last gift

We sat on a rock next to a Loch Leven lake and then we had to walk away with our things because the haze was turning brown from smoke. There was a forest fire nearby. There were lizards on the rocks but no rattlesnakes. We went over the ridge, mostly downhill. I woke that morning very early, I was sleepless because of my usual psychedelic forest fear. It's a sour contradiction, the night before I had nightmares of both a mangy bear snarling and chasing me until I ran inside and slammed and locked everything and then a dream where Michael and I walked through the mall and over the loudspeaker a very strange voice: "Attention. Please listen to this very important annoucement. A nuclear bomb has hit Washington DC and the president has died." And then there were instructions.

I woke immediately and that is mercy, I woke up Michael and I told him. We were sleeping in the guest bed at his Aunt Cappie's house outside of Sacramento. She is nearly 90 and she was a pilot in World War II and she stayed up late with us and showed us all of the pictures of Michael's grandma, as both a teenage wife of a coal miner and a 90 year old woman blowing out bithday candles and flower arranging. Aunt Cappie took us out for sushi, and we ate the decadence of the last life of the sea, and Aunt Cappie grew up in a cabin in West Virginia without running water. Could she have even imagined, even in a halucination fantasy, that she would be 90 one day, eating raw fish given a seat on an airplane after being napped from a cancered sea?

She drove us to Sierra College Boulevard and we stood there for a while and witnessed teenagers on lunch and burned in the sun and then we were picked up by Bosnian construction workers who took us to Auburn. We then tried to hitch from there and stood there a while, next to a road sign with furious graffiti, "GERONIMO WAS HEER. BAD RAMP. 2ND DAY TO RENO." Then a tweaker couple in a Ford gave us a ride the length of a Poison song. Then we were picked up by a mother and daughter and her daughter's friend, on their way home from alternative high school. The mom and daughter shared cigarettes and the friend was kind of quiet. We dropped her off at home on our ride, she lived in an arthritic little A frame, covered in camoflauge and junk and in the middle of a just-developed rich subdivision. "I wish we were rich!" the girls shrieked and started talking about the lottery. The mom was on the phone with one of her home-care clients and the daughter put her arm out of the window and moaned, "That's my car!" when we passed a banana Corvette convertible.

They dropped us off at a Starbucks in Colfax, 50 miles from the Joanna Newsom School for Gifted Children. Michael surgeried the sliver in my thumb until we got picked up by a business man in a rental car on his way to Reno. He would drive us to Loch Leven Lake. He started referring to us as beatniks and then told a sad story about his son who doesn't believe in anything and he became so angry that he went to jail. We arrived at our destination and it was about 5 pm. But we were at the wrong exit, we had one more to go actually, and a woman going home from her post office job drove us to the Rainbow exit and then the trailhead. We got woven into the manzanita but finally found our way over the ridge and we slept next to a lake. I barely slept.

The next day was the day that there were forest fires and we were glad we didn't see them on our trail, or any rattlesnakes. An owl did pay tribute the night before. We walked back to the freeway exit, but were distracted by the Yuba River and jumped in and greeted fishermen, and we got kind of lost and ended up walking back to the first gas station the man with the son tradgedy dropped us of at the night before. We chatted with a policeman and then stood on the lip of the 80 until a woman from Sacramento picked us up. She was fighting with her girlfriend and on her way to get wasted in Reno. She lived in Reno for a while, on and off. She dropped out of school in 6th grade and hitchiked the United States at age 15 alone. She lived in Reno before and after that. She took us to a thrift store so we could buy nice clothes to wear in Reno. I bought a pink knit dress and Michael bought khaki pants and a T shirt that boasted "UNEMPLOYED" with a $19 dollar unemployment check on it signed by Ronald Reagan.

She took us to a vegetarian restaurant and later, a Basque restaurant where all they had was walnut liquers and oxtails and all of this meat. I liked this meal anyway because of the old Basque man we ate with, his smile just polished the walls and he took his ice cream as a little island in a puddle of wine.

We stayed in a very fancy hotel at a bargain rate, arranged by our ride and we even had a sauna and swam in a warm pool as the new moon rose over the blushing desert sky. All of these men were in the hot tub talking about hookers. I lost money on gambling, Michael won a good amount. We could see the watted sad clown at Circus Circus from our hotel room, he seemed to grimace from holding so much money. There were loud fights all night, we could hear them even from our sealed hotel room.

We got back to Sacramento so easily and picked up my violin and Aunt Cappie made us dinner and we watched the hummingbirds have their dinner and then Cousin Dave drove us to the airport. He needed to make some kind of clandestine stop at McDonald's and we missed our train so we waited by the tracks for the last one, playing violin and harmonica. The train would be so much nicer if they could just turn down the lights. We annoyed the snack-counter man and I think he may have been drunk.

And today my achivement is adding the A string to my under-stringed violin. We played for a while before dinner. Tomorrow I will serve beer to the Tom Petty concertgoers. Tomorrow I will get a couple of the summer's last gifts.