Wanderlust

(legacy post - originally written Spring, 1987)

When the days start getting noticeably longer in early February, my feet start itching. Today, when the sky is clear, clear blue, and the sun is almost warm, I start thinking, "The sleeping bag's in the trunk. The seats go down - I can sleep in the car (It's not like I haven't done it before)." Myrddin, the gold setter, would hear me and come running through the woods if I whistled from the road. I could do it - I could take off and just keep going. 

We could go to the ocean, where the salt-water, sea-bird, rotten-mussel-and-seaweed smells never stop. Or to the mountains, where red cliffs and aspen trunks come orange in the morning, gold after rain, and purple as dusk deepens to dawn. To the desert, to the Alps, to meet the penguins at the Pole. 

Subie, the Subaru, just hit the 200,00-mile mark (on the way to work - if she weren't so quietly proud of herself, I'd wonder if such an accomplishment even counts when our current travels are only to and from the data entry keyboard at Seafirst!). 

Myrddin's toes twitch in his dreams, and I am happiest when my destination is anywhere that promises open air, long strides, and the bump of a water bottle on my hip. 

An awfully lot of Subie's miles came from weekend jaunts to the state park, but she and I have bigger dreams. This morning, my dreams have mainly been of the ocean. I feel like I could spend years traveling beaches, barefoot in the surf, a rucksack easy on my back, drinking water charmed from the garden taps of Malibu beach houses belonging to movie stars. 

The days are always golden, with that particular haze that softens coastlines and daydreams; the Irish Setter spends his days running after seabirds, and there's even a wisp of color bounding along the cliff line, keeping us in sight. A coyote stole Kittypurr J. (for 'Jambelly') Fuzzbutton last summer, but as long as we're traveling in daydreams, I guess he can come along. After all, that coyote would never have gotten him if Kittypurr hadn't been living kitty dreams of stalking starlit savannas after hyenas howling at the moon. 

I spent last summer exploring the Seattle area, adding to the memories of a summer ten years ago, when fresh out of college, a theatre troupe friend and I spent hours in the Gasworks Park, watching boats go by. We explored University Avenue in the summer rain, sang 'Michael from Mountains' to the prisms in the puddles, and, in spite of my homesickness for Colorado, I fell in love with Seattle. 

Paul and I did not have a car, so we never made it to the ocean, and I didn't last summer, either, although I learned about ocean smells from Puget Sound. Having grown up in Colorado, I have only a few memories of the ocean. I didn't even know that my soul missed water until I learned to miss the lakes during the long Minnesota Februarys when everything wet either freezes solid during weeks of negative 30 degree windchills or dries out and withers to dust from the steam heat of clanging radiators. 

When I was ten, and then again the summer I was thirteen, my family traveled by trailer caravan to Mexico. I remember Mazatlan in the sixties before the beach was a chain of large hotels and fancy tourist resorts. We stayed in a peacefully seedy trailer court right on the shore. In my memory, that beach is a series of sunlit tones - dusty palm trees, the yellow-golds of sand, and that blue-green water. 

I spent hours standing just where the waves broke, letting the water catch me and tumble me, legs and arms limp, to the white foam at the shoreline. And we swam on the rocky coast at Guaymas, where the surf was much harsher, and there was an added thrill of danger in body-surfing the breakers. Mother told me just a few days ago that she almost got caught in an undertow there. I had only the thrill to remember. 

Another summer, we trailered from Colorado to the Redwood forest and along the Oregon coast, which gave a tinge of reality to my hippie-era dreams of Highway 101. In the Redwood forests, the huge trees were a deep shade of wet green that doesn't happen in a Colorado pine forest, and we ran up and down the paths to the beach, bright summer sweatshirts against gray mist and dull water. A huge driftwood log added only white to the spectrum of fog. 

Our Colorado lungs gloried in the sea-level oxygen -- perhaps we ran to keep warm in the cold fog. I remember the strands of earthbound cloud as friendly, though. I chased streamers of it along the needle-laden path that twisted through a stand of great trees that so shaded the ground, the usual dense California undergrowth was missing. I ran through wet tree trunks, following the trail, then losing it, then following it again in the mist. 

I think that we have to go to the ocean this summer, Myrddin and I. Subie may be left behind for the sleeping comfort and cookstove of the camper van (whose only name is an occasional "that damned lemon"), and we'll light a candle in the sand for Kittypurr, who, catlike, preferred the forest to the beach, but loved to travel, anyway. I have bills to pay, but surely I can manage a short trip to the ocean. Until our sailing ship comes in, Subie, Myrddin, and I will do most of our surf walking in our dreams. 

 © Aspen Mountjoy, 1987