Carle Vernet: English Travellers (1815–25)

"I found a familiar sense of place …"

When toodling, The Muse and I are not merely traversing space but also TimeTraveling. All time seems present in The Schooner's cabin then, and even the territory we travel through seems unhinged and separate from the present. The ages of this world seem well-represented, from the earliest recorded activity to the present weather, all linked together. We do not seem just to inhabit the present, either. We're not just some audience passively watching a separate world pass, but an intricate part of those spaces and those times. Our conversation reflects this effect as it wanders through halls in its bathrobe, flitting from there and then to here and now, then forward to some future where and when. Our story's just as unhinged as our journey.

A stiff wind blowing sand met us as we entered The Mohave, and our stories shifted to that time when my birth family held up overnight behind a retaining wall behind a gas station there. A sandstorm had greeted us as we headed home from a visit to Southern California, circa nineteen sixty. When traveling in those days, we slept in the car, all seven of us crammed into a fifties Ford station wagon. We slept with the windows closed while the hot wind buffeted the vehicle. I remember feeling sticky and suffocated, and the disoriented sense when entering a cafe for breakfast the following morning, dirty and disheveled. That wind blew that old story back into currency. We fearlessly entered that storm.

Roadside geology continually reminds us just how insignificant our presence seems when stood up beside millions of years of this world's previous experiences. Those massive mountains continue moving as if to mock us, moving at speeds unlikely to sustain us. So much time preceded us, and so much more seems sure to continue whatever ultimately happens to us and our insignificance. Not even our insignificance appears to matter much. We travel humbled or do not travel at all, yet we still feel ennobled when rubbing shoulders with locals. We were introduced to the Sonorian Enchilada in a small cafe in Gila Bend. It turned out to be a Made Right with melted cheese on top of a masa bun and lightly sauced loose meat inside. We won't make that mistake twice.

We toodle to enrich our future and dredge up our past more than to improve our present. Long idle hours amount to just so much torture for our aging bodies. I can hardly crawl out of the vehicle when we stop after several hours. Some stretching tends to restore my flexibility before I fit myself back into that position again. We cannot always agree on what music should accompany our TimeTraveling, The Muse, and I prefer different classics, but little of what we listen to qualifies as current. The Muse remembers lyrics to seventies classics I'd never heard before. Almost every track seems like a one-hit wonder to me. We marvel at the primitive production quality that era mustered.

Every time we toodle, I'm reminded of how little I can discern from looking at a map. The presences and the pasts, the futures and the vast gaps between expectations and experiences- very little of that ever gets captured for reuse. I catch myself chasing pasts, almost remembering when without recalling many details. I chase feelings, it seems, more than people, places, or things. I experience an evocation without being able to explain anything. I insisted we route ourselves along the Eastern Sierra for some indiscernible reason that ranged around in some presumed but unremembered past. I found a familiar sense of place there without recalling a single time or face.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz