Jeremy flew to Oslo on the solstice and we are all trying to be very brave about it. He sent a picture of a gorgeous 1am twilight. But this morning I got two more Heath Ceramics salad plates in another suburban parking lot transaction, so who is the real adventurer here, hm?
The last couple of rides on Lenny I have been struggling to level up, to lighten my contact, to make my signals imperceptible, so it was pretty nice today to be able to cue the trot invisibly, by flexing my inside hip. The hard part – one of the hard parts – about riding is getting the timing right. (Other hard parts include Paying For It and Not Falling Off.) I know the theory but theory gets you almost nowhere. Lenny is alive and sparkly and opinionated and I need to be able to react to him in near-real time, and it’s only after four years of very patient and consistent training that I can be strong and quiet enough in the saddle for him to hear me. I adore him. What a pony.
I drive back from the summery oak-savannah hills to into a curtain of grey fog. The garden is too windy to sit in most afternoons, but even here the green grass has turned pale gold. Mountain garland and wine cups and farewell-to-spring have taken over from the globe gilia and tidy tips. Their gaudy colors mean it’s almost time for Pride, and then Jeremy will be home, and then maybe Karl the Fog will ease off a little and let us have some summer evenings on the deck, with a little Hendricks and tonic.
We have the contractors back in to rip out the Mamie Eisenhower pink bathroom (I know, what barbarians, but it was leaking) and replace it with Fireclay tile and a shower under the skylight. Opening the walls revealed, as expected, eldritch horrors, most notably that the upper staircase was supported by an angled 2×6 resting on its narrowest edge.
I’m no expert but that ain’t right. While the house undergoes what’s essentially a heart transplant, the main level is a carnival maze of plastic walls with zippered doors. We’re still working from home, camping in the kitchen, on the deck and in the garden.
Luckily it’s spring and the garden is a little ridiculous, unphotographable. The box elders and grapevine are back with a vengeance, velvet green leaves casting dappled shade. The sticky monkey flower, purple and hummingbird sages are in full bloom and the meadow is a riot of poppy, tidy tips, Chinese houses, flax, globe gilia, bird’s eye gilia, the last of the five spot and baby blue eyes, Douglas iris and mountain garland. Fluffy black bees as big as your thumb buzz from poppy to poppy with panniers full of emergency-orange pollen. It’s gaudy, excessive.
Because we’re further up the hill than the Mission, closer to the edge of the fog-tide, it’s often windy back here, and I’m aware of the atmosphere as a restless, oceanic thing, always in motion. The bathroom will be tiled in celadon and silver-blue, with a terracotta sink. Earth, meadow and air. Opening the walls of my own heart reveals, as expected, eldritch horrors, but what a privilege it is to rebuild this lovely old home, make it sound and safe for the next fifty years.
The city is strange and gorgeous at the dark end of the year. Summer lingers into September, and then on October first, as if someone had flipped a switch, it’s suddenly and irrevocably fall. You crave soup and pie. By November you are riding your bike to yoga in a dry sunlit cold that makes your bones ache.
Last week Lenny and I had a private lesson with the boss trainer to work on our canter depart. I’ve been riding for forty years but this program demands absolute correctness, and it’s fiendishly difficult. To canter, you sort of pick the entire horse up with your thighs and put him back down on his outside hind leg. Oh, and you sit perfectly still while you are doing it. Sound impossible? It is.
And then Lenny and I came around a corner and I saw where our canter depart should be, and I showed Lenny, and he stepped into it, soft and round and through. For a blinding instant I felt superpowered. We have yet to reproduce our feat.
On the drive home the marine layer rolled in with the early sunset. 280 was a freeway through giant trees – not mere redwoods, but dense black trees so huge they blotted out half the sky. 21st century cars zooming through a primeval forest, the landscape of the reptile brain.
Riding – not even bothering to compete, just riding for its own sake – is the most ephemeral of arts, there and gone almost before you can acknowledge its presence. Like the city circling the sun as the planet spins on its axis, that scrubbed-clean sky, those ghosts of monstrous dawn sequoias; I write them down because memory is the only trace they leave. As John Darnielle sings, “All of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” To live is to bear witness.
From Barcelona through Chris’s community in Vidalia and over the Pyrenees to Villerouge-la-Cremade, and back again. Cathar castles and Montserrat and the Med.
Even more beautiful: from San Francisco to Redding and up and over the Cascade Range and along the Rogue River Valley to Reed College in Portland. The State of Jefferson, the high desert where my wild horse Lenny was born.
My niece and her excellent husband safely married, we flew home (via shenanigans) to find our little home and our pride of housecats lovingly tended by yarnivore.
Driving to the barn last Friday I had to brake from 65 to a dead stop in the fast lane. The physical shock of deceleration meant I didn’t panic when the BMW that had been tailgating me had to drive up onto the soft shoulder to avoid hitting me. The traffic crawled for twenty minutes around the golf course near Crystal Springs. No one got impatient because as fire trucks and ambulances pushed through us it became evident that whatever had happened was very bad.
The highway patrol was letting one lane through. As I drove past I saw a tarp covering something instantly recognizable in the middle of the empty lanes. I saw a red hatchback crumpled up against the middle divider, and I think I saw the driver’s face, a woman, bereft.
i found a news story afterward that said her passenger had tried to cross the four lanes of 280 to get help, and that he had not survived.
He has haunted me all week. I rode Lenny that afternoon. His coat is like satin over hard muscle. He looks like a war horse. I’d be scared of his vigor if I didn’t already know how to dance with him. My garden is putting on a last glorious show before the heat. My Matilija poppy and hummingbird sage are flowering for the first time. Last night I cut two Frog Hollow peaches into rough cubes and put them in Hendricks and tonics to drink out on the deck while my friends the crows serenaded us.
The world is changing and I have never loved my life more. I feel them all around me, all the dead, and I try to make sure their deaths mattered. I feel him too, trying to get across the freeway to Crystal Springs. What they whisper is that this coffee, this little garden, this breath of wind, life, is a gift.
Riding our bikes to the beach or GG Park used to be An Event, and now it’s just what we do on a sunny Saturday when we have no other plans. All the colorful houses looked brilliant and happy. We stopped at wushu to catch up with Philip and wholeheartedly recommend “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” The dunes were reclaiming Great Highway, and there was a huge party along car-free JFK, a place so joyful that it can make a middle-aged murderbot question her misanthropy.
The Presidio has a new park, Battery Bluffs. We found and explored it, then turned towards home via Crissy Field and Marina Green. There was a Ukraine protest at the Ferry Building, and games at both the ballpark and the stadium. At Crane Cove we lay on the grass by the water, my with my head on Jeremy’s lap. I read a fantastic fic about the gay pirates, got a little sunburned. This city, you guys, my God, it’s so fucking good.
…life in a city near the sea or near the mountains where the sun shines for an average of half the day. My house would have a living room, big kitchen, bathroom and one bedroom for each of the family, and my work would be so engrossing that while I did it I would neither notice nor care if I was happy or sad.
After a pretty good run of books, including two history/biographies each of Imperial Rome, the First Fleet, the Donner Party and Hollywood in the seventies (spoiler: it’s settler colonialism all the way down), I have come to an annoying halt. You know when you pick up this book and that and you KNOW they’re good and if you were in another mood you would devour them, but today, eh? That.
Mostly, I think, it’s that I want to read more books exactly like Emma Southon’s Agrippina and A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Imagine I, Claudius rewritten by Tamsyn Muir: hilarious, serious, queer and profane.
I want this kind of telling of my own history, but the closest I found were the biographies of Esther Johnston, my umpty-great grandmother the Jewish convict and First Lady of New South Wales (Esther), and of her contemporary – NOT friend – Elizabeth Macarthur (A Room Made of Leaves). Weirdly, both books end halfway through the story, with Esther’s triumphant closure being social acknowledgment by Elizabeth, while Elizabeth’s is feeling a sense of connection to her Paramatta farm despite knowing perfectly well that she had wrested the land from it’s traditional custodians.
I mean, those narrative choices make sense when you consider that Esther died an alcoholic widow and Elizabeth’s entire life was mythologized to justify the attempted genocide of the indigenous people. The true stories are kind of a bummer and don’t fit traditional (imperialist) Chosen One story structures. But this is where Emma Southon is so fucking good. Agrippina’s story is also embedded in histories of violent dispossession and oppression, but Southon embraces the ambiguity and complicity and tragedy. Plus there are jokes and swears.
The Donner Party books – The Indifferent Stars Above and The Best Land Under Heaven – came closer to scratching that itch if only because there is no way to frame that story as anything like a triumph. The worst you can do (and this has been done plenty) is to cast it as a weird aberration, a sort of Californian Dyatlov Pass incident, whereas in fact it’s the logical consequence of white Western expansionism, manifest destiny literally eating its young.
And that’s how you get the US state of California, superimposed (by force) on the Bear Flag Republic and the Mexican Californios and Spanish Alta California and before and throughout all of that a landscape of indigenous cultures and languages maybe as ancient and diverse as those in Papua New Guinea. I went on to read The Mighty Franks and Hollywood’s Eve, both of which have to reckon with the titanic legacy of Joan Didion, the ur-pioneer. And look, back in the 90s I venerated Didion like any other young white woman would-be new journalist, but when you read Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting and are reminded of her callous line on El Salvador, “Terror is the given of the place,” that veneration turns a little sour. Given by whom, exactly?
Hollywood’s Eve makes a decent case for Eve Babitz – sensualist, humanist – as a counterpoint to Didion’s ironic analyst, but it’s weird and deeply Californian that each in the wake of profound personal tragedy has taken a hard right turn. I can’t think of a neat way to end this post. History, and especially history with white women in it, is just like this: frustrating, messy and inconclusive.
(As I was thinking about this post and its title, I pulled up Bosch’s altarpiece of the same name and looked at it on my large high res monitor. Did you know that it is a motherfucking masterpiece? I shared this insight with my pocket coven, most of whom, unsurprisingly, were already fans.)
Between coaching sessions with engineers, I sneak outside to pull white-ramping fumitory and Bermuda buttercups out of my garden. It’s the same meditative headspace as doing a jigsaw puzzle, with added sunshine and birdsong. I actually like and respect the buttercups and especially the fumitory, with its feathery leaves and pink-tipped white flowers. But I like the hummingbirds and native bees and the sprouting meadow wildflowers that support them even more.
The first time I remember wanting a garden was reading Kate Llewellyn’s The Waterlily, years ago. While “some outdoor space” was high on our list in hunting for this house, a large, level, undeveloped yard seemed so unlikely it didn’t even occur to me to want it. (Large by SF standards: 25 by 45 feet. A fortieth of an acre.)
The me who didn’t garden seems a stranger to me now.
I’m out here every chance I get. My fingernails are black with loam and clay. I meant to restore a postage stamp sized patch of Ramaytush land. Who’d have thought that the land meant to restore me.
My garden has been a gift all quarantine. My whole life I’ve hardly enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed Bic, Emma and Precious, the City Grazing goats who took down the worst of the weeds. After Marco and his team pulled out the raised beds I didn’t want and built a retaining wall and stairs, I started planting, and I haven’t stopped. There’s still one big raised bed at the back for a kitchen garden. So far I have nasturtiums, white sage, rosemary and wood strawberries, plus a young Eureka lemon to complement the neighbor’s Meyer lemon that leans over our fence. The rosemary, lemon and a potted jasmine are the only non-natives I bought.
Everything else is hyperlocal, from Bay Natives, Mission Blue or Yerba Buena nurseries, Annie’s Annuals or Larner Seeds. Ceanothus, ribes, coffeeberry, coast live oak – the keystone species. Bay laurel – much more delicious than dried bay leaves, we put it in all our soups and stews. An arroyo willow. Native grapes, Dutchman’s pipevine for the swallowtails, silver lupine for the Mission Blue butterflies, narrow-leaved milkweed for the monarchs. Hummingbird sage, blue eyed grass, variegated yarrow, coast buckwheat. A bog with sword fern and chain fern and douglas iris. A pond with seep monkeyflower and rushes, which is doing extremely well and which I hope will attract frogs. Yerba buena trailing down the retaining wall. Two elegant Dr Hurd manzanitas that, goddess willing, will grow into sinuous, sculptural rainbow beauties.
It doesn’t look like much yet. I am in constant battle with the Bermuda oxalis, wild radish and those bastard arum lilies. Everything else is barely knee high. But every chance I get I loll out here in a comfy blue lounge chair, listening to contentious crow parliaments in the neighbor’s lillipilli, watching hummingbird aerobatics, loving the sweet descending melody of gold-crowned sparrows. There are fat red-tailed hawks who coast from the hill to the canyon, often with an escort of angry crows. I leave almond offerings on the deck railings for the members of this murder, whom I dearly love. I planted a bog. I am a real bog witch now.
A Muir Woods park ranger once remarked to me that she saw in these structures the great redwood forests that had been cut down to build them, and so those tall groves up and down the coast were another ghostly presence.
Posted in bookmaggot, san francisco|Comments Off on recollections of my non-existence, by rebecca solnit
In February I moved to a new barn; in March we moved house and I started a new job. Also in March, of course, the shelter-in-place order came down, and we have been isolating ever since.
All at once, the house was a space station. I don protective gear for away missions, and decontaminate in a scalding shower when I get home. Everyone else stays home and communicates only over network links.
Don’t know when we’ll hug our friends again. Don’t know when we’ll see the rest of our family. But the house is glad to have us here, and I am glad we have each other.
