dad who would have loved knowing they chose his birthday for the big day.

But last Sunday wasn’t spring, it was late January. The weather has been bizarre – 80 degree days since before Christmas – and plants and trees and the world seem confused, but it definitely isn’t spring at 4,000 feet yet: cold and still, fog and low milky clouds hung between the big peaks, the grass tussocks were the dirty yellow of sour straw, stiff as chopsticks.

I never stop in Gorman going south, only going north and only if too much coffee is making me squirm. Going south it’s safe to say I never even slow down in Gorman. But I saw a sign for a new Jack in the Box, figured crap, I’m heading into Los Angeles on a Sunday that’s not a holiday, the traffic should be light and I want two for 99 cents. It’s a curse from junior high school that I will not outlive, so I’ve given up. Once or twice a year it’s me and the crunchy fried-everything with extra hot sauce tacos with Jack.

The new Box is on a funny offramp and has a weird parking lot that you have to cross this unpaved dirt thing to get to, kind of like fording a little muddy stream. The new VW turbo-diesel Golf wobbled gamely to a spot where I stopped and opened the bag like it was full of Benjamins and stuck a straw in the lid of my Coke. After a few fantastic bites, I looked up. Across the freeway and east of a long curve where the lanes disappear toward the rollercoasters at Magic Mountain were some low hills, out of place at the feet of their craggy, shrouded parents. The sun shone through a gap in the weeping clouds onto the hills, only there, from edge to edge, like a light on a painting that doesn’t extend past the frame. I swear I gasped.

Have you seen a trout like a golden or a rainbow with skin that’s speckled, little dark dots on a background of olive green under pale scales near its backbone that lightens to that sea green and platinum that circles its belly? And there’s a pink or, really, coral on the sides but it’s underneath the other colors, almost like it’s the salmon-colored flesh of the fish glowing through where the skin is thinnest. I don’t fish and only rarely cook them so I can’t say I love fish, but I love the way that fish looks with its colors that make me blink and wonder how it can be so beautiful, that combination, so clean and gleaming, those flickering, perfect cellophane scales.

Those hillsides were those colors - glowing coral dotted with dark green and black, blue-green in the swales, iridescence painted over top - but only in the odd rectangle of the sun patch, as if the UV rays had flipped a switch that stopped winter and revealed spring, a quarter mile of hope, a few acres of pretty beneath the grim.

As I sat there, eating lunch in a parking lot instead of while driving hellbent for Valencia, I knew reaching for my camera would be useless, even at a standstill. The light was leaving and the fish skin disappearing as surely as my taco was growing cold. I couldn't capture it, couldn't even believe I'd seen it with my own eyes, tearing up now in the sharp wind pushing down the pass, showing no mercy.

Copyright © rosie, on the back roads | Custom Blog Design by Lilipop Designs