I Remember

I woke up in a motel room in Lone Pine, in the Eastern High Sierra, with a song by John Prine in my head: “I remember everything.”

The sunlight slanted through the windows, and Monte did his best to make me coffee. Outside, on the other side of Highway 395, a wall of white granite mountains rose, and the air had the startling clarity of altitude, and the faded vintage signs of the sporting goods store and sundry shops broadcast whatever commerce was available in town. We remembered coming here when we were young, pedaling our bicycles 6,000 feet up winding Horseshoe Meadow Road, and a decade later hiking amidst boulders and fir trees with the little girl who has long since grown up and moved away. I don’t remember everything, but I do recall a lot, and the memories in such places flutter like autumn leaves, bright and lovely.

It was that kind of a trip. Immediate infusions of wonder highlighted with nostalgia. No longer a fit young couple in a VW bus with our mountain bikes in back, we were two old boomers in a rental car. We joked about our nonexistent social media platform, #rentalcarlife, and how we would document our adventures, including the hardships: convenience markets that sold Lotto tickets but no lattes or single beers; forgetting to bring the Dijon mustard; navigating the peculiar channel menus of satellite radio and motel room televisions.

But seriously. In Shoshone, a wind gust blew the heavy SUV door against my forehead––and I still have the lump to prove it. I tripped and fell hard while descending a mountain trail, boldly met the challenge of crossing a creek on a single log bridge, and walked on the soft sand and slick sandstone of Utah’s Yant Flat, remaining upright, my personal form of vestibular therapy. These expeditions are not for wimps. Reminders accrue with every mile that we are no longer young.

And yet. There is a pause at a picnic table along the road from Wild Rose Campground to the Panamint Valley, and from our trusty cooler emerging like miracles comes a repast of bread and salami, a chocolate bar, and a bottle of Italian blood orange soda. We observe the tenacity of life, luminous green shrubbery pushing through rock and sand, each living thing finding its home place and growing. And isn’t being here one of the perks of old age? Just being here, no longer compelled to conquer or climb. It’s so nice to simply sit in the sun together. And I do forget a lot, but I’ll remember the holiday scent of mountains and sky, the swig of cold water from a silver thermos, and nothing on me hurting for the moment.

I love the motley roadside signs: Blowing Dust. (Is it fun? Like blowing bubbles?) Lots for Sale. (Lots of what? Lots of everything, I guess. If you have the money, it’s all for sale.) Unsettled? Jesus offers stability. (But not so fast: some very malignant folks have lately co-opted Christianity…it will take unsettling courage, persistence, and the right kind of heart to find that promised stability these days.)

Funny little ramshackle dwellings, leaning into themselves. Sculptured desert in a thousand muted colors. A procession of valleys, from Death to Panamint to Owens. Earth’s story revealed in the dramatic geology and alien landscape, strangely beautiful, but poignant in its vulnerability.

Meanwhile, a witty hail of snippets from an audiobook we’ve been listening to, No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood:

“But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say ‘the massacre’ and you don’t have to ask which one.”
“The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.”
“Worth remembering: the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play.”

And this quote attributed to John Wayne, of all people: “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.”

I’m not a John Wayne fan, but I liked the sound of that, and even knowing that the source is a Hollywood cowboy and romanticized symbol of some fake Americana, it seems fitting in this Western setting, where midnight comes in very clean indeed.

We spent a few days with our dear friend Steve, a gem carver of some renown. “I don’t do facets,” he says. “I carve.” His carvings are small abstract sculptures in gemstone to be set by jewelers into pendants or other adornments. He has made a living out of this for his entire career, and he lives in a humble yellow house in Utah within sight of the Kolobs of Zion. We walked with him at the Candy Cliffs of the aforementioned Yant Flat, swirls of reddish-orange stone that are the remnants of ancient, petrified dunes. At one point, I lay down against the rock, stretched out on the ground with my face to the sky, and I felt the warmth and solidity of our beautiful planet. I was a part of it, connected, fully present, and I knew that I belonged.

The next day, we drove to an area called the Mineral Mountains, where we saw the glorious fall color for which I yearned, and were surprised by a wintry storm of fierce, chilly wind. We awoke at Steve’s house the next morning to the sight of snowy mountains beneath the pink clouds of dawn. The windshield of the rental car was frosted with icy swirls and crystal patterns, and we borrowed Steve’s scraper to bust through it, like destroying an ephemeral work of art.

Among the wonders I have contemplated on this trip is the simple fact of our enduring friendship with Steve. We were young with him once, and forty years later, there is the easy togetherness of friends with a long history, who effortlessly understand each other. He is the brother I would have if I could have a brother without the painful emotional baggage that comes with family. We talk about the changes, the accommodation and relinquishing that aging demands, the subtle slowing and adapting, and the intensifying gratitude. Because we’re still here, after all. And isn’t it amazing?

Long ago, on the way to Cedar City, I was so enthralled by the forest of aspen trees that lined the road on both sides that I asked Monte to pull over so I could go outside and be among them. They were adorned with bright yellow leaves that day, dropping all around me, like glinting sunlit sequins. I ran a little and jumped for joy. Monte took a picture of me in mid-jump, a slender young woman with dark hair, very high on life. And there it is.

Now, driving along that very same road, we couldn’t resist pulling over again near those stalwart stands of aspens, and of course I couldn’t resist getting out. The trees were bare this time, their white bark gleaming against the blue sky, and we heard the cry of an elk in the woods, and the sunlight slanted through the branches, and it was magic. My hair is no longer dark, and I am no longer young, and I couldn’t jump very high, but I made an awkward leap and grinned, happy to be a silver haired breeze passing through, grateful to have that same photographer with me.

Sometimes when we travel, Monte and I read to each other…or more accurately, he drives and I read…and one of the best things I read this time was Maria Popova’s latest Marginalian dispatch, Sixteen Life-Learnings from Sixteen Years. So much wisdom here, each prompting more pondering and discussion, each so fully resonant. But my favorite was number 14:

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature.

Again and again, I have come to this same conclusion. Ironically, it seems more true now as time erodes me and the experiences of life chasten me. The sorrows persist unabated, and the fears loom large and valid, but maybe that’s why the joy is all the more astonishing and vivid. We acknowledge the suffering as well as the happiness, somehow holding them both, and, as Jane Hirshfield says in a poem Popova quotes: