towards June,

beginning with a trip to town,

but in town ‘town” is “here” [as, here, “here” is here] and the town is Reno.

Or so I was schooled by Mark [truck, below] when I said I was looking for Willey and he said

Willey was “in town”.  So, back to “here”

land of skies,

‘pies

and sneaks…

unto the Friday, first of the June.  Friday the day

for a different town.  We saw golden eagles, an antelope and a whole lot of sheep going

up to Cedarville where the clinic was closed so over Cedar Pass to Alturas

[that white smudged triangle in the distance is Mount Lassen, really]

for errands and groceries where the Chevrolet/Buick Dealership, ancient-even-in-1972 when they’d replaced a torsion bar anchor* on my 1960 C10, has closed between last year and this.  The suspension tore out on Poker Jim Ridge, first trip in that truck, and how I cobbled it together to get from there to that longago town I can’t imagine, but Carsten’s had the part [truck was only a dozen years old after all], made the repair while I waited, then waited for my brother Bryan, who’d started that morning from a blackberry patch on the Oregon coast and was hitching in from Likely…or so the Sheriff told me around nine p.m. as I sat outside what passed for the Greyhound station.  Forty-six years later [to the day, could be!] I was checking the recycling center to make sure they’d accept my toasted solar batteries

before heading back over Cedar Pass to California’s most northeasterly pavement, which turns into Nevada’s SR 447 the bottom of Surprise Valley, crosses Duck Flat to tumble over and out

of the mountains to mile 84 where we turn, as always,

Down the Desert.  And Home.

Home to the only trees that were here when we arrived in 1995

[Populus fremontii Cottonwood at Wall Spring

and our sentinel Jupiter on the playa’s edge], still surviving

along with many more by now

as are we, though currently experiencing an increasingly disturbing uneasiness, a nostalgia for those innocent days of what Jon Stewart so quaintly called “truthiness” but even more over Lefty’s decline and probable demise…or maybe it’s reading Michael Ondaatje’s “Warlight”, darkly addicting.

All worrisome, some more than others.

 

M

 

* adjustable suspension, just like the Corvettes’ and similar to that in the 1964 Belvedere wagon I had much later, though there even the heavy torsion bars could not quite cope with the weight and torque of a 440.  The Chev had other [many] issues in those early Years of Exploration, but overloading the front end was not one of them.  Shearing it off on rocks, however….