A lot can happen in 225,000 miles

That’s 75 oil changes, and roughly 33.17 trips around the equatorial circumference of the moon.

It’s eight roundtrips between Athens, Ohio and Charleston, South Carolina down the West (by God) Virginia Turnpike, strafing semis while peeling grapefruits in my lap. Plus three coastal roundtrips between San Diego and Friday Harbor, cavorting with lively sea creatures en route. You know who you are.

Built in Louisiana, shlepped to South Carolina, that old Honda Accord had promise. She was as foreign in the land of rebel soldiers and fire ants as I was: the California vegetarian with no family ties to “Old South.”

Together we rolled up on klan rallies, ambushed president Clinton in his pre-dawn run on Hilton Head beach and visited folk artists in the backwoods of Georgia painting masterpieces on plywood. At the edge of endless wooden pathways hovering over black water mazes, we memorized the songs of cicadas on the marshes of the Low Country while massive grey cloud trains, pregnant with lightening and punishing rains, dominated the humid Universe.

We witnessed the birth of cell phones, websites and digital cameras. We walked a mile up hill both ways to school in Athens, Ohio while on a Knight Fellowship with Kathleen Hennessy and Stan Alost, living across the street from Miller’s Chicken, a factory of unknown offenses, while nurturing the future of photojournalism at Friday night photo parties in our grandiose living room. Ah, the late nights with Susanna Frohman and Penny De Los Santos in the photo lab, windows wide open at 2 a.m., despite the snow, talking and talking while dragging photos out of the fixer bath.

Conjuring the legacy of Robert Frank, we eventually headed west, rolling deep into Missouri sunflower fields, reclining on garish red cushions in the Jungle Room at Graceland before attempting to negotiate a truce among Country, Christian and “south of the border” radio between buttes in the Southwestern desert. With hopeful heart I was headed for the corroded metal vaguery of the US-Mexico border of my youth: the intoxicating aroma of fresh corn tortillas coaxing the day into being, the sounds of hand tools building a life in the sandy soil with driftwood, chickens and ceaseless, perfect sunsets.

My Southern gal Honda was soon festooned with proclamations. Less Bush, More Trees. Love Your Mother (planet Earth). Change Happens At The Speed of Thought. Tofino Surf Shop. Liquid Fusion. 

And the salt water took its toll: munching around the edges of windows, rack braces, door frames.

Corrosion debased a dent in the trunk forcing me to find a replacement trunk cover from a pancaked auto in a San Ysidro junkyard, albeit slightly off-color and a hairline narrower, therefore leaving a gap that forced me to empty the trunk of camera gear and fill it with towels during rainstorms.

The Hippiemobile was happiest on the road. Aliens in Nevada en route to the Black Canyon kept a parking space for her. She loved nothing better than to be perched on a seaside cliff in Ft. Bragg breathing in the ocean air before moving on to the next surf launch.

She carted me to backpacking trips in the Sierras, to Burning Man, the Rockies and for wildlife adventures at the Salton Sea.

I feared she would slip into eternal sleep when it snowed at Shakti Ma, but with help from the neighbor’s cats, snuggled overnight on the hood, she would rise to the pre-dawn challenge and get me to the base of Stonewall Peak so I could make the first footsteps on a trail knee-deep with snow.

Of course there were oil leaks, busted hoses, belts replaced, a new catalytic converter, windshield, tires, etc. But she had personality. A one of a kind. I’m glad the transaction happened in the dark. No telling what they did with her. Probably took her out back and put a bullet through her radiator. I’m glad I wasn’t there to see it.

She would approve of the new ride: a two years old, charcoal grey hybrid. And like every Prius in San Diego, the rack and SUP come standard.

We’ve got a road trip coming up. I have a feeling she’s not a city gal.

Non Sequiturs and Puncture Wounds

No one sees me pulling weeds. Under the dangling paddle cactus all things recede into shadow. I am no exception. Slivers of conversations drift in like torn bits of a love note. Unrequited and returned to sender, they impale themselves onto lethal opuntia spines in surrender.

“You know, it’s the way you are when you’re in your whatever whatever mood…”

“The mayor’s press office must look like a place where they do commie puppet shows.”

This is Hillcrest. People can say those things. In fact, outsiders come here to look at us. They are boring. But when I am pruning the two-story tall palo verde tree or pulling weeds from between tall euphorbia stalks, locals always stop to tell me how they’ve watched the jungle expand like a new universe.

“Those are PHILip’s!” (pronounced FILL ups). “Those were Philip’s clothes back there.”

I have found shirts, socks, condoms (people do wear them, apparently), and twice I’ve found sets of hospital scrubs. Either a physician’s assistant was transforming into a Superhero sans phone booth, or a sickee escaped from one of three nearby hospitals disguised as a caregiver. The latter is more plausible. In fact I have encountered just such an escapee, though he was wearing his street clothes at the time. He and a drinking buddy were leaning against the side of the house, noisily enjoying liter-size bottles of PBR when I asked if they could kindly carry their party elsewhere. The more sober one quickly staggered up to me confessing he really doesn’t ever drink, as he handed me the half empty bottle and hurried off to the bus stop down the street.

The other gentleman still wore his hospital wristband pronouncing him at least diabetic, but his problems were myriad. He didn’t want help getting up onto his cane, which meant, of course, he wasn’t getting up. I eventually left him to himself, at the very uncomfortable angle of between up and down, muttering about his combat experiences and thoughtless relatives; a toxic combination that has brought hundreds of veterans to San Diego’s streets. When I looked for him an hour later he had reconnect with his buddy at the bus stop.

My neighbor has a different approach. When a hospital escapee was napping on his soft green lawn, rather than ask the gentleman to please head over to the park, he called paramedics, who showed up, sirens blaring, with the requisite two police cars. Pulling on plastic gloves, they asked him how he was doing, about his meds, his sobriety, etc. Several thousand taxpayer dollars later, the paramedics retreated with their empty gurney. The cops gently escorted the man to the sidewalk where he sadly stood swaying, feeling foolish, rudderless, friendless and even more in need of that nap.

“The ocean has always been wet, but it hasn’t been until recently that you could set it on fire.”

OK, fill in the blanks. BP? Exxon Valdez, being that this is the 25^th anniversary of that catastrophe. Pick your slick. A river in West Virginia? Sadly, there are so many to choose from.

I don’t get oil slicks. I get Snickers wrappers and cigarette butts. I’m sure both indulgences seemed like a good idea at the time, but the consumer suffered for that moment of pleasure later on; kinda like off-shore oil drilling operations. So I guess oil slicks = Snickers bars.

“The white one?! The white one is all fluff, no puff!”

The magic of succulents is that a broken limb becomes a tree in no time. Several loads of culled blue agave pups and euphorbia branches became a flowering forest in two years. In three I was trimming it back and gifting loads of cuttings for other yards. The second floor windows are dark now behind the trumpet vines and giant bird of paradise.

Locals who saw the planting stage now walk by and reminisce with me about when they were just ankle high and cute. Now they are towering and quite lethal.

The Japanese mail order bride in pink rubber boots, pink polka dot skirt and pink umbrella from the condo on the corner comes by every few months. She chased her white poodle into the yard one day and I gave her a few starters in pots. A week later her Anglo husband walked their poodle by and thanked me for making his wife so happy.

“Coming of age is like getting a concussion!”

I wonder what age that might be.

If these are all non-sequiturs, then the wall-sized chalkboard next to my favorite Thai restaurant is about public art sequiturs. Passersby are invited to fill in the blank: “Before I die I want to…..” and the responses range from the inspirational “swim with dolphins” to cathartic “forgive my father.” The one that made me smile today was “be on time.” Surely the writer has more meaningful dreams or aspirations. But then again, this is probably the one person who is sure to realize that goal. And at the precise moment they are right on time for their own demise, they might see that being punctual isn’t such a valuable attribute after all.

Drought is a four-letter word

Fear. Dust. Fire. Dead.

There was a false sense of four seasons in California one day in December when snow swept across the steep escarpment of Wilshire Peak on the Yucaipa Ridge in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Laughing, freezing, smiling, we followed Charlie our guide from the Wildlands Conservancy on a stumbling-fast pace between islands of visibility and three different peaks.

The Conservancy owns and manages this 2,200 acre preserve to prevent exploitation of private lands within the National Forest. Would that it could harness the racing clouds tossing sleet like lightening bolts at our feet. This is the only precipitation that Southern California would feel throughout its storied winter months.

Imagine cabins in the woods without snow men to protect them. No deer prints on frozen ground. No icicles dripping from cedar branches, snow shovels still in their plastic packaging, no reason to drink warm cider or wear scarves.

A week later, in the desert, we found the snow. It poured between granite boulders in Anza Borrego's Palm Canyon, green moss forming on the surface of black water pools. There were waterfalls, butterflies and road runners. Pools pushed quicksand to cover the trail, forcing a slow creep up the rocky walls on our trek towards the four palm groves gracing this narrow canyon.

Snow. Melt. Life. Tree.

Folsom Lake in Central California is at 17% capacity. Farmers are selling their cattle because they don’t have enough water for the thirsty bovines. Republicans are blaming the drought on Democratic environmental policies. The governor wants to build tunnels sending 67,500 gallons of water per second from the Sacramento Delta to the lower half of the state. That’ll go over well.

Studying tree rings, climatologists say this is California’s driest period in 400 years. Ouch. They’ve come up with a catchy new term for it: megadrought. What will weather girls wear when describing this phenomenon? Downtown L.A. gets 15 inches of rain in a normal year. In 2013 it received 3.6. Look on the bright side: more storm drains will be converted to half pipe skate parks. Bring the X games to So Cal's culverts.

We’ve had droughts before and they can go on for a long, long time. In 850 AD, apparently, a drought began that lasted 240 years. Really it's not our fault. San Diegans can boast a 27% decrease in consumer demand for residential water use. We've been good.

Arid. Rust. Time. Hope.

I mean, the gators in Mississippi are burrowing into the mud to stay warm. Ice balls the size of WWII mines are rolling up on beaches of Lake Michigan. Tell Minnesota we want our storms back. There’s snow in Savannah, GA. for Christ’s sake. That’s our precip. Must have gotten lost somewhere on the Continental Divide. Send it back this way please.