feral

Monday, November 7, 2005

Long time. Too sleepy exhausted to keyboard a sentence here. And now time-pressed. We drove yesterday to the train station in Klamath Falls, 120 miles NNW of home, to meet the 8:30 a.m. Coast Starlight Amtrak Number 14 up from Sacramento bearing my old friend Les Light whom I have not clapped eyes on in over a decade. The train pulled into the station at the stroke of noon, in the gray and rain, and we roused ourselves from our hours' car-drowse to stand near the track and eyeball the debarking throng, and finally the loping figure in the far distance, toting the great backpack, it could be none other. And there was much exclaiming: You haven't changed! You're exactly the same! and hugs and introductions to the nervous carbound dogs, and then the long drive home across the juniper barrens of the Modoc plateau, with pauses for the buffet late lunch at "Captain Jack's Stronghold" restaurant near the historic landform of the same name. We had the rare roast beef at Captain Jack's, and two kinds of potatoes and orange blintzes and dark gravy and not a green or yellow buddy in sight. And drove on past the Tulelake Internment Camp, with its intact gray rows of tiny bungalows standing somber, spirit-chilling reminders of what we can be and do, what we are and are doing. In the rain through the rain-softened volcanic tableland and finally up the washboard gravel and potholed dirt of our own three-mile lane. No awkwardness, talking as though we'd never stopped, never gone silent over a gap of years, through my thin potato-soup-and-cornbread-supper until we had to give in and give up and sleep.

Today is as bleak and gray as yesterday, and the wind howls and rain spatters. Les may still be sleeping on the bad guest bed in the loft with my too many cats, or trying to sleep. Brian and I finished up silently our early morning routines and I have these minutes with my tea and toast and Greta's purrs and a little email. Snow predicted, and I wonder whether Les will board the southbound Coast Starlight tomorrow night having never seen the Warner Mountains, which stand right here next to us but completely cloud-shrouded, a rumor of peaks on the other side of the brown hills.
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