| July 18th
Sitting in the deluxe sleeper compartment of the California Zephyr bound for San Francisco from Denver, I am hypnotized by the rhythmic hum and click-clack of the trains wheels on the tracks. The steady stream of scenery goes by the window, the sun hitting my face and a flood of memories of this past week in South Dakota. It was my first time really seeing the mid-west. My only impressions to date where images I've seen on TV or in Magazines, and the conclusions I jumped to about the people that lived there. I stayed with Chris's parents who have 40 acres of forest land in the Black Hills, right by Wind Cave National Park. In fact, the national forest land borders their property on 3 sides. We camped out in the woods most of the time, spending our days exploring the Back Hills; Mt. Rushmore, Hiking and rock climbing in Needles National Monument, getting a private tour of Wind Cave, swimming in fresh mountain lakes. We saw Antelope and Buffalo, wild deer, turkeys, goats, prairie dogs and lots and lots of poison ivy. The weather was mostly hot and humid, just what I would have pictured in that area of the country. But that weather produces some of the most amazing thunder and lightning storms I've ever seen. You can see them coming and going in the distance, two hundred miles across and a constant strobe of lighting and thunder. One day we were even driving down a lonely prairie road and a lightning bold struck a power line 30 feet away! It was incredible! The people I met were all Chris's friends and family and they were so nice! They are part of a community of park rangers, fire fighters and ecologists. Each one brought their own warm, down to earth and in some cases eccentric personalities to the group. I very much enjoyed meeting Chris's family. They had a huge Barbeque on the forth of July and afterwards about 30 of us walked up to the top of the hill and watched fireworks in the nearby town of Hot Springs. The fireworks were set amidst a back drop of a lightning storm. It was hard deciding which light show to watch. I saw my first firefly! Caught him in my hand. It didn't look anything like the firefly's you seen in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland.
We also went to Nebraska one day. Friends of Chris's family, Bob and Martha, have built a log house into the side of a mountain. They live most of the year with no electricity, an outhouse and a hand pumped well. It was an amazing place. Very beautifully designed and decorated. The big surprise of this place was in the Pantry. It's a large walk in pantry with shelves brimming with mason jars full of dry goods. There were no brand names, no Kellogg's cereals, just bulk items. Bob took us on a tour of the pantry but for a special reason. He walked us to the back of the small room and opened up a lower cupboard and had us look in. I was expecting to see bulk toilet paper or pots and pans but what I saw was a trap door in the back of the cupboard. He swung it open and a cold damp, earthy smell came out while he got down on his hands and knees and crawled in. He motioned for us to follow. I saw a match being struck as I made my way under the shelves in the pantry and when I reached the center of this secret room I noticed that we were in an underground keiva. It was a round, stone lined chamber big enough to hold ten people. There was a pit in the center of the stone floor for a candle and the ground was covered with animal skins. It was a Native American Meditation chamber and it was one of the most spiritual places I've ever seen. One minute I was in some ones pantry, and the next I'm crawling into a cupboard and end up in a spiritual nether world. A group of us sat there for a while being alternately chatty and silent and I didn't want to leave. In fact I went back in for over an hour by myself to meditate later that afternoon. It was one of the highlights of my trip and it was in NEBRASKA of all places!
On the way to Denver to board our train back to the big city, we passed through Wyoming and I got my first taste of wide open prairie. It was everything I had envisioned it to be, including a town on Lost Springs, Population 4. The train ride from Denver takes two days and it's a great way to acclimate yourself to being back in the city again. You leave Denver in the morning, pass through the Rocky Mountains all day and sleep through Utah. The next day is spent in Nevada and the Sierra's before you descend into the Bay area. Even the trip through the Sacramento river valley was full of surprising scenery. A beautiful bird sanctuary, the moth ball fleet in Martinez, places that are not on a main road but can only be seen from our train or by taking a dirt road. As our train pulled into Emeryville, I am glad to be getting off but hope that I can hang on to the slower and relaxed feeling I developed along the way.
Thank you Chris for sharing this experience with me! |
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June 16
I had the best day on Saturday!! My friend Beau called me to go jet skiing in the bay. We couldn't have ordered better weather, sunny warm with a slight breeze. Jet skiing with Beau is not the normal putting around the lake type of day, it's a whole day-long saga through choppy seas and frothy mugs of beer. We loaded the ski's in the water at Jack London Square in Oakland and tore across the white caped bay past Treasure Island, Alcatraz and Angel Island to Tiburon. It's several miles from one end to the other and this being my second time on the ski, I started to get the hang of it. Last time I would scream up the side of a wave and then dive head first into the next one. Each time the wave would break over the top of the ski and bitch slap me in the face like a cold wet sledgehammer. This time, I got a tip from Beau and gunned it up each wave, landing back end first and ready to tackle the next one. Timing is everything I found out. Once we got to Tiburon, we tied up the ski's at Sam's and had a couple of beers. The place was packed. After a nice leisurely time we climbed back on board and headed out to the Golden Gate Bridge to jump some waves. But the swells were unusually small in that area so we followed a ferry boat instead. What a blast! The tourists would cheer as we jumped the wake and sped past them, only to go back and jump some more. There's something amazing about being out in the middle of that icy choppy bay with nothing but a small incredibly fast jet ski between your legs. These things can do 60 mph on flat water, and I had the chance to experience that too. After swinging by Fisherman's Warf and a place called THE RAMP, we headed back to Oakland. That part of the bay was relatively calm as the sun was going down so we were able to open up the throttle and made it back in about 5 minutes. I was sore the next day but I have to say that every grunt I made walking up and down stairs reminded me of how much fun I had and how when I was out there, I thought of nothing but the next wave. I need days like that…more than I realized. Thank you Beau!! |
June 1st
I have found that I can still be, quite pleasantly, amazed by some of the people that I encounter in my daily life. I have written before about Felix and Celia, the couple that lives next door to me. On the neighbor scale of 1 to 10, (1 = Charles Manson and 10 = Mother Theresa), they are a solid 9.5. Not sure how fun it would be living next too Mother Theresa anyway. I'd probably feel guilty all the time for not taking lepers into my house or feeding the homeless on a daily basis. So maybe I'd bump them past Mother Theresa just because they drink and Felix is the best cook in the neighborhood. Well, Felix and Celia have two amazing daughters, Nicki and Monica. Both are incredibly intelligent and self confident. Nicki just got accepted to Vassar. Monica however, is the one that blew my mind recently. She's a feisty little Eight grader who had a very difficult project for her final grade. Everyone in her class was supposed to pick a topic, research it, and give a half hour presentation in front of the school. Monica chose... Anti-Gay defamation. She went around the school with a questionnaire and took a poll of students attitudes about gay people. She got up and read the results, talked about how alienated gay students might feel, and educated students AND parents about the need for acceptance and compassion. AND...she did the whole presentation in Spanish! Now I don't know what a normal fifteen year old girl is supposed to be like. I can barely remember myself at fifteen. But as I listened to her talk about the presentation and the need for all of us to be more compassionate and accepting of not only gay students, but anyone that stands out as "different", I was filled with so much optimism about the future of kids today. She is a most amazing person, and the most open, evolved and free spirited fifteen year old I have ever met. |
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May 9 th
Seems like this is a "what I did on my weekend" journal right now so ....
AMAZING hot and summery weekend. Got on my bike late Sunday around 5:30 and rode across the Golden Gate Bridge, into the Marin Headlands. If you aren't familiar with the ride it's not particularly long, maybe an 8 mile loop but, it's SPECTACULAR! Once you're over the bridge which on a sunny day is one of the most beautiful places to ride in the city, you begin a 2 mile up hill ride to the top of the headlands. From there you can see the bridge, the city, east bay and way out into the pacific ocean. The Headlands are part of the Golden Gate Nation Recreation Area and were once part of the vast US Army base system here in San Francisco. Everywhere you go there are abandoned machine gun and artillery bunkers that protected the approach to the Bay dating back to the late 1800's and up to WWII. It's desolate and ghostly, conjuring up images of another era. From the top of the hill you start a screaming, twisting down hill ride. Honesty I have to say it's one of the most dramatic down hill rides I've ever scene. There are some corners that are so steep that you feel like you are going to ride off the edge and plummet hundreds of feet into the water. Once you reach the bottom you have some more gentile up hill terrain through a little grass covered valley, through more abandoned barracks and even an old missile silo. The final leg of the headlands takes you through an old tunnel. It's one lane and you may have to wait a couple of minutes for the cars coming the other way to get past and the light to turn green. But once in the tunnel it's a half mile long and Straight down hill! From there it's back over the bridge. I sat on a cliff above Baker beach and watched the sun go down, went home and BBQ'd some steaks. What a great day! |