Hi folks! Here is my first story for my creative writing class. Feedback welcome! DAY 1: My alarm on my phone, which I have loudly set to the “Breaking Bad” theme, awakes us with a start. We tenderly rub our eyes, kiss each other on the cheek, and watch the sunrise spray the sky with a pink and orange dotted tapestry. As we watch it expectantly, we are unable to stop smiling as we await the week that has finally fallen upon us. “Today is the day, Alex!” said Kim, my girlfriend. She has the loving nature of a child at heart, and she has been looking forward to this day for months. We toss our bed covers off and run to the car. Instantly realize that with all the suitcases, pots and pans, and piles of food we have to pack that I’m going to have to stuff myself in the seat like a confused chicken. As we leave Forestville, California and struggle to pack the car, our laughter about our cramped space mirrors that of the children we here playing at the local playground, their chortling echoing throughout the Sonoma County redwoods. This is what I consider divine energy. Nothing can get me down today! Up…up…up the 101…we’ve brought music to enjoy on the way. From Cypress Hill to Exodus to Cat Stevens…Opeth is the perfect fit right now. As their songs seamlessly shift between death metal and gentle acoustic passages, from the core of the soul I’m now able to feel the full range of emotions that these woods inspire in me with a heavy heart that I cannot hide. We’re leaving the superficialities of work and school and our old life, bidding farewell to the congested two-lane Santa Rosa highways as we notice the traffic become more and more sparse the further along we go. Soon we might see a car or two about every ten miles, but I get the sense that they, like us, are marveling about the close personal relationship that this remoteness gives them to their natural ancestors as they look up, returning to their true home, where their dignity lies. The long stretch of Mendocino finally ends and we gasp as we see the sign: HUMBOLDT COUNTY LINE. The gasp turns into a cheer. We pull up to our campsite and get out of the car. “We made it, Alex!” Kim exclaims. After we unpack the car, she runs around the place and hugs me. We were in a place free of both physical and spiritual pollution. The meadows were plentiful, the beach full of agates for children to play with instead of Happy Meal toys, and the trees the tallest and happiest I’ve ever been in the company of. I’m now recalling Kim’s love of Jazz. She truly was fascinated as a young John Coltrane must have been seeing and picking up his first saxophone. We read our favorite books using the sunlight that hit the forest floor and slept peacefully that night. “WELCOME TO PATRICK’S POINT STATE PARK.” DAY TWO: We hear the waves from the beach outside and feel little droplets of water reach our tent from the tree branches and leaves above us. We leisurely wake up, and then it’s time for breakfast. This is our first time camping as just the two of us, without our parents or anyone else with us. To translate: we don’t know what we’re doing. Kim busts out the pan to make eggs. She tries to get some heat going by lighting matches under it. None of them catch so she has to keep tossing them in the pit, struggling and laughing all the while. I at last hear “I did it, Alex! YEAH!” Those were the best eggs I have ever tasted, because they were ours. They were the first triumph in an odyssey with the themes of learning by doing and triumph of the will as central pillars. As we eat, look out at infinity around us, we get ready to hike. Kim says, “I was thinking we could go to Patrick’s Point today, the point the park is named after.” I’m down for this. Before we head off we go to the Visitor’s Center, where a lovely traveling couple asks me about how Humboldt got its name. I answer that somebody saw the beauty of the place and thought of Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist. The couple smile and say, “Oh, really?” their curiosity peaked as they smile at me. I feel like a capable tour guide. With this warmth in my mind, I see Kim buy a shirt before we set out: “May the Forest be With You.” We spend the majority of the day meaningfully meandering. Uncertain where the trails will take us, we walk everywhere searching for answers. Though we are alone and we don’t know where we are, we are not desperate or destitute; this is desirable. There are little brown rabbits in corners of green grass. Kim takes a picture of one as he helps lead the way to our spot. There is a clear red and orange sunset when we find a beach to rest, and the sky is home to puffy clouds. The water is reflecting orange. Looking up, we see a massive rock overlooking this vista. “There it is!” says Kim. We climb to the very top, sliding and scuttling. All I want to do is say I hugged her and held her atop this point. I hug her really big and we just stand there, watching the ocean. Kim runs to the precipice and starts to climb down. She watches as I follow her—her laughter rings throughout my body as I fall on my butt with about a quarter of a way to go to the bottom. We learn when all this is done that this isn’t Patrick’s Point proper like we thought. This place is called Wedding Rock. Exhilarated, we return home. As we rest our heads we can hear seals barking in the distance, and we still hear them in the early morn. DAY THREE: Waking up, we hear the seals and remember that they were here before us. Kim collects her purse and empties it out for our day at Agate Beach. On our way to this storied place where the names of agates and shells run off the lips like poems, their shapes and colors stored permanently in the mind’s eye, we pass eager elders holding infants whose wide eyes are imprinted with redwoods from the first, their gaze fixing on the color green. We run the spiraling path down to the water, the sand dunes racing us down with every step. With every tide and every crest of the waves agates and shells wash of on the shore. I’m reminded of the Bob Marley song, “High Tide or Low Tide,” in which he says, like a lullaby: “In high tide or in low tide/I’m gonna be your friend…I’m gonna be your friend. In high tide or in low tide/ I’ll be by your side…I’ll be by your side.” I bring a book and read in the shade for a while, happy to watch Kim beam as she searches for agates along the beach, barefoot as the first mothers of Humboldt as she lets the tide, warmed by the sun, wash her clean. Eventually I can’t resist the temptation and join her. “I filled my whole bag up with agates. Feel how heavy it is!” she says. We walk back to our fleeting residence and sit, satisfied, as we make s’mores. Kim emptied her collection of natural findings on the table and gave me the clearest ones to pocket. I felt lucid. One of her gifts was a rock shaped like the human heart as seen in the oldest fairy tales where true love is the hero’s passion. Only, this wasn’t a fairy tale. DAY FOUR (NIGHT, SERIOUS MADNESS): An intrinsic part of playing with nature is altering one’s consciousness. To enter the rural expanse of Humboldt County from a land of identical houses and culture that I can predict in Sonoma, all in what amount to no more than a few steps in the grand-scheme of time, is a mind-altering experience. To spend the majority of my life sober, taking in spiritual insights through only my eyes and brain, rather than my liver, is a necessity for me. However, I don’t believe in the concept of “wasting time,” because absolutely every human behavior we engage in can teach us lessons about ourselves and the world that can only be gained through experience. All this said, I would be lying if I told you that Kim and I don’t seek to enjoy ourselves in just a little bit less than a heightened state of awareness. We need a chemically and culturally sanctioned method to get this done. Luckily Mad River Brewery, that famed area house of ill-repute whose old-timer employees were said to have consumed copious amounts of cannabis in back rooms while working on their own product, delivers, praise the Sages! Taking out the large growler glass that Kim and I have purchased and filled with the exceptionally intoxicating Serious Madness beer, we sit around the fire and tentatively go to work like a young bicyclist just removing his training wheels, just like our ancestors before us. Whoever coined the term “growler” for these things might have thought they would give one the strength of a howling, growling, wolf, but over time, as we trip over our sentences and ourselves and our ability to control our laughter and our social filter ceases, Kim and I feel more like panting dogs. If history or biology is any guide, dogs need to play and humans need to drink. Acting like dogs brings us closer to our evolutionary brothers and sisters as we trip inside our tent. DAY FIVE (THE FINAL DAY—TWENTY-FOUR HOURS REMAIN): We wake up knowing we only have a last few hours in this place before we have to go back to Sonoma. Kim has a headache, but I’m surprised how holding her tight and rubbing her temples as I am accustomed to doing always seems to help it go away. She thanks me, and we think about how healing this trip has been for both of us, remembering the miscommunications we had to work through and the plentiful good times that have kept us together up to this point. At this moment, we can’t look at each other with anything but smiles. Then it all becomes real to me as she says, “We should come up here again when I visit you.” I am moving on to Humboldt State, where I will begin a new life, and she is going back to Forestville, where she will, too. I confess that I struggle with depression and anxiety. Talking heads in life, many of them with degrees, might try to tell us that there is something wrong with self-doubt, and to bury our unhappiness for the sake of others. Often what is necessary to overcome debilitating negative thoughts about oneself and the world is to go for a while to a place where you can think and give yourself a gift of a range of human capacity that you had forgotten was inside you until you find it again. Not only has Humboldt saved me from suicide, but it fosters a community-minded spirit in me for which I’m working to find the strength to apply universally. As I write these words, I miss her, but Humboldt is our home, where our dignity and our cherished selves lie.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 02:54:23 +0000
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