As Promised

August 22

I said I'd talk about things, didn't I? Like why I got to Santa Cruz ahead of schedule, etc. Here goes:

So the plan was, the beautiful and lovely Meg, girlfriend extraordinaire, was going to travel west with me-- not move out to California, that's not presently a possibility, but simply take the trip with me. We intended to swing down to New Orleans, and go to the Grand Canyon, and the Painted Desert, and Vegas, and other such entertaining diversions. We planned to take around two weeks to do this...

On the day before we were scheduled to leave, Meg had a family emergency, and after much talking to me and her relatives, she decided (quite rightly, I think) to stay with them. Postponement didn't seem an option-- she had committments later in the month, and wouldn't have been able to go with me later. So... I left on my own. I took a couple books on tape (King's Blood and Smoke, which I rather liked, and Tom Robbins's Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, which I think is his best book since, hell, Another Roadside Attraction, probably), some delicious homemade granola, a bunch of CD's... and I drove.

I drove for 12 hours, and made West Memphis (in Arkansas, just) that first night. I ate bad pizza and watched The Sopranos.

I also freaked out. What was I doing, ditching a good job and a great girlfriend to randomly live in Santa Cruz? Did I have some sort of self-destructive impulse thing going on? I had a good life, what was I doing mucking it up?

I slept very very badly.

The next morning I felt better, magically refreshed-- life once more was a grand adventure, the move an important step in freeing myself from the banal chains of blah di blah and so on.

That night I hit Amarillo (another 12 hour day). Amarillo may be a nice place-- I didn't see much of it except for the tangle of motels and taquerias right along the interstate. What I saw was not a nice place.

Despair descended again, this time in the form of job-terror. Housing is very expensive in Santa Cruz-- I had not-inconsiderable savings, but they wouldn't last more than a few months in Santa Cruz, even if I squeezed every last penny, living off of ramen and multivitamins... what if I couldn't find any job? What if I had to live in a tent in someone's back yard in exchange for maintaining their compost heap? What if what if what if...

I tried to chill. Change, I reminded myself, is the first law of life. Things that don't change, die. I had opportunities to succeed as well as opportunities to fail-- most importantly I had *opportunities*.

My attempts to make myself feel better failed. There's something about motel rooms that bring loneliness and fear welling up in me...

I ate a bad cheeseburger and watched Oz.

The next day I drove through the desert, and again I felt better in the mellow light of day. I saw thunderclouds hanging in the distance, and lighting forking down over the jagged hills. I'd never seen the desert before, and I liked it.

That night I made it all the way to Needles, California (purported home of Snoopy's mustachioed brother, Spike), putting me about a day ahead of schedule (but I'd planned for 8 hour days, and driven 12 hour ones, so you know...). My night in Needles was not so full of despair. I was getting excited. I was in California. Still, the doubts lingered. I'd left behind a sure thing-- a steady paycheck from a job I liked, a girlfriend who returned my love wonderfully, a coffee shop where people knew me by name... and for what? A chance to live at last with my best friend, an opportunity to fulfill my longtime dream of coming to California... but were those good enough reasons?

I ate a yummy chicken sandwich and didn't watch any television. I read Straub's Mr. X, which is really good.

The next day I got to Santa Cruz around 5 pm. The drive was alternately beautiful and watching-tea-steep dull... the area around the San Luis Reservation is breathtakingly beautiful, it's like something in Ireland, all green hills, only with no sheep or clouds or anything...

I promptly got lost in Santa Cruz, and Scott had to come get me. I wasn't despairing then... but I might have, later. It was becoming a nightly ritual, it seemed.

The first thing Scott, wonderful Scott, did was take me to the ocean.

Cliffs. Rocks. Water. Pelicans. And then we went to look at tidepools, these little pocket universes, genuine microcosms, closed worlds... certain metaphors occured to me... but metaphors aside, I was so happy. Beautiful things, a beautiful place, a world that suddenly had many fewer constraints than before, far more doors opened than closed... and I felt, then, that I had not made a mistake, and that coming to Santa Cruz was the right thing, maybe one of the rightest things I've ever done.

And, ordinary ups-and-downs notwithstanding, I've kept feeling that way.

So everything's okay.

Everything's good.