by Don George
In this sense, I thought, the lighthouse keepers are preserving much more than the lighthouse itself; they are keeping a vital piece of the state, and of ourselves, and deserve all the support they need.
After Point Arena, my next stop was in Mendocino, where something remarkable happened.
I had spent half an hour wandering among the galleries and boutiques, the upscale clothing and kitchen utensil places, the coffee and burger stops, and ice cream and sandwich shops. Despite its tourist orientation, I already liked Mendocino very much; for some reason, it reminded me of Lenox, Massachusetts, a resort town near the Tanglewood concert area where I spent many a youthful weekend trying to absorb symphony music and starlight.
I liked the feel of the town, the attention to gardens and benches and decks, the neat inns and wooden houses, the arts and crafts places, and then, in the opposite direction, the crashing white waves and magnificent, wind-slanted trees and wildly swaying grasses. It felt like what I once upon a time imagined much of California to be—or, more precisely, it felt like New England in California. Well, most precisely: It felt like me.
I sat on a bench outside the Presbyterian church, which could have been transplanted from a New England town, looked at the ocean and felt the world slow down a bit; I was beginning to get back in touch with what’s really important, like peeling paint and buzzing bumblebees, the feeling of sunshine and a salty breeze on your face, the surprise of wild roadside blackberries.
And then I came upon a gentle bookstore called The Book Loft, where Windham Hill music drifted through the air and books on yoga and Zen and new age science greeted fervent readers. It felt like a portal to another time, and so it became. I was standing in the back of the store, in the used books area, when I saw some old, well-thumbed, and obviously lovingly read copies of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.
This was the same trilogy that my brother had persuaded me to read more than two decades earlier because he had loved them so much, the same books I had inexplicably been thinking of earlier in the day—after not having thought of them for years. Suddenly I was aware of tears filling my eyes.
I don’t know quite what it was: the conjunction of youthful idealism and older-age reality, perhaps, a sudden and overwhelming sense of times past and distances traversed. It was not only sad, but a combination of happiness and astonishment and sadness; it was like something had tapped a spring in my soul, and all the waters burst out from within. I thought of my brother and parents on the East Coast, and then of my wife and child, equally far away, it seemed, in Oakland. And I wondered: What happens to our youthful dreams, our fantasies about what life will be? How can I reconcile the glories of the present with the goals of the past? Where do they come together?
I had no answers, but somehow in The Book Loft, among the blooms and benches and boutiques of Mendocino, that was all right. And when I resumed the trip, I realized that that moment had transformed everything: The world around me seemed stunningly beautiful, had taken on a deeper life.
I spent the night at an inn overlooking the sea in Elk. After an excellent dinner at Harbor House, I walked down Highway 1 to my cottage. From my balcony, there was only the wash and scrape of the waves, the vast slumbering outlines of rocks against the sea, and the intricate puzzle of the stars.
In the morning, soft sunlight lent the visible world a magical quality. Bumblebees flitted patiently from flower to flower, hawks turned and glided in the air; trees bent in the wind, water broke over the rocks. I felt calm and far, far from the city.
After a hearty breakfast highlighted by fresh blackberries and thick cream, I was back on the road. Above Fort Bragg, the scenery alternated from opulent open vistas of sea and sky to the surprise of sand dunes, to dense green groves of evergreens. On one side I passed flower-bright meadows and rolling hills, on the other broad white-sand beaches with picnic tables and ample parking lots, where the only litter was driftwood.
I passed through Westport in the time it took me to say “a couple of inns, an all-purpose general store and gas station, and not much else” into my tape recorder and then began to look for Rockport, which I had been told was the last checkpoint before the unmarked turn-off to the wilderness area known as the Lost Coast.
The road turned steep and twisting, and soon the sea seemed only a memory. Massive white birches, redwoods, and other leafy trees I couldn’t identify towered beside and over the road, giving it a kind of gloomy enchantment. To complete the effect, a gentle rain had begun to fall, and clouds were covering the trees like soft white comforters. Plush pine needles and green gossamer ferns carpeted the floor; the only signs of habitation were rotting, abandoned farmhouses and cabins.
And where was Rockport? Suddenly I came to a sign for the “Drive Thru” redwood tree in Leggett, which was well beyond Rockport on my map. Since I was so close to the Drive Thru tree, I decided the only thing to do was to drive through it, but my mind was on Rockport and the Lost Coast.
But first I drove to the end of the road, literally, the nondescript intersection where the forlorn green signs say End California 1. Then fate led me well. The ticket-taker at the Drive Thru Tree Park said she loved the Lost Coast, had once spent ten months camping there—“and one week when I didn’t see another soul”—and told me exactly where to find the dirt turn-off twenty-five minutes back toward Westport.
“Rockport?” she echoed when I asked. “Oh, that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Back along the winding road through the towering trees until there it was, ten minutes after the sun came out, a dirt road charging uphill with a tiny, virtually illegible white sign indicating Mendocino County Road No. 431, the pathway to either disaster (what if my reliable rented Reliant got stuck in the mud?) or paradise.
Six muddy, bumpy, grass-graced, vista-vibrant, lupine-lovely, heart-stoppingly beautiful miles and half an hour later I came to the end of another road, a dirt trail off the county road that stopped at the Usal Camp beach. I felt like I had stepped into an undiscovered world: Waves tumbled and roared; seabirds wheeled and screeched. Before me and to my left was sand, rocks, seaweed, driftwood; to my right, rocky cliffs plunged into the sea; behind me, grassy hills rose into a blazing blue sky. I sat and watched, and these lines drifted into mind: “The sea moves in white waves toward the shore; the wind moves—white waves toward the sky.” I saw bright orange poppies, purple thistles, blue and white baby’s breath, exquisite tiny white flowers with yellow centers.
The day moved, but I didn’t.
Thirty minutes that seemed like hours later, it was time to leave sea and seaweed, wave and wood, behind, but one adventure was left.
As I was driving back along Road No. 431, I came to a particularly tempting trail, stopped the car, and ran under the trees into a grassy expanse with a precipitous view of the glimmering sea. I was running through this meadow, exulting in the sunshine and pure, pristine freedom of the place, when I saw what looked like horse’s hoofprints in the grass. I knelt over them to get a better look, and as I was absorbed in wondering what a horse had been doing in that isolated place, a cool shadow passed over me.
I looked up to see one red-tailed hawk, and then another, spectacularly silhouetted against the sun. Wings outstretched, they were dancing in the air, riding its thin highway, swooping and soaring, wheeling with wordless grace out toward the ocean and then back over me. They performed this pas de deux for perhaps ten to fifteen seconds, hovering motionless in the air, wing tips almost touching, then soaring away, until they sailed out of sight over the trees.
I knew then that this was really the end of the road: This was where things, in some obscure way, came together—up in the air, catching the current and gliding, circling, swooping, hovering with ruffled tips on the wind. And even as I write these words, those hawks are still in my mind, swooping, soaring. The breeze freshens; the ocean glints below. They are dancing, dancing. I see them dancing. Still.
Japanese Wedding
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br /> I wrote this essay for a special quarterly travel magazine that the Examiner published in the 1980s and ’90s called Great Escapes. The theme of this issue was Extraordinary Journeys, and so I wrote about the most extraordinary journey of my life, when Kuniko and I traveled from San Francisco to her home village of Johen, in the southwestern corner of Shikoku, to get married. The trip alone required two planes, two trains, a ferry, and a bus, and took thirty hours door to door, but the truly extraordinary journey was simultaneously moving from one world to another and from one state of life to another. In the heart of rural Japan, I realized that our marriage represented much more than the union of two people—that it was a bridging of cultures and lifetimes as well as souls, and that the most extraordinary journey of all was just beginning.
OF ALL THE JOURNEYS IN MY LIFE, the most extraordinary occurred in the early 1980s in Japan, when my wife, Kuniko, and I traveled to her hometown of Johen to observe and celebrate our marriage in the Japanese Shinto style.
The journey to Johen, a tiny village located in the southwest corner of the island of Shikoku, was a revelation in itself, a trip through layers of modernity into the heart of the country.
We flew first from San Francisco to Tokyo’s Narita airport, then switched planes to fly to Osaka. From Osaka, we traveled by train past steam-belching factories and concrete-block apartment buildings into suburbs where two-story wooden houses were set irregularly among rice paddies the size of tennis courts, and beyond them to the port of Uno.
We spent the night with friends in Uno, then rose early to catch the ferry that traverses the Inland Sea to Takamatsu, the principal city on Shikoku. The ferry set off in a thick mist, and soon we were plowing by tiny islands—a stand of pines and a solitary cabin or two—that hovered uncertainly, as in a sumi-e painting, in the fog.
Kuniko said that this particular ferry was famous for its noodles, so we bought two big, steaming bowls and settled inside. There we were surrounded by a veritable symphony of slurping: Construction workers in sweatshirts and headbands, schoolkids in shorts and baseball caps, grandmothers in somber kimonos—all were vigorously sucking away. In Japan, it’s considered bad form not to, so after a few hesitant attempts, I began slurping happily away as well. (As I always suspected, the noodles do taste better that way.)
At Takamatsu, we transferred to a rickety local train that wound along the rugged northern and western coasts of Shikoku, where the mountains plunge to the sea, past forests of pine and scatterings of houses tucked into the hills, with smoke pluming from their chimneys.
We could tell the time by the ebb and flow of passengers: the housewives returning home from shopping in the late morning; the schoolchildren in their white shirts and dark skirts or shorts in the early afternoon; the farmers, factory workers, and fishermen around sunset. As we got farther and farther into the country, other differences became discernible as well: The clothing was less sophisticated and stylish, the faces rougher, the postures more relaxed. Tangerines were eaten and their peels thrown onto the floor, tiny glass bottles of sake were lined up along the windows, and men slouched back with their feet on the opposite seat.
When groups of men got on, the train turned loud with laughter and reverberated with clipped, guttural talk far from the genteel sounds of Tokyo. And when schoolchildren got on, they stared and giggled behind their hands at me.
We rode that train for six hours, to the end of the line in a town called Uwajima, about forty miles from Johen. There we caught the Johen bus, and after an hour’s ride in darkness punctuated only rarely by house lights, we arrived in Johen—a full thirty hours after we had left San Francisco.
Johen sits among thickly forested hills and lush green fields in a rugged and virtually untouched region of Shikoku. Very few foreigners have ever visited there, and sometimes wandering its streets—seeing adults stop in their tracks to gape at me, and little children turn away in terror or, conversely, run up to touch this strange being’s skin—I felt like a medieval European explorer. It is a quiet village of fishermen and farmers, a place of wooden houses arranged along roads that follow the contour of the land, of rice fields and vegetable plots and shops open to the street where housewives in kimonos gather every day for groceries and gossip.
In the days before our wedding, we visited Kuniko’s friends and relatives in the area, bringing small gifts, and explored the country around the town. Certain memories stand out: a conversation over tangerines and green tea at one relative’s house, about the “other foreigner” who married a girl from the town across the hill; random nods and smiles from grandmotherly shopkeepers; a thatched-roof farmhouse in the middle of distant rice paddies; fishing villages with their nets strung out to dry, and men and women in white sunbonnets sitting under tents surrounded by oysters and seaweed, beckoning to us and smiling great gap-toothed smiles while they patiently planted pearls; the quiet streets and wooden houses after sundown, lit from within; a gathering of mothers and children in the late afternoon, flying long-tailed kites in a field; and a Chinese lion dance a group of elementary school students put on in a garage in our honor, the kids in shorts and crew cuts beating the drums with all their might and the lion thrashing about under the garage’s single bulb.
It was in the accumulation and sharing of such experiences—of the meticulously tended gardens outside even the simplest houses, of mornings loud with wind and rain and birdsong, of the wooden steps at the local shrine grooved by centuries of soles—that I first began to understand the Japanese sense of richness in simplicity, of vitality in the unadorned.
The climax of the journey was the wedding ceremony itself—a glorious gathering of friends and relatives in Kuniko’s family home for five hours of eating and drinking and laughing and singing. At the end of that night, after we had made a wedding pledge to each other by drinking sanctified sake three times from three different cups, after we had danced a long and lingering waltz around the room, after I had sung the one Japanese song I knew and discussed in liquor-loosened Japanese all manner of things from Johen’s social mores to Soviet-U.S. politics, I was sitting back holding Kuniko’s hand and listening to everyone clap and sing an ancient folk song. I looked at her gorgeous kimono, and the lavish feast, and the animated faces—and suddenly the simple and the elaborate seemed joined, rounded, in celebration, and it was then I felt that one journey had been accomplished and another had begun, and that I had found a home in the heart of the country.
Prambanan in the Moonlight
I visited Indonesia in the summer of 1978, when the university where I was teaching in Japan was on summer break. I traveled to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and the world expanded in seductive sensual overload all around me: So much to do, so much to learn! Princeton-in-Asia provided a ready network of friendly Fellows all around the region, who offered couches for crashing and immersive introductions to their respective regions. The “American teacher living in Yogyakarta” mentioned in this essay was one of these, and I’m indebted to him for excavating the layers of Indonesian culture. For me, this essay captures the enchanted, almost intoxicated sense of wonder and surprise that I was feeling—and still feel today—as the world opened up before my mind and eyes.
THE INDONESIAN NIGHT WAS SO HOT and humid that when you walked, the air seemed to part around you, like a curtain of exquisite filaments.
There was more to the night’s dense weave, too—the liquid harmonies of an unseen gamelan wrapped around you, and the spicy scent of skewered chicken sizzling on a roadside grill, blue smoke curling toward a fat full moon.
The moon wove a gossamer scene: people in flowing batiks stopping at sidewalk stands, exchanging wadded bills for charred skewers; barefoot youngsters kicking up dust as they skittered through the streets; men and women ambling side by side, chattering in anticipation of the Ramayana performance at Prambanan.
Two days earlier you had visited Prambanan in the undiffused light of midday—the forests buzzing with insects, the h
eat bouncing off the hard-packed road and scythe-cut fields—and been staggered by the sight of its main temple soaring out of the fields like a stone thunderbolt carved by the gods.
An American teacher living in Yogyakarta had taken you there, and had told you that the monument was built between the 8th and 10th centuries, when a Hindu dynasty ruled the area.
He had guided you through the Shiva Mahadeva temple, the most fully restored, tracing the temple’s intricate, encircling scenes from the Ramayana.
And when you had come upon Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, on a giant lotus petal straight out of Buddhism, you had thought about the Buddhist monument at Borobudur, less than twenty miles away, and about the intricate interlayerings of religious practice and belief you had found in Asia.
Later, in the cool of the afternoon, you had talked about the layers of Indonesian society, and other layers, too—in gamelan music, and ikat dyeing, where the threads are dyed before being woven, and the epics themselves, in which the heroes have vices and the villains unexpected integrity.
Prambanan in the moonlight was an entirely different place, but layered, too—the top layer a festive scene of shouting kids and laughing families and, somewhere behind that, a more solemn place of ghostly footfalls and consuming faith.
