Day with Lisbeth

I just had to see the next one in the violent series, knowing already that the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had, shown in flashback scenes, Played with Fire, and vaguely wondering why.  Only vaguely.  The films are satisfactorily angry, gratifyingly violent, with the underdog and much misunderstood heroine triumphing despite all odds.  The latest, most extreme adversity involving personal burial, the redoubtable Lisbeth clawing her way through the dirt of her own grave to not only survival, but familial and personal revenge.  In short, my kind of story.

My kind of story in what is not my kind of weather.  I could do with some good Scandinavian overcast at the least, perhaps snow at the best.  There's none of the latter in The Girl Who Played with Fire, but we see plenty of northern forest, drizzle, the dark promise of winter always gathering overhead, even in mid-summer.  One right guy gets murdered.  Two wrong guys.  Plus there is a invigorating and appropriate motorcycle theft, a measured shooting of someone's foot, plus a well-deserved axe wound or two.  A northern survivor is our Lisbeth.  My kind of gal.

I tell myself that as a victim of violence, this is a harmless pastime.  A bit of consciousness doesn't hurt, of course.  Vengeance, wily self-defense, and not being the victim, all worthwhile elements in the summer ritual of potboiler films like these.  It doesn't matter.  The deed is done.  I wasted two hours watching this silly Swedish escapism, and worse as I say goodbye to my friend David and roll up Hamilton Street in Palo Alto, there goes my train.  Not another for an hour.  I had more or less decided this might happen and planned to spend the interval pleasantly over a macchiato and the latest copy of The Nation.  But time waits for no man.  And while I do not believe that time can necessarily be wasted, nor do I believe it can be killed.  Yes, it's high time I read Naomi Klein, but later.  At home.

Thing about Palo Alto is that it's not all that far.  Taking the train there always borders on the silly.  One can stand at the platform in Menlo Park, look southward and almost see the platform in Palo Alto.  Actually, if there wasn't a slight bend in the track, one could probably look all the way, even flash mirror signals at passengers waiting at the other station.  It's about a mile.  And having a full battery charge, why not?  I began rolling north, an inter-city journey via wheelchair.

I must say that a certain tension exists here, between the apparent travel experience and the actual.  Also between the politically-correct intention and the overland reality.

Palo Alto marks the spot where several forces converge.  A region-long thoroughfare, sometimes called an expressway, and near its northern end Alma Street, gradually slows, narrows and peters out, losing itself ultimately in El Camino Real.  The latter is a boulevard, northwest by southeast main drag up and down the San Francisco Peninsula.  Actually, it has a state highway designation, route 82, I think.  So it has some real importance in terms of traffic flow and a very American effort at an historical name, the royal highway.  

Even at its most regal height, the thing was a footpath used by the 18th-century Spanish who had the most tenuous of colonial footholds in California.  A series of mud churches staffed by aboriginal slaves, each supposedly a day's walk apart.  And being suckers for royalty, particularly that wielded by a safely departed pretender to power, well-past-its-golden-age Spain, damned if it's not El Camino Real.  The Spanish soldiers assigned to defend this donkey cart path must have felt as hopeless as modern troops in Afghanistan.  They must have sensed that it was royal in name only.  They must have read, at least some of them, Don Quixote.  Surely they understood irony.  Alas, my countrymen do not.

All of which converges as Alma Street rattles over the train tracks, El Camino just behind.  I pick my angle in crossing the rails.  I can see sections of rubber and additional steel that smooth the perilous gaps between track and pavement.  This is where I roll.  Knowing this is Where the Sidewalk Ends, the footpath visibly petering out as one drives along in a car.  Ahead the traffic roars fierce and formidable, the suburban rushhour beginning on the royal highway.  An intensification of cars mixed with the lightening of authority.  For this is the grenzland, the border zone.  The counties of San Mateo and Santa Clara mark their boundary here.  Boundaries being artificial, things begin to break down.  Important things.

Which side of El Camino Real shall I choose for the balance of the journey home?  I opt for the west side, the ocean side.  There is a crosswalk.  And there is a button to push to activate the crosswalk signal.  Here, the button is essential.  Two streets merge here, one angling into the other.  No cars actually head from Alma Street west, crossing El Camino Real, as I intend.  Without the button, there is no light to stop traffic for pedestrians.  And effectively there is no button.  The button is placed on a lamp pole in the middle of a concrete traffic island, way out of reach to anyone in a wheelchair, save an orangutan.  Still, I give it a go, leaning hard to my left.  It's hopeless.  Never mind, I am fresh from the northern survivor experience, still inspired by Lisbeth, bold thoughts of risk and adventure humming in my mind.  I know what I will do.  When oncoming traffic begins turning left, I will lurch west through the crosswalk.  The drivers looks startled.  I make it to the other side.

Turning more or less north, I bounce on the asphalt footpath over the boundary creek between the counties.  On the San Mateo County side, the path descends in something between a cliff and a ramp.  Some person has made a nominal effort at a tarry incline.  I eyeball the thing, realizing this is not the safest maneuver I could make.  What-the-fuck energies drive me over the edge and down to the next ragtag asphalt section.  Ahead the concrete sidewalk resumes.  Unfortunately, cars from the motel there have parked, completely blocking it.  Angry and unstoppable, I swerve into the royal highway.  I actually bounce along facing oncoming traffic for a good hundred meters or so, doubtless frightening drivers.  Pretending I am not frightened myself.  The dangers gradually give way to inconvenience.  Streetlight poles are mounted right in the center of the sidewalk, squeezing wheelchairs into narrow passages.  Sections of sidewalk are cracked into the past tense.  I am making progress.  I am thinking that at least in Los Angeles they make no pretense about pedestrian access in most parts of the city, let alone wheelchair access.  And yet when they do, they probably do it better than this.

A quick cappuccino in the neighborhood's new branch of Peet's.  But a relief to know that I have not only made this heroic journey, but will have gotten home before the next train would have delivered me.  In fact, I'll pick up a little soup at Safeway.  'Will you help me to reach something' I ask a young woman in a logo-branded apron?  What, she says?  I ask this again.  Yes, she tells me, I will help you reach something.  I can't tell if she is being ironic or doing a very convincing imitation of an automaton.  As for the checkout guy, this young kid looks positively frightened.  I just know someone is beating him in the stockroom and hope he will slip me a note.  The have-a-nice-day crap doesn't fool me.  I hustle home.

It is only here, on Roble Ave., that the day's journey acquires form.  Yesterday's heat, and even today's milder echo, sucks something from the quadriplegic soul.  Things go neurologically haywire.  My body's temperature regulator doesn't work.  I don't sweat normally.  Sympathetic nerve damage, they say.  Whatever the physical cause, I feel old and helpless.  Long after the actual weather has cooled off, and most denizens of Earth are no longer talking about the heat, we quadriplegics keep kvetching.  We can't get cool.  It takes all night to get the body back in balance.  But the mind?  This morning I woke up feeling despairing, defeated for no particular reason.  Jane reminded me that yesterday had been a challenging one.  And today?  Well, in spirit I kicked neuromuscular butt.  Traffic butt.  Wheelchair butt.  Nothing as dramatic as Lisbeth's exploits, but it would do.  It definitely would do.