In the morning I roamed around looking for the highway and chanced upon a small shopping center with a laundromat. This would be a good opportunity to freshen up the sheet that came with the bed and I stopped and pulled together a pile of laundry.
It was a big, bright, well-equipped place, intended to help and not hinder this essential household chore. I've never seen a laundromat so richly supplied with carts: along one wall was a line of them waiting and ready, and the attendant walked through often, returning vacant carts and checking up on things. I was the only Anglo in the place. Signs were in Spanish with small English translations; the TV was tuned to a Spanish program; customers visited with each other mostly in Spanish and I felt the occasional stare and was given that degree of physical leeway that told me I was the outsider. This is a good thing to experience.
As I waited for my laundry I sat drinking tea on one of the chairs by the window, reading emails on my phone and watching the scene. A young man came in carrying his laundry in one of the wide flat collapsible plastic crates that are used in the picking fields. I have a few of them at home myself, leftovers from some church food pantry program a coworker helps to run in Columbus. Here in the Salinas valley I had been seeing them put to their intended use, as I passed trucks on the road or in the fields, piled high with these crates filled with green. I expect this valley has seen a succession of container types over the decades. I know of four: the wooden type with thin slats nailed to thicker end pieces whose colorful labels are now collector's items, another version of much thinner wood slats bound together with wire, the heavily waxed corrugated cardboard box and now this plastic collapsible crate with fold-up sides that pop into place.
One young woman brought in basket after basket of laundry and was loading it into a long row of machines. Greeted in English by a friend she hadn't seen for a while, the two stood talking together, exchanging news. The woman with all the laundry said that her family had divided their house in two parts to share with another family. After the dividing was done, the woman discovered that she was now partitioned off from her washing machine, and while she waited for a new laundry room to be devised, it was easiest to trek down to the laundromat. She had a niece who stayed over often and added to the clothes mound. I wondered how many people she was keeping clothed, how many beds and towel racks she was supplying. I've seen photographs of people from different countries around the world standing in front of their dwellings with all their furnishings beside them. It's one way to comprehend the world's distribution of goods. But what would our laundry piles look like?
Then I, the interloper, dropped my cup and sent broken shards and hot tea onto the floor. I looked in the nearest trash can to see if there were any rags available. No luck there, so I checked the next one and the next. Then I spotted the attendant and told him I'd made a mess and wanted to clean it up. He watched me, uncomprehending, and I saw that English wasn't getting through. Miming comes naturally, and odd bits of sign language surface without warning from my one-time career, and now he got it. He found an old clean towel from the supply closet and followed me back to my spill. "I'm sorry," and "Thank you" are easy to show, no words needed.
When my laundry was done and packed away again I set my sights on Pinnacles National Park, hoping to camp there for at least one night. As I drove through sere hills, I lost signal on both the cellphone and the Tom Tom, then regained it and lost it again. It didn't matter, I knew my way and arrived at Pinnacles in time to snag one of the 5 remaining tent sites.
The whole park is in a cell phone shadow, a little pocket of peace from the traffic of images, alerts, promotions and deletable messages claiming urgency. I am constantly reminding myself of a line from The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield:
"Learn to know the difference between what is urgent and what is important. Do what's important."
It was important to walk. I claimed my territory in Site 33 and set off in the van to get to one of the trailheads. This was a Saturday and the place was busy with people. The parking spaces at the trailheads I wanted were full, so I returned to camp and set out on foot. We were now in serious dehydration territory and the warning signs and maps and brochures advised hikers to carry one liter per person per hour. I drank deeply before starting and packed several bottles for the walk.
This was sort of a warmup hike, testing my injured pelvis after a thumping fall on the steep path at Ragged Point on the coast highway. Every step, especially a step up, torques the sacrum and draws attention to itself. After the fall, I was so thankful my joints were intact and working that the pain was more a reminder than a deterrent. Having a sore bum puts eyes in the back of your head: you are mindful of what's back there that might make contact unexpectedly. You also pay attention to your footing.
I walked along the Bench Trail, a flat easy hike that traveled past several water spigots. The temperature was in the 80's, so the cycle of water in and water out was palpable. I drank and sweated and drank some more. At one water tap I soaked a small terry cloth towel to dripping point and draped it over my neck and down the front. I wore it for the rest of the hike and the evaporating effect was wonderfully cooling. Because of all the watering holes, I returned after 3 or 4 hours of walking with several bottles still full. Tomorrow would be different, for I planned to head up and out into rougher terrain where I'd have to carry my own water ration.
Sights along the trail: stunning blue steller's jays, tiny 3"-4" lizards, bridges built of large blocks of a lovely greenish stone I take to be serpentine, a dragonfly, a couple with a small child in a stroller, struggling off-trail and trying to force the stroller's wheels through a sandy dry riverbed, a California buckeye the size of a plum. I saw no condors but I did see black-&-whites who could have been magpies or mockingbirds. It's time to get more bird-educated.
I returned to the campsite well-used and satisfied, reminded of long day hikes with my father in the mountains of Nevada, Utah, Wyoming. It was nice there in my spacious, open campsite screened off visually on three sides, but connected by the sounds of excited children at play and adults working on dinner and cleanup and visiting with each other. I sat for a time writing and looked up once to see a quiet cluster of 11 wild turkeys scouting around for food across the road from me. There's something about the curvature of their backs when they are walking slowly that brings to mind sowbugs.
The band of small boys from across the bushes came tromping through my site at dusk in search of the raccoon who had just stolen grapes from my little camp table while I was off refilling a water jug. I had spotted it myself creeping off into the brush and I pointed the way I thought it might be found. They charged around for a while but I heard no sounds of triumph. Other urgent chasing and strategies soon eclipsed the coon hunt and their voices faded away again.
The moon was waxing full and the new binoculars give a stunning view of her craters and those streaks like longitudinal lines that star down her surface from one of the poles. As the moon progressed toward full I was sadly reminded of the coming of Halloween, the end-point of my trip, and I wished I could back up and prolong these days of freedom and exploring.
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