Three years ago today I played an inaugural game of bocce in Monterey in California to begin a two-week trip to Seattle and back replaying the sport at least once every day. The triad of public courts is located at the Custom House Plaza which is part of Monterey State Historic Park and next to the 1826-established Custom House which is California Historic Landmark Number 1, California’s oldest public building and the site of John Drake Sloat’s premature annexation of California and raising of Old Glory on July 7, 1846. The park is the center of a compass rose in which North meets the Monterey Bay and leads out to sea, Fisherman’s Wharf extends Northeast sheltered by the rip rap of the Coast Gurad Pier, the path along the marina runs forty-five degrees to the right sheltered by the wood and concrete of Pier Number Two, Southeast leads inland to the rest of the city and on to Salinas, South continues to the historic route from the wharf to downtown, from the water to the land, Southwest takes you up the hill that denizens of Monterey call a mountain to the site, if one were so inclined, of the signing of California’s constitution, or West to the California’s First Theater whose inside I haven’t seen in decades due to unsuitable earthquake retrofitting and further west to the Presidio initially established by the Spanish, taken by the Mexico and now occupied by the United States military—inaccessible to civilians since September 11, 2001—a Presidio being a Spanish fort which I learned is not obvious to people outside coastal California, and Northwest takes you along the eastern curve of the Monterey Peninsula, along the Recreational Trail if you like, or Lighthouse Avenue which originates in the tunnel directly underneath the bocce courts—one of two bottlenecks of the Peninsula (the Presidio severs all other access) that old timers in Pacific Grove who took too much acid in the ‘60s complain will seal the death of all Grovians in the event of disaster—tracing the route of the old 17 mile drive that took the original tourists of Monterey from the Del Monte Hotel to Pebble Beach and back, taking you by what was once a thriving canning block on Ocean View Boulevard and then a bohemian playground and now a tourist trap called John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, which does not celebrate the book but profits from it. You could go in any of these directions and you should because it is no longer the center of a thriving and important city, it is a hole where such a center once was. It is a National Historic Landmark within a National Historic Landmark all of which is in the National Registry of Historic Places and none of which has fulfilled its initial purpose in a century. It is not real. Or, better, it is dead and what it was is its tombstone and those who visit don’t even know the deceased, they understand that land meets water here in a visually striking way of vague historic importance, that professional golf and motor sport may be found nearby, that on these roads they may see a famous cypress tree from a photograph, a famous bridge spanning Pacific Ocean-bound ridges. The odds of seeing Clint Eastwood are best here. 16.4 million dollars were spent on a Ferrari here, a brief record. Where downtown meets the Custom House Plaza, which also used to be downtown, the heart was ripped out in the name of urban renewal and a hotel and conference center was put in its place. Early in my life candy stores surpassed book stores in number and Monterey, California ceased to matter. Perhaps everybody feels this way about their hometowns. Perhaps we all careen like balls from end to end of the planes of this world, sections of land we mistakenly perceive as flat, slowing and stopping close to the desired location, bumping and displacing others or careening recklessly into the endboards of uncrossable boundaries.
Two years ago today I planned an anniversary series of bocce games at the Custom House Plaza courts to inaugurate a second trip and commemorate the release of a book based on the first trip the year prior. The second trip attempted to mirror the first in geography and timing as closely as possible, promoting the book in the same moment. However, the books were not printed in time—the first 50 copies arrived in the mail three days after I left—and I instead read from Travels With Charley
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set the matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
I brought Steinbeck’s travelogue as part of a visual representation of my own. On a bench along the western-most court I laid out the maps used for the trip, the notecards used for writing the book taped to the corresponding locations, the books taken and found on the trip and read during, before and after, and the photographs developed from one of two disposable cameras purchased on the third day in Marin County. One camera was lost somewhere between Sonoma County and Oregon. I first spread this image out on my floor and took a picture which I included in the appendix of the book:
I didn’t realize how appropriate the beginning of Travels with Charley was to my purpose until this moment as I stood on a bench reading these words with a dozen friends and my parents bemusedly paying attention around me.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from.
To my travel companion, this reason was collecting things he had left scattered across the coast during the 6 months he was working on a boat earlier in the year, arriving in ports of call, buying things, making friends, leaving things with new friends. To me, throwing spherical rocks in different locations was great and more than sufficient.
Next he must choose his trip in time and space, choose a direction and destination.
Time was variable as I had just quit my job. The West Coast felt inevitable, like that’s all there ever was.
And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.
As described in January 7, 2011 in the first book, “We packed up Tristan’s jalopy [Toyota Tacoma] with jars of olives from my parents’ backyard I had cured a few weeks before, camping supplies, all the food we could scrape together, clothes for a week, firewood, and Tristan’s mom’s bocce ball set. Ideally all we would need to buy was gas.”
Two years ago we finished the ceremony with rounds of bocce and I went to complete a final shift at a restaurant in Pacific Grove. The next morning I would take a bus to Oakland and meet Tristan and we would roughly retrace the journey of the trip. I would come home to find dozens of copies the book I had written about the experience I had just simulated.
One year ago today I played a game of bocce at the Custom House Plaza courts to promote the first book and release the first hand-stapled installment to the sequel that I would compose one town at a time, a third time retracing the same trajectory.
Today I sit at the kitchen table beginning the process of piecing all of these threads together, this amalgam of words written and read, this fleet of cars, trucks, buses, trains and planes and the routes they crossed, this series of games won, lost or left unfinished, this unfinished saga composed of varied trajectories and occasional confluence, I type and reread, copy and paste, I look out the window and the sun sets on another day with a purpose that I try again and fail as always to comprehend.
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