#hwy101

Highway 1, Golden Gate Bridge, and some Redwood Trees in California

Harvest ended early— about a month early-  because of the smoke damage from the fires. I hit the road for San Francisco on Wednesday, taking three days to drive the Pacific coast from Newport, OR to Mendocino, CA and then cutting in through the Alexander Valley, Sonoma, and Napa. Harvest ending so early is just another wrench thrown into this weird year, another pivot to plan B, C, D— whatever we’re on now. I felt like I was hitting my stride at the winery, mastering the different tasks and beginning to put the pieces together to understand the process as a whole, from pumping the grapes off the crush pad into the tanks, to pumping over the tanks before fermentation, to inoculating with yeast, more pumping over, racking off the lees, and finally, on my last day, barreling down the best lots of wine. I started by branding the new oak barrels (spray painting them with a stencil, really) and numbering them, so it felt good to come full circle and pump the wine into barrels. I was sad to see it all ending, but also conscious that my sadness marked how good the experience has been. It struck me as I packed up: there’s nothing like leaving a place to make it feel like home.

The road trip is another novelty in this year of adventure, because as a city kid I’ve never really driven much. And, most of the driving I’ve done has been low-speed, tactical driving around the East Coast. It’s the kind of stuff most people hate: elbowing into a lane, swerving around a delivery truck, and trawling for a parking spot: circling the block, antenna quivering for a door opening, a brake light igniting, any sign that a parked car is about to move. That’s the real secret to finding parking in the city— you have to identify the spot before it opens up, because once the current car leaves, it’s too late. (this also leads me to hover annoyingly at busy restaurants.) So getting behind the wheel and rolling down the highway for 6 hours is a novel experience. I agonized over whether I should have turned off at that last vista point. I wondered whether my “drive safe and save” bluetooth beacon could autodial the Highway Patrol to report me for speeding, and how many minutes ago it was likely to have done so. I set cruise control and felt smug. On this trip, I discovered all the most banal aspects of driving and exalted in them.

The trip began in earnest when I hit the Pacific. It felt like an impact, the way it opened up at the end of the road as I crested a hill. Royal blue and velvety, blotting out the pavement and the low-slung commercial strip, the trees and part of the sky. Within minutes I was waiting in line at a roadside clam shack, debating whether to have the fried oysters and halibut or the steamers, and then ordering both. My first analyst said that according to Jung, who was Swiss, some people are drawn to mountains and others to the sea. When I lived near Mont Blanc, I remember hearing locals say that some people experience the mountain as a sinister presence, were almost driven mad by it looming over them. These seem like the beliefs of people who have not visited the West Coast. In Oregon, Highway 101 hugs the curves of the hills, periodically bursting through the curtain of pine to reveal the sea thumping against tall cliffs. I opened the sunroof to let in the alternating waves of crisp mountain air and gauzy ocean breeze. Everything had a sheen to it: the ocean, glimmering with reflected sunlight, and the rolling green hills of evergreen forest, its thousands of individual pine needles shimmering like bugle beads on an evening gown.

There’s something weird about going on a road trip within the context of a larger, longer trip. It’s like Shakespeare’s play within a play. The road trip is usually a place of wildness and interior voyage: The logic of the road pulls you away from the everyday and, unmooring you from the contexts where you recognize yourself, opens the way for introspection and discovery. Already at sea, I turned to the sea as a point of familiarity. But this was not my sea; this was the Pacific. The steamers were smaller than Atlantic little-neck clams, and sat in tiny, pleated shells instead of heavy, horizontally ridged ones. The relentless cliffs, the eerie rock formations jutting up out of the beach, all signaled an other ocean than the one I knew. The sea is the same; it is you that are different. I dreamed I loved a man who left his wife for a woman other than me. This was all getting a bit baroque. I probably should not have listened to so many hours of Dua Lipa. I was that person pulling up at a trailhead miles down a dirt road in the middle of Redwoods National Park at 8:45am, amidst the silent majesty of the ancient trees, with the sunroof open and dance music blaring. Fortunately there was no one around; I was the second car in the pullout. I could rustle around in my trunk and snap selfies in front of the trail sign in peace.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t get to the Redwoods until Day 2. I had my weird dream at a Dickensian forest lodge/ RV park pressed up against the highway that evening. On Day 3, I took the fork where Highway 1 begins in Legett, CA and headed for Mendocino. My favorite three minutes of cinema is the opening credits of the original Italian Job, in which a man in florid brown wraparound sunglasses guides a Lamborghini Miura through the switchbacks of the Italian Alps. Matt Munro croons “On Days Like These” as the driver walks his hands walk back and forth around the steering wheel underneath the dizzying view out the windshield. This was my aesthetic imperative for the day. At its beginning, Highway 1 slithers through forest, looping back and forth more aggressively even than it does on the coast. The speed limit is 55 but you would have to be Evil Knievel to go that fast, because most of the curves are 25 or 15 mph. I played Frank Sinatra and, as I flung my 20-year-old Camry back and forth, reflected that everyone should really be issued a roadster at the beginning of the road. Also perhaps a barf bag for any passengers. Fortunately my only passengers were the debris that accumulates on the passenger seat when you are driving alone, and they hit the rubber floor mat immediately.

On Highway 1 I found the sea again, after the interlude of the Redwood National Parks. Freud describes an “oceanic feeling”: “a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded.” He has never felt it, he claims, but a friend describes it to him to explain why people seek out religion. Over the following hundred or so pages of “Civilization and Its Discontents,” he seems to find the roots of this feeling in the condition of modernity, which separates us from one another and leaves us longing for love and connection. For Freud, the oceanic feeling isn’t really about the ocean so much as what it connotes— expansive, pacific.

Probably what earns Freud’s scorn most about the oceanic feeling is the benevolent view of nature it contains. The idea we have when we go on a hike or feel lulled by the sound of waves—of nature as restorative, nourishing, salutary— is a product of the Enlightenment and coeval with consumer capitalism. As Odysseus sails around the Mediterranean, Homer calls the sea “wine dark,” usually rendered as one word: winedark. I thought about this at the winery, sometimes while contemplating the wine stains on my t-shirt. The darkness describes more than the rich, opaque red of wine; it also stands in for the mysterious forces concealed in the sea and in the beverage. The sea yields monsters or, equally terrifying, storms. Wine holds a transformative power over humans— unpredictable and dangerous. For Homer, the sea is also a kind of beast: Odysseus’ ship sails on its back. The idea of the sea as a winedark monster reinforces this idea of a mysterious life force, the sea as a living beast with mysterious depths. The sea and the wine contain a vital force that promises to overwhelm and shatter human projects.

I realized I somehow NEVER uploaded any photos from my second redwoods excursion back in may???

Hwy 101, Confusion Hill, Crescent City, and Trees of Mystery - May 2019

Face Rock State Scenic Viewpoint