This post is three weeks late. It has been written a while now but some paralysis prevented the publishing. In the nineties Darling E, friend, Eldorado-sitter and fine art and soul doctor, explained to me how critical changes follow the Rule of Three. Three minutes, three hours, three days, three weeks....and so on. This week I reached the three week mark. It seems I am able, at last, to go to the notes scribbled in the black notebook during the journey.
Three weeks, a critical milepost. Darling E was right.
Finally it came: the day I had to leave. March 10. The baggage had all gone on the big Allied removals truck the previous day. So expert were the relocation specialists at their job that what seemed so much to me, only filled a quarter of the space in that big orange van.
After the moving men left, I cleaned from top to bottom. More or less. Energy was flagging. I packed everything remaining, give or take a few random last things into the amber liquid sunshine Ford Ranger.
This is it. Me and my truck are on the road with serious snow predicted for the passes.
I did not sleep well that last night and was wide awake at 2:00 am. I wandered the empty echoing chamber of a home-no-more grieving and cutting myself loose until 4:30 came. I had to leave..
Closing that door for the last time was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life.
I take the first ferry of the day out of Kingston at 5:05 am. For the last time. On a one way ticket.As the MV Puyallup pulls away from the dock, something inside me tears physically, ripping, breaking.
I do the only thing I know to do with pain this intense: I walk and walk in the icy wind, around and around the upper deck, breathing the diesel fumes. The lights of little Kingston town break up and fragment in the wake, recede in a salty blur of drizzle and tears until it is just too cold and exposed out there.
I am an old hand by now at finding my way through the 524 to the 522 to Hwy 2 at Monroe. Coffee and a toilet break at Monroe Starbucks and I settle in.After Monroe there is rain with a few flakes of snow in the mix. Startup. Sultan. Goldbar. It is now snow with a little rain.
Driving in snow is like driving in a swarm of white insects who splat softly, silently on the windscreen. The scene is like something out of an intergalactic journey in a movie. This seems so appropriate for this part of the journey. I am travelling to another universe, another galaxy.
Steven's Pass is still fair in spite of the falling snow and traction tyres warnings. This is lucky because I am blurry and a bit uncoordinated with crying all the way up the Cascades.
I stop half way up to walk a little way into the last of the rainforests on the journey, on an arbitary forest service road. I need to hug some trees.
Vir oulaas and in lightly drifting sparse snowflakes. Moss, lichen, trees, me and that beautiful clean rainforest smell.
The Renaissance Cafe in Leavenworth welcomes me as usual for a breakfast of the starving artist mound of salsa and potato. I buy a triple strand of white beads to garland my own renaissance. The beads remind me of the white strands an
amaquira or
sangoma (traditional Xhosa or Zulu healer) often wears.
I move through the familiar landmarks, stopping to photograph where I have made mental notes before. I am not sure when I will drive this way again. I am in no rush as the Allied van baggage will only arrive the day after. I just need to get to Chewelah in time to collect the keys.
With one hand on the steering wheel, one hand operating the camera I photograph the Easy Street signpost as one goes under the bridge in Wenatchee. Talk about driver distraction.
After Wenatchee there is an interesting cone of exfoliating rock which has caught my eye every time I have driven this route recently. It is about midway up a long incline. I pull over this time. Get out and photograph the landscape both sides of the road.
A beat up old pickup truck comes down the hill does a u-turn just after me, comes back to ask me if I am okay. A friendly older woman, comfortably lived in and somewhat weatherbeaten like her vehicle. I say, yes fine, thankyou, just photographing. She continues with a smile and wave. Easy.
I feel cared for. The kindness of strangers in this safe country. I stretch and breathe the fresh air.
Another vehicle comes up the hill. A shiny new, over muscled, metallic champaign coloured 4x4, big wheeled high horsepowered truck. Highly maintained woman rolls down her window as she passes and calls out: "You can't park there. People drive there. You could get in trouble."
She is gone then, with just her words drifting back at me and her high octane exhaust stinking up the fresh morning.
I am left wondering. Two vehicles in ten minutes, I have not exactly stopped at a high traffic volume time of day on this road. Nor is visibility compromised. Two people in the space of ten minutes: one kind caring individual who would u-turn to check up on a stranger and another: huuumpfh.....
With puerile satisfaction I flip her receding broad shiny tailgate the bird as part of my stretch and breathe side-of-the-road routine.
High horsepower lady, do you know who you just addressed? I mean, the very reason that I am driving this road with all my worldly goods in this little orange Ford Ranger and a big orange removals van is because I AM Trouble with intentional caps. I mean, don't mess with me. I have been to hell and back. Before breakfast already today.
She presumes that the possibility that I could get "in trouble" is significant chastisement to me. Oh ha ha.What gives this vigilante with a salon bill bigger than the gross national product of a small African country, the idea that it is acceptable to police me in passing. What elementary school ground is she still living on?
For the next twenty miles, I wind myself down writing mental scripts wherein I regale my friends and family with this lipstick vigilante encounter.
It is about noon when I enter the Scablands stretch of the journey. There is nothing in the miday Moses Coulee landscape except sagebrush and the sun glinting off discarded drink cans. The creaky call of crows echoes, bouncing off the mesa and cliffs. Standing in this strange landscape, I imagine the area under water as it once was: scene of the great post-ice age flood
I am in a Bagdad Cafe movie state of mind by now. Ears ringing, tyres singing, I enter the zen peace of the prairies.
Clouds accompany this journey. I am reeled in by upper air movements, driving ahead of a snow front, a tail wind pushing me, clouds building, beckoning, building. Calling me. The greening of the landscape is noted too. My first engagement with this road was the minimalism of snow in the late winter landscape The wind hums a mantra in the pipes of my new roof racks. The all weather tyres sing on the tarmac.
In Wilbur I photograph the wooden man with the broken hands. Forever parted from his guns, this blue eyed cowboy towers over the road. This little town also features wild geese pulling a life sized wagon in what passes for the town square. I photograph that too.
Once more I stop at the sorry, bleak reststop outside Reardon and photograph the strange automobile only litter cans. Clouds. Always clouds.
In Reardon I put in petrol, spill the same all over my hands and make a poor attempt to clean the eagle poop from the truck with a very tattered squeegee trailing fragmented sponge.
I arrive in Chewelah mid afternoon. Pick up the keys. Open the door on Skunk House and breathe in the skunky funky smell. The strange new smell of home.
The first thing I do is photograph Quartzite mountain from the kitchen window.
Then the unpacking. And the wrestling with the cold. The weather catches up with me late in the day. Wet snow and rain falls sporadically. I make some tea. Vacuum. Set up a nest of blankets. . Start the rest of my life.
