Blue Highways: Portola, California

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe continue our exploration into examining selves, going through doors, and seeing the wholeness of life rather than the little pieces that get us lost in the details.  William Least Heat-Moon finds an answer: Humbug (Creek).  I'm a little more positive.  Click on the map thumbnail at right to see where Portola, California and the area of Humbug Creek is located.

Book Quote

"Missourians sometimes speak of a place called Hacklebarney: a non-existent town you try to get to that is forever just around the next curve or just over the next hill, a town you believe in but never get to.  Maybe that's enlightenment - always a little ahead of perception.

"Hindus represent their god of destruction, Shiva, by the yoni-lingam symbols of regeneration to suggest the cyclical movement of coming into and going from being that never ceases.  Even if a man resists belief in the fixity of things, even if he discredits the scope of human understanding, even if he sees a hint of metaphysics between 'cosmic' and 'comic'...he still longs to arrive at a place of clarity.

"Just outside Portola, I crossed Humbug Creek.  I didn't believe it.  Nothing that apropros happens in real life."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 11

Portola, California under Smith Peak. Photo by Leslye Layne Russell at the city-data.com website. Click on photo to go to site. Portola, California

I recently bought, at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, a small piece of art from a Huichol Indian artist.  It is a beautiful piece of yarn art.  The yarn is pressed into beeswax pasted on a board backing.  The artists who create these colorful pieces of work usually are fueled in their visions by peyote, a powerful hallucinogen used by the Huichol and other native tribes to open the doors to the spirit world.

While there were large pieces that showed elaborate scenes with people, animals and plants, and natural features, I was drawn to a circular pattern with points like a star.  The son of the artist explained that the interior represented the person or being that brought the Huichol fire - kind of like the Huichol Prometheus.  Around the center was a pattern representing the doorway between the spirit world and our reality.  A starlike pattern represented the fire, and how it touches all of us in the cosmos, and then outside the circle, a night sky pattern representing the cosmos.

My newest piece of art work - Huichol Indian yarn art. Photo by Michael L. Hess.At almost the same time, I am spending this week teaching ecologism as a political ideology to my political science class at a local community college.  While ecologism can run the spectrum from environmentalism which preaches stewardship and conservation to radical ecology which denies human exceptionalism in the natural world, relegating us to mere parts of the whole, the whole concept keeps bringing me back to the idea of a circular existence.  Therefore, I find it interesting that the universe has synched up, as it were, to bring me to this point in LHM's book where he considered the same questions as he sought clarity.

LHM appears to have gotten his answer on the road.  He finds Humbug Creek and remarks how it is rare to find something so apropos in real life.  I don't really think that LHM thinks it's all humbug.  I think he comes to the conclusion that he is thinking too much.  He quotes a Yiddish proverb: "Man thinks and God laughs."

It is curiously near to my way of thinking at the present time.  47 years after I was put on this earth, roughly 29 years after I graduated high school and 25 years after college, and now three years after getting a PhD, I am beginning to think I think too much, also.  I have spent time in the scientific realm, only to find that no matter what theory I'm putting out there, with no matter how much data I have accumulated, it is simply going counter to someone else's theory that has just as much data to support it.  In addition, my theory will be debunked by yet another theory, with data to support it as well.

In my personal life, all my data and theories have really ended up not serving me well, especially when I don't think of the whole rather than the parts.  My wife and I are learning again how to communicate with one another.  We had approached the parts without seeing the whole of our relationship and putting it in a larger context.  My life's issues and her life's issues have crashed together in a way that has been, shall we say, difficult in some contexts even as it has been nourishing in others.  In many ways that we relate, we aren't even aware of the dynamics of that whole, especially when we are focused on one part or another.

To that end, I'm trying to get back into my creative side.  This side does not try to dissect and understand.  Instead, it tries to experience and feel.  It's been a difficult process because it's not exactly how I was trained in life or in education.  I've been trained to put things outside of me and examine them, observe them and report on them, all very dispassionately.  Experiencing and feeling, especially in a world that does not value feeling and considers it a little dangerous, as been a rocky road for me so far.

But it is a doorway.  Much as LHM drives through Portola, which conjures up images for me of a doorway, to reach Humbug Creek, I am trying to walk through a doorway to learn a new way of viewing the world that will only enhance my old way.  Perhaps without a more whole view of myself and the world, it will always be humbug until I put it all together.  Perhaps this exploration is my own version of getting fire handed to me, a fire that will bring vision in the dark, that will provide a spark to my creativity, and ultimately allow me to fully see what I need to understand.

Musical Interlude

I'm going to include this video - even though the sound is not very good - of Greg Brown, with guitarist Bo Ramsey, singing Hacklebarney.  Greg Brown is a unique voice in America, and I was first introduced to him by my wife, who often heard him in Iowa and on A Prairie Home Companion.  He is married to another unique American singer, Iris Dement.  Of course, Hacklebarney is in the quote above - a fictional town always around the next corner.  It represents the goal we attempt to reach but never quite get there, or the understanding we seek that seems to just elude us.  We shouldn't stop trying, though.

If you want to know more about Portola

City of Portola
Everytrail.com: Hiking near Portola
Plumas County News (newspaper)
Western Pacific Railroad Museum
Wikipedia: Portola

Next up:  Quincy, California

Blue Highways: Beckwourth Pass, California

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon drives through a low gap in the Sierras, and we go with him.  He's in a foul mood because he's not sure that he's getting anywhere on his spiritual quest.  But life is a journey of intersecting circles, up and down, round and round.  Even though we seem to come back to the same places, it's what we learn and gain in between that's important.  Click on the map thumbnail at right to locate Beckwourth Pass, and let's think about the circularity life.

Book Quote

"At Beckwourth Pass, only a mile high and the lowest route over the Sierra Nevadas, I hardly knew I'd crossed anything.  But the mountains rose again on the other side, and the day became a dim, sodden thing, damp without rain.  Dismal.  The weather saturated me, and it may have provoked a dark fit of musing I fell into.

"...I did have a vague sense of mentally moving away from some things and toward others.  But in the Sierra gloom, even that notion seemed an illusion....I was on a Ferris sheel, moving along, seeing far horizons, coming close to earth, rising again, moving, moving, but all the time turning in the same orbit.  Black Elk says, 'Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.'  A hope."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 11

Beckwourth Pass, California, the lowest pass over the Sierra Nevada at 5,221 feet. Photo at the Sierra College website. Click on photo to go to host site.

Beckwourth Pass, California

I find it interesting that LHM crosses a mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada and doesn't recognize it. However, he is pretty sure that he is moving somewhere, even if he is moving in an up and down circular motion.  We've all been there.

As I write this post, I'm feeling that if I were to describe my life as a Ferris wheel, like LHM does in his quote above, I would be on the ascent.  A couple of years ago, I was at the bottom, and not too sure when I would be able to get out of the doom and gloom that I had put myself into.  My personal life was not good, complicated by too many things.  My professional life seemed moribund.  My self-esteem was horrible.  If I'd had the ability, back then, to step out of the cycle and look, I would have known that everything operates in circularity.  People and their situations rise and fall.

I've written before about my belief in the circularity of life.  It's all around us.  Unfortunately, when one is along for the ride, one doesn't get many opportunities to take a step back and examine where he or she is.  The past seems to hold no lessons for us.  The future looks too frightening to contemplate.  However, our universe is made up circles, discs, and globes.  Everything rotates and spins around a center.

The nature of circles has always fascinated me, because they are very symbolic in how we understand our situations.  If we modify LHM's analogy of the Ferris wheel and put it on its side, we would have a flat, spinning disc.  Now think of times when you've observed or experienced spinning - for those of you my age, a vinyl LP perhaps.  Or, if you ever played on the playground as a kid and got on one of those playground carousels.

If one is at the edge of the rotating disc, the speed at which one moves around the rotation seems great.  Life flies by at a high velocity.  You have to travel a greater distance to reach someplace.  If this describes you, then you may feel like it is all you can do to keep up.  You are constantly buffeted by the wind and everything that is getting thrown at you.  Under such speed, given the rotation, you may feel like you are holding on for dear life and that you could be thrown off at any moment.  Things move in such a way that you cannot know what's coming next, and everything that does come hits you with a smack.  It's hard to keep oriented, and easy to be dizzy.  I've felt that way many times.

Yet if you look toward the center, the more you move in from the edge of the disc, things seems to slow.  Your velocity slows as you move toward the center.  The distance to reach your goal is smaller.  You feel less buffeted, and you can observe more.  There's less disorientation.

If you are lucky enough to arrive at the very center of the disc, then you've reached a stationary center.  You can look out toward the edge and see those poor souls just trying to hold on.  You can see people at various spots on the disc, and the closer toward the center, the more in control of themselves and their lives they seem to be.

LHM seems to describe this very phenomenon.  Unfortunately, life is much more complicated.  We occupy not one but many discs at the same time, and we are at various places on them all at once.  That is why we may have stability in our personal lives, but things at work are spinning out of control.  Or a relationship can be going crazy, but we find stability within our friendships our our families.

But I believe that there is a stationary center for everything that can be reached if we try.  I think that moving toward the center and getting clarity on one aspect of our lives can help move us toward clarity on all the rest.  I've been learning how to reach it for myself, and feel like now, I have moved inward from the edge of the disc to a inner region where things feel like they are more under control.  I may be on the ascent, but it is a controlled ascent.  And if I'm moving more slowly, then when I start a descent (and I know sometime I will) I will be more aware and more in control, and the effect of the descent will be less traumatic.

Ultimately, I believe that we can align the spinning wheels of our lives so that the centers come together.  Again, if you are my age, think of the old spirograph toy, where no matter how many loops you draw, everything still crosses the center of the circle.  If I can gain access to the center of all the circles of my life, then hopefully I will be more observant and more aware of what has happened and what will happen.  I'll be able to appreciate my journeys.  I'll be able to come back to those places I like, and be better able to avoid those that harm me.  And if I reach that center, then when I'm living in the present and I happen to cross a mountain pass like Beckwourth Pass, I will know it.

Musical Interlude

The idea of the circularity of life is a common theme throughout human history and culture.  This simple Harry Chapin song, Circle, caught me the first time I heard it, and I can't hear it even now without it staying in my head for a long time.  I thought it fit with William Least Heat-Moon's feeling of beeing on a Ferris wheel, and his quote from Black Elk.

If you want to know more about Beckwourth Pass

The Beckwourth Trail
California Office of Historic Preservation: Beckwourth Pass
Sierra College Press: Beckwourth Trail
TrailBehind.com: Beckwourth Pass
Wikipedia: Beckwourth Pass

Next up: Portola, California

Blue Highways: Hallelujah Junction, California

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAnother border is crossed with this post, and it's a special one to me because it's the border of my home state.  As you'll see in this post, I am a veritable font of no knowledge when it comes to my own state.  It's sad when one has to learn about his state from others, but there you go.  That's what Littourati is for, in part...to stimulate knowledge and imagination.  Click on the map thumbnail at right, and you'll locate the place that has inspired a classical piano piece.

Book Quote

"I headed north out of Reno, crossed into California at an intersection once called Hallelujah Junction because it meant arrival in Eurekaland, then turned west on state 70."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 11

Hallelujah Junction Wildlife Area. Photo by the California Wildlife Conservation Board and at the California Department of Fish and Game. Click on photo to go to site.

Hallelujah Junction, California

One of the projects that has been percolating in the back of my mind would be an actual travelogue.  I have been astounded, even amazed, at how little I know about the state I lived in for 22 years, and where I grew up.  This is the state I have visited every year since then, for about 25 years.  It's embarrassing to me, really, that there are such huge gaps in my knowledge about California.

Here's a little example that my wife continues to relish and gives me a bad time about.  One year, during a visit to see my mom in Fort Bragg, she suggested that we check out a little winery about 10 miles up the coast from our house.  The Pacific Star Winery was a lovely place, dramatically perched on the bluffs.  It had a tasting room, and a little area for a picnic lunch.  The day was bright, as sun glinted off the water.  We started with doing some wine tasting.  As I was speaking with the man who was pouring, I asked him how long the winery had been around.  I was expecting to hear a year or two.  Instead, he said that the winery had started 10 years previously.  At that, my wife hit me and exclaimed "You mean we've been coming to this area all this time and you have never brought me here?"

She had a right to exclaim.  The fact is that my family never really looked any farther northward than a few miles above my hometown.  Fort Bragg sits about 180 miles north of San Francisco, and about 370 miles south of the Oregon border.  All of that area directly north and northeastward I knew nothing about, because we never went there.  I was born in Eureka, about 135 miles north of where I grew up, but remembered nothing about it.  I once went with a friend's family to Benbow, about an hour north, but that's it.  As for the northern interior of California - forget it.  I've never seen one of my state's most striking national features, Mt. Shasta.  I've never seen the rugged wilderness up in that area.  As my wife said, it was if my family's map was stamped Here be Dragons north of my hometown.

But it just wasn't the north.  I never saw much of the Central Valley or Southern California either.  We never traveled farther south of San Francisco than Santa Clara.  I went once to Yosemite National Park, and that was when I was in college.  I didn't visit Los Angeles until I was in my early 40s.  I've never been to San Diego.  The coastal stretch of highway high above the Pacific Ocean along Big Sur exists only in my imagination because I've never been there.  I'd say that as a Californian, I've seen maybe only 25 percent of my state.

My book, should I ever write it, will be called Coming Home: A Californian Discovers California.  From what I know and have read, California is the United States in microcosm.  You can find the most cosmopolitan of people, and the reddest of rednecks.  You will find mountains, valleys, oceans, and deserts.  I've barely scratched the surface of my own state.

Another example.  While many people will know even the tiniest communities in their state, I never knew that Hallelujah Junction existed.  However, I now know that a famous American composer wrote a piano piece inspired by the place.  As LHM travels through California, I will also be on a journey of discovery in a part of the state that I am barely aware of.  He doesn't spend much time in California, but hopefully my knowledge of my own state will increase as I plot his course.

And most importantly, perhaps it will spur me onward to write my own travel book about my own state, a state I barely know.

Musical Interlude

American composer John Adams wrote a piece for two pianos entitled Hallelujah Junction, named after the place in northeastern California.  There are two videos to get the whole piece in.

If you want to know more about Hallelujah Junction

Hallelujah Junction Wildlife Area
Roadside America: Hallelujah Junction Shoe Tree
Wikipedia: Hallelujah Junction

Next up: Beckwourth Pass, California

On the Road: Blythe, California

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on October 23, 2008

Unfolding the Map

First, an apology. It has been over a year since I have posted to this blog. In the intervening time, I got my Ph.D. and I am now doing a one-year position at a university somewhere in Texas. But I've always had this at heart and wanted to return. So now, I will finish this. When last we left Sal, he was on a bus heading back home. Here's the updated map - click the thumbnail - and it will only go forward from here until we finish this trip of Sal's.

Book Quote

"...Blythe..."

On the Road, Chapter 14

Blythe, California

That wasn't much of a quote. I'd like to think that Kerouac put Blythe in the book, out of the other small towns he passed through, because of some literary allusion. Perhaps it was because he seemed to blithely leave California after his various adventures there. Perhaps it was because he had a blithe spirit. Perhaps Kerouac just liked the sound of the town, or the look from his bus window. It's hard to know. Given that Sal doesn't have much to say about it, in fact he is just ticking off the places until he arrives home, I really don't have much to say about it either. It doesn't really bring out any kind of feeling in me at all. Perhaps I'm being too blithe about it. I don't know.

If you want to know more about Blythe

Blythe Chamber of Commerce
Blythe Intaglios
City of Blythe
The Desert Independent (Newspaper)
Wikipedia: Blythe

Next up: Salome

On the Road: Indio, California

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on September 25, 2007

Unfolding the Map

We're now zooming on through the night and into the dawn with Sal as he leaves California on his cross country trip back home. Click on the map and you'll see where we are.

Book Quote

"At dawn, my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio..."

On the Road, Chapter 14

Indio, California

Obviously, this is just a little place that Sal zooms through as he heads back home. He most likely didn't stop. But one thing that I understand from this book now is that Sal really finds place names fascinating. He mentions this before as he is hitchiking through the towns of California's Central Valley - Manteca, Madera etc - drawn by their exotic Spanish monikers. And now, he mentions Indio, another Spanish word, and he will mention at least a couple other places that stick in his imagination. Kerouac, being a poet, would gravitate to these words -- words that stick out there almost as if you can hang your coat or hat on them.

I know nothing about Indio, but I do know about cross-country bus rides. I may have mentioned it before. I traveled from Milwaukee to Billings, Montana and back via bus in the late 1980s to attend a friend's wedding in Wyoming. The trip was long, with many stops. I was solicited by a guy in a bathroom in Fargo, North Dakota. All of North Dakota and eastern Montana were about the flattest things I had ever seen in my life. Periodically, the smell of weed came from the bathroom at the back of the bus. At one point, a woman got on with her two children...whatever drove them onto the bus had not been good because she was angry and the children were crying and it was something besides the normal mom angry at cranky kids. It was night, and someone shushed the kids, and the mother yelled "Don't you EVER shush my f&^%king kids again!"

The funny thing is, I remember all of the things that happened on the way out to Montana. It was new territory that I had never seen, and I was excited. I remember very little about what happened on the way back. It was long, but suddenly I was old hat to this traveling stuff.

I think maybe this is just in the way of warning. Sal will not describe much about what happens to him on this bus ride. Unlike the trip out to California, his mission here is to get home as soon as possible. The mileage that took chapters to get through on the way out to San Francisco is done in one chapter on the way back. So, we'll try to fill in some blanks, or at least ruminate a bit.

If you want to know more about Indio

City of Indio
Coachella (Huge music festival near Indio)
Desert USA: Indio
Village Profile: Indio
Wikipedia: Indio

Next up: Blythe, California