Horizon

A few days ago there was a ferocious windstorm. Grit flew in from under the door and the palm fronds were in continuous motion as though they were underwater in a changing tide. A whistling noise came from the front of the house every time the wind shifted just so and the roof creaked like someone was walking around up there. I had wanted to go shopping up the valley but the wind wanted to knock the car into oncoming traffic so I decided to leave it for another day. A tree went down in front of the house; right now it is sideways, the rootball exposed and drying in the desert air.

A bit of wind in the afternoon has not been unusual, but most days have been still and mild with just enough cloud cover to make for drama at the bookends of the day. I have taken to standing on the back steps at six in the morning to watch the sky change from a deep blue punctuated with stars to a range of fiery oranges and pinks to the blue of a palace ceiling. Or, sometimes, like today, to a sheet of variegated gray. This morning in seemingly no time, the sky had gone from bright tangerine to dull pewter as though someone had turned the saturation levels down to zero. I went inside to get my camera and when I came back out, all the color was gone. Like that.

It is about 1200 miles from my home to where I sit now. The drive crosses two mountain passes and to get here, I needed to outrun a series of bad weather fronts. I had a friend with me for the first half, the second half I made on my own. The last day’s driving was particularly nerve-wracking. The road signs had been programmed with menacing warnings. I had the feeling if I didn’t make it across the mountains now, now, now, I would be stuck for days waiting for the flood waters to subside. I got up early and fueled with corporate coffee, I made it to the Mojave side without incident. I passed the town where my father served his time in a minimum security prison, and miles later, a parking lot full of commercial jets. The airplanes looked like a hallucination, so many of them sitting in the literal middle of nowhere, their bright tailfins sharp against the desert sky.

Seattle is a beautiful city and I love where I live, but the winter days can be so short and dark. Some days I never cast a shadow. Here in the desert, I see my shadow every day, sometimes it is sharp like a paper cut out, sometimes it is softer around the edges, but there is always enough light so that shadow exists. I suffer from seasonally affected depression but also, I am solar-powered enough that when the days drop into darkness at four in the afternoon, I fight the urge to crawl into bed. Napping helps, and socializing, but it is no exaggeration to say it is a battle for me not to fall asleep by seven every evening between November and March.

Nothing cures the fatigue I feel from light deprivation, not exercise, not full spectrum lights, not copious amounts of coffee, nothing works. At this time of year, I watch my dog slow down too. If the weather is particularly bad, he can spend as many as sixteen consecutive hours indoors. I told this to his vet once and she looked at me with great concern. “Oh no,” I assured her, “I have a dog door. He can come and go at will. He just doesn’t want to.” The dog makes me wonder if we humans have tried too hard to suppress our hibernation instincts. Perhaps we would benefit from allowing the sun to set our sleep schedules, not the clock. We do not argue with the car when it is out of gas.

Now that I’m settled in the California desert, my day-to-day routine is quite similar to what it was at home in Seattle. I had to replace my lap swimming time with a video-led yoga practice and my social activities are compressed into multi-day visits from friends who also want a change of scenery, but I walk my dog, cook my meals, get my groceries, same as at home. I miss my bicycle but Harley is as happy to walk here — perhaps more so for the lack of rain — as he was at home. I spent a lot of time alone at home; doing so here is not a big change.

Remote work means that what looks like a vacation on paper is not always a real vacation. I had a vacation after my mom died, I took myself to the ocean, but I spent the week writing so does that count as a real vacation? Do writers even take vacations? The time driving down here felt vacation-like in that I did not give much thought to my job but the driving itself was a kind of work. On one of the evenings, my travel companion and I ordered Thai food delivered to our hotel room; we sat on the floor eating pad thai and watching a classic film noir picture; that felt like a vacation. The next day, though, we traveled many miles in driving rain, which was less leisurely. Last winter I spent some time in Hawaii, the name of which is synonymous with vacation, but I was up in the dark nearly every day for meetings on Seattle time.

A change is as good as a rest, that’s how the aphorism goes. I would argue this is not true, rest is much better than change when you need rest though I do think change can be good. Wherever you go, there you are, well, that’s an aphorism too and you can’t run away from yourself, your problems, your desire to go directly to bed as soon as the sun drops below the horizon even if that horizon is 1200 miles south of the one you left behind. My current rule for living is to not make any sudden moves. This change of scenery isn’t sudden, I started planning months back. I do tend to make big changes as a result of this kind of time away. It can seem like a sudden move from the outside. It’s not. It’s the result of change and rest and looking at the horizon long enough for things to come into focus.