Death and Rebirth on the Road Home
I wish you all a peaceful day, whatever this day means to you or doesn't, and I'm more grateful than I might have been otherwise for the gift of life itself, because of my journey home Tuesday and yesterday. I'm grateful to all 34,547 subscribers here, paid and unpaid, because writers need readers first and foremost; your attention is a gift. As for that journey....
I didn't chase the storm; the storm chased me. On Saturday, I drove down to Los Angeles to spend three days recording the audio version of my next book, and planned to visit friends in Palm Springs for a couple of days when I wrapped things up in the studio. We managed to get the whole book recorded Sunday and Monday so I was free to go Tuesday morning. I had been checking weather reports since before I left, and they had suddenly gotten far more serious. That morning, the county of Los Angeles issued a pretty terrifying storm warning, with eight inches of rain possible – that's a deluge producing floods, shutdowns, landslides, debris-basin catastrophes, shut roads, and more (eight inches is a shocking amount; reality outstripped it with more than eleven inches falling in the first twenty-four hours in the San Gabriel Mountains, according to the Los Angeles Times). If I didn't leave soon it would be too dangerous to travel.
It felt too bleak to just drive straight home after spending two days in the dark closet in which I read my book aloud from an iPad, with stumbles, retakes, adventures in pronouncing some of the magnificent long names from other cultures of people I'd quoted. So I swung by Palm Springs to say a quick hello to the friends. The clouds were coming in, and the sky was darkening even before night came on. I had thought it was smart to get behind the wall of mountains that keep a lot of Pacific weather from reaching the desert, and it would have been. The skies were clear and the stars and a crescent moon were out. But in the pitch dark on Highway 247, which goes to Barstow, from which I'd take 58 through Mojave, Tehachapi and Bakersfield to the I5, the great central artery of California, I suddenly came to a big flatbed truck stopped. Another truck was stopped in front of it.
There had been a catastrophic head-on accident that must have just happened, with only these two trucks ahead of me and the ambulance yet to arrive. I stopped, and a car stopped behind me, and another behind it, and so it went, with perhaps hundreds of cars parked on the road, their lights gleaming in a long ribbon behind me, and then switched off to spare the batteries. A while later, a policeman drove by, stopping at each vehicle, by to say it would be about an hour while they took care of the victims and cleared the road.
An hour, I thought, and took out my atlas, my reading glasses, and put on a light: to backtrack and find another route would take longer, unless I gambled on a small side road back a few miles – but that didn't seem like a wise or safe move in that black night, though I watched a few cars head out on it. I would wait. I put on the audio version of Patti Smith's new memoir Bread of Angels, and lived through the first years of her life while we waited. It's a poignant story in its opening chapters, a portrait of a close-knit poor family living in the gritty, vivid world of the 1940s and 1950s that has been swept away long ago, a world of factory jobs and kids walking to school alone and playing in vacant lots and forming their little tribes and gangs in the neighborhood, a world where one toy, one book, one photograph, in a time when those things were not so abundant, could be a treasure, a talisman, a doorway for the imagination to travel through into other realms. Smith was often ill in that old world of childhood diseases most American children will never suffer (or perhaps they will again, thanks to the current regime).
Smith's gravelly voice was good company, and so were the constellations out in the black sky. But I'm an impatient and inquisitive person so after a while I paused her story and went up to see what was going on. The cab of an eighteen-wheeler was bashed in on one side of the road. What had once been a passenger vehicle, perhaps a minivan, was already loaded onto the bed of a tow truck, its front end crushed and compacted. It would be hard to imagine anyone in the front seat of that vehicle surviving. I had arrived just after what was likely a fatal accident (in this post-local-newspaper era, I've not been able to find any records of it). If I'd been a few minutes earlier if it might have been me in the head-on accident, though I didn't know which vehicle had caused it, which had gotten out of its lane.
It took them two and a half hours, these men in reflective jackets in the dark who must have done this before: been the first to the scene of a death or deaths, done a form of last rites that was also janitorial duty. After the ambulance left, it was quiet. The creosote bushes by the side of the road waved in the breeze, and their wonderful smell was so evocative for me, who had once lived part-time in Joshua Tree. I noticed that I could be impatient that I was delayed, or I could meet the unexpected with equanimity, or I could think about what was happening. My mother had once told me that in Catholic school, they would say a prayer when they heard an ambulance go by. I said a few prayers for whoever had been in that semi-truck, that smashed car.
Had I known how long we'd be there, I might have turned around but a decision has its sunk costs; the longer I waited the sooner it seemed likely they'd soon open the road, the more time I had invested in that option. As a result of the tragedy, I only made it to Tehachapi, the town that sits on the high pass between the Mojave desert and the San Joaquin valley, between the landscape of yucca and creosote and the great agricultural expanse of California's vast interior. I got there after 11pm, about a hundred miles short of my goal for the night. When I got up at 6:30am on Christmas Eve, the storm had, thanks to the delay, caught up with me, as I had feared.
Torrential rain was coming down, but I bargained on outrunning it, and I did, about forty miles later. Heavy rain came down once more an hour or so after I'd left but I pressed on and got ahead of the storm. Far ahead to the northwest, I could see the low gray mass of the atmospheric river had broken up into individual clouds and the sky was lighter there. That was what I was headed for. Bread of Angels kept me company; Patti Smith had grown up, had moved to New York, had begun performing. By the time I reached the Bay Area, there was blue between the clouds, and sunlight, and she had become the poet she dreamed of and the performer she never imagined she'd be.
I headed over beautiful Pacheco Pass and stopped at a Trader Joe's in Morgan Hill. As I walked in, an old man wearing a gold cross and all black greeted me, and then blessed me, though he said he wasn't a priest. I'm not Christian, but I'm the granddaughter of a devout Catholic and friends with many believers, and I gratefully accept blessings wherever they come from (they often come from homeless people, and those ones really touch me). From Tehachapi on, I saw the green of renewal that comes with the rain, green hill after hill after hill with the deciduous oak trees more lovely in their leafless bareness against that color, the wonderful crookedness of their boughs on display, andI knew that up close the mosses were flourishing after the rain, back from their dried-up summer state.
This is my favorite time of year, because of that green and that renewal of life, the trees leafing out again, the grass and annuals shooting up again, the mosses glorious in their lushness, fungi abundant, once-dry streams singing, waterfalls in the steep places. But water is sometimes the bringer of life and sometimes the opposite: people have and will lose their lives or homes in the catastrophe now being visited upon Southern California; a woman was washed nine miles down a creek there and then rescued by helicopter. Climate change, I did not understand at first, is a crisis of water, of too much and not enough, of water coming in deluges or not coming at all, of a breakage of the patterns of nature that were about the time and pace and quantity of water moving through ecosystems.
And while I outran the storm, the storm ran after me. At 3am an emergency alert woke me up this Christmas morning, warning of flash floods, while I could hear rain lashing the windows and the wind howling. The local paper reports this morning, "As officials warn of damaging winds, flooding rain and blizzard-like snow, California also may face another form of severe weather: tornadoes," which are rare here. The storm has two more days to run across much of California. On Highway 80, heavy snowfall has made cars spin out and crash and slowed traffic to a halt over the high pass. On the Grapevine, the I5 pass north of Los Angeles, the rain and wind had likewise caused a lot of delays thanks to a lot of crashes.
I'm grateful to have made it home and will be out on foot soon, enraptured as always by the new green in the landscape. That landscape has always been home to me too, since I was old enough to wander into it. I wish you all home in the best sense this third day of the lengthening light.
