Road trip

Sabitri and I will take off in a couple of hours to collect her twin sister from college. A mini road trip from my desert mountain hide-away through towns and valleys, to cities and ocean bays. We’ll have an ice chest for water and cheese, a dry box for Wheat Thins and chips and my coffee.

I love these runs. Something in me responds to the road, something I share with those I am closest with, even if it’s different now than it used to be: my cars are so much more reliable, and if they do break, there’s my cell phone Link to make a call for help. One has to make an effort now to get lost, with that same Link and its maps and GPS and evenly cadenced voice saying “in one quarter mile turn left at the fork…”

That said, there’s still freshness to moving through time and place as we speed past a woman with a wide-brim hat walking an absurdly tiny dog wearing fluorescent pink ribbons; by a man fighting to keep upright an overloaded yellow wheelbarrow with a single wobbly wheel; as we cross then recross the Santiam, swollen from a week’s worth of rain, crashing through rough canyons of grey rock to the Willamette in its lush wide valley, then along the Columbia that carves sweeping curves into a continent on its way, on our way, to the Pacific.

It’s never, “when will we get there?” with my girls. We go to go, to be going, to be seeing something we may have seen before, but with fresh eyes. Moments of Zen. I’ve given them this, and they give this back to me.

And now, it’s time to throw a few things in a bag and hit the road.

Fear of Goodbye

Fear so often keeps us pinned inside lives we wish were different. So often, that fear is irrational, only an echo that sets wiring of brains vibrating, certain we will be set upon by wolves if we leave the ring of firelight.

How do we not fear pain? How do we not fear loss? How do we not fear being unloved, or not-now loved, by someone we love? How do we not fear that, back in the ring of firelight, they laugh and sing and did not notice we were gone?

Fear is hard-wired into the code of who we needed to become when we descended naked and defenseless from the trees. Fear is fed to us with mother’s milk, perhaps tainted by her abandonment, maybe spoiled by angry harsh words from her own father, or corrupted by neglect from the man she married. What’s to do with it now?

Sitting, watching a rising sun paint mountains pink then gold, I see goodbye for what it wants to be, an ogre too large when wrapped in a cloak of fear, instead of what really is, just a good bye. I miss you. That’s a good thing, not to be feared.

Remember the future

Yesterday, I bought my first robot.

Also yesterday, my Link (cellphone to you) upgraded itself to Android 4.4.2, though I had to manually invoke the “Android RunTime” upgrade.

Today I read about Google buying Boston Dynamics, a company that makes a robot that runs like a cheetah faster than a man, and while I couldn’t quite see the lounge chair on my porch with the satellite view in Google Maps, I can see the front door of a friend’s house. And my Link can guide me from my remote Oregon hilltop to a deli in San Francisco if I ask it to.

At one time, getting lost was the adventure.

They are are floating Google cameras down the Grand Canyon, and two thousand cars  photograph the streets of Hyderabad, India every day. When I was in India the first time, it was on the other side of the world. Now I can drive the streets from my easy chair.

Everything. Is. Being. Digitized.

This column started to be about how we might expect to see a flood, with frozen ground covered by snow, if warm, wet Pacific storms head our way for Christmas as they often do. But something happened on the way to the laptop. A friend recalled the flood of 1964, which we both remembered, then we both realized at about the same time that was a half century ago.

I learned to read from Asimov, Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Delaney and the others. They took me to worlds where anything that could be imagined could be true, a place better than where I lived. I wrote a paper in sixth grade that described such a place.

I live there, now. Its job done, my vacuum cleaner just put itself away.