To the South Bore

Posted on October 24, 2005 in Driving Vacations

I’m off on a road trip for a few days. We’re waking ourselves up as I write this, washing clothes, and packing the bags for the long trip up to Palo Alto and then, on Thursday, Sacramento for a DBSA state convention.

To get there, we’ll take Interstate 5 which may qualify as one of the world’s most boring freeways as it runs through miles and miles of cotton fields between the two Californias. Those who know it laugh when I say that the most exciting thing about the route is a feedlot just north of Kettleman City. Even the names of the town bore: Buttonwillow where the most exciting pastime is to stop for fast food along a small strip and Lost Hills whose surrounding terrain is flat.

Our aim is to get into the Santa Clara Valley around 7 so we avoid Silly Con Valley traffic as it spills out of San Jose into the surrounding suburbia. A freeway that was completed just before we moved to the Orange in 1999 will allow us to go around the tiny center of the city that has no downtown (or didn’t in 1999). Then it will be up Interstate 280 and off Arastadero Road for our final descent to the home of a friend in Palo Alto.

From there, I hope to be able to broadcast from there, but just what I will talk about is beyond me. The South Bay is familiar ground to me, home of many jolting memories and depressions. Maybe I will see Silly Con Valley’s long stretches of street and industrial buildings in a different kind of sunshine. I intend to make a pilgrimage out to the fetid shoreline at Palo Alto, to stand at the end of a catwalk over the marshes there and just stare stare stare across the Bay to Dumbarton Bridge. With the west wind uncombing my hair, I will wait for the tide and the fog rolling over the low hills of the Penninsula. The sound of a plane plowing the sky as it lands at San Francisco may help me keep my hands to the rail. The scent of the salt evaporators might remind me of the night we came out to this place to observe the Hale-Bopp comet. Or I’ll just remember how bored I was when I lived there, undiagnosed for my true disease, unmedicated, and subjected to the stupidities of small minds who I called “neighbors”.