The Siskiyou Trail

In those days smoking was allowed in the back of the bus. I lit one up and waited for the bus to move… the driver ambled down the aisle checking our tickets and counting heads in case someone snuck aboard. I was antsy… “Come on… lets get goin’”, I grumbled beneath my breath thinking no one would hear me.

The driver eyed me up and down to check-out what kind of smart-ass he’d be dealing with before he spoke, “Don’t worry boy, we’ll get there when we get there.”

Something about his tone was soothing and I relaxed…. opened up a book I’d stolen from my high school library… It was Shakespeare, The merchant of Venice. I still have it. Maybe one day I’ll go to one of those reunions I get invitations to and throw away… at first it was the fifth years… then ten… fifteen… then twenty… what has it been now? … forty-seven… oh-oh, fifty is coming up in a few years. Okay, maybe then I’ll return it.

We transferred to Continental Trailways in Portland. Had to wait a while before that happened so I explored the skid row area down by the Union Station to score a pint. Being underage didn’t make that too much a problem. We boarded and the bus rolled off in what must have been early evening. There was no smoking on the busses in Oregon… they were ahead of the curve on that one. Nighttime turned the windows into mirrors so I had a chance to read and doze off.

The I-5 hadn’t been completed yet and Rte 99 wound its way through downtown streets of small towns and the larger cities of Salem and … stopping every now and then to load up and debark. Taking a bus through these towns in the middle of the night… picking up an occasional passenger standing there waiting… me, nodding off and awaking at each stop… hoping no one would take the seat next to me as I had spread out… spayed over the two seats… it made the ride all the more adventurous. I remembered from what I knew of history that this route was as old as the West. It was called the Siskiyou trail by the trappers of the Hudson Bay Company… then the Forty-Niners… and the General Sutter… and then the erasure of the people who had greeted them all … the genocide I barely knew of. But I imagined the ghosts of the aboriginal people standing by and watching us pass through the homeland lost long ago in the dark of night. I could hardly sleep but eventually dozed off and didn’t wake up until we rolled over Siskiyou Summit down past Yreka, approaching the sunrise that backlit Mount Shasta in the East.

We pulled into Weed California where a Greyhound awaited us to change buses at a tiny store that served as a bus station, post office and local hangout. A young woman boarded there… she came straight towards my seat. I made room for her … having a good looking girl as a companion on the trip added to the experience. She asked for the window seat and I gladly obliged.

She lit up the butt of a cigar wetter than that Grease Monkey’s back in Washington saying, “I need something to suck on.” The sign overhead the seats commanded: No Cigars or Pipes!  Okay, I thought, she doesn’t care so why should I?

The driver climbed up into his seat, smelling the cigar, shouted back… “Whoever it is that is smoking a cigar better put it out, Lady.”

“Okay… okay already… I’m putting it out!” she snorted…

Snubbing the butt, wrapping it in a piece of Saran Wrap torn from a sandwich she tucked it into a crocheted multi colored kaleidoscope of yarn bag packed with sandwiches smashed between books. She was also wearing equally kaleidoscopic knee socks, surplus Army jungle boots, and hiking shorts. I was staring at the flesh between the knee socks and shorts when she asked, “You got a smoke?”

“Yeh, sure…” I lit it and passed it to her like they do in old movies.

“I’m Wildfire. Where you headed?” she reached over to shake hands.

“Max…” I hoped she would be going all the way with me. “San Francisco.”

“Me too… Red, actually Berzerkeley. You ever been there?” the way she said Red sealed the deal. I would be called Red instead of Max.

“Berkeley? Naw…” I wanted to say I had but she looked like the kind of person that would know I was bullshitting. “San Francisco.”

“You’ll love it… what you got there?” she grabbed the Shakespeare off my lap… “Ohhh, you are a classics guy, eh?”

“I have only read a few,” I wanted to impress her but I pulled back, “Mac Beth, King Lear… Julius Caesar… the regular high school stuff.”

She took out of her bag an illustrated copy of William Blake and plopped it on her lap… “You ever read Howl?”

“I’ve heard of it… but no,” I said as my eyes pleasured on the illustrations draped across her lap.

“Awwww, you gotta read Blake first anyway.” There was something impish about her when she added… “drop acid and then read Blake.”

“Drop? Acid?...” I wondered what kind of lunatic was sitting next to me, “What’s that?”

“Ohhh, you gotta try it. Your eyes will open up to Blake’s vision and then your mind will follow into the doors of perception… dig it?”

“What is it?” I puzzled. It was 1965 and I only knew of a handful of Airforce servicemen and old beats who smoked pot back at the Red Lion.

“Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: when you get to San Francisco you will run into some pretty hip people and all you gotta do is ask one of them… you’ll find out.”

The words came out delicious as she gave the name of the acid. She didn’t mention anything about it from there on. We talked on and off relaxed the rest of the trip the way folks do on buses… or did on buses before I-pod, I-pads, Kindle, laptops and dother alienation walls of technology were invented. She had grown up in southern Idaho as a Basque sheep rancher’s daughter; then the family picked and moved to another ranch in Rio Vista as a teen. I didn’t know what a Basque was so she told me all about her father fleeing Spain under Franco and settling near Boise. They had absolutely nothing but the community pulled together and he met a nice Basque lady to marry. She was born there. There was more to history than I’d ever heard about in high school for sure.

I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about myself but she listened regardless. I chattered on about Linda and how much I loved her and how painful our last meeting was. I had a friendly ear for all that was bottled up and let it fizz like she’d opened champagne as a told her of my ambition to be a painter; to be with like minds; to see San Francisco for myself; to go to sea and so on. I felt as though I had been a mediocre sized frog in a small pond compared to her but she asked questions and listened to me tell of the hills around Spokane Valley and the lakes, Priest Lake Idaho and all that.

We rolled past a panorama of Shasta that I’d seen before my bus approached Weed. It was somewhat disappointing to me because I was used to the drama of the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains. Shasta stood alone in a semi-barren landscape of not so ancient lava flows. But, after Weed, exciting glimpses of it passed from one side or the other as the bus then took us down and away towards Redding on the curly road that wound through the wild shanks of mountains and tunnels of pine.

From Redding on, to step off the bus to stretch our legs, we were met with blast furnace winds outside the air-conditioning of the bus. Rolling along a flat straight line all the way through until we turned and went over the bump past Davis, Vacaville towards Vallejo, it was fiercely hot. The sun was setting in the West as the road hugged the mudflats of the bay all the way to the Oakland Terminal. “I get off at Oakland, Red.”

“Do you have a number I can call,” I asked as she stretched to take down her back from the luggage rack above, “maybe we can get together?”

“This here’s my favorite book,” she took a small black leather-bound book from her bag.
“What’s it, a bible?” 

“Sort of, it’s Keats.” She opened it up and said, “Everyone has heard of the Ode to a Grecian Urn but this has Lamia.”

I recited from memory the last stanza of the ode to impress her:
“When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

“Oh, you know Keats after all.” She smiled.

“Just the last Stanza,” I admitted thinking humility best to impress. I then flipped
it open randomly and read a line,

 “There she stood about a young bird's flutter from a wood, fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread, by a clear pool, wherein she passioned to see herself escap'd from so sore ills, while her robes flaunted with the daffodils.”

“Interesting, what’s it about?”

“You read well. It is about a goddess, a nymph really, took human form to suffer love.” She lifted her eyes to meet mine, “Maybe you are a Satyr that had taken human form to suffer love? We are, after all, spiritual beings having a human experience.”

“Thanks. I played Puck once in high school English lit class… a scene from Midsummer’s Night Dream” I wondered if she’d like the Shakespeare. I had to give her something in return… an informal potlatch, “Can I give you this?”

“No, you keep it. Where I’m goin’ I have to travel light. I’d have given you the Blake too but I promised it to someone else.” The air-enveloped-sadness about that last bit tweaked-a-curiousness as she reached up to take down her bag.

“Good-bye… say, you didn’t give me a number!” I hollered as she strode down the aisle purposely.

She turned and waved. I never saw her again. I read in the Chronicle about a young woman leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I wondered whether or not that was what she meant. You never know… the finality of those last words… it might not have been her. Naw, she most likely would have chosen to go off the Oakland Bay Bridge….eh?