The first blog entry for Nikki Cormaci invites the reader to journey with her. Her plan is to integrate the
methodology of her project organically throughout a series of posts.
I
found myself slipping in and out of consciousness driving at 70 mph in the
Northern California dark. I had a deadline, two in fact, a 5 a.m. low tide in
Nachotta Bay, WA, some 700 miles northwest, where I work in the oysters. That
one was impossible. The other one also proved impossible. Noon I was scheduled
to work in the old hotel in Seaview, preparing the rooms for the weekend. The
smell of propane gas leaking out of the kitchen in the trailer we call African
Queen was the first thing I remember about work that day when finally I
returned after 9 hours of sleep in a third as many days. The drive from San
Francisco had been ambitious and badly-planned. The work in the oysters is
early and tough, but the bright bay sunrises and milky fog daybreaks mixed with
the brute to surge adrenaline, making things seem reasonable that are in fact
completely insane. The first 12 hours on two hours sleep had been fine enough.
The last twelve were another story, a bible story, the one about a desperate search
to find a place to rest. You cannot shut your eyes and keep moving without
death. The paradox of driving, shocking to me in my weariness, is that we are
not the passengers but the pilots of these strange ships. We are their captains
our duty is to stay alert. I pulled off the highways after several losing
rounds pummeled by sleep, losing badly, I reclined in a terrifying RV park,
where a fat tweaker approached my car, yelled "Hello" and told me to
start it up and move it along, that he would stand there and watch me pull out.
I made another attempt to sleep in the backseat in the parking lot of a small
motel. I covered my white shirt in a black dress to camouflage myself against
the black leather seats, blood freezing at every footstep or car door closing,
opening. Silence hit again and I hit the black road once more. The white lines
came alive, flattening, dizzying, then lifting up out of the concrete. I once
thought the curved white line was the lip of a giant plate. The spore prints of
insects on the windshield flattened against the moving pavement, too, then
flipped, receding until I saw all the souls of the bugs flying at the
windshield all at once, scaring me awake again. The temporary relief from sleep
that the scare produced made a small victory out of the danger of dreaming
while driving.
Before
I left SF I visited the Zen Center and flipped through a book about sitting.
Sitting and meditating have been used interchangeably although the author
argued this was incomplete, since sitting with your thoughts, if they are
greedy for attention, is not meditating. Sleeping is also not meditating,
although meditation (sitting) can collapse reality and the dream, too. Can
driving, which is sitting, be mediation? Yoga for Truckers, my Nashville Flex
it project, searches for this link, this difference, asking buddhists and
yogis and truckers to share their experiences of sitting and find the common
ground. I found a safe place to sleep in the rest stop outside Shasta. A
"Safety" rest stop, full of people hungry for sleep and the cessation
of movement. There I slept soundly until the sun rose. I left and climbed
Siskiyou out of California and into Oregon. There at the summit, drenched in
the early morning sun, were a flock of long-hauls trucks and trailers. There
was something ancient about seeing them there, like sentinels, or eagles
perched atop the mountain. Why did they stop there, and not down at the Love's
Travel Stop and Country Store, with its bedazzeled flip-flops and Nascar kit?
Why were they up there sleeping just four miles north of the California border
on the tallest peak on the I-5?
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