Come Back, Baby

I wrote this waaay back in mid October. But here it is now!

The past few weeks have been the kind of glorious fall weather that I have dreamed of my entire life. The mornings were cool, with just enough chill to make that cup of tea seem extra nice. The clouds hung low over the city in the early hours, enticing you to stay in bed, to stay wrapped up in your own white comforter, but once you crossed the hills west of Portland the blue sky opened up overhead. Demure velvety carpets of fog hovered over the fields in Hillsboro, leaving the foot or so above the golden ground strangely clear. The morning chill would eventually give way to glorious afternoons: just warm enough to draw you outside, and just cool enough to make you appreciate the sunshine. It was perfect for sitting in the courtyard in a sunbeam. The treas, at first unsure, started changing their dressings a few leaves at a time. First one branch would turn, slowly, tentatively shifting from green to red and gold and orange. Then its neighbors, perhaps inspired by the first branch’s boldness, or maybe just envious of its finery, would join in.

The fallen leaves crunched under foot, and swirled behind the cars like a beautifully mastered but not particularly creative car commercial.

It was gorgeous.

And then, suddenly, it was gone.

I didn’t know it would be leaving so soon. “The good weather lasts from July 4th through October”, the locals told me. I thought that included October! But here it is, not even half-way through October, and the forecast shows only rain for the foreseeable future.

This came as a shock to me, as I am not in the habit of checking the forecast. Tomorrow, I kept telling myself. Tomorrow I will remember to bring my camera, and capture all the glorious leaves and astounding blue sky. Tomorrow, I will pack a picnic lunch, and eat outside. Tomorrow, I will bring a jacket and eat in the courtyard.

I did not realize that hypothetical tomorrow would not be coming. I did not realize that once the rains start here, they don’t stop for six months. I did not realize that the sunshine was so, so precious.

Now that it’s gone, my desperation is clawing its way out of my chest. The end of any relationship is painful, of course, but I am taking this breakup particularly badly. I am that ex that makes you cringe.

Come back, baby, I say to the sunshine. If you just come back, I’ll be better. I’ll do it right this time–I’ll do right by you, I promise. I will eat dinner on the roof garden every night, even though it’s a hassle to bring the dishes down. I will eat every lunch in the courtyard at work, tossing crumbs to the scrub jay. I’ll drive to the beach every weekend! I’ll go kayaking, I’ll go hiking, I’ll go swimming; I’ll do all of the things I wanted to do but put off in favor of stupid things like cleaning and watching trashy supernatural dramas. I will go out even when I think it’s too hot, even though I hate wearing sunscreen, even though I am tired.

I cling desperately to the hope that this is just a trial separation. I believe–I know we can still work out our problems. I didn’t appreciate the sunshine when it was here–that’s on me, and I’m so sorry. I’m going to do better! We can make this work, if only the sunshine would give me another chance.

But deep down, I know. I know that it’s over. The sunshine took her toothbrush, and her record collection, and that stupid cat throw pillow. I even hear someone saw her out in New Mexico, drinking a beer and throwing darts with someone new.

Well, fine, if that’s the way it’s going to be. Two people can play that game. I can find someone new, too. In fact, I think I might even have met someone today. He’s different, certainly. A little less ostentatious, a little more reserved. He’d just as soon stay in as go to the beach with your friends. He says he likes warm soups and long baths, candlelight and reading, board games and crafts. He’s coming over this weekend. And, you know? I think I might even like him a little.

Driving in Portland: A Southerner’s Terror

Driving in Portland is unlike any driving experience I’ve had previously. Downtown is particularly bad (most downtowns are, I suppose.) It stars out all right enough. You cross a bridge over the river, heading into downtown proper. You’re just cruising along, minding your own business, when suddenly the lane you are in becomes turn only. Not having sufficient warning to change lanes, you are forced to turn and are now going 90 degrees away from your intended course of travel.

Then you realize that you’re in a bus-only lane.

Then you realize that the bus-only lane is demarked, on both sides, by the solid white line that indicates that you are not supposed to change lanes here.

You are now faced with the dilemma–break the law by driving in a bus-only lane (and really piss off any bus driver who happens to be behind you), or break the law by changing lanes illegally? Oh, and you need to make this decision and execute it in the next 50 feet.

Fortunately, those problems decrease with experience. For the first time in my life, learning a route doesn’t just require learning which streets to use–it requires learning which *lanes* in those streets to use. I’ve learned to avoid 5th and 6th street entirely, which have two whole lanes devoted to the bus, and off of which you can only turn in one direction (as you can’t cross in front of the bus-only lanes).

It’s the bicyclists and pedestrians who are the problematic bit.

I’ve never lived in a city where there were bike lanes along every road, much less bike lanes that are actually used. Unfortunately, no one stops you as you’re entering the city to hand you a primer on sharing the road with bicyclists. Thus, early in my Portland driving, I was faced with the difficulty: what happens when you need to turn right and the bicyclists (in the bike lane to your right) want to go straight? My reaction was to panic. “What do I do? What do I do? There are a thousand bicyclists and I need to turn right and I can’t judge how fast they are going in relationship to how fast I can turn and what do I do what do I do?!” Zack, ever the calm one, said dryly, “Don’t get hit things is generally a good guideline.” I amended that to the situation, which was really more of a “Don’t get hit” scenario. I yielded to the bicyclists. Crisis averted… that time, anyway. More recently, I found myself needing to turn across a bike lane. I thought the bicyclist was turning right, as I was. No such luck–the poor guy braked hard and shouted obscenities. I apologized profusely, but that probably wouldn’t have mattered to him even if he could have heard. Zack soothed my conscience by telling me that I probably gave him the best indignation boner. He probably spent all day telling everyone he encountered about how the horrible gas guzzler nearly killed him, and wouldn’t it just be better if everyone who drove cars died? Etc. etc.

So whereas the bicyclists are fast, angry, and unpredictable, the pedestrians in Portland are slow, oblivious, and unpredictable. All over downtown, there are special white-striped pedestrian crosswalks. In the UK, they call them Pelican crosswalks. Of course, in the UK, they also put nice little flashing lights on them, so you know when a pedestrian has stepped into the crosswalk. But this is America, and we can’t have nice things, so our stripey crosswalks are unlit.

That doesn’t deter the pedestrians from stepping into the street with impunity, without regard to the speed or proximity of the massive steel death dealers hurtling towards them. They step off the sidewalk with the innocence of babes, utterly assured in their belief that no harm will come to them, seemingly unaware of the possibility that one of the people operating the hurtling steel death-dealer might be a visitor in Portland. That that visitor might be from suburban Texas, where pedestrians are rare, and confident pedestrians even rarer. That the visitor might never have encountered a crosswalk where it is legal for a pedestrian to cross at any time. That the visitor might therefore be unaware that pedestrians are even something they need to be on the alert for. No, no, the pedestrians in Portland walk with the confidence of an animal that evolved in an environment without predators, In Portland, pedestrians are the top of the food chain. And they will step in front of your grill and amble, ever so slowly, across the street, not even looking at you apologetically for causing you to come screeching to a halt in order to avoid squishing their sorry patchouli-scented ass.

In other cities, pedestrians will at least acknowledge your existence. Even in Athens, where the pedestrians know that you have to step boldly into the street in order to cross it at all, those street-crossers pay careful attention to the traffic. You wait, you watch, and you choose the moment when you know that your boldness will impress the traffic to a standstill for your passage. In the American South, pedestrians have a nervous, prey-animal air about them. Even when they have a walk sign, they dart across the street, looking around, waiting for that one driver (it seems like there’s always one) who is going to come flying around the corner and cream you just as you’re about to reach the safety of the sidewalk. When a Southern pedestrian walks in front of you when they don’t have the right-of-way, they have the good decency to look apologetic. They give you grateful, doe-y eyes, a look that says, “Thank you, fossil-fueled death dealer! Thank you for not squishing me!”

Southern pedestrians get it. Southern pedestrians understand. They know their place, and, all philosophical questions aside, it isn’t the top of the food chain. It’s a simple question of physics:force equals mass times acceleration. Even if the car were moving very slowly, as slowly even as the pedestrian walked, it would still have a couple of tons of mass to translate into force. The pedestrian will not win that one. You can’t fight physics.

It took me a while to lose my Southern pedestrian sensibilities. Even in the pelican crosswalks, where I ostensibly had the right-of-way all the time, I would wait for a break in traffic. Sometimes, a driver would see me there, waiting for a safe time to cross, and stop to let me across. I would smile graciously at them, and hurry out of their way. I had taken to coaching myself across these crosswalks, “Act confident. Act confident. They’re not going to hit you. They’re not going to hit you. Don’t look at them. Pretend to be a local. Act confident. Keep walking.” I suspect I did not fool anyone. I suspect they could sense my anxiety.

But now, four months in to my life in Portland, my inner anxious Southern pedestrian has relaxed. Sure, I look when we cross the street–that’s just good sense–but I’ll also step into the pelican crosswalk when there are lots of cars in the road, instead of waiting until the road is empty. Sometimes, if I feel like it, I’ll smile at the cars that have stopped for me, but just as often now, I won’t pay them a passing glance, keeping my eyes instead on the path ahead of me. The cars have become a strange background object, like lions behind the glass at the zoo. It’s pleasant. It’s peaceful.

Well, until someone new to town plasters my sorry kale-carrying ass across their grill.

Food Incantations

I chop onions the way Zack Kaplan taught me. In half lengthwise, from stem to root. Peel off the skin, trim the dirty nubs of roots, cut off whatever papery bit of stem remains.Place it cut-side down on the cutting board, and, holding it in place using the rounded side that faces up, slide the knife in parallel to the cutting board, cutting almost–but not quite–all the way to the root. This is the trickiest part–press too hard on the top of the onion with your hand, the knife won’t go in and you’ll have to apply too much force to the knife, opening yourself up to the opportunity for the knife to slip suddenly as the onion gives way, possibly chopping off bits of your hand that you’d just as soon keep. I cheat, sometimes, balancing the onion on its root as I slide the knife through. But I know it’s cheating, and I try to do it flat on the cutting board, which is safer anyway. You repeat that, making slices parallel to the cut through the onion, at the desired dice size.

Make cuts perpendicular to the cut side of the onion. Press the point of the knife almost–but not quite–at the root end, cutting through the onion towards where the stem used to be. This part is tricky, too–have to choose the cuts carefully, to hold the onion together.

The final set of cuts, across the onion, like making onion rings. Starting near the stem end, slice, moving closer to the root with each slice. Like magic, the onion turns from the carefully created sculpture of cuts into a dice, small chunks of onion falling onto the cutting board. Cut closer and closer to the root until the onion won’t stand on the side facing the cutting board any more. Turn it over, the root pointing up now. Cut off the little bits remaining around the root, leaving the root intact. The chemicals that make your eyes water are concentrated in the root end–if you cut as little of the root part as possible, maybe you can avoid the stinging pain.

It’s a precise way to dice an onion. It’s a fast way, too, if you are good with a sharp knife.

And every time I do it, I conjure Zack, standing at the table in Jessie’s cabin, showing me how to wield a dinky, sorry-excuse-for-a-chef’s-knife to the best advantage. It was around the 4th of July last year, and the air outside was hot and filled with the buzzing of insects. We were probably making guacamole to eat out on the porch, lazing in our bathing suits on the weather-proof furniture, filling our tummies with chips and beer, trading stories. Every time I chop an onion, I have a vision of that moment, a perfect instant in our friendship.

While Zack managed to teach the onion-cutting skill to me, there are other skills, passed on from those I hold dear, that I haven’t quite mastered. It was Malavika, for instance, who showed me how to scrape a bowl. Never before or since have I seen someone so thoroughly remove all of the food from a container. Even without a rubber spatula, she manages to get a bowl so empty that you have to look closely to tell that it just held food. I try, but I lack her patience and skill. Instead, as I’m scraping down a bowl or a yogurt container, I see the four of us–Malavika, Dhruv, Neha, and me–crammed like sardines into my tiny Hilltown kitchen in the darkness of that Dundee winter, the kitchen window fogging with the steam from pasta and our breathing. Rarely have I had guests so unwilling to accept my refusal of help, and so we made macaroni and cheese (Malavika’s request) all together, in the improbably small space of my kitchen. We bemoaned the terrible Scottish stoves, electric behemoths with cast iron burners that stayed hot for hours–how we longed for the gas stoves of home! I see Mal, every time I empty the contents of one container to another. I hear her, tsk-tsking my shoddy bowl scrapage, sounding both fond and exasperated as she rolls the r in “Raych”.

Malavika, too, is the best  tortilla roller I have ever met. Somehow, when I roll tortillas, they always come out looking more or less like Africa. Mine are a little too thick, a little uneven, a little ragged around the edges. Malavika, though, rolls with both precision and speed, turning out the most perfect round tortillas, one after the other.  She tried to show me how she managed it, as we stood around the table in Dhruv’s bachelor pad in Dundee’s west end, but it never took.

In eating, too, I find the memories of my friends. Roasted chicken, for me, is especially laden with with moments from our shared pasts.

It reminds me first of my father, who had a fondness for chicken livers and other chicken bits that are less socially innocuous than the ubiquitous boneless-skinless-chicken breast. Once, standing in my grandmother’s kitchen, a chicken cooling on a plate by the red glass jars full of Lipton tea bags and sugar, he showed me how to strip the meat from a roasted bird. He removed all the meat we normally think of, and then pulled out a series of gray, lumpy, organy bits from alongside the backbone in the cavity of the chicken. He showed them to me, and joyfully popped them into his mouth. Those, he said, are the best part of the chicken. They are the parts that taste most chicken-y. I shuddered, at the time. Lumpy gray organy bits do not make the most photogenic eating.

Then I moved to Scotland, where it was so much colder and farther away from home than I anticipated. I roast my first chicken, using the beer-can method that has since become my standard. Alicia and I ate it hungrily, sitting at the table in our cold living room, tearing chunks off the crisp, golden flesh with our bare hands. We ate like barbarians, for this chicken and for many afterwards, the warmth of home soaking into our eager fingers.

Later, in the kitchen, as I stripped the cooling carcass of the chicken, I came across those little bits of which my father was so fond. I popped them, still warm, into my mouth, and discovered that he was right on two counts–not only are they the most chicken-y bits of the chicken, they are also delightful.

Stripping chicken carcasses of their flesh is a task that reminds me, too, of Ilya. After dinner together one night in Dundee, he asked me, shyly, if he might avail himself of the carcass once I had removed the meat I planned to use. We stood in my tiny kitchen, as I put away the food and washed the dishes. Ilya hovered over the plate of carcass by the microwave, gleefully sucking every particle of flesh from the bones. As I recall, this is something his grandmother did.

Jessie, for instance, I associate with fruit. At Intel, we are allotted on free piece of fruit per day (This is what I assume is Intel’s financially-sensisble nod to Silicon Valley’s wealth of free food.) Every day, as I select a piece of fruit out of the endlessly refilling fruit baskets, I think of her (and what I anticipate would be her unmitigated glee at such a wealth of fruit to choose from). Lately, I’ve been selecting nectarines, which are inevitably drastically under-ripe. Jessie prefers her peaches a little under-ripe, delighting in their tartness, but I leave the nectarines on my desk to ripen for a few days. In the afternoons, after I’ve picked up the nectarine and breathed in the sweet perfume from the stem end too many times to count, I slice one up using the pocket knife Jessie gave me. I’m not strictly sure that I am allowed to have a knife at work, but I figure as long as I don’t stab anyone, it’s okay.

These conjured moments are why we should break bread together. Sharing the cooking and eating of meals teaches us the ingredients and gestures of an incantation, that we may use to invoke the presence of one another later, when we are apart. It is a prayer, a spell, some magic that keeps us connected across space and time.  Every chicken I roast now sings to me the song about the winter Ala and I survived together, in that cold flat in Scotland, a testament to our tenacity, to the strength of our friendship. Every onion I dice transports Zack into my kitchen, sharing stories, cracking jokes, and expanding my worldview. Every nectarine I slice on my desk at work calls Jessie to my cubicle; every bowl I try to scrape speaks to me of Malavika.

This is the magic with which  I fill my kitchen (and my belly), and it is what I hope you find in yours. Now, shall we make a meal together?

In Which Our Heroes Get on a Bus

We are taking a break from our “Long Road to Oregon” series to provide you breaking coverage of life in Portland. Which, as it turns out, is heavily weighted towards the insane.

Saturday had been one of those days when things don’t go quite like you planned them to. My plan to be at the farmer’s market at 8:30 when it opened and then Skype with Kate was supplanted by me laying around the house until 11 and then finding that there were no golden beets, nor purple cauliflower, nor elderly opera singers selling poems, at the market. (Though I did at least try a Pine State Biscuit, which the other researchers insisted I try. I had one called “The Chetfield”, with cheese, bacon, fried chicken, and apple butter. While it was tasty, next time, I’ll probably just get the apple butter.)

Zack and I spent the afternoon doing shopping for things that we realized we needed, after our second week of living in our apartment. Things like an extra recycling bin, a hamper for clothes, and an assortment of interesting beer. (We have discovered, that while the grocery stores do sell cold beer, they do not typically have a good selection, and so a reliable supplier had to be located.)

It was also one of those afternoons where, post-cup-of-tea, I couldn’t shut up and really wanted Zack to talk with me. For him, it was an afternoon where he had hit his weekly maximum word limit, and wanted to say nothing at all.

By the end of the evening we were both a little frazzled.

So I insisted that we go out. At the very least, the people watching would give us something to talk about. Instead of heading towards the cafe one block over that has live jazz, we struck out for Kelly’s Olympian, a bar that I only knew about because we drive past it when coming home from the east side of town. The first time I noticed it, they were advertising an upcoming burlesque show, which singled it out in my mind as a place worth of investigation.

This evening, they were hosting, among other bands, a group called Wizard Boots.

The bar itself was long, tall, and narrow, though I imagined the adjoining venue to be more expansive. Various vintage motorcycles hung from the high ceilings; vintage motorcycle helmets lined the wall above the bar. The bar was crawling with hipsters, including, but not exclusive to: a curly-headed boy (old enough to pass the ID check at the door) decked out in full Boy Scout regalia, a tall man in a silvery jacket and an honest-to-goodness tinfoil hat, and then the usual assortment of vests, mustaches, tweed, and ridiculousness. One man was wearing a red skirtsuit, but he did not give off the impression that he was wearing it ironically. Clumps of hipsters formed precisely in front of the bar where we were supposed to order, and I had to fight through them to get to the bartender.

I was pretty sure this was not our crowd before the music even started. As the sound crashed through the door to the venue every time a hipster came through to by a drink, I became increasingly convinced that the was not our scene. So, after a couple of Coronas, a mediocre cheeseburger (that had mayonnaise on it in spite of the bartender’s swear that condiments were served on the side), and some pretty-decent nachos, Zack and I  tucked the last Corona in the pocket of his jacket and set off for home, with our only regret being that we did not have an opportunity to buy a drink for the guy in the tinfoil hat before he disappeared into the concert.

We were about a block from home, engaged in an animated discussion about why it is that I assume all girls who look like Zooey Deschanel hate me, when a white bus pulls up at an intersection in front of us. In big black letters, the bus is labeled “Interstellar Transmissions”.

Perhaps because we were near the place where earlier in the week, I had found an index card scribbled with web addresses for cultish conspiracy theory sites, or perhaps because we were near a church and the bus reminded me of church vans, or perhaps because I recently saw Prometheus, I thought it was a bus full of people trying to contact aliens. Maybe they were going around proselytizing. This assumption was validated when a girl got out of the bus and gestured for us to join her.

I hesitated a split second, and then went over. The decision was not entirely conscious, though retroactively I would say that it was a decision out of the “Good Time or Good Story” paradigm.

When we got closer, the girl explained that they were traveling artists, and that we could get on the bus for a donation.

I fumbled for my wallet, which was fortunately flush with cash that I hadn’t spent at the farmer’s market, and we stepped onto the bus.

I don’t know what I expected. I’m not sure I even had expectations. But I know that I didn’t expect what we found. The seats had all been removed, replaced with a collection of sofas and cushions that lined the aisle for the first two thirds of the bus. The back of the bus was filled with a band, who appeared to be in the middle of a gig, complete with light psychedelic light show.

The band looked more or less exactly like the kind of band one would find in a mysterious white bus at 11 pm on a Saturday night on a deserted street in Portland. The guitarist, decked in a top hat, reflective sunglasses colored like an oil slick, and sporting a beard, was playing a bright red double guitar. The drummer’s face was painted white, with a blue hand print splayed across it, the palm resting on his chin and the fingers brushing his forehead. The keyboardist had long, raven hair, wore white-rimmed black sunglasses, and had an utterly devastating smile. A black twist of a gauged earring, like an overgrown animal claw, hooked through his left ear.

The whole thing was so surreal that it took me a moment to notice the other passenger on the bus. At first, I assumed he was a member of the band, so calm and unconcerned he appeared as he lounged across the aisle from us. Then I noticed that he was holding a skateboard. I introduced myself, and so did he, shouting his name over the music.

The band took a break after the song we entered on, and I had a chance to ask our fellow passenger a few questions. Did he travel with this bus frequently? No, John replied. He had just been on the bus home, reading a book by Deepak Chopra. He had just concluded a chapter on coincidence and gotten off at his stop when this white bus had pulled up. Serendipity, he said. He did not travel frequently on magic buses, but that was primarily for lack of magic buses on which to travel.

We rode around Portland, the captain of the bus enticing people off the street to enter. We picked up a birthday party; the birthday girl borrowed a sparkly feather boa, which had been hanging from the guitar stand, and her friends photographed her in front of the band.

People entered and exited seemingly at random. I asked John, “How do we know when to leave?”

“When it’s time to leave the magic bus, you know.” He replied knowingly.

Some of the passengers joined only briefly. A stout young queer man, dressed in tight white clothing and wearing, among other decorations, a windsock, got on while it was still just John and Zack and I. He looked delighted with his good fortune for a few minutes, and then asked if we knew if it was okay for him to smoke weed on the magic bus. We shrugged, none of us having the authority to say one way or the other. (I assumed no. Medical marijuana may be legal here, but I feel like the average police officer would not be pleased to have marijuana smoke floating out of a moving vehicle.) We deferred his question to the driver, but he was reluctant to ask, and beat a hasty retreat (presumably to find someplace he knew he could smoke out).

Apparently, however, you could smoke on the bus. Or, at least, the next group of partygoers that joined the motley crew in the back of the magic bus assumed you could and then did so. Among this group was a whip of a young man, tall and slim and full of crackling energy. His straight hair, a sandy blonde, fell to his shoulders when he wasn’t in motion, a state that he moved in an out of with no warning. He reminded me strongly of Joris. He was wearing, inexplicably, only jeans, a tan trench coat, and aviator sunglasses with one red lens and one blue lens. He was less Spider Jerusalem and more the Flash. He was so tall his head was inches away from the ceiling of the bus. He danced in the aisle, steadying himself with a hand on the ceiling as we accelerated. He was kittenish, one minute dancing and the next minute curled up on one of the cushioned benches, exclaiming wide eyed, “GUYS. THIS IS SO COMFY.” He was still fist-pumping to the music from his reclined position. He might have been 16.

John pointed out that fist bumping was incongruous with laying down. The boy, whose name was either Bobby or Robby, fist-pumped on.

At some point, John recognized Bobby, primarily by his di-colored aviators. “Hey, man, I saw you get EMTed out of a <somewhere I can’t remember>.”

“Oh yeah,” Bobby nodded. “I guess my brain just gave out. It must have been all the abstract art I was looking at.”

We bantered between songs as we drove around Portland, adopting strays.I tried to keep tabs on where we were, so that Zack and I could exit the bus somewhere near our destination. We drove by a billboard that Zack and I find kind of alarming. It’s a picture of an anthropomorphic duck mascot, with giant eyes that bore into your soul. He is staring directly at you and holding a big bouquet of red roses. The only text on the ad reads, “WE ARE OREGON.” Zack and I do not understand this ad. Are Oregonians ducks? Is the duck from Oregon introducing himself and trying to date you? WHY IS HE STARING?!?! We jumped at the chance for the natives to explain this. Their explanations were unsatisfactory, but it launched the most impressive series of duck-related puns I have ever heard. Bobby and one of his friends traded puns back and forth for ten minutes, before exhausting every facet of a duck anatomy and behavior they could think of.

The bus continued in a bumping, swaying haze of cigarette smoke, great music, and puns until finally, the captain of the bus decided it was time for this group of passengers to exit the bus. As John said, “When it’s time to leave the magic bus, you know.” we knew because she told us that we were getting off. The bus dropped us at a “lovely pork stand”  deep in a part of town I had never been to where I recognized nothing, and drove out of our lives, as mysteriously as it had arrived.

The Exodus, Part 4: Victorian Artichokes in San Francisco

Fortunately, the route we left the Sequoia National Forest by was somewhat less like being thrown in a slow-moving blender. It almost made up for the terror that was trying to change lanes on a San Francisco highway at rush hour on a Friday with a bike rack and two bikes on the trunk of my car. When we finally arrived at our destination, I gratefully accepted the offer for one of the staff to park my car in the garage across the street.

Our room was on the third floor of one of those iconic San Francisco Victorian houses–this one made the more remarkable both by its survival of the great San Francisco fire post 1890 earthquake and by how all the furnishings looked like they had been around approximately that long. It is the Victorian bed and breakfast of my 10 year old self’s dreams. The air was heavily perfumed by orchids, lilies, and roses, which were dotted about the honest-to-goodness parlor. The furniture was all mahogany and walnut, lace and brocade.The walls were decorated with old maps and photographs, and at least one portrait of George Washington. Aside from the people in jeans using smart phones, it was like stepping back in time a century and change.

Our room was on the third floor, overlooking the back garden. The bathroom held a Jacuzzi tub that was deep enough to cover me to my shoulders.

We took a rickety wrought iron staircase to the roof terrace, which afforded delightful views of the Mission district. Under different weather conditions, it would be a great place for a bottle of wine, a plate of fruit and cheese, and good company. In the current wind, it was too brisk and we quickly returned to our posh digs for a bath.

The bathtub came with a little reminder not to use it between 10 pm and 8 am, out of consideration for other guests. I thought that was a little weird.

Then we turned the jets on.

It sounded like our bathtub was trying to use mechanical means to open a portal to hell. Various canons would have you believe magic is generally involved in opening portals of that nature, but this bathtub was determined to whir and grind its way straight into the underworld. I had to admire its tenacity.

It was also really fun to sit in, as long as you were careful not to let your digits get sucked into the intake valve. I am not convinced, however, that the jets are awesome enough to be worth the extra expense and maintenance costs of a jacuzzi. I suspect that a sufficiently large soaking tub would be good enough.

For dinner, Zack and I moseyed to Luna Park, a favorite of the San Francisco locals. Ilya introduced me to it last summer, while Caoimhe, Zack, and Cora went rock climbing. They serve their bloody marys with darling colored plastic charms hanging off the rim. This time around, we ordered goat cheese fondue and a grilled artichoke as appetizers. At some point in my formative years, I was told that the appropriate way to eat an artichoke was to dip a leaf in butter and scrape any flesh off the leaf with your teeth. I had assumed that this was nonsense peddled by the kind of people who only eat apples if they are peeled. In my long determination not to waste valuable phytochemicals and other nutrients, I have often taken to eating things that other people do not perceive to be edible. This list includes, but is probably not exclusive to, peanut shells, sunflower seed hulls, and shrimp tales. (We will pretend that we believe it is a sincere desire for the fullest extent of nutrition that leads me to such bizarre behaviors, as opposed to a laziness or a desire for the saltiest part of the peanut.)

Much to my dismay, however, artichoke leaves do, in fact, seem to be inedible. And not inedible the way a roasted salted peanut shell is inedible, or in the way a fried shrimp tail is inedible. An artichoke leaf is inedible in the way a boiled pine cone is inedible. Sure, it’s soft enough to chew, but it sure isn’t going to break up at all. It’s like fibrous, kind of pointy shoe leather.

Delicious, kind of pointy shoe leather, that you desperately wish you could eat all of but can’t, reducing you to endlessly chewing to squeeze out all of the deliciousness before wondering how impolite it would be to spit a hunk of chewed artichoke leaf into your napkin.

Before long, my hands were covered in artichoke juices (because no one ever explained if I was supposed to eat it with a knife and fork or not) and my jaw ached from effort. At that point, even the transcendent, entirely edible heart of the artichoke couldn’t convince me that the vegetable (which is a relative of the sunflower, incidentally) was worth the effort.

Breakfast at the San Francisco Inn was served in the parlor, with (as I have come to expect of California) fruit that would make angels cry with happiness. Particularly if those angels were monkeys, or fruit bats. We sat at the heavy mahogany table in a room awash with the smell of lilies. I read the paper–an actual, physical paper, made out of tree pulp and printed with ink, not just made of electrons on my screen–and drank tea. Zack read the internet on his phone and drank coffee. It was all very civilized.

After breakfast, Zack and I took a stroll towards the Castro district. I ogled the stands of flowers that I didn’t have space to take with me; we both noted the number of fathers out with their children. On the way back to the Inn, I stopped at Tartine Bakery, where I cared about nothing so much as the amazing marinated carrots.

These carrots are legendary, let me assure you. Yeah, yeah, I know Tartine’s a bakery and I should be raving about their bread or cake or whatever, and don’t get me wrong–their lemon tartlet is worth going quite a bit out of your way for–but it’s the carrots that are truly something to write home about. They use tiny fingerling carrots, brand new, fresh out of the ground. They are shaped like a carrot is supposed to be shaped, as opposed to weirdly cylindrical like the “baby carrots” one gets in bags at the supermarket, which have been polished clean of all their carrot-y character. The carrots are a little soft, like they have been very gently cooked, and they are spicy and salty and crunchy and snappy and a just a little bit bright, like they have been just barely kissed with citrus or vinegar or something.

They are transcendent. What was the largest quantity they would sell the carrots to me in? I asked the man serving me. He gave me a small carry-out box of them. I am not even sure if he charged me for them. I tipped him $10, just for the carrots.

Soon, with my precious cargo of carrots (and some sandwiches and a lemon tartlet) in tow, we were back on the road, this time headed for Oregon.

We were getting close to our new home.

The Exodus, Part 3: Giant trees, beer, and bears, oh my!

We were late, again, as though our eight ours of lateness has spilled over from day to day, making it impossible for us to get away from our overnighting locations in a timely manner. Fortunately, the drive from Vegas to Grant’s Village in the Sequoia National Forest is only seven or so hours, instead of nine or ten, making it theoretically possible that I wouldn’t be driving after midnight.

There were a few more hours of driving through the desert, but after we crossed a mountain range and the sun sank towards the horizon the landscape changed to flat fields of agriculture. Low trees in neat rows lined the highways, and the air smelled of chemicals. We stopped for gas in some tiny California town, and decided that even if this land didn’t appear to be the paradise some people consider it, the presence of cold six-point beer in the gas stations made it a step up for sure. There was a restaurant, Planet Burger (or was it Planet Pizza?) across from the gas station, but we allowed as how an open restaurant with nary a car in the lot was probably not a good choice for dinner. We would pick something up before we hit the National Forest.

The roads we were driving on got progressively smaller, less well-traveled, and closer to the fields, until at one point we’re driving on a dinky two-lane track through an orchard that is so close you can practically reach out and touch the trees. It was at this point, as my headlights are the only light for miles, that I begin to reconsider the likelihood that we would find food before reaching our destination. I also began to suspect that our GPS was planning to lead us out into the wilderness, where no one could hear us scream, so that she could murder us and sell our belongings on eBay.

The orchard roads were soon replaced by the tight curves of a narrow mountain road, winding up and up and up. We were forty some odd miles from our destination, and the GPS insisted that it was going to take us almost two hours to cover that distance. Soon, as the curves grew ever tighter and our progress slowed to a 30 mph crawl through the twisting blackness, I began to understand that time estimate.

I am not prone to motion sickness. However, after an hour of the road up into the forest,  I was so dizzy that I had to pull over. Zack, who is prone to motion sickness, had squeezed his eyes closed and was focusing as hard as possible on the audio book and breathing. I got out of the car for a moment, until the rustling in the underbrush reminded me of all the bears and rabid racoons and very lost serial killers that could be hiding in the mountains a million miles from anywhere.

Near the end of the drive we did see a bar and grill at which we might have obtained sustenance, had it not been shuttered for the night. It’s just as well–I doubt that we have comfortably filled our churning stomachs at that point anyway.

We finally arrived in Grant’s Village, which as far as we can tell is at the top of a mountain covered in trees for which I do not have an accurate sense of scale. I tended to look at the trees and think, “Oh, they aren’t so big.” But, as previous experiences with the making of food and preserves have established, I am a terrible judge of volume, which is one of the metrics by which these trees are determined to be giant. I tended to judge them based on circumference, and by circumference a lot of the trees weren’t that huge.

We checked in, where we were given a map to our cabin and a flyer warning us not to leave food in the car, lest the bears rip off our car doors and gorge themselves on our groceries. “So this is the part in the trip,” I asked Zack, “where bears destroy everything we own, isn’t it?” Fortunately for my car, but unfortunately for both us and the bears, we had only sour gummy treats, a snack bag of jalapeno chips, and a six pack of Modelo Especial. We took our meager stores up the path to our cabin. Staggeringly huge pine cones decorated the ground next to the path.

Our cabin was clean and spare. It felt a little like stepping into the 1930s. Two double beds, covered in scratchy quilts, were tucked into the corners on the left side of the room, each under two windows. A clean white  bathroom with a pedestal sink adjoined the room. We opened the windows and Zack opened a couple of beers, the scent of pine, dew, and old house mingling with each sip. We laughed at ourselves and our beer dinner until we fell asleep, beers left unfinished on the nightstand.

Zack woke in the middle of the night to a rustling sound outside that he felt confident was a bear. He closed the windows. I am not sure if that was to keep the bear out, or to convince himself that if he couldn’t hear it, the bear didn’t exist. I am not sure that a closed window would keep out a sufficiently hungry bear, being that they are known to rip apart dumpsters. Whatever the case, I slept right through it.

The first thing we did that morning was seek out the restaurant for breakfast. It was mediocre food made palatable by our beer-dinner induced hunger. They had no jam I was interested in eating on my biscuit–in the little stack of shelf-stable single-serving Smucker’s, there was only grape and things mixed with grape. This lack of strawberry jam is something I have experienced repeatedly, which leads me to believe that strawberry jam is by far the favorite, and that few people like grape or things mixed with grape. When I was in Vegas over spring break, I witnessed several people elbow-deep in a shipping box full of single-serving jam, desperately seeking the strawberry jam hidden among the apple jellies. In ten minutes of searching, I found only one.

After breakfast, we checked out and booked a room in San Francisco–at a Victorian-styled bed and breakfast called the San Francisco Inn. Then We headed off down the mountain to investigate the General Grant tree, which is a national shrine and the second largest tree in the world by mass and volume. (How they estimate the mass of a tree, I don’t know. I hope it involves lasers.) The first largest tree, by the way, is the General Sherman tree.

It was already heating up by that point in the day, and I was wearing a skirt and not interested in hiking, so we elected to leave the hike up to the General Grant tree for another visit, another time, and exited the park, bound for San Francisco.

The Exodus Part 2: To Vegas and Beyond

We were late, again. We got out of Santa Fe around 3 pm, just in time to drive through the desert during the heat of the day. Incidentally, there are large swaths of desert that are as uninteresting as large swaths of the plains. I drove, guzzling overly sweet canned iced tea, for a million hours, until my eyes were too tired to focus on the endless miles of highway and we stopped for dinner.

We stopped in a little strip town in New Mexico, the name of which I cannot recall, though I can recall the dozens of shops claiming to sell “Indian Fetishes”, which I found to be a weird and possibly offensive phrase. Even if they were selling sex fantasies, I am pretty sure the more appropriate way to reference them is Native Americans, or perhaps First Peoples. Wouldn’t you get annoyed if your local sex shop was called “Cracker’s Wet Dreams”? (Actually, I would totally shop there. Also, this is a joke. Fetishes are like ethnic knickknacks, I think.)

Zack found us a restaurant, the Badlands Grill, which had some of the highest ratings of restaurants in whatever town we were in. Turns out, it was a semi-fancy steak house, the kind of confusing place where everything is lit by candlelight but the tables are covered with white paper instead of linen. They were piping in 90s pop country music. Various dead animals featured prominently in the decor, while green chiles featured prominently in the menu. We ordered green chile wontons, served with green chile marmalade, and split a plate of “sliders”, monstrous burgers with 1/2 pound of beef, green chile, and cheese. I am not sure if this restaurant really didn’t understand the concept of a slider, or if they were just trying to out do Texas. I guzzled coffee and went to the bathroom while we waited for our food. On the way there, in addition to the heads of half a dozen ungulates, I discovered a fish tank. Filled with glass fish, hanging from the aquarium lid on strings. The bathroom was equally funny; a sign over the potpourri admonished the reader “Do NOT eat!!”. In the defense of whoever first ate the potpourri, it did look a lot like rock candy.

The food was pretty good, if the coffee was somewhat watery. The best part of the whole experience, I decided, was the taxidermied squirrel hanging above the bar, holding a bottle of what was either Windex or a wine cooler. This being a classy joint, Either way, someone probably needed to speak with the squirrel about his drinking habits. Maybe he wasn’t taxidermied–maybe he was in fact pickled from drinking Windex. On our way out, while I peered more closely at the squirrel–the bar tender informed me that the squirrel was holding a bottle of Hypnotique. I suppose that’s not far off from Windex, is it?

After dinner, Arizona happened, which was not all the interesting, save for the discovery that McDonald’s now serves espresso and their chicken McNuggets taste just like they did when I was a kid.The shape of the chicken McNuggets, which is vaguely boot-like in many specimens, remains as perplexing as ever. I wonder how they did the market-testing on nugget shape. I perused an article on USA today on the ways we are incorporating mourning and death into our digital lives. Did you know that you can get a QR code on your tombstone? Now you know. The espresso I ordered was better than I expected, and got the job done, in that I was subsequently able to avoid running off the road on the rest of our way to Vegas.

We drove in to Vegas so late I could barely focus my eyes any more. The heat, even in the middle of the night, was impressive. (Perhaps more so because I thought the desert got cool at night?). We were staying in the Mirage hotel, which purportedly had dolphins. However, we were so exhausted that after waiting a ridiculously long time for the frat boy in front of us to check in, we headed straight for our room. Well, as straight as you can ever go, in a casino. We wound our way through the maze of slot machines and restaurants before finally locating the elevators, which took us up 18 floors to a room with the most virus inspired hotel art I have ever seen. If you so much as brushed the weight-sensitive mini-bar, they’d charge you $10 for a bag of sour gummy treats. Our room looked out on to the Strip, which under normal circumstances might have been pleasant. As it was, I closed the curtains as quickly as possible, using all of the fabric available to block out the neon until only a dull green glow remained, leaking out from the top and bottom of the curtains.

I was not feeling Vegas, this time around. I didn’t have the energy for the lights and the people and the disorientation. So, on waking, Zack and I left the strip in a hurry, passing a Zombie Apocalypse Supply Warehouse on our way to an Indiana-themed hash house, where the portions were giant but the food otherwise mediocre, as though they took the total flavor of a normal meal and spread it out over more mass.

We couldn’t get out of town, and out of the desert, fast enough for me. Even still we didn’t get off until around 2 pm, heading off through the desert towards California, aiming for the Sequoia National Park.