Leaving Santa Fe, the weather matched my mood. The Sandia mountains to the east were capped with fierce clouds, white blooms erupting from a steel base, the fog below dusting their steel and rust-colored slopes white with spring snow, the air as cold and turbulent as my thoughts had been the past few days. But then, on the other side of the highway, bright desert sun filled a blue sky. As I turned west on to Interstate 40, my mood began to lighten as well.
The next two days would be some of the best of the trip, and I almost missed them.
Heading west, I vacillated whether to go through with my next stop. It was with an old friend, the ‘P’ from KPM racing, and the plan was to stay two nights. I had not spent more than an hour with him since 1999, during my angry phase, and the second night it would be just me and his wife, who I had met over breakfast the month before. Our friendship seemed tenuous, and as I drove through the desert, spring sun warming the car after a month in the mountains, I went back and forth between whether I should visit or not. I had forecast a dinnertime arrival, but the drive took longer than I thought, and as my arrival time slipped from six to seven to nine, I considered calling off the visit. In the end, his big black dog Guinness met me at the door with a deep woof and a stream of drool.
Over a dinner of mac n cheese we began catching up: where we had been, what we had been up to. This soon expanded to our friends: marriages, divorces, who was still in the Air Force or the work they were doing now they were out. Some have been radicalized against ‘brown people’ over the previous decade and we speculated on the cause (their work? the media they attend to?). Then it was reminiscing old times, Saturday nights at the short track north of town, missions they had flown together, and even things that had happened the year I was in Korea (the Air Force’s 50th Anniversary Air Show) that I had never heard before. We swapped stories late into the night like two old coots down at the VFW. His wife wisely nodded off early on.
The next scheduled stop was my mom’s place on the coast. The route took me through Mojave, and feeling nostalgic I stopped at the Air and Space Port for lunch. I pulled in to the airport, expecting it to be Virgin Galactic-ville (which it was not) and there it is, the restaurant where we used to stop at for burgers after we’d done our little ‘airshows’ down the road at Rosamond Lake (we being me and the five college-age guys I learned to fly with). It brought back a lot of memories, my time as the airport coffee shop waitress and the excitement of visiting Mojave, the test flight epicenter of the world (well nearby Edwards AFB/Muroc Lake was, but this was as close as we could get). The restaurant is named after the (then) Rutan Aircraft Voyager, the first aircraft to fly non-stop (and without refueling) around the world, and is an unofficial museum of the flight, with photos, maps, and commemorative materials covering the walls. (Exciting for me as Jeanna Yeager had been one of my role models when I was learning to fly). After lunch I poked around a bit on the ramp, smelled the jet fuel, watched a King Air start up and taxi off, took a few photos of the aircraft in dry storage (quite a few Atlas Air and Southern Air Transport, both DOD long-haul contractors), and along the way got to remembering how much fun we had back in the day. I returned to the road with a light heart.
After a quick stop to visit my mom, I headed north up the coast for a few nights at Land of Medicine Buddha, a Tibetan monastery and retreat center nestled in the Santa Cruz foothills. Here you have the option of staying in a room or a yurt, and I elected for a yurt. It was early in the season, so the yurt village (where I had stayed two summers before) was not yet open, and I was placed in the handi-accessable one (read: adjacent parking!) on the road to the Wish Fulfilling Temple. This center was founded by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who’s teachings focus on kindness to all living beings, and is home to a project to build the largest stupa in North America.
The center is located next to the Nisene Marks State Forest, a 10,000 acre secondary forest (it had been clear cut over 40 years during the late 19th and early 20th centuries) with over 40 miles of trails through towering redwoods. This area is known (in addition to the awesome hiking) for being the epicenter of the Loma Prieta quake, and damage (including a seam in the earth) is still visible along one of the trails. I quickly changed clothes and got to walking. After a slog up a steep fire road, pausing every twenty steps or so to catch my breath, I reached a fork in the path. I chose east, downhill, along the three-mile loop. Despite the day’s heat it was cool under the canopy, fallen needles dampening my footsteps. The trail, also wide enough for vehicles, gently sloped along the steep hillsides, with coast redwoods towering from below to above. Towards the bottom there is a turnoff to the Enchanted Forest, a local gathering spot with fallen logs to sit on, hollow stumps to shelter in, and a large peace sign constructed with sticks on an open area of earth. There is also a makeshift memorial where people leave photos and mementos honoring loved ones passed. After this the road merges with the Eight Verses Trail, a one-mile loop through meadow and forest with verses and benches spaced along the way to allow reflection on the Buddha’s teachings.
One of the other nice things about LoMB is the meals: vegetarian, organic, and locally sourced to the greatest extent possible, eaten communally in the dining room with the senior lamas and nuns mixing with the guests. I had timed my walk to finish at dinnertime by the dining room. It was packed with two yoga retreats, so I sat off to the side with two nuns, one a resident teacher and the other a visiting scholar from Australia who is active in the Prison Dharma program. Over the next few days we had several fascinating conversations about international politics, the prison-industrial complex, mass surveillance, and avenues to walk the teachings in the world. After dinner the first night was a dharma talk by Rene Feusi, a lively and quite funny French monk. He quickly dispensed with the advertised topic (they asked me to speak on the fifth chapter of the Bodhisattva Way of Life, but…) to tell tales about his Tibetan teachers, provide the reasoning behind several Tibetan meditations, and share a lovingkindness meditation (we do this practice for others so it becomes easier to do it for ourselves). In the morning I did prayer wheel practice with the nuns, 104 turns in a clockwise direction while chanting Oh Mane Padme Om.
After another day spent hiking, eating more great food, and spinning the dharma wheel, I was back on the road, off to the next leg of my adventure: Green Gulch Farm.