Surfing a Sensuous Rainbow

a cross-country driving manual pt. 1

on the last sweaty days of June, Gavin and I got in the car to drive from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

everybody has their season of the year that really works on them.

and by work I mean like working dough or working soil. an effortful preparing of something so that that something will yield something new.

the heat and toil of alchemy

everybody has their pressure cooker portal time.

maybe it’s a grief portal.

for me, this is June into July.

the thing about portal time is that you don’t have to be aware it’s happening for it to effectively have its way with you.

I always think of what Blakeney told me years ago about her take on the purpose of long roadtrips: to feel the changing landscapes working on you, like shifting gradients of sandpaper—sloughing, polishing, revealing.

an exercise in metamorphosis just because you decided to depart from business as usual.

the last time she came through Atlanta, we went to the Korean spa to get rough scrubs by the no nonsense Korean ladies in booty shorts and flip flops.

to be roughed up in the world, and come out alive and polished.

when we pulled out of Atlanta, south on 85 to Mobile, my fingernails were dyed green-black around the nail bed from squishing plantain leaf in my hands and rubbing the juice on my arms to relieve nettle stings I caught in the garden moments before we departed.

the stains lasted three days til West Texas.

along the drive I attempted to map the space between Middle Georgia and Southern California by way of the plants that grow in the highway medians. I stopped knowing them by name on the other side of Austin.

I stay interested in what lives in the space between other things. We think the highway is a main character here, but I’d rather pay attention to what can grow between some of us who are going one direction and others of us traveling the opposite.

Comfrey outside of Auburn

Queen Anne’s Lace outside of Montgomery

the first palms spotted in Mobile

Swamp Mallow and Elderberry east of New Orleans

Spanish moss from New Orleans to Houma

Spanish moss all the way to Lafayette

I started writing this email to you from a rooftop pool deck in Austin almost three weeks ago, at the moment when we were spatially half way between the beginning and the end of this drive.

then Marfa happened, and what happened in Marfa happened, then the desert happened and now LA is happening with a chaotic exuberance, and the letter didn’t want to be written because of my resistance to the impossible task of putting language to the thing.

describing an experience so utterly disorienting as hurling one’s body at 85 mph for eight days across the unfathomably magic expanse that is the North American continent requires some extra special gas in the tank of the writer.

photos can’t capture it, can words?

the resistance to being penned down, pinned down.

I love that there are roads in this country that take you, uninterrupted, from one coast to the other, tip to tail.

I-40 from Wilmington, NC to Barstow, California

I-75 from the top of Michigan at the Canadian border to the tip of Florida in Miami

highway 10 starts in Santa Monica, California and terminates on the east coast in Jacksonville, Florida

you could say the matter of starting or terminating depends on where you the driver begins, but Jordan taught me that the exit numbers increase from west to east, left to right, as if you’re reading the landscape like a book.

sometimes in Crybaby Dance Club I say move like you are one long line of cursive writing, penned in silk.

no ending and no beginning.

not a collection of individual body parts, but one undulating, curving, articulated line spilling out into infinity.

highway 10 is like this.

not a collection of singular towns—so many named with stolen and skewed words from the language of the Original People the land belongs to—not unique municipalities and districts and parishes, but one long, exquisitely alive and breathing line traversing the landscape.

Gavin points out that the changing plantlife is a much more suitable and accurate indicator for when you’ve entered new terrain, more so than the arbitrary lines in the sand made by cities and states.

the land says what it has to say, the land will have its way with you

I want to tell you about what happened in Marfa, but I’m not ready yet.

I want to put words to the woman who left her body and died in front of Gavin and me, blinking right out of existence, but not yet.

I want to keep honing language that’s truly in service of the Beloved Dead, and resist the well worn path of shock-and-drama language we are accustomed to when we talk about dying.

I really just want you to know that it happened so you’ll recognize the rippling intensity behind my eyes and the elsewhere I drift to when you ask me how my trip was.

scraggle claw trees between Austin and Fredricksburg

the fluffy bushes that look like dog fennel but different near Sangovia

the spiky ground palms with a straight leggy plume that remind me of Mullein stalks

I recall what Sylvia told me the week before we left about driving cross-country, through the desert in particular. we were sipping hot and sour soup in a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta, and she sort of smirked-smiled in this mischievous way when I shared our plans and pit stops for the journey. in a not quite ominous but certainly attention-getting way, she informed me that my plan was cute and lovely and also the desert will have its way with you. the land is who is really in charge, so be prepared for your plans to pivot in little and mighty ways.

this, I was here for, albeit slightly unsettled by it. dommed by the land. topped by terrain. sloughed by the sandpaper of transit.

on the last leg of the drive, I decided I wanted a new metaphor for the act of journeying through the wilderness of the world. I’d been polished enough, rubbed raw aplenty.

driving through Valentine, Texas the phrase surfing a sensuous rainbow came to mind.

yes to being swept up by a beauty so grand that it swallows me body and spirit.

yes to awe as my north star, uncertainty as copilot, faith as surfboard.

this is the gift of friction-as-initiation.

now we are in LA, tucked into a cozy hidden cottage with a lime tree on the terrace.

next to the kitchen sink is a quote from Thích Nhất Hạnh to help the reader hate washing the dishes a little less. it suggests that you are washing, not the sticky jelly plate, but the belly of baby Buddha, and that this right here, the suds and the goo, is all there is.

in every moment you say to yourself I have arrived, I am home.

I’m thinking about this mantra while washing dishes 2,500 miles away from ho

me.

I’m thinking about the promises of the Wide Open Road and the impulse to run away from home, to get lost in the world, to see where the sky and earth make contact, to look out in 360 degrees and see a pastel dreamscape roll on forever.

one of the first albums belonging to my parents that I remember noticing as a kid was The Road Goes on Forever by the Allman Brothers.

the road goes on forever.

the road begins in the west and terminates in the east, where the land meets the sea.

some things you have to find out for yourself.

🖤