Lost Coasting

The water was slate-gray, and from the back of the room it looked as if it rolled right under the hotel.  The horizon, where ocean met sky, was a strip of gunpowder black.  Sea-foam laced across the rocky shoreline.  Earlier that day, Greg had leaned against a cliff-top railing, pointed at the sea-foam, and asked, “Isn’t that dead mermaids?”

I laughed.  "Well—you're right.  The little mermaid does get turned to sea-foam, in the original story, when that prince guy won’t love her.  Jerk.”

We were on the Lost Coast.

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The Lost Coast is a stretch of terrain in Northern California’s Humboldt County that was depopulated during the Great Depression.  Because of the steep King Range Mountains, all major roads go around it.  As my parents, Greg and I found out, the only way to the Lost Coast is to drive (slowly) up a mountain, then drive (slowly) down a mountain, then curve (slowly) up another mountain, and then inch down it again.

Greg played the “Carnival of the Animals” while we descended into the fog.

While the Lost Coast wasn’t exactly lost (it was, after all, right where we expected it to be) it was some of the most beautiful country that I’ve ever seen by car.  Its natives: the coast Douglas-fir, the coast redwood, and the tanoak tree.  Every curve of the road was another ten seconds between us and the rest of the world.  The temporal barrier built—and it should be taken into account that here, the closest outposts of “the rest of the world” were the towns of Garberville and Redway, neither of which possessed a chain store.  (Garberville did, however, possess the One-Log House.  For a dollar each, we got to peek inside this edifice: a cabin built entirely from the felled and unsplintered trunk of a redwood.  The walls curved, but in the effort to make it historically accurate, shelves had been nailed up and packed with garlic and allspice.)

Our destination was Shelter Cove, a fishing village.  Topographically, Shelter Cove is a strip of cleared land at the base of tremendous cliffs, looking as if it’s about to be swallowed by the sea.  Its houses were weathered mansions, and its beaches were black sand.  The color comes from the high tectonic activity in the area: the Lost Coast is where the Pacific Plate, the North American Plate, and the Juan de Fuca Plate meet.

We ate breakfast at a cart called “Jam Buddies”, and lunch in a British-style teahouse where the menus were inside encyclopedias about nautical voyages.  Mine was called “The Atlantic Crossing,” and opened to an oil painting of the Mayflower. 

Outside, a pelican perched on a log, its saurian feet blending perfectly with the grain.  Its eyes were black and sleepy.  Mom and I came within a respectful four feet while it studied us, chest swelling and settling with breath.

The waves, thunderous waves, gathered themselves and then crashed against the rocks with drum-claps that rivaled sonic booms.  I heard them breaking through the night. 

It was my birthday.  I looked out the window of the hotel, the window that, from the back of the room, showed nothing but swilling gray water, and realized that I’d never written a story about the sea.

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The book you carry with you can color a trip.  With the right book, you can travel to two places at once: and the tension between where you are, and where the people in the book are, will lead to weird and illuminating thoughts.

I was on the Lost Coast, and I was reading a Lost Book: The Voyage That Never Ends, by Malcolm Lowry.  My copy of The Voyage that Never Ends says “Advance Uncorrected Proof: Not For Sale” on the cover.  This was the only paperback version I could find online.

            Malcolm Lowry was an author who lived in the Canadian wilderness in the first half of the twentieth century.  The Voyage That Never Ends is a collection of his unfinished novels.  Most of these are told from the perspective of his fictionalized doppelganger, Sigbjourn Wilderness.  Sigbjourn travels with his wife, Primrose (the double of Lowry’s real wife, Margerie Bonner), across the Americas; and everywhere they go, they see the scrawled graffiti, “Kilroy was here.” 

It was enough to make me want to start my own American road-trip novel.  I asked Greg if he had any ideas about characters, and he proposed someone called “Oswald the Ostrich Optometrist.”

In The Voyage That Never Ends, though, this mysterious Kilroy, who has reached every point on the map before the characters and changed it, becomes a sign of imperialism and destruction.  Malcolm Lowry wasn’t casually aware of nature, the environment, or the changes his generation was incurring: I don’t think he was casually aware of anything.  He split hairs.  He once had Sigbjourn Wilderness wonder, on an airplane, “if he had the courage to take off his shoes.”

Malcolm Lowry did have courage: perhaps not the courage to take off his shoes (who does, in the deeper sense?), but the much more profound courage to write utterly unique books.  I think he was afraid that modern society was tending toward using language at its most convenient, and least subtle.  There’s a section of The Voyage That Never Ends where the Wildernesses are riding a bus through the U.S., and gradually the description becomes nothing but the words of the advertisements they pass along the way.

            I’ve said this before (though never in my blog): it’s dangerous to homogenize language.  Human language, human communication, is like an ecosystem: it can’t be healthy without diverse and startling interactions.  That’s why I tell stories.  Stories, in their utter specificity, teach us how to be thoughtful, autonomous, and empathetic; to survive hardships; to fight stereotypes and dogmatism; and to find reasons to laugh.  (Odd reasons, perhaps.  I’m imagining a gaggle of protestors marching with signs that say, “Take off your shoes!”)

None of this should be taken for granted.

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Leaving Shelter Cove, we twisted upwards, then downwards, then upwards again.  When we finally reached Garberville, we pointed.  “There it is!”

“Yup.  That’s just one log.”

On the drive home, we stopped at a gift-shop.  One of the items for sale was a carved placard saying, “Greatness is nothing without passion.”  At lunch, we ate sandwiches and drove off with Greg’s suitcase still on top of the car.