These are my observations looking back on the first week of staging and the first day of travel.
Goodbye San Francisco
I was pretty much knocked out there in San Francisco for a while; sick like hell for a week solid, and then totally pushed under with work. There have been ominous rumblings around the money situation for the trip so I'd been picking up all sorts of freelance gigs and just basically knuckling it down for the past four months. When it came time to head up to Humboldt, I finished what I could early downstairs at Common Grounds and took the afternoon off from work; packed for an hour and caught a city bus down to the Transbay terminal.
I thought I left myself enough time, but I missed a limited-stop bus, which got me thinking about how slow the #14 Mission bus in SF really is on a Friday afternoon. So I tensed up on the way down, thinking the thoughts I often think on that bus -- how I catch myself being self-congratulatory because I'm cool riding a hot city bus in the Mission being the only white person on... you know, sort of getting up and then knocking myself off my high horse. And of course rolling along in the sun, saying goodbye to the Mission, and listening in on other people's cell phone conversations, and wondering how all the old ladies with canes get by in this crowded fucked up world. Anyway, I'm still starting to stress the time, and when I get to the terminal there's maybe 15 minutes until the bus is set to leave. In fact I pass the bus driver (who I recognize from other trips) on my way up the stairs, and it turns out there's a long-ass line at the ticket counter, and the time stress kicks into high gear, getting upset at how slow the old people in front of me in line are, a ticket lady #2 for leaving her post for five minutes. Who's the manager here? You get the picture.
Turns out the bus is sold out. Can't go Greyhound. Nothing until tomorrow.
So that's a defeat. But as I walk out of the Transbay terminal into the modest friday afternoon hustle of downtown SF, starting to think about where I should stay tonight and about calling up to the guys and telling them I'd be delayed again, I don't want to be waiting another night and day away. And it hits me that there are other ways to get to Humboldt county. Fuck it. I'm not staying here. It's a beautiful day and I'm on the road.
I hiked around downtown with my bags and cowboy boots, sweating it up until I hit Union Square where I picked up the open WiFi and started looking for rental cars. After calling around and going through several websites, I got turned on to the National/Alamo agency, who are the specialists in one-way rentals.
Now bear in mind that I'm walking up trying to rent a car right this minute, which happens to be about 4:30pm, on a Friday to drive one way from Downtown San Francisco to Arcata Airport 290 miles north on Hwy 101 and walk away from the car right there. Enterprise charges a $400 fee to deal with restocking a vehicle that's driven one-way to that part of the state, and yet my man at the National/Alamo agency off Union Square got me sorted for just over a hundred bucks. Yeah, I think, it's more than twice bus fair, and I still have to do the driving and buy the gas, but on the other hand driving up the 101 on a beautiful afternoon is a privilege once you clear the hell that is Santa Rosa. It'll be a good way to start the trip. Plus, I get out of town that night. I went for it.
Got a little lost on the way up. Didn't really think about where I was headed at first and I ended up taking the long way, up through Vallejo, across that marshy two-lane crossing in the north bay, and then through the Napa countryside on a bunch of small highways to reunite with the 101 in Petaluma. I assumed I'd lost time, but apparently the traffic I'd driven around was really bad: I passed the Greyhound bus, which left almost two hours before me, before I even got to Garberville.
It was a good drive overall. The various public radio stations were playing solidly eclectic music. There was a big bike rally somewhere along the way and I enjoyed rolling up and down curvy hills within a pack of bikes for a while. I also noticed that the little towns all along the 101 up above Ukiah -- Willits, Laytonville, etc -- are getting more and more lively every time I pass though. It occurs to me that the money coming in ain't from the timber business coming back. The cash economy runs strong in Nor-Cal. Property rights and rural bohemianism. I contemplated this as I bought my gourmet roast beef sandwich with horseradish on artisan bread at Safeway. The sandwich maker was a youngish head with expanded ears and a budding 'fro. Another sign of the times.
Staging
I was getting pretty punchy by the time I go in to Westhaven. It was a little after 11, and I arrived to find Mark and Ziah in the hot tub and Luke gone down to see the Weary Boys in McKinlyville. I took some time to settle and stretch out and by and by Mark and Ziah joined me in the kitchen for a little hand-squeezed margarita action and we caught up on the times.
I turns out Luke and Mark had been in a pretty serious car wreck earlier in the week. They were coming back from having a beer at the beach with a coworker who in hindsight is a known boozer and should not have been driving. He took a 90-degree turn way too hard and they ended up slamming into the guardrail, hanging halfway off after coming to a bone-jarring halt. Luckily there were no serious injuries, but there have been visits to the chiropractor and doctor. Mark has a tear in his rotator cuff, so he'll be recovering all summer long. There's a little cache of emergency vicoden. Kind of a bummer all around, and a continuing source of hassle; insurance men, physical therapy, resentment, regret, pain.
Other than that though, things seemed to be coming along well. The truck was coming together with its no-cost mismatched canvass (made for a Dodge, missing one window), a Yakima Rocket Box for extra cargo storage acquired on very favorable terms from Ziah, and a new oxygen sensor in the engine improving performance noticeably.
Eventually Luke rolled in with Laura, who lives at the house along with her four-year-old son Wiley, and he and I caught up some as well. The todo list was long, but not indomitable. With my arrival bringing fresh energy and vital liquid capital to the situation, it looked like we would have no problem getting out on the road by the morning of the 15th.
The next several days were a golden mix of low-level truck mechanics, dog wrangling, guitar picking, sushi rolling, hot tubbing, supply roundup and getting down to brass tacks with our short term plan. We changed the oil. We built ourselves a platform for the truck bed, waterproofed the roof, replaced one window and built a sliding opening into another. We got a deep cycle marine batter to go with our inverter to bring electrical power with us. We figured out we'd have enough money. We worked on a logo. We made about nine trips to Kragen.
Typically we'd get started in the late morning after coffee/breakfast, make a todo list, break up as needed and run various errands for most of the business day. Then we'd reconvene in the later afternoon, relax a bit, maybe crack a beer, sit in the hammock for a minute with a J. After the respite, we'd use the rest of the daylight to work on the truck before. Drilling, cutting, building, mounting, bolting, caulking, cleaning, packing. It came together in five days.
At the same time a couple surfer ladies were moving in to Kelly's house and Mark was moving out. Luke had been staying in the old Siesta camper, now a kind of guest cabin for the house, and apparently carrying on a little affair with Laura for the duration. I learned of this not from him (though I did sense something in the air) but rather from Wiley, the four-year-old who reminds me a little bit of me when I was that age. He was upset one night because his Mom wasn't around and he needed to get his superman outfit untied so he could go take a pee.
It was a moment. I can still vividly remember the frustration I felt as a little four-year-old about the fact that my Mom and Bill were together, back on the farm. I used to physically try to break them up when they would hug and kiss. Bill played along like it was a joke most of the time, but I can only imagine how annoying I must have been. Anyway, I felt like i was on the same wavelength as little Wiley right there, but with the benefit of hindsight I could tell him with conviction that everything would be ok. And it was. I did my level best to convey the tough fact that he was growing up and his Mom wouldn't always be there when he woke up. He calmed down and I untied his costume and he took his piss and went back to bed, and I finished watching The Matrix.
For five days and nights we prepared our way and enjoyed the life in Humboldt county. It was good. Kelly has a great little place, and the house runs pretty well. There are three dogs and two cats and a big kitchen and plenty of room for everyone, including guests. It's a friendly, mature kind of vibe, one way to live well for sure. And then it was time to go.
On The Road?
At the end it was a final push to pack and get on the road to reach San Francisco by a decent hour. There was some scrambling to organize people to see us as we were planning to spend one night and one night only in the bay. We got out a little before four, everything pretty much going smoothly as we rolled down the 101. It felt a little bit in-between. We were on the road, yes, but it was a road well-traveled leading to a well-known place, not much sense of adventure. Still, we made a few forays into conversation, and the music was good, and on some of the two-lane roads, looking out for the highway patrol and talking it up, there was even a hint of momentum.
And just when it started to feel like the ball is rolling, like something might add up, the transmission started freaking out. There was a single-lane situation on the Richmond bridge, traffic was backed up for a couple miles, forcing a 20 minute crawl to the merge point. When we finally got there and I tried to accelerate out of gridlock velocity, the truck wouldn't shift out of first gear. Just the noise of the revving engine and a top speed of 30-mph. Vaga-blunder.
Luckily when we limped off into Richmond we found that dropping the tranny into Park somehow reset things, and we turned around at the mouth of some industrial park and got back on the highway. When we made it down to the streets of Berkeley the problem manifested once again, it was corrected easily enough at the next stoplight, but it showed that this wasn't some fluke problem.
So we have to see a mechanic, and it's late, and we roll up to Kim and Liz and Molly and Alley's, and there are some friends there and we have a few beers and talk about how its going to be. We'll have to go to ground here for the weekend, wait for automotive succor in the East Bay. We're in familiar territory still, but we're on our way.
