VOLUME V, CHAPTER 9

THE CALL OF THE WHILE

courtesy NASA

September, 2008

It has been some time since the Curmudgeon has blown the dust off his passport, and we are hearing the sirens’ seduction to travel once again. “Fly,” we hear them call, “fly to verdant Ireland, to romantic Chile, fly to the spectacular Serengeti.” And we respond: “Are you nuts? Have you been in an airport lately? Going through LAX is like being a contestant on Wipeout.”

But it is September, after all, the time when Jeanine digs her gypsy shoes out of the back of the closet and says “Let’s go. Somewhere.” It is September, the time when Jeanine looks at the utility bills from August and says “We need to get our stats up. Let’s close up the house for a while.” It is September, and the Prius gets around 50 miles to the gallon, so we are going to drive up to the Bay Area, even though we were there as recently as Chapter 7. We plan to visit a museum, watch a bocce match, hang out with family. And we heard they have wine up there, as well. It’s all good.

Getting out of the house, maybe not so much. It started yesterday: I went to the bank for some travel money and some time later realized I hadn’t seen my ATM card since. Retracing my steps for the whole day took almost as long the second time around and accomplished nothing. I was still stewing about it this morning at 2:00 A.M. when thinking about the bank led me to think about the money I had transferred into the checking account last week to cover the bills. Something about the transaction didn’t feel right. This is estimated taxes month. When you subtract thousands from a balance of hundreds, your answer should be a negative number…. So I got up, dialed the bank’s machine, and transferred some more. Fortunately, the IRS hadn’t gotten around to cashing the check, so I’m not overdrawn.

Then I stewed some more, got up at 3:30 and drove down to the bank to see if the card was lying on the roadway under the ATM. It wasn’t. I came home and blogged. I went back to bed. I got up and took a shower, ate breakfast, read the paper. Waited for the bank to open. They had it; the ATM had sucked it in when I failed to take it out. The bank manager called me an idiot. I agreed. Then it was time to hit the road. I’m hoping for an hour or two of sleep in the car before it’s my turn to drive, once I finish this sentence.

What? Hello? Are we there yet? Is it time to eat yet? We stopped at the halfway point for intake and output. I washed my hands and splashed some water on my face. That helped, though it was a bitch getting my face under the hot air dryer….

One of the characteristics of mid-week road trips is that the people you visit have to work. We camped out on my brother’s porch until he and Jan had seen their last patients, had a nice evening with them, and crept out of their house early the next morning to avoid getting involved in group therapy sessions. We had breakfast just down the street, where we listened to a young mother reading a story to her preschooler. Their pancakes came too soon: if anybody knows what happens after Dora the Explorer opens her bag of sunshine to turn winter into spring, please let me know.

Hey! There’s a Carpool Lane on the Bay Bridge! It requires at least 3 passengers per vehicle, or one Prius. Ahh, yess! You don’t pay, you don’t even stop. If you’re from around there, you barely even slow down through the toll booth. We arrived for our date at the museum in San Francisco two hours early…. The de Young has mounted the largest exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s glass in the history of the universe, or at least of his universe, which is one of riotous color and undulating organic forms. Since James Turrell stopped producing art to concentrate on terraforming, Chihuly is the most interesting artist alive. Too bad you missed the show.

Dave and Anna had a bocce match in the evening. The game is kind of like bowling without pins: you toss a ball the size of a kumquat about 60 feet down the court and then see who can come closer to it with another set of balls about the size of a bocce ball (i.e., just big enough that you can pick it up with a long-handled Plumber’s Friend if you are too old to bend over). Kind of like golf without the hole. It’s actually more interesting than it sounds, kind of like curling without a broom or croquet without mallets, or maybe horseshoes without a horse, though bids from Fortune 500 companies to put their name on a 50,000 seat retractable-dome stadium to hold the U.S. Open of Bocce are fairly rare as of this writing. The kids are the youngest team in the league—Dave, the oldest member of Zuppa di Zucca, would be the youngest by twenty years on any other team—but they acquitted themselves well, defeating Cornelius and the Larrys (not their actual name, but their actual names) in straight sets, two games to one.

In the morning, Dave had to get up and go to work. Yes, Dave. Yes, go to work. Wow, how suburban. Even Anna had to work, though for her, “going” isn’t part of the deal. So we were packed off to the di Rosa Art & Nature Preserve, a zillion acres of vineyards and art strewn all over the place.

A national treasure which beggars description, so I will give up without even trying. You’ll just have to go, and you will be glad you did.

We have decided not to bother with the wine country; we can get wine at home. So we are going down to Monterey for the aquarium and then we’ll spend a couple of days at the beach. Surprise.

On the outskirts of Monterey—or maybe the inskirts of Seaside, I’m not too clear about the border—there are rolling dunes of soft, golden sand which support a luxuriant growth of iceplant in intense colors of green, yellow, orange, and red. This morning I woke up at 5:30 to go out and photograph the railroad tracks curving across the sand and receding into the east, set aflame by the rising sun. I hope you can picture it, as I roll over and go back to sleep. You know you’re old when….

We got to the aquarium even before it opened, and I’m pleased to report it still has fish. Even better, the dismantling of the jellyfish exhibit was either misreported or misconstrued. The “Jellies Gallery” is a permanent installation. What was coming down was a separate thing called “Jellies: Living Art” which included not only sea creatures but also some Chihuly glass things and some other art with the most tenuous connection to jellyfish you could imagine. This was held over an extra month by popular demand, so we got to see it, too.

We wandered the floor of the aquarium until lunch time, when we repaired to Bubba Gump. As I scanned the menu I suddenly realized that if I had to eat another Cobb salad, I might do something colorful and explosive. So I ordered a fishwich instead. On a hamburger bun. Yeah, and it came with fries, too; you wanna make somethin’ out of it? This was probably not the best way to violate my 5-year-old low carb diet. Still, it was the best sandwich I’ve had in years….

And so, fortified and sublimely guilty, southward. We took the famous 17-mile drive along the beach past Pebble Beach where the insanely wealthy play golf. It was not at its best, a gray day with no surf, and the cost of driving the seventeen miles has gone up to a bit over 54 cents a mile. Still cheaper than driving the first tee, which would be 1/18th of $475, or $26.30. The course as configured for the U.S.Open is 6828 feet (1.29 miles), so if you played a complete round, it works out to $360.22 per mile. Of course, that’s retail.

The end of the seventeen miles is essentially the beginning of the long, winding road through Big Sur. That is a drive that never disappoints, but I must say that with the tide out, the heavens overcast, and the water as flat as the sky, the level of enchantment was as low as I’ve seen it. The damage from this summer’s fires was evident, even from the highway, but not devastating. Big Sur will be back.

Nobody along the coast has a room available for Saturday, so we will be home a day early. But the Sea Crest in Pismo Beach gave us a deal (I whined and looked pitiful) for Friday, with cookies. We came at the right time: they have just renovated, refurbished, and repriced. They added air conditioning, flat screen TV’s, a microwave, and the biggest refrigerator I’ve ever seen in a motel. And they replaced the old four-cup coffee maker that made two cups with a sleek, modern single-cup brewer that makes…none. No, wait! I’m wrong. The foolproof system isn’t quite, but on the third try, the fool managed to figure it out. Newly revised estimate: the one-cup brewer makes slightly more than one cup. Or at least slightly more than the cup they give you will hold.

We walked over to Marie Callender’s for a sumptuous dinner. They were out of that, but the chili was OK. Then yet another conundrum presented itself. Marie serves apple pie any time, but sour cream apple is listed as “seasonal.” So the question is: what is sour cream season? (Ans: November.)

Hooray! We don’t have to go home today! We have been granted an extra day, even though it’s Saturday. At the same great rate (every new desk clerk who looks up what we are paying opens her eyes really wide), even though it’s Saturday. Next week I am opening my new College of Wheedling so I can pass on my techniques for the betterment of mankind.

Our extra day meant we didn’t have to miss the local surfing competition. The surfers weren’t too good, but the surf wasn’t either, so it balanced out.

We also didn’t have to miss the sand castle built by the pier by Raul “the Sandman” Torres, as he does every Saturday, rain or—well, no, probably not in the rain.

Some time before sunset I had an idea for a photograph under the pier, but I needed the sky a little darker to even out the exposure. I suppose I could have waited another hour or, even better, come back after dinner. But I decided to make an early night of it and get up before dawn. I woke up at 1:30, just a bit more before dawn than planned, but I remembered the full moon and thought that might be interesting while I was waiting, so I threw on some clothes and went down to the pier. The moon had gone off someplace behind the clouds and taken all the stars with her, so I worked the darkness for an hour or so (photographing in the dark is possible with long exposures, but focusing and composition are another story) and then went back for a quick nap.

I was back at the pier before the first hint of light. Visible only in the bright sodium lamps of the parking lot, a surfer rode up on his bicycle, dropped his shorts and put on a wet suit, and disappeared down the stairs from the boardwalk into the ink below. Almost immediately another surfer appeared. “Don’t you have to see the waves to surf them?” I asked. He admitted that the first fifteen minutes could be pretty gnarly but it got light quickly and “you gotta be the first.” He was right, too: within 10 minutes I had the light I wanted, and in another 10 it was all over. Photographers aren’t like normal people, but maybe they are like surfers a little.

I got the shot I wanted, though you may wonder why, and a couple of others of some interest. But this was essentially my second all-nighter this week. There was a time I could get away with that, but it was a long time ago….

©2008 michael grossman

More (and better) photos from this trip at:

MichaelGrossmanPhotographs.com