Violent Yaw Under the Influence of Heat

Two months ago, in an unkempt motel out in Fernley, Nevada — the night before I went out to drive some of the same roads we wound up traveling on our leg from Death Valley to Yosemite —  I’d had one of my Delphic dreams about Miss K. Even so, I didn’t expect this trip to pry me out of my life so fully. I did know it was the last real commitment I’d made to an arc I’ve been on since I decided to leave Los Angeles just about two years ago. I was aware going in that it was an end, but that’s about all I was sure of.

I’ve long been a fan of singer/illustrator Rick Froberg. For those unfamiliar, he was a pivotal figure in the early ‘90s San Diego music scene, back when it was being done over with a nitcomb by A&R men with an eye fixed on finding “the Next Seattle.” But the record long-considered his magnum opus, 1994’s Yank Crime by Drive Like Jehu, never quite connected with me.  I’d known it was important; little lines from it like “Do you compute?” and “Aloha! Suit up!” had stuck with me for years. The cover art — a simple black-and-white drawing of an India ink bottle with the dropper suspended by an invisible hand, trickling a puddle down the side — had always hung somewhere in the recesses of my mind. But the whole of it was way too big for me, somehow. Finally, fifteen years after its release, about five days into the desert, it became all I wanted to hear.

My copy was in a storage space with the rest of the detrius collected moving from town to town; job to job; woman to woman. Gathering dust in an uncertain stasis as to where it would land next as part of an actual home. In lieu of having the record to listen to, remembered snippets played themselves out, stretching and contracting with the scenery.

Six-hundred-mile days seemed about right. We both preferred the windows open, only resorting to air conditioning when the wind got too extreme or the thermometer on the dash crested 42C. Eventually, it was as if we were taking separate journeys to the same places. We’d stowed the iPods in favor of the roar of the long-distance interstates and blast-furnace air. And that’s when the expansive, rolling, abrasive patterns constructed into soaring mini-suites — topped with oblique lyrics about standing in the face of decay, accusation and misunderstanding — began to assert themselves as the internal score to my side of the journey.

The thing about my Delphic dreams is that they never play out literally. They tell a story and assign some sort of fate. And any attempt to fuck with or subvert it or make it something else, or to play off the literal aspects of the story spun in my subconscious, just seems to make that fate more certain. When I had that dream of her in the desert, I sensed that I would come away from this trip fundamentally changed. But I’d largely discounted that premonition when I picked her up in San Francisco. Or if I didn’t exactly ignore it, I tried to half-ass my way around it like Laius of Thebes in low-top Chuck Taylors.

For the better part of two weeks, I’d been trying to see America — and myself — through her eyes. The result was somewhat like seeing my obsessively-maintained collection of myths as a room full of stained-glass art and wincing as a hammer-wielding logician took them on. The fragile ones shattered; the ones worth keeping held under the blows. There was a lot of glass on the ground by the time we got back to San Francisco.

After dropping off Miss K., I really just wanted to get out of the City as quickly as possible; staying in the 415 area code was only going to make me dwell unhealthily on everything I was leaving behind — something I’m already fantastically good at. So out it was, across Market, across Mission, across Folsom and Harrison, left on Bryant and onto I-80 toward my beloved East Bay.

In the middle of my favorite bridge in the world, I realized that the Northern California where I’ve spent roughly 87 percent of my life seemed totally foreign to me, other than that I knew where the roads went without the aid of an atlas. It was immensely freeing. After all, when everything becomes unfamiliar, there’s really no bias when it comes to dropping the next pin on the map. Or, to quote Froberg once again, “Take it or leave it. Do both. Do both if you choose.” -DGJ

[Thanks so much to my lovely and brilliant travel companion for inspiring this trip and for doing so much to make it the transformative experience it became for me.]