A year ago today I was still where I had started three years ago. We played the most cosmopolitan round of bocce yet at the recently constructed courts right off the Embarcadero, across from the Ferry Building, at the origin of Market Street. Outside the court swirled city buses, taxis, panhandlers, people in suits, a craft fair and its goers streaming from the city, crossing the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building. And below the court arrived and departed the trains, slowing down from or speeding up for the journey beneath the San Francisco Bay, just like the courts in Monterey, historically situated between the boats and downtown, above the tunnel that takes you to the next town over, but here we are so much smaller, hardly noticeable, just two people occupying a space in the midst of hundreds immediately visible, thousands within a few blocks, and millions in the area, my hometown made infinite and incomprehensible to me, exciting and requiring somehow both more and less imagination at the same time.
A year ago today, after returning to the East Bay, gathering my things, preparing a snack, finding my way to the station in Emeryville, I took the Coast Starlight north, on the day three years ago that I began the return south. Three years ago today I had learned I got a job administering tests to non-native speakers of English. If there was ever a great call to adventure this was its opposite, the ultimately unremarkable return. From the depths of the centurion redwoods and the pounding rains of the Pacific Northwest, an echo of civilization called out to me...for two weeks...administer tests...to children...back in California...
But not today a year ago, I had just started, I was tripling the length of my trip, I would only be leaving California this evening, sometime in the middle of the night between Dunsmuir and Klamath Falls where I might wake up in my seat and see snow outside on the tracks and the station roof. Two years ago today I took that same train south, from Seattle to Salinas, ending the trip again, returning to inhabit the room I rented, to work the job that paid for it. I wrote a dozen-poem cycle about and on the train including the haiku
The Coast Starlight is
italicized because it’s
a great work of art
and encounters with other passengers in the various cars, the views out the windows, the sadness passing into Oregon and stopping in Portland, that I stayed on the train, that I “had” to stay on the train. A year ago today I was going north and I was stopping in Portland. The train north was always happier, that’s where I wanted to be, south awaited my responsibilities, ones that always felt arbitrary when the distance between us grew. The Coast Starlight south crossed the Cascades in the dark, pointlessly. Three years ago today and two years ago today I fell asleep in transit as I did a year ago today, but last year when I woke up it was just the beginning. Those January 19ths before, the book, in my mind, was already finished. I passed in and out of sleep with the rolling Gabilan hills outside my window, and came to as the text ended “Salinas!”
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