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Exfoliation
It rained in the Mojave this week. Driving up onto Cima Dome on Friday was driving into a wall of electified sleet. Immense bolts of blue lightning snaked horizontally for miles just above the surface of the Dome. I fretted about fire until I got under the storm. The windshield filled up with melting hail. The Dome was sodden.
Home.
Home.
I filled the pickup with four-fifths of my books, at least those I hadn’t given away in the previous month, and coaxed that overloaded truck over the mountains and into the desert. 420 miles of heavy wind and awkward center of gravity, an ungainly migration, and it had daunted me Thursday morning as I carried the boxes. Flinging yourself into the abyss is a scary thing to anticipate. I needn’t have fretted. Rolling down the east slope of the Tehachapi Mountains I felt it leave, this stale and cloying sadness I have carried in me the last months. It evanesced, blew off toward Harper Lake in shattered wisps under Mojave’s constant wind, and I was free.
Home.
A notable change, this change. The human lifespan being what it is, the number of times you can leave a place you’ve lived for a generation is somewhat limited. This will be my second time. I suspect that if I live in any other place for a generation, I’ll leave it with my bootsoles pointed at the horizon.
Right now I’ve got my gaze pointed that way.
I’ve got a place to stay starting in July, in Nipton, in a small house 400 feet from a mainline train track, and only 16 miles from Joshua trees. I’ve got a post office box in Cima, CA, 92323 — something I’ve long desired — and you can send me a letter there at PO Box 43. I’ve got a storage locker in Barstow with four-fifths of my books in it. I’ve got a 14-foot truck reserved to haul the rest of my belongings down there on June 1.
Which means my last full day in Pinole, and quite possibly my last day living in the Bay Area, will be May 31, 2008.
This will be five years, almost to the day, since I started Creek Running North. I find the logic irrefutable.
Creek Running North is shutting down.
I’m a firm believer in the merit of a finite lifespan for projects artistic and otherwise, and my intent in starting Creek Running North was to describe the world around this creek down the hill from where I sit typing this, and I may never see it again after this week. I ranged crazily afield, but the creek was my pole star: For five years I always found my way back to it.
Obviously, I can’t do that anymore.
I’ll still maintain a website here, and it will still have some of my writing on it, and after July some of that writing, from time to time, will be quite new. I expect to spend almost all my writing hours working on potential print, but there will likely be observations and passing thoughts and photos and such that fit nowhere but on a site like this. Many of you have invested in the work I’m doing this summer, and in any event the site represents a little income I can’t walk away from too blithely. It won’t be a blog in the sense of having a blogroll and linking to slagfests and playing the circular-argument status game. It will be a place for the writing, for occasional photos, for environmental politics in appropriate measure, maybe a podcast or two. Lots of ambient sound out there in the desert, you know?
But not until July at the earliest. And it won’t be called Creek Running North.* Because Creek Running North is shutting down.
This isn’t, however, the last CRN post. I have one more left, a good closer, on a topic that’s long been an undercurrent here and whose subject really deserves a bit of notice.
That final CRN post will be up before the end of May.
This morning I woke up in the Central Valley, got in the truck and intended to head for home. Pulling to the mouth of the motel parking lot, though, about to turn onto Route 46, I realized I didn’t know where home was. I sat there, turn signal indicating a left, waiting for the traffic to clear, and I looked rightward. Down that way lay the Carrizo Plain, the Coast Ranges, the Salinas River and the coast. I had a talk with myself sitting there.
It’s longer, I said.
I sneered at me in response. So? It’s not like anyone’s waiting for you up North.
But I have work to do. Packing and such.
And you’ll get that done today?
No. But still,
Still nothing. When’s the last time you were in Paso Robles? Was Reagan still president? When are you gonna be this way again?
But the gasoline. 4.10 a gallon here, and this was cheap for the neighborhood.
So do the math. It’s what, an extra ten bucks to go this way?
I’m already in the left turn lane.
You’re such an idiot. No one’s behind you.
I waved the sirenian me away impatiently. Places to go. Things to do. The traffic cleared, and I pulled out into the road, and I turned right anyway, went toward the coast. I just figured it was time to start setting an example.
* And I have no ideas for names whatsoever.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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