Taste for Darkness

I've been doing something odd lately.  I've been 

driving the back roads from Aptos to Corralitos on

a frequent, routine basis.  I'm doing it for the tranquility.  I get in my car and drive the five miles to town, turn around in the Safeway parking lot, and drive back home.  And I do it at midnight.

The road is a rural, two lane serpent through apple orchards, and vineyards, and forest.  It dips beyond artificial light into a dense and quiet darkness, and reveals itself in pieces as my headlights brush over its slumbering features.  It's relaxing.  There's no sound unless I'm singing along with a CD.  There's no movement.  There's no detail. All there is is history.  And the presence of God.

The last significant lighted structure on my way home is the elementary school my sons attended.  The school that shaped the roles they would play out in their youth.  The school where Aidan's first grade teacher dropped dead in the copy room, and taught the biggest lesson, early.  Where doves bred in a nest built for interrupting, grubby hands.  The school I redefined my manhood at as I waited on the playground for 6 years of final bells, and received hugs from children I didn't know, but who knew me as a consistent novelty that represented something essential.  Something they didn't know how to name.  I was the rec leader who walked in creeks, and complimented properly placed cuss words.  Next time you stub your toe into backwards try leaving "shit" or "fuck" or "damn" off the menu.  You can't reprimand the order of things.

Past the school there's a long curve, and the last glowing bulbs on the wall that hides the Garvey house. After that, you're driving in forest, and it's brilliant.

 The apple orchards collapse together and the houses behind them get swallowed in shadow, and I'm just a guy in love with the soul of the universe, and 'wilderness'. Wilderness by definition is something you can hold back, but never completely.  It's waiting for Man to grow tired, for his lights to burn out, so it can consume everything he put in its place.  I'm humbly reminded how  puny I am, and how ridiculous my self-importance appears.  I'm Jonah in the belly of it all.

As the orchards slip into distance an alley of redwood turns dark to something before memory, and a hairpin turn. The hairpin turn two Hell's Angel bikers slid off the road on trying to pass my mom as she drove me home from school, before I belonged here.  Before I had friends.  The hairpin she stopped in the middle of as she helped the biker's get to their feet, and inspected as if they were her own children.  "You boys should know better than that", and thank you, Ma'am, and they vanish.

Then, on the left, is the street a high school acquaintance grew up on, the one who married his Love, and woke next to her lifeless body one morning, and daughters now his own to grow. The street I packed alfalfa sprouts in 4 ounce containers for $6 an hour in high school, and used the left overs to make rooster tails with the Oldsmobile '66. 

Then onto the 3-mile triangle of Day Valley, Cox, and McDonald roads my brother and I ran at 5 a.m. on summer mornings to prepare for football.  The stillness of those mornings is the stillness of these nights.  In one corner of the triangle are the fields I learned to be alone in, and a water tower I'd climb to feel unreachable.  In another corner there's a house and a marriage worthy of observance, and the old classmate, and wife, who made them.  And right next door there's balance in the form of the 'live and let live' philosophy of orgies, drugs, and exposing your children to what's real, not imagined. 

At the bottom of their hill is my old bus stop on Cox Road, the one that spawned the catch phrase, "We get off on Cox". The bus stop that was exactly one mile from my front door.  That lone mile forced conversation with whoever was walking with you, and the guys I walked with became best friends, or unexpected ones.

At the top of that street is the house I grew up in, and the tree that killed my father.  It's where K.K.'s brother drowned, and where his mother got cancer, and where his stepfather betrayed him. It's where my brother discovered that sanity has an alternative, and where a cop who had a heart bigger than his badge returned him to us when he recognized he was lost.

It's where I saw my first set of tits, real tits, on the German lady who sunbathed naked across the street, the one I asked to have sex with when I turned 18.  The one who gently shot me down.  The German lady who took me to dinner, and drinks, at 23, and said yes.  It's where I learned how to make friendships, and walk away from them.

On the main road I drive by the house the twins lived in, and the memory of how their father died during an argument at a Little League game, and the strength they had at his funeral.  The house that burned down, and was left in disrepair for years.

The remnants of that house became the backdrop for the most courageous remaking of self I've ever witnessed when my college roommate pronounced his rejection of his fathers values, and the defining of his own.   He lived in air and water for two years with a few items of clothing, a bike he rode off a cliff when confidence vanished, and a sleeping bag.  He learned how to use carpentry tools to build homes, and a soul..   It was beautiful.

Finally, there's a sweeping turn, and a last, long straight-a-way.  And my home.  Or purgatory.  And what's left of me, and what I am for the moment.  And the kindness of strangers.  There's the cottage and the garden and the stars at night and a commencement I'm still waiting for.  I don't know the man who lives there, but  I wear his skin and think his thoughts and say his prayers, and hope they'll be answered.

I drive at midnight so I can have the world to myself for a moment.  And to be with God.  I drive at midnight on an old country road to taste my life again.