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California Daydreamin’

© 2020, 2021 by Vernon Miles Kerr, vernonmileskerr.com

Loved those lyrics, “…don’t know whatcha got till it’s gone,”

That’s the upside of Coronavirus—

If there is one.

For a California road-warrior, lockdown is hell.

After wearing-out tons of tires —

(In leaner times even down to the cords and belts)

Pursuing work, and far-flung friends and  kin,

All the way up-and-down

Cali’s  lion’s-share hunk-of-the-Left Coast,

Whether trips perforce or trips per pleasure —

I’ve grown to crave the whir and whine

Of tire-tread on California pavement,

All of it.

San Ysidro to Crescent City — all 862 miles of 101,

And thousands of klicks, spent meandering

The branches and twigs of side-roads, East and West:

The spiny desserts, the never snowless Sierra,

The little gray-board towns of the Mother Lode,

With fragrance of old redwood, kerosene

And rusty mining tools

Still wafting from basements.

California, how do I love thee?

Let me count the ways:

It’s the summoning fog bank, peeking over brittle-dry Altamont’s crest

While crossing up and out of blazing-Valley-Summer

And down into  perpetual-Coastal-Spring.

It’s the great leap of Highway 99 across 400 miles of Prairie,

Red Bluff-on-the-Sacramento to Bakersfield-on-the-Kern,

Gracefully arcing through crazy-quilt fields of green

Bordered by palms of North Africa and Blue Gums of Australia,

(Just two more immigrants from elsewhere — like the rest of us)

Okay, Interstate 5 is the quick way to go SF-to-LA,

Shooting uninterrupted, as it does,

Boringly straight,  along a quarter-thousand miles

Of rolling, truck-rumbling, monotonous, cattle range …

But 99 is — and has always been — California’s Main Street,

Giving glimpses of  towns set up by the railroad in the 1880s:

The M-towns:  Madera, Merced, Modesto and Manteca (Lumber, Mercy, Modesty, and Lard.)

Spanish names were the rage in those days,

But with little thought toward meaning:

If it sounds Spanish, name it!

Then comes the Big Ag town, Fresno,

With it’s surprising sky-scraping once-bank-buildings

Built by figs and wine grapes,

And bent-over Okies and Mexican folk —

They were towers sprung up to deal out Big Ag loans,

Now largely vacant.

Another hundred miles and, Bakersfield!

Stopping place of Dust Bowl refugees.

Once, endless cotton and watermelon fields,

Punctuated by pumping oil wells,

But now, endless wine vineyards and almond orchards,

Punctuated by pumping oil wells.

In my daydream, the pavement gently winds

Through 1949 Bakersfield,

I savor memories of that six year-old California advent:

Pump jacks nod, the aroma of crude oil wafts through the window,

Swamp coolers drone, a distant child shouts to another,

A screen door slams.

I envision those Sunday drives, outside Shafter:

I watch through the side window, as rows of watermelons,

LIke giants’ legs, stride by in the summer shimmer.

Back to reality, I read the Tweets of sequestration-frustration —

I Add a few of my own,

While yearning for the murmur of rubber on asphalt.