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Distant Fires New friend.
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A tavern in the coastal town of Brookings,
Oregon. Chris, who I'd met half a day back, and I, were having a beer
and a chili dog before heading to camp. A woman staggered past, screaming
obscenities toward a blond man with a Fu Man Chu mustache who sat at
the bar. The man hunched a little lower over his beer, but otherwise
seemed unaffected. When she got to him, she held on to the customer
on the stool beside him for support. It seemed to be a routine.
It was the worst of possibilities for a relationship, and was painful to witness. It was time to leave. Chris followed me on his Honda racer to the peace of a campground outside of town where we threw off our jackets and shoes and walked to the beach. It was laden with snuggling couples preparing for sunset. |
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A river flowed sluggishly through the sand. In the
fading light it resembled a thin stream of molten iron separating the
beach into halves. Bleached white lengths of driftwood rested in patterns
where they'd come to rest during the last storm, and waited for the
next storm's rearrangement. Footprint shadows grew deeper. I sat on
one of the driftwood logs and dug my toes in the cold, fine sand. There
is nothing like a sunset on the Oregon coast. First of all, there are
the large dark hulks of haystack rocks, scattered out to sea like monster
sculptures half-formed and tossed from the sky by a dissatisfied giant.
Most of the time the sea batters them, sending froth flying to their pointy tips. But this sunset occurred at low tide, and the sea was calm and flat. Rings of gray mist settled around the bases of the haystacks, and as the sun sank lower it was tinged with pink and orange like the sky. Chris stood wide-legged on a large rock and stared out to sea. His backwards baseball cap, black army boots, jeans, and slightly ethnic appearance made him look tough, concealing the deeply romantic contemplations that I knew the seaside sunset must have inspired in him. Chris had told me about the romance problems he'd left at home in Virginia. I tried to think about my ex-boyfriend, Robert, who fled to Jamaica after our breakup. I imagined him sitting on the beach somewhere at that moment beneath the same moonlight. Robert and I used to go to Montego Bay on those cheap air/hotel packages and immediately leave town on a rented Honda Rebel. We'd take a day pack between us, with a change of clothes and a bathing suit. We found islander-owned guesthouses and hippie-havens on the south coast and lived on rice and peas, coconuts, and mangoes. Robert fulfilled his reggae star fantasy by dee-jaying at small clubs, and became something of a celebrity. Maybe he's doing that again. And staying with the friends we'd met together, who I'll probably never hear from again. That's what I was sad about -- the loss of mutual friends because of our breakup. But I couldn't get worked up about Robert. We'd had a passionate but destructive off-and-on relationship for years. He'd wanted too much from me, and I'd wanted too little of him. He didn't like my traveling alone. "Who would?" he said. So we broke up. And got back together, and broke up again, and again, and again. I think he's right. I don't know if anyone will ever be okay with my sometimes lengthy absences to travel. But Robert is gone now, and so am I. Our last encounter had been violent. A ripping of souls. I was glad to have torn free. The sun wavered and wobbled at the horizon before dipping below it. Yes. I was quite glad to be alone. And I didn't envy Chris, who wasn't glad to be alone, who was escaping from an unsuccessful love affair. At 26 years old, this already seemed to be a pattern. He had already escaped once, for romantic reasons, to Spain. Once there, he had learned more Swedish than Spanish, having fallen immediately in love with a Swedish student. Chris is just naive and cute enough to have this problem a few more times. We'd met at the hostel in Leggett and decided to ride together the next day. Since I'd traveled this way before, I played native guide and led Chris on backroads through the redwoods. I'd done the trip before on my Yamaha, which was quite a different experience. Though the engine is the same size as the Ural's, it has two more cylinders and twice the horsepower. I could also lean through the corners which, as every motorcycle rider knows, is akin to flying. It was also a different experience because the temperature was about 95 degrees. Unheard of in the redwoods. And I had my first roadside breakdown. We'd been running at about 55 mph for a few hours when the Ural just quit. It sounded like it had run out of gas. I pulled the clutch and coasted to the side of the road. Chris couldn't put his kickstand down in the grass, so he just sat behind me and waited. I was glad his bike and helmet were so colorful, to attract the attention of the cars that zipped by so closely. I walked around the bike, looking for something, anything, unusual, then checked the gas, the filters, and the fuel lines. Vapor lock is a common problem in hot weather. The liquid gas that flows from the tank to the carbs evaporates in the fuel lines because of the heat. This is not a good thing, because the whole purpose of the carbs is to mix gas with air so that it can be sent through to run the engine. The gas in the carburetors is supposed to be evaporated. The gas in the lines is not. When the liquid gas in the fuel lines evaporates, the two meet at the same consistency and just sit next to each other, building pressure but going nowhere, because there is no heavier or lighter substance to force the issue. So effectively you're out of gas until the gas in the lines cools down and becomes a heavy liquid again. In 100-degree heat on a 55-mph highway with a 37-horsepower engine, this is the obvious problem. Still, the mind wanders to horrifyingly complicated ordeals. A cracked block, a thrown rod, a failed part I don't have. Cars raced by at 65 mph just inches from us. My imagination flew. Adrenaline pumped through my veins. We were about 10 miles from a town. But just for the heck of it, I kicked it over. It started. Three minutes had passed. It took an hour, plus a beer in the Brookings tavern, to get back to my normal mental state. After the sunset on the beach I was completely relaxed. We took armloads of driftwood for our fire, and ate a dinner of peanut butter on wheat bagels. Three middle-aged Mexican women, from Salinas, California, were in the tent beside us. They offered their flashlight, which didn't work. I fixed it. The batteries were in backwards. They shrieked with laughter. All night they shrieked and laughed, chattering in Spanish and English. We laughed with them a lot. I guessed they were on an escape themselves. I almost enjoyed their freedom more than my own. Chris and I talked beside the fire and drank bottles of Red Dog beer. I ate most of a box of chocolates that his aunt had given him. Each piece was injected with alcohol, which he didn't like, so I got a lot of chocolate. And, I guess, a lot of alcohol. While watching the flames of the fire I began to think about a man I started to get to know before I left. He'd distracted me from Robert's haunting presence, and I'd distracted him from a similar break-up. Our voices still meet sometimes on the telephone, and his electronic letters catch up to me in cyberspace. But his physical presence is fading, and he's becoming more like a character in a dream. In my firegazing I heard his voice. In my sleep that night I dreamed that the full moon set the treetops aflame with a fire that didn't burn. |
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