To: Friends and Family
Subject: Through the Rainbow
From: walden@intermind.net
Greetings All,
So many wanted me to let them know how the trip went that I decided to keep a log. Because of the cats, I’m limiting the driving time each day, and we’re taking a longer route through California and up 101 to avoid snow.
Dec. 25: Modesto, CA
We left Vegas as planned this morning. The cats slept all the way to Motel 6 and find our room way more interesting than I do. As I walked around the neighborhood, people were coming and going with shopping bags full of gifts and food. They appeared more busy than merry.
How many gifts will end up returned or at Goodwill? Peace on Earth and Goodwill to shoppers. Why not simplify the season—we each buy something we really want or need and pretend it’s from everyone who loves us. What did Joseph and Mary do with the sheep, gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold—good choice. But sheep? And all that perfumy stuff? I wonder if Jesus had allergies.
While enjoying a dinner of reconstituted vegetable soup, fruit, and bread, I watched the Christmas choirs on TV. I felt relieved to be free of the holiday busyness. Free but alone, like a lingering soul.
•••
Dec. 26: Eureka, CA
As we cut across California before heading north to Eureka, our drive through forested hills and valleys was quiet and uneventful. Except for the rainbow.
Arching over the valley to our left and into the trees ahead of us, its colors were pure and distinct. Suddenly the trees opened up, and there was the end of the rainbow. We drove right through it. FYI, there was no pot of gold.
What could it mean if you go through and not over the rainbow? Had I been graced by some mystical gifts from the Great Light?
Upon being released from her carrier, cd leapt to the Motel 6 window sill, her fifteen-pound presence in open defiance of the sign stipulating Only One Pet Under Nine Pounds / Violaters Will Be Asked to Leave. Luckily, the manager who kept walking past was preoccupied with a plumbing problem next door.
After I finished hauling in our gear, I realized MITTS had disappeared. I looked everywhere...laid down the evening meal to lure her. cd wolfed down both servings. MITTS had somehow slipped out. After searching the grounds for nearly two hours, I returned to the room desolate, full of self-recrimination, and weeping into cd’s fur. cd, annoyed by my tears shed into her fur, left me for the window. When my folly grew too much for me to bear alone, I shook the treat jar to lure her back. And lo, the MITTStical one emerged from an opening the size of a baseball between the mattress and bed stand.
•••
Dec. 28. Netarts
I guess when Noah received the rainbow promise that The Almighty would never again destroy the world, it did not preclude harrowing weather. We crept blindly through fog this morning only to be hit with a ferocious storm just minutes after we crossed the Oregon border. The rain was not falling but assailing us, driven by gale-force winds as men in trucks with giant tires kept roaring past leaving me in their torrential wake. The cats started wailing in Newport. An hour later Lincoln City, I wanted to join them.
When I finally turned onto Third Street in Netarts, I followed my map to a red house with a tin roof flapping madly in the gale. The door was supposed to be unlocked but wasn’t. Son of a bitch! Oh, wait, wrong house. I pulled forward two houses.
Opening the door, I peeked in and beheld a large living area and kitchen paneled in rich, warm wood. In the middle of the room sat my wood stove surrounded by cozy furniture in comfortable earth tones. Through the wall of windows on the far wall, I peeked through Venetian blinds covering the front wall of windows and looking over Netarts Bay at the Pacific—experienced no panic.
Freed from their carriers, the cats immediately made themselves at home on the big comfortable bed in the back room. Before unpacking, I walked down Crab to the Bayside Deli and bought a bottle of Oregon pinot noir and by 8 p.m. was listening to Beethoven and reading the local paper. Letters to the editor were mainly from citizens up in arms at the way animals were being abandoned at the side of the road and cutbacks in the teaching staff due to lack of funding. Time for bed.
Dec. 29
This morning, I awoke before light. The ocean sounded distant. Like the Spirit of the deep moving across the pitch-black. As I sat drinking coffee, a faint light separated the earth from the sky, and the shadowy forms upon which my house rested became a hillside of willows and beach pines. Seagulls and crows flew out of the dark. Through the spotting scope by the patio door, I saw seals lined up on the sandy spit across the bay, their big dark eyes looking out of their big blubbery bodies at rest—like bombs that just weren’t gonna study war no more.
Something large flew across the scope. A Great Blue Heron parachuted into the shallows at the foot of the hill just below me. A flotilla of black and white birds paddled down the middle of the bay—I checked the bird book on the table beside the scope. Buffleheads, so named, said the book, because their heads were shaped the head of a buffalo. Seagulls waddled about. Still no people in sight. I was alone, all that I’d been now behind me. A strangeness filled the air. Had I gone through the rainbow into the world of myth?
A sudden uneasiness prompted me to turn on the TV. The traffic reporter showed cars lined up on what he called the Sunset Highway. Two separate and disparate windows on the world, I was thinking when the lineman knocked on the door.
While connecting me to the other world, he told me the storm yesterday was a hundred-year flood, the second such flood in two years. I was apparently one of the last vehicles to make it through Hwy 101 to Tillamook. While Tillamook is navigable this morning, it’s totally cut off from the outside world by high water and mudslides.
Four more days left until the last year of the millennium.
Happy New Year to all of you who kept me from backing out of this adventure. And thank you.
Joan
Next: After the Storm
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