In the rearview, I see Leonie snicker and lean down to stage-whisper loudly near The Bomb’s ear: “Well, if anyone’s an expert about that, for sure it’s Auntie Wusty!” And The Bomb’s tail thumps. Her tongue flaps out one side of her mouth.
They are laughing at me.
I do too, a little.
The Pacific Ocean has more than just one mode. From high up in the upper left hand corner of the country at Neah Bay all the way down to the mouth of the Columbia, it is cold and wild and inhospitable, even in the summer. But that’s just us. You get to love it.
It’s an acquired taste; it doesn’t get that much warmer in the summer or that much worse in the winter because it’s generally just freezing and blowing and hard to be with. Occasional surfers in black bodysuits ride the bleak waves, flanked by screaming gulls, but you probably aren’t going to see many bathing suits on the beach up north, even in August.
We head for the warmer Pacific we have seen on TV.
As we near the salt water again, farther south, I can begin to feel the rhythm and the song. When we travel inland, I grow aware of this great silence—this lack—and it’s almost unnatural. Too still.
Returning to the ocean renews a subterranean rumble I can hear through the soles of my feet and it just keeps getting louder, drawing me like a magnet till we can actually see water. It feels great when I can see waves again. They are rising and singing in a gigantic chorus. They are calling. We stay near and follow 101.
We discover that occasionally we can drive on the beach so we do. Minivans are not known for their handling. We push the van onto firmer ground twice and give up trying to do doughnuts.
But we can just drive down the hard sand beach for miles. It’s beautiful, though the ocean always looks a little disheveled and muddy right through here. This is as far south as I’ve ever seen. The waves come in fast. We eventually leave the beach for the asphalt and return to 101. I pull over frequently to let cars go around. There are a lot of turnouts for this. I’m driving slowly because it’s so winding and narrow.
Next stop Florence. The white sand capital of the Oregon coast.
You feel the land changing as you drive into the dunes.
It’s crazy beautiful when you glimpse the distant hills of sparkling white sand for the first time. I’d heard about the dunes and seen pictures of them when a UK friend posted his vacation shots: “Trev from the Oregon dunes!” He went sand-boarding in Jessie M. Honeyman Memorial State Park last summer, but I think the weather this time of year is going to keep us from doing that. I don’t think the sand will cooperate. It’s wet and makes the board stick and we can already go stand on the sand. For free.
We park the van and walk through the trees up over the crests of the mounds. It is blowing and cold but not too bad. The Bomb is running around and chasing sticks and having a great time. We can see for miles in all directions, mostly dunes, beige and blowing. There is a small blue man-made lake according to the sign I read, and we walk down to it and throw The Bomb’s stick in there, and she fetches it time and again, her mouth wide open and laughing.
Beau has a good arm. He makes her swim far out for the stick. Then we get the idea to drop a rock into this three-feet-deep creek and The Bomb dives for it. She is so crazy! We can see her looking underwater for it and then plunging down and grabbing the same rock, over and over! It’s bananas!
I feel myself warming to her very slightly.
After getting way too wet and having to go buy some towels at a thrift store we discovered in Florence, we search out the library so we can go online and find a youth hostel to spend the night.
We need to keep this trip cheap. There is a youth hostel in Bandon, just a few miles south that has rooms available. That would be about the right amount of driving and then we will make the push into San Francisco tomorrow.
I need to get a map. San Francisco looks way more complicated than Portland to drive into.
We get into Bandon later that afternoon. The marina is everywhere in this small town, and the sun is still setting on the ocean. It was cloudy, but the sky is clear near the horizon and the sun casts surreal colors on the water, just for a minute in its setting.
We find the hostel. We park and go in.
There is room in the hostel, and the shower is the best, most remarkable experience I’ve ever had! Even better than at La Push, because now we’ve become embedded with sand. It’s weird. When you’re at home, a shower or a bed just feels normal, but on the road it becomes a treasure. It is amazing, beyond imagination luxury.
Strange . . . when and what we take for granted.
We each get a bunk, and we are the only three out of four bunks in the room so unless someone else checks in tonight that makes it private. The guy who runs the place, whose name tag says Guy (and whose mustache is gigantic and waxed pointy!) listens to Leonie’s sad tearful plea for The Bomb to come inside too, or she’ll be lonely. At first he’s all no way, no how. Then when Lee really turns on the waterworks he says that The Bomb could come in for a ten-dollar deposit, as long as she didn’t make a mess. Maybe refundable.
I look at both of them, and they look back, all pleading and broke, and I reluctantly fish a ten-spot out of my pocket.
And yeah, it better be refundable.
I don’t think The Bomb has ever been inside a room before. She comes in and I think, If she pees, I swear I’m gonna . . . But she doesn’t. Leonie sits on the bottom bunk and pats it and calls her, and she jumps up and slides alongside Leo’s leg with her ears all flattened back and her tail thumping. Then she proceeds to go mental and jump from one bottom bunk to the other, back and forth, making this weird under-her-breath yipping song. Then she runs around in a circle, jumping on and off the beds like a wing nut till Leo pats one of the top bunks and The Bomb jumps up on it too—then proceeds to tear around all the bunks, top and bottom. She goes so fast she becomes a blur—up, down, over, around, underbesidealongyondernearbyadjacentupon—faster and faster, till we make her stop and she lies on her tummy, panting and snuggling in the bunk beside Leonie.
“I guess The Bomb approves,” I note.
Beau throws his stuff on the top bunk without being asked. He knows I don’t want to haul my big butt up there and also that Leo and The Bomb would be better on the ground floor. He does it before I have to make some stupid joke about my size that I don’t think is funny but is expected by society. I see he is intentionally doing it before the subject comes up so I won’t be embarrassed. Again, he is saving me pain.
Beau is quite a guy. He forged kindness from the torment he’s faced.
Not everybody does.
I think there are two kinds of people, or maybe two ways of handling abuse from others. You get really mean and beat the others at their own game, or you evolve and swear never to treat others like that.
Or you just withdraw from the human race and become enmeshed in a lumpy chain-mail shield against mean people. Which is what I did. So more ways than two, I guess.
The problem with withdrawing from the mean people is you never know who the mean people are going to be, so you shut down everyone. Which is also what I did. And from which, my friends, I suffered even more, upon recollection. I do not miss my depression. I do not miss being broken. I do not miss the void.
I never knew how much I wanted to be part of a gang till I had one. Even a gang of misfits.
Especially a gang of misfits.
I wake up in the dawn of the next morning, which isn’t all that early in the winter, though it is lighter here in south-central Oregon than it is in Seattle. I get up and I see The Bomb’s head pick up. I take the leash Leonie made for her out of some plastic grocery bags (it’s kind of cool; she tore one into strips and braided it, and she made her a collar that way too) and show it to her. The Bomb jumps down like she needs to go out.
I’m a little surprised she would even want to go with me, but I open the door quietly and we head out and down the stairs. It’s early and there is no one at
the desk, so we make our way out the front door unobserved.
Outside is gray and a steady wind is blowing, but it’s not raining and it’s not that cold. Seagulls cluster around me in midair because this is apparently a tourist town where they get fed just for being seagulls.
“Get lost! Bug off!! I’m from Seattle!” I wave my arms. “So unimpressed!”
Our freaking seagulls do tricks for fries. At least on the waterfront and on the ferries.
If you have the nerve—their beaks are huge close-up—they will swoop down and take a french fry from your fingers, slick as a whistle. We found as kids that if you don’t look, it’s much easier. We all have that picture (though we never took it till not-from-town friends or cousins came to visit)—one of us with the seagull in mid-snatch, fries and feet and fingers and beak all a big yellow blur.
When we get to the sand, I throw a stick for The Bomb and she runs madly and catches it. I throw it higher, and she catches it like a pop fly. I fake her out, and she goes left when I throw right. The second time she doesn’t get fooled by the same trick and gets the stick.
The Bomb might be a real smart lil’ doggy.
And isn’t that just what we need, a real smart doggy. . . . I remind myself to roll my eyes when she brings the stick over and drops it at my feet and waits.
On the way back, I stop and get a small coffee and a two-dollar map of California at the gas station. I walk The Bomb off the leash back to the hostel and then put her in the van with the window open a little.
Inside the room the two sleeping beauties are still sound asleep. I pull up the blackout shade and open the window a crack. It’s breezy. They stir.
“Get up! Time to be off with you!! Up and at ’em! Hip hip hooray!” I clang gleefully.
They groan and fire pillows in my direction, but that alone cannot reverse the clock and it’s time we should be going. I go find out about my tenner. I mean to get it back.
The rest of the day is driving. We leave Oregon and enter Cali in heavy fog.
Leo takes a picture of the “Welcome to California” sign in the drifting mist. The background is completely composed of shades of gray. It’s weirdly beautiful. For some reason it makes my nose sting; that’s my version of getting verklempt. I turn my lights on low and drive slowly as shapes shift.
We arrive in Crescent City around one thirty in the afternoon. It’s a pretty town. There’s a huge beach, and we walk and throw sticks for The Bomb and get something to eat.
We are developing a routine: eat first, and then find a library. If you are patient (or if you go to a smaller town), there is always a computer waiting at the library.
Which happens to be the case in Crescent City.
So we find out that San Francisco is still like six hours away. For some reason I thought we would get there at around sunset and we would just drive up to his uncle’s house and go get some food and have a bath, you know, be welcomed with open arms by Uncle Frankie.
Instead it’s getting on toward two in the afternoon, it’ll be dark again in about three hours, and his uncle hasn’t even called Beau back. We have his address from a card he sent for Beau’s birthday; I googled the directions when we were online. Beau says that his uncle and he never really talk; he just gets a birthday card every year.
Whatever. It’s more than I’ve been getting the last couple years from my dad, never mind some uncle. He has decided he has forgotten Paul’s and my birthdays or something. The last card I got was for my fourteenth birthday and had a picture of a unicorn and was covered with glitter and fuzzy velvet card fur. It made me wonder how old I am in my dad’s mind. It was exactly right for a five-year-old.
And that was more than Paul got. Nothing came later that year for his birthday.
The weird thing is my dad signed that card “All my love, dad.” Well, two weird things:
1. He never capitalizes Dad when he uses it as his name.
2. He neglects us, bailing emotionally while claiming we have all his love.
What am I supposed to make of that?
But I meander . . .
I sit at the computer in the library with Beau. Lee and The Bomb are outside. I can see them through the window. They were dancing but got bored.
They now sit, huddled and waiting.
“What part of San Francisco does he live in?” Beau is no more familiar with “the city” than I am. He squints at the map on the screen as I type.
“Well, the address is right here at the balloon.” I show him. “It looks like he is kind of near Amoeba Music, which I’ve always wanted to go to, so that’s the Haight-Ashbury district.” I look at Beau. “But I really don’t know if we should just show up on his porch and be all, ‘Hi, Unc!’ ”
“Yeah, I know.” Beau looks worried. “I’ve thought about that too. I’ve called him twice.”
“What do you think the deal is?”
“I dunno. I know he talks to my mom on occasion, even though she isn’t his sister—my dad is . . .”
I snicker. He glances at me reproachfully.
“Dude,” I say, “I know what you meant.”
“It’s crazy how well he and my mom like each other because my dad hates him.”
“Did your dad ever say why?”
“No, but my mom said that because Uncle Frankie was older and gay everyone in their school thought that my dad was going to be gay too, so they were ready for him. It messed him up, all the crap he had to deal with.”
“So they bullied him before he even had a chance in high school.”
“Yeah.”
“So that sucked, but—I mean, no offense, how old is
your dad?”
“Yeah, I know, maybe he should be over it, but I’m not sure some people ever can get over things they experience early in life.”
“I so don’t believe that! I think if you turn your fine mind onto a problem you can change it.”
“Yeah, but what if you don’t have a fine mind? Or if you don’t perceive it as a problem? Or you just won’t? He is not a guy who analyzes things. He thinks I am making a choice. The one time I tried to explain, after the cops left, he was freaking out so bad he punched me in the mouth. Then every word I tried to say, he punched me again. So I shut up. Then I left. And to this day, I don’t really care if I ever see him again.”
Beau goes quiet. His handsome, healing face is hard. Not great memories for him and his dad.
So what we decide finally is that we will drive down till dusk and then will spend even more money by spending another night at a hostel or motel and then we will call his uncle again in the morning and tell him we will see him that afternoon. Then he will invite us to come over and let us stay with him and then he will say this and that and solve all our problems forever.
So that’s the plan.
We get back on the road.
Almost immediately we are faced with a choice. Stay on 101 or turn down the “Avenue of the Giants,” which is where the last of the huge redwoods are. I say stay on the road.
So of course you know what Thing One and Thing Two want to do, don’tcha?
Yup. So we go down the avenue (which isn’t really all that out of the way and totally worth it). It runs parallel to the highway, and the weather’s dry enough that we get out and take pictures of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, and Beau takes one of me and Leo in the van inside that tree you can drive a car through, and I take one of them inside the single huge log that was hollowed out and made into an entire cabin. Windows with curtains even.
I gotta admit, it was fun.
When we pull back onto the highway, we are soon faced with yet another choice. Stay on 101 and go inland, or head over to Highway 1, probably much more slow and winding, and follow the coast.
Unanimously, we choose Highway 1. It’s about the ocean till we get to our destination. On this we all agree.
Highway 1 in Northern California is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It has to be. As it clears farther to the sout
h, it gets ever more amazing. It’s ridiculously, excessively beautiful. At one point I pull over, and we just stand spellbound for half an hour. The hills to the water. Again: Sky to sea = eternity.
We shout out the names of the towns as we drive by them. Westport, Fort Bragg, Casper, Mendocino. We pass a sign for Albion and I start to explain that was the old name for England, and their eyes glaze immediately so I stop. I concentrate on the concrete.
I was right though. The roads are slow and winding. There are more and crookeder switchbacks than I’ve ever seen. At some points there is only one lane. I focus hard and drive.
We study the map I got at the gas station. It’s like impossible to figure out at first. We are so totally out of our depth. I know I need a smartphone but, like I said, I’m waiting; Beau’s is at the bottom of Lake Washington; and Leo, well, you know. But I show everyone how. Paper maps are a lot more work than computer maps. There are no little balloons showing where you want to go, plus they take up a ton of room. It’s just harder.
But we work it. We study up and decide we will spend the night at the hostel in a town called Point Reyes Station. It’s about the right distance.
Beau navigates and I captain. Leonie sings. The Bomb’s tongue flaps out the window.
We stop and eat at a roadhouse café, appropriately called Queenie’s Roadhouse Café.
Food fit for a queen.
Leonie is out of money. We have still never discussed who all is paying for what, but I knew it would happen when all she had to start was less than forty bucks. I start to blow a gasket, but then I remember how Beau took the top bunk, etc., without saying anything to embarrass me, and so I do the same now and just pay for her. We can use my college money bank account for now. I’ll figure it out some other time.
Afterward we go for a walk and The Bomb detonates. Lol.
Beau, Lee, The Bomb Page 10
