Good Busy, Bad Busy
A while ago I wrote about how great the summer was simply because you could do a bunch of nothing, all snoozy style, in the sunshine. That was, like, a lifetime ago, and a whole different person writing that. Because I haven't had a spare sec in the past weeks to sit my keister down, much less fall asleep in a pool of sun and start drooling on myself.
But. Busy is good, right?
Skate camp at Commonwealth! Skating, sweating, and more skating, bookended by a series of minor catastrophes where we scramble around putting out fires until the veins in our foreheads are ready to blow. Small business life!
About a half hour of peace, working in the shade.
Long days and longer nights. Alex's birfday session at Commonwealth.
Straight up pooped.
Exit Spring
This weekend, I threw off a long, dull two months that had hung heavily around my neck like dead weight. I pointed my car to the highway with a cooler full of bread and peanut butter and drove—south across the flats of Salem and Eugene, up and around through the winding trees of Grants Pass, down and out onto the parched plains past Redding and the gray-green olive groves north of Sacramento, all the way to the greasy blacktop of the Fresno Amtrak station. There, Lance stepped off the train, and next thing ya know, we were camping in Yosemite.
Mt. Shasta springs up suddenly, the second you cross the Oregon-California border. I've been jaded by my proximity to Mt. Hood so I was only nominally impressed by this view.
Dusk in the Sierra Nevadas—so many shades of green.
This little view is what John Muir was on about. Minus the girl and the dog. Not bad, eh?
Beyond the tour busses and open-air people movers packed with butt whites, there were pristine meadows like this one.
Sleeping in the dirt. Barking at the wildlife. Chewing on the firewood. Lefty loves camping!
My first swim of the ’12 summer season was at this, the mother of all river spots—right at the base of El Capitan. Then we hit the road.
Now, no offense to anyone who lives there, but the section of California between Fresno and Sacramento is the worst. Driving through it filled me with dread. Shanty urban sprawl made from drab, depressing vistas of sun-parched America where, on the way down, I ate lunch by myself in a Motel 6 parking lot just because there was a little merciful patch of shade. Ugh. We drove as fast as possible to get this leg of the trip behind us, only stopping when Shasta Lake came into our view.
Four minutes off the highway, empty, crystal clear, complete with rope swing. So fucking good.
Sunset over Williams, California.
Loud/Quiet
Were you in Portland last night? Thunder rolled in off the hot eastern plains, the sky turned purple, and the air was wild with ions. We were all at Heidi's loft overlooking broadway when the downpour started, but the sun was out too, so the rain was a kinda shower of light. Then it stopped, and the sunset was spectacular. Ah, summer!
In other news, I love working on the weekend (esp. a behemoth weekend like this one) because when everyone else is panicking out of town/elbowing through crowds, I'm just sitting behind my desk quietly typing ideas onto cyber-paper. My friends pop their heads in to visit, sometimes bearing coffee. And then my own days off (Thursday/Friday, currently) are spent skating empty parks, swimming in empty rivers, and generally hanging out amongst chill weekday scenarios. It's a good plan.
Doing Nothing
The thing I like to do best in the summer is do nothing. When else can you get away with such bare minimums of activity and still feel okay about yourself? Honestly I'd be happy if all I did was sit quietly, alternately in the sun or in the shade—depending on temperature, and read John Steinbeck or something else good, and after a little while, maybe put the book down so I could watch the way the gnats are going crazy in a shaft of sun over the rosebush, or the bees in the rosemary, or the dog lick-nibbling his paw, or, or, or ....
It's fun to bookend those hushed hours with other stuff, though—like drinking iced coffee with cream through a pink straw, skating in the heat and then swimming the sweat off, sipping cool things on verandas under white garden lights, and so on. I'll probably try to fit some of that in, too.
