She's Leaving Home - chapter two

23 May 2003 – George Bush International Airport, Huston, TX

I'm sitting in the biggest kip of an airport this side of the Mason-Dixon line, waiting for my connection which will deliver me into the lap of my family in Philadelphia. My ticket has been randomly tagged by Northwest Airlines, making me one of several people to have the entire contents of their luggage emptied and repacked by someone who has no appreciation of the time it took to get your bags configured as they are. Thank god they chose me! Now I can get checked throroughly at every checkpoint and gate while the real dangerous people skate smuggly by. Not my fault. When we're falling out of the sky amidst a fireball, I will stubbornly cross my arms and state how glad I am that I know that they know that it wasn't my luggage that caused the incedent. So that's me off the hook.

It’s nearing Bob Hope’s 100th birthday and the streets of Palm Springs that I left this morning are adorned with bunting and signs bearing statements of well-wishing. We had arrived in good time on Saturday afternoon and for me it was instantaneous, having fallen fast asleep somewhere in the Mojave Desert and woken to see the whirling wind farms that embrace the Santa Anna winds and turn them into profit.

Clint and I were doing our annual gig for the National Conference on Building Commissioning that had taken us, over the years, from Orlando, FL, to Portland, OR, to Kansas City, MO, on to Newark, NJ, Chicago, Il, and now Palm Springs, CA. It might sound like a dry subject, this gig, but Clint and I both are both incredibly fond of the client (and they are of us as well!) and Clint always jokes every year that he’s ready to hang out a shingle as a consultant on HVAC systems. Personally, I have found building engineering and the process of actually commissioning a building to be a fascinating process and quite an achievement! And thank god for that because some gigs that you get in the corporate audiovisual world are BORING and nothing else.

The desert was, as usual, hot. And that was no help to us newcomers who had woken the morning in Mammoth, on the high side of the Sierra Nevada. Dressed against the cool morning, navigating around the piled snow outside the door, we trundled out of our room at Motel 6 early so that we might have time to sample the local hot springs before we departed. We set off down the road, realised that according to the guidebook leading us to unmarked springs we’d missed the red church that was to be our guidepost, backtracked, found the dirt track that we were looking for, and we ended up far out in the middle of the desert plain, well off the beaten path.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the eastern Sierra Nevada, but it’s one of those places, much like the Mojave to the south, where distance is terribly difficult to gauge. Some distance off further east were hills rising away from the plain and if you didn’t think clearly about it, you might think you could hike to them from where we were in easy time and you would be sorely, if not dangerously, misjudged. We found there a very small pool, not really big enough to share with strangers and this was a problem because there was already stranger laying silently in the pool with his eyes closed, unclad, and the obvious aside about hot spring etiquette, we would be most definitely killing his moment if we were to intrude. I headed a distance to a rocky outcropping I spied and climbed it to see what I could see. It amounted to desert plain, sagebrush, and dizzying distance. So I sat and contemplated the silence and the vastness, feeling both that I was inside a great cradle as well as inside a great void.

There was not a sound, save the birds. No wind in the trees. No trees for wind to pass through. No cars from the highway. No sound of humankind, not even a jet. But there were birds that trilled lightly in the sagebrush, unseen. They were everywhere, all around, but you never saw a one. And in the midst of my surroundings so devoid of human construct, I thought, “They sound like techno-music bleepings.” Shannon later confirmed my sentiment. I turned around to look back at the van and my travelling companions and each of us had embarked on a little adventure, following what intrigued our fancies. In almost perfect unison, we all headed back to our chariot.

We drove down the road a little further and went on a walk through the sagebrush floor, skirting small hidden lakes and beds of long departed pools. Two girls and a guy, walking three abreast, meandering aimlessly about in a big circle, talking and laughing. Enough, though, time we were on our way.

Our home for the next week, and my last temporary home before I departed the west coast and later the United States, was in the Courtyard by Marriott, Rancho Las Palmas; a quaint and humble villa, surrounded by fairways, greens, and water. It’s a place where the lawns hiss, the heat thrums off the pavement, and when you exit the over air-conditioned buildings to go out of doors, it’s almost enough to make one wilt like a soggy rag. And it’s only May. None the less, you’d be mad not to jump into one of the many pools while in transit from point A to point B, just to be sure you get there. It’s the kind of heat I’ll undoubtedly be dreaming of on a frostbitten January morning in Ireland.

We worked through the days for the conference, sadly leaving Shannon most of the time to tend to herself beside the pool. I have to say, she ended up with one hell of a tan and I wish I could have joined her for the duration but that’s the nature of a working trip. Clint and I had things to do. Shanny was there to see me off along my journey. She made friends with a duck one day and I would nip back to our shared room in the middle of the day to find her and the duck sitting quietly on the patio together. We made the most of our surroundings at the Marriott, the three of us visiting the tapas bar frequently over the week, drinking all manner of fun cocktails and rediscovering the delights of The Cosby Show on Nickelodeon as we lay in bed late at night, giggling. Despite the hours spent working, it felt very much like a vacation.

It wasn’t until last night that I finally began to feel like this wasn’t simply another vacation. When I bid a final farewell to Clint and Shannon and saw them on their way back home, I returned to my now empty room, lay down and wept. As I lay on the bed and contemplated the prospect of very lonely times ahead I felt the familiar presence of nothingness and the fullness it holds. Sometimes nothingness feels like a lover embracing me as if I’m not really alone. I’ve begun to wonder if I am perhaps accompanied by something, someone, and am never truly alone. The whole of the earth is my constant friend and I shouldn’t feel such loneliness when I am at home with her. Should I venture into space, then that would be another matter entirely.

I lay in the embrace of my non-present presence until my heart settled quietly with reconciliation about this being nearly the final embarkation upon my journey. I spent the last of the afternoon poolside with a 151 strawberry daiquiri appropriately named “The Scrambler” and Tony Hawks’ book Round Ireland with a Fridge. The desert evening took its sweet time arriving and even longer leaving. Twilight hung forever. After my drink had been consumed, it took everything I had to concentrate on finishing my book but I succeeded and then collapsed, destroyed by the empire of Bacardi. The only thing that crossed my mind that made any rational sense was the word “food”. I needed food.

Somehow I donned appropriate clothing and tied my chlorine infused hair out of my face and ambled to Pablo’s, the tapas bar. Someone recognized me as I was lead to a table on the patio, “Hey it’s the AV goddess!” AV goddess, yes indeed. Don’t you forget it and by the way you could make life easier on yourself, drop the “AV” bit and just call me “goddess”. That would be ok with me. I took my seat while the waiter made nice.

“Hey, I remember you. You were drinking cape cods the other day.”
“Sounds great, you sold me!” I stammered.

What the hell was I thinking? Wasn’t I just recently conquered in my battle with the empire of Bacardi? Surely I wasn’t going to hop right back in the fray! That’s Absolut madness!