palmy days

How long the road to the weary traveler;
How long the wandering of many lives.
--The Buddha, Dhammapada

My mind goes back often now to those Bakersfield nights, those close, overheated but rapidly cooling, terribly polluted, magical evenings sitting on the patio with cigarettes and ice water. On a good night, when the neighbors weren't wrangling and the dogs weren't barking, and the cars weren't racking their pipes, when it was quiet enough to hear the crickets call, I would sit in the stillness and listen to the faint hum of the 99 freeway a mile off, that river of cars that never goes dry.

Somehow, I derived a feeling of peace and permanence from that humble little balloon-frame house and the incessant, relentless road so close by. I knew that early in the morning I'd start my own car, and take to the northbound lanes of that road going 75, and in half an hour be in the grape fields adjacent to Delano, a.k.a. Uvasville, where I taught English at the high school, mostly to the children of the Spanish-speaking farm workers in that community. It was hard and honest work, and made me a better person, mostly.

Eventually it came to an end, as it always does. I left off going to Delano and closed up the house, took off from the three-bedroom, two-bath on Stillman Ave in a yellow VW bug with a yowling cat in a carrier in the cargo hold, and headed southeast. Driving through the desert there were large, dense, black clouds shrouding the eastern hills, and an afternoon sky like a very dark night as I crossed over them to descend to the desert valley floor. I found out later that this was a sign of what would come.