California dreaming, 15 years later

Spring break 2011: A colleague and I take my California Literature class on a journey that ranges from Muir Woods to Monterey, from Big Sur to Jack London's ranch, from the bookstore that Lawrence Ferlinghetti built to the stone tower that Robinson Jeffers erected and beyond, a field trip that ranks pretty high on my list of most rewarding teaching experiences ever. 

A few times since then I've managed to take classes on shorter, less ambitious field trips, but never a multi-night trip involving airfare and car rentals and youth hostels and many meals. Such a trip would be nigh on impossible today, for reasons too depressing to enumerate: no administrative assistants to help with logistics, little access to discretionary funds or grants, an impossible labyrinth of campus purchasing procedures, very few English majors, the gradual and then sudden decline of my creaky joints.

One day in San Francisco we walked something like eight miles, largely led by students' interests. In the end one of the students commended me for my ability to keep up, but today they'd have to carry me after the first block--if I could even find students interested in making such a trip. Who's willing to pay an extra course fee and take a risk on a class that might not "count" toward degree requirements for students eager to complete their education in a mere three years? The course would be canceled due to lack of enrollment.

Now I sound like a cranky old curmudgeon longing for the Good Old Days, but I love looking back on that trip and relishing the learning that happened. This year my spring break is more constrained--spending a few days with grandkids and birds, then getting back home in time for a root canal and essential meetings. I won't be sharing photos of most of that, though you never know. Maybe readers are just begging for close-ups of my dental work? Until then, maybe we'll have to settle for California dreamin'.

Stepping in the same sea (oceans apart)

Five years ago today I sat on a beach near Carmel, California, sharing a picnic lunch with my California Literature class and watching the waves. We weren't the only ones keeping watch: news had been trickling in all morning about the Fukushima tsunami and fears that a similar wave would hit the Pacific coast.

We'd been gallivanting around San Francisco, Monterey, Salinas, and Carmel all week, learning about California literature at places important to California's writers. We'd spent the morning at Robinson Jeffers's house in Carmel and planned to picnic at Point Lobos, but tsunami warnings closed that park so we perched on a dune at another beach and carefully watched the crashing waves.

This was the last day of our week-long sojourn, which was educational and exhausting and exhilarating all at once. All morning we'd been fielding calls from concerned friends and family; my colleague who helped chaperon the trip has relatives in Japan, so our relaxing picnic was accompanied by an undercurrent of distress. With Walt Whitman we were "Facing West from California's Shores," looking toward "the house of maternity, the land of migrations" as the beginning and end of all our striving, "the circle almost circled."

We felt our closeness to the land across the sea, the same Pacific waters lapping at our feet carrying death and devastation to Japan, but of course we also felt our distance. We were safe, picnicking quietly high above the waves, while others just across the way were being swept to oblivion.

All that week we'd been, like Whitman, "Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound" and finding things we hadn't known we were searching for. Three of those students later returned to California for work or play and one worked for a while near Carmel and considers it her second home. I look back to that trip as my most rewarding teaching moment and I wonder whether I'll ever again pull off anything close to the learning experiences we found at Jack London's ranch or City Lights Books or Muir Woods or Hawk Tower.

Hawk Tower: built by hand by Robinson Jeffers, a poet who viewed building with stone and building with words as springing from the same impulse--the desire to create something that outlasts our meager existence:

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind, his heart blackening:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

We had our time in the sun; we enjoyed our sandwiches and poetry by the Pacific, grateful for the presence of peace but knowing that no ocean can completely separate us from the suffering of others. Today we remember the suffering and pray that they find peace.

The call of the mild

Before I opened my eyes this morning I could feel the presence of snow, that muffled silence suggesting that the world has been packed in soft cotton. It's just a light coating of white, but snow is a tremendous relief from the recent incessant cold rains.

And now a ray of sunshine beams into my inbox all the way from California. Some time ago--September?--a Los Angeles Times reporter called to interview me and some of my students about my California Literature class. The tone of his questions made me fear a headline like "Hicks from the Sticks Seek Gold in California," but the article has finally been published and I'm pleased to report that it's pretty good (read it here). I wish he had included more comments from my students, but the article puts my class in some pretty good company and also offers a pretty interesting reading list.

My reading list this week focuses on another sunny state. I leave for Florida two weeks from today but I've been living there in literature for quite some time, following William Bartram through the Alachua Savannah, Karen Russell through the Everglades, and Zora Neale Hurston through Eatonville. Do students in Florida and California take classes on Ohio Literature? Do they make pilgrimages to Clyde and Lorain and Columbus and Martin's Ferry during Spring Break? Do they even know why Clyde and Lorain and Columbus and Martin's Ferry are suitable destinations for literary pilgrimage? 

Probably not. I'll be sure to tell them while I'm there.

Going for the gold (star)

This morning I was talking to the pleasant young man who answered the phone at the motel in Monterey where my California Lit class stayed two weeks ago--have I lost you yet?--when he started apologizing for the weather. "I'm sorry you had such bad weather for your trip," he said, but I quickly corrected him: in a full week in San Francisco, Monterey, and environs, we got rained on only once.

"Well, it's done nothing but rain since you left," he pointed out, and he's right. I see in the news that Highway 1 to Big Sur is closed in places because of flooding, and those rich farm fields we viewed near Salinas are turning to mud. Let's give a gold star to whoever was responsible for the planning the weather on our class trip!

I'm not sure yet whether I'll get a gold star for planning the budget on the trip. In fact, I called Monterey this morning in order to ask about a discrepancy I discovered while assembling my receipts to submit to the business office: my college credit card was charged nine cents more than the amount shown on the motel's receipt. The two of us put our heads together but still couldn't figure out where the nine cents came from, and eventually I realized that the long-distance phone call was going to cost more than the nine cents I was trying to track down.

On Monday I'll submit this big batch of receipts, reports, and spreadsheets to the business office and the other entities with an interest in the trip. We were fortunate enough to get funding from several different sources, so I'll spend the afternoon Monday trotting around campus spreading joy in the form of receipts, one off by nine cents and one written entirely in some variety of Chinese and one almost entirely blank. Planning this kind of trip is an adventure in itself--one that doesn't stop until long after we've arrived back home.

Serendipity, baby

I'm feeling my way around campus today, suffering from the aftereffects of jet lag and time change and the rigors of responsibility and many cramped hours of travel with six students, and I keep hearing the same question: "Would you do it again?"

My answer: Yes, but not today. Not tomorrow either. Give me some time to collect myself and wash my socks and sort through the piles of receipts and then we'll talk.

So many things went right on this trip: terrific students, wonderful weather (only one rainy day!), pretty good (and occasionally great) food, sparkling conversations about interesting authors at amazing sites. I especially enjoyed those moments of serendipity that can't be planned in advance, like the pit stop at a farm stand where we ate deep-fried artichoke hearts and fresh strawberries and gummy frogs, or the the time we accidentally stumbled upon the perfect place to pull off and hike on craggy rocks near Big Sur. My new motto: Serendipity, baby.

I'm not feeling particularly serene today because somehow the work I left piled on my desk didn't get done while I was gone, but classes are canceled while flood waters recede so I've got some time to work through the mess. The first thing I did when I returned to campus, though, was to print out a bunch of photos from the trip and post them on the English Department bulletin board so students can see them when they return to classes. We did it! We went to California and learned things and had fun and came back in one piece! And we could do it again tomorrow!

Well, maybe not tomorrow. Wednesday will do.

From one waterworld to another

The news from Japan is horrific (earthquake, tsunami, death and destruction) and the news from Ohio is distracting (rain, snow, floods, classes cancelled Monday to let the river recede), but the news from here is less dramatic: we're fine. Really. We appreciate all the phone calls and expressions of concern, but the tsunami warnings didn't affect our travel plans at all except that we had to cancel our visit to Point Lobos, which was closed because of the threat of high waves.

We saw some high waves, but they looked pretty normal for the beach we visited, which was posted all over with signs warning of dangerous waves and undertows. We sat on the sand and shared a picnic to the sound of crashing waves, our final visit to the Pacific before returning home. This morning we climbed the tower Robinson Jeffers built with his bare hands, a labor he compared to putting together words to make poetry. Tonight we're staying at an airport near the San Francisco airport so we can catch a 6 a.m. shuttle and fly back home, where a wet world awaits.

Swimming with the otters

First of all, we weren't swimming. We were sore and tired after a long day of walking around the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and Cannery Row and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, so when we found a rocky stretch of beach, we couldn't resist taking off our shoes, rolling up our pants, and wading in the water. I'm pretty sure this was the first time I've ever stuck my feet in the Pacific Ocean. It was cold. And sandy. And cold.

Then of course we had to sit and let our feet dry off before getting back into our shoes and socks, so we were sitting on a wall brushing sand off our toes when someone called out, "Otters!"

And there they were, two frolicsome otters diving and dining beyond the rocks. We had visited the otter exhibit inside the aquarium, but seeing them in the wild was somehow different, special, as if they were our own private personal otters. I wish I could take them home with me but it would be difficult to smuggle them through security ("These are not the otters you are looking for") and it would be hard to make them behave in the overhead bins.

I also wanted to take home the jellyfishes and the kelp forest and the teeny-tiny baby seahorses, but my favorite undersea creatures are the sea dragons. They look as if they were designed by cartoonists to star in a musical involving a great deal of dancing and singing. And swimming. With or without otters.

Big Sur rocks!

I'm standing on a crag jutting out into the Pacific, waves crashing on the rocks below and laughter floating through the air and I can't stop smiling. This morning we left the city behind and drove through insane traffic and constant shifts in terrain, through pine forests and artichoke fields, sand dunes and wind-weathered rock, arriving in Big Sur in time for lunch and stone-skipping lessons followed by a hike up a steep hill to a scenic waterfall in Pfeiffer State Park, which would have been wonderful enough in itself, but then we pulled off the highway at a serendipitous spot and found a rough path down to the cliff edge where we stood like Walt Whitman facing west from California's shores, "Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound."

Like Whitman we are children reveling in the wonders of earth and feeling both very old and utterly new. Not so long ago I lay awake with a bad case of the jitters after a bout of chemotherapy and to calm myself I planned long road trips including one along this highway between Big Sur and Monterey (read it here), but at the time I wondered whether I would ever drive this road and walk these cliffs. Tomorrow we travel to Salinas and Monterey to commune with John Steinbeck and in a few days I'll be ready, like Whitman, to "face home again, very pleas'd and joyous." Today, though, I'm here and I'm happy and I wonder how anyone could live here and not be a poet.

The house that Jack built

"Rest/Read" says the sign on the green mailbox. Next to the box is an inviting bench, and inside the box is a collection of short stories by Jack London. London himself rests not far from here, or his ashes do, buried in an urn beneath a mossy boulder. We're visiting the Jack London State Historic Site, the farm where the author spent his final days.

First we visit the ruins of the dream house London built in 1913, a massive structure of stone and redwood that burned before he could move in. It makes a lovely ruin. At the cabin where the author wrote his last books we see how he organized his ideas: scraps of paper covered with his notes are clipped with clothespins to ropes festooned across his sleeping porch. The view from the porch features a koi pond and herb garden and vineyards stretching into the distance.

We share a picnic lunch and listen to a guest lecturer by Dr. Charles Crow, who taught the California Lit class I took in grad school years ago but is now retired to California. We sit beneath trees and discuss London's work as Charles draws Jungian diagrams on an invisible blackboard. We rest. We read. We carry on, as Jack would want us to do.

Heard on the street

Woman on cell phone: "Yeah, I'm unhappy with my eyebrows, I'm trying to grow them out...."

Sign on the cash register at a coffee shop: "We would be happy to take your order after you've finished your cell-phone conversation."

Student finding sticks on the ground on the path to Coit Tower: "Look, they have magic wands!"

Helpful tour guide in Coit Tower elevator: "[indiscernible] the [unintelligible] when [incomprehensible] the [unimaginable]."

Woman trying to lure us into a restaurant in Chinatown: "Yummy yummy, yummy yummy, yummy yummy" (repeat x 8000).

Wordswalk

We walked most of the day through the streets of San Francisco and sometimes we walked on words. This morning in Jack Kerouac Alley next to City Lights Books a student read us poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and this evening another student translated the characters written on the gateway to Chinatown and read from Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men.

In between we walked and walked: to Fisherman's Wharf to see the sea lions and the view across the bay, to eat fish and chips and bacon fudge and turn up our collars against the wind. Then we were off again, up to Coit Tower and down Lombard Street and then up again to Chinatown, where my students introduced a classmate to the joys of chopsticks and enjoyed an amazing meal.

Tonight my ankles and feet are complaining and my face feels tight from windburn, and I have a feeling I'll start the day tomorrow stiff and sore. But it makes me happy to recall how excited my students were to browse among the books at City Lights and then tramp around a city where words are underfoot everywhere we look.

Unhostile hostel

The light fixtures in the lobby of our hostel make me smile. Sidney opera house (upended) meets 60s mod to suggest modular clouds or birds with spectacular plumage or fat floating angels. Whatever they are, they amuse me.

The hostel as a whole amuses me. It's noisy and busy and full of lively voices chattering in many languages, but it's bustling with a freshness I find relaxing. I've never stayed at a youth hostel before and although I chose this one primarily because it provides very cheap lodging in a great location, it's turning out to be a terrific experience. The students are staying in dorm-style rooms with visitors from other countries, but I have a private room about the size of my childhood bedroom (except I don't have to share the bathroom with my brothers). True, we have to make our own breakfast and wash our own dishes, but we can do that. Besides, it's a small price to pay for lodging in the heart of San Francisco, just three blocks from Union Square.

Now I just need to get my internal clock adjusted so I can sleep past 4 a.m.

Step across this line

I think it started with the liminal nesting dolls. There we all were enjoying our four-hour layover in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport (which showed up on the boarding passes as "Minneapolis SPA" but we never found the spa) when a student said, "This is like liminal nesting dolls!" Meaning, I think, that we were straddling several overlapping thresholds, in the middle of our trip and the middle of the midwest while preparing to cross over to our California adventure.

We stepped across that line and made it to San Francisco, but not before attempting to assemble a syllabus for a Concepts of Place class focusing on Hell. What would you put on the reading list? A student suggested House of Leaves and another called for Dante's Inferno, but when I asked how we could plan a class trip to Hell, the answer was simple: Virgil Airlines.

Maybe next time. This week I think we'll stick with California.

Countdown

Ready to go? I suppose so: midterm exams graded, grades submitted, classes prepped for my return to campus.

Bags packed (mostly), petty cash picked up, maps and receipts and itineraries all present and accounted for.

Editing project submitted. Desk cleared (mostly). Bills paid? Not yet.

Cell phone, camera, netbook charged and packed and chargers packed. Still figuring out how to send text-messages. Can't find the apostrophe. Use question mark instead?

The countdown has started; we leave first thing tomorrow morning. I'm ready for California--but is California ready for me?

Listing

I live by To-Do Lists but this week as I prepare for our class trip to California I'm also working on a list of things not to do--may I call it a To-Don't List?

Don't think about bedbugs.

Don't worry about what the spouse will eat all next week. The spouse can take care of himself.

Don't start reading any big fat novels that can't be finished before Saturday.

Don't think about earthquakes. Or plane crashes. Or bedbugs.

Don't worry about the weather.

Don't pro-actively apologize for the weather. The weather can take care of itself.

Don't pack until the laundry is done. And don't pack stupidly. In fact, don't do anything stupidly.

Finally, don't forget to have fun--after everything gets crossed off the list!