UNTITLED HOLIDAY

ABOUT MID-NOVEMBER, when what we call “cold” in Northern California sets in and we’ve pulled from the cedar chest the woolen shirts and extra blankets for their properties of comfort, we had a holiday. It wasn’t one marked on the calendar.

The local paper predicted that the first big storm of the season would slip down from the Gulf of Alaska, and, like clockwork, it did. Coincident to that, family had lost a member, one who’d been hurting for some time. In the days before the advent of the storm, we’d gathered in the city to say our farewells. We would all return to our respective homes resuming lives that were, at once, a little bit richer and a little bit poorer.

Then came that polar burst from the Gulf. It started with a gathering overcast – one that fully insulated the earth from the sun. The temperature dipped and a drizzle developed, prompting use of the intermittent setting for windshield wipers while driving up the Interstate. As the storm matured, the rain became steady and darkness fell without sunset.

Down to the city, after services but before parting, someone mentioned that perhaps they could come to our section – maybe visit for an evening. And they did.

I think that suggestion sowed the seeds of holiday.


LIKE THOSE WOOLEN COATS and blankets, a bracing stew is a favorite essential of late autumn evenings cloistered in fog and mizzly precipitation. Cubes of beef and lamb are rolled in a flour mixture, browned in a skillet, and set to steep in a bath of bouillon and water. At the opportune time, chunks of carrot, celery, turnip, bell pepper and potato are added. The mixture simmers and the house is filled with a tantalizing aroma that boldly declares: this winter may be bitter, but we’ll beat it.

Such as this was cooking when, with a gentle rap on the door and a chorus of welcoming barks from the dogs, folks arrived.

Warm apple pie had been pulled from the oven to be replaced by biscuits made with too much baking powder.

“No guarantees,” the self-anointed chef said as he slipped them in.


A DANCING ROW OF FLAME from a pressed-wood log tickled the metal edge of the only-on-occasion-used fireplace. With red wine, we toasted the departed. Then we toasted each other. We sat and ate at a table not big enough to accommodate our number. We bumped elbows and off-handedly drank from our tablemate’s cup. The sorrow of loss quickly dissolved: first with a titter, then a barb, then laughter. One spoke. Then we all spoke. Then we all laughed some more. Most had second helpings of the stew. The batch of biscuits did not see the end of the meal.

“Save room for pie!”

Another bottle had been uncorked and a third – perhaps even a fourth – waited.


IT BECAME ONE A MOMENT that could never last but would always linger. By late in the evening, folks headed home: To Texas, to Maryland, to parts unknown – and some only back to the city an hour or two down the Interstate.

Those of us who’d hosted sat for a long spell – fairly quiet – wrapped in warmth. The dishes would wait.

As they left, somebody had said: “We must do this again.”

“And soon,” said another.

“Yes, soon,” said another, “because there are no guarantees.”

It had indeed been a holiday –one in which no gifts were exchanged.

Except for the gift of family.

1438 Bidwell Avenue.  Circa 1958

© 2010
Church of the Open Road Press

FOLLOW-UPS, UPDATES AND CORRECTIONS II

Our crack fact-check team here at the Church of the Open Road offers these follow-ups, corrections [and apologies] to previous posts:

TO A GUY NAME JIM - The “Church” apologizes: A correspondent informed the Church of the Open Road that some yahoo in Washington State had sponsored an initiative to change the Washington State seal to incorporate a tape worm underlining the concept that the state’s tax system was sucking the people dry. The “Church” was able to identify said “yahoo” and contacted him out of the blue, electronically suggesting some unkind things about himself and his appreciation for how his tax dollars were spent. Jim, a veteran and a citizen, (and a motorcycle rider) responded with far more civility than was offered by the “Church.” And the Church, proverbial hat in hand, realizing that it had stepped well beyond its middle-of-the-road belief system, (hopefully) graciously apologized.

This post makes that apology public. Jim: Thank you for your service. Thank you for your point of view. And know that it is an honor to read it, disagree with it and (finally) understand the tongue-in-cheek nature by which it was offered. And even if it were not offered in humor, you, sir, deserved better.


REGARDING BOTH SIMPSON CAMP (posts: May 12, June 10, July 10, 2010) AND BRUFF’S CAMP (post: November 8, 2010): Recall that when searching for places visited decades ago, it was discovered that place names related to those enchanted spots were no where to be found on current maps of the two unique and separate areas.

The Church is a little concerned that when a place name is removed from a map, the history of some individual is lost to the proverbial dustbin and the exceptional lessons of their perhaps-judged unexceptional lives will be forgotten.

Bruff is a case in point. Bruff sent his company forward without regard to his own well-being. He cared for the properties of his company to the detriment of his health. He comforted others who traveled the Old Lassen Trail, showing them kindness, compassion and ultimately the way to safety while standing fast in his commitment. He nearly starved.

Without the map listing, would anyone look through the annals of gold rush history to find that he shepherded hundreds of fortune-seeking immigrants to their goals? And how would what-he-did challenge us to help others in our time, if the place name is removed?


REGARDING “AUNTIE DaVONNE” (posts: October 20 and 28, 2010): On this Veteran’s Day, after staging a valiant come-back from emergency surgery, “Auntie DaVonne” declared victory and left this place to be with her late husband who predeceased her a mere six months ago (post: April 8, 2010).

There are things about love that, if people claim to understand ‘em, they probably are just blowing smoke. “Auntie DaVonne” understood love. She understood commitment. She understood her faith to a degree that others may swear to, but never realize.

Dear Sister Lisa: Those of us who understand far less, know that you are in that special place on the other side of the netherworld, now fully embraced by love – the love in which you so passionately believed. Time to rest, dear woman.

The circle is unbroken. The circle is never broken.

DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT II – NETHERWORLD IMPRESSIONS OF COUNTY ROAD 31 AND STATE ROUTE 128

Sometime, between about 55 and 60,

the herd begins to thin itself.

And it’s the herd I’m in.

I THINK OF THIS as I motor across the valley floor on what is a now-familiar route. Back to the east, a few shafts of morning sunlight slip over the mountains and under a low ceiling of clouds. In moments, the promise of daybreak will be gone, absorbed in the velvet layer of moisture that blankets the region and renders the landscape gray. The morning is not warm, but it is not cold. I am in the midst of a netherworld – a neither-this-nor-that environ – similar to the one separating last night’s wakefulness from sleep. It’s a good thing I know this road.

I wonder, as I advance into the next turn, if Aunt DaVonne is somehow in a netherworld of sorts: unwanting of the oxygen tube forcing the breath of life into her, but equally unwanting of the alternative. Today, I’m told, for the third or fourth time in the too-recent past, the device supplying O2 will be removed. “Can’t keep the tube in there too long or the lungs will forget how to function.”

I EXHALE THROUGH MY NOSE and the inside of my Shoei helmet's visor fogs. The road disappears. Riding blind at 55 to 60, I push upward on a tab to crack open the face screen. The condensation melts away. Again I see the muted colors of the mid-autumn landscape. The valley’s beauty subdued. Its aromas of fermenting grass stubble and derelict melons have soaked into tiny, leaden water droplets that fall to the ground. A fence line parallels the road. Its wooden posts, once erect, tilt at odd directions, bases rotted away, suspended by the strands of wire the posts, initially, had been engineered to, themselves, suspend. Two hundred yards west, the fence disappears. But it never goes away. For as long as I choose to be aware, the fence continues, always disappearing into the gloom. Always two hundred yards ahead.  And I smell moisture.


MY MIND WANDERS to the netherworld – the ill defined place between the here and now and the somewhere else. I wonder who populates this undefined place: who they are, how long they might stay, where they might be headed; but mostly: are they still with us?


THE ROAD RISES from the valley floor and into that low blanket of cloud cover. Its cloak thickens. Then, after a distance, as the pavement twists and sweeps upward, the mantle disappears. The fence is gone, too. Ascending, I pass the familiar concrete dam on Putah Creek and its reservoir, then through stands of valley and blue oaks and thickets of scrub. The road dips into pastures of golden grasses recently laid flat by the rain. The land here is sectioned off. More fences. Country folks scratch livelihoods, raising dry vineyards or irrigated pasture or, maybe, a Christmas tree farm. A paintless, weathered barn balanced on an ancient rock foundation and its attendant cattle shoot faces the highway. Back from the road a distance, a derelict Atlas moving van with faded lettering and an artful curve to its prow provides covered storage for silage or equipment. Primitive, scrabbly dirt roads exit to the left and right of the pavement, curling around knolls and into hidden and, perhaps, enchanting homesteads. Each one is gated to protect what’s in there from what’s out here.

Topping a ridge, I find slivers of blue sky, but only slivers. Thin cirrus ice crystal arrays, harbingers of tomorrow’s storm, already lace the highest atmosphere. Though the temperature has slightly risen, when I snap closed the Shoei’s face shield, my breath fogs the damned thing up.

I stop to wipe it clean, pull out my word processing device and begin to type these words. Kind passersby see the BMW propped at the side of the road with one pannier open. They pause to ask if I’m okay.

I am, I say, thanking them.


THIRTY MILES AWAY, a loved one has, by now, been freed of her ventilation. She is no longer in the netherworld between self-supported breathing and not. I hope to see her in the next hour or so, but wonder if somehow, we might have passed along the way this morning.

Then, damn it all, I think about the thinning herd of which I am a part and realize: Auntie DeVonne is, too.

© 2010
Church of the Open Road Press

JUST-PAST-DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT: YOLO COUNTY ROAD 31

A MID-MORNING NECESSITY in Napa finds me racing westward across the floor of the Sacramento Valley. Seventy-five miles behind me, the sun has crept over the summit of the Sierra. The season’s first drenching rain occurred yesterday and extended into the evening. This morning’s rays work to slightly warm the air and dissipate the season’s earliest Tule fog.

Life had dealt Auntie DeVonne a bad hand. An internal infection needed to be staved before an operation could repair the faulty heart valve. The abscess, however, wouldn’t respond to antibiotics and the infection’s growth now inhibited respiration. During the storm last night, DeVonne “coded.” Something much more invasive was necessary. But what of the weakened heart? According to the surgeon, Auntie’s circumstance was “like being on the third floor of a house where the first floor was totally involved in flames. You can wait around or you can jump out the window. I’ve got the net.”

There would not be time for breakfast on the road this morning. Or pictures.


COUNTY ROAD 31 beelines west from Davis. Once out of town the farmland looks laser flat. In the slightest depressions, cool air pools. Clinging, earth-bound sheets of gossamer fog mark these low spots: rimmed silver on top by the rising sun, but filled with icy daggers as the rural road slices through. Even with the heaviest of riding gloves the chill, like an x-ray, finds each of the 54 bones in my hands and tries to freeze them – and their connecting tissue – solid.

Under the broadening expanses of clear sky, yesterday’s rainfall begins a fermentation process on fresh wheat stubble in the neighboring tracts. The air assumes a sugary fragrance, as the landscape outside the fog pools turns golden. A field of rotting watermelon smells particularly pungent and rich. As does the windrow of eucalyptus planted several yards south of the pavement just beyond an irrigation canal. The BMW’s on-board thermometer reads 48 then 50 then 52 degrees. My black leather jacket absorbs some early morning warmth and an involuntary shiver transfers it to my body.

Straight ahead, the lower reaches of the Vaca Hills of the Coast Range bask in this just-past-dawn early light. But the season’s first storm had been significant. Up the mountain, fresh moisture soaks the top few inches of soil and the lower few feet of atmosphere. Vaporous wisps fill the east-facing hollows of seasonal creeks that may have come back to life. At the crest, a bounteous pure white blanket of moisture lay peeking over, so much like disheveled bedclothes pushed back against a footboard after a raucous and intense night of passionate and long-awaited frolic.

Sure enough, once over the little nameless pass and into the Monticello Valley where now rests Lake Berryesa, the sun’s work has not begun. The road enters the bank of fog, perhaps never to exit this day. The cold x-rays work against my hands to stiffen them and render them numb all the way to Napa. But the recent warmth and sweetness of the Sacramento Valley at dawn lingers and comforts me.


AND CONTINUES to do so as I sit outside the ICU, awaiting word.

© 2010
Church of the Open Road Press