January 27, 2007 – SciFi Novel “The Traveler” Will Have Readers Racing

January 27, 2007 – SciFi Novel “The Traveler” Will Have Readers Racing

Over the years I’ve read novels depicting technology’s ability to provide sinister power to control the citizenry. In the middle of the last century George Orwell with his novel “1984” and Aldous Huxley with his work “Brave New World” were typical of the genre, I enjoyed. With the advent of the computer, came the concept of the despotic machine. Nowhere was the idea more terrifyingly portrayed than in “Colossus the Forbin Project,” a science fiction film released in 1970 based on the novel “Colossus” by Dennis Felthan Jones. The movie is dated, especially its technology, by today’s standards but in its time told a story of the U.S. developing a supercomputer that controlled all the nuclear weapons in the country’s arsenal. The computer was given unquestioned power to protect the U.S. against attack. The computer finds the Russians have a similar supercomputer and the two machines decide to merge and create a single machine that subjugates all of mankind for the good of mankind. The humans who built this thing made it completely invincible: the perfect example of technology run amok. The movie ends—I didn’t read the book—with Colossus telling every citizen of the world that they will obey and live in harmony.

Over time technology’s dark side has taken on different forms and most all involve computers. The most recent work to come along and turn technology into a terrifying boogie man is “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks, a work that describes a world where a powerful, wealthy organization has harnessed the enormous power of information technology to their ends. For example, the narrator describes a truth room where the villains’ computers monitor the biometric activity of occupants and detects who is lying. The villains are called the Tabula. Their computer systems can access every computer anywhere in the world that is tied into the net. They can even access the cameras installed throughout every major metropolitan area globally, as well as those used by immigration services worldwide to screen passengers entering or leaving a country—find someone they want to detain, they simply flash a warning on the screen and that person is detained. The Tabula’s omnipotent power resembles that employed by the NSA in the Will Smith movie “Enemy of the State”, right down to bugs in the clothes to track someone; satellite imaging that can locate an individual on the ground and track his/her movements, etc. As in “Enemy of the State” the Tabula’s system can also access the myriad of transactions any citizen performs each day: bridge and highway tolls, airline tickets, ATM activity, even being able to track the movement of a vehicle, and control its on-board systems—locking its doors, disabling the engine. This is the dark side of On-Star if you’re the owner of the car and you’re trying to get away from the bad guys. This does happen to one of the good guys in “The Traveler.”

The good guys come in two flavors. The first are the Travelers. They are humans with the ability to leave their body and enter other dimensions, where other life exists. In this story life in one of these dimensions, has technology that far exceeds that found in our physical world and they want to build a bridge between the two. The Tabula has been able to crudely communicate with it and it’s been giving the Tabula information on how to create more powerful computers as well as other information such as how to bioengineer killer hyenas that are tough to kill. The Tabula now need a Traveler they can control to make the journey and speed up the transfer. The other good guys are the Harlequins who are the sworn protectors of Travelers and their job is to ensure the Tabula never takes control of their charges. These bodyguards are a kind of Knights Templar who are trained from birth in every form of martial art and every kind of personal warfare. His/her trademark is a sword—think “Kill Bill”—which each carries in a case slung over his/her shoulder. This book draws from most of the other popular icons of today’s youth culture, containing elements of “Star Wars,” “The Matrix,” “The DaVinci Code”….

The narrative centers around a reluctant Harlequin named Maya, daughter of Thorn, who has turned her back on her father’s world and is attempting to make a life for herself in the 9-to-5 working world of London. She can’t, or course, because she has no real identity—she lives a contrived life based on false documentation and invented personal history. Thorn summons her to Prague, where he entreats her to protect two brothers, Gabriel and Michael Corrigan, sons of a Traveler, reported to have been killed by the Tabula. The pair are living in Los Angeles neither aware of their father being a Traveler, neither suspecting they may have inherited his ability. However, both are aware of the clandestine life their parents lived and Gabriel has continued living an assumed identity in a rundown area of Los Angeles, with few modern amenities and no paper trail, Michael has thrown caution to the wind, living under his real name, and working on making a killing in upscale LA real estate. Their mother is dying of cancer in a hospice as the story begins.

The fast paced novel switches between the bad guys searching for the two travelers and the good guys, Maya and Gabriel trying to elude them. As you might have guessed Michael the material guy, is seduced by the dark side. The other main character of this narrative is the information technology that the Tabula has harnessed to carry out their evil plot to capture both travelers and to destroy the harlequins and anyone who aids and assists them. The harlequins have devised ingenious ruses to combat this technology. For example, Maya distorts her face by injections, applies a false fingerprint over her finger, uses contact lens to change eye color…

The author himself has created additional mystery by proclaiming himself “off the net.” He lives without creating any information trail that anyone can use to exert control over him. He communicates with his publisher by a satellite phone, presumably one that can’t be traced. He disguises his voice over the phone to prevent voice prints being made. The man is living his story.

In this book, the heroine Maya has plenty of fight scenes, some solo, others alongside a black martial arts expert named Thomas Hollis who she has hired to help her protect Gabriel from the Tabula. There is his love interest: Victory from Sin Frazier—Vicki for short, a member of the church of Isaac T. Jones. The founder Jones was reported to be a Traveler who had been arrested and was to be hanged. A Harlequin had come to his rescue and died trying to protect him from the lynch mob. Some church members like Vicki believed that the church owed a debt to the Harlequins and belonged to the debt-not-paid branch of the religion. The other sect, Vicki’s mother and others did not hold this view. Vicki’s act of rebellion is to help Maya in her effort to protect Gabriel. She introduces Maya to Hollis.

The book reads fast, but in the end you’re left waiting for the second part of the trilogy to come along and pick up where this one left off. The book is being heavily marketed by publisher Random House. It has built an interactive webpage http://www.randomhouse.com/features/traveler/ where the visitor is immediately dragged into the current story with an assignment issued by the Tabula as you, the visitor, are one of them. If you continue as directed, you’ll be confronted with an array of monitors that show all the Tabula’s tools for tracking and locating their enemy. There is a display depicting fingerprints, video surveillance, audio surveillance, satellite surveillance. Other monitors show credit card transactions, police reports, and GPS vehicle identification activity. Beyond the web, there is a movie in the making based on this first installment. There’s a video game and other marketing tie-ins to keep the cash register ringing. If you’re in the mood for a fast paced action-adventure thriller, “The Traveler” delivers. It will keep you occupied on a long flight between San Francisco and Taipei.

January 22, 2006 – Information Technology’s Two-Edge Sword

January 22, 2006 – Information Technology’s Two-Edge Sword

On many intersections in San Francisco, you will find video cameras monitoring vehicle and pedestrian traffic. They have become ubiquitous. I first noticed intersection cameras while attending the Electronica Trade Faire twelve years ago. My German editor AV and his wife GV were driving me through the streets of Munich on Sunday November 5th, 1994 en route to a hiking excursion. AV kept pulling up at orange lights and I finally joked that in the U.S. an orange light was still considered green. AV explained that in Germany running an orange light would trigger cameras at the intersection and automatically result in a traffic ticket being sent to your address. The high resolution cameras would record the driver, the car, and its license plate and use the vehicle registration to issue a ticket.

I had encountered an early version of this technology in 1974 while employed at M-Systems, a government contractor based in Garland, Texas now owned by the Raytheon Company. There was a dangerous stretch of road in Arlington, Texas—where exactly it was I can’t remember any longer. Speeders along the section of highway caused an abnormally high number of accidents and the city wanted to end the carnage. My employer had successfully won the city’s contract for a system to detect a vehicle’s speed and to photography any that was speeding. The system comprised a camera standing alongside the highway and two sensor strips across the road ahead of the camera. The sensors fed data to the system’s on-board computer and the computer calculated the car’s speed. The camera took a high-resolution picture of any vehicle exceeding the limit.

The city of Arlington, publicized that cameras were installed along the road and that each citizen caught speeding would be issued one warning. Thereafter, violators would be ticketed. The pictures I saw from early tests of the system showed drivers surprised by the sudden flash of light with their license plates clearly readable. One devious trio of teenagers reportedly covered their car’s license plate, tripped the camera, and the resulting photograph showed all three with fierce faces displaying an obscene gesture. One of the three was recognized by someone in the police department and justice was meted out.

Today’s technology far exceeds the crude contrivances of 1974 and 1994: digital video replacing still images, software that not only reads the license plate and identifies the owner, but also recognizes the person’s face and matches it against a “be-on-the-lookout” list of individuals. Furthermore, the technology, matches data bases of vehicle registrations to driver’s license numbers, past traffic infractions, parole violations, outstanding warrants… In addition, these data bases can be linked to others the city, county, state, and federal governments continue to amass; not to mention the data bases of credit rating system, telephone call records, automated toll collections, credit and debit card purchases, ATM withdrawals… In effect, computers and their associated data mining software can perform extensive cross references among all these information repositories to determine a great deal about someone running a red light. The analysis would not occur for the average Joe, but for someone on a watch list for good reason or clerical error, the whole evaluation process gets set in motion—the unsuspecting violator caught in a Kafkaesque world.

In San Francisco, there have been 18 homicides and countless other incidents of violent crime in the high crime areas of Bayview-Hunters Point and several others. In October last year, Gavin Newsome, mayor of the bluest city in the blue state of California, proposed installing cameras at each of these areas to help reduce crime. This led to an outcry from the American Civil Liberties Union that the invasion of privacy was not warranted by the likely reduction in crime. The ACLU cited a British study of street cameras used since the mid-'90s showing they do little to curb crime. Casino owners in Vegas, looking over gamblers’ shoulders since television technology was available to do so, might dispute the claim. Law abiding citizens of the crime ridden areas are so fed up that they are willing to accept this intrusion into personal privacy even if the cameras provide nothing but the illusion of enhanced security. “Somebody is watching me; therefore if I’m victimized they will see who the perpetrator was.”

For most of my adult life, I’ve been an unabashed proponent of information technology. In reality, the computer has enabled handling the incredible numbers of people who must be accommodated 24/7. Imagine shopping in a grocery store without bar code scanners; with human checkers keying every item. This same gridlocked vision would apply to airline ticketing, entertainment venues, every transaction in which hundreds or thousands of people must be accommodated quickly. Without information technology, it just wouldn’t be possible. This is technology’s great virtue: performing repetitive mundane transactions at incredible speed.

As with all tools humans have invented, the weakness lies not in the instrument but with the individual wielding it. That especially holds true for information technology. In the hands of a totalitarian state, it could be used to exert enormous control over the citizenry. However, even in an enlightened democracy as ours, the power can be applied at the discretion of the sitting government as the debate over the Patriot Act attests. Ultimately in a free society, the citizenry determines how this vast power will be used. Democracy is a fragile state of being continually attacked by well meaning men.

In 1928, the Supreme Court ruled for the government in the landmark case Olmstead v. United States. Olmstead among other petitioners argued that the government violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution in obtaining evidence that led to the conviction of Olmstead et al. The government victory set a precedent that would take nearly 40 years to rectify with Katz v. United States in 1967. In summary Olmstead and others were bootleggers who paid off Seattle’s police to maintain their lucrative $2 million-a-year business during the time of prohibition. The government tapped phone lines going into the defendants’ places of business and recorded their conversations. There was no dispute that Olmstead and his associates flaunted the law. The only question was did the government violate the Fourth Amendment in obtaining evidence to convict them?

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote the five-to-four majority opinion, stating that the Fourth Amendment had not been violated because the defendants’ premises had not been illegally entered, nor had their mail been read. Only conversations over phone lines—not specifically cited in the original language of the amendment—going into the defendants’ private property had been recorded.

Louis D. Brandeis—Supreme Court Associate Justice 1916 to 1939—and three other associate justices—including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—dissented stating that though the government had not violated the letter of the law, it had violated the spirit of the fourth amendment. Brandeis wrote, “experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Words written at the dawn of the 20th Century remain true at the beginning of the 21st.

January 19, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 4

January 19, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 4

For my wife IM and me, Friday December 30th, 2005 began with the sound of waves breaking against the gray sands on Moonstone Beach about two-thirds of a mile south of Leffingwell Landing Park in Cambria, California. The park was named after William Leffingwell Sr. who built the area’s first sawmill shortly after settling here in 1858, when Cambria was an active seaport and whaling station, 24 years after Richard Henry Dana shipped out as a seaman on the brig Pilgrim to live the experience he would document in his classic Two Years Before The Mast—likely passing this stretch of the Central Coast in his voyages. My wife IM and I had an early night and woke a little after 7:00 as the winter sun cast long shadows westward. Outside patches of fog diffused the light producing a dreamy effect looking southward along Moonstone Beach Drive.

A morning run in Cambria is one of the highlights of my day in the coastal resort town. From our ground floor room at Cambria Landing, I jog north on Moonstone Beach Drive toward its junction with California Highway 1, also called the Cabrillo Highway. As I amble out the Moonstone Beach Bar & Grill on my right is getting ready to serve breakfast and I notice the wait staff preparing to receive guests. Along Moonstone Beach about the only activity are early morning walkers and the occasion car disturbing the Debussy-sounding rhythm of waves lapping the beach—though today, stirred up by the Pacific storms that have lashed California the last four days, the abnormally high waves hit the coast with an increased fury. The two-lanes of Moonstone Beach Drive are trapped on the left by the pounding Pacific, slowly eroding inches of bluff every year and on the right by a line of bed and breakfast motels: Cambria Landing, Castle Inn, Sea Otter Inn, Best Western Fireside Inn, the upscale Blue Whale Inn—the most expensive in the area, White Water Inn, and Windrush, all with ocean views across Moonstone Beach Drive. The one lone exception is the San Simeon Pines Motel, which sits at the top of a gentle rise where Moonstone Beach Drive dead ends into Highway 1. Its view is obstructed by the wind-sculpted pines overlooking Leffingwell Landing.

When I reach Highway 1, I continue north a mile and a half, toward Ragged Point, a collection of motels and businesses a couple of miles south of San Simeon. The stretch of two-lane blacktop starts at the top of a rise and then descends into a valley cut away by a hundred-years-old-plus stream that continues to carry run off from the Coast Range Mountains. (Hearst Castle sits atop this range a couple miles north and several miles east up a winding mountain road, where it commands an incredible view that extends from Morro Bay in the south to Big Sur in the north). Today the stream is still running fast carrying the remnants of the storm that deluged the mountains earlier in the week. At the bottom of the hill, a concrete bridge—the length of a city block and a good 15 feet or more above the canyoned-out ground below—arcs the canyon and its fast moving stream. The bridge has a narrow shoulder that I cross running against fairly light, on-coming traffic traveling at a good 60 MPH, their wake ruffling my Rohde & Schwartz running suit. On the eastern side of Highway 1 on the north bank of the stream is a public camp ground, part of San Simeon State Park. It’s filled with RVs, trailers, and tents, the transient abode of brave souls some of whom weathered the earlier storm and are now being treated to a beautiful morning—the sun’s rays deflected skyward over the rim of the Coast Range. Just beyond the camp is the entrance to the state park and I’m now running up a slight grade. On the left is a small multi-building estate with an unobstructed ocean view sitting atop the bluff that parallels the highway. The ocean is a good 10 to 15 feet below. Most of the bluff on the ocean-side of the highway is colonized by ice plants that spread like ivy. On the eastern side of the highway, the treeless sloping foot hills of the Coast Range are covered with winter grazing and a handful of cows widely spaced from one another are having their early morning fill.

About a quarter of a mile south of Ragged Point, the grade I’ve been climbing levels off and I cross the highway and start my return. I would normally have carried on and made my turn at Ragged Point, but I’m lazy today. As I begin my return I pass the strong distinctive odor of skunk that I missed on the outbound leg, as the wind was blowing on shore. The animal was hit and thrown to the side of the highway, though I can’t see its carcass. I make it back to Cambria Landing and complete my shower just as breakfast is brought to our room—two rolls, sliced fresh fruit, orange juice, and coffee. After breakfast, IM and I sit back and watch Moonstone Beach come to life, with a steady stream of walkers, joggers, bicyclists, and cars passing our floor to ceiling window and sliding glass door giving access to a wood deck with two white plastic outdoor chairs. It’s a bit too cold to sit outside and we hide behind the glass and watch the world go by.

The routine in Cambria is as regular as the constant pounding waves. Each morning, walkers take to the wooden boardwalks the city has installed on the ocean side of Moonstone Beach Drive to minimize the damage to the fragile ecosystem on the slowly eroding bluffs that guard this valuable beach-front property from inundation by the Pacific. The flora must not only contend with the fury of nature—windblown salt spray from crashing wave, the ever present fog that visits overnight most evenings, the punishing storms that sweep the coast during the winter months—it must also endure the footfalls of sightseers who ignore the signs to stay on the boardwalk, the antics of pets, mostly dogs, and the ever present carbon monoxide exhaust continually sprayed by passing cars during the daylight hours.

The walkers are an interesting collection of aging baby boomers—like IM and me; same-sex two-somes; young families with one or two adolescents; the occasional newborn wrapped snugly against the brisk morning breeze off the ocean; and romantic couples of all ages strolling hand in hand, oblivious of the world about them—they’ve found paradise for a day and they’re going to ring every ounce of pleasure from it before sunset and even then watching till the last ray of sun sinks into the distant horizon (on a good day with no fog).

The rhythm of this couple-mile stretch of Pacific coast is tuned to the metronome of the constant rolling waves. At night, IM and I love to sleep with the window open listening to the steady beat of successive waves. There is no place in the world that makes you more keenly aware that the earth vibrates to a constant frequency, each rotation marking the continuous passage of time in a never ending progression, one revolution following another.

The sound of time passing has just reminded us that the year 2005 has just over 37 hours left and we’re anxious to return home and do all the things we haven’t quite finished in 2005. Just before 11:00 we load up the Chevy Trailblazer, drop off our room key and head back to San Jose.

January 18, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 3

January 18, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 3

It's Thursday December 29th and my wife IM and I are up early from our peaceful night at the Hilton Sedona Resort & Spa. From the air, the hotel has the outline of a staple that had been removed, bent in the middle with both ends curved in a shape of a stylized “C”. Our room is in the middle of the “C” two rooms away from the registration desk. After we get cleaned up, I call the front desk to say the bill they slipped under my door was correct and to check us out. We load up the Chevy Trailblazer and head out Highway 179 south about 10 miles to get back on Interstate 17 heading north toward Flagstaff. Once on the Interstate, we’re traveling along the Mogollon Rim, an escarpment that begins just south of the Grand Canyon and runs southeast through Arizona and into New Mexico nearly 300 miles. The rim continues being shaped by the North American Continental Plate's relentless drive against the Pacific Plate—wrinkling and stretching Arizona's geologic crust, minutely reshaping the state’s mountain ranges and valleys, ridges and depressions, and mineral outcroppings. In the Sumo wrestling match, the Continental Plate is successfully bullying the Pacific Plate, shoving it northwest-ward at a rate of 600 feet every million years.

The lifetime of humankind is so insignificant when measured against the earth’s four-and-a-half-billion-year lifetime. The distinctive layers of Courthouse Bluff in Sedona contain a written record of over a half a billion years of geologic activity, when the entire region was close to the equator. By contrast, the human’s lifetime on earth is barely a couple of million years. The distinctive red color comprising over half the bottom of the 1200-foot Courthouse Bluff bear evidence from hundreds of million of years ago of the iron oxide staining the sandstone comprising these structure. The layers of white interspersed with the red sandstone tell the story of the region being inundated every several million years by the ancient Pedregosa (the Spanish word for “stony or rocky”) Sea. The once-submerged whole of the Western U.S. later went through cycles where the Pedregosa invaded whole sections of the landmass. With each successive inundation, millions of aquatic life forms buried themselves in the sediment of that sea to be compacted into the layers visible now in the exposed multicolored limestone and sandstone cliffs. Will the remains of humankind be among those layers some hundreds of millions of years hence? It does make you wonder about the ultimate question of what this is all about. It’s like we’ve all come in on the middle of the movie and it’s been going so long that no one recalls how it started and no one is smart enough to figure out how the movie will end. What’s more infuriating is that none of us will have the slightest clue of the end when we have to leave, though the answer may lie in the place we arrive when we leave this one—if such a place exists.

Less than 30 minutes on I-17 and the Chevy Trailblazer is nearing the Interstate 40 junction. We’re heading toward the San Francisco Mountains that tower over the college town of Flagstaff. Somewhere above the tree line of Piñon-Juniper at lower elevations and Ponderosa Pine, Fir and Bristlecone Pine at the highest elevations, is the towering peak of 12,633-ft high San Francisco Mountain. Over the past 6 million years, this range has produced over 600 volcanoes, the youngest of which is Sunset Crater which last erupted less than a thousand years ago. We’re tourist rummaging among the remains of ancient natural disasters.

At Interstate 40, I nose the Trailblazer westward and feel a sudden jolt of excitement heading toward the Golden State. On this stretch of highway we are riding the path of famed Route 66. In the U.S. highways are revered in the same way railroads are in the U.K. We celebrate them in song, make television series about them—Route 66 with Martin Milner and George Maharis, who played Tod Stiles and Buz Murdock, respectively driving this famed highway in Tod’s 1960 Corvette Convertible, another memory from a fast receding past. The last time IM and I drove Interstate 40 going to Santa Fe, we stopped in Williams to pay our respects to the road. That thought came to mind as we zoomed westward Williams off to our left a little west of Flagstaff. Old Route 66 runs straight through downtown Williams along Bill Williams Boulevard. On that earlier trip to Santa Fe, we stayed in Williams to visit the Grand Canyon. We decided to book passage on the train that daily runs to the canyon in the morning returning in the late afternoon. The train ride resembles a theme park ride with musicians and actors plying their trade and passing the hat afterwards. For generations raised on constant stimulation, a journey with no diversions except the natural scenery you’re passing makes for an endless journey and the performers do a brisk business. We stayed at the hotel/motel close by the train station in Williams, which offered a packaged deal: room and ride.

Beyond Williams is the town of Kingman, Arizona, the last of the larger towns of I-40 before the California border. On the earlier Santa Fe trip we exited I-40 at Andy Devine Avenue in Kingman. (The road gets its name from the movie actor, born in Flagstaff, Arizona, who played Roy Rogers’ sidekick as well as in many other movies—many westerns.) We stopped at a Denny’s near the off ramp for breakfast after trying to find a breakfast café like the one I remembered from the days I was a kid traveling with my family and like the ones depicted occasionally in Route 66, the TV series. This time we exit the interchange for gas at Woody's Food Store near the offramp, but IM and I both remembered the last Denny’s meal we had here and decided to forego breakfast though we can clearly see the restaurant across the street.

The trip from Kingman to Needles seems to take no time at all and suddenly we’re leaving Arizona and heading into California toward the Central Coast and the ocean-front town of Cambria our destination for the day. It has been overcast most of the drive from Flagstaff and as Needles recedes in our rear view mirror the gray gloom continues. The drive for the next 140 miles is largely through uninhabited stretches of the Mojave Desert, as I-40 meanders, curving around and over low rise mountains. Along the way we catch sight of trains along the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. They’re heading to or from Barstow, a hub for railroads east and west and north and south, where hobos still make connections. The city was a jumping off place for immigrants from the dust bowl traveling west on Route 66 to seek a new life in California. Route 66 still lives in Barstow along Main Street. The desert city is also at the junction of three major highways—I-15, I-40, and California 58. We take the latter as our road west.

Driving California 58 is a tour through John Steinbeck’s early 20th Century California: miles of farmland, most of it farmed by corporate giants, the heavy equipment that replaced the early mechanical and animal powered farm implements of Steinbeck’s time, nowhere to be seen, though their existence is clearly evident. California’s miles of fertile land basks in a climate that allows crops year-around, most if not all harvested by John Deere equipment or migrant workers—today from Mexico not from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas as in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Along other stretches of Highway 58 are oil pumps appearing like a field of giant preying mantises sucking oil deposited beneath the ground collected over 100s of millions of years in the deep recesses of geologic strata. Incredibly what took hundreds of millions of years to form, we’re burning on our westward drive in a billionth of the time.

I think of that primeval Pedregosa Sea, inundating this land millions of years ago depositing plant and animal life to be covered over by successive generations. Today’s tenants of the land are layering it with the detritus of modern time—junk cars, beer cans and soft drink containers, and every other man made package—that millions of years from now will represent our contribution to the geology of this world. Scary thought, no? Along the way we pass Edwards Air Force Base and the town of Mojave before reaching the town of Tehachapi. It sits atop a 40-mile transverse mountain range named for the city. Like a huge brace, the range lies perpendicular to the two opposing plates trying to squeeze California as if attempting to keep apart two warring factions that no amount of restraint will deter.

We reach Tehachapi at a quarter past one in the afternoon and I stop at the Summit Chevron station at 400 Steuber Road, just off Highway 58. The place is mobbed with RVs, SUVs, and passenger cars. I manage to find and open pump, whip out my credit card, insert it into the machine and it starts pumping gas. Outside the wind is blowing and the clouds that have kept the day overcast seem nearer—perhaps because we’re 3900 feet above sea level. The winds over the Tehachapi pass are that strong and persistent that it is home to windmill farms to rival those we passed in our outbound journey through Palm Springs and Indio. After filling the tank, IM and I press on in the gloom down into the great central valley and the town of Barstow This is the as country and western as California gets. And it’s a haven for 18-wheelers hauling every conceivable commodity under the sun.

We work our way through Bakersfield on 58, catch California Highway 43, the Stockdale Highway, for a short stretch before it intersects Interstate 5. There we head north for a few miles before coming on the Highway 46 exit, which we take west for just under 100 miles before reaching California 101. Highway 46 is a two lane road with sections of passing lanes for traffic going uphill. As we near the intersection with 101, the land on either side of the highway suddenly sprouts vineyards for as far as the eye can see. This is the central coast wine growing region, depicted in the movie “Sideways.” At the 101 junction, we head south for a couple of miles as 46 and 101 become one, then head west as 46 abruptly breaks away to run toward the ocean. The drive along this stretch of 46 is over the Coast Mountain Range and as we reach the summit we finally see the sun. It’s a welcome sight after so many miles of dreary gray overcast. We arrive at our room at Cambria Landing on Moonstone Beach in Cambria around 4:30 and finally manage to stop moving and leisurely watch the sun dip below the western horizon. The perfect end for a long day of driving.

January 12, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 2

January 12, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 2

It's Wednesday December 28th and we sleep in until about 8:30, tired out by the long drive to Sedona from El Paso on Tuesday. Close to 9:00 I don my running suit-a gift from Rohde & Schwarz, the Munich Germany test and measurement company (a rival to Agilent, the Hewlett-Packard T&M spinout) given to me when I attended my first ever Electronica the first week in November 1990. Electronica was once one of the largest trade fairs in the world, now downsized thanks to the declining fortunes of the electronics industry. The royal blue running suit consists of elastic waistband pants with an 8-in. zipper at the cinched bottom of each outside pant leg and a zippered jacket with zippered pockets. It's great running gear in cold weather and the Sedona morning was crisp and chilly. I call the front desk of the Hilton Sedona Resort where we're staying and asked for a good jogging path. They have none to recommend so I decide to strike off and see what I can find on my own.

The Hilton sits atop a 20-or-so-foot rise at 90 Ridge Trail Drive; a left turn off Arizona Highway 179. I jog out of the parking lot and down the grade to the stop light at 179. Traffic is fairly light and I cross the highway when the light changes to green for Ridge Trail Drive traffic. On the other side of the highway is a new-built housing development that begins just across a creek that runs along side the highway. Could this be the Oak Creek that this suburb of Sedona is named after? Jogging down the slight decline from the highway, I cross the bridge over the creek and see that the street I'm on is not Ridge Trail but Avenida de Piedras, which begins to gradually rise as I run. On either side of the road are new homes constructed within the last year or two at the most. Some are vacant; some with homeowners just moved in. One fellow on the right side is out puttering in his front lawn, an older man, probably retired and paid cash for his place and now collecting his retirement. I suspect many of the houses in the tract are owned by retirees drawn by the red-rock, high-desert scenery of Sedona. Ever so often along Avenida de Piedras, there is an open lot with a “sold” sign posted. After the equivalent of four or five blocks, the road makes a wide U turn and I look up to see the familiar red rock mountains in the distance. I realize that nearly every home in the development can look out their window and see these magnificent landmarks in the distance.

At the crest of the slight rise I've been jogging up for the past few minutes Avenida de Piedras completes its sweeping U turn and circles back on itself five or six block down the hill. As I begin descending the rise, I notice that the street is now named Piedras del Norte. I'm looking for distance so rather than follow the street until it returns to the entrance of the development-the street forms an oval that looks like a watermelon from above-I turn right onto a street called Sin Salida, which carries me straight for a three or four blocks before making a gradual right angle turn which ends a few blocks later in a cul de sac. I turn and resume my run back to Piedras del Norte and down the rise until I return to the start of Avenida de Piedras. I repeat the same circuit three times and at the end of the last cycle, I head back to the Hilton-a forty-five minute run that in combination with the scenery and the unspoiled air makes me feel exhilarated. By the time I make it back to the hotel, IM is booting up a Mac laptop to check her e-mail and I begin my morning toilet.

I'm a creature of habit and running is the first of the waking rituals I perform to start my day. It's followed by a morning shave, shower, and teeth cleaning. Into a fresh pair of jeans and sport shirt, loafers afoot and we're ready for breakfast at the Hilton restaurant-“The Grille.” Restaurant breakfasts used to be the highlight of a trip when I was younger-eggs, breakfast potatoes, and bacon or sausage was prepared from scratch. Today, with so many restaurants relying on serve-yourself buffets, even meals ordered off the menu, the bacon, sausage, and potatoes are cooked in advance, kept warm and served to you with eggs cooked to order-most not done as requested. I'm not being critical of the Hilton's restaurant but rather making a statement about breakfast restaurants in general. Gone are the days of the skilled short-order cook, except in small towns like Los Banos, California. There last year by happenstance I stopped at a café off Highway 152 downtown and found a genuine short order cook that talked with the patrons at the counter and the waitresses as they dropped off and picked up orders. He was a creature out of my past, who made a decent breakfast.

But, we're not in Los Banos, but rather Sedona and the menu has French toast stuffed with cream cheese-my choice, and a short stack of pancakes, IM's choice, which we order. I have to describe cream cheese filled French toast. For me the standard for this dish is il Fornaio Restaurant in Northern California-San Francisco, near the Embarcadero, Palo Alto off University Avenue, and San Jose in the Sainte Clare Hotel across San Carlos Street from Plaza de Cesar Chavez Park. The il Fornaio dish uses thick pieces of French bread to make the toast and at one time the slices were split and stuffed with sweetened mascarpone cheese. More recently the cheese is served on the side and I always asked for extra helpings. The dish comes with a delicate maple syrup and I typically have a side of Applewood smoked bacon-breakfast doesn't get much better than this. Another variation, which I've only had twice-the second time because I forgot that I didn't like it the first time-was at Mimi's Restaurant. It's a chain in California featuring a French country motif that serves a dish called the Pain Perdu Breakfast-French toast made from sliced white loaf bread with cream cheese sandwiched between. The third variation is the one I just ordered at The Grille. This dish comes with a side of sausage, which helped make up for the Pain Perdu-like dish I was served. I don't recommend either of the alternatives.

We finish breakfast a half-hour before noon and leave the hotel to wander about Sedona. Our first stop is the Oak Creek Factory Outlets, where I go about replenishing my depleted wardrobe of jeans and t-shirts. I also score a new pair of ASICs running shoes-my preferred choice in athletic foot ware because of the cushioning in the heel and they are about the only brand that fits my feet without causing blisters. Once we've satisfied our need to shop-IM found one item, a knit top (who's the chick among us?)-we gas up at the Giant station a couple blocks north on 179 from the outlets, where I'm once again made aware that I'm not in California-the pump's credit card reader is not working. Once fueled, we proceed north on 179 for nearly ten miles into the center of Sedona. Along the heavily traveled two-lane highway are turnouts at vista points that are filled with park cars; each disgorging camera carrying passengers each eager to capture the distinctive shape of Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock, Chimney Rock, Coffeepot Rock, Courthouse Butte and Snoopy Rock in digital film.

We're being swept along by the continuous stream of cars moving toward the center of Sedona, which was named after the wife of T. Carl Schnebly in 1902 when he filed with the U.S. government for a post office in the region to serve early settlers-is it any wonder the area has a distinct feminine feel? As we near the center of the town, just past Highland Drive on our right, Highway 179 makes a 90-degree left turn over a creek (possibly Oak Creek again) and heads for its rendezvous with Si Birch Highway or Highway 89A. On our left as we complete the left turn, is the shopping center called Tlaquepaque, modeled after a small Mexican village. With unique architectural features that are a draw unto themselves, the centers contains all the yuppie conveniences you've come to expect, a collection of galleries and restaurants as well as a chapel and musicians often performing in the courtyards. Trying to get into and out of the village is a feat since the traffic in both directions is unrelenting. Any thoughts we had of indulging our upscale appetite was thwarted by the traffic nightmare that confronted us. We push on to the traffic light at 89A, where 179 ends and 89A carries on north to Flagstaff and west to Red Rock State Park, our destination.

The road leading up to Highway 89A is mostly old Sedona, architecture suggesting the 1940s and 1950s, when John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were making “Angel and the Badman” and “Firecreek” with the Sedona landscape as their larger than life backdrop. West on 89A, which widens into multilane boulevard both directions, is new Sedona: strip mall that would not be out of place along Interstate 17 or 10 on the outskirts of Flagstaff or Phoenix. And there are the familiar chains-Wells Fargo Bank, MacDonald's, Starbucks… We push on until we leave the modern-development-cluttered hilly terrain of Sedona sprawl and enter the open desert again-rolling hills of red rock colonized by desert scrub that manages to thrive on only 17 inches of rainfall annually. From the 89A-179 intersection we drive just over eight miles turning left off 89A at Lower Red Rock Loop Road after going a little over five miles. About three miles later we turn right into Red Rock State Park, elevation 3900 feet. The park came about because TWA president, Jack Frye and his wife Helen, the former Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. (nee Helen Varner)-she divorced to marry Frye-decided to build their getaway place in Sedona.

The two purchased between 700 and 800 acres, just a third of which is today Red Rock State Park, in the early 1940s shortly after they were married. It took nearly a decade before they built a home on the property living in properties on the land-the Ambrosio Armijo Homestead, which they sold, and Willow House, which is still part of the park today. The house they decided to build, which they called House of Apache Fires, sits high on a knoll overlooking the valley. It's the one of the first features that catches your eye as you enter the park because the structure contrasts with the surrounding natural beauty. This land has been inhabited for as long as there have been humans in North America. Oak Creek snakes through the park from the north meandering in a U from the north at Lower Red Rock Loop Road south past the visitor center to just in front of House of Apache Fires-at the bottom of the U-and then turning north again. IM and I park and walk the Bunkhouse Trail and cross Oak Creek over the Kingfisher Bridge, then turn left on Kisva Trail and pass beneath the now derelict House of Apache Fires. We follow Kisva Trail sheltered by Utah junipers that reach as much as 60 feet tall, fed by the water from nearby Oak Creek. Off the trail and away from the creek, trees and desert flora able to tolerate the sparse rainfall stake their claim: mesquite, cat claw, agave, scrub oaks, manzanita, barberry, prickly pear, yucca, and Mormon tea. Short to the ground, with sparse foliage to minimize moisture loss, deep rooted to tap whatever wetness the sun-baked earth hordes. I admire these living creatures for their tenacity and their ability to deal with the harshest conditions nature can dish out.

IM is blissfully at peace walking the length of Kisva trail from Kingfisher Bridge to Blackhawk Crossing another bridge over Oak Creek. The path has taken us back to the visitor center parking lot-the creek on our right, cliff walls of red rock hammered by wind and natural erosion on our left blocking out the sun. We spend an hour or more communing with nature as we amble along the trail, the fine red sand giving way under our shoes, the occasional bird call and the continuous prattle of the slow moving stream the music serenading our saunter.

Our hike ended back at the parking lot of the visitors' center, which had filled to capacity since we had arrived. We notice cars, trucks, and minivans with plates from all the western states-California the most represented. Refreshed we leave the park and return to Lower Red Rock Loop Road and turn right and as soon as we get on the black top, the macadam ends and we're traveling a dirt road wide enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic. Along the road we pass a number of houses some new built, others standing for many decades. They have good reason to be on this lightly traveled road. They have a commanding view of all Sedona's rock formations. I find a spot on the side of the road to pull off and IM and I get out to gawk at the 180 degree we have of these magnificent natural structures. We have the view atop a promontory looking out over a valley to the Red Rock natural monuments in the distance. I tried to capture the vista in my own digital camera to no avail. The lens forces the perspective into a confined field of view and can never capture the incredible depth, height, and breath of the scene we were beholding.

We leave our perch and head back to the hustle and bustle of everyday life in Sedona just as another car pulls in. As we drive on the dirt road turns back into black top and we find ourselves once again surrounded the cacophony of modern times. Back to the hotel to rest before dinner and enjoy having nothing to do but contemplate our return to California the next day.

January 9, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 1

January 9, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 1

At about half past ten on Tuesday December 27th, my wife IM and I said our farewell to my mother and father. Dad and EV, my parents' long-standing caregiver, open the gate to the chain link fence and as I backed the rented Chevy Trailblazer out of the driveway. As we were about to take off EV came up to my window and looked earnestly into my eyes and said "don't worry, Mr. Jonah, I'll take good care of your parents." It helped ease the guilt I felt leaving my parents and returning to our home in California. My peers in the community of Filipino families I grew up with in El Paso are similar to me in many ways. The older males left home for lucrative jobs in larger cities, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, leaving their parents to the care of younger female siblings. In our family the youngest and the oldest left the care of our parents to the two middle children and youngest grand daughter. While EV has been given the task of providing day-to-day care, my two sisters handle the health care issues and other responsibilities.

As we make our way along Highway 54 heading south to Interstate 10, the exhilaration of heading west replaces the lingering sense of guilt I felt leaving my parents behind. We're bound for Sedona, Arizona, where we'll spend a couple of nights before moving on to the Central Coast of California to catch a sunset over the Pacific before returning to San Jose for the New Year weekend. Our journey thus far has been an awakening to the world outside our own. Living in Northern California were are sequestered in a cocoon of liberal ideas and a high tech vision of the world that a good part of the world we've traversed thus far have no appreciation for, nor cognizance of. I recall being in Las Vegas and asking another visitor if they were part of the Comdex Conference that was in town in early November. His response was a puzzled question of "what's a Comdex?" I explained that it was a computer dealer's exposition in which the major PC manufacturers showed their wares, companies like Hewlett Packard, Compaq, Dell, Intel, etc. He replied that he had never heard of any of those companies. I felt like a visitor to a foreign country in which everything that I took for granted was foreign to most of the locals I encountered and only meaningful to other visitors like me.

We all live within cocoons of our own making, the product of our daily routines. The doctor has his own language that he uses with colleagues and friends, most of who are in the same profession. The vast majority of those living in the Santa Clara Valley—the official name for Silicon Valley—all speak a language peppered with acronyms that some of the rest of the world has had to learn, but is foreign to everyone else—the janitors who clean the buildings in the valley, the service station employees, most workers in restaurants and hotels, grocery stores, department stores, shopping malls… What part of life am I missing not knowing about their lives? About the places where they live? About what makes them worry, happy, depressed, angry…?

We stop for gas at Chevron Station off the Main Street exit of Interstate 10 in Lordsburg, New Mexico. Anyone that regularly travels I-10 knows this New Mexico town. In the 1960s I-10 went through the center of the town, right down East Motel Drive, which turns into West Motel Drive, where Highway 70 “T”s into the street. The Southern Pacific Railroad created the town of Lordsburg in 1880 and today Southern Pacific tracks run along side Motel Drive making the city a way station by rail and by car. All along I-10 going into and out of the town, you can see ling lengths of train that two or more locomotives are straining to move. The small town, county seat of semi-desert Hidalgo County, has its claim to fame. In the early 1920's Lordsburg was where the first airport in New Mexico was built. The field hosted the likes of Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, Tom Mix and other celebrities. The Chevron station was busy and there were no automated pumps—you had to take your credit card to an attendant in a enclosed kiosk between the two rows of two pumps each. I plunked down my AMEX, set the pump to fill the Trailblazer and took a comfort break while the tank filled.

Back on the road we head for Tucson. It’s 1:00 PM and we have 350 miles to cover. At 70 MPH, we’ll arrive right around 6:00 PM just as the sun is going down; the prospect of a Sedona sunset tonight is doubtful. We make Tucson after 3:00 and get to the Interstate 17 junction with Interstate 10 in Phoenix right around 5:00. We’re in the carpool lane and manage to keep at the speed limit through the lighter-than-normal commute traffic on this Tuesday after Christmas. Once clear of the suburban sprawl creeping north out of Phoenix, the traffic on I-17 begins to move at 80 and 85 MPH as the highway begins to climb from sea level toward the 4500 foot elevation of the area around Sedona. We finally arrive at the Hilton Sedona Resort & Spa at 6:20 PM. The hotel is actually in the Sedona suburb of Oak Creek within a quarter mile of three golf courses; lakes of lush green turf in the high desert—the hotel has notices for all its guest rooms that water is precious and to please conserve.

IM and I order a dinner of burgers and fries from room service and a bottle of Champagne to toast our return to Sedona, which we first visited in the late 1980s with IM’s brother and sister-in-law from Scotland. They had come to attend the wedding of our eldest daughter ME and we decided to tour the 4-corners states of the Southwest. The red rock of Sedona has a magical affect on everyone who visits and this has probably been true since man first stumbled upon this high desert paradise. Sedona is a feminine place. Its population is 53 percent female and 57 percent male, which is 88 percent white non-Hispanic, less than 1 percent Native American. It’s a mystic, new age place, reputed to have fifteen vortex sites within a ten mile radius of the city. These sites are claimed to have masculine and feminine energy and the city’s tour guides make a booming business taking visitors to all fifteen—some guides offering a geographic tour others adding a spiritual element to the tour to help you sense the energy. The four of us passed on the first trip through and IM and I decide to do the same this time around. Somehow, tours of mystical sites have the same connotation as tours of churches—you don’t get a lot of time to pray.

January 8, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 4

January 8, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 4

IM and I spend the Tuesday morning in conversation with my mother and father. It’s the first chance we’ve had to engage them without the distractions of other visitors. My younger sister DD left for Boston yesterday and my other two sisters have gone back to work. My mother is scheduled to see her doctor today about adjusting her drug combinations to return her sodium and sugar levels back to their normal range. We’re also expecting her to be treated for the persistent cough associated with the bug she picked up from sick patients in the waiting room during her last visit. The television reports are calling the ailment the California Flu, the flu variant first isolated in 2004. It evolved into the strain that attacked denizens of California and the western states in 2005, and resumed its assault this year—ironically the strain first began in Nepal according to a notice on the recombinomics.com website.

Mom and Dad have both had a flu shot and a pneumonia vaccine and their symptoms are not that of the flu—no fever or muscle aches. About the only thing they’re experiencing is a persistent deep cough and lethargy. In their ailments is yet another example of the struggle that is life. From the time we’re born we are besieged by predators, some clearly visible, others microbes relentless attacking any host they can attach themselves to, in this case my aging parents. The human condition resembles a castle that is continually fighting off a persistent unending siege. As with all sieges, ultimately the walls will be breached and the castle overrun. But, my folks are pretty resilient and repelled the onslaught this year.

The four of us are sitting around the breakfast table in the dining room and are joined by EV, long-time care giver to both mom and dad. EV is a bubbly personality with a continuous twinkle in her eye. My mother and father love her as a daughter and the feeling is mutual. She can make herself understood in English but is far more comfortable in Spanish, which she speaks to my mother who acts as translator. We had been introduced to EV’s son MK, yesterday when he came by to borrow his mother’s car. EV is proud of her son, who has a burning desire to expand his knowledge of computers. He is fluent in English and works in the customer relationship department of one of the maquiladora manufacturing plants in Juarez. “He wants to attend the University of Texas at El Paso,” my mother explains as EV describes her son’s ambition in Spanish.

I’m taken with the exchange that my mother is carrying on—translating our English questions into Spanish and EV’s responses to us in English. My mother exhibits signs of dementia, asking the same question several times after forgetting the answer and that she asked the question earlier. Now, as we are conversing, I’m witnessing a woman with all her wits about her managing a fairly difficult task of converting from one language to another and doing so effectively. How much of old age dementia is the result of being deprived of intellectual stimulation for long periods of time and only having a television for company? Clearly when my mom is challenged to perform intellectually, she’s still up to the task.

My father has no signs of dementia. In fact, his memory for details is far better than mine. He remembers dates and details of past and recent events with relative ease. My father’s curtailed mobility is what is most worrisome to me. Here is a man used to getting up and going whenever the urge came upon him and now he’s feeling confined by his physical infirmities. He has been longing to drive back to Mississippi to visit relatives he hasn’t seen in a decade or more. He has a big 1950s vintage Airstream Landyacht trailer that he used to haul behind a 1970s Lincoln Continental with towing package. I have an 8-mm film I had digitized that shows him and my mom at a rest stop on Interstate 10 near Van Horn, Texas. He’s decked out in cowboy boots and wearing a cowboy hat. He is either on his way to or coming back from a trip to our family homestead in Brooklyn, Mississippi.  Another strip of digitized 8-mm shot by my niece and her girlfriend in the back seat of the Lincoln, shows my dad driving along Brooklyn Road through the main part of the town en route to our place. Still another film strip shows him wandering through knee high and chest high brush with his metal detector on the family place. He’s dressed out in a one-piece jump suit with a Caterpillar cap on his head smiling at us from the past, a man at peace with himself and the world in the place he once wandered as a young boy.

I need to take him and my mom back to Brooklyn and I have to do it while there’s still time. It will be good for us to see the old place again. I may have to rent a small RV for the trip. I doubt we could get the Landyacht ready to make the trip. I doubt I would know how to handle the behemoth if we did.  Still the trip would do my folks a world of good and it would probably give me a better appreciation of my own fast receding past.

January 5, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 3

January 5, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 3

Sunday December 25th—Christmas day, IM and I wake relatively early, around 8:00 AM and I don my running suit and run up to McKelligon Canyon Road for my morning jog. Imagine a grade that climbs continually up the streets of Morningside Heights, the El Paso neighborhood where my folks live, from Dyer Street to Alabama Street, roughly 13 blocks. You’re heading due west running up the foothill of the Franklin Mountains. This is the mountain range that gave El Paso its name “El Paso del Norte” since the city is built along the pass between the 15-mile long north-south Franklins and the 7-mile north-south North Franklin Mountains.

When you reach Alabama, you’re near the base of the Franklins and from there McKelligon Canyon Road extends a miles and three quarters before dead ending. Soldiers from nearby Ft Bliss routinely run from the base into the canyon and back, a little over 10 miles round trip. My morning effort will not be as ambitious. I content myself with cresting the grade that guards the entrance to the canyon, about a third of a mile along McKelligon Canyon Road from Alabama Street. The only way to describe the grade is to liken it to running up Powell Avenue from Market Street to the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco. I take pride in still being able to do it without stopping, though the spring in my stride is not as young as it used to be. Halfway up the grade that grows steeper as you ascend, I hear footfalls behind me and to my right—I’m in the on-coming traffic side of the road. It’s a young G.I. with backpack only pumping his finely toned, young, muscular legs up the grade. He passes me but the gap between us doesn’t widen as quickly as the grade slows his ascent, though he is still outdistancing me easily.

In that one moment watching that young man easily stride past me, I have an epiphany about myself and my place in the world. Since I started running in the late 1970s, the hour-long run has become my metaphor for life. It is the ultimate expression of being alive and willing to struggle. First, you have to wake from your slumber and drag on jogging togs. Next you have to shod your feet in running shoes and then convince yourself to leave the house in the dark when there are precious few souls stirring and begin an hour-long seven-mile journey out and back with only the sound of your steady breathing, rhythmic heartbeat, and the constant sound of your own footfalls for company. And you have to do this day in and day out without end. If that isn’t the perfect metaphor for life, I don’t what is. The epiphany however is in that young man and his ease and grace ascending the hill; I recalled a younger me doing this same run up this same grade with equal vigor. My younger self would probably have had trouble keeping up this young man’s pace; but that other me would have had more resources to call upon to give it a game try. All of us come into this world with a finite amount of miles to run before we can not or will not make the effort. I figure as long as I can still make it up the hill, I’m still in the game.

This revelation was particularly poignant to me because of what has happened to my father and mother over the years since the turn of the century. It is particularly acute with my father, who after years of suffering with a painful hip and knee decided to have a hip replacement followed a couple of years later by a knee replacement. Both curtailed his ability to move freely as he had before the surgeries. His freedom of movement was later further curtailed by a fall that shattered his one good leg, an accident he is only now recovering from sufficient that he can walk with the aid of a cane. He tells me that the cane isn’t to get around but rather to help him to get up after being seated of kneeling to retrieve something from the floor. His gait is the slow, measured pace of an elderly man—he’s in his mid-80s. I keep thinking of that hill and how it has steadily been slowing my ascent over time. I tell him he needs to exercise his legs more and he agrees, but it gets harder to do when you stop seeing the reason for running the race. As a young man I would have challenged the solder with the backpack. Though I stiffened my will and dug deeper to keep up with him this time, it was harder to command myself to do so. I keep remembering the migrant African tribe featured in a documentary I saw many years ago, who lived their lives moving constantly. The elders unable to maintain the pace would simply drop out and let the rest of the tribe abandon them. I can’t remember how they died. If this were a story, though, I would have the old man take on a lion and die a noble death fighting to the end.

Neither my dad nor my mom have given up and let the rest of the tribe abandon them. They both seize each day and ring a day’s worth of living out of it just as they’ve done for all the years they’ve been on this good earth, but they take their time doing it now. Like my father, my mom has a stern will to survive and endure. The two of them feel a deep-seated obligation to one another that neither could conscious leaving without the other. A symptom of old age, my mother is a walking chemical experiment, pills to regulate blood pressure, others to maintain her sodium level, others to regulate her sugar level, still others to thin her blood. She despairs of the drug regimen but consents because her children all believe that her doctor’s prescriptions is how best to maintain her health. Just before we arrived, the drug combinations had failed to do their job. Her sodium and sugar levels had fallen out of their nominal range. She went to the William Beaumont Hospital to get re-regulated and caught whatever bug everyone in the waiting room happened to have. When we arrived she was coughing and generally feeling miserable and still had not managed to get her sodium and sugar levels back in range.

Nevertheless, she sat beside my father at the dining room table next to the decorated Christmas tree filled with presents from her extended family and network of friends. She opened her gifts and complained that we shouldn’t have. And we shouldn’t. My parents have a house full of things, gifts received over the many years, all tucked in cabinets for display or drawers for safe keeping. But the gifts are the only way we have of showing our concern and love. We siblings all have our own lives and spend quality time with our folks only at these holiday gatherings. With our separate lives, about the only thing we all share is our common past. Just before coming home this year, I sent away several rolls of 8-mm film to a service bureau that specializes in digitizing this content. I received a DVD containing all the film in digital form and went about turning the old movies into videos using iMovie on my Macintosh.

One strip of film recorded a party held at our house in El Paso in the 1970s to celebrate the baptism of my niece, the daughter of my oldest sister’s—she younger than me—now a beautiful young woman older than her mother was in the film. I’m absent from the movie but the film shows my three sisters as they took turns holding the baby and taking Polaroid still pictures and the 8-mm movie. I added Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were” as the audio soundtrack to the silent movie. It worked. There were many moments in the 8-mm strip that each of them smiled and I slowed them down to savor the moment longer. As they saw their younger selves in the past I wanted to ask each what they thought of how their lives turned out, but it wouldn’t have been a fair questions. Our lives are what they are and no amount of wanting a do-over will do anyone any good. We are who we are.

January 4, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 2

January 4, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 2

Saturday December 24th—Christmas Eve, IM and I wake early before 7:00 AM at our room at the Hampton Inn in Blythe, California, get cleaned up, check out of the hotel, and get back on Interstate 10 heading east. It was a chilly this Saturday morning, I’d guess in the 50s Fahrenheit, but there was little or no wind. A cloudless sunrise greeted us as we left California and entered Arizona. Shortly after we passed the truck scale inspection station and the grade pretending to be a mountain before descending gracefully into long expanse of low desert—elevation a few hundred feet above sea level, we could see a long stretch of nearly straight two-lane highway ahead of us interrupted only by clumps of traffic slowing around one or more 18-wheelers.

Before we entered the stretch of I-10 with few rest stops or gas stations, we pass the desert town of Quartzsite. The town is a paradise of snowbirds in their RVs of every shape and size. In early January the town becomes ground zero for rock hounds from all over North America and beyond. The life lesson that years traveling the roads of this country has taught us is that humans are restlessly wandering creatures. We are no different than the wildebeest of Africa, the migrating birds that call no geography a year-around home, whales circumnavigating the earth’s oceans… We all share a restlessness that drives us to different places for every possible reason. Some like the winter denizens of Quartzsite come to swap rocks, crystals, and gems from January 6 to 15—the largest show of its kind the promoters claim. This trip was meant to satisfy our own human restlessness and we leave Quartzsite behind and head for Phoenix.

The traffic is heavier along this stretch of road—now traveled by those journeying from California to relatives in the Grand Canyon State—than we remembered it in years past. Arizona as well as New Mexico has always reminded me of West Texas. The states share much in common, the climate, the influence their huge common neighbor to the south, Mexico, exerts upon all three, their conservative politics—liberal Santa Fe and Sedona, notwithstanding. As a kid growing up, I wanted away from that influence, which is why IM and I live in Northern California. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the values denizens of these states share: a reverence for hard work; a self-determined don’t tread on me attitude; a hard nosed pragmatic view of the world—you have to be downright practical in the desert; a strong sense of community—my family still has an extended network of friends and neighbors that look after one another unselfishly; among others. The southwest—including a great deal of California—is reclaimed from nature through extensive public works projects that enable large numbers of human inhabitance to live where the natural ecosystem would not allow. I’ve always felt as though I was trespassing somewhere large numbers of humans weren’t meant to be: an alien in an alien landscape. (Humans trespassing in places where large numbers of humans aren’t meant to be is becoming more true nearly everywhere in the world.)

The skyline of Phoenix greets us around 10:00 AM. We decided to pull off the Interstate somewhere in Goodyear—that suburb of Phoenix named after the giant tire company with a blimp that set up a shop here at the turn of the last century to grow Egyptian cotton to make the cords used in their rubber tires. It’s now a suburban sprawl complete with giant strip malls at every freeway exit sporting Walmarts, Targets, Lowes, and Home Depots superstores, all surrounded by fast food restaurants. We pull into one such center off the freeway and find an I-Hop where we thought we might get breakfast. As soon as we parked and got out of the car, we noticed five other cars disgorging passengers all heading toward the I-Hop to join a queue of waiting diners spilling out the door. IM and I turn around, get back into the Chevy Trailblazer and merge back onto I-10 heading east. The suburban outskirts of Phoenix could have been anywhere along any Interstate in the southwest—congested shopping centers with consumers competing for parking spaces, restaurant seating, checkout registers, gas pumps, and space on the Interstate, which was congested but moving at the limit as we passed through the heart of Phoenix. From the freeway you can see two clusters of high rises making the skyline appear as if two rival camps were vying for the right to be “downtown.”

We pass Interstate 17, which was hurrying north toward Flagstaff and the less populated more wooded region of the state. Shortly after we pass I-17, I-10 dips south for a short distance passing the western extreme of the twin runways of Sky Harbor Airport—great name for an airport—before it takes a southeasterly direction at the southern edge of Sky Harbor to begin it trek toward Tucson. The eastern part of Phoenix is hemmed in by the sprawling suburban growth—spurred by relocating California high-tech companies—of Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler. In Chandler on the East Ray Road off-ramp from I-10, we stop at a Circle K gas station to fill up and grab some water for the road—we had given up on breakfast as the wait would have delayed us far too long in our journey. Back on the Interstate, we pass through Casa Grande with its large outlet mall off I-10—appropriately called The Outlets at Casa Grande—and assimilate eastbound traffic off Interstate 8, the 564-mile road—the Border Friendship Route—that empties onto I-10 after connecting San Diego with south central Arizona. We reach Tucson just after noon, the two-lanes of I-10 broadening into sections of three, four lanes and up to six lanes as we cut through the center of Arizona’s second largest city—this one a close cousin to El Paso. The drive beyond is through the eastern part of Arizona where I-10 passes through mountain terrain that is spectacular, but by now we’re intent on making El Paso by mid-afternoon. We reach Deming, New Mexico just before 2:00 PM and I pull off at the East Motel Drive Exit, gas up at a Chevron Station and get back on the Freeway, heading for Las Cruces, the last place in New Mexico before entering Texas and El Paso a mere 40 miles beyond.

We make Las Cruces at about 2:45 then follow the southerly path I-10 takes as it leaves New Mexico and heads toward the western tip of Texas, where it follows the western border of the state with Mexico through El Paso and beyond. This stretch of I-10 resembles the suburban sprawl we encountered around Tucson and Phoenix, though it was less obvious in the smaller cities of we passed through in New Mexico, Lordsburg, Deming, and Las Cruces, the largest. We pass through the center of El Paso at about 3:30 and exit at Texas Highway 54, heading north to my folks’ place a couple miles away. After we park the Trailblazer and hug my folks, we bring in our luggage and settle down for our first meal of the day, a bowl of Costco clam chowder and a garden salad wash down with a glass of Kendall Jackson Merlot salvaged from one of my brother’s 18-wheeler crashes—no one hurt just a lot of cases of wine spilled along the side of I-10 in Arizona someplace, one bottle from which I was tasting for dinner. We were home and it felt much the same as it did on the numerous Christmases in the past.

January 2, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past

January 2, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past

Sojourn is a word with a melancholy sound to it, which makes it most appropriate for what my wife IM and I did the past couple of weeks. Outbound, Friday, December 23 around 8:00 AM, we ahead south on California Highway 101. We’re sitting in a red Chevrolet Trailblazer with 7642 miles on the odometer that we just rented from Enterprise Rent-a-Car on Pearl Avenue near Capital Expressway in San Jose, California—$300 for the week we’d have it, unlimited mileage which was good because IM and I were going to “see the USA in our (rented) Chevrolet.”

The traffic along 101 before the Highway 152 East junction was relatively light—we were south and heading against the northbound rush hour traffic, which was light because nearly everyone was off for the Christmas Holiday. IM and I were on a sentimental journey back home to my folks’ home in El Paso. It would be sentimental in that all sisters—including DD, who lives in Newtonville, Massachusetts would be home to celebrate Christmas with my mother and father—in their late 80s and the other in their mid-90s (good genes no?). We would also be without our two kids who would be celebrating the holiday with their own little ones—for the first time, since up to now our two daughters celebrated Christmas at our place. IM and I realized this year that we had crossed a passage in time—our daughters had families of their own and they were now the mommies and daddies and we were the empty nester grandparents.

It had happened the same way for IM and me early on when our two daughters were little. We had made the journey from Dallas to El Paso to celebrate Christmas with my mother and father. For the longest time out two kids thought of Christmas as being in El Paso until we moved from Dallas to San Jose in 1974 and celebrated Christmas at home in San Jose. That year, the cycle was broken and El Paso became something we did once in a while when I could get the time off to make the two-day drive IM and I were now embarked upon. The first couple of times we drove home with the kids from San Jose, we went south on 101 to California 46 and then headed east to California 99, south to Highway 58 east to Highway 395 then south to Interstate 15 south into San Bernardino where we picked up Interstate 10 east to Blythe at the California-Arizona border—usually around 8:00 at night. It’s a longer and slower drive but far more scenic than the route we were driving in the Trailblazer this time.

This trip was down Interstate 5 to Interstate 210 east through Pasadena to Rancho Cucamonga to Interstate 15 south for a couple of miles before merging onto Interstate 10 east. We had started taking this route in the late 1970s when the kids were older, but back then I-210 ended at San Dimas and we headed south of Highway 57 to pick up I-10 east. The idea for I-210 was to bypass the heavy commute traffic through Los Angeles, but back then as with this time, the traffic was congested as soon as we approached I-10 and stayed below the limit through San Bernardino. Our youngest daughter RD works for a home builder in Irvine and she keeps telling us that much of the new home construction is going on in the “Inland Empire,” a euphemism for Riverside, San Bernardino, and further east to Indio. After the slow-and-go crawl we experienced merging onto a plodding stretch of 101, we began to gain speed beyond San Bernardino through Redlands and Yucaipa. All along this stretch we began to see signs for home builders advertising 3,000-square foot homes for under a half-million dollars as well as the sprawling developments themselves.

In this drive through the past, IM and I were seeing that the landmarks of the past that we remembered were being obscured by unbridled growth that characterized the passage of time. When we made the drive after Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of U.S. had left office—renewable energy was his answer to the gasoline shortages of the time, the first of the windmills began to appear along I-10 around Palm Springs. Now, they were everywhere, capturing the wind and turning its force into electricity. Windmills have their own mystic, probably because of Cervantes and his beguiling character, Don Quixote and his quest. The lyrics to the song from the Broadway Play Man of La Mancha came to mind: “...I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest, that my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest...” That about summed up life, a continuous quest, which accounts for why the Cervantes story has such staying power.

Passing this way, this many years after the windmills began to blossom in the Mojave Desert, I was struck by the swift elapse of time—both our daughters are the age we were when the windmills started to spring up. Beyond Palm Springs we pass beside the country club towns of Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert with their streets named after mostly deceased celebrities: Bob Hope Drive, Frank Sinatra Drive, Fred Waring (a 1940s orchestra leader) Drive, and even an aging president: Gerald Ford Drive. Of the four Frank will be the one that this generation of people and future generations will know when the name is spoken because his music continues to be played. Few of today’s and less of the future generation will know of Gerald Ford, Bob Hope and Fred Waring. Ex-presidents and old celebrities fade from the popular culture quickly. It’s a revelation I’m, reminded of daily as I explain names I mention in conversation with the younger generation.

The other attraction along I-10 that could not escape unnoticed was the Gambling Casinos luring motorist off the freeway to extract their toll for passage. IM and I ignored the call and carried on but we could not but be amazed at the number of these flashy Las Vegas-like edifices adorning the freeway: the Morongo Band of Mission Indians with Morongo Casino, Hotel and Spa, near the Apache Trail exit in Cabazon; the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indian with the Aqua Caliente Casino at the Ramon Road Exit in Palm Springs; and the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians' Fantasy Springs Resort Casino off the Golf Center Parkway exit in Indio. These were all the signs of change that had come over the landscape since our early travels through the region.

The wealthy neighborhoods south and east of Palm Springs gave way to the farming communities of Indio and Coachella with street names like Grapefruit Drive and Citrus Avenue. Due east from Indio, I-10 begins a climb over the Little San Bernardino Mountains and Orocopia Mountains heading for Chiriaco Summit and Desert Center—in between the 100 miles between Indio and Blythe. We began the ascent around 4:30 PM and the sun was beginning to set. Interstate 10 had narrowed to two lanes and the traffic along the span had thinned from that we had pass through heading into Indio, but we still encountered clusters of cars all laden with people and belongings. A great many were like us heading home from California to Phoenix, Tucson, some as far as New Mexico, and a few like us heading for Texas.

We exited I-10 at the South Lovekin Blvd. Exit just before 6:00 PM and made our way north under the freeway to E. Hobsonway—the main drag of Blythe. The intersection is the heart of the small town. At Lovekin, everything east of the intersection is East Hobsonway and vice versa. And everything north of Hobsonway on Lovekin is North Lovekin and vice versa. At the intersection, we stop at a red light. At the northwest corner are the remains of the Sahara Motel, where we had stayed on a few of our earlier trips with the girls. Across Hobsonway on the southwest corner is a restaurant that was once a Sambo's or Denny's or some such when we first started coming through. It's still in business but I neglected to look at its name. Blythe has changed over the years but remains a farming town. If you look at the town from the air, it' appears as a watermelon shaped oval of lush green from 10th Avenue north of Hobsonway for nearly 20 miles south bordered by the Colorado River on the east and the Riverside Mountains on the west. The town also caters to traffic on the Interstate, and fast food restaurants and gas stations clustered around each side of the Lovekin off ramp on both sides of I-10 testifies to the fact.

After checking into the Hampton Inn just west of Lovekin on Hobsonway, we grabbed fast food at the Carl's Jr on Lovekin and returned to our room to eat—not worth an appetizing meal but we hadn't eaten since midmorning and it quieted the hunger a day's worth of driving and listening to the audio book, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer, had created. We turned in early and prepared for the continuation of our journey on Saturday.