Three years ago today Tristan and I woke up in a tent in Bandon, Oregon. There had been a storm the night before and the towel I bought at Grocery Outlet earlier that night had been soaked through overnight. There were hot showers at the campsite and I took one anyway, without the luxury of a dry towel. It was long overdue. The entry in the first bocce book is a pithy three pages that hits the major points of the day: I took a shower, we stopped at a Christian coffee shop in Coos Bay, we tried to meet a friend in Eugene and failed, I read Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson aloud as Tristan drove, we met Kimberly in Salem and played bocce in a park by her house before going to dinner with her parents to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of her mom. Not mentioned were the two dozen cupcakes baked by her mom and eaten by Sophie while we were at dinner and the guilt and pain on the dog’s face when we returned, the effect of the sugar and flower on her stomach and conscience. Also not mentioned was the walk to the South Salem dive bar off Commercial where we sang karaoke which included Tristan’s rendition of “Runnin’ Down a Dream” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and his literal jog through the bar around the the KJ booth with the wireless mic in his hand at the breaks. As a corollary to this oversight, it was not mentioned how uncanny the lyrics to the song described the moment we inhabited. Not argued was that this is the purpose of pop music: general ambiguous statements that convince the listener the song is about him. Not mentioned was that I slept in Kimberly’s brother’s old room, Tristan slept in Kimberly’s sister’s old room, Kimberly slept in her childhood bedroom.
Two years ago today we left Arcata, but we went south. My friends had to return to their lives, driving buses in Oakland, giving tours on bicycle in Berlin, they could not continue with me up the coast, and I could not find a means north. The greyhound turns around in Humboldt County and goes back to San Francisco. The Arcata-Portland bus I had taken in 2004 and thought still existed no longer did. Local buses would take 6 hours and two transfers to get to Redding. It was Friday the thirteenth and flights were very inexpensive, so I bought one from San Francisco to Seattle. Two hours south of the Oregon border was as close as I would get to the state except for flying over it. The heart of the journey was cut out. The unspoken assumption that my feet would stay on the ground was made false, the continuity was disrupted, the trajectory line on the map doubled back on itself and became dotted and I woke up in Seattle with my suitcase and bocce set. My brother rented a car and picked me up at the airport.
A year ago today I was still in Arcata. We were a group of half a dozen and we played a couple of games at Larson Park and, for some reason, drank from a variety pack of Kona beers. There is no reason not to drink Steelhead exclusively when in Arcata. I wish I were doing that right now. Money was an issue, I guess. Money’s always a damn issue.
2012 was a leap year, I discovered in my research, so Saturday the thirteenth was skipped. I don’t know exactly how to unpack this detail, nor the Phil Jackon text. Perhaps a theme of dislodgment—intention, pattern, physical connection to the earth, the three states unified in a whole coast—gaps appear, a shift. The three-peat happens on the surface, but what happens underneath, in the locker room, is much more complicated. Phil Jackson understood this, let go of his need to control everything, put his faith and trust into players, and won three championships in a row three different times, a three-peat cubed.
If the world isn’t watching, though, you’re just running circles in a bar, convinced its important, that you’re running down a dream, working on a mystery and going wherever it leads, even if it just leads back to its start.
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