Bien fácil, buey! Nice and easy. Sometimes I say it to myself when I’m climbing a big hill and getting too excited: calm down, stay steady. Slow down 5%, fíjate, slow down more. You’re going too fast, it’s a long hill ahead of you. Really, slow down.
The last few days I find myself focused on the same advice, but I’m not climbing a hill. I’ve flipped the game board, sending all my pieces flying. It wasn’t poor sportsmanship: it was a gamble on something new. What will happen? I have no idea, and new data is slow to come. It feels like I can make it however I want, that life is a blank slate. Right now it seems mostly about willpower, staying calm, not worrying about the millions of things to do. There are currently quite a few problems at 5318 Meyers Ave: why is there a ten foot tall pile of cardboard boxes in the living room? Why is the pantry infested with bicycles? Why doesn’t the stove work, where will the art go, how do I set up the speakers around my desk so they sound good? There are more abstract problems: where are my things? Where are my systems? In making a cup of coffee this morning I had to travel back and forth across the kitchen twelve times.
There are a lot of things I said I wanted to do when I move North. I’ll pickle, I’ll grow herbs, I’ll make a sourdough starter and a series of bread. I’ll make horchata and ginger beer. I’ll have more homebrew, on draught. It will be like Lothlorien, I’ll assign myself to a granola shift, a hummus shift, a beans shift, the salsa shift. I’ll perform yoga with Beth to Alice Coltrane in the living room. I’ll map national parks by foot and bike, I’ll write more, I’ll make new friends.
But when do I start doing those things? Probably after that stack of cardboard diminishes and I develop the series of simple life systems necessary to be happy and effective. Or, I could just drop it all and go for a bike ride.
Yesterday in my first semi-full day in our new house in Eureka, I stumbled around for two hours looking for my things, read baseball gossip, then slowly suited up and went for a ride. My back brake didn’t work properly, as the cable has become finicky and sometimes the brake is hard to balance; once you activate it once, it won’t turn off. That couldn’t stop me, I needed to find peace. I rode to the end of our street and descended a quick hill with a big diesel truck behind me, somehow negotiated the wet hairpin at the bottom with the aid of front brake only, and then I was out in the river valley to the south of our home. I crossed a brackish creek and received my first good sign: a female kingfisher, sitting in a tree! That’s my favorite bird. I rode on through the pasture lands and turned left onto Elk River Road.
I rode Elk River Road to the end. It rolled through forest and over little hills, following the river. I passed ranches and farms, got chased by farm dogs, saw cows and sheep and goats. Side roads crossed the river on single lane covered bridges, the kind that look as if someone laid a barn over the top. It was quaint and foreign, the terrain was totally new. I was five miles from our place yet I felt I was in a different state. As I rode up the valley it narrowed and I started to see the stumps of old growth redwoods. The loggers used to cut the big trees fifteen feet up, as their bases were too wide and gnarly to stack efficiently. This leaves the foundation of the tree and its dead roots to sit in the ground like petrified molars.
Towards the end of the road the forest grew tighter around me and the valley narrowed until I reached the parking lot for the Headwaters Forest Preserve. The path was paved, so I rode into the park and kept exploring along the river. It started to rain, as if the forest had conjured water. The farther I rode up the river the more magical it became, with serene mossy trees over olive brown pools of rocks and water. A mile down the path it turned to dirt and the rain intensified, so I turned around and retraced my path home.
