From San Diego to Scholls
Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.
— Gary Snyder
Two weeks ago I packed my van (a minivan) and set out on a road trip—a spring break of sorts—with Scholls Valley Lodge in Hillsboro, Oregon, as a final destination. On the morning of the first day I scrambled to donate clothes and dispose of a broken dehumidifier at the dump. My friend Erin had decided to join the expedition, so after a couple stops we returned her rental car and cruised together north on I-5. We made it to Big Sur on the central coast minutes before dark, just in time to watch the sunset over the Pacific Ocean from Bixby Bridge.
The next day I made a pilgrimage to the Henry Miller Memorial Library. Books, protected in plastic sleeves, hung from the library’s eaves. I followed them like breadcrumbs to the backside of the building where a framed TIME magazine article, large enough to read at some distance, was mounted on a far wall. I approached it as I would an attractive woman across the room, directly, with keen interest and playful curiosity. When I got close I read the byline and recognized the name. Pico Iyer, an essayist known for his travelogues, penned this tribute to Miller on what would have been the iconoclast’s 100th birthday.
“Through 50-odd books about finding ecstasy in squalor,” Iyer wrote, “he simply sang of life and love as if the two were interchangeable.”
Miller’s life was a cocktail that, though it promises to inebriate you, burns on the way down, a startling mixture of improvisation and total commitment. He himself preached, “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
The morning following this shot of American joie de vivre, Erin and I headed into Yosemite National Park. After passing through a tunnel we pulled off the road to greet the snow-topped granite and shimmering pine trees, a breath-stopping grandeur that pronounces itself at the entrance to the valley floor. “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,” John Muir said, “places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” For Muir Yosemite was a cathedral, and his words echoed in my mind like a mantra throughout the visit.
Later that afternoon we exited the park through the west and traveled north parallel to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. We were still driving when the sun went down, a van full of boxes and loose clothes and one bicycle, banking into unlit bends in the road as the headlights of oncoming cars blinded me behind the wheel. And then we were safely in Tahoe.
Two friends I hadn’t seen in four years welcomed us into their home. We shared news of our lives and, between the laughter and looks, recalled memories of when we lived together in the bowels of San Francisco, south of Market Street on the edge of the Tenderloin.
Our final stop in California was the city of Mount Shasta, after which we crossed into Oregon and stayed a night in Ashland. We drove the last leg of the journey after having lunch at the grocery co-op and at 5:30 PM, five days after departing, as the sun was starting to kiss the grassy grounds, we arrived at Scholls. Where a friend lives with three generations of her family. Where I have retreated more than a dozen times. Where a new adventure awaits.
I come to Oregon after a 22-month stopover in San Diego, a post-pandemic plan I pushed for despite unforeseen difficulties, and learned a lesson about the repercussions of forcing my way forward when life pushes back. San Diego dommed me. Then its ocean taught me to ebb and flow, to wait and listen and—when moved—to ride life’s waves.
I carry San Diego with me as a collage of ordinary moments: eating an acai bowl on the patio, grabbing a book off the shelf at the library, offering my hand to the neighborhood cat at my door.
Now in Oregon, I look forward to hiking in old growth forests and soaking in mineral hot springs and wading into the ocean and, when winter wears on me, getting away to San Diego or Hawaii or—who knows—New Zealand.
I want to share my love affair with life with you, in person. Come visit.