nearly done, the slog north from San Francisco

SEATTLE, WA | MONDAY, JUNE 7, 2010 | E. Helen St., Apt. A - We are home. After 88 days, 8703 miles. 

People have traveled around the globe in less time. Or they have spent a lifetime - more time - in one town, never straying. Either way, we were on the road, away from home, for three months. 


We had planned on about a month. We were interrupted. Delayed. Transubstantiation.

From San Francisco, we had about 900 miles to go. Yellow Truck was repacked, only now with another 200-odd pounds - telescoping ladder, chop saw, wood scraps for birdhouses. His suspension was sodden with all the weight. The tires could have used some air, which they didn't get until much later. The back bumper scraped the sidewalk as we pulled out of Sistah Margaret's driveway. 


The transmission was also rough. Reverse gear was pretty much gone. There'd been a couple different times already, Adrienne had to get out, push. We had backed Yellow into the drive like a drag car - they don't have reverse either. 

First and second gears were mostly not cooperating. On errands, I'd adapted to getting Yellow going in third gear. It was essentially a long slow release of the clutch. But freighted with gear, it wasn't going to work. Too much weight for him to get going in third without crapping out. 


So the last 900 miles were looking awful as we pulled out of the drive. It was 11 am. Sunny. Hot. The suspension was drunk. I couldn't find the gears without wrestling, trying and retrying after the lights would turn green, keeping people waiting, waving out the window, waving them past. It was stressful, you could say. We realized we were hungry. We made it to Mission St. I pulled to a stop in the right lane, dropped Adrienne across from El Farolito, wrestled Yellow back into gear as traffic approached in the rear view mirror. 

She went for the burritos. I would circle meantime. Without reverse, I wouldn't likely be parking, not parallel parking anyway. I needed to be able to coast in and coast out. I found Bartlett, a small side street. Coasted into a spot not quite big enough for a car, but with apartment driveways on either side. I decided I'd call Adrienne, coordinate the pickup. Her phone started ringing next to me, left in her bag. Ah well. I got out the roadmap. I would consider things, given the performance of the truck in the first few blocks. I'd barely found San Francisco on the map when an old man in a dress shirt, belt and synthetic pants came out of one of the apartments and hobbled down the stairs. He held up his hands for me to see. "You don't fit. There's not enough room for you."

I said "Sir, don't bother me. I'll be here five minutes. I'm not getting out. I'm just stopped for a second."

The old man pursed his lips. "I have to leave in a half-hour."

"Okay. That's fine. I'll be gone."

I went back to the map, staring in my lap, enraged, waiting for him to go back inside. He went back up the stairs, one foot up, then the other to the same step. Then the next stair, same one-two rhythm, pulling himself with one arm on the rail.  


In another minute he reappeared in a satin baseball jacket and hat. 


He was determined, obviously, to see me leave. Yellow fired up, the idle didn't catch, sputtered and died. That had never happened. I waited and fired again and the idle caught and I pulled out, turned onto 24th and came back to Mission. Amazingly, Adrienne was already back on the street, standing by a streetlight, the burritos in a bag under her arm. In all the traffic she didn't hear the horn. But eventually she saw me. I pulled over in a nebulous zone between parking and crosswalk. I was already getting good at finding these places. She ran across 24th and hopped in. We made it to a church on Cesar Chavez, parked in a loading only zone, sat, unlooking at anything, unpeeled our burritos. 

101 North ended up taking us all through the downtown. I'd forgotten what a nasty stretch of road it was. Must have been 40 lights at least. Before long I was putting the hazards on, eking into gear, then stopping again for the next red light. We finally made it over the Golden Gate, all shrouded in fog.

The coastal route no longer seemed like a very good idea. The first half-hour had stripped us, left us raw, not knowing enough to laugh, to just laugh and laugh and laugh.

Adrienne suggested maybe we go back to the house, call a mechanic. Looking back, it seems sensible, maybe even obvious. In most situations that would be the thing to do. 


We kept going. We went the 101. It got beautiful. Wine country. Hills and vines. Like Tuscany, Adrienne said. 

Then we tried cutting along a back road, Rt. 185, to the sea. To catch just 40 miles of the coast highway. A compromise. A concession to beauty. But the road coiled up, got all curvy and hilly. We came around a hairpin that reared up into a short steep hill, needed to shift down into second gear, and that was all she wrote. Couldn't find second, wouldn't go into gear. We slowed to a stop. I started braking, backing, letting gravity take us back down the hill until we came to a stop where we could turn around. A truck was coming the other way, also down the hill, so I stopped, not sure why, to let him go by. Then we kept backing down, rolling in neutral, around the hairpin backwards, back down into the valley, and rolled into a driveway, managed to get turned around and headed back to the 101.


Before the 101, we stopped at an onramp. We looked at the map. It was crazy. We couldn't do hills. We couldn't do lights. We couldn't start, stop or park. The only thing we had left was third, fourth and sometimes fifth gear - we had only driving, only the going, only the -in-the-midst-of-things gear. Poetically anyway, it made sense. Just the sustained-ed-ness of it all. We had found that zone of timelessness, the still moving zone of everything-held-at-bay. But every other way, the transmission's state of disrepair was impractical to say the least. Hard to get anywhere. And we still had a good 840 miles to go.

At some point, oh, how I wish it had been earlier, I discovered that if I jammed the shifter all the way to the right, in the central neutral zone, and then brought it back to the left, I could clear out the gears - realign their teeth, something - and ninety percent of the time, shift into first gear. Then the same thing to get into second - out of first, all the way to the right in neutral, then back and down into second. And then direct into the last three gears. Still no reverse. But anyway, being able to drive again in traffic, at least to get home. But I didn't figure this out until late in the day, not until the next morning, in the last miles as we approached Tacoma. And maybe the gears hadn't settled into this new order before then.


Eureka, Calif., for example. We counted the stoplights, how many we made green, so that we didn't have to stop. There were 19 stoplights in all. We made 15 of them green. I felt blessed by that. Only four to wrestle into gear, holding up our lane.

We saw some coast. Very beautiful. We went inland, over the mountains, on Rt. 199. Did I mention? It had been raining all this time, since shortly after entering wine country. I'd forgotten about the rain. And we went through the night fog of the redwood forests. We crossed two slide areas, where rocks had spewed across the road, good-sized rocks in one place, barely got thru, Adrienne called 911 to let them know, Mile 597 I think it was. Big sharp fresh rocks, tear out an oil pan. The car behind us didn't risk it. We kept going, navigated through. We couldn't stop at this point. Not even when in Willits, Calif., we saw a mural of old cars at an auto parts store, and the central image was a white shifter. Like a warning. Or maybe auspicious. So bizarre at all. We kept going.

We slept for three hours in a rest stop, curled against each other in the front seat. We parked between semi tractor-trailers. Their generators blaring. We woke up, kept going, still in the rain, rain getting in and dripping on Adrienne's feet.

As we came into Oregon, where Yellow Truck is from, he came alive, truly, which makes some sense. His tuning for nearly 30 years was for this climate. We were back up to 62 mph, driving strong, the aftermarket mist setting on the windshield wipers just right for the slow gauze of rain coming down.

We made Portland, Oregon, around 7:15 am, just beating out the Friday morning rush hour traffic. It was just building up. We slipped through, saw the slog coming from the north, already a parking lot.

We kept going. When Adrienne's Mum called, we asked her which route would have the least stoplights. How to slip into town. And as we came along the route she told us, it must have been here, during this stretch, at one of the intersections, I figured out the shifting trick. And we made it to Adrienne's parents' house, choosing the last approach to leave us coasting uphill past the driveway, so we could let the gravity of the hill roll us backwards through the gates, down the driveway. Her mum was there. Adrienne got out. Came around. They hugged.




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