Month: May 2014

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

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California-Oregon-Washington
Suggested by: Natalie
Traveled: May 18-20

I had a drink after work last week with a new friend of mine. It was at an upscale cocktail bar with an “Old Western” atmosphere, the type of place where the bartenders pour you $15 shots of whiskey from behind handlebar mustaches and period-style suspenders. Somewhere in the middle of my second “Punch Drunk Buck,” my friend and I started talking about daydreams we like to have, the happy places we like to visit when things get stressful. I told him my favorite: I don’t even have to go into that much detail for you, because it’s essentially the plot of Cast Away. It is overwhelmingly tantalizing to me to be marooned alone on a desert island, charged only with the act of survival. I’d get to clear away the bullshit significance of emails to answer and flowers to plant, and just straight up succeed every day by finding new ways not to die.

Clearly, we were not good enough friends yet for this.

“3 years??” my friend choked on his drink. “That’s your ideal??” 

“Well, yeah,” I reasoned. “The first couple of months would be terrible, because I’d be figuring things out and starving and thirsty and thinking I’d be rescued. I want at least a couple years to get the hang of basic stuff, and then enjoy the daily victories of being alive.”

“I guess so,” he said, eyeing me skeptically. He didn’t get it at all.

Only a few days later, I opened Wild for the first time, and immediately found someone who does. Cheryl Strayed, in her compelling account of her journey hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone and generally completely unprepared, has an amazing story. With her life basically falling apart, completely off course, she decides to hike from Southern California to the Oregon-Washington border. Alone. 26 years old. And, oh yeah, she has never backpacked  before in her life. Somewhere in her, she knows that a journey of physical struggles and solitude will pull her out of the spiral she is in. She will be reborn. And she is! In between her toenails falling off and the rain-soaked days of trudging over rocks and bramble, she becomes firmly and gloriously rooted back into life.

Now, I’m about as far away as you can get from being a hippie. But dammit if there wasn’t something seriously soul-stirring, seriously compelling, seriously instinctual about a return to the wild. Where communing with nature doesn’t just mean a stroll in the park, but a down and dirty, desperate, raw, simple relationship with the world. Where you cannot help but recognize the beauty and pain around you and rediscover its reflection in yourself. Where the aches of your soul can be healed by new aches in your back, and the answers to some of your hardest questions are found as long as you take just one more step.

Cheryl reminded me that I am a creature. That I have a little flame of an animal inside of me. It’s the same little flame that yearns to be on an island somewhere, chewing on coconut rind and smelling fresh leaves ground between my fingers. It feels good to know that I have that little flame. I feel like going on a hike!

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

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California
Suggested by: Reddit friend
Traveled: May 7 – May 15

Reading East of Eden has felt personal from the first page. I guess most fiction feels personal, a genuine relationship we get to have with minds and lives otherwise unreachable. But now deep in the reflection phase of my own move to northern California, a transition that has been stranger and much more difficult than the “You will love San Francisco“ assurances I came armed with, the stories of Eden echo moments I have almost daily. Is this shocking? Not really. The entire book is a retelling of Genesis, and far be it from me to exclude myself from the stories and patterns of the entire, collective human race. Seeing my story in East of Eden is inescapable. But still, my dust feels absolutely to be Steinbeck’s dust, the stretches of rainless sun and waves of long grasses of the Hamilton ranch must be the same that tickle these new vistas of mine. And the choices, the wrestling within oneself, the biggest fight of all for identity and absolution. Why, those are mine! The very same!!

California is home and it’s not home. It’s familiar, but with different shadows, different window dressings of desert scruff and palm fronds. The air tastes dustier than it should, and the sun is at the wrong angle. Yet it’s home. There are patios, and mothers that fill my glass before I can get up, and families gathered in rooms with clocks on the walls and jars of something colorful and pickled on the counters. People still do people-things here. They go to work and love each other. They lose touch with friends and take showers at the end of long days. I feel at home in the people. They remind me that the hills and dollhouse doors and palm trunks are just different props in their stories and sins and victories.

So yes, I am Adam Trask, and he is me, and we both came here on the promise of perfection. We came seeing a world that was born and will die in our heads. The reality is muddier. It’s harder. It is a profound feeling to realize that you don’t belong in paradise. Wherever it is, it’s not here. It can’t be. Lives are being lived here. And lives, in all their shallow soils and young loves, in their valley storms and pin-pricked mists, are too rich, too tangled, to be lived in the emptiness of Eden. We have lives to live and terrible mistakes to make. And it’s immensely comforting to know that we’ll stumble through together, even if the seasons change differently and the sky is the wrong shade of blue.

Off We Go

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libraryStepping into the Main Library branch in downtown San Francisco, I was reminded all over again of the refuge, the cool-marble-on-a-hot-day relief, that books so enticingly offer. Yes, boys and girls, I am now an official San Francisco Public Library card-holder, which is, funnily enough, my first real documented proof that I now lay my head here in San Francisco. Renting a no-lease month to month room in a house of 9 roommates, my car sold with no need to change my driver’s license, this library card is really the first tiny root of my time here. It’s the only clue in my wallet that my life is being lived in odd, bright colors, warmer air now filling my lungs.

More importantly, it means I am ready to start my Readable Road Trip!

It seems only fitting to start in California, a place that in its vastness seems ungraspable and strange to me still. Leading me back to a row of stacks, the librarian manning the information desk chirped earnestly, “Oh East of Eden! That should be required reading for every Californian! It just puts you so in touch with the state.” I couldn’t have asked for a better review, a more reassuring moment as I buckle my seatbelt for this American tour in ink and deliciously sturdy pages.

So, I’ve got Steinbeck in hand, an excellent companion for the first leg of my trip, I’d say. I’ll be sharing my lit-inerary  (too much book/roadtrip punning? Ok, ok last one, promise) for the first part of my journey — California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho — very shortly. Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who has suggested books so far! I can’t wait to get started.