M.E. Breen

I’ve taken my show on the road lately. The show, in this case, means my laptop, along with a stack of fliers advertising apartments for rent printed off craigslist. The road is San Francisco’s Great Highway. I depend on and disapprove of the Great Highway about equally. On the one hand, it creates a broad, ugly, treacherous barrier between the city and the ocean. On the other, it’s the sort of highway where you might reasonably expect to encounter a highwayman: windswept and fogswept, with ice plants draggling their way over the curbs and crows picking their way through the ice plants. The highway runs unbroken for sixteen blocks, but every two blocks is a pedestrian crossing and a traffic light with a seagull sitting on it. Commuters prefer 19th Ave, roaring two miles to the north, which leaves the Great Highway to dog walkers, surfers, funeral processions, Irish house-painters, and the guy with the refitted police car with the words “UFO Response Team” stenciled on the side.  The highway is closed so often in winter and spring it has its own gate. Wind off the ocean blows the sand into drifts right down the middle of the road. If they didn’t plow it, the beach would bury the highway in a week. In two weeks, the beach would be at my door.

The Great Highway does have its own highwayman, of a sort. He’s an old man with bright white hair and pink cheeks and red flannel long underwear who sleeps in the dunes. He looks like a thin Santa Claus and I can tell you from experience he does not like dogs. I’m always scandalized when the weather turns hot and all these people pour off the train and flip-flop themselves across the highway to the beach. Don’t they know this is a cold beach? A dead bird and seal beach? A beach for pot-smokers and lonely rangers and washed up jelly fish? It is not a bikini beach, and a thousand times not a volleyball beach. I wonder if thin Santa sees me and Truckstop and thinks, Get out of my yard!

When I make my lists of life’s pros and cons, when I worry those old bones of Where should I live? and How should I live? and What if I miss all my chances? I realize I’m always assuming there is a better place to be. Not better because it would suit me better, as I am, but a place that would make me better. Here, where I live, amid the dead birds and the living birds and the broken bottles and the trash and the tourists and the heavy, encroaching sand and the vast gray ocean, this huge, imperfect place — this is just the place for me. This is just like me. Sometimes I can’t bear it.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding–
Riding– riding–
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

-From “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes, 1913

I’ve been on vacation in the desert. I went there to see my family. I love seeing my family and this was an especially joyous occasion, but what I actually want to write about is how my dog almost starved to death. She didn’t almost starve while I was on vacation. She ate things like fresh buffalo in giblet sauce while I was on vacation. The time she almost starved was when she lived in the desert, before I knew her, before maybe anyone knew her. I suspect she had a dog mother and dog litter mates, but I don’t know. She does look a little like E.T.  A space ship might have crashed in that Arizona wilderness. For the record, she would still be a dog on her home planet, with dog-level brain power, except her owner would be a rubbery looking alien instead of me.  She hasn’t exactly been building the return-pod the whole time she’s been here on Earth.

While I was in Arizona I kept thinking two things: one, how my dog’s fur is the exact color of this landscape (dun), and two: HOT. Then we got home and I watched the desert episode of Planet Earth about the poor kangaroos who only survive the midday heat by cringing in the shade and licking their forearms. All of this got me thinking about what it means to be from a place that is always trying to kill you. What would it be like to live in an environment so hostile that even your bizarre, precise adaptations fail to protect you? David Attenborough told us that if the kangaroos don’t make it to the shade in time they just fall down dead from heatstroke. I kept thinking, why don’t they move? I mean, why don’t they pack up their pouches and hop off to a verdant plain somewhere? Ok, that’s dumb, but it does make you wonder about habit, and habituation, and why it’s easier to do the same, incredibly difficult thing over and over than it is to do something new, the difficulties and pleasures of which are unknown. And even when you do move, the new place only ever exists in some uneasy relation to the old: It’s hotter/colder/tackier/cozier/lonelier/more unreal here than there, or there than here. I guess I’m reminded these days of something I’ve known for a long time, which is how much easier it is to suffer than to change.

Unless you’re Truckstop. She survived the ride through space. She survived the crash landing. She survived the desert and the truck stop, though barely, and only by swallowing dirt. She survived transplantation to this city of ocean and fog, and grew back all her fur.  She does not participate in fatalistic arm licking, air-conditioner blasting, or complaining. Take that, tourist-self. Take that, hoppers.

Thanks to Jo Keroes of Mommy Track’d for this soul-restoring review.

If anyone wonders where I’ve been, I’ve been in bed.