Day 14: Travel day, Return to Ohio

Friday

"Oh, Righteous!!" said the cab driver. I'd given him $45 on a $34 fare. He let me off at the Delta doors to the terminal at SFO where he had double parked next to a long line of other vehicles.

Re-entry day and I was not ready to make the jump. I revisited memories as I waited for my flight.

The last minute scramble to get to this point meant topping off the gas at a station across the street from Lost Campers. Before I drove off, I went up to driver's window of the truck at the next pump. "Can you use these?" I asked the man inside, holding up two cans of black olives I hadn't opened. He looked at them a little puzzled and I explained I was about to fly home and couldn't take them with me. He said, "Yeah, I think I have a recipe for a vodka drink that uses those. Sure!" Then I asked if he could use a big box of wooden kitchen matches and he said he could, so I ran back to the van and found those for him.

That taken care of, I drove over to the entrance of the Lost Campers yard and found it locked. The man I spoke to on the phone yesterday had assured me I'd be able to get in, so I circled the block and found an open gate at the far end. I parked by the wall he described and noticed a trash barrel others had used to toss leftover trash. On the ground against the wall was a line of propane containers just like the one I'd used to make my morning tea an hour ago. The flame had lasted exactly long enough to boil my water (Righteous!) and then it went out, bottle empty. I still had several gallon jugs of drinking water left so I emptied them into the freshwater sink supply and added the squashed jugs to the trash barrel. Not a perfect recycling job, but the van was empty and pretty clean and I was all packed up. I called the cab company and within a few minutes was settling in for a dark and peaceful ride to the airport.

 Sleep has been one of the riches of this trip. I was often tucked in by 8 p.m. and laying aside my book before 9:00. I'd sleep - wake - sleep until a final good heavy sleep towards dawn, waking again at  ~~7:30. That's almost twice what I get at home during the work week. And it tells in my body,  as of course the hiking does. Happy body, newly engaged mind. There is life outside of the compass of the usual work-home-work routines.

For the two weeks of this vagabonding I'd been weaned effortlessly from the stream of audio I normally consume: on work days my daily commute eats two and a half hours and I keep on hand a supply of audiobooks to play as I drive. Once I got used to the constant talk and became engrossed in the stories of life elsewhere, I was reluctant to turn it off and dwell in the silence. I brought the stories into the house in the evenings and on weekends and even into the office to override the babble there. I was hooked on the spoken word, hooked on stories of life more interesting or dangerous or significant than the routine parts of my own. When I packed for this trip, however, I decided to cut the strings. I brought one only, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and that was for dire emergency. Those discs sat unused in my luggage the whole time. Instead of looking on at someone else's life I was present in my own, led by curiosity and letting my legs carry me.

This time, instead of listening to other writers I took time to record my own life, singing my own song, and using the camera to record what drew my attention. It's a little like deciding to bat left-handed all of a sudden: it takes a new twist of the physical and mental capacities to use a set of muscles and nerves that have been lying at idle. As I've said before, I was inspired by the diary kept by Nella Last during WWII. What I have to say lacks the dramatic context of Britain in wartime; missing, too, are the rich social interactions of Nella's life within and without her family. But everybody has a daily life. This is mine.

Three summers ago I returned from a weekend of contra dancing feeling inspired.

The band for the weekend was The Latter Day Lizards, a highly talented group who can bring a few hundred dancers in a large dance hall to a roof-raising happy frenzy.  

   I felt even more let down than usual, once the weekend was over.

I'd missed the chance to buy music at the dance, so I decided to send for some of their CDs

The order form grew

 and it was fun

and it kept growing 

and then there were enough pages to bind together as a book.

http://www.latterdaylizards.com