Highway 17

"Have you thrown your senses to the war, or did you lose them in the flood?" -- Springsteen

Originally a track used by natives and stage coach companies, the 26 mile route between San Jose and Santa Cruz rises to 1,800 feet at the summit of Patchen Pass before descending into the coastal fog. The first time I rode through the wicked twists and narrow lanes between the trees of the Santa Cruz mountains, I was a passenger in a carload of partying students heading from the state college over to the beach.

The road had several popular nicknames at the time: Suicide Alley, the Valley Surprise, Glenwood Slaughterhouse. Separated at first by the force of wind generated by logging trucks passing in opposite directions along the lanes shadowed by the trees, Highway 17 wore a thin median fence and the occasional concrete barrier by the time I had moved to Northern California. You usually knew you were close to the center line by the chips of glass or broken fenders lying in the way.

That never stopped us from tearing along, passing bottles of Mickey's Big Mouth or a waterpipe between our cars, ten or fifteen of us en-route from the smoggy Santa Clara valley to the cool and salty beaches. Mark the Wop usually tore along in his modified blue Ford, driving like the erstwhile race driver he insisted he had been, the rest of us letting him get a few cars ahead so we knew where he was.

Cresting the summit, we wended between sputtering VW vans and terrified senior citizens in their camper trucks, letting it fly down the western rim through Santa's Village and Scott's Valley, finally planing out near the Branciforte where you could see the steeple of the Holy Cross Church in the salt-spray air. Safely--strange as that could be--on the coastside, we turned north on Highway 1 toward the beaches of Davenport, stopping only for fresh beer and sandwiches.

I liked the Red, White and Blue beach, marked only by its tri-color mailbox, where you descended again through a twisting dirt road to the sandy parking strip, and stumbled down the rocks to the nude beach, toting your cooler, towels, and radios. So long as you were going to be cold, your body prickled from the wind, you might as well wear nothing. We'd wake from hours of beer-snoozing, painfully sunburned all over. I used to joke that even the insides of our mouths, open to snores in the late afternoon sun, had been burnt.

Once, Ron and I climbed into Roger Andrino's Volkswagen and the three of us drove over Highway 17 to the flat beach between Davenport and Wilder Ranch. The tide was out, so Roger putted along the hardpack so we could picnic close to the waves. Later, the sea came in and flooded the car where it stuck in the sand and we had to wait until the tide went out again. We had long days and nights of bota bags and reefer and anger at the war, grave relief at having scored our draft deferments. The sun was setting into the anvil of fog, but across the waves on the other side of the world, it was rising over the jungles and hamlets where our friends and family members were dying or going subtly insane.

* * *

In my state college days I hadn't the slightest notion that I would someday live on the coast side of Highway 17. But when I went back to school to study literature, Maki-san and I drove her overloaded green VW over the pass and took a little beach house by Twin Lakes. I so hated Highway 17 then, for it no longer represented a road to freedom from the heat and choked thoroughfares of the Santa Clara Valley to the languid beach-side roads, but instead was a highway of inevitability going the other direction, toward the San Francisco airport where Maki would depart homeward.

On what I thought would be the last drive, a year after Maki had departed from my life forever, I was in the green VW she'd left me, packed now for graduate school in Alabama, a place as far removed from the laid-back surfer lanes of Santa Cruz as Albania, or Antarctica. I would not be back in California to live for more than fifteen years.

In 1999, having taken a job with a dot-com startup in Silicon Valley, I drove out Highway 17 to the coast. I rented a tiny apartment near the San Jose airport and found myself in a stranglehold commute, taking 45 minutes to travel less than five miles to work each day. One Saturday morning, I rose early and sped westward on the section of Highway 17 that had been renamed Interstate 880, hitting the pass before most people had woken up for coffee, descending from the summit in darkness, speedling along the patch from Scott's Valley toward Santa Cruz, the rising sun glancing off the whited steeple in the pastel pinks and grays of daybreak.

I had been sober for more than a decade and sought out other ways to smooth out the edges of life, but the sea had turned an inconsiderate shoulder, the Santa Cruz morning streets were walked by strangers or, worse, shadows and echos, and the buildings themselves wore new names.

Allusions

In the fall of that year Maki Yamada and I took a small house on Lakeview Drive, less than a minute's walk from the beach. At night the fog rolled in and you could smell the sea and the eucalyptus trees through the window. It was a tiny converted garage with a smelly carpet and leftover flea population from the previous tenant, but we cleaned it with love and made it a safe place to live at a time when Ronald Reagan was President and Mark David Chapman had shot John Lennon.

In the morning, I walked past the sprawling gardens where our dirt road turned to asphault, where chickens ran free across the path and an old mare grazed silently at the fencepost. We had no money, but the university included a bus pass and there was a stop at 26th Avenue for the 56 line that ran right up to Porter College and my morning class. The return bus dropped me off in front of Kong's Market, where I bought our egg rolls for dinner. It was the happiest time of my life.

I was a good decade older than the students in Paul Skenazy's modern novel course, and I had no idea how to read critically or talk about writing. I'd listen for an hour while students bantered about the structure of Gravity's Rainbow or Absalom, Absalom!--difficult novels for a first-year student who was just stepping into the river. And so I'd weep on the bus ride home for fear of failure and my inability to wrap my mind around the muscular narratives.

Maki had a car, a VW that seemed to blow out a part every month, sending me scrambling for the idiot book and the box of metric wrenches. I had never even changed the oil before in my various Buicks, Dodges, or Datsuns and now had to crawl under the back hood and see what I could do to keep the bug from separating into disparate parts under its labored idle.

We had no money.

But Maki waitressed at night at a Japanese restaurant on the west side, and she'd come home with a plastic bag of sashimi and California rolls, and we ate like high members of the shogunate. On weekends we splurged and went over to Chef Tongs for a chicken stir-fry of charred peppers, vegetables, and peanuts. While she was away, I sat in the chair by the window and read novels, marking up the margins with arrows and multiple question marks that underscored my utter failure in understanding the arc of the plot, let alone the subtle literary allusions and call outs to Shakespeare. In the late afternoons, when the wind picked up, I'd pull on a hoodie and jog along the beach.

If we had a little extra cash, I'd ride my bike up Portola to the fruit and vegetable stand and buy dried apricots and dates, or eggplants and onions for our own stir-fries. Some nights, when Maki wasn't working, we took our books and rode down to Capitola Beach and had coffee at Mr. Toots, overlooking the harbor where pelicans curved down from the cliffs in tight formation, screeching down where the anchovies rolled in on the tide as easy prey.

I loved looking at our shadows fall before us when Maki and I walked in the sun. I was over six feet tall and she barely reached five, and we looked like a parent and child. Years later it occurred to me that she had relied upon me to teach her English, the odd customs of the Santa Cruz hippie lifestyle, and even how to drive the VW. And once the parent/student relationship had outgrown its utility, what would come to take its place?

Some nights the stray cats used the fat planters of rubber trees at Toots for a litter box and you had to run out of there squeezing your nose. Teen-aged tourists and gee-gawkers from the crowded peninsula drove out at dusk in their souped-up cars and drove the Capitola loop in search of sex or a proximate encounter in conversation.

But we'd end the evening together, cuddled under the comforter in our little house, listening to the waves out the window and feeling very happy.

Skenazy saved my life in mid-semester after flunking me over a poor paper. I had no idea how to write a paper; I'd been trained as a journalist, and while my powers of observation were sharp, you didn't pen a critical essay in the inverted pyramid format of a news story. I was nearly washed out. I sat ashen in his office at Cowell College as he explained that I had to learn the literary form and aeriodite lingo of the trade.

The door to his office was open and you could hear the great American classicist Norman O. Brown chewing out an undergrad: "You don't have the courage to drop out of school!"

Well, neither had I. Nor did I have a source of income save my scant student loans and scholarship. But I was willing to follow Skenazy's directions and spent long hours in the undergraduate library trying to make sense of my suffering. One afternoon I was nearly laughed out of the seminar room by my utterance of a wicked malapropism: "architypical".

Across town, Maki was making quick work of building a wide network of Japanese students who had enrolled at the nearby community college where she was taking undergraduate classes of her own. Unlike me, she had a social life, and I was insanely jealous. The platters of late night sushi went away. And so had she.

I'd come home to our empty house by the beach and mope. I'd try to chase her down by telephone, ringing up her friends to see if she were there, stammering in Japanese when I couldn't find her. I had enrolled in a Japanese language class, prospering wonderfully, learning the hiragana and katagana and speaking with uncanny mastery--like a woman! I had picked up Maki's inflections and feminine nuances with sufficient acumen that my professor bristled. "You talk like a girl," she said.

And in the spring semester, Maki was spending more and more time away from the beach-house while I brooded in the library over biblical references in Faulkner. We had two languages between us now and so little to say. And Maki had begun to drop references to a man in her pottery class.

One night I sat alone in the dark, listening to the waves, and phoned her at the number she had for the classmate in her address book. Yes, she admitted when he put her on the line, she was there. And she wasn't coming home.

In the morning I had my valise packed, waiting outside the door to the beach-house. I wanted to be anywhere but inside my own crawling flesh. But she had been unfaithful, so why was I to leave? We agreed to find separate homes and when I left the solitude of Lakeview Drive, I moved into a bustling, dysfunctional community on East Cliff Drive, a house and cabins on a giant lot where 14 people lived and ate together. (Today, Lakeview is paved and the little house has made way for a choked row of overpriced condos.)

In the summer of that year, Maki flew home to Japan and I sat in my basement room of the noisy coed house speaking to the twenty books of my oral exam list where they were stacked on my desk, reciting to each literary character what I knew about them, how their world was structured, from which biblical or literary work did their titles spring anew, and how the landscape suited the thematic considerations of the form.

And out the window the afternoon light faded and the gulls screeched as the fog swept in.

Strange Fruit

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." -- James Joyce, Ulysses

As someone who has rarely left food on my plate over an entire lifetime, I was not one to flinch at supper, no matter the shape, color, or texture of food if someone else was eating it. I was a premature birth, housed in one of those little plastic boxes for a while in the nursery, then held in the palm of the delivery nurse, who told my mother I'd always be scrawny. Once I topped 265 pounds.

Consequently, I've eaten most of the odds and ends of living beasts and plants, including blowfish along the Japan Sea, salted herring with onions on stiff bread from a Dutch breakfast cart, blood pudding, kidney pie, and haggis (oatmeal-stuffed sheep stomach) in Scotland, kishke (vegetable-stuffed chicken skin), whale-meat hotdogs in Tokyo (please forgive me), gooey sealfat and nori appetizers (in the Yukon), steamed chicken feet (and other mystery dim-sum), roasted iguana (in the Yucatan), frogs, snails, and an assortment of plants and roots that most people would rather use for compost than shove into their mouth.

Maki-san once fed me kagami mochi, a sticky double-cake of rice that the Japanese eat just after New Year to break open a new experience. My new experience was that the mochi tasted like eating your pillow and chasing it with white paste.

Once, when I was in Athens, I stayed in the Plaka, the oldest section of the city nested in the shadow of the Acropolis. The narrow streets threaded among cozy cafes, jewelry shops, tavernas, and souvlaki joints. Feril cats scampered about or sat begging under the cafe tables. Cats were everywhere. They sat on the steps of the Acropolis, curled for naps in flowerbeds, darted across the tiled walks just ahead of noisy motorscooters. You couldn't take a snapshot that didn't have a cat in it.

Souvlaki is Greek fast food. They serve pork (or lamb) on a skewer or in a pita with vegetables and piquant sauces. I prided myself in finding the cheapest place in the Plaka. Calling it rustic would be a complement. But the souvlaki was most excellent and at nearly half the price in drachmas.

I ate two or three of them at a clip. And continued the practice for several days until a Greek passerby stopped to whisper in my ear that this particular cafe served cat, thereby maintaining its remarkably low price. He said I could wait and see that the meat was delivered fully cooked in a pan to the rear of the joint every hour or so--rather than cooked on the premises. Further, he said, I would never catch an Athenian ordering from their window. After he left I looked to my plate where a scrap of meat lay untouched in the creamy sauce. I didn't wait to see whether the cat was delivered to the rear door. I took the messenger at his word. Yet the souvlaki had been quite tasty.

On a trip to Italy in the late 1980s to attend an international Hemingway conference, I feasted among other academics from around the world at a banquet hosted by the communist government of the town of Lignano Sabbiadoro. We had spent the day touring the Udine reqion, saw the marker on the riverbank where Hemingway had become the first American wounded in World War I, and ended up at long tables set among tubs of iced shrimp, carved melon, and a dazzling spread of cheese and cold cuts. I particularly loved the bright red, thinly sliced beef that had a sweet aftertaste, and went back for more. I asked the server for the Italian name of this savory meat, and she said, "cavallo". Even with my poor Spanish I knew what I was eating. It's tough to say, but dogs have it awfully good.

It's only fitting here to celebrate the rich, Eastern European palate that my mother introduced to our home. Our entrees were so strange, I feared bringing classmates home for supper. We naturally ate organ meats or vegetable soups normally eschewed by my friends. Liver, tongue, borscht, shav (cold spinach soup), matzo-meal pancakes. Mom had a hand-cranked meat grinder into which she fed boiled livers, eggs, chicken fat and onions. Out came a heavenly paste with the faint suggestion of organic chemistry.

Once she put a ground concoction in front of me that vaguely resembled pale, runny chopped liver. It had an unfamiliar smell.

"Spread it on some matzo," she said.

It did not taste good to me. It was something I could not eat.

"Brains," she said.

It might have been the only part of a cow on which I had never dined. Brains.

Persistence

"...after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls· bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence...." -- Marcel Proust

Neurobiologists say that we have more than 1,000 different sensors inside our nose, located at eye level, enabling us to identify more than 10,000 distinct odors. Since the cells in the nose are short-lived and frequently replaced, the researchers claim that olfactory codes must be mapped in the brain to enable us to associate the smells with phenomena. Then the brain attaches linguistic information so that we have words for them. The catalog can be extensive. Wine aficionados probably have a broader memory vocabulary than I have for crushed grapes. While the associations seem instantaneous, they have taken a lifetime to form, and we probably inherit genetic memory from ages ago when we had to sort out meat and berries for spoilage.

My favorite earliest memory is of honeysuckle hedges along the walkways of a motel in San Diego. I would set the date around 1963. Whenever I pass a row of honeysuckle today, I am instantly in front of the Mission Valley Inn, and then I wander the broad highway of associations with lobster, which we ate by the harborside, and an evening's walk in the crisp salt air. My first sweetheart wore a lily of the valley perfume and whenever I smell something in that broad palate of odors, I am transported instantly into her arms.

In the spring of 1979 I met Maki Yamada , a woman from Nagoya, Japan. She had arrived in California to study English -- and to learn how to drive a car. Driving school was prohibitively expensive in Japan. After several months we moved in together, taking a small cottage just a block from the beach in Santa Cruz. You could smell eucalyptus trees out the window and hear the morning waves. In those days, my attire of choice was a pair of overalls, a railroad engineer's cap, and bare feet. It was the beach, after all.

Maki adored the cap, which she would swipe from my head, hold to her nose, take a long sniff, and sigh.

"Ee-nyoi," she'd say.

It was as if the cap was a portal to her baby blanket, or some ancient connection to paradise. As often as she did it, I could never see it coming. She'd whip the cap off my head and bury her nose in it.

"Ee-nyoi."

I'd ask her what a smelly old hat had to do with anything and she would just sigh and lift it back to her nose. It had no particular odor I could discern. Perhaps it lay camouflaged in the blank spot of familiarity, just like the smells of our house that only visitors can sense.

Teaching Maki-san to drive was a challenge. We had to overcome linguistic barriers and the illogical machinations of clutch and stick. "Put the clutch in where!" she stammered as the VW lurched and died.

At the end of her stay in America, I took Maki-san to the San Francisco Airport, hoping I'd be invited to join her back in Nagoya when she settled. No such fortune. I was heartbroken and sent her tape recordings of the waves rushing against the sand at the beach. The cap had finally deteriorated and I put what was left of it in a mailbag and sent it, too.

She eventually married a German doctor and raised a family on the coast of Australia. In the photos, the children look hale and inquisitive.

Do you think that associations can morph over time? One of my fondest memories of my extended tour of Japan was the smell of rice fields when farmers burned the husks after harvest. It reminded me of the smell of wild dormitory parties at San Jose State in the early 70s.

Today, whenever I smell a burning campfire, it reminds me of the scent of smoldering paddies, and that, of course, makes me think instantly of Japan, and instantly of Maki Yamada... and then I see my hat as good as new.