Читать книгу Roads From the Ashes - Megan Edwards - Страница 9

Chapter 3

The Epicenter of Burning Desire

Itching For Adventure

Itching is romantic when it means desire, and in the days Mark and I spent planning our grand journey, the word aptly described our yen for adventure. It was a pleasant itch, one we were eager to indulge. Little did we know, in those halcyon days when our travels were unsullied by genuine experience, that there would come a day when all notions of sentimental scratching would be routed by a real-life invasion of starving fleas.

Or maybe they were ticks. Whatever sort of bloodsucking pests they were, about a million of them hitched a ride when we pulled into a truck stop near Albuquerque, New Mexico. We’d taken Marvin for a walk before going to sleep. The parking lot had just been resurfaced with a layer of asphalt the consistency of blackstrap molasses. “Oh, great,” I said as I peeled my shoe away from the ground at every step. “This will be with us forever.” Marvin hadn’t liked it much, either, and we’d headed for a dusty field full of sage brush where he could walk without sticking.

We retired for the night. In the morning, Mark woke up scratching. Pretty soon I was scratching, too. From the look of him, Marvin had been scratching all night.

A closer look revealed armies of minute black bugs marching across his belly, entrenched around the edge of each ear, and bivouacked between his toes. He was swarming with them from nose to tail. Suddenly I remembered that he’d slept in our bed most of the night. Not only that, he’d spent at least an hour on my head. It had rained during the night, and Marvin was frightened by the thunder. Excuse me while I scratch. Just writing this is making me itch all over again.

I am a person who believes that one tick is hideous beyond description. One is enough, when you think about what it does. It screws its head into your vein and bloats on your blood. More often than not, you don’t notice it until it’s a foot long. When you finally discover it, it’s like realizing you’ve been hosting a body snatcher. You scream. If you’re in the shower, it scares your husband. When he sees why you screamed, he screams, too.

This situation was so extreme it rendered us both speechless. Mark held Marvin down, and I set to work with a pair of tweezers. It was a Sisyphean task, like mowing a football field with nail clippers.

If you rolled bagels in them, you’d swear these things were poppy seeds. You wouldn’t notice the difference until you took a bite. Then you’d make the delightful discovery that your mouth was full of little balloons bursting with blood. They popped when I pinched them. It was a gory scene.

I stayed at my task for an hour or so, and the war was still far from over. “I’ll keep up the attack as we go,” I said to Mark. “I hope you don’t itch too much to drive.”

I searched and destroyed all day, taking breaks only to scratch and wash blood and body parts off my hands. The bugs fought back by dropping to the floor and scurrying into corners. I added a Dust Buster to my arsenal and kept on fighting. By the time we arrived in Las Vegas, the enemy was in full retreat.

Money, Money, Money

Have you ever noticed how, once you have resolved on a course of action, life’s minutiae mobilize to thwart your best-laid plans? Distractions attack from every quarter, just like an invasion of bloodsucking bugs. How can you concentrate when you itch? How can you progress when you’re constantly pausing to scratch? Sometimes, in the months we spent getting ready to hit the road, I had the feeling we might never actually do it. We were too busy swatting mundane distractions.

And even now, psychic fleas are pestering me. Every time I set out to talk about money, I let them sidetrack me. Instead of facing my subject squarely, I find myself writing about mysterious black boxes or infestations of biting insects. But money, as it is wont to do, keeps floating back to the surface. This time, I swear, I won’t pause to itch or scratch for at least a page.

There are two reasons money is a recurring theme. One is that people always ask us about it. The other is that we keep having to drum some up to stay on the road.

People usually ask an either-or question, something like, “Did you get a huge insurance settlement, or are you independently wealthy?” Having observed our itinerary and estimating how much gas a 7-ton monster guzzles, they figure those are the only two options. I would have thought the same a few years ago.

The fact of the matter is, there are other possibilities. They aren’t the ones you’ll read about in how-to-manage-your-money magazines. They only show up occasionally in interviews with people who have “beaten the odds”: an illiterate man who manages to send eight children to college or a 45-year-old woman with cancer who climbs a peak in the Himalayas.

If the illiterate man had waited until he had enough money to educate his children, they would have grown up illiterate, too. If the woman with cancer had waited until she had enough money, well, forget it. Somehow, both completed projects that cost thousands and thousands of dollars they didn’t have.

The fact of the matter is, money isn’t what allows you to do things. It actually keeps you from doing things if you believe it has to come first. What really has to come first is resolve, a burning desire to accomplish something no matter what.

We did receive insurance money to cover the belongings inside our house. We used a large piece of it to pay business expenses: all the inventory we lost had not been paid for, and it was not insured. There was enough money left over to buy an inexpensive motorhome or make a down payment on a custom- designed one. The route we chose would make a financial advisor cringe.

It’s been five years since we’ve received money on a regular basis or from traditional sources. We’ve used up our savings, we’ve worked, we’ve borrowed. On spectacular occasion, we’ve been visited by miracles. Sometimes we’ve felt hopelessly short of cash, and other times, we’ve felt as though we had plenty. We’ve been scared, and we’ve been confident, we’ve come close to giving up hope, and we’ve ridden high on waves of abundance. Every once in a while, as we’re barreling down a highway on a fine day, we look at each other and say, “Well, here we still are.” And we are. It must be magic.

If it is, then life is magic. Nobody waits for enough money to raise a child before they have one. They just go ahead and make things happen as the journey unfolds.

It wasn’t money or its lack that sent us on the road. It was something far simpler. We wanted to. We wanted to more than we wanted to do anything else. We had a burning desire, appropriately ignited by a wildfire.

A Large Shake

By January, we were a few steps closer to rolling. The Revcon Trailblazer was slowly taking shape in the Irvine factory. It now had its own name, the Phoenix One. I’d wanted to call it Phoenix because it was rising from our ashes, and Mark said okay, as long as we added the One. “It means there might be a Two someday,” he explained. “It’s forward looking.” We were forward looking, too. Most of our sentences began, “When we leave,” or “Once we actually hit the road . . .” We were living in the future, and I was getting impatient for the future to be now.

Then, on January 17, I 994, something happened that riveted us to the present. It was still dark when the first jolt hit, and it threw me out of bed. By the time the second tremor rolled under us, I was wide awake, and Mark had joined me on the floor. Car alarms were screaming. Dogs were barking.

“Unless the epicenter is right where we are,” I said, “This is a really big earthquake.” Another series of shakes rattled our windows. I crawled over to the television and turned it on. Already, a disheveled announcer at a local station was on the air. Behind him, shelves had toppled. Books were scattered on the floor.

It was a serious quake, all right, 6.7 on the Richter Scale. The worst damage was sustained in the San Fernando Valley community of Northridge, where gas mains exploded, apartment buildings collapsed, and more than 50 people died. Twenty-two thousand people were forced to leave their unsafe homes, and even more evacuated out of sheer fright. Public parks were transformed into tent villages, and the National Guard turned out to keep order. Once more, legions of insurance adjusters and FEMA staffers arrived in Los Angeles to set up temporary shop in the latest disaster zone. The fires of October were forgotten in the dust of crumbled freeways.

A friend of mine in North Hollywood lost the contents of his apartment. Everything was smashed, and he was in shock. I told Mark about it while we were eating dinner. “I wonder what we can do to help,” I said. “Well,” said Mark, “We’ve accumulated a lot of stuff that we aren’t going to need when we hit the road. Maybe it’s stuff he can use.” It was true. What would we do with a microwave or china bowls? Only a crazy person would take crystal glasses on a road trip.

I called Rich the next morning, and the things we’d acquired matched remarkably well with what he had lost. We loaded up his car to the roof.

So I guess you could say that the earthquake cleaned us out, too, and we were happy it did. When we took to the road, we wanted nothing material tethering us to a specific spot, especially a storage locker. I’d travel to the edge of the world to see a friend, but an aging coffee maker is hardly a worthy grail.

While I’m still on the subject of earthquakes, I must share a bit of wisdom gained from experience. You’ve heard the standard admonishment, “When you feel a tremor, get in a doorway.” I’d heard it, too, all my life, and I’ve even told other people. Well, folks, there’s a little more to it than that. A friend of mine found out the hard way. When the Northridge earthquake hit, Barbara rushed to a doorway. As she stood there, another tremor struck. The doorframe hit her between the eyes. She lost consciousness briefly, and the next day, she had two black eyes. So remember, when an earthquake hits, go to a doorway, and CROUCH DOWN, COVER YOUR NECK AND HEAD, AND BRACE YOURSELF INSIDE THE FRAME.

The only other piece of useful earthquake advice I can share I heard from a Caltech seismologist. “If you live in Southern California,” he said, “Push your expensive Scotch to the back of the shelf.”

Wheels!

Slowly but surely, our Phoenix was rising. Mark drove to Irvine nearly every day to make sure it was rising to his satisfaction. I was still working at the job I’d held before the fire.

It got to be January. It got to be February. It got to be March. It got to be a week away from the day we were supposed to assume ownership of our new home.

We had started applying for loans the day we decided to have the Phoenix One built. We’d heard “no” three times. We were on the fourth application, and the prognosis looked no better. Why would a bank whose usual M.O. is to loan people only money equivalent to what they already possess, lend us a cent? We were crazies with an irresponsible gleam in our eyes. We were exactly the kind of loan applicants that lending agents are trained to escort firmly to the door.

With only a week to go, we needed a miracle. We needed a bank that would loan us $56,250 because they liked our smiles, one that would believe we meant it when we signed a piece of paper saying we’d pay it all back.

Eighteen hours before we were due in Irvine to assume possession of the Phoenix One, water turned into wine. The last bank, represented by a woman with a lovely smile, funded our loan. The next day, we drove to Irvine, signed a bunch of papers and kicked the tires one last time.

The Phoenix was ours! Mark climbed into the cab, turned on the engine, and pointed it toward Pasadena. I followed in the car. I tailed him along Irvine Boulevard as we headed for the freeway. Outside the rarefied atmosphere of the Revcon factory, the Phoenix stood out like Santa Claus in July. It stopped traffic. “My god,” I thought, “We’ve bought an eyesore.” A sharp pang of buyer’s remorse struck me in the gullet. “I’m a conspicuous consumer. I’m a frivolous spendthrift. Those other three banks were right. We really are insane.”

The Phoenix paused at a traffic light, then turned onto a freeway ramp. I followed. I had 26 miles to think about what we’d done. It only took two for me to recover from my momentary lapse. What did I care if the Phoenix drew attention? We’d picked it out because it was different. The ordinary possibilities hadn’t appealed to us. They hadn’t suited our new lease on life.

As we headed north, my mood rose like a hot air balloon. The truck rolling smoothly along the highway ahead of me meant everything we’d planned was suddenly real. We had our wheels! There was nothing stopping us! We were ready to roll! We were free!

We drove to Mark’s parents’ house. They came out. “It’s beautiful,” they said. My sister and brother-in-law came over to take a look. “It’s obscene,” they said. But everybody looked inside and outside. They climbed underneath and up on the roof. They sat at the table and lay on the bed and turned on the faucet and opened the cupboards. Before the afternoon was out, the Phoenix had attracted twenty gawkers, and it was parked on a secluded cul-de-sac.

I can’t tell you who was right. Maybe the Phoenix was beautiful, and maybe it was obscene. I’d wondered myself whether it was good or bad, pleasing or offensive, right or wrong. But that night, as Mark and I lay down for the first time in our new bed, we fell asleep knowing that only one thing really mattered. The Phoenix was ours.

Four Cats in Santa Cruz

Wait a minute. Did I really say, “I was free” back there? I may have felt that lovely lighter-than-air ebullience as I drove back to Pasadena behind our new set of wheels, but it was fleeting. We’d just gained a car payment as big as a mortgage. Freedom? Maybe it really is a word for nothing left to lose. Maybe it’s only a tantalizing abstraction to sing about on the Fourth of July, or to enjoy for a moment when all your worldly goods are gone, and you haven’t had a chance to fill the vacuum.

The Phoenix filled a good chunk of the vacuum, and gradually, we were acquiring its contents. New stuff. Different stuff. Stuff I never knew existed.

Insurance companies are organized to make sure you replace all your old stuff with stuff that’s as similar as possible.

If you had a couch, you pick out a new one. You work your way down your list, putting everything back. As long as you stick to the footprint of the stuff you lost, everyone is happy. Pretty soon, you can start forgetting that the fire ever happened. It fades like a bad dream at daybreak.

If, on the other hand, you decide that the fire wasn’t so much a disaster as a chance to reinvent yourself, you’re on your own. If you decide that in place of a couch, you would like a black box that will make a cellular telephone work with a modem, don’t expect an insurance agent to understand. It won’t make sense to anyone but you.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I look back, most of our decisions about stuff revolved around keeping in touch. We could live happily without a dishwasher, but we couldn’t leave town without a modem. We had no yen for a dining room table, but we couldn’t depart without a computer, a printer, a telephone, and a fax machine.

Nearly half of the living space in the Phoenix One was dedicated to communication. The entire “back room,” space which in most motor homes is filled with a bed and wardrobes, was an office, complete with desk, filing cabinet, slide-out shelf for the fax machine, and storage for computer equipment. One cabinet was reserved to hold all our clothes. Our bed was a bunk over the cab.

Now that the Phoenix really existed in three dimensions, our plans for departure began to solidify, but we still didn’t know exactly when we’d actually climb into the cab and drive away. It’s a funny thing when you plan to set forth on a journey of your own making. You can plan and plan and never quite get around to leaving. You need a deadline, or you can keep planning forever.

A deadline appeared at precisely the right moment. Mark’s brother in Santa Cruz called. “We’re going to Hawaii at the end of March,” he said. “We need someone to house sit for us and feed the cats.” Suddenly there was no more time for dreaming. The Phoenix One had a mission, a focus, a drop-dead date. Four hungry cats were counting on us to hit the road.

Meeting the Roadman

While we were in the midst of preparing for our departure, we received an invitation to attend an Indian meeting. The meeting was to be held at a friend’s house in the mountains just north of the San Fernando Valley.

“It lasts all night,” explained Catherine. “You should bring pillows, and Megan has to wear a dress. Also, bring food to share with the group.”

An Indian meeting. My only knowledge of such things came from Carlos Castaneda, and lots of people said he made things up. “But why not?” said Mark. “It seems like a perfect way to start an adventure.”

We arrived at the house around five-thirty and parked in front. A pick-up truck was parked in the driveway, and two men were sharpening a yucca stalk to a point in the front yard. A handful of other people were sitting on the porch. Catherine was in the kitchen, “just bring whatever you brought on in,” she said. “Things will be starting pretty soon.”

Two men were moving furniture out of the living room. A serious man in a leather jacket seemed to be in charge. He said, “Let’s build the altar now,” and a thin teen-ager wearing combat boots and chains carried in four two-by-fours and dumped them on the floor.

“What are we supposed to do?” I whispered to Mark as seemingly random activity continued around us. Another man entered with a bag of sand over his shoulder. He dumped it on the floor. Another man arrived with a load of firewood. “I have no idea,” said Mark. “I guess we just watch and see what happens.”

The man in charge walked into the room. “What are all these pillows doing in here?” he demanded. “Get them out of here.” He was pointing at our pillows, the ones Catherine had told us to bring. We stuffed them back into a corner, and shrank back on top of them.

A blonde woman in blue jeans arranged the four two-by-fours into a rectangle. The man who’d brought the sand arrived with another bagful and dumped it inside, right onto the floor. He added the other bag, and the rectangle was full. The woman used a flat stick to smooth and flatten the sand.

More people arrived carrying food. Catherine came to tell us that one of the women was the organizer of the meeting. “She’s the one who called it,” she said. “She’s the one who will tell the Roadman why we’re here.”

The Roadman. The man in the leather jacket. I’ll be very curious to find out why we’re here, I thought. And why we’re staying all night. It’s going to be a long one.

What looked like chaos continued to swirl around us, but out of the seemingly random activity, an altar took shape in the middle of the room, a fire was laid in the fireplace, the women changed into dresses, and people arranged themselves in a circle, kneeling or sitting cross-legged on the floor. We were about thirty in all, a large group for a small living room. The roadman took his place directly across from us. The room was slowly filling with smoke.

The ritual unfolded before us, and much of it revolved around smoke and fire. The roadman had a beaded leather bag full of tobacco and cedar. He laid talismans on the altar. He filled a pipe, and we all smoked in turn. He talked to the woman who had called the meeting.

Our knees were already hurting, unaccustomed as we were to sitting immobile on the floor. We had at least twelve hours to go, maybe more.

“I’ll pass the medicine,” the Roadman was saying. “I want each of you to take four spoons.” Catherine had told us about the medicine. “It’s a peyote tea,” she’d said. “And yes, it can make you sick. There are containers to throw up into, if you need them.” Near us was a plastic gallon-sized milk jug with a hole cut in it, just big enough to hold a face. “It tastes horrible,” Catherine had warned us. “In fact, I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever had in my mouth.”

The bowl arrived. I downed my four spoons quickly, before I could change my mind. It’s not so bad, I thought. It was bitter and herbal and odd, but down it went. I eyed the milk jug, but nothing happened. Piece of cake.

The room was smokier now, and darker. The only light came from the fireplace, where a young man with black, waist- length hair was tending the fire.

The ceremonies continued. There was chanting and praying and drumming. I saw demons in the embers. The Roadman across the room had a devil’s face. A woman in a black dress had snakes in her hair. I watched and watched. I must have slept.

Three times during the night the Roadman passed the medicine. The rituals continued, the praying, the chanting. A bucket of water was passed around, and we drank in turn from a tin cup.

Dawn peeked in around the edges of the curtains, and the ceremony seemed to trail off. We found ourselves again surrounded by aimless activity. Some people lay on the floor. Others walked outside. The fire went out.

Somewhat dazed, we decided to put our belongings into our car. “Maybe we should just leave,” whispered Mark. “Not a bad idea,” I whispered back. It was already mid-morning, and there was no way of telling how long people might stay. A small group was chatting with the roadman at the other end of the living room. Catherine seemed to have disappeared. “No one will ever miss us,” I added.

We picked up our pillows and walked outside. Before we reached the car, a voice called, “Wait!” We turned, and the Roadman was standing on the porch. He walked down the steps. “You aren’t leaving, are you?” he asked. “You must come and eat.”

How had he known we were leaving? He’d been ensconced in conversation twenty feet away when we slipped out. How had he crossed the room so fast? We went back inside the house.

Suddenly, we were part of the group. The Roadman, it turned out, was a Navajo from Phoenix. Other Native Americans had come even farther distances. Many participants were Caucasians who attended meetings of the Native American Church regularly. One woman had built a sweat lodge in her backyard. One man, a Hopi who lived in North Hollywood, had lost his apartment in the earthquake. “But I still have my truck,” he said. “And my grandfather told me to come to this meeting.” His grandfather had died three years before.

We feasted on the food everyone had brought, and finally the real time to leave arrived. Feeling much better than we had a few hours before, we climbed into our car and headed east, the opposite direction from which we had come.

Just why we drove off in the wrong direction is unclear to me now. Maybe it was difficult to turn around, and we thought we could “go around the block.” Maybe it was the peyote. In any event, we found ourselves driving over the mountains in a dense fog. When visibility returned, we couldn’t have been more surprised to find ourselves at Buttonwillow, a traveler’s oasis on Interstate 5 about two hundred miles from any place we wanted to be. “We better not ever tell anybody about this,” said Mark. We decided to rent a motel room and sleep.

Our rumps were still numb. The motel had a whirlpool, but even a half-hour soak failed to bring them back to life. They stayed numb for three days. By the time sensation returned, we’d begun to fear we’d never feel anything in our hind quarters again.

As we drove back to Pasadena the next morning, we agreed that the Indian meeting had been a transforming experience. “I have no idea in what way I was transformed,” I said, “But something definitely happened.”

“I still can’t figure out how that Roadman knew we were leaving,” said Mark. “Or how he got out onto the front porch so fast.”

“I don’t see how he did it, either,” I agreed, “But then, I don’t understand most of what happened there. Like how does a grandfather who’s been dead for three years tell you to go on a road trip?”

But then again, maybe I do understand. It may be my imagination, it may be only a demon in a fireplace, but I swear there are times I hear my own grandfathers speak. I hear the voices of those who crossed the plains in wagons, and the older ones who crossed the Atlantic in sailing ships. It’s not my own idea to hit the road. It’s in my blood.