Drawing with a Pencil

So here I am -- in San Francisco -- far from the adventures I have known in my recent past, close to all the adventures of my childhood, reading, as it were, the future and current adventures of Jill. I have to admit I am more than a bit jealous.

I have boots, and a bike, and a truck. I can walk, hike, ride, camp, bike, but can't manage to get away, so I stay here. I miss the new Jane, the "happy hiking buddy™", and the Superstition Ridgeline. I can go there. If I can just get away.

I can't. In my youth, I was stuck here too. I dreamed of tigers and safaris and ostriches, and places far away, rain forests. I wrote read National Geographic on the remote wilderness and the world adventure. I was their staff ornithologist. I dreamed. I dream now, too. I dream of orchids in Madagascar and Brazilian women (just one actually). I dream of the world without. I dream in the dentist's office as I read where people have circumnavigated the globe under human power. I could be one of those people.

And where am I? They survive a hurricane at sea in a boat and I am at my desk. Did you know that Ernest Hemingway finished "As the Bell Tolls" in Havana, Cuba. I can't even go there, as far as I know. I am really just here, in the place of my youth. My friends are here, and I make new friends easily, because I know the rules, the local code. I grew up here, in a marsh, in a barrio, I lived through glass in the street and neighbors that we called "the stealers" for seemingly obvious reasons (they were replaced by a Portuguese family that -- guess what -- got robbed) and several floods.

I feel V.S Naipaul's neighborhood in Trinidad in the way I can still feel my own. The babysitter of teaching my children Erdu is here, my neighbor of the perpetual sushi is here. My best wiffle ball playing childhood friend. Islander Markets and taquerias, the taquerias of my youth. Seafood, tacos and cioppino. I am a tidepool of cross-cultural driftwood. So be it.

So, where am I now? On a journey in my head -- an adventure within. It's a place where we draw the birds in our yard and read all the bird books at our library. We draw the birds of the Arctic, the puffins, and barnacle geese, and dream of the future when we can travel. Shoot arrows into a bale of straw at the back fence until we manage to send one out to the freeway. We get poison oak at the local rope swing while smoking (my political career is a disaster anyway -- honest -- I did inhale) and dive off the dam at swim in the water shed. It's the place where we had our first kiss and got the truck stuck in the mud; the first time we got laid, and then I met that young Asian woman who will remain nameless. We rode our bikes to shoot at rabbits with wrist rockets, and later learned to hunt with guns. A rock concert -- a love-in, and ... a fifth of tequila. Birds on the edge of the bay in the morning. Canoe trips and costume parties. And we should never forget beer drinking bonfire parties to be broken up by the cops on the beach out at the ocean in the wee morning. It's the place where we met ... almost every one we know.

It's the place where I learned to work and ride a bike; learned to navigate an uncertain future. I learned to make art, got married, raised a family, and was a strong part of this community. My community is here. My friends, family and mentors are all here, too; some to live and die here. I sure wish I could strike out on a ten mile hike with the camera into the sun and the scorpions ... there's a wilderness within, I know it; I just have to find it. I must find it.