Banana Airplane

I hit the eject button on my life. Let's find out where I land. First stop: Making Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley for harvest 2020 #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; width:100%;} /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe

[bananaairplane]

Morning vineyard dog

[bananaairplane]

Another World

Over the months since I left the mountain, I have gained a traveling companion and have been through several addresses. At the moment, though, I am standing in front of our Airstream trailer, eating roasted corn on the cob and looking out over Lake Champlain at a set of wind turbines rotating on a hillside in the purple distance. I said it looked otherworldly, and Cavan said it looked like somewhere else in the world. Tucked up near the Canadian border in Northern Vermont, we could be in Denmark. It does feel like we pulled a lever and tumbled out of a chute into a foreign land. Gentle slopes of grass run down to the deep blue water; the shoreline is green and fringed. Sunsets over the Atlantic are orange and purple, but here on the lake they are denim blue and pink.

I intended to pick grapes on my year of adventure, a plan that got sidetracked by the Coronavirus. A year later, I’m at a biodynamic vineyard in Vermont. As a new year begins I am coming full circle on the old one, but also pondering what to call a year of adventure when it is no longer a year. What I initially thought of as a interlude to “real” life is becoming durable enough to be a reality of its own. I don’t have any desire to “go back” to anything, not after a year feeling the onward pull of my journey. There have been times, looking out of the trailer at dinner time toward a rain-soaked grill, or sitting on the concrete floor of a friend’s garage during a failed passenger window motor replacement on my Camry, that I’ve thought: I want to go home. At this point, I don’t even know where that would be.

This year was, itself, another world, and as it extends into a second— as it begins to feel indefinite— my unmooring from whatever the world to which this is other is feels more complete. On the one hand, I feel like I’ve opted out of the early midlife that surrounds me: career, kids, couch. In this sense, I am in another world, a parallel one, that feels almost unseemly in its lack of responsibility. On the other hand, this world feels as real and intense as any other I’ve inhabited. I’ve discovered new abilities and I’ve uncovered new failings to distract me from the familiar ones.

“I don’t want a career, I want to sit on the porch.” This was a tweet that got picked up by an Op-Ed in the New York Times, the point of which was to highlight a trend of people walking walking away from overly demanding jobs and reorienting their life goals. The piece resonated with me for obvious reasons— I left a highly competitive, passion-driven career and, as a result, have watched the sun rise and set numerous times this year. As a year of adventure stretches into something longer, what it is I am doing is looking less like a career transition and more like a a change in life goals. At the moment in this country, that raises lots of ugly questions: How will I pay for health insurance? What about when I get older? What happens if I’m injured and can’t work anymore? One answer would be, get a job, a real job. Don’t be a lazy bum opting out of society and pay your way. But if picking grapes for 10 hours a day doesn’t count as work, I’m not sure what does. Sitting at a desk for a few hours and then going to some meetings was much less onerous— physically, at least. Our ideas about work in the US seem to be laden with moral judgments that don’t resolve into anything that makes sense. In any case, it seems that we should all have the freedom to build the life we want, and that everyone who works should get the same benefits: access to medical care and to support in old age being two major ones,.

Tomorrow we will pick grapes again. In the morning we start at 8:30, loading on to the golf cart or walking down among the vines to the place we left off yesterday, or to some new area to pick. Today we continued picking the same grapes we had been working on yesterday. It was just four of us, not the usual crew of six or eight. It was just Cavan and me and Handsome Nick with Kendra, the vineyard owner. Usually Missy and Tim are there, too, and Scott. Lately Missy’s boyfriend Jonathan has been joining us, too. Sometimes Kendra’s husband Rob picks, too, when he’s not being a professor. You lift the net in front of a plant and discover what awaits you— beautiful clusters dangling from the vine, or a sparse set of small clusters wrapped around vines and tucked up among the leaves. As I cut the grapes from the vine with a pair of office scissors, I drop them into the yellow plastic lug— a tub with holes in it. Sometimes we play music on the Bluetooth speaker, but either way there is general conversation in the vines. You chat with the person next to you, or on either side, or listen as others around you talk. When you finish your plant and move on, conversation ends abruptly, potentially to be picked up later when you find yourselves side by side again. As you pluck the rotten berries out of a cluster bugs may come surging out at you— a little gray spider that jumps, or a squirming earwig. Bees burrow into the grapes and get drunk, then buzz around angrily when they are dislodged with the tip of a pair of scissors. I never see the ones that sting me— it happens as I lay may hand on a cluster, or once through the hole in the lug as it bounced against my body while I carried it down the row. My fingers have been in various states of swelling and itchiness throughout harvest. At lunchtime we sit at the picnic tables up by the tasting room and Kendra brings out a bottle from the cellar. Throughout the day the angle of the sun over the vines changes, throwing shadows first in one direction and then another; the clouds overhead are brushed or daubed over the sky, spreading far off over the lake toward Mount Mansfield and the Adirondacks. Mountain asters, Queen Anne’s Lace, Goldenrod, and all kinds of grasses and grow up among the vines and brush against my legs as I walk, and my pant legs accumulate fluffy brown nettles from the Burdock plants. My fingers sticky with grape juice at the end of the day; I feel acutely that nature provides but that it also stings, pokes, and scratches.

[bananaairplane]

Quiet morning at the lift return terminal, before opening. Run your stops, rake your ramp, chill out.

[bananaairplane]

Lift Ops

I came up to Vermont to run a ski lift. It’s been bliss, and consuming enough that I’ve written bits and pieces here and there but haven’t sat down at put it all together into a post. Some of the same themes are coming back from earlier in the year: the dark majesty of the early morning; rolling through pristine natural beauty in my Camry with dance music blasting. But I’ve procrastinated long enough that, this time, I’m writing mostly from retrospect as opposed to in the moment. It feels like retrospect, at least, because we’ve turned the corner in the season from winter to spring, and suddenly it feels like everything is winding down. We could have as much as a month left, depending on conditions, but I have the feeling of waking up the day after the party.

Seeing as I showed up to work on time and didn’t smoke weed during the day, I was quickly scheduled on the main lift at the center of the mountain. They refer to it as “driving” the lift, even though you’re just standing there by the controls waiting for someone to wipe out. The lifts are regulated by the state of Vermont as motor vehicles, and each one has a special license plate. It’s oddly tiring work, because you have to be paying attention every moment, even as nothing in particular is happening. People wait at the top of the ramp, scramble down to the loading area, and are whisked off through the low-tip zone as the chair ascends and speeds up. Snowboarders wipe out constantly, but when the skiers go down it’s a special kind of mayhem, because they often lose a ski in the process. Sometimes they just lie there on your ramp, helpless. Sitting down on the lift chair poses its own hazards— some people don’t sit in time and fall off the front of the platform; poles slip, skis tangle. Then, as the chair begins to climb, you’ll get a kid suddenly sliding down and off the lift. Or someone will catch their foot and the ski will snap off. To quote a friend, it’s boredom peppered with chaos.

“Driving” the lift, though, feels appropriate, because when you are operating, it’s your lift. Super Bravo is the longest lift at the resort, and it’s a detachable grip quad, meaning it seats four people and the chairs slow down as they ride around the terminal. The drive motor is mounted overhead in a glass structure that looks like a 1985 rendition of a spaceship. It hums loudly enough that someone needs to be pretty close to you to be heard. A thick steel cable runs around like a bicycle chain and the chairs churn through, one after the other. It’s an enormous beast, and you, the op, are its master. You slow and stop it as you see fit. Sometimes, when a pole or ski drops in low tip, you don’t slow it— you simply hop out to grab it and then in one smooth motion pivot around to hand it to the people in the next chair, while leaning out of range of the metal armature of the chair itself as it whisks past. You always have an audience at the bottom of the lift, and they are somewhat apprehensive of the speeding chairs. “Nice!” they exclaim as you recover your position by the controls. You feel smug. Then you remember that 95% of the lift drivers are 19 years old and stoned.

I’m living in employee housing, for the full “lifty” experience. Picture a circa-1825 historic bed and breakfast, and then cross it with a frat house. “Hey Jacky, want to see Chapo shotgun a 16-ounce beer?” Eoin is holding up a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Charlie— Chapo— is standing nearby, his employee ski hat perched jauntily on his head. Jacky and her husband own the bed and breakfast that the resort has leased out as employee housing for the winter. “I’ve already seen it,” she says blandly. When you step into the vestibule of the inn, you are greeted by the overpowering smell of Cannabis.There is a French-country-style bench and a framed poster from a Chagall exhibit, and on the floor underneath are about 15 pairs of snow boots. One morning as I went out a set of jumper cables was lying on the bench. The guys are working on a display shelf of empty liquor bottles in the dining room, and in the big commercial kitchen at any given time during the evening someone is heating up frozen mac and cheese or making a PB&J. A communal collection of spice jars clutters part of the counter; about 60% of it is meat rubs. There are many kinds of hot sauce.

I guess it could be weird to be surrounded by college kids all the time. Doesn’t it feel strange to be hanging out with, essentially, teenage boys? But in my former life as an academic I was also surrounded by college kids all the time. It doesn’t feel unusual. It has all the charms now that it did then, without the responsibility of grading them. There is this irrepressible enthusiasm that you have at 19-22. It’s easy to forget until you see it first hand, and then it’s infectious. One of the lifties tested positive for Covid a couple of weeks ago, and everyone at the inn was locked down for a week. On the first afternoon, when we’d all been sent home early from the mountain, a group of them set to work building a ski jump in the ravine behind the inn. We spent the next day sitting around outside drinking beers as people did backflips. Later, I skied the footpath that winds through some public land in the woods with a couple of the guys. They veered into the steep woods and came flying back out at the bottom, where we all pulled up within a few feet of the river. Another guy showed up on snow shoes, and as we huffed it across the flats back to the inn he gamboled around us wildly in the deep snow. In the evenings, there were acoustic guitars and whisky (strictly for the over-21s, obviously...).

It’s not just me and a dozen kids— Eoin is as old as I am. You can tell we’re older because we both showed up in 20-year old Toyotas, which stick out in a parking lot full of parental discards, showy dude cars, and commuter-student late model Civics. At the mountain, too, there are a number of older lifties— some retired guys and some snowmakers who moved over to the lifts for the end of the season. The snowmakers are rugged and leathery from winter nights spent outdoors, and the retired guys have a bemused air to them. We’re all here for the season pass. The older ones like me usually have some kind of story. It’s like a secret club: the “guests” flow through the lift in their shiny jackets with their clumsy poles, but I’m riding the lift up before opening, the morning shadows picking out the corduroy stripes left by the groomers on the slopes below. Or I’m cruising down from the top shack at the end of the day, after last chair has been called, only a couple of ski patrollers in my wake. The mountain is silent then, and I hear only the hissing of my skis. Outside the boot room I find my people again, in a disorderly throng, waiting to go in and leave their skis and boards. Because of Covid regulations, only 7 people can be in there at a time. One of the kids emerges to ask me for a ride back to the inn. I went out looking for the wilderness and I found this happy tribe.

[bananaairplane]

Headwinds, Part 2

Initially, the balance of power between them teetered from moment to moment. Logically, it lay with the captain. She was in charge, after all— and most obviously so at the moment in the evening when, at a notably early hour, she would announce she was bushed and heading to bed. A glance would be exchanged before she disappeared and, the signal received, he would follow in short order. But over time her infatuation developed into affection and he, feeling her growing dependence on him, became bolder, more assertive around the boat. And yet she still held the trump card: She was the only one who really knew what to do and, reading the movements of the weather and the boat, when to do it. He mitigated this by listening for her preoccupations and repeating them back, later, as sage assertions. He monitored the battery voltage closely and announced it eagerly at intervals, bursting up into the cockpit to inform us of a new reading and propose running the engine. On the anchor, he fretted constantly, disappearing onto the deck to check its holding at even tighter intervals than the captain. His eagerness gave him a doglike quality that was enhanced by the moderate age gap between them. I took defensive measures. On the first evening, we had dinner on a larger boat anchored next to us. As we nibbled a cheese plate, they exclaimed that they hadn’t eaten anything all day except for some avocado toast at noon— evidence of the assiduity with which they had been absorbed in some boat project, I believe this I time it was epoxying the windlass. I reckoned I could amuse myself on the edge of the gilded circle happily enough, but I was not willing to sign up for their infatuation diet. When we provisioned the boat, I quietly set aside a case of canned tuna and paid for it as we loaded up the other groceries. I had learned that Pete was allergic to fish, so I knew I could dip into my stash without appearing to hold back some desirable delicacy from the others. I kept it under the v-berth and, when I had the salon to myself in the evening, would fix myself a little snack. I also laid in a stock of novels culled from a couple of Palm Beach thrift stores. Well, you may be thinking, this is why people go to sea alone, single-handing a small sailboat. But being alone is a form of sociability— it is not the absence of social life so much as one end of the spectrum. To be alone is to elect a certain form of sociability. I witnessed this fact in the character of the captain, Maggie. She had an unsociable, awkward side that fell into place for me when she talked about life on the boat as an escape from the complexities of shore. She wanted to have a boat so that she could sail away from it all and be alone. Ironically, in this instance, leaving shore had only enmeshed her into the most fundamental kind of interpersonal entanglement. But in romance, I observed, she also sought a kind of solitude. The comfort of that bubble that forms around a couple, insulating it from everyone around. When three friends of hers joined the ship about halfway through the voyage, she took to spending long stretches in the aft cabin or playing a two-person board game in the salon with Pete while the rest of us played hands of bridge on deck. Like the ship and its endless projects, her relationship with Pete offered another kind of protective layer against the squalls and open chop of other people. Like a grain of sand stowed away in an oyster shell, I penetrated the protective layer, my presence constantly piercing the cocoon. And, likewise, it was impossible to be alone in my solitude with the two of them rattling through. In the evening, we reached a peaceful, even harmonious equilibrium, gathered in the yellow glow of the lights below deck, sipping wine or some improvised boat cocktail and scooping a steaming hot vegetable mass out of bowls. We were all in stages of transition, our lives in various forms of disarray back on shore and the horizon opening before us with the promise of something better ahead, if we could only choose which way to point our compass

[bananaairplane]

Headwinds, Part 1

Naively I went to sea to find the wilderness— the place outside civilization, beyond the circle of habit and ease. To do this on a boat is to make a fundamental error, because if the boat is a direct and obvious means to find the great wilderness of the sea, on a boat you are not surrounded by wilderness entirely. There is first around you the buffer of other people. The experience of sailing is only secondarily of the sea. Primarily, it is a social endeavor. Whatever the number of the crew, the social life of the vessel will define the voyage and is the heart of sailing. Just look at Ahab and Ishmael. Maybe this fact imposed itself on me with more clarity because the weather was relatively good. In the teeth of a storm, when each person is struggling to ensure the survival of the ship and all the others on board, the elements must take over. But the ability of those on board to meet the challenge depends on the social life below decks. And the quality of the experience, it seems, depends less on the weather than the vibe— the harmony or lack thereof among the people inside the ship. The interior weather in the cabin, that is. The weather systems of one’s own soul. It became apparent almost immediately after I climbed aboard that the captain and the other crew member were sleeping together. In the dinghy, she cast him meaningful smiles as the outboard roared and we chugged through the web of anchored ships in the Palm Beach inlet toward the boat. The energy between them crackled. As night fell I watched what would happen. Had they already...? The captain yawned and stretched. She was heading to bed. The mate, as he seemed to be, lay on a banquette in the salon languidly scrolling on his phone. They had given me the V-berth, a happy discovery as I had, upon doing the arithmetic, projected I would be sleeping in the salon for the whole voyage. I began to brush my teeth, loitering between the head and the open door of my berth. And then, in a smooth motion, the mate slipped off the banquette, dropped his phone into a pocket, and was tossing me a casual goodnight as he glided into the shadows beyond the companionway, towards the aft cabin. I would be third-wheeling for the next five weeks. The goal of the anthropologist is to the be a fly on the wall, observing the behavior of the native population without disturbing it. This is a fantasy, obviously— your presence inevitably disturbs the balance. People behave differently under observation. The only pure experience of observation, if there is one, is of a couple in the early stages of fascination. I observed the dynamic between them from a vantage point of immediate proximity. Maggie was tall with dark hair and strong features; her physicality gave the sense of fabric draped over marble. She wore filmy, loose t-shirts that swished around her waist like the fringes of a theater curtain, never quite long enough for her tall frame. The first thing I noticed about her, though, were her feet: Shapely, tending toward the angular without being bony, and always flexed at the toes elegantly, showing off a high arch that suggested an iconic representation of Hermes’ foot. Her decisive physical presence telegraphed her bluff capability. She talked about buying houses and boats and she seemed like the kind of person who could handle a horse.

Pete, meanwhile, was slight of frame, with blond hair and a nose that turned up winsomely. He usually had a red knit cap perched on the back of his head in a way that evoked an old-timey newsboy. There was something slippery about him. When we talked about the future, he said he wanted to spend more time on boats, but “next time” he wanted “to get paid for this.” I wondered which of the tasks he was performing on board “this” referred to— what, exactly, he envisaged receiving a cash payment for. It dawned on me over the course of the trip that he did not like sailing, in part because when we were underway he always suggested the wind was dying and wondered aloud whether it wasn’t time to turn the engine on.

[bananaairplane]

Boat Daze

I’m sitting on deck, watching a catamaran’s slow progress across the protected bay where we are anchored and out into the sea. It turns left and continue gliding, silently, wakelessly, almost imperceptibly. A sound of rattling comes up from the galley as someone pokes through the clean dishes, then the clatter of silverware and the thud of its drawer, which must be lifted heavily by its pull hole before drawing it out— a locking mechanism like all the drawers and cabinets on board. Now there is the steady, deliberate sound of chopping. The wind whistles through the rigging and over the canvas top of the cockpit, and the bilge gurgles once. The waves make a swishing noise as the wind ruffles them, in addition to the occasional slapping they make against the hull. I had intended to swim before coffee but woke up hungry and was put off by the sound of the wind. The water looks wet and chilly, and I am dry, warmed by the early rays of the sun. I hear the rustling and tearing of an onion being peeled. With any luck those were potatoes being sliced earlier. I look across the cockpit to check if any shade has developed. The heat of the sun is beginning to build to a prickle in my hands and forearms. I smell the faint edge of the onion wafting up through the open hatch over the galley, just behind my head. A soft grind and then chop of a knife blade moving through a dense, fibrous matter— distinct from the staccato chops of earlier. That must have been bell pepper, and this is the potato. The blade of the knife rings along its flat edge as it is laid on the counter. We are at an anchorage in Eleuthera, an island in the eastern part of the Bahamas, waiting for the wind to slow down and swing around so we can sail north to Abaco.

This has been our rhythm for the week or so since we sailed over from Florida: Anchor someplace for a night or two, and then sail or motor to the next island, the next anchorage. We cleared into the Bahamas at a marina in Grand Bahama, and then, after anchoring for two nights in a little waterway, sailed all day down to the Berry Islands. The crossing took us out in the middle of the water with no land visible on either side. The sea was dead calm and reflected the blue of the sky perfectly, so that it almost melted at the horizon line instead of making a clean line. The captain stopped the engine in the afternoon and we leapt off the side of the boat into the silky water. When you are cruising you are always headed somewhere and yet overall, in the larger sense, you are not going anywhere. It is the purity of voyage without destination. Only passage. Everything is blue and white— the sea, the sky with a few fluffy clouds lying down low, the white fiberglass of the boat, and the blue vinyl cushions in the cockpit, the canvas sail cover and bimini over the cockpit. It makes the yellow life ring on the aft stand out, and the red stripes on the flag flying off the back of the mainsail rigging, and the dishrags, red, hanging on the side rail on wooden clothespins. Two of us are on deck and the third is in the kitchen tidying. She appears with an old sponge to show us how cutting off the corner once designates it for the counters, and as it gets dirtier and more corners are cut off, it will be for the floor and then finally for the head. Some tinny, cheerful rock blares on a little speaker over the hum of the diesel engine.

I put on my suit when I woke up the next morning and jumped into the clear, shallow water off the boat, seeing our anchorage in daylight for the first time. A current ran through the little bay where we anchored, rippling the water. It was saltier than the day before, when we swam off the boat in the open ocean and it was calm, still and dark. Even though I could see the bottom from the edge of the boat this time, I felt the residual fear of the unknown that rises up when I look into the sea. Annie said yesterday, if you see any sharks, get out. Here it’s so shallow it seems unlikely there would be any. But I stay close to the boat all the same because of the unfamiliar currents, doing laps back and forth. I swim until the salt begins to burn my mouth. There are islands all around— pieces of Great Stirrup and Little Stirrup Cays. They are pleasure islands for cruise ship lines, and an enormous red tower rises up off Little Stirrup, a water slide, and nearby a large red orb— a planetarium? The water slide dwarfs the white column of a lighthouse on the other island. Otherwise the land is empty and scrubby. As we lift anchor and get underway, the line of sandy beach runs along under green shrubs and stands of low trees. Large houses with columned porches are dotted along the coastline. It feels more domestic than Grand Bahama, with its abandoned buildings and the unlikely architecture of vacation destinations— hotels in various stages of decrepitude and showy grandiosity: Ziggurat stairs of balconies, rounded swoops of white stucco, and hulking blocks of rooms with running balconies, each door marked by a glowing light fixture. The faded grandeur, the dingy pompousness of it still has more dignity than the sinister cruise ship pleasure island, which glows at night with rows of bright white lights like an industrial installation.

After Grand Bahama and the Berrys, things have felt less touristy. We don’t see anymore cruise ships or big hotels. Plenty of charter boats, but also fishing trawlers. Beach bars, with rickety wooden superstructures and brown cans of Barritt’s Ginger Beer, are populated by locals as much as boaters and vacationers— not that there are many of those this year. Regular life, whatever that is, already felt quite distant— we all left it last March with the first lockdown of the pandemic. Out here, though, it’s just a memory. Time feels suspended. The bustle of West Palm Beach feels insurmountably distant, as though the Gulf Stream were a vortex to a new dimension. Coming back to it will feel like tumbling out of the wardrobe from Narnia.

[bananaairplane]

Bahamas sunset

[bananaairplane]

Land and Sea

I ran away to sea. We sailed into the Bahamas early yesterday morning, after leaving West Palm Beach at sunset. Leaving the inlet that protects the harbor where we had been anchored from the ocean, the boat began to roll on ocean swells. The Gulf Stream runs northwards about five miles off the coast. The lights of Florida fell behind us and the sky opened up overhead, bigger and more studded with stars than I’ve ever seen it. As we sailed, Orion rose and climbed overhead, wheeling off to the south as dawn approached. After barfing up two dramamine tablets, I was ready to take my first watch.

I felt the pull of the sea as soon as I hit the Oregon coast this fall, and also for a good while before that. It’s a constant theme, the sea. A wide open space of freedom, and another kind of wilderness. I drove back and forth past a cargo dock in the days before departure, on provisioning runs and to get a tooth looked at for a possible emergency root canal— no, I just haven’t had a teeth cleaning in rather a long time thanks to the pandemic. Big orange containers marked “Tropical” were stacked around the cranes and one or two big ships. I thought of my great uncle the sea captain, who sailed ships like these to East Asia in the 1930s. This pull I felt toward the water, is it something like what he felt, running away to sea as a teenager? Who can know, I immediately thought, and why does it matter? Why do we look for explanations of our behavior— good or bad— in the past? Heritage holds the promise of connection— that we are not alone in how we feel. It offers reassurance that we’re not alone and justifies our choices by offering an explanation for them. In doing so, though, it gives the lie to the fantasy of breaking free. If the longing for freedom is an inherited trait, like my narrow eyes or my freckles, then it isn’t really freedom so much as a fulfillment. I don’t think this is the right way of looking at it. We all have the same destination in life, but we choose the lodestars that will guide our passage there. They are not infinite, and the choice not entirely free— freedom is an odd imperative because, like nature, it is so poorly defined. But we do have a range of action within which to shape what we do. Do it consciously.

Every trip has two parts: departure and arrival. The switch happens somewhere along the way— possibly the halfway point, but not necessarily. The valence of departure is broken, and your focus swings around toward where you’re going. I took off from San Diego two weeks ago, aiming to catch this sailboat in Florida. I did not know very much about the boat, or the people on it. I didn’t know how long I’d be on it, even— just that we were headed to the Bahamas. I could not answer even the most superficial of the follow-up questions people asked when I announced my plan. All the way through the desert I was leaving California. I felt the places I’d been pulling back, and saw before me everything I was leaving. The beginnings of a life in Oregon, the friends and family scattered down the coast all threw a strong valence out over the highway as it stretched before me.

I blew across the white gravely desert of Arizona, listening to an audiobook of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, banned for indecency when it came out in Britain in 1915. Alternating descriptions of quivering flesh and pointed arches boomed at maximum volume over the whoosh of the road. The sky felt like a glass dome placed over the earth, and in places where the road began to rise gently it felt like my car might take flight. Then the highway thickened into Phoenix and I stopped at the first of a string of worn out roadside motels.

Roadside motels, offer a smooth, hard surface to the consciousness, unable to become particular and therefore familiar. Well, not smooth— more like lumpy in the way a wall is that has been badly painted. And not so hard, either: Why are all the lampshades in cheap motels dented? How many ways are there to dent a lampshade? Or is it the same way, over and over? One clumsy salesman is roaming around, all elbows, putting the same dent in squared-off Days In lampshades.

In New Mexico, a man sat in front of the souvenir shop/ gas station with his dog, looking for a ride to Las Cruces. The exits feel perfunctory— the land around them is as vacant as anywhere else along the highway. Buildings are placed far apart and gratuitously set back from the road, like they didn’t have enough of them so they wanted to really space them out for maximum effect. In New Mexico the land turns orange and the mountains are red instead of the inky blue of California. As you begin to hit Texas, the grass picks up, thickening into shrubs and then live oaks as you get out of the hill country. It is deeply dark on I-10 at night west of about San Antonio. The only lights are white and red columns on the road and the glow of the yellow lines. After El Paso, the lights of Juarez shine off to the left, like distant land when you are at sea.

I stopped in San Antonio for a day off the road with my aunt and uncle and a masked, impromptu Thanksgiving. Every place you stop is sticky: it’s hard to push back out into the the empty current of the road— even more so when you drop into a warm cocoon of kin. We stood around in the kitchen catching up, a dog shuttling around at our feet; the next day was filled with the project of preparing and eating food. In the evening, my aunt and I popped open tubes of dough and rolled up Thanksgiving leftovers into little pastry pockets. When I got back on the road, the arrival of the East Coast announced itself with the thick roadside vegetation of the Bayou and torrential rains. After the austerity of the desert, the excess of vegetation and water felt messy, crowded. It also marked the shift into the next chapter. I had definitively left the West behind and now, instead of the backwards pull of the beginning of the trip, I felt the tug of arrival pick up. In Mobile I parked and went for a walk with a friend through neighborhoods of deep porches and old plaster. I wound up in St Augustine for several days at the house of old family friends, to await the results of a Covid test before joining the boat.

The periodic connections with people and places along the way felt incongruous— so much for wilderness, or the idea of the long drive as some kind of mystical journey of self-discovery. Thanksgiving leftovers and cozy afternoons on back porches felt like cheating. But that’s the lie of departure again. There is no radical break, only a series of arrivals that, like the other half of a parenthesis, reshape the meaning of the departure.

[bananaairplane]

Fireball

I look out from the patio at the orange glow of the sun hanging over the wide blue line of the ocean. The sky is beginning to to go orange, and a fluffy margin of cloud rests on the water. The rays of sun shine through the leaves of a tree and gild the fronds of a giant bird of paradise. The air is still as the heat drains out of it. Where will I go next? I can go anywhere, and yet with Covid numbers spiking and communities locking down, the options seem extremely limited.

Some kind of descent into chaos was perhaps inevitable. I’m here in paradise, having an existential meltdown. I was supposed to leave San Diego, where I’ve been staying with friends, to start a cross country drive last week, but a brief, low fever made me hit pause for a Covid test. It came back negative. By this point I had quite literally missed the boat— a sailboat headed down the East Coast that I was meant to connect with in North Carolina, just south of Cape Hatteras. In the last week, I’ve run through Plans G, H, I, and J. I’ve pivoted myself in a circle, coming up with so many different backup plans I’m paralyzed. How to choose among them? Are any of them sensible, given what is happening around me, the pandemic running out of control? Throughout these months, whenever my plans have fallen apart, whenever the pandemic has taken a new turn, my thought has been, what did you think was going to happen? How could I expect anything different than disaster, undertaking what seems like a year of hubris and flight from reality? The only sensible thing right now is to be sheltering in place. Play it safe. To do anything else feels naive at best and at worst, callous to the real suffering going on everywhere, and to my own role in either spreading the virus or keeping myself and others healthy. But this isn’t really particular to my year of adventure— it speaks to the larger absurdity of trying to carry on normal life in conditions that are anything but. And yet, what alternative is there? The sun continues its path, indifferently, brutally, toward the ocean. Next door, a mother calls out to her child as they move among the trees and shrubs. She is holding a camera. A dog barks in the distance.

It’s easy to lose sight of the goal of the year, which is adventure and new experiences, when the whole world feels like it’s in such uncharted territory. Staying home and working remotely, or navigating the opening and shutting schools, is enough of an adventure for anyone. In the face of that, adventure seems like a lot.

I am choosing which chicken recipe to make from the British-Israeli restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi’s repertoire. His recipes require long lists of ingredients, usually involving lemon zest and harissa, purple onions, cilantro, some kind of chile or other. You have to cook all kinds of component parts before you can actually begin cooking the recipe: roast vegetables, prepare elaborate sauces and marinades, pick cilantro leaves off the stem. Inevitably it all culminates with a heavily laden pan going into the oven for an hour, to be basted at intervals or covered in foil and then uncovered. Also a vegetable dish: “Roasted cauliflower with harissa chili oil” or maybe “Roasted eggplant with anchovies and oregano.” I am picturing platters of food, large chunks of vegetables with toasty brown patches; pieces of chicken nestled among onions and potatoes; a bowl of couscous with toasted almonds.

I will summon abundance out of nothing, out of a nest of filmy plastic bags set in the trunk by a teenage girl with an iPad strung around her neck in the garage of a local grocery store. I walk on the beach before it’s time for my curbside pickup and all the women around me are wearing black leggings just like mine. We are in a secret club. My feet kick up sprays of sand that fall into my sneakers. Huge lumps of seaweed lie around on the sand like beached sea creatures, glistening and inert.

Something about this bourgeois take on Middle Eastern food feels like what I want to eat right now: Wholesome and homey, vegetable and chicken, but sun kissed, spicy, transporting. Everywhere I am this year is somewhere else, other than where I would normally be. And yet, preparing and eating food imposes normalcy. When we look back on 2020, it may be above all the year we spent buying groceries. 

I’ll try again on the drive and the boat.

[bananaairplane]

A storm blows in on El Cajon Mountain

[bananaairplane]

You Already Know What To Do

Shortly after I arrive in Oregon for harvest, I got an email from an editor asking for the manuscript of my dissertation, which I had described as being ready in my book proposal but was, actually, filled with notes to myself and the random rough patches left behind by cutting and rearranging. My first goal, however, was to find a cheap, old Toyota to buy. This was how I found myself sitting in the back seat of my roommate’s car, in the parking lot of an auto mechanic, typing footnotes on my laptop and glancing up every few minutes at the rear view mirror to glimpse the back of a pale green Camry perched on a lift in one of the bays behind me. Its wide fenders framed the horizontal red bars of the taillights like parentheses. As I gazed upon it, I knew this was my car. It was perfect: not beige, with leather seats, and the owner lived in the same suburb where I found my mattress, also on Craigslist.

It was not perfect: The “check engine” light was on, the radio didn’t work, and the A/C vent made a clicking noise. After the inspection found multiple oil leaks, I couldn’t come to an agreement with the seller on price and I walked away. I was so sure it was the one, but after all I don’t believe in superstitions like that. I reasoned that it only felt like my car because car buying is stressful and I just wanted it to be over.

The next day, I drove four more Camrys. Two of them were beige and most had the kind of busted suspension that makes it feel like you are driving an ox cart through a Thomas Hardy novel. One of them had a broken driver’s door handle, which seemed like a dealbreaker: What if I were being chased by a bear, and needed to leap to safety? Also, if no one has bothered to fix something so superficial, what kind of shape can the car be in?

I almost bought one of the beige ones from Adem, the salesman at a crowded car lot pressed up against a two-lane road on the outskirts of Portland. Relaxed, unflappable, cheerful, Adem had a careless air that telegraphed supreme confidence in his trade and also a certain disdain for it. When I returned to the lot a second time and explained that I wanted to drive the car 20 minutes away for an inspection, which would take at least an hour, he shrugged and waved off my offer to leave my license as surety. “I know you’ll come back,” he said easily. When I did come back, we sat in the Adirondack chairs outside the little office and reminisced about Turkish food. He told me about his vacation home in Anatolia and invited me to use it sometime. He smoked a cigarette and sighed as he looked out over the dense thatch of Subarus and Nissans on the lot.

Two days later, I set out to buy the car. I got a sense of what kind of day it was going to be when Andrew, the teller at the bank, began listing the Zodiac signs of all the actors who have played James Bond. It started innocuously enough. I asked him for $3,300 in cash. He took my ID and started typing things into his computer. “Oh, I see you have a birthday this month.” I assumed this was the prelude to some kind of security check, so I said yes, and was going to confirm the date. “You’re a Leo,” he mused. Was he hitting on me? He named two celebrities who were born on August 16th. Did their shared birthday yield other similarities, I asked? They were both in superhero movies. I offered that Madonna is a Leo. He was filling out the request slip for the money when he got to the James Bonds. Sean Connery: Virgo. Timothy Dalton: Libra. He needs a supervisor’s approval to give me this much cash. I make a comment about Libras being calm by nature, so he serves me Hugh Jackman, another Libra. Leonardo DiCaprio: Scorpio. He met Leonardo DiCaprio once, at the Aerospace Museum of California. The manager has come by and now Andrew is counting out the cash, spreading out the bills like he’s setting up a magic trick. I glance around the lobby nervously to see who may be observing. I sweep up the bills and stuff them into bank envelopes as quickly as he finishes counting. Now he is telling me that he paid $300 for a 3-minute video meet and greet with John Cleese, one of the members of Monty Python. He used part of his 3 minutes to tell Cleese that he didn’t really like “Holy Grail” very much. Cleese told him to watch "Fawlty Towers.” A line was forming for the teller windows. It seemed rude to just leave, so I waited for him to finish his story.

I don’t exactly remember how things went sideways at the car lot. Adem and I sat inside the little office, on either side of his desk. I brought up that the struts on the car were original and overdue for replacement. The owner of the dealership, sitting nearby, got wind of what was happening. “What is the issue? The what? Struts?” He called over. “What does that cost? $50? $100? We’ll replace them for you.” Immediately he had his phone out and he was dialing. “This guy is the best front-end guy in Portland, only the best work,” he was saying. “He gives me a discount.” He had the phone on speaker and held it before him like an old-timey movie star in her dressing room with a cut glass atomizer of perfume. The front-end guy quoted him $450 for the struts. “How much?” He exclaimed. He began dialing another number. “Hector is a grease monkey” he explained, “but he does good work.” Hector quoted $350. “With the savings,” the dealer assured me, “we’ll also have him change the oil.” I ended up taking my envelopes of cash home in an Uber.

Reader, I bought the pale green Camry. The owner was a somewhat disgruntled, wiry man who lived in an ostentatious tract home in a subdivision whose streets all bore the names of European cities. Except, incongruously, for Iceland Street; I guess they decided no one wanted to spend their life trying to spell Reykjavik over the phone: “ROMEO ECHO YANKEE KILO JULIET ALPHA VICTOR INDIA KILO.” When I texted him abjectly offering to buy the car, he surprised me by texting back that I could have it for $200 less than we had discussed, if I bought it the next morning. When I rang his doorbell, accordingly, at 10:00 the next day, he looked shocked to see me. He had deleted our previous text exchange and thought I was someone else. But, seeing as I was there with one of my envelopes of cash, he went inside and got the paperwork.

As the global pandemic and West Coast wildfires have upset my plans for this year of adventure, I’ve been flying by instruments, making up my itinerary as I go along. Where will I go next? What will I do? How will I spend this year, and what if the pandemic, having killed my round-the-world plans, extends what was meant to be one year of adventure into two? With little to guide my choices, I inevitably look for signs to signal which way to go next. When things fall into place, it feels like the universe sending me flowers: Sorry I screwed up your plans, here’s a Toyota.

Outside a cannabis dispensary in Santa Cruz on the side of Highway 1, a letter board sign reads: YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT TO DO. I drove past it on my way to Big Sur to camp in my hard won car. Those words stuck with me as I drove down the coast, and resonate now, as I stay with friends in San Diego and contemplate my next move. On the one hand, I feel baffled: where to go next, what to do in a pandemic? On the other hand, this trip has revealed to me that I know the answers to those questions. I already know what to do. It’s time to make it happen.

[bananaairplane]

Breakfast in Big Sur

[bananaairplane]

A Bad Idea Is a Great Idea

Sometimes you commit to an idea that you know is terrible— objectively so— because you feel in your gut that, if not a good idea, it is the right idea. This was how the plan to camp in my Toyota Camry came into being. No sooner did it occur to me that I could fold down the backseats and spread a sleeping bag over the flat space that extended from the trunk to just behind the front console, than I knew I must do it. 


My camping exploit would be the centerpiece of a drive along the Pacific coast from San Francisco to San Diego. Day 1 would take me through Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Carmel, and into the heart of Big Sur. In the final episode of Mad Men, the enigmatic anti-hero Don Draper has an epiphany at a yoga commune in Big Sur. He wanders in with a few belongings in a paper bag and slowly succumbs to the beauty of the place. Why are all my aesthetic imperatives 1960s-era men? There is a debonair carelessness in their attitude when faced with challenging circumstances: the cigarette dangling from the driver’s lips in the Italian Job as he handles switchbacks at high speeds; Don Draper’s disdain for luggage. There is obviously a whole scaffolding of privileges that allows these men to drift along, so confident in the benevolence of the universe. There is a certain depravity in thinking, the world’s going to end, let’s have a cocktail. Such confidence is called something else when adopted by others, and is punished brutally. But there’s another side, one that takes in the inevitable ugliness of the world, the myriad ways it falls short of what it could or should be, and says, let my life be a piece of art hewn out of the stone of reality. 


No, I don’t have any camping gear. In San Francisco my brother, sharing the vision, loaned me a sleeping bag and— presciently, expertly— a ski hat. A hardware store in a shopping plaza in Carmel, California yielded a camping chair. It was clearly meant to be: I asked the clerk if they had any folding chairs and he started to describe some patio furniture. “I’m looking for more of a camping chair,” I clarified. He disappeared briefly and then reemerged. “You know,” he said, “I have this one chair that I was holding in the back for a customer who called in, but that was several weeks ago. I was just about to put it back out on the floor.” Kermit green, in a bag with a little strap, it was kismet. The man at the campground, the kind of hardened hippie worn smooth by Bug Sur sunsets and weed, seemed bemused at my endeavor: One person, one night. “Are you going to sleep in your rig?” he asked as he typed my license plate into the computer. Later, when I reemerged from the forest asking to use the microwave, he peered into my takeout container and asked, “where did you score this?” It was cumin lamb and I made it in San Francisco, then packed it up in the cooler bag from the Goodwill in Oregon that has been a linchpin of this road trip. He commented politely that it smelled good. I took my lukewarm noodles and a pack of firewood back into the warren of campsites. 


Wilderness is a relative term— an unknown, unmapped place, standing in opposition to settled places, to familiarity. For me, the West Coast is already a land of wilderness. It feels bigger, and the forests larger, nearer, pressing in around. Mountains, gorges, tall trees all press around the settled places, which do not seem to have won as definitively as they have on the East Coast. Even the mountains of New England roll gently and are dotted with fragile steeples. On Highway 1 at Mendocino, I saw a rugged cross standing up out of the hillside— I used to see similar crosses in Haute Savoie, in Eastern France, where they are a symbol of the maquis, scrublands that took on symbolic meaning during World War II as a place of refuge for the French Resistance. The crosses were used as landmarks by Resistance fighters, who fled to the maquis and then organized themselves there. The maquis is a good metaphor for my wilderness— a place to hide out from occupying forces, but also the place to mount a new offensive. A place outside the scope of government. Government here is another metaphor— I’m no prepper, outside of a couple of gallons of water in my trunk leftover from the threat of wildfires. Government is the forces of domestication and embourgeoisement. The government of expectations and inertia. The virus has created its own kind of maquis or wilderness, effacing our landmarks of daily life and throwing us into unfamiliar terrain. Suspending the normal flow of life and its authorities: the office, holidays, sociability. It’s a cloud bank blotting out our lodestars. Astrolabe lies useless on the map table. It’s a time of feeling in the dark. I’ve been consulting my gut to figure out where to go and what to do next. What does my gut know? It whispers, drive on. Leave behind the oasis, familiarity.

And so I sat in the dark in my camping chair, beside a blazing fire. Some kind of highway construction project was underway on Route 1, so the supreme stillness of the woods was cut by the whining rumble of large machinery doing something laborious. I sipped red wine. The brightness of the fire rendered the darkness all around me more complete. I felt like I had slipped into the space in between time. The group at the adjacent campsite was speaking Japanese, and the patter of unfamiliar words and occasional laughter tucked in around me. The sound of the machinery faded slowly as it rumbled on down the road. I turned the logs and fanned them as the fire died down. 


My brother had suggested that I test out my sleeping arrangements before leaving San Francisco, an idea that I dismissed out of hand. My plan was flawless, testing it was pointless. When I folded down the backseat in the dark, though, I immediately discovered that it did not lie flat. Scrambling in and plunging my bottom half into the trunk, I found that the angle of the seat rendered the opening to the trunk too narrow— it clamped uncomfortably around my hips. I would be sleeping in the backseat. This was, of course, why I didn’t test my plan out earlier: Learning this in San Francisco might have deterred me from realizing my vision. I unfolded the mattress pad I absurdly brought from the East Coast, that didn’t fit the mattress I ended up finding on Craigslist in Oregon. My yoga mat unfurled on top of it, and then the sleeping bag. All night long, when I opened my eyes, I saw the trunks of Redwood trees silhouetted in the dark through the surround of window glass and the pane of the sun roof.


In the morning I packed up quickly, pumped some free campsite coffee into a hot mug, and drove to a turnout overlooking the sea. I set up my camping chair in the gravel near the edge of the cliff and sprinkled Cheerios into the empty container from my cumin lamb. There was a plastic knife in the car somewhere but I used my spoon to slice chunks of banana over the cereal. Setting the container on the trunk, I poured out milk as the occasional sports car or camper van whooshed past. The waves crashed rhythmically below and a band of mist smudged out the line between sea and sky. The brown hillsides glowed gold in the morning sunlight. The whole world stretched out around me.

[bananaairplane]

[bananaairplane]

The Winding Road

Harvest ended early— about a month early-  because of the smoke damage from the fires. I hit the road for San Francisco on Wednesday, taking three days to drive the Pacific coast from Newport, OR to Mendocino, CA and then cutting in through the Alexander Valley, Sonoma, and Napa. Harvest ending so early is just another wrench thrown into this weird year, another pivot to plan B, C, D— whatever we’re on now. I felt like I was hitting my stride at the winery, mastering the different tasks and beginning to put the pieces together to understand the process as a whole, from pumping the grapes off the crush pad into the tanks, to pumping over the tanks before fermentation, to inoculating with yeast, more pumping over, racking off the lees, and finally, on my last day, barreling down the best lots of wine. I started by branding the new oak barrels (spray painting them with a stencil, really) and numbering them, so it felt good to come full circle and pump the wine into barrels. I was sad to see it all ending, but also conscious that my sadness marked how good the experience has been. It struck me as I packed up: there’s nothing like leaving a place to make it feel like home.

The road trip is another novelty in this year of adventure, because as a city kid I’ve never really driven much. And, most of the driving I’ve done has been low-speed, tactical driving around the East Coast. It’s the kind of stuff most people hate: elbowing into a lane, swerving around a delivery truck, and trawling for a parking spot: circling the block, antenna quivering for a door opening, a brake light igniting, any sign that a parked car is about to move. That’s the real secret to finding parking in the city— you have to identify the spot before it opens up, because once the current car leaves, it’s too late. (this also leads me to hover annoyingly at busy restaurants.) So getting behind the wheel and rolling down the highway for 6 hours is a novel experience. I agonized over whether I should have turned off at that last vista point. I wondered whether my “drive safe and save” bluetooth beacon could autodial the Highway Patrol to report me for speeding, and how many minutes ago it was likely to have done so. I set cruise control and felt smug. On this trip, I discovered all the most banal aspects of driving and exalted in them.

The trip began in earnest when I hit the Pacific. It felt like an impact, the way it opened up at the end of the road as I crested a hill. Royal blue and velvety, blotting out the pavement and the low-slung commercial strip, the trees and part of the sky. Within minutes I was waiting in line at a roadside clam shack, debating whether to have the fried oysters and halibut or the steamers, and then ordering both. My first analyst said that according to Jung, who was Swiss, some people are drawn to mountains and others to the sea. When I lived near Mont Blanc, I remember hearing locals say that some people experience the mountain as a sinister presence, were almost driven mad by it looming over them. These seem like the beliefs of people who have not visited the West Coast. In Oregon, Highway 101 hugs the curves of the hills, periodically bursting through the curtain of pine to reveal the sea thumping against tall cliffs. I opened the sunroof to let in the alternating waves of crisp mountain air and gauzy ocean breeze. Everything had a sheen to it: the ocean, glimmering with reflected sunlight, and the rolling green hills of evergreen forest, its thousands of individual pine needles shimmering like bugle beads on an evening gown.

There’s something weird about going on a road trip within the context of a larger, longer trip. It’s like Shakespeare’s play within a play. The road trip is usually a place of wildness and interior voyage: The logic of the road pulls you away from the everyday and, unmooring you from the contexts where you recognize yourself, opens the way for introspection and discovery. Already at sea, I turned to the sea as a point of familiarity. But this was not my sea; this was the Pacific. The steamers were smaller than Atlantic little-neck clams, and sat in tiny, pleated shells instead of heavy, horizontally ridged ones. The relentless cliffs, the eerie rock formations jutting up out of the beach, all signaled an other ocean than the one I knew. The sea is the same; it is you that are different. I dreamed I loved a man who left his wife for a woman other than me. This was all getting a bit baroque. I probably should not have listened to so many hours of Dua Lipa. I was that person pulling up at a trailhead miles down a dirt road in the middle of Redwoods National Park at 8:45am, amidst the silent majesty of the ancient trees, with the sunroof open and dance music blaring. Fortunately there was no one around; I was the second car in the pullout. I could rustle around in my trunk and snap selfies in front of the trail sign in peace.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t get to the Redwoods until Day 2. I had my weird dream at a Dickensian forest lodge/ RV park pressed up against the highway that evening. On Day 3, I took the fork where Highway 1 begins in Legett, CA and headed for Mendocino. My favorite three minutes of cinema is the opening credits of the original Italian Job, in which a man in florid brown wraparound sunglasses guides a Lamborghini Miura through the switchbacks of the Italian Alps. Matt Munro croons “On Days Like These” as the driver walks his hands walk back and forth around the steering wheel underneath the dizzying view out the windshield. This was my aesthetic imperative for the day. At its beginning, Highway 1 slithers through forest, looping back and forth more aggressively even than it does on the coast. The speed limit is 55 but you would have to be Evil Knievel to go that fast, because most of the curves are 25 or 15 mph. I played Frank Sinatra and, as I flung my 20-year-old Camry back and forth, reflected that everyone should really be issued a roadster at the beginning of the road. Also perhaps a barf bag for any passengers. Fortunately my only passengers were the debris that accumulates on the passenger seat when you are driving alone, and they hit the rubber floor mat immediately.

On Highway 1 I found the sea again, after the interlude of the Redwood National Parks. Freud describes an “oceanic feeling”: “a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded.” He has never felt it, he claims, but a friend describes it to him to explain why people seek out religion. Over the following hundred or so pages of “Civilization and Its Discontents,” he seems to find the roots of this feeling in the condition of modernity, which separates us from one another and leaves us longing for love and connection. For Freud, the oceanic feeling isn’t really about the ocean so much as what it connotes— expansive, pacific.

Probably what earns Freud’s scorn most about the oceanic feeling is the benevolent view of nature it contains. The idea we have when we go on a hike or feel lulled by the sound of waves—of nature as restorative, nourishing, salutary— is a product of the Enlightenment and coeval with consumer capitalism. As Odysseus sails around the Mediterranean, Homer calls the sea “wine dark,” usually rendered as one word: winedark. I thought about this at the winery, sometimes while contemplating the wine stains on my t-shirt. The darkness describes more than the rich, opaque red of wine; it also stands in for the mysterious forces concealed in the sea and in the beverage. The sea yields monsters or, equally terrifying, storms. Wine holds a transformative power over humans— unpredictable and dangerous. For Homer, the sea is also a kind of beast: Odysseus’ ship sails on its back. The idea of the sea as a winedark monster reinforces this idea of a mysterious life force, the sea as a living beast with mysterious depths. The sea and the wine contain a vital force that promises to overwhelm and shatter human projects.

From things that Freud says at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, I think he sees the oceanic feeling as something womblike and reassuring. The wine dark sea represents loss of control, the futility of human will before the capricious gods. Between the oceanic feeling and the winedark sea lie the will to dominate nature and the sorrow when this domination is achieved, shot through the with the unsettling idea that an untamable current runs deep within the human psyche.

[bananaairplane]

Trucks full of grapes waiting to unload, seen from the catwalks in the winery, 10/7/2020