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: Portal, Arizona

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAs we cross into another state, Arizona, we peruse on portals, gateways and doorways and where they may lead us.  William Least Heat-Moon hopes it might be Paradise, but we'll see.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to see where Portal, Arizona is located.

Book Quote

"I crossed into Arizona and followed a numberless, broken road.  A small wooden sign with an arrow pointing west:

PORTAL

PARADISE

"The pavement made yet another right-angle turn, and a deep rift in the vertical face of the Chiricahuas opened, hidden until the last moment.  How could this place be?  The desert always seems to hold something aside....

"...Portal consisted of a few rock buildings, and not a human anywhere."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 12

Portal Store, Portal, New Mexico. Photo by Al & Kelly Bossence at the Travel with the Bayfield Bunch blog. Click on photo to go to site.

Portal, Arizona

In an earlier post along another journey, when we were traveling through St. Louis with Jack Kerouac, I wrote about a gateway.  America is full of gateways.  In that post, I spoke of gateways being portals to someplace different.  In this quote, I like how LHM enhances the directional sign to Portal and Paradise with a passage about how the place he is entering is so different than anything he's ever experienced.  You wonder if he'll find Paradise.  Instead, he first doubts he'll find anything, then he sees an opening in the mountains, and finally encounters Portal as a small empty settlement.

Have you ever had that kind of "oh my God!" moment when you're traveling?  A moment when you turn a corner, travel through a mountain pass, or emerge from a forest or fog and experience a sense of wonder at what lies in front of you?  I have had those types of moments every so often in my journeys around the U.S. and abroad and when they come, they have stayed with me.  When I was 15, my family made our only really big family trip.  We took a cruise from Vancouver, British Columbia to Alaska.  The ship was a Soviet cruise ship, hammer and sickle proudly emblazoned on the smokestack, called the MV Odessa.  It had screws on the sides of the ship, so it could turn around in one place.  That meant that we could go into narrow fjords, right up to the sides of glaciers, and then turn around and go out.  Just being able to go between those high cliffs through still fjord waters was an amazing experience, and the wildlife - bear, eagles, orcas, seals were just the lagniappe.

My first and only trip to Yosemite National Park was also amazingly breathtaking.  I drove through a gap in the Sierras, a true portal, into the most magnificent landscape that I've ever seen.  El Capitan, Half Dome, all the landmarks made famous by Ansel Adams in black and white were there in front of me, towering over a gorgeous valley in full color.

I once drove through West Virginia.  I didn't know much about the state, but I had decided to take blue highways of my own.  Coming around a turn, I suddenly found myself at an impressive overlook.  It was the New River Gorge providing me with another magnificent travel portal.  I was inspired deeply, and wrote a poem for my girlfriend based on the fall colors of the vegetation around the gorge.

Standing on top of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park, looking out over the border into the Mexican Chihuahuan Desert, I had another moment of wonder and a feeling of joy that I was alive and able to experience such a view.

There have been many others.  Standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Looking out toward a live volcano in El Salvador, and later walking on the side of one with steam coming out of small vents along the trail.  Standing on the edge of the Jamuna River, huge in width, in Bangladesh watching a rainstorm on the river in late afternoon light during the monsoon season.  Walking through the forest to stand where Hildegard von Bingen entered the convent in the early part of the last millenium.  Standing at the edge of the Roman Colosseum.  Seeing Lake Michigan for the first time and being amazed at the immensity of this inland sea that they call a "lake."  Seeing the Mackinac Bridge - the third longest suspension bridge in the world - in the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan.  Gazing on the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the twilight.  I'm sure there are others I can think of.  I know there are others who have traveled more extensively than I, and therefore have enjoyed more wonder-filled moments, but i treasure the ones I have experienced.

However, my favorite portal is always the one closest to my heart.  When I drive Highway 20 in California west from Willits and toward my hometown, and the forest opens onto the ocean, I know that I'm back to the familiar.  The gateways we travel through to get to paradise or to places of trial are also the ones that bring us back home.  As we'll see in the next couple of posts, the portal that LHM travels through, slightly hoping for paradise, will give him cause to wonder, and worry.  But he's traveling and moving through life, he will eventually find home, and that's all that matters.

Musical Interlude

I was looking through my music and found the song that perfectly fits this post.  Tish Hinojosa is a Texas singer-songwriter who I saw many times when I lived in San Antonio.  This song, Destiny's Gate, has a lyric in the refrain that reads:

You find a road and you pave it
A long lost love and you save it
So much of the past sees tomorrow at destiny's gate

Enjoy Tish, and enjoy whatever places your portals lead you!

Share Destiny's Gate by Tish Hinojosa

If you want to know more about Portal

Arizona Sky Village
Cave Creek Ranch
DowntheRoad.org
PortalArizona.com

Next up: On the Cave Creek near Portal, Arizona