Travels with Sappho: Into the Flood Again

I left Tempe after the last stint, which I had arranged in order to get Sappho's low beams fixed and get her an oil change, as well as generally touch base with something familiar and maybe grounding, after a fairly chaotic and rough couple of weeks on the road. While in Tempe, I did my laundry, reorganized the car, put a bunch of stuff I had been lugging around into storage, stayed with a friend of mine and got some good human Platonic friendly time as well as some cool time with her two dogs and cat. 

But I knew I was headed out again, and decided to go up to Las Vegas to have dinner with a friend of mine who was in that weird, totally surreal and disconnected "city" for the behemoth Consumer Electronics Show, because she is involved in 3-D fabrication and leading edge new design and manufacturing tech. I wanted to talk with her about possible applications of some of the statistical, machine learning methods I've learned in my Ph.D. program to her project, which is a work force training initiative based at MIT. 

So I found the cheapest but not the sleaziest place I could find in Vegas, and we got together for a nice dinner. She grew up in Newport, RI and McCoy Tyner actually played at one of her birthday parties. She said this with total casualness and as if it were the most normal thing in the world. My jaw had to be held in place via the firmest self control possible. Anyway, there might be some ways I can contribute to her project. Time will tell. 

I left Vegas feeling empty and stupid, unhappy and restless, cold- hearted, self-pitying, and angry. I knew I had to get out into the wild again. I decided to go to Death Valley and see about camping up at Wildrose, free camping but at a fairly high elevation, in the foothills of the Panamint Range. I stayed there two nights, with overnight lows in the mid-20's, and it was a definite cold-to-the-bone winter feeling. Some good solitude though. And a lot of time working in the warm car on the dissertation and preparing an article for submission to Ecology and Evolution. Having the cigarette lighter car charger for the laptop was a major breakthrough. 

Sunrise out the "office" window

 Almost full Wolf Moon from Wildrose

No idea how accurate Sappho's thermometer is but she claimed 26F

 One of my favorite spots in Death Valley is way up here

 Experimenting with Sappho's capabilities on various kinds of roads. Amazed by the way she just prowls along, sure footed and with complete control.

 Old charcoal kilns 

The pinks of a glorious winter sunset being caught by the Panamints to the east. The view from my campsite at Wildrose. 

I realized I had to get back on the grid, sadly, to stay in communication with my dissertation adviser and submit the article, etc. I was dreading being connected again, because over the course of a couple days and nights away from human contact, I had found some serenity and peace in my heart. It was a surprise to be able to access that. 

I decided to get connected again up along the Eastern Sierra, where I had never been before. I have always either headed home from Death Valley or to the coast and the enticements of Los Angeles or San Diego. I had often seen signs for Lone Pine, Big Pine, and Bishop, but had never headed up that way. So that's where I went. 

 The wild combination of the low Mohave and the rising Sierras

Echinocereus engelmannii along CA 168 east from Big Pine

 Full Wolf Moon, Bishop

 Took a break from article formatting to drive up into the mountains as far as I could. 

Loved this place

The best restaurant in Bishop is at the bowling alley

A snowstorm blew in down the Sierras while I was there

I had been hoping to retain my peace of mind and heart while spending three nights in Bishop, but this didn't happen. Which is an understatement. I was able to format and submit the article, and make a series of important contacts, etc, but my sense of being heartbroken and bereft started kicking in again. I was avoiding social media, thinking avoidance would assist in me keeping equanimity. But I was also dipping into Instagram a little bit, and every time, just feeling sad and lonely. By the time I left Bishop, I was really an emotional mess. I had the following strange and extremely vivid fantasy while I was there, triggered, I suppose, by the romantic combination of winter weather, the old motel I was staying at, etc.:

I flashed on a 1950's couple, all dressed up, the man with an overcoat and a suit and cologne, the woman in a fancy blouse and pleated skirt, expensive but understated jewelry, and they had been driving for hours across tiny old snowy 1950s California roads, and they had arrived at this old motel where I was staying and checked in, in the middle of basically a blizzard, and they were madly, totally, completely in love with each other. Youngish, maybe early 40's or so. And when they got into the room, they turned the little wall gas heater on, and it made that igniting sound and rush of warm air, and they started taking off their winter things, and the woman took off her jewelry and very carefully placed it on the nightstand, and they smiled at each other, and there was a perfect kind of radiant, warm, shy, and wordless tenderness between them, and I knew at that moment they were both married to other people, and they had come to Bishop from swanky Los Angeles, to see each other for the last time, ever, to say goodbye, but to sleep together one last weekend, to be with each other one last weekend. It was so incredibly vivid and real-seeming, poignant and true feeling, tender and weird. It was so vivid that I myself felt heartbroken for these two, and I wanted to talk them out of it, see if maybe they couldn't find a way out of their situations, find a way to just make this their life. It still feels incredibly tender, loving, kind, gentle and yet the saddest tale. 

Two side effects of solo travel that I had not counted on: the reliance on public spaces like coffee shops for internet also means hearing endless love songs; and, going to interesting places also means seeing a lot of couples who are having a great time together. I guess these things combined to inflame my imagination. I have no idea who The Lovers of Bishop were, but it hit me pretty hard. I hope they found happiness somehow.  

So I set out for Death Valley again, in the hopes that wildness would get me back that brief sense of equanimity from before the Bishop trip. But I didn't really have the spine for more nights in the mid to low 20's so I tried a couple nights at the $16 Texas Springs campground, at much lower elevation, one of those weird national park campgrounds that is not very well designed, where campsites are right next to each other. My mood just kept crumbling, my heart kept shredding up. I was opening to something that I had been resisting, is how it felt. I'll write more about the utterly ferocious storm of emotions that I was about to go into in another post, when I myself get it a little more clearly. Let's just stick with old Percy's travel tales eh wot. 

starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might. 

The two nights at Texas Springs in Death Valley were marked by the usual shitty human campground behavior. The first night, a couple nearby, where the woman just talked, and talked, and talked, endlessly into the night, and then, when they finally did go to sleep, one of them was a ferocious snoring beast. The second night, a couple of women right next to my camp who were up late drinking and talking, just having a good time, but with utterly no awareness of being in a public campground and no effort to moderate their volume. Volume always goes up as more alcohol is consumed; it's like a Newtonian law of ethanol to volume proportion.They also kept swinging a very, very bright halogen lantern around, so it seemed my tent was being swept by a searchlight every now and then. Bear in mind they were an actual distance from where I was trying to sleep of perhaps 15 feet. It is so weird to be out in the great, vast silent middle of nowhere and have to wear earplugs, but this is almost always the way it is in these public campgrounds. 

I decided I had to go as far from humanity as possible, especially since my state of heart and mind was seriously deteriorating. Again, more on that later. Anyway, I went to a wilderness area and I was the only person camping there for several nights. It was so silent on windless nights (which all were but one), that I could hear my own heartbeat in my head. There were a couple of owls. Otherwise, nothing at all, except for the trucks going to and from a mining site nearby, and those were very few and far between, and only in the morning and at night. 

Now, I am back in the "civilization" of Tempe, uncomfortable in my hotel room, but getting a pre-op exam prior to cataract surgery, scheduling said surgery, meeting with my committee chair tomorrow to discuss necessary revisions of the dissertation before submission for formatting review and sending it out to the rest of the committee. 

I reconnected with a bit of social media and someone asked me, "How are you?" I never know how to answer this question these days. I mean, the honest answer is: I am not well. I feel like I'm totally destroyed in just about every conceivable way. I'm heartbroken, bewildered, anxious, living in total uncertainty. I have felt fortunate to have Pema Chodron's company and her book, When Things Fall Apart. I had somehow thought that the worst passages through Hades had concluded already, and yet, from Bishop to now feels more challenging than anything I experienced previously. More challenging than anything I have experienced in my life, actually. 

I'll write about the dimensions of those challenges another time, or maybe not at all. I am, while experiencing a baffling phase of heart and mind, also finding my entire process absolutely tiresome. I am exhausting myself daily. I have no idea how certain friends have been able to so kindly and generously keep listening to me. I can barely even listen to myself. I keep trying to be kind to myself and I keep trying to call a moratorium and just take a fucking break, but the energies are not cooperating, at all. "Things" I thought I had entirely resolved or at least had really begun to move away from have returned so powerfully that at times I feel like they will kill me. Not exaggerating. 

I guess it's fierce weather, and it's not linear, and who knows what lies on the other side?