Walter “Sweetness” Payton (pictured on my shirt) famously ran hills in the heat, first on a sandbank of the Pearl River outside his hometown of Columbia, MS and later on the landfill in Arlington Heights, IL now known as “Payton’s Hill.” As part of the sports and fitness fantasies sustaining me for nearly 58 years, I draw inspiration from trying to replicate my heroes’ feats, albeit with age-and-ability-appropriate modifications.
So, on the hottest day of the year, I wear Walter to the local landfill at Seal Point Park to run my own version of his workout. Sweetness called his hill “The Widow-Maker.” I call mine “Motherfucker.”
On the dirt trails up from the parking lot and/or the stairs cut into the bay side of the hill, the workout is sprint up (about 30 seconds) walk down (about 90 seconds) x 10. On a good day, allowing for a few extra steps at the end of each lap, I finish that HIIT (high-intensity interval training) workout in 23 minutes.
Spotify plays my Run list from the phone in my pocket. Other distractions from the pain include pelicans gliding low above the bay, the rare hare bounding along the trails, and even a snake slithering across my path.
Then there is the human wildlife, the regulars who inhabit the hill, all given secret nicknames for their attire, their physique, or their other bodily adornments. On any given day there’s Beanie, Lefty, Sideboob, Osama, Chihuahua, and Ab-Tats.
To keep myself going on those 10 laps, self-talk:
1. “Get one done.” 2. “That’s two for you.” 3. “Feeling it now.” 4. “Starting to sweat.” 5. “Halfway.” 6. “More than halfway.” 7. “Just three more.” 8. “There’s that one-mile buzz on my smartwatch.” 9. “I can’t breathe.” 10. “Come on, Motherfucker.”
In that last one, I address both the hill and myself as opponents. Throughout my “athletic” career, that 12-letter word has always issued challenge. It’s the gauntlet thrown by pick-up basketball foes and anyone ready to fight or at least find out if you’re ready to fight.
Like Sweetness, every day that I run hills in the heat, yes, I am ready to fight, at least against myself.
After dark on May 2, D.C. wasn’t overly hot, walking from my de facto headquarters at The Hamilton back to Hotel Harrington. The night held just a hint of humidity, a soft blanket that subtly alluded to the city’s notorious sweat soakings.
Nothing even happening at Harry’s, the often-rowdy dive bar in the Harrington, which is a dive hotel like the one where Robert Blake and Tom Ewell lived in the old Baretta TV series. But it’s worth staying there for the old-school “charm” at half the price of anywhere else such a short walk from the White House and even more importantly The Hamilton.
But up in my room, where the blackout drapes almost met closely enough to keep the light out, CNN let me know we’d feel heat the next day. The news broke about the Supreme Court’s draft opinion re: Roe v. Wade.
Sleep with CNN spicing my dreams segued into waking surrealism. The candidate’s team communications platform overflowed with internal messages, mostly of the wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth variety. I would have to directly phone the candidate back in Houston to sort this out.
And it would have to happen while walking to the day’s destinations, familiar haunts from my past D.C. visits. I refused to forego the pilgrimages I’d planned on top of a two-day out-and-back from San Francisco to D.C. built around representing my client, Fit Kids, at the Aspen Institute’s Project Play Summit.
The call came at 10 a.m. from the candidate — Cameron “Coach Cam” Campbell, known for the #GridironGrit he brings from his football coaching career to his campaign to “go to state” as the representative for Texas House District 132. Yes, in Texas, it takes nothing less than #GridironGrit grit for a Black man to turn a red seat blue.
Between Coach Cam’s infant and toddler in his office and the street shouts and sirens that started to wane when I walked the gentrified U Street Corridor, we somehow managed to mostly understand each other. I would duck into Busboys and Poets, the progressive bookstore/cafe, for inspiration…
…and I would take my findings — which this time included The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander and Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus — to a proper office to compose a statement on SCOTUS for Coach Cam’s consideration.
In my booth at Ben’s, fueled by the vibe and an Original Chili Half Smoke, I wrote: The Supreme Court opinion that came out yesterday demonstrates the vast overreach and ruthless power grab of the political right, reaching right down into the most intimate and personal aspects of women’s lives. The right, embodied by the Republican Party, does this against the will of the people they are sworn to represent. It is up to us as individuals — politicians and constituents alike, starting at the local level — to use our voice and our vote to protect our legal rights. The Supreme Court stands poised to trigger the worst of what Texas Republicans already have decided. Our best defense against the violation of our civil rights and human rights is to remove Republicans from power, and I intend do so in HD 132.
With Coach Cam more or less signed off on that, a long, hot walk had me hit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian an hour before closing. On the way there, and then to happy hour at Off the Record in the famous Hay-Adams Hotel, glimpses of the Washington Monument, the U.S. Capitol, and the White House had me feeling some type of way.
The sight of the buildings themselves are so iconic, so burned into my brain as a patriot-in-training from earliest memory, that they raise a reverence. But knowing what their residents and honorees perpetrated is just as breath-taking.
Sitting in Off the Record — elbow-to-elbow crowd clamor drowning out CNN’s continuing coverage of the not-yet-24-hour-old SCOTUS news — I wondered who around me shaped policy in which ways. In those surroundings, politics feel real.
It was nothing a stop at headquarters couldn’t cure. So I walked back out into higher heat and humidity than the night before.
About 20 years ago, I consulted to Clifford Robinson, founder of Juneteenth.com. So, when June 19th suddenly became a federal holiday, I was happy for Clifford. I was happy for anyone who felt “seen” or “centered” or “redeemed” or “triumphant.”
But I was also feeling some type of way. I didn’t quite know why until I saw this:
We asked for extensive voting rights protections, defunded police depts w/resources reallocated to education, job training & other essential &underfunded areas, criminal justice system overhaul and reparations.
And what did White folks do instead? Gave themselves a day off work.
— Candice Marie Benbow (@CandiceBenbow) June 16, 2021
@CandiceBenbow nailed it.
Still, I wanted to know first-hand if the Juneteenth vibe felt any different now that the holiday had gained white recognition. So, I headed to Oakland for the afternoon.
First stop was the home of Jilchristina Vest at the corner of Center St. and Dr. Huey P. Newton Way, painted on one side with a mural of the women of the Black Panther Party and its first floor converted into the just-opened Black Panther Party Mini-Museum@The Mural.
That event was festive and low-key. A block party featured a DJ, a food truck, and horseback rides. It was a 15-minute wait to get into the museum, which at 1,000 square feet, and still in pandemic days, accommodates just seven or eight people at a time.
I was glad to Venmo the suggested $15 donation on my way in, and even happier I had done so on the way out. Some of the sights seen:
Jil asked us to limit our museum time to 30 minutes. I could have stayed longer, not that there was a lot more content to consume, but because the space echoed with what the Panthers meant to their community. Before leaving, I chatted briefly with Jil and signed her guestbook.
Next stop was the official Juneteenth celebration at Lake Merritt Amphitheatre. I never made it. Traffic and parking was so prohibitive that I parked a mile and a half away and walked downhill to the lake. I passed a UPS truck blaring “What’s a Telephone Bill?”
“Hey, man!” I yelled over the bass. “I am loving that Bootsy!” Dreads in the brown uni lugging a package across the street fired me a raised fist.
When I hit Grand Avenue, the exhaled smoke scent thickened. So did the sidewalk traffic and roar of backfiring motorcycles and 808s booming out of cherry ’64s.
I took a lap through and around the vendor tents near the Lake Merritt Pergola. I saw scant sign of Juneteenth or its historical significance. Instead, I saw this.
My other obligations that Saturday kept me from staying. Maybe that’s a good thing because two hours later and two blocks away:
So, by Sunday morning, I had my answer. “Official” Juneteenth celebration vibe may have changed. Otherwise, same old shit.
This Coronavirus Diary must end sometime. That time is now, with the State of California, where I live, officially “re-opened” 15 months after the shelter-in-place-order.
It is a moment of closure in my experience of the Coronavirus Crisis. That’s not to say the pandemic is over. We all experience this situation differently. Those who suffer from sickness or lost loved ones may never feel the pandemic ending.
For me, even after a gradual return to my old life in the two months since my second vaccination, the state re-opening is a watershed. The re-opening means communal recognition that the health threat has passed, at least for those vaxed, which is an even greater uplift than the relief and joy of feeling safe as an individual.
So, to close this diary, here are highlights of the weeks between my individual vaccination and our communal exultation.
The day after flying to Milwaukee to visit my parents, our first flights in nearly two years, my daughter Eleni and I jogged the bluffs at Klode Park and took time on the beach to thank nature for delivering us.We timed our trip for “ASAP after vax+2 weeks” so we could see Papa and Lulu after almost two years apart. We celebrated Papa’s 80th with a family dinner about a month after his actual birthday.Molly hosted me for a much-needed catch-up conversation on the balcony of her new home.Fire seemed to be a theme of our friend gatherings. Beth hosted a “Jake’s in Town” bonfire.Molly, Beth and The ’82 Project crew, plus many others, have taken Eleni under their wings when she visits my parents–a source of my great pride in friends and family. Here, Eleni, Mark, Tom, and Liz show off their “Jan’s Pack” bracelets worn in support of an ’82 classmate courageously facing health struggles.On the next leg of my trip, in Chicago, my worlds started colliding. As a member of the Redwood City Racial Equity Mural Steering Committee, my eyes are opened even wider to murals (which is not to say I’m “woke”.) As a Chicago ex-pat, I follow the city’s news. After learning of The Firehouse Community Arts Center and its effort to intervene in violence among North Lawndale neighborhood youth, I arranged a visit.Pastor Phil Jackson, who founded the The Firehouse Community Arts Center, welcomed me into his inner sanctum and toured me through the facility. We kicked it for a couple hours, covering our backstories, my writing of “The Black Book,” his writing of “The Hip-Hop Church,” our thoughts on whoever wrote “The Good Book,” other authors (Frantz Fanon for me, Greg Boyle for him), which Chicago Public Schools to call on for a free trial of the Fit Kids program that I represent, how art heals, basketball, sneakers, rap lyric quotations, civil rights history, the movement’s various visionaries, economic empowerment, and too many other topics for my frantic mind to remember. We learned a lot and now know we need to work together.The day after meeting Pastor Phil, still all about the arts and seeking ideas for my mural folks back in the Bay, I passed this one on Lake Shore Drive while walking from my friends’ place where I was staying down to the Art Institute of Chicago for the Bisa Butler exhibit.Mind. Blown. “Bisa Butler: Portraits” is the best art exhibit I’ve ever seen. One signature moment was viewing this quilt, titled “Southside Sunday Morning.” The variety of personalities shown in their poses and the distinct differences in the hauntedness of their eyes speaks to the individual and collective experiences of Black people in the United States.This detail of “Southside Sunday Morning” homes in on those facial expressions.Another favorite was “Les Sapeurs.”Look what she can do with eyes and facial expressions in this detail from “Les Sapeurs.” With fabric!Same here.And here.“Four Little Girls, September 15, 1963” grabbed me because it depicts those killed in the infamous 16th St. Baptist Church bombing, including Denise McNair, elder sister of my friend Lisa McNair.This, and the rest of my favorites from the exhibit, follow without comment.After the Art Institute, I was tired from about six miles of walking and no food all day. I could not get a Lyft or a taxi, so I set off on foot toward one of the holy grails of Chicago sandwiches and passed this Coronavirus-themed mural in the South Loop.A shot of the Sears Tower (or whatever they call it now) from the Dan Ryan Expressway overpass near 26th and Wentworth.Holy GrailCan’t stop won’t stop the art walks, but I took a lunchbreak the next day with Mark before peeping Pilsen.The next day, a much different kind of walk–golf with friends.
Those are just the photo highlights. Many one-on-one, face-to-face conversations with other dear friends and family helped me emerge from the pandemic. After isolation, nothing beats breaking bread with people I’ve loved for decades.
Back in the Bay, early June, I miraculously had an in-person business meeting. I wore big boy pants for the first time in 15 months. Now, the lockdowns and quarantines and even most of the mask mandates are officially behind us. Barring the unforeseen, the last steps in my journey through the Coronavirus crisis will be into a pick-up basketball gym in these big boy shoes purchased the day before the courts closed.
Playing basketball with friends and strangers will be the ultimate communal confirmation that the pandemic has passed. With my feet aching, body bruised and maybe bloodied, barely able to breathe, I’ll know that, at least in my world, we’ve returned to full health.
(To read the Coronavirus Diary all the way through, start here.)
Drugs helped reduce the characters of Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson to gibberish in their best-known road books, “On The Road” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” But it wasn’t just drugs. It was also the overwhelm of the road itself, with its expansiveness forcing eyes and mind open and sheer beauty pounding the optic nerve from inside and out until you struggle to share your vision with anyone. Inexpressible intimacies hide under layers but still drive the story like the bass you don’t realize you hear under a band’s thunder.
Drugs played no role in my road trip with my daughter, Eleni, through California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado (CANVUTCO), so if I write gibberish like my writing heroes, it’s only from overwhelm. In my wiser moments, I let pictures speak at least a thousand words, though neither pictures nor words can convey all we saw.
This road trip formed about six months into the pandemic. Eleni’s friends invited her to Colorado, and she asked if I would join her. Restless and road hungry, work schedules scuttled, we would handle our obligations remotely. Zoom let us zoom. We had friends and country to see.
To keep us Covid-safe(r) and cash richer, Eleni outfitted her used Ford Escape with a makeshift bed: four eighteen-inch boards jointed together with a sliding plywood platform on top that created a storage space and left room for a mattress on top of the platform. With the inside loaded and her bike in the roof rack, we headed out on October 16.
She drove us out to Highway 5 via 152 through Gilroy, along the rolling reservoir hills. When her sleepiness settled in, I took over. The car’s ignition challenged me, which brought some daughterly ridicule, so I launched into a quasi-satirical, full Luddite, get-off-my-lawn-guy rant.
“Hybrids have no pickup, and electrics leave us at the mercy of a shortage of charging stations.” Eleni de-bunked that with statistics and said, “but I understand, you’ve already decided not to do the right thing because of the research you haven’t done?” Fake posturing fell into real laughter.
Gauging our time as we sped down Highway 5, we planned to camp at Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, which came recommended. That way, we could visit St. George, also recommended, early the next morning.
Hunger hit. Las Vegas was an option. Eleni had never been, and a burger stop on the Strip was about all the Vegas experience either of us would want. Whenever we had cell service, she researched restaurants. Pandemic protocol left us unsure of what was open and how limited the seating might be, so we switched Luddite roles, and I convinced Eleni to use her phone as a phone. We settled on a burger joint in the Venetian, and the setting sun in our rearview mirror soon gave way to Vegas neon on the windshield.
The Strip traffic crawled. Crowds on the sidewalks were much thicker than we’d guessed. Only about half the people wore masks, replicating roughly the presidential polling less than three weeks before the election. Covid concerns crept in, but we persisted with our plan even when I missed the turn into the Venetian driveway. It wasn’t until I misunderstood the parking lot directions and tried to ease the car into a garage that threatened to peel Eleni’s bike off the roof and then had to three-point turn out of there with a hundred honking cars behind us that she yelled, “Dad, let’s get out of Las Vegas!”
So we did. Or we tried. With no dinner-worthy food packed and nowhere between there and Valley of Fire even hinting of a hot meal, we turned around just outside the city limits and settled on Raising Cane’s. The kid with the menu board in the drive-through lane earnestly explained that the product was better than Popeyes but not as good as Chick-fil-A and sold us on baskets of tenders that were no good at all.
Leaving the lot, we noticed the Five Guys down the street, whose sign was invisible from the other direction, and which had not turned up on Eleni’s internet search. She yelled again that same yell as at the Venetian, further frustrated by burger misadventure.
The Valley of Fire campground was full, so we boondocked and had a hard night’s sleep.
The park looked promising in the sunrise.
But now we aimed to reach the Denver/Boulder area by nightfall to connect Eleni with her friends on time. We left about 6:15 a.m., stopping for a McDonald’s coffee to keep us from driving off the road between there and St. George.
In Utah, the coffee took full effect. We had to lower those Cane’s. We pulled into a strip mall that had a combination FeelLove Coffee and Be Hot Yoga studio, which met all of our needs from the plush restrooms to the interesting gift shop to the great coffee necessary to fuel us across most of Utah and Colorado that day.
We talked a lot. We took turns driving and reading to each other when the views lapsed into the less spectacular. Eleni read to me from Zora Neale Hurston’s “Moses, Man of the Mountain.” I read to her from the introduction of a book I was writing about Black America and some chapters she suggested from her copy of “Braiding Sweetgrass.”
The need for gas, to lower more Cane’s, to replenish our beef jerky supply, and to stop in a town called Beaver led us to stop in Beaver, Utah. Inside the gas station convenience store with my Rasta-colored gaiter/do-rag now serving as a Covid mask, I made eye contact and raised a fist in solidarity with a young woman wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. Her eyes smiled back, and I pointed to her shirt and said, “Eleni, look what we found. In Utah!” The other prizes we found there were Scotty’s jerky and an “I Love Beaver” sticker to mail to my father.
Post-Beaver, about twenty-four hours into our trip, the road sensibility kicked all the way in. The scenery swelled my chest. I felt how much I’d missed the road during quarantine and gave thanks in silent prayer.
We next stopped in Fruita, Colorado to eat at an old-school burger joint called Munchies, which also served the first in a series of pumpkin pie flavored shakes we would drink on this trip.
Pushing east across Colorado…
Our last gas stop was at a Kum & Go. When I snapped a photo of the sign, Eleni asked if that was to accompany the Beaver sticker I’d bought for her grandfather.
We landed at the Fetter family household in Highlands Ranch by about 8:30. We had an immediate and delicious dinner with Ross and Karen and their kids, Hayden and Hayley, friends with our family since our children’s grade school days who had left the Bay for Colorado years ago. Eleni soon had to take off to meet her friends in Longmont and left me behind for a few days with the Fetters. Our conversations were deep, intense, personal, and hilarious, not for sharing here. Otherwise, hiking was the highlight. On the first day, Ross took me to Red Rocks for a look-see and then to Three Sisters for more vigorous rises and falls and scrambles.
The next day, we took a five-mile hike in the neighborhood. That night, I convinced Ross to spend the next day helping me tick off a bucket-list item: the Manitou Incline. He researched the pandemic protocol, which demanded reservations and bus tickets from a remote parking lot. We left early the next morning, because Ross decided if we were driving past Garden of the Gods, we might as well stop in. I’m glad he did.
The Incline was spectacular. It’s an athletic challenge I first learned of through a Facebook friend’s comment on a photo I’d posted of myself running stairs. On the site of a former railcar route that was destroyed in a landslide (fact check), the Manitou Incline consists of 2,768 stairs carved into a mile of trail that climbs 2,000 feet to a peak of 8,500 feet of altitude. The average grade for the trail is 45 percent, and sometimes is as steep as 68 percent. The record time of ascent is 17:45. Based on my stair-sprint training, I thought it might take me an hour.
It was a grueling physical and mental challenge. Sweat poured off me. Breath thinned. Quads quivered. Footsteps faltered. I often wanted or needed rest, mindful of incomplete acclimation and hydration and remembering that two years earlier, I’d seized while walking a golf course with Ross. On the Incline, he needed to rest more often to catch his breath, but I couldn’t leave behind the guy who might have saved my life on that golf course, and anyway, resting meant awesome sights.
It took us an hour and forty minutes to summit.
Ross has a few inches in height on me and more than a few pounds, so downhill on the Barr Trail, his momentum through those switchbacks helped him beat me back to the base by about forty-five minutes…including time I took to stop for photos.
Over a well-earned lamb dinner that Ross cooked, he dispensed a life’s worth of advice on National Park choices. Early in our planning, Eleni and I hoped for Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands, and Zion. But our various friend commitments took at least two of those off the table. Then she added Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Mesa Verde as possibilities, and I mentioned that route should include a stop at Woody Creek Tavern for a Hunter Thompson pilgrimage. With one final yawn and groan as he lifted off the couch, Ross urged me to emphasize Arches and to take Highway 128 down from near Grand Junction.
The next morning, Ross reminded me to sign his guestbook, warning in all seriousness that the last person who left without signing suddenly died. So, I made sure to do so.
For the next phase of the trip before Eleni and I headed home, Ross drove me to Denver and dropped me at the Bresler family residence. Eleni would meet me there after breaking from her Longmont friends, and we would spend a couple days in Boulder with my high school friend, Jan Abendroth North. After a too-quick lunch with Justin, Alison, and their son, Charles (elder children Max and Elie otherwise occupied), Eleni and I left for Boulder. Jan could not host us until late afternoon, and Eleni had never seen Red Rocks, so I visited for the second time. After a quick walk, she took a spin on her bike while I walked and ran the amphitheater rows, another workout as famous as Manitou Incline.
That still left time for an enormous dinner of burnt tips, Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale, and a burger on the West End Tavern roof deck above Pearl Street mall. We made it to Jan’s in time for a Zoom call she has periodically with a posse of girls from our high school. When we signed off from Zoom, our conversations became deep, intense, personal, and hilarious, not for sharing here.
The next day, I had a real-live, actual, in-person business meeting with Erin Vito, a website designer collaborating with me on a client project. While Eleni hiked and cycled Boulder, Erin and I had a great, productive, fun first meeting at Rayback Collective, a cool space for beer, coffee, and conversation. Erin recommended I eat at Roadhouse Boulder Depot, so I walked the mile or so on Goose Creek Path. On other visits to Boulder over the years, Jan showed me wondrous places, such as El Dorado Canyon State Park, and on my own I had wandered the CU campus and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, but I never stumbled onto the more urban beauty that also infuses Boulder.
Dinner done, I Lyfted back to Jan’s for another night of conversation. The next morning, Eleni and I scraped windshields as fall had become winter overnight, said our goodbyes and thanks to Jan, and visited my former work colleague, Amy Manson, for breakfast at her house in Superior with husband, Pat, and son, Max. We left there fueled with good cheer, excellent coffee, and breakfast burritos.
A major accident on Highway 70 slowed us down for a couple hours. We enjoyed views of frosted treetops towering above the freeway and those at eye level, maybe just fifty to seventy feet lower, that were still their usual deep green.
By the time we passed that accident scene, all the National Park possibilities melted into the one that Ross recommended. Passing the junction that leads to the Woody Creek Tavern and eventually the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Eleni and I started making plans for our next trip.
Other specific memorable moments were opening the lid on our hand sanitizer and having it shoot a shot that splatted on Eleni’s passenger seat a few inches from her eyes and our search for fast food in Grand Junction leading to Qdoba until the sudden sight of the sign for Freddy’s Steakburgers dragged me across three lanes of traffic and into two rounds of burgers and chicken sandwiches and pumpkin pie shakes. That held us until we hit 128, which winds about forty-five miles along the Colorado River.
At dark, we drove into Moab for a light bite and drove back out 128 to a boondock site.The next morning, we woke up at 6:30, did gymnastics into the front seat, and bee-lined past the rock faces visible in the dawn for the Denny’s at the edge of town. It was closed. I’d never seen a closed Denny’s. It was open the night before. Maybe it was a fluke Covid-related event. As cosmically disconcerting as a closed Denny’s was, we accepted the universe’s gentle nudge toward the much more mom-and-pop Jailhouse Café for coffee and what their menu listed as “soul bacon,” which was bacon.
Arriving at Arches around 8 a.m., it was too late to hike out to Delicate Arch for sunrise or whatever you’re supposed to do, so we just drove and checked stuff out and stopped whenever something awed us more than whatever else was aweing us. We made friends with random hikers, like the guy in a Bears sweatshirt and Cubs hat, who I talked sports and neighborhoods with, and then a little Latino kid, sprinting ahead of his family in a walking cast for his broken foot, but irrepressible and oblivious to pain just to be free in such beauty.
At one stop, Eleni also took off running, boulder-hopping, scrambling, letting her soul dance, and I watched full of joy and love, my chest swelling like a few days earlier when we first crossed Utah, happy and proud to hug her when she came back.
I had to return to Moab by 2 p.m. to run a Zoom class for The Writing Salon, so we drove back down to the visitor center for gift shopping, and I dropped off Eleni and her bike with plans to meet her at 6 p.m. I had a room reservation at The Virginian hotel so that I could run my class.
At the front desk, I asked for Kate, whom I’d spoken to by phone several days earlier about Zooming from a quiet lobby space that might save me the $200 room reservation. The barefoot lady in the peasant dress said, “I’m Kate.” I reminded her of the conversation. “Oh, I remember. No problem. You can have the room for three hours, no charge. Just don’t mess up the bed. When you leave, it has to look like nobody was there.”
Class complete, I dropped off the key with Kate. She would not accept a tip or other compensation. “Just do something nice for somebody else.”
I drove back through Arches to meet Eleni. We used the rest of daylight to wind back down through the park before a giant burger dinner at Moab Brewery to celebrate her cycling every paved mile of Arches that day, and then we fell into a deep boondocked sleep.
In the morning, we took a last look around camp and left by 7:30.
We lingered at Moab Coffee Roasters, Poison Spider Bicycles, and a rock shop and found a dream house on the way out of town.
In Crescent Junction, needing gas and allured by signage, we stopped at Jackass Joe’s Oasis. It was jerky heaven. We stayed a while. Eleni rehearsed her later line, “Dad liked the jerky store more than he liked Arches.” We left with $90 worth of jerky, including wild boar, Alien Fresh Roadkill, Papa Dan’s Prime Rib, and Oak Barrel Whiskey Rabbit.
We mostly sprinted across Utah, until awe stopped us at Eagle Canyon.
We also slowed through a sudden snowstorm outside Price. Our nav directions put us on some state and county roads, and we ended up at Mom’s Café in Salina, where the waitress asked Eleni to wipe our table and tossed her a rag. We were afraid to eat anything other than cherry pie and coffee there.
Weary, we drove through eerie landscapes, winds howling, temperatures dropping, long horizons of salt or sand or both. Near sunset we had a low-gas scare and held our breath downhill toward a distant Philips 66 sign that belonged to the Border Inn Motel in Baker, Nevada.
It was just across the Utah line, one of the most desolate spots I’ve ever seen. On the way to the restrooms, you pass through a convenience store selling every imaginable vice, and some unimaginable, and then a pool room stuffed with slot machines, but all cordoned off due to virus. It screamed of Sam Shepard, and Eleni didn’t know him or Patti Smith, and I didn’t know some of her artists, so we started a Spotify playlist of stuff we knew and didn’t know.
Making our list and the conversational riffs that came with that carried us through the early night until we got really hungry and stopped at Urban Cowboy in Eureka, Nevada. It was about 19 degrees when we got out of the car. We knew we’d need a hotel instead of boondocking, and we also knew we had to hit Fallon before we could sleep if we were going to get Eleni home in time for her next scheduled shift. I had a Jameson and a huge chicken fried steak.
We shared road talk with a couple from Chico, who thought we were nuts to try to make it to Fallon that night but probably never read Jack Kerouac or Hunter Thompson.
We slept a few hours at the Motel 6 in Fallon, fueled ourselves at Stone Cabin Coffee, a place stuffed with taxidermy of fish, sheep, bear, waterfowl, deer, elk, bobcats and Halloween skeletons with Covid masks. We spent our next five hours speeding, working on our playlist and our jerky rankings, and marveling at the crystal shimmer of the Truckee River dancing down the Sierra Nevada. Returning to civilization, we took ugly 80 back to the Bay, listening for traffic reports on the radio between the too-early Christmas carols, stuck in a slowdown in the suburbs, longing again for the road behind us and the road ahead of us.
Today is the one-year anniversary of our county issuing its shelter-in-place order due to the Coronavirus crisis. My closest friends and family have stayed well, except one who tested positive and felt some relatively slight symptoms.
Sometimes we’re numbed by the number of dead. At others our hearts hang heavy and our heads are hot at the avoidable loss of life in this country, which despite its might, has fallen from height.
Not quite two weeks ago, on the way to my daily slog up and down a running hill for the sake of sanity, the phone rang. The news was good. My work in schools qualified me for the vaccine.
On that run, I felt about twenty pounds lighter. Back at my desk, I almost enjoyed the bureaucratic hold time and online dead-ends that it took to make an appointment at a place an hour away, in Emeryville, on the other side of the Bay.
Last Friday, the clinic staff moved me efficiently through their system and painlessly pricked my arm. They were friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. They sent me on my way after about twenty minutes.
Driving back along the Bay, the sky faded purple orange over the San Francisco skyline to the right and gleamed and glowed off the glass towers of Oakland to the left. It was the falling of a night made beautiful by the sight of light at the end of the tunnel.
Video from Boundless — an immersive, distance-learning after-school program on which Inkflow consulted to WeXL — shows the adaptability that defies acceptance of a “new normal.”
You won’t hear me say “new normal” although it’s cute and catchy. Alliteration always allures me. But I won’t say “new normal” in the context of the Coronavirus crisis, because I don’t believe it.
Nine months into this mess, facemasks are not normal. Nor are loved ones refusing hugs. Or televised sports featuring cardboard cutouts and piped-in crowd noise, as if to soothe us into submission, lest we hear the truth contained in the silence of our stadiums.
Most importantly, it is not normal for Zoom to serve as school. So, yes, we have adapted to the pandemic. But with all the resilience we’ve shown, saying “new normal” sounds like surrender. I’m more optimistic than that, because even when I’m apart from clients, what we work on together is worth working for.
For example, at The Writing Salon, where I will resume teaching “On Point” and “To Make a Long Story Short” in January, a past session’s student, Erin Lewellen, became a private writing coaching client and has since produced this opinion piece for NBCNews.com and this story about her work to lead Global Citizen Year through the pandemic.
Two more writing coaching clients have joined me, one about my age and the other a middle-school student. If you want a writing coach, let me know.
That work extends to Creative Writing curriculum design and teaching for Citizen Schools, a non-profit that provides enrichment programs for underserved middle-school students. As a volunteer Citizen Teacher for Oakland’s Greenleaf Elementary, I partner with AmeriCorps teaching fellow Emily Yonce on work with students who bear the brunt of the pandemic’s academic fallout due to the digital divide.
My first two years with Citizen Schools, about 25 students personally handed me their poetry collections, comic books, or short stories. This term, just five students log-in, almost always leaving their cameras off, and just one consistently answers our writing prompts.
The cliché, “If I can positively impact even one child…” rings true.
Consulting on WeXL’s Boundless, featured in the video above, was a much different experience. Dozens of fourth-graders at New York City’s Girls Prep Bronx Elementary School participated exuberantly, with cameras and minds turned on, under the leadership of WeXL Founder/CEO Arabella DeLucco and Girls Prep Teacher Danielle Sacks Sierra.
The first season of Boundless had students produce their own video-based stories while learning from luminaries in the worlds of sports, entertainment, and journalism, such as Monique Billings of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, known off-court as a high-quality YouTube creator, and TV journalist and Miss Wisconsin USA 2020 Gabriella Deyi.
Student response to the program provides every reason for optimism. And Boundless might not have happened without the pandemic forcing hands. Still, even if some good comes from the Coronavirus crisis, let’s not succumb to accepting a “new normal.”
My friend and collaborator Gino DeGrandis — photographer for our mutual client, Fit Kids — snapped this photo of the near-unprecedented thunderstorms that rolled through the San Francisco Bay Area on August 16. One of Gino’s photographic specialties is stormchasing all over the world. He’s seen a few, some too close for comfort.
This one was not so threatening in and of itself, but its 10,800 lightning strikes sparked hundreds of fires in the Bay Area, plus a phenomenon new to me called a “fire tornado.” The three major “fire complexes” — named the LNU, the SCU, and the CZU — have burnt a half-million acres. The CZU, in my county of San Mateo, is 0% contained and threatens more than 24,000 structures.
For now, I am safe other than inhaling the occasional floating ash while running or bicycling, which I must, even more than usual, to stay centered during the Coronavirus crisis, let alone this latest shit-rain. An August thunderstorm, a delightful staple of my Midwestern days, but never experienced during my quarter-century in the Bay Area, contained next to none of the actual rain our region needs to prevent fires.
What to do? Keep working. After all, it’s back-to-school season.
When Gino emailed me his photo, he mentioned that he missed Fit Kids. Pre-pandemic, he shot many of the non-profit’s free after-school fitness trainings for under-served elementary school students. Of course, COVID canceled those for the foreseeable future, and as Fit Kids continues its pivot to distance learning via Home Workout videos, we shoot more footage of scenes like these.
My new one-on-one writing instruction clients in Chicago get the Zoom treatment, as do students in the two classes I am teaching for The Writing Salon this month. One of those launched on August 16, about four hours after our thunderstorms passed. After the class, one of my Chicago clients emailed apologies for canceling her August 10 session due to losing power when near unprecedented 100-mile-per-hour gusts tore through the city.
I replied: “Thanks, and no worries. We all do the best we can. Ironically, we lost power out here on Friday when PG&E implemented rolling blackouts because of our ‘heat wave’ and then about 3am today we had a thunderstorm, with lightning strikes that ignited some blazes. At the start of my Writing Salon class today, I had to say, ‘Just log back in to Zoom if we get disconnected due to blackout, fire tornado or plague.’ “
The new Dames I bought in March are still on my shelf, but at least their namesake is not. Delightfully, Dame D.O.L.L.A., his teammates, and opponents have returned to NBA play.
This is the closest to normal I’ve felt since March 11, when Rudy Gobert’s positive test for COVID-19 shut down the NBA and signaled the start of the Coronavirus crisis. Still, the resumption of all sports — in the name of both the almighty dollar and restoring some creature comforts — is far from a diversion.
Instead of distracting us from societal challenges foremost in our minds, watching NBA games shows us how far from normal we really are. Digital bells and whistles — fake crowd noise from fake fans — taunt us and haunt us with reminders that we cannot gather, that pandemic protocols deprive us of community.
To the credit of the NBA and its players, the league’s restart embraces and emphasizes anti-racism efforts, rather than trying to distract us from those, too. The announcers, interviewers, and studio hosts who advance the platforms printed on the court and on players’ jerseys for the most part do a wonderful job.
If the commentary intrudes on coverage of the on-court action, well, that’s the point of a “no-more-business-as-usual” stance, though the league, the TV networks, and the advertisers they serve desperately need business as usual. They all walk a fine line between inspiring an audience to action on social justice and lapsing into complicity. Already, the most repeated messages and ads are threatening to become, if you’ll pardon the expression, “white noise.”
Aside from a bit of understandable rust on some players, the games are so worth watching. Hopefully, that means the social-justice messages will get through and have their intended effect. Even more hopefully, what we’re being sold is worth buying.
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