Friday
14 February. 7:20 p.m.
Liverpool Street Station. Awaiting
departure for Audley End. I should have
stayed home and finished (would I have?) my book. Am I even now, a few days left of hard work
on it, losing interest? Could anyone
else possibly be interested? I must see
it through.
Spent
the day in Canterbury,
while Cathy entertained her friend
with a tea party. Canterbury is a little like Cambridge: not as big, a lot glitzier,
trendier, smaller shops. Visited the
Canterbury Tales exhibition, then to the cathedral for a movie and walking
tour. Whittard's for tea, then the 5:05 back to London.
The cathedral is magnificent; like Westminster Abbey, but not as
crowded.
On
the train to Victoria,
back from my day visit to Canterbury,
I read Brazaaville Beach and looked
out at the rain-slickened streets when they were visible. On arrival I decided to walk a bit rather
than stand in the taxi queue, after standing in the Hagen Daz ice cream queue
for twenty minutes for two free pints of vanilla swiss almond.
I
walked out. It looked familiar. (I thought it looked like around Westminster
Cathedral.) I was following the crowds,
but I wasn't sure which way they were going, then I saw the sign point the
other way to Hyde Park Corner/Westminster Square. Suddenly I'm just about by myself again,
thinking: like Edinburgh! There are
cars, but stopped at the signal, the street deserted for a minute. I don't panic, just have the feeling of doing
something slightly stupid. Then it's
over and I'm back on the main street (it was always lit) in the midst of
traffic and, after all of that, a bit disappointed, for rather than conquering
new streets of London, I am right where we were before, that Sunday in July,
walking down Buckingham Palace Road. I
realize I've missed the 7:02 train. I
see no further sense in walking. A taxi
is more expensive and takes longer than the Underground, but you can't see the
sights when you are under the streets. Then
I'm in the taxi, the guy finishing his sandwich. I look around for a number, always after New
York, when I left the bonds in the taxi. At first I can't find it (they don't
have fake, rip off cabs here, do they, I wonder, calmly). Find the number. I begin to think, in Parliament Square, next
time we come back to London after this year is over, it won't be the same. It won't be to discover it all, but to enjoy a
nice hotel, restaurants, museum. The
future will be different than now, when we are on such a mad rush to see as
much as we can. Then, suddenly, I have
the feeling again, as we turn up onto Queen Victoria Street, that love of
London. I am almost overcome with my
attachment to this place. Something I
have not ever felt for Las Vegas.
My
insight from the other day: how I have lived at different places in my life
representing different times in my life, then suddenly I think maybe I missed
it. Maybe London is for middle age: a 20
or so year stint in London, sell the house, send the kids to St. John's for
another year. But what will I do? Surely there's a job somewhere. I love this city. Perhaps that will change after I get to know
it. I tell myself it's just living high
on the hog I like; but then, no, I'd like to see the storms, the problems, the
highlights, the lowlights of 20 years.
Maybe
this is where I need to flip my coin?
7:38 p.m. En route to
home, 1st stop, Tottenham
Hale.
MOISTURE
Until
1968, except for a year in England
as a boy, I had always lived in Los
Angeles. In the
fall of that year, however, as I began my first term at UCLA, my parents packed
up my eight brothers and sisters and the family dog into the Dodge wagon, and
moved to Las Vegas
leaving me behind. Home was suddenly
away.
The
move was not really a surprise - we had known for more than six months; but, to
be actually uprooted from the pleasant Mediterranean climate of Southern
California, and replanted in the harsh, barren desert of Las Vegas was such a
shock that no amount of vitamin B could have helped.
My
own actual change in residence took place more slowly, as I began to spend
holidays and summer vacations in Las
Vegas, until I finally moved there for good seven
years later, after law school. Yet, even
my gradual adaption to a home in the desert began to work, from the very
beginning, profound changes in my life.
After
November 1968, I began to make frequent trips to Las Vegas.
Sometimes I drove the four and a half hours through the desert; often
alone, occasionally with company; sometimes during the day, more often at
night. When I didn't drive, I took the
48 minute plane ride from LAX, and, ever a fearful flier, held on for dear life
in the summer, when the heat waves from the ground sent the jet soaring up and
down like a yoyo or the plane weaved in and out of the turbulence and updrafts
of tremendous thunderclouds.
All
that travelling back and forth between the desert and the sea began to make me
see my life in terms of those two very different lands. As it happened, the winter of 1968-69 in Southern California was one of the wettest in history,
promising a spring to be remembered; that same winter was one of the coldest in
memory in Las Vegas.
In
the late summer of 1968 I had been a promising high school graduate blithely
headed for courses in the sciences so that I might follow in the footsteps of
my father (what else?) as a physician.
Six months later I was writing poems, for the first time in my life,
about the rain and the confused directions in which I saw myself pulled.
Perhaps
it was only my age and place in life - a young man from a good family and a
sheltered upper middle class upbringing naturally tends to have his eyes opened
when he leaves home. But it was more
than this, for it seemed as if I had walked about in a fog for my first
eighteen years (and indeed I literally often had); moving to the desert seemed
to bring clarity and vision. Las Vegas
was a place where clouds were not dull masses of grey, but dangerous and magnificent
multicolored structures towering tens of thousands of feet into the air, focusing
light into shining streams of sunlight and providing spectacular sunsets. There were frequent lightning storms in the
summer; and the winds! They were not the
steady, gentle cool afternoon ocean breezes, but erratic and powerful, bringing
dust storms and howling night winds.
Somehow nature was corresponding to my own awakening and awareness of
the things within.
More
than anything else, however, desert horizons disturbed me the most. In the daylight, one could almost see
forever, but what was there? Nothing but
more of the same barren, sometimes beautiful, desert. In the nighttime, especially on the long
drives through the desert, one could literally see forever in a multitude of
stars so brilliant I saw starlight for the first time.
Even
in a car going 75 miles an hour along Interstate 15 in the middle of the night,
one can feel the presence of the desert and almost imagine the sound of
God. Radio companions, signals, faded in
and out. Sometimes there was no choice
but to turn inward; and, yes, that's what the desert makes you do: look inside,
feel your own sense of being. In Los Angeles one is
literally surrounded in sights and sounds, a million distractions, right down
to the fog and low clouds which hide even more sights just beyond your
eyes. In the desert there is no fog, and
few grey days hide the clarity.
But
it was more than scenery. There was the
isolation of Las Vegas, an island two hundred miles from anywhere; and the
furnace-like summers, obliterating all memories and beliefs in other
seasons. Beginning in the long, silent
and lonely drives through the night and the short, terrifying plane rides,
after we moved to Las Vegas
I began to see my life in terms of the contrast between the friendly confines
of the calm, moisture laden coastal air and the stark, limitless horizons of
the sparsely populated desert.
Most
often as I headed back to Los Angeles over the Cajon pass, I descended into a
mixture of fog, clouds and smog, all pushed back against the San Bernardino
Mountains that separate the Los Angeles Basin from the Mojave Desert. My usual reaction is an appalling sense of
man's ability to destroy the environment, but revulsion is almost at once
subsumed into a feeling of companionship with society and the millions of
people living in Los Angeles. I feel at home, which is a bad way for a
Christian to feel on this earth.
When
I head the other way, driving north out of Los Angeles, following the snaking Interstate
up the pass and out into the desert, I gradually rise up through the haze to
the clean air of the desert. More often
than not it is windy on top. Suddenly my
civilized companions are all behind me, and there is only me and the deadly
beauty of the desert. Alone with my
thoughts, more often than not, I find a prayer comes easily to mind.
Saturday
15 February. Had our neighbors over for
dinner, Paul and Theresa and Bob and Jackie. Bob
and Paul are still talking about the
England-France rugby match and the cheap shots by the French. Very nice evening. Paul
stated, early on, "I'm a Guardian man, a socialist, you know." Quite a departure from normal American
political discussions! Socialism is not
a popular cause back home.
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| Getting Ready for the Dinner Party |
Sunday 16 February. Cathy and I on the walking tour between Chisell and Littlebury Green. Very windy, and exhilirating pace. Felt good. Saw three deer run through the field. Retraced the end of the Boxing Day walk.
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| Saffron Waden Walking Society Event |
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| The Trail |
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| The End of the Trail |
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