Dough-Nuts Don't Help

Right now cloud shadows are scuttling across the hills, and the treetops are shaking their heads in bemusement, wondering where everyone is going in such a hurry.

Damn. It’s a hard time in the world. Even for the lucky ones, like me (so far), it’s getting to be a bit much. We wake up to a dystopian nightmare daily. Escalating cases of Covid-19, accompanied by denial, resistance, even death threats to the experts who speak truth. Explosion in Beirut. New climate disasters. A president who is increasingly dangerous and deranged. Good morning.

So yesterday, desperado that I am, I decided to venture into town. While Monte took care of weekly grocery shopping, I actually got out of the car and walked along the surprisingly deserted streets of Solvang, in my mask, of course. I stopped at a favorite coffee place, somehow in need of a five-dollar coffee fix, and ordered a flat-white to go. It was dark in there, and my glasses were fogged, and I felt like a feral animal who had wandered from the forest.

“How do we pay?” I asked through my mask. A card was deemed fine, and then I fumbled with the chip and the keypad and accidentally touched the screen with a sense of alarm and finally emerged again into the sunlight, pricey coffee drink in hand.

And a man walked by, smiled, and said good morning to me. My first thought was a hope that we hadn’t passed each other too closely, and then I wondered what is becoming of me, and who we will be when this is over. If , that is, it ever ends.

But I walked on and soon got my rhythm. I love where I live, and I’m so grateful to have wild backcountry places to hike, but I’d forgotten how much I also enjoy the sights and smells and sounds of towns and cities. It was still early, and there were morning aromas of bacon and fresh bakery goods, plates clattering at restaurants with outdoor curbside tables, doorways painted bright colors, an occasional whiff of jasmine and newly watered grass, and the shine of shop windows with beseeching signs, everyone pining for days so recently left behind.

I met my friend Kelley, as planned, near the post office. We decided to walk along the trails behind the Mission. We were both in the same state of mind, and it was good to talk about it. The blank gray sky calmed us, and the cool air, and the quiet beauty at the edges of the Valley. We acknowledged some of our favorite oak trees, paused to look at a tiny herb garden, and detoured to the ruins of an 1820 grist mill, whose weathered stones and adobe have transformed themselves into art over the years. There’s something steadying about seeing what quietly remains, things grown or built, testament to lives lived.

But I was still out of sorts.

I decided I needed a dough-nut. I know–– that sounds anticlimactic, but I hadn’t been out and about since March, and I didn’t know when I’d head this way again, and I wanted (also needed and deserved) some little treat that I couldn’t get at home. Typically, I don’t even like dough-nuts, but there is a place in Buellton that makes a lemon-blueberry one that had dramatically boosted my opinion of dough-nuts the one time I had tried it, and here I was, right in the vicinity. Some might even call this an opportunity, and I wasn’t about to miss an opportunity.

Now I saw that others had discovered the place. There was a line of five people, and x’s on the sidewalk and the floor, spacing customers six feet apart, and I almost turned away, but having come so far, I decided to go for it. I finally made my way to the counter and discovered that there were no lemon blueberry dough-nuts to be had. In a fit of defiance and daredevilry, I ordered maple-bacon, and chocolate-iced custard, and some kind of glazed orange thing, two of each. I carried them away in a waxed white bag, and within moments they were squashed, and bumping into one another, coalescing into mushy lumps, each a part of the others, and, as Monte said, these were not even dough-nuts anymore, if indeed they ever were, but soft amorphous cake-y things, so sticky sweet they made my teeth ring, and I hated myself.

Nevertheless, I ate bits, because I had, after all, invested in them, and I told myself that the custard and bacon parts were simply a form of lunch. When I got home, I cut the rest in pieces and put them in the freezer, where they haunt me still.

I guess it was a form of greed. And as always, there’s a lesson there. Quit while you’re ahead, or something like that.

Dough-nuts don’t help.