Coasting To A Pause

North of Mendocino on US 1

Northern California Coast

Dec. 15 2010

Humboldt County, with its magnificent coastal redwood forests is  the marijuana capital  of North America.  Marijuana is the largest cash crop in the United States,   more than corn, wheat, grapes, cotton, oranges, apples or vegetables.  That it is so huge and overwhelming a multi billion dollar industry is almost too hard  to comprehend.   For one thing you don’t see it.  There are no acres and acres of cultivated fields, hills and valleys  with all the trappings of agriculture, no sprinklers, tractors, field hands.   It is all hidden from sight.  It is green gold hoarded and protected.  An entire industry exists to grow it, medically prescribe it, market it, and distribute it.   The number of clinics that prescribe  ( “recommend” as prescribing is still illegal ) it that are popping up in the marijuana states and the number of shops that sell to the “medically” permitted populace is runaway.  More than 1000 such shops blossomed in Colorado  alone in less than 2 years.  It is as if the somber massiveness of the redwood trees here in Northern California hinted at another shadowy parallel world of equal immensity.  And this hidden world continues to expand at such a rate that soon, very soon,  it could very well be the largest industry in the United States of America.  Our entire national economy could become based on a single drug product.  The United States of Marijuana.  We will probably ignore its existence even as it drives our entire monetary and political/social/military/industrial system.  It is amazing our capacity to so completely consume yet ignore even deny the existence of the eight hundred pound gorilla sitting on our head.  I am dumfounded.

As the winter season gains a  dripping,  gray hold we find ourselves one of only two campers here in Benbow, CA, the other also an Airstream, in this large and open field.  It is in a  cold wetness that we set up for the 120th day.  We will not escape winter after all.  Not a lot of snowbirds in the northern climes this time of year.

We left Benbow RV Resort and Golf Course relatively early, 9:30, as the weather was supposed to break clear and I suspected we might try to make the eight hour  run all the way into Southern Oregon and I did not want to get into Nancy’s, Jo’s sister, after dark as they live in the boonies.  

The redwoods were of course head shaking grand.  How did we manage to save these from our rapacious appetites for plowing through every living thing in our way?  We  humans can do a few things right but it is never an easy task as we are basically consumers.  We are takers.  Givers are looked upon with bemusement or even hostility because we don’t believe them.  Then one of us will lay down our life for another for love or war and we are momentarily lost for words at this ultimate giving.  So we act a little too loudly with song or praise or even medals.  I don’t know where I am going with this only that I seem to be drifting away from the sublimity and infinity of the Pacific Coast’s spray  and back into the hinterlands, back into the resource consuming crush and I despair at my acceptance and participation.

All adventures, road trips, even vacations start out with the freshness of hope that a simpler life will open to us that a generous earth will welcome our untethered pause.  And on the road this is most often the case.   Yet we must always come back to those and that which remained.  To family, friends, homes, jobs, chores and projects, the density of life that never left.  Do we  owe it to them to bring something back of ourselves that was changed for the better?  Trinkets and souvenirs don’t do it.  Gestures of considerations for sure and more on the giving end than the taking but we want to have come back with more.   I know I never come back with enough gestures and I am piqued by  guilt.  But there must be more of something to accompany our return.  More of what we have seen, done, felt.  More of ourselves.  

There will be some of us who are anxious to get back to the familiar, to our own beds. There will be some of us who are already thinking about their next departure even before their return.  I am afraid I am of the later.  Often I fear for my restless soul and wonder where it will or can find stasis.  I want it to find quiet.  So that I may look again with loving. Perhaps it is again a suffering of that hunger to consume all in front of me.  To consume completely all of the time, all of the short life I am allotted before it drifts away like a fine sea spray over an infinite beach.

I will slip this lengthy journey by seeing my grown son in Eugene, Oregon.  With this visit that is ending I will selfishly see someone of my self, love, that will continue our journey forward.  That is plenty.  That is everything.

Bon voyage,                                                                

 Air streams from Tony & JoAnn

Mt. Jupiter with a dust of snow taken from our back porch,  home