Tonight I lie back against a pillow in the bed of my truck while blue and orange sink over sage mountain silhouettes. Beneath me an old blanket someone made me in high school. Beside me a hot bowl of chili on my camp stove, and a sleeping bag someone threw into a craigslist deal for free. "Sweet Afton" fills the dim space below the camper shell with the thin echo of memories from college. Outside, redwing blackbirds lilt the night wind with lullabies.
I've driven through six states on the way to pick up an old ultralight I last flew as a young teen. Dad and I dropped it off in Idaho to have a new engine put in after the old one put me in a field for my proud "first engine out." That was years before Dad got cancer, years before the plane was hoisted up into the dusty rafters of an old hangar to await word, or someone to come for it.
Now the two of us nestle into the night on the side of the highway home, both bearing memories, both looking forward. This old truck, once Dad's, now bears stickers from mountains I've skied and places I've been. They too silhouette in the fading light over the road I've traveled. Is this how one becomes the father tinkering on an engine while his toddlers run with screw drivers? Where do ends end and beginnings begin? Here I am, somewhere along the road.
5/30/13
I don’t know what town I’m in, or what the nearest highway is, or how exactly to get back to where I came from. All I know is that there is water—the water that brought me here, and a large, wooden ship with two masts and a figurehead who stares off at the horizon with confidence and perhaps the slightest hint of a smile. There is a bridge with lights, one that cuts a line between the deep blue of the night sky and the blue of the river below, and there are endless cars on it that clank back and forth from land to land. Mine is a different pathway, one that leads underneath and further on, around the next bend to I don’t know where next.
Tonight I found a video clip online in which Captain Hook proudly walked the deck of the ship I now sail, and another one filmed 20 years earlier in which she was the original Enterprise--a precursor to the starship commanded by Jean-Luc Picard that sought out new life and civilizations, and boldly went where no one had gone before. Last year Captain Picard came to my university, and 50 or so of us sat around to hear him tell stories. He said every year the crew of the International Space Station get to request a videoconference with someone earthiside. One year the ISS captain asked if he could speak to him, Patrick Stewart. After the video link was up, Patrick asked the ISS captain why a real space captain would want to talk to a pretend one. The real captain replied, it was because he had been inspired as a little kid to become an astronaut by that pretend captain.
What am I to make of my life, these two weeks, this moment? Why am I even here? I think I can can hazard an answer. When I was a little kid, I would ask my dad for things I dearly wanted. He would first tell me he always tried to say yes as often as he could, and then he usually would say yes, but sometimes he had to say no. I learned it’s good to say yes as often as you can. So when my lifelong friend Josiah called me near midnight and said he was joining the crew on a sailing ship, I found a way I could yes to that too. I’ve discovered that attitude turns my trajectory in life into a very different one. It’s like a little secret pixie dust sprinkled on all the stuff I do. Once that trajectory changes, every point of contact I have with the world around is different. I’m cutting across the grain, and I begin running into people who have ridden a bike from Seattle to Los Angeles, like Emily our cook, or who performed in the circus like Sabrina our bosun. Maybe we all live in fairy tales, but we just have a hard time believing it because we’re too scared we’re only fooling ourselves, or maybe we’ll be disappointed somehow that our tale isn’t good enough. I am, but I want to keep on trying. Tonight I fall asleep to lapping waves and the gentle rocking of the river. Tomorrow I’m going to wake up and haul lines on sails that will take me a little further into the unknown. As I go, I’ll be remembering two great captains who have gone before me on this ship, men who have been examples for thousands of others, even though neither of them ever even existed. This is just a river, but for all I care, I’m seeking out new life and civilizations, and I’ll be darned if I’m not going there boldly.
6/15/13
I met Christine in the middle of nowhere on Highway 89 on my way up to Oregon to go sailing with my friend Josiah. She was walking along the shoulder, and just barely seemed to stick her thumb out as I drove by. I pulled over and turned around still not even sure if she was looking for a ride. She climbed eagerly into the truck. I asked her where she was headed, but all I got back was a stream of loud, falsetto gibberish that didn’t resemble anything at all and a big, mirthful smile. My first thought was, “Oh gosh, I’ve kidnapped a handicapped lady! How am I going to figure out where she belongs??” But as I tried to communicate with her she seemed aware of her situation and just waved me on down the road, laughing loudly.
She continued to “talk”, making vague motions with her hands, which I watched as attentively as I could manage while driving. I pointed ahead and raised my eyebrows inquisitively, and she continued to wave and babble “Bababaaa babaaa haha!”
“You point when you need to stop,” I said with as illustrative hand motions as I could muster. She pointed at a house, and I started to slow down, but she immediately waved me on, and babbled something totally unintelligible, probably about the people who lived there. I could deduce some kind of general meaning from about half of what she attempted to communicate. She wiped her forehead like she’d been walking for a while, and shook her head pointing all around, perhaps at imaginary cars that had passed her by, then let out another loud laugh.
She tried to tell me about a lot of other things, which I could only decipher as either positive or negative. To the latter, I shook my head and frowned empathetically. I’ve met deaf people who mouth actual words or something like them. They usually use sign language at the same time. She did neither, but somehow, mile after mile, it felt like we were getting to know each other on some odd level. I felt very uninhibited, being stripped of all relational nuance. To her strange laughter, I returned a big, happy grin. “I’m glad we’re driving together!” it said.
More miles went by, and I grew a little worried about whether her destination was even on my route, and if so how far. Hours? What was she doing walking so far away from where she was trying to go? But she kept waving me on and babbling whenever I pointed and raised my eyebrows. Suddenly it occurred to me to type to her on my phone.
“Where are you headed?” She squinted and stared at it for a long time, and for a moment I worried that she couldn’t read either. But then she pulled a yellow notepad out of her bag and looked around for a pen. I handed her one, and she laughed loudly. “Pit River Casino,” she wrote in labored handwriting. I noticed she was wearing a shirt with the same name on it and deduced that she probably worked there. “Good, we’ve got a destination,” I thought to myself. Burney was a little way off 89, but not too far. I showed her a picture of 2-year-old Natalie and typed “My niece.” I pointed to Christine, and she raised a lot of fingers accompanied by lots of smiling and noises that sounded like her trying to imitate conversations between her and little kids. We both laughed.
She started to write again on her pad, and I accidentally drifted onto the road bumps next to the center line, jostling her writing. That was just the funniest thing in the world to her, and she laughed for a long time. So I did it again, on purpose. Strange, I thought, how quickly I felt comfortable using mischievous humor with this stranger, when it would usually take a whole hour or two of getting to know one another first.
She wrote on her notepad that her name was Christine, and listed names of several of her family members. There was a car show in Burney, and we pointed together at the fancy cars we passed. The whole time she talked in her loud falsetto, but seemed to be doing it more because she felt like it than because I could understand anything she said. I felt self-conscious about speaking to her verbally since she didn’t seem to do any lip-reading, but I realized it was just as hard for me not to speak my way as it was for her not to speak her way.
Finally, we came to the casino. We’d been together for about 45 minutes, and I was already sad to see her go. Before she climbed out, I held up my phone and snapped a shot of the two of us, which sent her into another wonderfully long and loud laugh. Thinking back on it, I wondered whether we all have a lot more languages at our disposal than we think, and disabilities are just one of the things that blesses us with the opportunity to sort some out from all the others. Christine could read and write with some effort, but we actually did very little of that during the drive. Whatever her story is, and whatever other languages she knows, I’d say her language of choice is joy. I had a blast letting all the others go for a 45-minute crash-course in it from her.
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