La Vida Plana
by Titus Gee
Someone who lives on Sierra Highway smokes a pipe on calm autumn evenings. The house must be about half-way between my home and work. The mellow, fragrant smoke mingles with the smell of leaves and of the sun-baked earth now cooled and stirred up by the breeze.
Six months ago, I could not have told you about those autumn aromas. I could not tell you that the world on Balboa Boulevard just north of Los Angeles smells like a pile of dirty diapers with lavender Lysol sprayed over them, either. I could not tell you how the climate shifts half a dozen degrees when you round a corner deep in the canyons or describe the unsettling quality of a precipice beside the road.
Six months ago, I was puttering along in my Volkswagen sedan, one day, musing to myself instead of paying close attention to the BMW passing me (on the right) at 98 mph, when it struck me — my world was flat.
Television screens, movie screens, computer screens, windows, windscreen. Everything in the world was glassed-in, sanitized, and hermetically sealed for my protection. Freeway driving felt more like playing an arcade game. I slaked my travel lust by watching documentaries on television and adventured vicariously through film heroes played by people I’ve never met.
So I got a motorcycle.
Ok, the cause and effect may have been a little less straightforward than that. Nonetheless, circumstance tossed me out into the three-dimensional world on two wheels, which is to say with nothing between my and the eco-sphere except the clothes on my back.
So, when wood smoke started drifting on the wind I knew that fall had ripened. On garbage day, I knew that something else had ripened also.
And when winter fell on us like an anvil from the sky, I showed up everywhere chattering and stuffing handwarmers in my gloves.
One night I set out, just past midnight, into 32 degrees — and at 70 mph with heavy winds that’s pretty cold.
I felt it, stem to stern and skin to bone.
Yeah.
It hurts.
But the moon was full and the canyon road mostly empty. The familiar curves flowed past bathed in silver light, and my cheeks remembered the gentle flush of snowy childhood afternoons.
I was alive, out there in all dimensions — and ever so awake.
I loved it.
And that’s more than I can say for commuting on four wheels, even with a heater.
