April 2005 Archives

These days, the big news is little. And entirely agricultural. Not to mention boxed in. I am acquiring a garden. Actually, I've been down this horticultural road before. I had a garden during the era of the first marriage. I recalled spending many lonely hours surrounded by raised beds. Interspersed with lonely hours in the marital bed. You make your bed, you lie in it, and you watch your garden grow.

I am not entirely certain what the current garden has grown from. I am no longer a landowner. It is my landlord who has sanctioned the construction of two redwood planter boxes at the end of his four-plex. Right at the end of the building, at the convergence of a mid 1950s apartment house, a late 1940s retirement home over the back fence and the sagging limbs of a massive oak tree. Actually, the latter are rapidly disappearing. My friend Robert has been assaulting them with an escalating arsenal of chainsaw weaponry. He's building these boxes. He's determined. He understands the mission. Get the crippled guy into agricultural production. He understands the reason. Salvation. Voltaire had it right. Fight the battles, betray and be betrayed, then retire to hoe your plot of earth. If it was good enough for Candide, it's good enough for me.

Robert's raised beds do reflect the changing times. They are twice as high as the ones I tended a decade ago. I simply cannot bend over as far as I used to. And they are designed for wheelchair access. There's not going to be a lot of walking around these beds. This is going to be a predominantly sedentary form of agriculture. Though I can gauge my neuromuscular losses in the new design of the raised earth beds, the prospect of gardening activity has already captured my spirit. Even without sighting a single one, I've already entered into combat with snails. It's survival, the law of the jungle, survival of the agricultural fittest. And I'm not yielding any precious ground to these mollusks. Before a single shovelful of soil has even gone into the planters, I've got the snail defenses in place. Long strips of copper, biochemical snail hell. Cross this line, you slimy fuckers. Make my day.

In my mind, I can already see the amber waves of grain, the bursting leaves of green, the rows and sheaves of my crops. Lettuce can hardly fail to impress. Particularly varieties like rouge d'hiver, which has the approximate consistency of crêpe paper and falls upon the plate like a languid ballet dancer. Surprising the quantity of plum tomatoes one can generate for cooking and drying. Not to mention basil. Carrots. And when it's time to roll out the big guns, corn. Until, rolling into the autumn, production begins to wane, the cover crop takes over and then in the dead of winter garlic and seed potatoes go underground. Growing against all odds. Until it's spring again.

All the more appreciated, and a little poignant and bittersweet, from a wheelchair. And it is this sensibility that makes me forget the crop and the winter and even the snails to participate in the now, and the Robert, and the building of the beds. Because I have a tendency to hurry through my days, endlessly disappointed at my own limits and how long it takes me to do things for work, so that I not only miss the raising of the garden, but I fail to participate. For Robert knows what he's doing. He has had his own losses, his own midlife setbacks, and he understands why a crippled man needs to watch a garden grow. Just as I understand that Robert needs to build this garden at his current pace. He's in between things. And the garden work goes on in between those in-between things. I keep looking at the lengthening days, and my agricultural impatience mounts. But I understand. Robert is putting love into this work. Which is something you can't really buy. And certainly can't hurry.

Which is why on this day, near the end of the building, on the eve of having a big dump truck bring the soil in from Redwood City, it's important to participate. Which means Robert and I will drive to Home Depot. Or I'll just hang out with him as he saws and joins. With a disability, it is very easy to get habituated to being an observer. You don't, and you can't, do much of your own work. There's no changing oil or hanging sheet rock. Able-bodied people do these things. They do them for you. Which isolates you from the essential activities of life. And cuts you off from life's essentially active people. The workers. The doers. Those who build, and tend, and renew our material world. Particularly those who choose to hammer and rake and haul by choice. Like Robert, who's got a Ph.D. and years of professional research in his not-too-distant past. And now chooses to watch his carpentry grow, just as I plan to observe my garden. Men have camaraderie around building and fixing. It's something I've missed. So it's a perfect time, late middle age, to rediscover male construction space. A rediscovery like everything in a disabled life comes too little, too late. And like young lettuce leaves, carrot sprouts and, yes, weeds…right on time.

"Mr. Poe is die," said the Vietnamese cabdriver on my way home from San Jose Airport. The turbaned Bengali cab dispatcher who loaded me into the taxi and shut the door assured me that my driver was a good man. I already agree. He is a very good man, full of questions. What state have I been in? Washington, I tell him. Do they know about Mr. Poe? Yes, I tell him. CNN is showing nothing but Vatican pomp and pre-funeral majesty. Mr. Poe is a Christian leader, the cabdriver tells me. He passes his card over the seat. He is Hoa Tran, and he is driving very fast up the 101 Freeway, which is fine with me. I've been gone for five days, but it seems like five months. The train journey to Seattle has been physically arduous, but that was predictable. Less expected was my mother, who has reached the angry stage of dementia. My last days of hospital visits in Olympia have included motiveless outbursts of rage interspersed with scenes of orderlies chasing my mother down the hall. All in all, the trip drove home my own neuromuscular decline and the fact of my mother's protracted sojourn in the Grim Reaper's waiting room. I am tired. Fortunately, Mr. Tran in the front seat isn't. He asks me if I ever go to San Francisco. Yes, I tell him, on the train. I feel obliged to make the latter point whenever possible. He asks me if the train will take him to Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, the Alcatraz Tour. I am circumspect on this point. Take the train, I tell him, and you won't have to pay for parking. He volunteers that having driven all week long, he doesn't like dealing with a car on his day off. On this point, Mr. Tran and I are in perfect agreement.

It's one of those cloudy, turbulent spring days on the Peninsula. Being Sunday, the road is relatively free of traffic. But there is discord in the air. There's a rainstorm moving in. I'm very glad to be home. My mother's decline has, in my mind, merged with the nation's. I don't like to see either going downhill so quickly. In both cases, I am a helpless bystander. There is no hope for it, but to take the long view. There is a bright side. We have never had this much rain in years. All the Silicon Valley reservoirs are brimming, spilling over, watery bounty cascading toward the Bay. And, no, this is not going to be the New American Century that neo-conservatives are hoping for. That's why everyone at the airport was so optimistic, the Honduran who pushed my wheelchair, the Bengali who flagged down my cab, the Vietnamese who is driving. All of them know that this is going to be the New Asian Century. When they're not pulling in tips at the airport, they are investing in software startups in Bangalore. They are biding their time. They see what is coming.

All this makes me feel buoyant. I need a little buoyancy after lead-footing it around the Coast Starlight. My wife put me aboard at our suburban train station, handing bags to the conductor and waving a fond farewell. I don't know if she was nervous. I had been, for weeks. But once things were under way, they were what they were. The commuter train conductor pushed me into the terminal at San Jose. Actually, by the time we got into the station lobby the Amtrak agent was on her way to do the same, i.e., push me in. Which was rather amazing, considering that Amtrak had only one employee on hand. Her name was Patricia. She was all youth and keenness, with her hair braided in tight cornrows. I asked her to give me the lowdown on the train. She gave me an even look. Three hours late, plus or minus.

The San Jose station must be about 100 years old. Or maybe not. Actually, some of the fixtures look more Art Deco. It's got a hint of Union Station, Los Angeles, 1940. The ceiling soars to about 3 1/2 stories. It's got that pseudo-Mission look about it. The benches are made of oak, and it's not a bad place to hang out and read magazines for three hours. "Do you need some help?" The woman next to me was shabbily dressed, all in mismatching plaids and tweeds. She was headed for Klamath Falls. She helped me get nuts and a chocolate bar out of my rucksack. It's a tough overnight journey to Klamath Falls, but much cheaper than flying. So, here she was. Until at midnight when the train finally rolled in, and we rolled out.

There's something joyous about a sleeping compartment. Cozy, womblike, and presenting framed views of the outside world, while one's inside world of open suitcases, familiar toothpaste, the next day's socks and the remainder of the chocolate bar, are all reassuringly close at hand. Might as well leave the shades up. After all, I came for the view. Yes, it's a little disconcerting to be lying more or less naked on an Amtrak bed while passengers at Oakland wander up and down the platform, inches away. But with the tinted glass, they cannot see in, and I don't want to see out. Not here. Of course, it's kind of hard to wake from a profound sleep and avoid looking out at Sacramento, when the platform is alive with workers bringing water on board, shouting to each other, tending to the train in ways that are unclear but reassuring. I fell asleep again once we pulled out of Sacramento. I woke a couple of times in the night, and when I woke the final time there was light in the sky. There was also sky in the sky, for the sun was up and blazing at 6 a.m. Full of promise, if not photons. I knew better than to linger in bed. Daybreak on the Coast Starlight is a major event. It's like watching the stars wander in for the Academy Awards. It's the dawn of everything. It's Redding.

It's not supposed to be Redding, of course. When the Coast Starlight is on schedule, the train stops here at around 3 a.m. But being on schedule is not what the Coast Starlight is all about. It's all about America. America as it really is. It's an America that packs aboard these trains, selling out the sleepers year-round, selling out even the seats all summer. "I don't know why they even bother with this train," Patricia confided in me at Amtrak's San Jose station. She's right, of course. The train is so off schedule that waiting passengers can often get to the airport, and even fly home, before the locomotive light appears in San Jose. Train fanciers agree that Union Pacific is trying to drive long-distance passenger service off its rails. The CEO of Union Pacific is a close personal buddy of Dick Cheney, so things don't look good for the Coast Starlight. Unless you're awake and looking out the window at Redding this particular dawn.

You and the train and everyone driving pickups -- and no one seems to be driving anything else -- are heading north along the sluggish Sacramento River. Where did all the trees come from? They look like elms and other friendly species from backyards, mixed with native river types like willow, oak, alder and yew. It has the unadorned feel of the clapboard midwest, this stretch of highway into Redding. We pull into the Amtrak station and stop only briefly, barely touching base. After all, who gets on and off a train scheduled to stop at three in the morning? The Amtrak station is old and restored, and there's even some lawn and greenery, all well tended. The station and the old buildings around it face the river. Somewhere across town, Interstate 5 roars along with the usual procession of gas stations and Wal-Marts. But not here. This is the old town, the original, and pulling away from the station, the river itself floods into view. If floods under the train and soon shimmers to the north and south. Everything is rising. Actually, the train is ascending an enormous curving viaduct. But it's all happening so fast that you piece together the reality only in retrospect. In the moment, we are rolling and soaring above a riparian bowl. Is Redding a blue-collar haunt of NRA members and trailer parks? Or is it this, a town spread across a sparkling green valley, snowcapped mountains in the not too far distance? The orange orb of sun is rising over all of it. All of us. There was never a moment of more promise. This is the dawn of all dawns, beginning of all beginnings. In a moment, the beginning ends. We have rushed through Redding, past small prefabricated homes with big yards and more sturdy stands of trees, and into a tunnel. Beyond the tunnel the train rolls onto a causeway and crosses a small finger of Shasta Lake. There are more tunnels. And more tunnels. It takes all of seven tunnels to shake off Redding, so persistent is this town. In the end, Redding only gives up when the Sacramento River Canyon takes over. It's an excellent bargain.

And, yes, Mr. Poe is dead. He was probably a good sort, Mr. Poe, railing as he so often did against materialism and unjust war. My body is aching from the strenuous daylong fight up and down the stairs and corridors of the train, and whatever pain I picked up visiting my mother. But, never mind, for I'm in a cab now and heading home to my wife. And grateful that I've got both, a home and a wife. There are peak moments. And they exist for a reason. We sight them from mountain summit to mountain summit. And we forget about them on the steep, dark valleys in between. And the future belongs to Mr. Tran. And the present belongs to me.