It rained in the Mojave this week. Driving up onto Cima Dome on Friday was driving into a wall of electified sleet. Immense bolts of blue lightning snaked horizontally for miles just above the surface of the Dome. I fretted about fire until I got under the storm. The windshield filled up with melting hail. The Dome was sodden.
Home.
Home.
I filled the pickup with four-fifths of my books, at least those I hadn’t given away in the previous month, and coaxed that overloaded truck over the mountains and into the desert. 420 miles of heavy wind and awkward center of gravity, an ungainly migration, and it had daunted me Thursday morning as I carried the boxes. Flinging yourself into the abyss is a scary thing to anticipate. I needn’t have fretted. Rolling down the east slope of the Tehachapi Mountains I felt it leave, this stale and cloying sadness I have carried in me the last months. It evanesced, blew off toward Harper Lake in shattered wisps under Mojave’s constant wind, and I was free.
Home.
A notable change, this change. The human lifespan being what it is, the number of times you can leave a place you’ve lived for a generation is somewhat limited. This will be my second time. I suspect that if I live in any other place for a generation, I’ll leave it with my bootsoles pointed at the horizon.
Right now I’ve got my gaze pointed that way.
I’ve got a place to stay starting in July, in Nipton, in a small house 400 feet from a mainline train track, and only 16 miles from Joshua trees. I’ve got a post office box in Cima, CA, 92323 — something I’ve long desired — and you can send me a letter there at PO Box 43. I’ve got a storage locker in Barstow with four-fifths of my books in it. I’ve got a 14-foot truck reserved to haul the rest of my belongings down there on June 1.
Which means my last full day in Pinole, and quite possibly my last day living in the Bay Area, will be May 31, 2008.
This will be five years, almost to the day, since I started Creek Running North. I find the logic irrefutable.
Creek Running North is shutting down.
I’m a firm believer in the merit of a finite lifespan for projects artistic and otherwise, and my intent in starting Creek Running North was to describe the world around this creek down the hill from where I sit typing this, and I may never see it again after this week. I ranged crazily afield, but the creek was my pole star: For five years I always found my way back to it.
Obviously, I can’t do that anymore.
I’ll still maintain a website here, and it will still have some of my writing on it, and after July some of that writing, from time to time, will be quite new. I expect to spend almost all my writing hours working on potential print, but there will likely be observations and passing thoughts and photos and such that fit nowhere but on a site like this. Many of you have invested in the work I’m doing this summer, and in any event the site represents a little income I can’t walk away from too blithely. It won’t be a blog in the sense of having a blogroll and linking to slagfests and playing the circular-argument status game. It will be a place for the writing, for occasional photos, for environmental politics in appropriate measure, maybe a podcast or two. Lots of ambient sound out there in the desert, you know?
But not until July at the earliest. And it won’t be called Creek Running North.* Because Creek Running North is shutting down.
This isn’t, however, the last CRN post. I have one more left, a good closer, on a topic that’s long been an undercurrent here and whose subject really deserves a bit of notice.
That final CRN post will be up before the end of May.
This morning I woke up in the Central Valley, got in the truck and intended to head for home. Pulling to the mouth of the motel parking lot, though, about to turn onto Route 46, I realized I didn’t know where home was. I sat there, turn signal indicating a left, waiting for the traffic to clear, and I looked rightward. Down that way lay the Carrizo Plain, the Coast Ranges, the Salinas River and the coast. I had a talk with myself sitting there.
It’s longer, I said.
I sneered at me in response. So? It’s not like anyone’s waiting for you up North.
But I have work to do. Packing and such.
And you’ll get that done today?
No. But still,
Still nothing. When’s the last time you were in Paso Robles? Was Reagan still president? When are you gonna be this way again?
But the gasoline. 4.10 a gallon here, and this was cheap for the neighborhood.
So do the math. It’s what, an extra ten bucks to go this way?
I’m already in the left turn lane.
You’re such an idiot. No one’s behind you.
I waved the sirenian me away impatiently. Places to go. Things to do. The traffic cleared, and I pulled out into the road, and I turned right anyway, went toward the coast. I just figured it was time to start setting an example.
* And I have no ideas for names whatsoever.
Go in beauty, Chris. Thanks for everything. And leave a forwarding address, when you do come up with a name, hear?
Did you head up Hwy 1 or the 101? We’re camped just a few feet from the Salinas these days, and would have loved your company. I sent you mail, anyway, about the ‘yak.
Damn, you made me miss the Dome. It’s now been a year since we were there.
We’re camped just a few feet from the Salinas these days,
Aw hell.
I coulda brought scones and coffee instead of eating the execrable boiling cheese omelet at the Wild Horse Cafe to the dulcet tones of Bill O’Reilly.
Dale, whatever I do with the web will likely be here, excepting of course a guest post or two or ten at the Desert Blog.
Chris:
It’s been a good run. I put you on my list of frequently-visited sites as soon as I knew about CRN, and I’ve enjoyed your posts.
Speaking as another writer, your delicious words have evoked inspiration, admiration, and sometimes even intimidation. (It scares me how well you write, because some tiny part of me insists there’s only so much good-writing-ness to go around—if other writers are too good, my own writing might suffer.)
We all got to meet Zeke through you, in the most beautiful and touching way. From my point of view, the whole CRN effort was worth it just for that.
Just in knowing about Tuvan throat singing, my life is immeasurably better. (Okay, that’s a joke.)
I hope to keep in touch.
...
One of the great things about living in a really small town: You can get a PO box number smaller than your age.
Go well, and safely, Chris. Thank you for the beauty and the companionship; I look forward to reading new writing of yours and applaud your courage. It’s hard to imagine a blog world without CRN, but the important thing is that you’ll be thinking and writing, perhaps with much more flow and focussed direction than the blog afforded. Whatever it is, I know you will be opening your heart to your eventual readers. Think of me when you look up at the stars; I’ll be wishing you well.
Peace and happiness, Chris.
It can only get better. :) See you in the new place with no name.
“Coyote Crossing” would be just fine, but don’t take “Fauns Cross Here.” I’m laying claim to that one.
Not to be selfish or anything, but when CRN ends, will it be taken down totally (i.e. when we check back here will we just get a 404?) If so, then some of us are going to have to scramble to copy everything from the last five years for ourselves before it disappears.
Not that such copying would be such a bad idea in any case.
Side personal note: that piece of paper we’ve been waiting for came in the mail yesterday. It’s got my name backwards, my wife’s name wrong, and our street address mis-gendered (“Queens” where it should be “Kings”), but it’s got the VIN right and is notarized. It should work. If it doesn’t, then we’re going outlaw.
Not that going outlaw would be such a bad idea in any case.
Godspeed, Chris.
Well Chris, we’ve just missed each other again! Wednesday we were in Nipton and Thursday camping in the Ivanpah Mountains near Riley’s Camp after having circled Clark Mountain!
Best of luck with the wander and your time in Nipton—you’ll soon be sleeping through the night wondering if a single train has passed.
Hope everything continues to go well for you!!
How about Desert Dreaming or Desert Dreams for a blog name. I will be looking forward to the last CRN blog.
“Coyote Crossing” sounds like a very fitting name.
Thanks for all the great writing so far, and best of luck in all your future ventures.
I wish you every happiness and all the best for the new blog.
I’ll still have a little bit of nostalgia for the CRN that was.
Still, the Blog is dead, long live the Blog!
How about Desert Dreaming or Desert Dreams for a blog name.
Or “Midnight at the Oasis”?
good luck chris…this has been a blog i read everyday for a few years now…and i will miss it
about the new blog name…how is faultline tied to the creek? i love the faultline theme in the url coz your writing frequently appears to be from the trembling junctures of metaphorical tectonic plates
Chris, you need to know about this:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/587757
Sorry I don’t have full-text access.
Thanks, Sven.
That Pellmyr guy sure is prolific.
Gonna miss reading here, tío. Glad to hear it won’t be gone altogether.
Clever, clever buck!!
Have you read Gary Snyder’s essay Coyote Makes Things Hard? If not, you should. It’s in his latest compilation Back On The Fire, and was a foreword to a collection of Maidu creation tales.
In re the changing of the blog and its name:
Reflecting the change in your locale and hence your local hydrology, might I modestly propose…
“Creek Running Nowhere”
Or not.
There is such achingly beautiful, full bodied longing in this post. Not the kind that’s empty of purpose. Not the kind that leaves you wandering and reaching for the vapid commercial of “want for the sake of want”. The kind instead, that inspires me to drive great distances for the love of being consumed by earth’s unblemished and outstretched hand. The kind that makes me miss reading all the things you’ve not yet written.
Thank you for having the guts to do what you’re doing and thank you for letting me come along for the journey thus far.
- Misty
I really like “Coyote Crossing.”
“Canis CalTrans” might be fun too, though.
(For those not in the know, “CalTrans” is the short form of the California Dept. of Transportation, which maintains Calif. highways. Coyotes, smart critters that they are, can often be seen on the roadside, helping clean up the roadkill. Along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, there are large herds of mule deer. Every year during their spring migration from the low-country to the high-, masses of them cross Hwy 395, and a significant number of them get aced by traffic. To the local coyotes, this has to be Xmas and Thanksgiving rolled into one.)
take care, chris. look forward to what’s next.
Like many others here, I’ll miss my daily visit to your Creek, Chris. But it’s great to hear the clarity and engagement with which you open your heart to your new life (and that eventually, you’ll share some of that with us).
Over the hill and into the sunrise: go well.