I was feeling really moody and angry and blech a few evenings ago, so I went for a walk. It was one of the best things I've done all week. It is SO good to be in Real Life. Nothing spectacular happened on my walk. I saw people washing their cars, kids playing and riding bikes. I saw dogs. I saw flowers. It feels so healthy to feel a part of a dynamic community, of people who are just happily living their ordinary own life. And i've been busy at home, helping my mom with dishes, and cooking, and grading papers for her. (ha. i feel so powerful). I'm really glad I get to take a break from school, and also that I can hopefully have engagement with the Real life stuff throughout any other schooling I end up going through.
In Women Writers, we read a line of a poem "These are roads to take when you think of your country". I've been thinking of it, throughout my journeys. We drove past a sawmill next to a lumber yard, loading processed wood onto a train. I've never seen that before, in my whole life. I've played in an abandoned sawmill (if you ever come to the valley in summer, i'll take you, its wonderful, hidden in a forgotten meadow, with old cabins and a post office and a general store, all abandoned). How sad of a society, where I have never seen trees in process of being made into hardware store wood. I even know how to build things, how to turn hardware store wood to fake walls, tables, shelves. But somehow its different to see the sawdust piling out of the tube. across the filled parking lot. onto the pile of sawdust as large as a barn for elephants.
The roads to take, when you think of your country, they are filled with ordinary people working normal jobs. the non-glamorous ones, that I take for granted until I see the dust whirling in the parking lot. The roads where mom and pop grocery still stand. Open for some precarious number of hours, always freshly closed by the time we wander past.
Questioner (Michael Klein, Boston Phoenix): One of your societies for many years has been California, after many years of living and writing on the East Coast. There is a strong sense that those vastly different landscapes have greatly influenced you internally as well -- what Muriel Rukeyser may have meant when she said: "There are roads to take, when you think of your country."
I dropped a dear friend off in Oakdale, outside of Modesto, on the way home. And though I pride myself in my Valley roots, I'd never seen an intersection with the cornfield across from the dairy farm across from the livestock pavilion across from the railroad tracks. Everything a cow would ever see in its whole life, exists (as it should), within a hundred feet of the place a calf could be born.
I drove Avenue 12 across from 99 to 41. Through the orchards, driving straight. Peaches, Nectarines, Plums, all to-be. Between trucks and semis, we drive this valley our home.
When I got back to Fresno, I started taking the surface streets, so I could reaquaint myself with the Ordinary here. The smog isn't to bad yet, so I can still see the Sierra Nevadas in the distance, although the nearest foothills are significantly clearer. Cedar is another street, and I can bike out Bullard to get strawberries. That's a different sort of road to take. Going east, I hit Fresno State land quickly, and on those roads I learn about how almonds look when they are changing from green to red. What grapes taste like ripe off the vine.
Fresno St is a street I take when I think of my hometown. I love driving to see where the graffiti has emerged, to see what new shopping center has been repainted. I take Fresno street south south south. Past the churches, the firehouses. Apartment Complexes of varying brightness of white paint. More dirt lots emerge, but so do more people walking on the street. I drive past my old elementary school. There is an old hospital and a huge dirt lot that is finally turning into the mixed income housing that was promised by many since the old hazardous section-8 housing was torn down.
An apartment burnt down in Somerset a few months back. Firm always has new graffiti markings that are creatively covered and erased. And then the freeway underpass. There are always people waiting in the shadow of cement for the city busses.
I drive slow, with the windows down, and somehow I find my roots again. I breathe the dry warm air, listen to everyone else's music, and reconnect to this place.
Adrienne Rich: Well, you know, California is the most bizarre place to be, in a certain sense. It's so laden with contradictions. It is, in some ways, almost flaunting of them. I think it flaunts more than any other part of the country, in the visual sense: the extraordinary visual degradation, the extraordinary beauty. There are still these vast tracts of wilderness. There is this amazing ocean. You're constantly living in a kind of cognitive dissonance here.
This whole state is jobless, bankrupt. Fresno, no less than anywhere else. I would stay here if I could. Milagros says FIRM could just find money to pay me. I somehow doubt it. No one seems to have a job around here. We're all leaving... On the brink of Fresno's longawaited turn-around... we still float away...
I'm excited to spend some time in the mountains this summer. Spend some time on the Pacific Ocean. Maybe drive fast to that atrocious Katy Perry song.
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