August 2006 Archives

It's a dark ride out of Sonoma. The town itself is ablaze with wine and its trappings. California's aspiring haute bourgeoisie attach much importance to everything winish, the vintage, the label, the tour of the place where the wine is made, the glimpse of the big house on the hill where the money is made on the Internet. Not to mention the restaurant where the wine is served, the menu that goes with the wine and the waitress/waiter/serving person who approaches the table with the nightly specials. Which are so special that they inspire an animated recitation.

As Jeanette, one of my wise companions for the evening, points out, there is an essential problem with mixed media here. There is a reason why we have the visual language of menus and, if one must, blackboards, with the usual fare and today's special fare, vis-à-vis, dishes. We are not used to oratory regarding what to order. This half explains why during the waitress's earnest account of the night's specials -- salmon and something else -- the diners' eyes wander. But there is the other part which has to do with the embarrassing use of what are doubtless standard cookbook flourishes. A reduction. A glaze. A finish. I don't exactly cook on this level, so I am in no position to cast stones about the haute kitchens of Sonoma, but as I hear the pitch for the $25 salmon, I experience a reduction, a glazed expression and a finish that doesn't come too soon.

The evening does, unfortunately, and Marlou and I in our vacation lightness head back over the hills to Inverness, to our two-week rented home on the hillside. Even if inner Sonoma is becoming overwrought, the outskirts remains pretty much what they always were, rural and empty and, at night, dark. The route to Petaluma is circuitous and vaguely marked and involves a few wrong turns. Once we find the right road, the experience seems even more tenuous. We pass Adobe Creek and Adobe Creek Road. In the darkness, with only a few cars making their obscure back way at 10 p.m., the sinister predominates. It was on Adobe Road that Polly Klass, the murdered poster girl for California's newest crime laws, met her helpless end. The death was made even more scary by the proximity of the police. An officer even stopped to see if he could help the murderer with his apparent car breakdown. It was a breakdown of everything that night. And I've had a night of breakdown myself, 40 years ago. Now, I would like to forget all that and have a drive in the dark that is just what it is. A trip through that part of the day that happens when the sun is turned off.

Unfortunately, the past is turned on. The road over the hills from Petaluma to Point Reyes banks and bends and abruptly rises in and out of dark corners of the empty hills. There are occasional houses, an authentic one-room schoolhouse and lots of empty coastal sage brush. In places the road is too narrow for a disabled car to pull over. In such an eventuality, the disabled person inside the car would presumably sit there, exposed to traffic, while the driver sought help. Along other stretches of road, the car would have plenty of shoulder. And driver and passenger would sit in the dark, waiting for help to come for the flat tire, the blown gasket, the dead battery. The dangers would come from the others on the road. One of the itinerant night marauders we seem to breed in America.

But these are thoughts and mostly what I have are feelings. The feeling that my body is stiff with age, not to mention injury, and that I really have no business being here, rolling through a night world of chaparral and bay laurel and summer grass. I am as at home here as fish in the desert. My realm has become the mechanical. The wheelchair. The van with the lift for the wheelchair. The apartment with its known passages, defined widths, heights and surfaces. The computer adapted for the one-handed production of work and leisure. But not here, hurtling on a cold, lonely asphalt expanse. Or, just as bad, pulled over to the tilting, gravelly edge. I can see myself opening the car door for some purpose, even just to pee in the dark. Staring into the rocky, sandy unknown beyond the road's edge. If I needed to escape someone or something, just a step or two over the road's bank would land me in a benign slope down to some dry creek bed, nestled among rustling summer trees, where if someone did not mount a reasonably thorough search, I could perish. Could a one-handed, one-legged paralytic crawl up such a slant? How long would it take to succumb to dehydration? The Highway Patrol could cruise by repeatedly, talking on their radios, oblivious to my plight.

But when I am too afraid of the night and what it holds, it's important to remember the night in question. A Saturday night, at midnight, in June, 1968, lying near death and nearly out of air, my body kicked and battered and inert under some bushes beside a church on a hilly street in Berkeley. Too late, too dark, too hopeless and too short of air. But even then someone was awake. Someone heard. Someone rose from their bed, wandered outside with a flashlight and found me. Lost and found. Both things happen. And both can happen even here, on the night road laid out for stagecoaches, but now transporting me and Marlou and the occasional vacationer, farmer, teenager, insomniac and, yes, now and then a freelance psychopath, over the hills from Petaluma.

The news crept in with the morning light. Outside the fog hung sad over the tan oaks and scrubby laurel. What was one to do? Marlou stood in the doorway quietly explaining what had happened. I sought some deeper answer in her eyes. But there was nothing, only the resigned air of someone who has witnessed loss before. She said it again. There would be no foam. This was to be, from its start to its conclusion, a bad foam day. Something passed between us, the knowledge that as the espresso machine had hissed like the pneumatic brakes of a slowing train and both of us had seen that milky froth even before we fully saw each other, caffeine still being absent in our systems, the promise was not to be fulfilled. Something had failed. And so, something failed and faltered within me. No foam. There would be no milky foam. On some days, the Italian coffee machine failed to deliver. This was one of those. Nothing more needed to be said. Nothing more than everything. I wanted to tell Marlou about the dampening of desire, the muting of possibilities, of hopes thwarted, of promises shipped to the wrong address. No foam. No effervescence. None of that quality attributed to the bubbly personality. There would be no bubbles. No foam.

The range of disappointments possible in Inverness, California, is rather slim. Failure to foam is about as bad as it gets. It gets foggy, then it gets sunny, then it gets foggy. But it never gets old. Only I do that. And Inverness is where I do it best. If I had the money, I would do it here forever. Why Inverness? I don't know. It's beyond knowing. Actually, no one does know about it. Inverness has escaped the notice of virtually everyone, even in the Bay Area. Only hardened introverts know it. Unfortunately, there are just enough of these to drive up the price of vacation real estate to ludicrous levels. We have rented a house for two weeks. Small decks hang off either end of the place like flaps on an inexplicably double envelope. And the whole thing sits up on poles, being a pole house. The usual hillside trees pose at the windows, limbs held high and formal, framing everything. Particularly the bay. Did I mention Tomales Bay? It's out there shimmering and beckoning all day long.

Why Inverness? God only knows where the name came from. But suffice it to say, once the Scots got out of the Highlands, there was no stopping them. So why not head for Point Reyes, abandoned, windswept and devoted from its earliest settlement to the raising of cows? A situation which, in spirit, matches the Scottish experience. And never mind if the details are little off. No, it doesn't look like Scotland. The real Inverness is much grayer and bleaker. Certainly, Tomales Bay doesn't remotely resemble a loch. In fact, the bay is quintessentially Californian. Treeless hills on one side, green or brown depending on the season, forest on the other. Actually, it's a thin, even scrubby forest. Bishop Pines, a rare and rather primitive looking breed, work their way down the hillside. The hillside is straight as a line, and so is the bay. Both share precisely the same geological origin. The San Andreas fault runs under the water, making a beeline for the Pacific Ocean where it disappears from sight. But not from mind. Evidence of earthquakes is all around Inverness. The temblors are fêted at the national park visitor center, the tiny Inverness museum, and on the walls of any local restaurant worth its salt.

Our rented house, sitting up on its foundation poles, holds itself proudly, as though to say "this is enough." So forget the television. There isn't one. And you can largely forget the Internet, as well, unless you want to watch your life move before you at dial-up speed. So, you get up, deal with the loss of foam and get on with the day. The day being rather like the night, except brighter. You will be brighter too if you have been reading. If not, you will be duller. Which will force you to contemplate the bay, spending hours counting sailboats. Followed by a long meditation upon the opposite shore where, maybe in those indistinct white shacks, locals sell oysters. Okay, so they're not really locals. They are probably advance agents from some huge Japanese cartel, quietly cornering the market on the Tomales Bay shellfish brand. But they seem like locals. And that's all that matters.

Inverness tends to be something of a disaster for disabled people. The houses are generally old, built on slopes, and the particulars of their accessibility or inaccessibility can never be determined through any means of remote communication. Never mind the pictures on the website. Forget a phone conversation with the realtor. The latter will only yield a chirpy description of "a short walk down a path." Which sums up our current circumstance. Though one should mention that the short walk is preceded by a harrowing drive up and down a one-way road, which eventually widens enough for cars to park on a bend. Followed by the descent of a virtual cliff. A walkway, more exactly a trail, traverses the slope from the road to the steps leading to the front door. On the day we arrived, two workmen patching up something at a neighboring house watched me attempt to maneuver the path in my electric wheelchair. Wielding a huge shovel of the sort that elsewhere clears snow, they gathered up huge shovelfuls of Inverness leaves, gradually revealing the powdery earth, one result of the eons of ground leaf dust, underneath. They cleared the way just enough for me, with their considerable help, to make it back up the trail and park the wheelchair permanently beside my van. Marlou threw a tarp over it. The latter will keep raccoons, blue jays, neighborhood cats, foxes and squirrels off it. I will be using it only occasionally, mostly to load myself back into the van and drive somewhere. Not that I won't think twice about doing even that, descending the quadriplegic nightmare hill, my life and my Ford van, hanging by the neurologically weakened powers of my left foot. On the brake.

Indoors it's not a place for access. More steps from the front door, a full stairway down to the beds. Never mind. I come to Inverness to see everything change. To spend day after day hearing the breeze rustle through the trees, to answer approximately one phone call per week, to read, to think, to write. Supposedly to "slow down," although everything in my spirit speeds up. That is to say, things brighten, despite the losses of the day, such as the foam. That's as bad as it gets around here, no foam on the morning coffee. That and the weather, for some days the fog comes in too early and stays too late. Too late for what? I don't know. I'll spend the next 10 days figuring that one out.

The thing about having special needs, not to mention a special spinal cord, is that you get to feel, well, special. Like the Blue Plate Special or the Midnight Special. You're kind of featured, on sale this week only, and various other things, all of which make up for people staring and preferring that you're not in their offices 40 hours per week. But in the end what life delivers is always more disappointing, not to mention, ironic. So that you get a little too used to special status. Which brings us it to Zion Canyon. Actually, it brings us to Las Vegas, gateway to Zion Canyon. Las Vegas thinks it is the gateway to itself. One of these days a licensed medical professional will give the city a resuscitative bitch slap, and Las Vegas will stagger out to the edge of its own desert, look for Zion, get confused, bone up on nature lore, mostly trying to remember why they call the wind Mariah. The simple answer being that the wind is not Mormon. It was the Mormons who called Zion, Zion. All you have to call is the 800 number for the Zion Park Lodge. And, yes, they have a wheelchair accessible room. And besides that, they have a wheelchair-accessible park.

Human accounts of wheelchair access vary greatly. That's because wheelchairs and wheelchair users vary greatly. Your macho paraplegic who plays two games of wheelchair basketball before breakfast, just as a warmup to all-terrain rugby in the afternoon, will have one view of whether or not a national park trail is cripple-friendly. An able-bodied middle-aged woman pushing her not exactly weightless husband up and down geologically tilting sandstone slabs will have another. But as for hitting the trails, we're not there yet. We're not even in Zion. We're in Las Vegas, pulling out of the airport, and thinking that, sure, the place is tacky, but it does have an allure. Especially once you've seen the Eiffel Tower perched right next to the Parthenon. And you're thinking, wow it should always have been like this, because think of the air fares between Paris and Athens. When right here the epochs share a parking lot, and you can have a beer in one and nachos in the other. So, why not do that very thing? Just swing into Bellagio for a quick self park, followed by a little lunch before you're on the way to the main national park event.

Within an hour you wonder what all these people are doing with their sandals and their children, wandering about dazed and talking too loud, drifting past Cartier display windows on their way to where? After all, you were on your way to Zion and now you're here. And "here" has more places to eat then you can shake a stick at. And shaking a stick is what you would do if you were at Zion, because stick shaking is what the out of doors is all about. Anyway, you're here, so you might as well order Ahi tuna encrusted in something and served in a salad beside the famous Bellagio fountains which may be on or off, though their status really doesn't matter, because you and your wife are arguing about something. The something feels terribly important, but also feels old, old as you. Because old is all you can feel when your waitress and the hostess and most of the Bellagio diners have stepped right off the runway of some fashion house. And you feel not only old, but more quadriplegic than ever.

Which is why it's a relief to be back on the interstate and hurtling toward a mountain cliff. The base of the mountain cliff, to be precise, which at the 11th hour opens slightly to reveal a canyon, a slit just wide enough for a freeway to pass. Which you do, passing out of Nevada, pirouetting across a corner of Arizona and landing squarely in Utah. Everything in Utah is done squarely. Utah is square, just check out a map. And the thing about being squarely Utahan is that you know where you are. And where you are involves being Mormon, procreating frequently and staying pretty much out of the way of the management of Zion National Park. The latter is run by the feds, a.k.a., Department of the Interior, and the park lodge at Zion serves caffeine and alcoholic drinks, though not without a few restrictions. Never mind. This is the first thing you'll check out as soon as you get to the Lodge. But, remember, we're not there yet.

We are at the visitor center. All national parks have a visitor center. Why? Because visitors need a center. Americans are not a very centered people these days, having been knocked badly off kilter by 9-11, so they congregate at visitor centers hoping to get concentric. Many of them do. We did. A quick look at the map, a glance at the rules, and the Zion experience begins to make a kind of sense. Only one on thing about Zion. You can't drive. In fact, even to take your car from the park entrance to the Lodge requires a large red card, mounted in your windshield, which the park ranger hands you while making you swear, scouts honor, that you absolutely will not wander about the park in your car. In fact, you're going to leave your car, at the Lodge, and more less forget it. Or the Rangers will get you. Got it? As for getting around, that's what the park shuttles are for. They are small articulated buses, powered by natural gas and virtually silent. They run every five minutes or so and, yes, they are wheelchair accessible.

Which puts the battle-hardened quadriplegic in something of a quandary. For the dirty little secret of disabled life is that there are benefits. First boarding the airplane. Free admission to the Musée d'Orsay. That sort of thing. So it's natural, almost instinctive, to do what that large woman with the disabled scooter is currently doing with the ranger -- getting special dispensation. She wants to drive her car, claims the scooter won't make it on the shuttle's wheelchair lift. Listening to this, I know better, or think I do. In any case, I would demand a trial run. I think the ranger should adopt a show-me stance and insist that the woman give the lift a try. As for me, well I'm such a unique and neurologically complex victim of the world that I really shouldn't be using the silly shuttles either. I mean, does equal access mean, you know, equality? I don't know. I don't know anything except that I'm glad I'm here, and after a few minutes driving up the canyon it's easy to see why.

Zion Canyon opens like a magical book with strata for pages. It winds like the river that made it, the aptly named Virgin River. But any observation begins to falter as the sheer walls, the vertical sandstone faces, ascend to where they started. Up there. Way up there. At a point so high, descending into a canyon so narrow, that the canyon walls don't seem so much to wind as to stagger. Zion Canyon doesn't look as though it's going to hold together much longer, that the whole plunging earth-tone vastness of it will give way. Within the next 20 million years or so. Meanwhile, here it is, alternately purple and red, microscopic pine trees dotting the top rim, big aspens here below where the Zion Park Lodge provides benches for its carless patrons. A good place to sit for hours and hours and wonder how anything could get so big and high and sandstone and geologic, while on the lawn in front of the Lodge screaming three-year olds chase the occasional wild turkey. No, not the whiskey, the bird.

The June morning feels mild, almost brisk. The Lodge and its lawns feel shadowy. They are. The sun glares off the red sandstone summits, thousands of feet above, but here it's all purple morning shadows. Which, as anyone will tell you, is good. No sense in waiting for the day, which in June brings shimmering waves of heat stroke. The park rangers are up and at it early on a summer day. They urge visitors on with 9 a.m. hikes, 10 a.m. lectures and 11 a.m. bus tours. So, we board an 8:45 a.m. shuttle and head up the canyon. The wheelchair lift works smoothly. The driver even knows how to run it. Zion Canyon's main road, now shut to everything except the shuttles, feels like a wide mountain trail with big rest areas. The latter are the shuttle stops, each with its own stone shelter and informative signs. The last stop at the head of the canyon leads to a trail through the red narrows, where the mile-high canyon walls close in to 20 feet apart. My wife pushes the wheelchair, a folding, non-battery-powered thing. We bounce and tilt over stones and ruts, keeping pace with the ranger and her acolytes, mostly middle-aged women. It's a slow group, so I don't slow it down. We stop to look at plants and oddities of the sandstone canyon walls. Water oozes here and there. The appearance of water in a place so arid seems miraculous, especially when it arrives sideways, coming laterally out of cooperative strata. The ranger says it takes many centuries for rain to percolate through the surface ground, down to where we're standing, on a trail, beside a glistening rocky face. Amid the glistening there are black dots, bumps, and they are snails, a species unique to Zion Canyon. Around them grow ferns and vines and other water-loving plants, a curious garden hanging off a stone face which keeps cool in the evaporative air. The humidity borders on zero, and everyone keeps telling you to drink water.

There are lots of people on the trail, and on the way back at the shuttle stop several pitch in and help the wheelchair pusher. My wife isn't too keen. She would prefer to do this herself, but she has over time accepted that we depend on the kindness of strangers. At the shuttle bus stop we depend on the wheelchair lift, which works beautifully every time. We head down the canyon to the visitor center and hang out in the heat. The latter drives us back to our room. Well, not exactly, for it's the shuttle that drives us. And it's the shuttle that drives us back up the same road we took in the morning at around 6 p.m., when the valley again descends into shadow, a layer of white sandstone reflecting the sun. Natural indirect lighting. We ask the shuttle driver to stop at Big Bend. That's what it is, a point where the canyon turns, all thousands of feet of it, a deep crook cut by a shallow creek. The shuttle purrs away, leaving us alone. Which is the odd thing about this major national park destination, with its throngs of sightseers. Without cars rumbling up and down the road, the occasional hiker seems like nothing, and the canyon vastness seems like an echoing wonder. My wife starts pushing the wheelchair down the road. It's easy. The road is paved, the next shuttle is minutes away, and we are alone in Zion. We stop and get another angle on the bend and some of the features the shuttle drivers point out. There's the zigzag trail high on the opposite face of the canyon. Here's the wooden tower that once held up steel cables to slide logs from the forested summit down to the valley floor. Maybe those logs now comprise the benches and joists of the Lodge. It's an easy, utterly quiet moment of canyon solitude. We could have insisted on driving, but we would have missed this. There's no missing the next shuttle, for they run every few minutes. We deliberately miss a succession of them. With the departure of each, the place becomes ours again. In quadriplegic terms, it's a true wilderness experience, empty and alone, yet safe. Mother nature is a fearsome thing. And human nature can be the same. But not at this moment, which has given high meaning to access and lift.