Highway to Pleasure
During a springtime trip in 2019, along exposed stretches of the I-80 corridor, sudden gusts of wind shoved me, repeatedly, across my lane in the direction of oncoming semis. The 90-mile freeway ride from San Francisco to Sacramento on a motorcycle had been treacherous. I took the exit toward the town of Woodland and swiveled my head to survey the farmland, manicured plots of single crops, eerily uniform like suburban tract homes. Chickens scattered to each side of the road as my red cafe racer rumbled through the entrance to the Kimball family farm, where three generations lived on 20 acres, boxed in by “Big Ag,” the corporate agricultural industry.
I parked next to a teepee nestled on a ridge overlooking a pond. I lifted off my helmet and walked to the barn at the back of the property. George greeted me there. He had a full beard and tasteful man-bun and had on a Browning (a gun manufacturer) baseball cap. I noticed the Om symbol hanging on the wall as he told me he moved his family here in 2000.
“You work in tech?” he asked.
“No, I used to. Left a couple years ago, pretty disenchanted,” I said. “I moved here to study alternative economic systems.”
He ranted about bankers and their loans to farmers for almonds and the bubbles they create, referencing wine grapes in the 1990s. We took turns mentioning books we’d read and then, as if approaching a speed bump, he paused and asked, "Do you follow any kind of spiritual path?"
I nodded and he revealed he'd been a member of a Hindu ashram for 16 years. For the next three nights the teepee I rented on George’s farm was my ashram, a preparatory chamber where I read The Call of the Wild, Jack London’s classic about Buck, a canine protagonist.
Buck is part St. Bernard, part Scotch Collie. Stolen from his owners, he’s sold to dog traders and shipped to the Yukon, confined to a crate and starved and abused along the way.
“He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten,” London writes of Buck. “The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body.”
I pierced through my numbness when I first screamed seven years earlier. An awareness of painful sensations had returned to me, and although the feelings were uncomfortable and sometimes alarming, I allowed them to come and go rather than push away the intensity.
With this practice came greater connection to pleasure. Pleasant sensations danced with the painful ones, and as I shifted my attention to those, they started to take up more of my conscious awareness. They also triggered emotional stories about not deserving to feel good, or fearing my behavior will run amok as pleasure overrides my better judgment. I was more sensitive to the flow of feelings, but I tended to suppress the flow by tensing my body and then releasing the buildup through movement or sound, through shaking or yelling. I had yet to learn how to stand relaxed in the river of pleasure as it pools at the bottom of a waterfall.
On Sunday morning I said goodbye to George, rode back to San Francisco, and—stepping across the threshold—headed straight to the airport. I’d accepted the call of my wild desire.