We were ambling down some country road in and around Elverson in Joey’s RAV4. The conversation burbled and bumbled in directions only two Geminis in their 40’s could do. The bucolic stillness of Chester County, Pennsylvania distracting me as we whizzed by. While my mind drifted into the landscape as we drove to go get breakfast, somehow I was steadily able to stay in the flow of the conversation.
“….wait until winter, all that’s hidden now comes into view” Joey bemused.
I heard a mourn in his voice, thinking of the boxes in the house as he and Dan prepare to move back to Philadelphia proper. Their planned re-entry point not long before I plan to move there myself. There’s a special rhythm to this land, even if they’re throwing in the towel on trying their damndest to commit to this land. They set out to do that oft ballyhooed retreat of queers to the land, to farm, frolic and fuck. It came crashing down around the middle aged concerns of health and healthcare access. We’re not young, we probably no longer have the energy to keep 10 acres up by ourselves. We aren’t finding community we hoped for in the sticks. The world out there is actively more hostile. It’s hard to let go of dreams, its also wisdom to know when to hang it up.
Last time I was in the Mid-Atlantic, it was mid to late December. I understood what he was saying in the way the branches stayed strong in the brisk winter sun at Bartram’s Garden on a Saturday morning 9 months before. We piled into the Outback, Ted driving, Theo in deference in the back seat to keep Canela and Wiz company, oddly me finding myself in the shotgun seat. Those magnificent trees reaching towards the winter sun, into the bluest of skies, grounding themselves in the gold of their shed leaves. I honestly can’t wait to see that again.
At this point, after going back and forth and time again for 13 years, I’ve seen the what’s between The Potomac and The Hudson in all 4 seasons. Actual seasons. I’ve seen the rolling carpet of trees blossom in late spring to become green velvet, shedding gold, orange and red threads leaving them to become recycled life to stand strong in Spring. Sure, this process has been manicured and maintained for senses of purpose and rhythm not natural to the land I grew up on as well.
Granted this has happened in the more affluent parts of it geared to white people, manifest destiny and the delusions of such. There’s so many sacrificed Oaks and Redwoods, probably smatterings of Manzanitas too that fell victim for those to preserve what is natural to one region to be coddled in the narcolepsy of lack of seasons on the West Coast.
Sure, the Weeping Willow in front of my childhood home, as the tree itself dies from neglect, still marches towards its crypt growing green banana shaped leaves that yellow, mature and fall in bulk after the first significant rain in mid-October. But in late Mr. Phelps yard still stands a Palm tree towering behind it 3 suburban tracts away. Pine Shrubbery 25 feet tall? Why not?
I’ve had to come to peace that so much of California is a ridiculous mirage of Manifest Destiny not in sync with the realities and limits of life. I’ve found that to the detriment of the land. The Mountain spring quality of the tap water I got used to coming out of the tap comes from 200 or more miles East, behind a dam that flooded a valley apparently just as beautiful as the tourist trap that Yosemite is.
Yosemite is one of the few places you can experience seasons in California. I’ve only been to Yosemite twice, when I was 14, when I was 35. First during the icy beauty that is early March, before Lent was over for a week in Outdoor Ed. The later trip just a few hours by rental car coming up the treacherous pass out of Lee Vining, never dipping but observing the valley floor before descending into the arid desolation and newly built suburban sprawl of the sweltering Central Valley.
I haven’t seen all of California. I’ve seen my fair share. It’s vast, expansive, and the fewer I find friends to go places with, that vastness and extremeness of having the highest mountain in the lower 48 with one of the deepest valleys in the world less than 2 hours apart from each other actually becomes boring, tired, uneventful. I ended up passing through them without grounding myself in them. I don’t bring people along with me, nor do people want to show me the world through their eyes here. People seem to prefer the same old sights here because at the end of the day, California is what Hal David asked Dionne Warwick to sing for her first grammy, Los Angeles and far beyond:
L.A. is a great big freeway, put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star
Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas…
It’s telling to me that in my lifespan San Jose went from bucolic citrus and stone fruit groves on its edge, to the version of technofascist paradise laid out as basically as a San Fernando Valley lite. My early life was filled with a quarterly ritual of my family to spend a whole day of living life at the Flea Market. From there we’d always end up getting Tres Leches Cake at The Pink Elephant before perhaps treating a Sunday evening relief of not cooking with hot lamp Fried Chicken and the sorts at Kings Table Buffet.
The mirage faded, I got older, I haven’t put my feet in San Jose since DJing at at Drink & Draw last August. Much as I love an all ages gig, the only way you can get me to San Jose at this point is to pay me. It’s starting to get that way about all of the Bay Area for me at this point. The thrill of living on my own in my first solo apartment has devolved into me wondering how a 100 year old apartment with noise pollution and no central heat can be ‘it.’ There’s going to be interesting imagery if it comes out next week about me encountering more of my roots before I go build a new nest.
“First time I came down here in 5 years was two weeks for a work retreat” Ty said about Menlo Park.
Menlo Park is the suburb where both our mothers grew up. Where both of our mothers 15 years apart went to high school. The Suburb modeled after, yet failing to capture the ethos of its namesake in New Jersey. Desperately clinging to Stanford a similar 30 or so miles from San Francisco as its namesake 30 miles outside of Lower Manhattan. There’s a history and there-there to the one in New Jersey. All we’ve got of history surviving into the current millieu is the Stepford Wives characteristics of our bottle blonde and crows feet carrying classmates. They thought they could feed a crowd of 35 on two bags of chips for chrissakes. Who are these zombies?
Perhaps I’m fleeing before the zombies on this land consume my flesh.
Full of dripping irony, we both recognized why we left even if he mourns me about to go a great deal further from what gave us our foundations. I’m recognizing I had to get a full year of disillusionment in before I make this drastic change in my life, in a part of the world conspicuously full of a natural rhythm of change that is starting to falter on the principles of not working symbiotically with this bitter earth we call home. More southern flowers and trees are finding root in the Delaware and Hudson Valley. It’s really not that much of a concern to bring a Corvair back east, for the winters are sunnier, warmer, if more extreme than the road saltier ones of the past. I’ll try to not drive anyways on those days and enjoy the winter splendor. I giggle at Bryan and Ted’s quest to squish every goddamn spotted lantern fly they come across.
It’s approaching 9 months. Perhaps gestation has been embracing the disillusionment about where I’m from. Perhaps this process gives birth to a life I really want.
