Authenticity

Bruce and Andrea, holing up in Santa Cruz for a week before they leave for Southeast Asia, came by and took us to the Big Sur Lodge last night. Early this morning we went for a hike on the headlands which are beautiful beyond imagining, a landscape the way God intended landscapes to be (to paraphrase Henry Miller.) And yet I found myself in the bubble, curiously unable to engage with the beauty — I was walking through it, but really it was only a visual scan. Andrea, a naturalist who tracks birds and butterflies, and shortly will be in the backcountry of Laos tracking (if memory serves) plovers through a small grant from the World Wildlife Federation — knows the names of all the plants and animals we passed. Surprisingly, I knew at least half of them too. It didn't make me feel any more connected.

Bruce and Andrea spend a lot of time hanging out with hoboes and riding trains. The rides are often weeks long, the pleasure is not the destination but the trip itself. "But what do you with yourself while you're riding?" I asked over dinner.

"Look at the scenery," said Andrea. "Make up music. The trains are very rythmical, you know. Sometimes I sit and sing to myself for hours. And you cook, and you sleep, and you read."

"You don't talk, though," said Bruce. "It's too loud to talk."

I wouldn't do well on a train.

Their life seems somehow more authentic than mine. They take pleasure in a wide variety of things, and none of these things has been marketed to them as such. They like nature and travel, and off-the-track amusements (long conversational segue last night about the sport of curling which is very big in Minnesota,) and it almost seemed odd to hear Andrea talk about movies they had rented. The thing is they enjoy their lives, and I don't honestly think I'm enjoying mine.