The art that actually changes you—the stuff that crawls under your skin and messes up your equilibrium—is almost never the pleasant kind. It’s the piece you don’t like on first contact. The one you would never hang on your wall. The book that unsettles you. The music that vibrates at a frequency you weren’t prepared to hear. That’s what I found at the Portland Art Museum a couple of days after Thanksgiving, though I didn’t know I was looking for it.

I’d traveled to Portland to spend the holiday with my sister and her family, and it was a lazy, drizzly, post-holiday afternoon. If you’d asked me why I wanted to go, I probably would have said something about relaxing, restless from being inside too long, just wanting to take a stroll through the new Portland Art Museum, which re-opened last year after a 100,000 square-foot upgrade. But subconsciously I think I knew I needed a mind shift. My equilibrium was off. I was seeking balance, or maybe I was seeking to tip further off-balance in a useful direction.

I was still reeling from the message our president had spewed out to the entire country—a Thanksgiving greeting that wished happiness to everyone “except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything America stands for—you won’t be here for long.” A shocking holiday message directed at millions of Americans.

Perhaps I needed a widened perspective, exposure to ideas that challenged rather than confirmed, a visual reset button as an antidote to a country contracting into itself, closing doors that had taken generations to open. And I got it big time, walking into Rick Bartow’s world.

His work stopped me cold. The first painting that greeted us was “Crow, Song, Bear” (2014). I walked toward the painting slowly, trying to understand what had drawn me besides the sheer force of color. It felt like encountering a new language I was suddenly desperate to learn.

The painting’s vivid orange backdrop immediately commands attention, an aggressive vibrancy that refuses to let viewers pass by. That intensity pulled me forward to examine the transformational ambiguity at its heart: the bear-human hybrid caught mid-metamorphosis, the multiple faces layering and emerging, the red hand pressed flat as if the figure is simultaneously pushing through and being absorbed by that luminous field. The crow overhead watches this threshold moment, this unstable instant where boundaries dissolve. What Bartow captures is the disorienting vertigo of becoming—not the before or after, but the uncomfortable, electric present of change itself.

On the other side of the wall hung two paintings in a completely different mood but equally uncanny. Thought provoking.

Bartow (1946-2016) was a member of the Wiyot, a Native American tribe from Northern California, and a Vietnam veteran. Much of his work sits inside an intersection of human, animal, trauma, resilience, and spiritual permeability. You can feel it. His canvases insist that the boundary we like to draw between animal and human is much thinner than we pretend. I kept thinking: this is what I mean by “disturbing in a constructive way.” Bartow’s art doesn’t just show you an animal spirit; it shows you the parts of yourself that remain half-wild, half-spiritual, half-wounded, half-transformed. There’s no polite separation.

And that disturbance—being forced to confront your own in-between-ness, your own ambiguity—was energizing. I welcomed it. I could feel my spirit moving.

In a corner of the exhibition, a video of Bartow performing music with his band was looping. A reminder that he wasn’t just a painter who also played; music ran parallel to the art, braided through his life the way his animal-human figures braid identities on the canvas. He had been drawing since childhood, but the guitar came in during high school, and by the time he was in Vietnam he was literally playing in military hospitals for wounded soldiers. The Army even gave him a Bronze Star for that.

I didn’t know anything about him and the music aspect of his art made the paintings feel different—not softer, but more dimensional. The urgency in his lines suddenly had a rhythm to it, like improvisation. The fragmented faces and animal forms, the crows perched on shoulders, the eyes that look both startled and ancient—they carry that same pulse you can hear in someone trying to play their way out of grief.

Yoshida Chizuko: The Sound Inside Color

When we stepped into the Yoshida Chizuko exhibition, everything suddenly clicked. I didn’t long for the old masters or even the impressionists so beloved to me most of my life. Museums can serve two purposes: they can offer comfort in beauty you already understand, or they can disturb you with what you don’t. I’ve needed both at different times. That day, I needed disturbance.

My sister and I hung out there for a long time, enjoying the layers of the artist’s compositions, reading all the plaques, and listening to the audio whenever QR codes were offered. We marveled at the disturbance, energy, process, pattern, and performance of every piece. My favorites were on a cobalt-blue wall—two of her 1956 prints: “Mambo No. 1” and “Mambo No. 2.”

These are electric. Bright oranges. Yellow slices. Purple sparks. Lines like musical staves gone rogue. Shapes that behave like sound hitting the air at different angles. And the wall label confirmed exactly what I thought I was seeing: “Mambo is Chizuko Yoshida’s interpretation of a South American–influenced jazz style that became popular in Japan in the 1950s. These prints capture the rhythms and movements of the music.”

So my brain hadn’t invented the musical reference; it was built into the work.

Chizuko listened to music and tried to translate what she heard into color and shape. She was literally making a visual score. I stood there trying to figure out how she got her colors so bright. It’s printmaking—pigment and metallic inks on paper—and yet the thing seemed to buzz with a frequency that felt louder than the room. It’s not that the prints depict music; it’s that they behave like it.

This made me think of something I’d seen earlier in one of the photography rooms. A small placard beside an Ansel Adams print reminded me that Adams was an accomplished classical pianist before he became a photographer. The musical training never left him; in fact, it structured his whole sense of what a photograph was. He said: “The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.”

Meaning, the decisive moment with the shutter click is just the beginning. The real art is in the printing, the layering, the interpreting, the printing again, adjusting contrast, manipulating shadow and highlight like you would voice or volume. The finished thing isn’t the point—the process is. The performance is. Chizuko seemed to have understood this: the way the print becomes a performance of something behind it. The way the process and the result refract each other.

This disturbed me too, in the best way—because it challenged my idea of what printmaking is supposed to do. I realized I’d been limiting myself. I’d been thinking too small about color, texture, mark-making, and the way visual work can carry vibration. It made me want to rush home and paint my walls in some unruly color and then scrape and sand and glue and draw into it until it held some life. Not a soothing life—an awake life.

The Bathroom

Before moving to the next exhibition we passed the restroom. The “All User” sign was a simple icon of a toilet, a piece of art, itself. Where I live, as in Portland, this is unremarkable. But I stood there for a minute, waiting for my sister at the water fountain, and felt the weight of knowing that somewhere, someone is terrified of this door. That legislators spend hours debating who can use which bathroom while actual human beings are being told they “won’t be here for long.” It wasn’t that long ago that bathrooms were segregated into white and non-white. The fear never really changes—just the target.

The museum is full of work that questions the very idea of fixed identity—work that celebrates cross-cultural exchange, that treats difference and foreignness as essential rather than threatening. These works are decades and centuries old, and modern too, yet the world outside still fixates on bathroom signs as if rigid categories are the only thing holding civilization together.

Jiseon Lee Isbara: Learning and Erasure

A little later, I almost walked past a glass case holding a book—open and fanned out like an explosion of pages, with long ribbons trailing downward like roots or tendrils or nerves.

This was Jiseon Lee Isbara’s Jane Eyre from her series Top Ten Books to Read Before You Die. A real book, opened wide, pages stretched and fanned, with long ribbon markers dangling like tendrils. But the real shock was the stitching. Thread sewn through every word she didn’t know while reading these classic novels as a foreign-born U.S. citizen learning English. On one side, the stitches are the exact record of not-knowing, of stopping, of struggling. On the reverse, they’re arbitrary erasure. The same action becomes learning from one angle, censorship from the other.

That struck me: the same action can be learning from one side and erasure from the other. Assimilation is like that. So is censorship. So is misunderstanding.

Standing there looking at Isbara’s Jane Eyre, I kept thinking about the panic over books now—the way certain people insist that stories they don’t understand are too dangerous to be allowed. That novels about queer kids, or immigrants, or racial history, or gender complexity, or anything outside the majority curve, need to be pulled from shelves to “protect” children.

But protect them from what? From the feeling Isbara recorded so honestly—the moment of not knowing, of having to pause, of being humbled by unfamiliarity?

Because that’s what reading actually is: a long sequence of not-knowing, stitched together by curiosity.

And I realized how honest Isbara’s piece is about what comprehension costs. She doesn’t hide her struggle; she exposes it. She shows exactly where meaning faltered. Imagine politics that allowed that level of honesty. Imagine leaders who could say “I don’t understand this yet” or “This makes me uncomfortable but I’m willing to learn.” But we don’t. We erase. We ban. We refuse conversation. It’s the adult version of stitching over all the hard words—not to learn them, but to make sure no one else can read them either.

Gazing at that book, I felt something breathing—like understanding itself needs space, needs air, needs exposure. A book or a painting or a print cannot change you unless you are willing to be unsettled. Unless you come to it with the willingness to be wrong, to be surprised, to feel something unfamiliar.

Cross-cultural understanding has always involved this kind of discomfort. You have to let another person’s story pass through you, even when it contradicts your assumptions. You have to listen to rhythms that aren’t your own—like Yoshida Chizuko listening to South American mambo in postwar Japan, translating it into sharp color and metallic percussion on paper. That’s what cultural encounter looks like when done honestly: curiosity, absorption, adaptation. A willingness to sit inside someone else’s pulse for a while.

The Beige Problem

Which got me thinking: I’m in the process of painting my walls, considering neutral tones—beige, greige, sage—for calm, something stable and easy on the eyes. And sure, home should be comforting to some extent. My home—currently a 34-foot fifth-wheel parked on my parents property in California—does a good job of giving me both the stability and the freedom I need. High ceilings, little kitchen island, a cozy bedroom with a queen bed and a big closet, a decent sized bathroom. It’s an ideal living space for someone who has always valued going places over staying places.

I’ve always been itchy to explore, to learn new things, to see how other people live, to test myself. I’ve never been good at staying put. For me, mobility is stability. The fifth-wheel isn’t a compromise or a way station; it’s the point. It lets me stay exposed to whatever comes next. It keeps me from settling into one answer, one view, one version of how life should look.

But nothing in my home currently disturbs me in the way that Bartow or Chizuko’s work does. Nothing wakes me up.

I’m rethinking the use of beige and greige and sage for not disturbing me, because they don’t ask anything of us. But I’m wondering if a home that inspires is one that pushes back a little. One that says: wake up. Be here. Pay attention. Maybe a bold turquoise wall with scraped white showing through would do that. Maybe sketching on the walls themselves might do it, too. I’ve always been drawn to drawing, but at some point I chose writing, so I’m not terribly skilled. But why not? I might hate it. I might repaint. But the point is the attempt.

Living as Performance, Not Product

I’ve lived this in my own way. Riding motorcycles across countries alone, as a woman, was not soothing or safe or beige. It disturbed people—including me. It showed readers something about what was possible. I’ve gotten emails from women (and men, too) who said my travels made them rethink their own limitations.

In 1998, riding solo through China, I got lost in remote mountains hours after dark. When I finally found shelter, it turned out to be a brothel. I stayed anyway, because my only other option was to camp beside the road in the cold and the dark.

I lived through it. Laughed about it. Learned a few things about what happens when you let yourself be that exposed, that vulnerable, that far outside the map of what you thought you knew. You don’t get to choose your comfort. You get what comes.

That’s the same energy I felt looking at Bartow’s orange morphing figure and Chizuko’s explosive Mambo prints. They weren’t trying to comfort. They were showing truths—unpredictable, electric, raw. I guess you could walk away, but why?

What Art Demands

So maybe the question isn’t “Do I like this painting?” or “Would I hang this above my couch?” or “Does this fit with my color palette?”

The real questions are: Why does it disturb me? What is being awakened? Does this make me think?

If the answer is yes, then that’s the piece you need to stand in front of longer. That’s the one that wants to change you. That’s the one worth letting in.

Art is not decoration. Art is exposure. And exposure—if you let it—is how you change.

Every time I’ve let myself be disturbed—quitting the steady corporate gig for short-term contracts, taking a job in France, moving to Baja, choosing the fifth-wheel over the apartment, leaving relationships and leaping into new ones, pointing a motorcycle toward a country I’d never seen—I’ve grown. Every time I’ve chosen beige, I’ve shrunk.

I’m thinking about turquoise walls again.

Here’s the first post, and here’s the second post. If you haven’t read them, you might want to read them in order.

And oh… change the batteries in your smoke alarms!

Now, on to the third post, which includes practical advice on surviving a fire in your house at the end.

Part I | Part II | Part III…

March, 2020

Remembering now… I heard the alarm, saw the fire, and yelled at my mom to get out. She woke up. Put her bathrobe and slippers on. Grabbed the dog. We kept calling to each other. She walked out her door but I had to crawl through the house and out another door. You know the story.

Here’s the thing. I heard the alarm. The batteries were good. We are alive.

My mom and I meet at the front of the house, so relieved to be out.

I don't feel like a heroine, or brave, or level-headed. I feel like I acted on instinct. But if I hadn't been there... oh, it's terrifying to contemplate. (See the end of this post for a link to a super-loud, bed-shaking smoke alarm that would have wakened my mom.)

House Fire Statistics

Before I go on with my update, I'd like to share some information from some research on house fires.

According to the latest data (2018) from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA, a global organization) 27% of all fires occur in homes. Four of every five (79%) fire deaths and three-quarters (73%) of all reported injuries were caused by home fires. (See National Fire Protection Association 2018 report).

According to FEMA's National Fire Data Center, "Cooking, at 52%, was the leading cause of residential building fires. Heating caused another 9%. These percentages (and those that follow) are adjusted, which proportionally spreads the unknown causes over the other 15 cause categories."

In the NFPA Fire Loss in the United Status During 2018 report, US public fire departments responded to 363,000 home fires, with a US fire department responding to a fire every 24 seconds on average. In 2018, 2,720 (74 percent of all fire deaths), occurred in the home. They have recommendations for prevention:

There are five major strategies for reducing the death toll in home fires. First, more widespread public fire safety education is needed on how to prevent fires and how to avoid serious injury or death if a fire occurs. Information on the common causes of fatal home fires should be used in the design of fire safety education messages. Second, people need to install and maintain smoke alarms and develop and practice escape plans. Third, wider use of residential sprinklers must be aggressively pursued. Fourth, additional ways must be sought to make home products safer from fire. The regulations requiring more child-resistant lighters are a good example. Finally, the special fire safety needs of high-risk groups, such as children, older adults, the poor, and people with disabilities, need to be addressed.

NFPA Fire Loss in the United Status During 2018

Though the cause of our fire has not yet been officially determined, Dad said the forensic firefighter pointed to the spot where I saw the flames and said, "That's where it started." So we're thinking, electrical, maybe from the lamp cord.

Cleaning Up

At my brother’s house in San Jose.

At Jeremy and Lisa's house we showered and we did laundry. There were three items in the washer: my dad's sweatpants, my tank top, and mom's bathrobe. Lisa had thrown them in while we showered.

We stood at the door to the laundry room waiting for the washer to switch off, still shaken and tallying the losses.

"My passport. My driver's license." I said. "And more than 500 dollars... and I had pesos, too. I don't know how much."

The wash cycle ended and Lisa bent to open the door.

"I have no idea what was in my purse," Mom said. "I think it was a lot."

"Well, they smell clean," said Lisa. We'd been worried the smoke smell would linger or worse, contaminate the washer. Lisa, her head still in the drier, handed back a roll of cash.

"Is this yours?" she asked. "I know it isn't mine!"

Mom grabbed the roll. It was secured with a paperclip.

"Oh! Oh!" she said. "It must have been in my bathrobe pocket."

We laughed. "Who keeps cash in their bathrobe pocket?" said Lisa.

Mom shrugged. "I don't know. Just for emergencies, I guess."

"Here's another one."

It was exactly like the first, a roll of five twenties secured with a large paper clip.

"And another one! Gosh, Mom, how much cash do you need when you're in your bathrobe!?"

We laughed harder when she found another roll, and then another. She kept handing them out with a final count of $1000 in twenties.

My parents are of what's called "The Silent Generation," the children of The Great Depression. They were taught to be frugal and grew up practicing nuclear bomb drills at school, hiding under their desks. They migrated from the cities to the suburbs. They were silenced in the McCarthy era and worked within the system, obeying all the rules. They married young and had children, with Doctor Spock as their guide. They like to be prepared for emergencies, so I guess they keep cash tucked here and there. Just in case.

Aftermath

We went back the day after the fire. My dad and my brothers collected all the wet clothes and items worth saving from the closets and bureaus in the rooms at the far end of the house that didn't burn completely. It got very hot in there even before the roof fell. In the guestroom something had exploded and spattered glittery goo all over the place.

This was the least important side of the house in terms of contents. Mostly clothing. We soaked them in tubs of vinegar and baking soda which got most of the smell out.

It didn't work as well as we'd hoped, but with a more thorough internet search we learned that natural fabrics can be cleaned but not the synthetics. So we separated them into piles, put them into a cooler, and drove them a cleaners nearby. The owner accepted the smelly mess with grace after another customer, who had been chatting with her, wrinkled her nose and fled.

A few days later the clothes came back but they weren’t as clean as the clothes we’d soaked and washed ourselves. We had sorted through everything and thrown out the ones with scorches and burn holes.

In our family, shopping for clothes is our least favorite activity. I have replaced most of mine at online shopping sites, but I keep remembering things.

My suitcase had protected some of my things, like my laptop with its scorched screen and a piece of window-glass melted to the case. My audio recorder, an expensive one, survived, and my interviews from the San Francisco Writers Conference are intact.

My purse melted to form a protective case around my wallet with my passport, driver's license, bank cards, and cash, along with my cosmetics bag with lipstick and eyebrow pencil and concealer, all of them intact but smoky.

The next day, my brothers and Dad donned masks and boots to sort through the rubble. They found the oddest thing; a pristine plastic bottle of margarita mix in the liquor cabinet among the various exploded and melted beverage containers.

A row of books on a lower shelf didn't burn. And a photo of my great grandfather, who was an editor at the Boston Herald at the turn of the 19th century, survived, just a little crispy around the edges.

The shower in my dad's bathroom looked like this.

Depression

My brothers were in ninth grade when the family moved to Morgan Hill. Other than the loss of the house they are particularly broken up about the photo albums, as they've been meaning to digitize them for ages. I've never seen them so depressed so I was glad to see Jeff on Find My Friends on his mountain bike the morning after.

Which reminded me to do something good for myself too, like go on a hike, but I couldn't put shoes on because of my broken little toe. But later, my niece Dana came over with a pair of her old Birkenstocks and we took a slow walk in Almaden Quicksilver County Park nearby. It felt nice to get out in the sunshine with the old oaks, the wildflowers and the bay trees in bloom.

I'm feeling better. Sharing these posts has been really good for me. Writing helps me process, organize my thoughts. The process of writing slows down my thought process. I'm not good at snap decisions and need to remember to ask people to give me a little time to process before any big decision.

I haven't had the fire nightmares in a few nights in a row. Maybe it helped that my mom told me the living room sat on a concrete slab so there couldn't have been a fire raging under the house. But wow, that means the little armchair-sized fire I saw moved so fast. So much faster than I ever could have imagined.

And I'm really glad I could share my experience with you so that you stay safe, so you can get louder alarms if you need them and practice exit routes. Hundreds of you have written to tell me you have done just that.

Moving Forward

There is so much left to do. Mom and Dad have found a rental house near my brothers which will be furnished in "modern neutral" and equipped with all the necessities. For now, they will only need their (mostly new) clothes and groceries as they slowly replace the furniture with things they really want.

They are making plans to rebuild. Inventorying its contents. Purchasing clothes and laptops and toiletries and earbuds and laundry soap and replacing meds and all the little things. For now, they are surrounded by nothing but love.

What we wish we knew…

Take a complete inventory of your home. Lists and photos are great. The easiest thing you can do now is go room-by-room and videotape EVERYTHING in every drawer and cubby.

Here’s the home inventory template from my parents’ home insurance company.

Check out this bedside alarm that hears your smoke detectors and shakes your bed.
Lifetone HL Bedside Fire Alarm and Clock.

Practice evacuation strategies. My mom left the door open when she ran outside, and the outside air accelerated the fire inside. I left doors open between the kitchen and the hall and then also in my dad’s bedroom, which did the same. If we’d closed all the doors behind us, the fire would have been contained at one side of the house. Do the exercise in various scenarios, so that you are habituated with the practice. What would you do if the fire started in the kitchen, den, upstairs bedroom? Practice opening the windows and actually getting out of them. I almost died because I didn’t know how to open the back security door.

Building with Insulated Composite Concrete Forms (ICCF) I think it’s dumb that the carpenters or builders union blocks the use of this material. It’s faster to build with, easier to build with, and completely, absolutely fireproof. If you need to, you can actually shelter in place in a house built with this stuff. Rebuilding with wood is stupid.

Check your smoke alarm batteries. Get rope ladders for your second floor windows. Figure out if you’ll stay in the room with wet towels under the door, or use those ladders. Practice your escape routes. Decide what you’ll grab if you have time. Decide that life is worth more than any priceless item.

I hope you don’t ever have to go through this yourself! ❤️

PS: If you’re a writer, I have a Summer Critique Group happening May-August. We’ll have a whole-group meeting weekly but work in small pods of 3-5 writers to concentrate and critique each other’s work. I’ve set up a structure for this group that includes a community discussion area and small group (pod) areas, plus a google docs folder where you can submit and collect feedback on your stories and chapters. Here’s more about it and how to join.

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of a fire that completely burned down my parents home. This is part 2 of 3 stories I wrote after the fire, chronicling the physical, emotional, and financial aftermath. [Go to the first story.]

It’s been over a week since the fire and the nightmares have not subsided. The cause of the fire has yet to be determined but there are many theories. One theory is that the fire started in the wiring under the living room, Was that whoosh I heard caused by the collapse of the living room floor, releasing the burst of black smoke and soot that engulfed the dining room and the kitchen? Had I been seconds earlier to wake I might have been standing the middle of it.

So now my nightmares have expanded to include falling through the floor into an already raging fire to land on flesh-searing embers. As I try to scrabble out my sweatpants are burning, my synthetic tank top has melted to my torso, and I cannot breathe in the searing, sooty air. Over the crackle and the wind I hear my mother outside screaming my name as I become a whirling energetic disembodied being dissipating into… where? Christianity would put me in heaven or hell. Quantum mechanics posits an energy merge. Buddhists believe in bardos and reincarnation.

This nightmare triggers the memory. Shortly after 4:37 am on February 26, 2020 I am trapped by the security door in the kitchen while the black smoke thickens and the crackling sound of fire grows closer and louder. I twist the locks, push, pull, and twist the locks again with no effect. I realize there is no more time to waste flipping locks and that I might be losing cognition. I shake the door in frustration then drop to the floor. A fraction of a second of peace and acceptance washes over me and I feel light and free.

A fraction of a second after that I am scrambling across the floor with my sweatpants over my face.

A week later, I know what PTSD is. Yes, I have always known that PTSD is real and horrible but I have had no idea until now. If this is me a week later having nightmares and short, sudden verbal outbursts in the course of my day, I try to imagine the level of PTSD of someone traumatized by war or abuse or chemical imbalance. I have never been one to scoff or blame or laugh at the guy in loud conversation with himself as he plows through pedestrian traffic with his shopping cart. Or the homeless woman holding a sign at the traffic light. I have tried to help with a smile or a short human interaction or some cash or contributions to a local charity. It isn’t enough, especially for those who are alone and without support.

The person standing next to you may be in crisis. It turns out hospitals in California are required by law to offer homeless patients a meal and clothing. The nurse asked us if we wanted to take advantage of their “closet,” assuring us there were some very good clothes there. We said no, knowing we could afford to purchase anew. In retrospect we probably should have accepted.

Dad, having just flown back from Dallas, now owned the clothes on his back and the items in the suitcase he’d packed to visit my nephew. My suitcase had been burned up in the fire, so I was was dressed as a teenager in my niece’s clothes. My mom wore my brother’s sweatpants and my sister-in-laws shoes.

Under the bright lights of Costco, trying to think of every little thing was difficult and disorienting. Underwear, pants, shirts, socks, shoes, sleepwear, toothbrush, moisturizing cream, and all the little things like nail files and tweezers and eyebrow pencils and lipsticks and purses and cases. Other shoppers deliberated over a single purchase. A woman holding a shirt up for scrutiny shrugged and smiled at me. I tried to smile back. I’m not sure I succeeded.

We didn’t deliberate much, flinging the basics into a shopping cart, Jeremy trailing behind with his credit card. As I was choosing a purse my peripheral vision started to close in and I sunk to the floor. Shoppers wheeled by, my brother, I think, saying she’ll be fine in a minute. What do people do, I wondered, when they don’t have the resources we have?

My parents have great homeowners insurance. They’ll move into a comparable rental property while they rebuild their home and replace their belongings. But we know that the journey ahead will difficult and disheartening. We are alternately joyful and depressed.

It has taken me three days to list the contents of my suitcases and fill out the columns with item, purchase price, purchase date, replacement price. I have re-purchased most of my things online but I keep thinking of other missing items. Today, I was looking for my business cards and realized I had packed them for my conference.

The insurance company sent us an example spreadsheet with a list of contents for each room. We’ve customized it and put it on Google Docs so all of us can work on it. Beds and linens and desks and clocks and computers are easy to list. But imagine how depressing it is to list items like antique desk, heirloom, est value TBD. Each irreplaceable item must be researched to determine cash value for the insurance company. And how do you determine cash value for dozens of old photo albums?

Plans to replace the house must be made. There’s property testing—asbestos and toxic wastes—and cleanup. At 85 and 86 years old my parents just want to get back on the property fast. Traditional building takes too long so we’re discussing prefab. Building with Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) is a new option. It is fireproof, earthquake proof, warm in winter, cool in summer (energy savings), non-toxic, made of recycled materials, is noise-insulating, and takes less time to build so labor costs are less.

Recently this “Legos for adults” material was approved for building in California—the US is years behind Europe in adopting it—but not a lot of builders know how to build with it yet. It’s not complicated, in fact it’s easier than the nail-banging method, but there is resistance to change. Contractors, lumberyards and big stores like Lowes and Home Depot are resistant, too, though they could easily become suppliers.

What a life-changing event. And wow, it sure is good to be alive. Still, my parents have a long year ahead. Our entire family has a long year ahead! And we realize how very fortunate we are in our family and network of friends. Speaking of which, thank you for the outpouring of real offers for help, for your condolences, and for just checking with a virtual hug via the blog comments, email, and on Facebook. And thank you for writing to let me know you’ve been inspired to check your smoke alarms, create and practice exit routes, purchase fire extinguishers and second-story rope ladders. I love technology for its ability to keep us connected no matter where we are in the world.

Part 3 coming soon.

Your thoughts? Have you been through a fire? Any event that has caused you PTSD? Now, five years later, I rarely have the PTSD nightmares any more, maybe every three or four months, now. Will they ever stop completely? I wonder.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of a fire that completely burned down my parents home. (Later, investigators concluded it was electrical.) I published this story a few days after the fire, and I re-publish it annually to 1) remind myself how lucky I am to be alive and 2) to remind everyone to check the batteries in your smoke alarms and rehearse escape routes. The batteries saved our lives but rehearsing an escape could have saved the house.

My iPhone tells me that it was 04:27 am when I called 911. More irritated than alarmed, I leapt out of bed from a dead sleep when I heard the smoke alarm go on. It had been beeping repeatedly a couple of days ago unnoticed by my parents who were talking in the next room. I dragged a small table nearby to yank the battery and stood there waiting for a break in the discussion to ask where the replacement batteries were. Finally, I gave up, set it down, and filed it away in my mind to fix later.

This house and the shop and the shed, like the property I grew up with, remained far from perfect, and that’s the way they liked it; charming in its idiosyncrasies.

The alarm wasn’t beeping; it was screeching. I strode down the hall in a tank top and my dad’s sweatpants, because I forgot to pack my pajamas. Earlier that night, I woke up cold and raided his bottom drawer. I chose the soft, gray cotton pair with the crosshatch on the knees. When Dad had his stroke we got him a wardrobe of sweatpants as he recovered from bedridden to wheelchair to walker and then back on his own two feet, so there were lots of cushy sweatpants in that drawer.

Dad wasn’t home because he was visiting my nephew in Dallas, so it was just me and my mom and their big old dog Tucker, more gray than black and in good health but like my parents getting a bit deaf and creaky and slow. In fact the whole reason they kept their old minivan in the drive between the house and the shop was because they were sure that “when the time came” they wouldn’t be able to haul Tucker’s 75 pounds into the SUV to take him to the vet. The minivan’s slider door is just inches from the ground so they knew they'd be able to drag him on a blanket into the back.

My parents' house sits at the end of a dead end road in an underdeveloped neighborhood above a creek that runs year round. One side of the house is half buried into a hillside studded with pines and oaks glowing evergreen in the golden grasses humping higher into the landscape, peaking and diving and undulating. Formerly chicken farms and apricot orchards, this land is now vineyards and McMansions and standard issue developments all culminating into the downtown where the annual Morgan Hill Mushroom Festival is held, sister to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. The roads are narrow and winding and sparsely trafficked. Bicycle clubs are a local nuisance in neon but that is the price you pay to live in a place of beauty and isolation. It is paradise at the dead end of a one-way lane that ends just one house short of a Christmas tree farm.

I walk fast through the narrow hallway, dogleg right and then left around the stairs to the basement, past my dad’s office, veer left again at my mom’s bedroom door, then turn into the kitchen and through the dining room and finally into the living room where, oh shit, there really is a fire.

It is a cheerful little fire dancing bright orange and yellow about waist high in the far corner of the room behind my dad’s easy chair next to the wood-burning stove. It gives off a bright clear light and I can see everything as if the lights are on; the chair and the stove with the front door exiting to the porch, the television and bookshelf lining the opposite wall shared with my mother's bedroom, the couch and the carpet, yards and yards of old carpet between it and me and the linoleum in the dining room and kitchen. My mind briefly attempts to resolve the why and latches onto the possibility that an ember had jumped out, forgetting that the wood-burning stove hasn’t been used in a decade or more.

I look down at my iPhone, which I had unconsciously picked up from the night table, and punch 911 while screaming at my mom in the adjacent room.

FIRE MOM! GET OUT! FIRE! GET OUT!

I hear her say WHAT? and I yell, FIRE! FIRE! WHERE'S THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER!?

IN THE KITCHEN BY THE REFRIGERATOR she yells back. My mom wakes up fast and early, at 6 in the morning or earlier.

OKAY BUT GET OUT. GET OUT!

I sprint through the dining room to the kitchen to grab the fire extinguisher, but in a whoosh that sounds exactly like the word whoosh, the kitchen fills with smoke and I am blind and choking.

MOM GET OUT I scream again because now I know the fire extinguisher is no longer an option and I have to get out, too.

The space between the refrigerator and the back door is about the length of the span of my arms spread wide. I am there in a second and twist the knob to the old wooden door and it opens, thank god because my eyes are burning and I can’t breathe and there is clean, cool air outside where I can be in a second. I can see it despite the smoke rushing out attracted by the same clean cool air I am desperate to reach.

Except between me and outside is the door with the heavy security screening and I fumble to find the lock as I drop to my knees where I instinctively know there is more air. It’s a deadbolt and I twist left and push.

It doesn’t budge and I remember, oh no, it’s this damn door, the door that’s hard to figure out even in daytime and there are two locks; one’s higher and you have to get them just right to open, one left and one right, or one first and one second, or something, click click twist. I reach up again and twist one and then the other. The tumblers turn easily and click smoothly into place and I push, and I turn them again and push, but nothing, again.

Breathing is taking more effort and I waste energy to shake the door in frustration, then, scolding myself, turn the locks again this way and that. I'm thinking, trying to visualize them, consciously slowing down, not rushing, systematically thinking, right right, push. Left left push. Right left push. Right left push.

Why the hell is this door even here with no crime and driveway alarms and a dog and nothing to steal, only some old computers and a television worth nothing, antiques and art and tools. But the tools, almost the only things of real value, that is to say, the only things a thief could resell, are all the way down the sidewalk and the stairs and across the gravel driveway in a different building altogether away from the fire.

My cheek is now pressed against the bottom of the door and I am trying to breathe but inhaling only the smoke flowing out, then I slide even further down on the tile on the floor so cool against my cheek brick red with its cream stucco or was it the fake wood now that looks so real like real wood or was it just what they were talking about for a while before they decided on the tile and then there is no more air, just hot dirty smoke that hurts my throat and my lungs don’t want.

Without knowing how, I’ve got the sweatpants off and tied around my face and I am crawling, slithering on the floor by elbow, knee, elbow, knee, bleeding but I don’t know it yet, toward my mom's room and closer to the fire, into the smoke and to the hallway, the only option out now, and under me the floor is made from smooth tile or fake wood that replaced the flooring that came with the house. Chosen because it’s easy to mop up as I remember from the many conversations and samples spread out on the kitchen table, and it doesn’t wear and the floor underneath is wavy so if we decided on real tile we would have had to level the whole thing and make it flat enough so the tile wouldn’t crack, though terra cotta would be nice but then there was the living room which is a step down and that’s harder to do with tile and my phone in my hand has a woman in it saying loudly and with authority “What is your location? What is your location ma’am what is your location?” and I am surprised there is somebody talking and so pleased that she called me.

I yell the street number and the city and MOM WHERE ARE YOU GET OUT GET OUT! And I hear her say I’M GETTING OUT! And I scream ARE YOU OUT? DO YOU HAVE THE DOG? and you say I HAVE THE DOG I’M GOING I’M GOING but you haven’t said you’re actually out so I stop by your door leaning in to look into the room where you were sleeping and ohmygod there is only black and your voice so far away and sparks and we’re screaming both of us and I have to turn my face away from the heat hot and black dark and smoke.

I can still hear you and have to trust you are out on the porch now heading to the stairs so I crawl the other direction on my elbows down the hall with my left hand keeping the sweatpants over my nose and my mouth and my right hand holding my phone with my elbow hitting the floor and my eyes burning in the smoke past my dad’s office into the narrow hallway.

I know I'm at the jag around the basement stairs because I hit my right cheek and then my shoulder so turn right elbows and knees past a few paces more and veer right by the guest room where I was sleeping minutes ago and another turn left before I hit the other wall hard with my head and then my right shoulder again and finally into dad’s room where I don’t see the phone glowing any more. I hit something with my thumb and it glows and a woman is on loud and saying, “Ma’am, ma’am, what is your location?” and I am so grateful for the white glow and maybe it was in sleep mode and I'm yelling the street number and the name of the town and not the street number and the name of the street. So I yell the street number and the street name and I spell it twice because it is hard to understand and I add the name of the town again and now I am reaching up to the lock on the sliding glass door and it opens and I am out and breathing, coughing in the cold air.

Somehow the sweatpants are on again and I still have the phone in my hand as I run down the stairs onto the gravel driveway to the other side of the house screaming for my mom and finally I see you mom, walking slowly, so slowly, hobbling down one step at a time down the stairs bent over with your hand on the dog and I am so relieved, you have him by the collar and I meet you at the bottom and I grab you by the elbow hard despite your tennis elbow but I don’t think about it or my bare feet on the gravel or the dog collar choking the dog too hard and dragging you both too fast because I am thinking about the car at the top of the drive next to the living room where the fire started and if it catches there might be an explosion.

We get to the white SUV that I used to go drive to the writer’s conference in San Francisco last week but I had parked it outside the gate and locked it and you are saying you never lock it why did you lock it? And she is saying I’m not used to leaving cars unlocked so the keys are in my purse inside the burning house.

But there is another car, the dying dog minivan, and I know the keys are in it because I moved it before I left for San Francisco and it is parked behind the gate. So we walk there me with bare feet that are being cut by the sharp gravel but I don’t know it yet and I slide the minivan door open and we push the dog in and I you are saying How did you know that the keys were in the middle console and I say MOM GET IN WITH TUCKER and you say No I'm going around to the passenger side and I yell JUST GET IN WITH THE DOG! and still you want to walk around to the other side but the other side is blocked by the wall so finally you walk around to the dog side again and then gravel is flying under the tires up and over the little rise past the garage and the house and down the driveway where we turn around by the mailboxes.

We made it.

We have shelter. Maybe that was my unconscious goal. Shelter and mobility and communication. We are shivering in inadequate clothing at the end of the road like refugees with sooty faces and bare feet waiting to be rescued but we are safe and we are self-sufficient. Is self-sufficiency the reason I dragged us the other direction all the way over the rise on the gravel driveway past the shop and the now raging fire to the shelter where the van was parked? My mother did not argue the point and I think I would have done it anyway had she objected but my thinking process is lost to me now.

In the minivan, in the shelter of the vehicle, in the relative quiet, I look at my phone and it’s dead because now I remember my service doesn’t extend to this very rural area and I was using your WiFi at the house and the electricity is probably burned up or dad’s office is burned where the modem is melting on his desk.

I turn the engine off and there is silence. We stare at the house watching the smoke and flame and my mind is still racing on what needs to be done. I think who is closer, which brother, and because my phone doesn’t work I grab your phone. And then we are wrestling for your phone, you say Use your own phone and I say My phone doesn’t work without WiFi here and wonder for a second why we both grabbed our phones and still have them gripped in our hands. They are our lifelines to the outside world. Not our shoes or shirts or pants which are extraneous but our phones.

It takes a moment to let my brother know it’s the house only and my sister-in-law Kathy is saying what, the town what? and he says, “Can I come?” and I say "Yes! Bring clothes we have no clothes and we’re hungry” setting off a chain of events with his family gathering clothes and food that will delay his arrival.

Finally there is nothing else to do and in the quiet we turn to each other and I say “We’re out we’re alive,” and we hug and then look out again at all the house burning down, the flames shooting out the windows, and glass breaking, and black smoke billowing into the sky. I look at our phones and think maybe it isn’t so bad that we’re so joined to these devices that we pick them up unconsciously rather than leave them too far away from us because that would be disconnecting from everything and maybe no trucks would be coming now until somebody woke up and not a chance would that be Phil next door who is 90 and lives alone now because he lost his wife last year to Alzheimer’s.

I check my recent calls to look at my 911 record to make sure I really made it and how many minutes ago and if somebody is really coming. I see the call lasted two minutes. This gives me pause. What happens when you dial 911 from a cell phone? The cell call hits the nearest tower and the call is routed to the Highway Patrol dispatcher who hears “Morgan Hill” and “fire” and transfers the call from the 415 area code emergency department to the 408 area code emergency department and routes it to the fire department and hopefully stays on the line but I don't know. I relive the experience, now knowing that the call was being rerouted as I yelled for mom and attempted to unlock the kitchen security door and gave up to crawl across the floor and down the hall past mom’s room and the office and the guest room to dad’s room where I heard the woman who appeared in my phone demand my location.

I now know that it took only two minutes for the fire to dance its fancy little dance and transform into a raging smoking killing monster. I look at the house, the flames and smoke and I look at my mom shaking with cold in her thin robe in the passenger seat and the what ifs start rolling again.

Such as, what if I had heard the alarm only 30 seconds later we may not have gotten out.

Such as, what if I hadn’t gotten sick after the conference and instead headed north for my meeting and to visit my friend in Sonoma leaving mom and the dog alone in the house.

My mom is wearing her thin robe and slippers and I am wearing my dad’s soft gray cotton sweatpants which have been turned inside out to be used as a respirator and then right side out again and my feet are bare. There are two thick moving blankets in the car, the kind with quilting and some sort of rough silver-gray coating. We bundle up in them still shivering because it never occurred to either of us to turn on the engine and run the heater but we would probably still be shivering even if we were warm.

Just as I think about walking to a neighbor’s to wake them up in case I didn’t say the address right after all a man strides by, his hair disheveled, intent on getting to the house. He stops when he sees how big the fire is with flames shooting up into the sky and I roll down the window and he turns, surprised because I don’t think he saw us in the parked van and his eyes are wild when he asks, Is it your house? I say yes, my mom’s house and he says Are you all right? and we say Yes we got out and he asks if everybody is out, and we say Yes and he asks again and we say Yes it was just us, my dad is in Dallas and the dog is here, too.

His name is Mike and he knows my parents and his dogs knows their dog as he lives just one house down. My mom says he is a hazmat guy, the kind of firefighter who deals with toxic fires, and he says he has his radio on all the time and when he heard the name of his street, our street, he woke up fast and ran outside down his driveway. I imagine him bursting out of his house running turning right toward the dead end and my parents’ house. Was he thinking two people in their eighties are in there and how would they get out? Of course he was. He knows about dad’s stroke and mom’s bad ankle and so he is so very relieved to see us and confirms that the fire trucks are coming and stays with us talking as his head swivels between the house and us and back at the street and up to the house next door where 90-year old Phil lives wondering if he should go wake him up. I feel like we are on the same adrenaline bandwidth knowing he is thinking about the fire jumping roofs and getting his wife and kids up and out and also Phil next door in his walker or his wheelchair, maybe he should be doing that right now, but I trust his assessment that the trucks are seconds away and anyway the fire is devouring the house in a direction away from Phil and the houses downhill and along the block and so we talk, or I talk to him to tell him about where it started and how fast it spread and we watch sparks from the living room side of the house and the smoke rising and the three big fir trees we always worry about and think oh shit those are for sure going up.

Fire truck lights and Mike is heading out to meet them. Mom looks at me like she's trying to remember something and says How did you know? How did you know? and I say How did I know what? and she says How did you know there was a fire and I say I heard the smoke alarm didn’t you hear the smoke alarm? and she says Ohmygod no I didn’t hear it I slept right through it and I squeeze her hand. She might have been there alone and I think of the lunch meeting I missed in Redwood City because of my cold, which was probably the Coronavirus we figure out later, and my cancelled visit with my friend in Sonoma.

Mom takes her phone back and calls her sister in Virginia who hesitates a second before responding in exaggerated articulation, “This is in no way a very bad joke you are telling me Cynthie, right?” and mom says No Ginny no this is in no way a joke, I am actually now sitting in the minivan in my bathrobe with Carla and Tucker watching the house burn and Carlyle is in Dallas.

Mike walks back to us from the first truck that arrives with a firefighter who asks me and I am saying it again and mom is saying it again that Nobody’s in the house. It's surreal staring at this real live firefighter doing his real live scary job in a real live fire in his big black coat with the yellow strips of reflective tape and the big red helmet hat with its visor and his number and his square-jawed firefighter face with his big eyes looking into mine and asking again and I realize I don't sound definitive enough so I say in the most definite tone I can It is just me and mom and the dog and my dad’s in Dallas and there are no other people in that house but it’s nice that you are checking so many times and he looks relieved.

More trucks come and more firefighters in big black coats with yellow reflective tape and red hats wrestling hoses and the ambulance is here and they tell me to get in and mom will go in the second ambulance. That doesn’t seem right and I keep thinking they can take both of us, isn’t there enough room for both of us? they should take mom first? and they say No it’s you who has to go first.

It’s bright in the ambulance and quiet and amazingly, stunningly clean and white and quiet so quiet and calm and the paramedic is chill which reassures me and when he looks down I keep staring at his safety glasses, or maybe because I'm staring at him so intently he looks down. They are very hip glasses with frames in neon yellow along the top ridge that glows in the light. He’s quiet thankfully not filling up all the space with meaningless chatter which means I can think about the sequence of events and after he puts me on oxygen he busies himself further making notes on a pad. The bright lights going by on the street hurt my eyes. Where are we? It seems like it’s taking a long time. I must have asked out loud because he tells me back roads because the fire trucks and the other ambulance are stopping traffic on the main road which makes sense and then I notice there's no siren on the ambulance so I must be okay.

Jeff tells me later that he arrived with clothes and food as per my request, though I have no memory of asking now. He and his wife Kathy and their teenage daughters Maddie and Jackie wiped out the pantry and Jackie’s closet and threw everything in the car. He passed my ambulance on the way in and spent time with mom until her ambulance came and then stayed to watch as more and more fire trucks arrived because Jeremy was headed to the hospital to meet us once mom was loaded up. There were ten trucks in total, he said, some from Morgan Hill, others from San Jose and Gilroy because everybody knows that if the trees and the grass catches these dry hills will go up they can swallow whole neighborhoods and the orchards and vineyards and maybe even all the way to town. He said that at sunrise a volunteer crew of people arrived with coffee and juice and pastries and everybody was saying thank God it’s February and not the end of summer when this fire would have burned down all of Morgan Hill.

The ambulance ride takes too long and parts of my body start to tell me about their troubles. Besides my lungs already stressed from my cold the bottom of my feet hurt and I wonder why then remember sprinting back and forth on the gravel driveway barefoot. My face and shoulder and hip hurt on the right side and I wonder why and will have no memory of hitting the side of the kitchen island and my bumps by the staircase and the hallway for over 24 hours. My right pinky toe is black and swollen and very sore and I still have no idea what happened to it. I am coughing from deep in my lungs not only because I caught a cold not the Coronavirus from one of the hundreds of people at the writers conference in San Francisco but also the smoke has seared my throat and coated my lungs so that when I cough and blow my nose I leave black marks on the tissues.

My sister texts and I want to reply with a status selfie in the ambulance. When I turn the phone to selfie mode I jump. My face is smeared with soot and my hair is not blonde any more and my eyes are so weird that I barely recognize myself. I am clearly on drugs and they are called adrenaline and shock, no wonder I was first in the ambulance and now I know why the firefighter was staring at me so intently.

Somebody counts one two three and I’m heaved onto a bed in a white room where they give me more oxygen and take a vial of my blood to separate it centrifugally to look for cyanide and other poisons which are in furniture and other synthetics they say when I ask. I think of the old carpet that caught so fast and then I think maybe they’re also testing for the Coronavirus because of November when I was in Thailand which is okay despite being more than 30 days, because I am where I need to be if I have it and there are cases cropping up here and there

I can see all the way down to the emergency room doors and sometimes people look in my room and then look away very quickly but finally I can see mom arrive in the gurney and she is talking and joking and then Jeremy comes in behind her.

Jeremy sped in his Tesla all the way from San Francisco and says Jeff is still at the house. A nurse comes in and calls me Missus King which makes me groan and say I’m not a missus and he says oh I’m sorry and he gives me a container of warm water and a bunch of towels in case I feel like washing up. It seems important to him for me to wash up but to me it seems like too much trouble but I would like to pee so somebody walks me to the bathroom and I look in the mirror at my black face and hair, green eyes and dilated pupils in the bright white light. Someone knocks on the door and I open it and then say I forgot to pee yet and close it again and wash my hands. I towel my face but the soot is sticky and I just end up having to rub pieces of sooty sticky shreds of towel off my skin and they walk me back to my bed.

Then I am in my room alone and coming down from the adrenaline high. My head hurts and I want to talk to somebody and I call my sister. It is exactly 6:00 am but it is two hours later in Dallas where she and dad are visiting her son Andrew who just moved there to work at the zoo. And after that I lie there listening to the sound of Jeremy and mom talking. I can’t hear their words but they sound perky.

I have much too much time to think, to relive the nightmare of the bright dancing flames, the sudden smoke, and the metal door and the locks that turn but don't release and the view to safety but no way to get out. Every night now for three nights I wake shaking from nightmares about the fire pressing me against that door as I twist the locks that make their friendly clicks to assure me that they’re working but they really don't and it is so hot and I wake up before I start burning.

Here in the room alone there is too much time to think about all the causes and effects. The cause of the fire itself, maybe an electrical fire? Was it already raging under the living room floor before it sneaked up through a crack? Was that the whoosh or was it when mom opened the door to the porch that made the house fill the house up with smoke.

And there are all the what ifs, would haves and should haves.

Such as, it was a good thing my dad installed redundant smoke alarms in the living room and hall, because it might have been too late for us by the time the smoke reached the dining room alarm.

Such as, if that damn metal door only had one lock instead of two.

Such as, if there was linoleum flooring or tile and not carpet in the living room.

Such as, if I had taken the alarm seriously instead of thinking it was a malfunction I would have run not walked.

Such as, if I hadn’t spent some of the months or years of my life in an unhappy job or relationship or location because life is precious and should be lived every single second as if it is your last.

I know I will cataloguing the such as'es for some time to come.

My blood has no cyanide in it so I am discharged and there is a shift change and mom is stuck in the hospital staff shift change but Jeremy and I sneak her out anyway walking her to the car and head to his house where his kids are both off to college and there is a guest room and Mason’s room and Zoe’s room and two bathrooms which we immediately occupy and my sister-in-law Lisa is making breakfast and coffee.

Such as, what an incredibly fabulously lucky thing that I was born into this family.

The hospital calls mom to belatedly discharge her and I take a long shower with lots of soap and look in the mirror. There is still soot on my neck and on my back. Jeremy rubs it with a soapy washcloth but it’s not working so we fill a bath and he brings me salt scrubs and bubble bath from Lisa’s closet. I soak until I see a black ring around the tub and run the shower again while it drains, using my yoga practice to reach every inch of my back.

“Oh my god I thought you had dyed your hair black” Jeremy says when I finally emerge from the bathroom.

Dad arrives in early afternoon from Dallas and now Mom and Dad and I are occupying Jeremy’s and Lisa’s and Mason’s and Zoe’s house entirely. Their old dog Vegas and my parents’ old dog Tucker wander aimlessly in the chaos, their nails clickety clacking across the wooden floors and their chins heavy on our knees when they want reassurance.

We have visited this house a lot and I have spent the night and weekends but not all of us at once and with celebrations and not trauma. Lisa is patient and shows us where the coffee is and how the dishwasher works and asks us to keep the dogs out of the kitchen and finds Acetaminophen for my mom and helps look for rental houses that the insurance company will pay for and so much more.

Such as, who your siblings marry is really important.

Such as, spending money on really good insurance is important.

We returned to the rubble to stare at the bricks and ashes, at the fallen metal support beam that dad added to straighten and stabilize the roof, at the three scorched fir trees the firefighters sprayed first so the hill wouldn’t catch fire, at the gaping black maw of the basement, at the heavy wood-burning stove tipped over and pushed by high-pressure fire-hoses to the far side of the living room, at the SUV with its hood and left-front corner panel melted like ice cream. At the garden which flourishes and the side yard with the squirrels and birds gorging themselves on the bushels of scorched corn and sunflower seeds spilled from the screened-in porch, and at the fish in the ponds still eagerly nipping at bugs on the surface.

We wonder what caused it. There is no wall plug and there are no extension cords on the side of dad's chair where I first saw the fire dancing so it may have started under the house. It may remain a mystery or an investigation may solve it.

This house which to my parents was their only home. This house which to my brothers was their childhood home. This house which to me was a place I felt at home.

My dad and I planted California poppies on the hill only a week ago. He ordered a gallon of seeds from a catalog and I walked the steep grassy hillside tucking them into crevices next to rotting oak branches and clumps of grass and roots hoping they’d germinate and turn the hill orange come summer. We watered copiously and now we wonder if watering the poppies helped prevent a spark from catching and spreading to the next hill and the next all the way down to the next street with only two houses just one hill away and then the meadow and vineyards and a goat ranch across the pasture and orchard and then not much until the main road and the dense housing development across it.

And we wonder, come summer, will the poppies bloom bright yellow and orange, the color of fire? From now to forever poppies will remind me of fire, this fire, and the resilience of nature and the fragility of the human abode.

My dad and my brothers return after a trip to the hardware store and Best Buy to lock up the garage and secure the property with deadbolts and motion-detection cameras and alarms that notify you on your smartphone. The technology is easy now but the neighbors on this private road are just as good a deterrent as everybody knows each other and the names of the UPS and FedEx and Amazon Prime drivers and especially now everyone will be on the alert for strangers. The ambulance-chaser construction companies and lawyers have strolled up the drive and been accosted by one neighbor in particular who hates traffic on the lane and we've said just please go away because... well, just because... ambulance chasers.

One of my brothers sources industrial masks from a friend with a house-painting company and they and my dad don heavy boots and disposable work clothes to pick through the toxic rubble. They don’t find my mom’s rings, her purse, or her wallet because that side of the house burned completely and poof, there goes the money and plastic and anything paper or cloth. All of its walls and floors and furniture is now just ashes and whatever had been there was scattered by high-pressure fire hoses. The other side of the house with the guest room and dad’s room didn’t burn but the damage from a caved-in roof and smoke and water from the fire hoses created their own havoc.

They spend half a day shoveling ash and picking through the rubble and find my purse which had melted around the interior where my wallet is intact though with a wet and smokey passport and bank cards and a few hundred dollars in American cash and Mexican pesos. And they find my laptop with a piece of broken glass melted to the cover. The hard drive powers up, but the screen doesn’t. It doesn’t matter, because all my files are in the cloud. It wouldn’t matter, anyway.

They even rescue my journal and for a moment I experience great joy thinking all my entries from my November trip to Thailand through to the writers conference last weekend are intact but the water damage to the ink has made my writing nearly indecipherable.

It doesn’t matter. None of these things matter. The rings and the wallets, the clothes and the furniture, the antiques and the heirlooms, sentimental as they are, mean nothing to the dead. And we are not that.

Thank you for reading. Now please go replace the batteries in your smoke alarms and I’ll follow up with parts 2 and 3 of this story later.

Let me know your thoughts about this story, or about fire preparation or recovery. I’d love it if you hit the LIKE button below and comment.

I sighed, leaning farther back against the bench to shade my face as the sun dropped lower in the sky. Its warm light shone golden on my bare legs on this sunny Valentine’s Day weekend in Calistoga, the quaint Northern California hot springs town—one of our favorite places for a short getaway.

Our room wouldn’t be ready for a little while, but it was nice to relax and people-watch, decompressing from the two-hour drive up from San Francisco.

A couple on a bicycle built for two rolled past, the woman in the back pointing at something down the street. I caught a snippet of their conversation—something about where to have dinner, oysters maybe, or barbecue.

My stomach rumbled.

“That sounds good,” I said. “With a crisp white from Napa.”

He laughed and agreed. We almost always agreed. We had such a good time together, and it was going to be another good weekend.

I snuggled closer to him, but he took a sharp breath in and tensed slightly, as if I’d pinched him. So I shifted away. But it wasn’t that. He was fumbling for something in his inside jacket pocket.

A pulse of unease moved through me, quick and sharp, my breath hitching before I even knew why.

“I love you,” he said. “We have such a good time together, don’t we?”

I wanted to say I was just thinking that, but a sense of dread crept over me, and I couldn’t speak.

In his hand was a small velvet box.

“I think it’s time,” he said, flipping it open.

The diamond caught the light and the entire world around me blurred, narrowing to a pinpoint on that cold, sparkling stone.

The air thickened, the sounds around me dulling as my mind reeled. The soft laughter of tourists, the faint hum of bicycle tires against pavement, the rumble of a muscle car trailing its scent of oil and gas. All of it faded under the weight of the moment pressing down on me.

I took a deep breath, still staring at the diamond.

It’s time? I thought. Why now? Why here on this bench, on the sidewalk, in the middle of town?

And then I thought, again, Why? Why at all?

I’d never really wanted a diamond ring, despite everyone else apparently wanting one, but this one was beautiful—catching the light and emanating it at the same time. Absorbing and reflecting, tempting, twinkling, winking.

“Oh.”

Not Yes. Not No. Just… Oh.

His smile faltered, his hands tightening slightly around the box. I had to say something else, but it wouldn’t come.

“Oh?” he repeated.

My heart pounded against my ribs, frantic, disorganized.

“I love you,” I said, tearing my soul away from the sparkle and looking into his eyes—blue, hopeful, doubtful, and then, as if he knew what I was going to say, sad, just before he looked down.

“But I don’t think I can say yes.” Then desperately, I wondered, why couldn’t I say yes?

A muscle in his jaw twitched. The box snapped shut. And a silence opened between us, gaping and bottomless.

Then, without a word, he stood.

I could feel it happening—the slow-motion unraveling of something we had built over the years, the years leading up to this day, this moment.

Our love was easy. Our friendship was easy. Smooth, full of laughter, anticipation, fun. And I thought we also had understanding between us. I hadn’t had a clue. Couldn’t things just go on as they were? Days spent hiking in Marin, enjoying jazz in Oakland, the roadtrip to Tomales Bay in the driving rain just crawling along, laughing as the windshield wipers slapped discordantly against the beat of the music.

I wanted to say something else, to explain, but my throat was thick, my mind full of cotton wool—sticky, clogged, unable to form words.

And then he walked away.

The white Lincoln was parked in the first spot next to the B&B. It hung out of the space a little, too long, too impractical.

But it was also roomy, quiet, with plush upholstery and a great sound system.

It was like him, an extension of him, just like the way he carried himself—with an old-school sort of confidence. I loved the way he moved, and the way he dressed, with a careless but classic elegance, fashionable but immune to fashion.

I rose, watching him go, my stomach twisting, my breath shallow.

“No…” I almost cried out. “Wait.” But I didn’t.

What was I thinking? That he was going to grab our suitcases, roll them back over here, and continue our weekend plans?

He didn’t look at me as he yanked open the driver’s side door and got in. The engine roared to life, and the tires screeched as he threw the car into drive—then reverse.

A couple on the sidewalk jumped back, startled, their hands flying up in reflex.

They stood there. I stood there.

The rear suspension scraped as he backed over the curb.

Luckily, there were no bicyclists, no cars. But I don’t think he would have noticed if there were.

Then he floored it.

He’s not like this, I thought. My God. He’s going to kill somebody, I thought, as I watched him go.

And then, just as suddenly as he had peeled out, he braked. My heart leapt with hope.

He’s changed his mind, I thought.

Relief rushed through me so fast it made me dizzy.

We can talk, and we can go on as we were.

The Lincoln sat idling, the rumble of its engine filling the silence.

Then it reversed.

I took a step forward to meet him, but he braked again, just short of where I stood on the sidewalk.

The rear window slid down.

I held my breath, trying to think of what to say.

I’m sorry? I love you? It doesn’t have to change. Maybe even… yes? What would “yes” feel like?

But then my suitcase came flying out of the window.

It hit the pavement hard, bounced twice, then tumbled backward, landing on its side in the center of the street.

I flinched.

A slow wave of silence rippled through the town.

Then the engine revved.

The tires screeched again.

And the Lincoln was gone.

Incredibly, there had been a break in traffic during this whole ordeal.

The cyclists, the couples strolling hand in hand, the families, the friends sipping wine on the patio across the street—everyone was watching now, a collective pause hanging thick in the air.

It took a beat, but what was I going to do? Run around in circles and cry?

I heaved a deep breath in and stood up straight, shoulders back, and walked to the middle of the street to collect my suitcase.

Without looking around, I released the pull handle, stretched it out, and turned.

Rolling the suitcase back to the sidewalk, bumping it over the curb, and dragging it into the B&B felt like an eternity.

Inside, the air was cool, scented with eucalyptus oil and freshly brewed coffee. The lobby was all rough wood paneling, dim lighting, and the kind of muffled quiet that only came with a place that cost hundreds of dollars a night.

The woman at the front desk—a silver-haired pro with a no-nonsense bob and the energy of someone who had seen it all—watched me approach, dragging my suitcase behind me.

“Checking in?” she asked.

I nodded, feeling the weight of everything pressing into my bones.

And now, I’d have to figure out how to get home tomorrow.

“Just me.”

She clicked a few keys on her keyboard, then glanced up, studying me for a long moment.

“I’ll put you in a different cottage,” she said. “He requested number three, but we’ll put you in six. Because…” She hesitated, then shrugged. “There’s always somebody here, twenty-four seven. So you can just dial the front desk… whenever.”

Something in my chest loosened. “Thank you.”

I felt tears burning in my eyes.

“Safety first,” she said. “He might be a nice guy, but you never know what people are gonna do when their heart gets broken.”

I let out a short laugh, despite myself. “Oh, I think I might have some idea.”

The cottage was beautiful. Too beautiful. A four-poster bed with gauzy white drapes. A bottle of Veuve Clicquot chilling in a silver bucket. A platter of antipasti—marinated olives, ribbons of prosciutto, dark chocolate squares arranged just so.

I pulled down the duvet, nestled into the white sheets, and sighed.

What the hell had just happened?

Why couldn’t I just say yes?

We were happy. I did love him.

But there is something about marriage that changes a woman in a way it does not change a man.

Once married, a woman is claimed. Owned. Controlled.

And being married changes friendships in the same way that being divorced changes friendships.

Suddenly, you’re single, and your coupled friends find it awkward. Suddenly, you’re married, and your single friends find it awkward.

You haven’t changed, but the world changes how it sees you.

It changes how much time you spend—must spend—on the relationship.

Now, if you travel: Why isn’t your husband going with you? What does your husband think of that? I can’t believe your husband would let you do that.

I’d had quite enough of that in my life already.

But could it be different now? Now that I’m older?

Does he really see me?

Or would it all backslide—into expectations, into limitations, into something I could never quite name but always felt closing in?

Incredibly, I went to sleep.

When I woke from my nap, the hot tub outside was steaming, mist rising into the night air. Beyond the deck, the silhouettes of oak trees swayed gently, backlit by the moon.

Somewhere in the distance, someone was playing acoustic guitar, the soft melody weaving through the crickets’ song.

I uncorked the champagne and slowly filled a glass, watching the bubbles rise from its hollow stem.

Stepping into the warm water, I took a sip, then let my head fall back and the silence settle in.

I wanted him to be here.

I loved him.

But I never wanted him to be mine.

And I didn’t want to be his.

Can you be in love and still want to be free?

Thanks for reading. I hope this story is thought provoking. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

And in the meantime, here’s the perfect anthem for the occasion: Leslie Gore's "You Don't Own Me"

Adventure motorcycling has always been my passion. The hum of the engine beneath me, the open road stretching endlessly ahead, the smell of dust and freedom—this isn’t just something I do; it’s who I am. But lately, the road has begun to feel different. Each journey is a story, and each story is proof of resilience, curiosity, and strength. Now, though, I feel that identity slipping through my fingers like sand.

This month-long trip to Baja, Mexico, was supposed to be like all the others—thrilling, rejuvenating, transformative. Instead, it became a reckoning.

From the border crossing at Tecate, the ride to Baja Rancho la Bellota was everything I expected: remote, rugged, and beautiful. The dirt road leading to the ranch demanded skill and focus, the kind that once felt like second nature. I was thrilled when my navigation app led me to a lonely dirt road winding into the mountains. For miles, I seemed to be the only one on it.

But then the road narrowed sharply and curved hard to the right before climbing steeply uphill. Anticipating loose dirt and gravel at the curve’s center, I shifted into low gear, slowing and committing to keeping my tires on the left outer edge. All good so far. But when I accelerated uphill, the back tire caught the edge of the washout, spinning and jerking me dangerously to the right. Instincts took over. I overcorrected, leaning sharply left, and gave it more throttle. The bike straightened out, and I made it to the top. From here, I could see nothing but nature rolling out in every direction.

I cut the engine, letting the silence settle in, and stepped off to recover. My hands burned, my wrists ached, and my thumbs felt bruised from gripping the bars and working the brake and throttle. Setting the bike on its kickstand, I walked a few steps to clear my head and glanced at the navigation app. For the first time, I felt trepidation where I normally would have felt exhilaration.

Had four years between trips like this really made such a difference? We like to joke that 60 is the new 40, but here I was, asking myself: Am I too old for this? Despite workouts, hiking, biking, yoga, and a healthy diet, I just don’t feel as strong as I had just a few years ago.

At 5’8” with a 32-inch inseam, my feet touch the ground on most bikes, which has given me a lot of confidence. But it was the weight that challenged me. The KLR weighs 400 pounds, and I’d added 100 pounds of gear: clothing, camping supplies, electronics, and food. Lately, I’d noticed that it was harder to heave it upright, especially if it leaned too far over on the kickstand. When did this happen?

I checked my navigation again and realized I had no cell service. The stakes were higher now. If I fell, I’d be walking miles to get help. For a moment, I considered turning back, but it didn’t feel right. After all, I’d just navigated a very tricky, rutted curve on my loaded adventure motorcycle. How much worse could it get?

By the time I reached my destination, I’d fishtailed through several gullies, veered off the road into a field, and nearly dropped the bike once, planting my leg firmly to keep it upright. Exhausted, I rolled into the ranch, a beautiful valley scattered with oak trees. I parked by a hitching post, shook out my tingling hands, and walked to the main building.

I found Rosa, the ranch cook, who showed me where to set up my tent. I unloaded the bike, inflated my mattress, topped it with my sleeping bag, and went for a short hike on the trail by the arroyo into a canyon. Rocky hillsides were bearded with early-November scrub brush, and clumps of wildflowers were going to seed. One of the ranch dogs accompanied me, trotting just ahead, and sat patiently waiting for me to catch up when she lost sight of me. There was no road noise, no generator noise, not even a jet flying overhead. Birds flitted to and fro, tittering and scattering in the dry leaves, bugs buzzed. There was a tinkle of rockfall and a breeze rattling the dry leaves on the oaks and sycamores. Mostly, there was the sound of my own breathing and footfall.

Reckoning With Identity

For years, adventure motorcycling has been my refuge. It’s how I escape, how I prove I’m strong. It’s how I think. Helmet time is sacred—a space where I’m unplugged, away from the noise of life. No podcasts, no calls, no music. Just me, the road, and the rhythm of the engine.

Back at camp, I cooked some noodles, and popped a Corona. Even the small effort of tearing a packet, pressing the ignition button on my JetBoil, pulling a beer tab— sent shooting pains up my fingers to my wrists. I couldn’t imagine riding on or even riding back. I tried to convince myself that in two days I’d be fine, ready to ride again. But as the moon rose over Baja’s wide-open sky, a question pressed harder: Is there bravery in letting go, too?

The next day, I met Raul and Caroline, the ranch owners. Raul shared stories of Baja’s misunderstood beauty, its resilience, and its culture. Caroline, his partner in life and work, spoke of her own adventures and the power of embracing change.

Sitting by the lodge’s wood stove, Caroline coaxed me to speak my fears out loud. I spoke of the difficulty of getting here and my fear about the changes in my body, my abilities, and riding back. I was surprised and a little ashamed to feel my eyes filling with tears. After I’d gotten control of my emotions, we sat in silence for a moment, listening to the pops and whooshes of the fire. The smell of woodsmoke mingled with Rosa’s cooking in the next room. The big moon poured white light into the room through the windows.

“Sometimes,” said Caroline, “change opens a door to something wonderful you didn’t expect.”

Facing What Comes Next

I couldn’t ignore what my body was telling me, so the next day, I turned toward home. I rode through the Valle de Guadalupe, passing vineyards, restaurants, hotels, and pottery shops, thinking about alternatives. A smaller bike. A vehicle that could carry a bike. Short fly-and-ride motorcycling destinations.

Letting go of long motorcycle journeys doesn’t erase the miles I’ve ridden or the places I’ve seen. It doesn’t undo the strength or joy those journeys have given me. I told myself that this change simply means I’m being called to redefine what adventure means for me now.

A New Journey

The US border guard at Tecate smiled as she scanned my passport. “I’d love to learn to ride a motorcycle, but I’m too short,” she said.

I laughed. “No, you’re not! Start with a Motorcycle Safety Foundation class—they use small bikes—and maybe try a Honda Rebel.” She smiled and wrote it down.

I continued into the US, following smooth highways that didn’t require much shifting or braking. Despite the discomfort in my hands, or perhaps because of it, I felt a bittersweet clarity.

This trip might have been my last big adventure on two wheels, but it also feels like the beginning of something new. Trading my motorcycle for an overland vehicle might let me carry a paddleboard or bike for other adventures. The new year invites reimagining. I don’t know exactly what’s next, but I know the road still calls—it just might look different now.

For Those Facing Their Own Shift

I never thought I’d face this crossroads, but here I am. If you’re feeling the same, know this: You’re not alone. Whether it’s age, injury, or life’s demands, the loss is real, and the grief is valid. But so is the opportunity to evolve.

My tears fogged my helmet visor as I considered this change. I felt betrayed by my body, resentful, and silly because I hadn’t planned for this. But we don’t stop being who we are because we can’t do what we once loved. The courage it takes to get out there and push your limits—it’s still yours. That courage will help you navigate this transition, too.

Oh boy. I headed out 10 days late and so tomorrow I’ll cross the border during Baja 1000 race week. The excitement is building, people are flocking to Ensenada, and the races start on Friday. But I’ll be at a ranch 60 miles south of Tecate, hiking, riding horses, and tasting tequila, not necessarily in that order. Then in the Valle de Guadalupe for food, wine, art, and architecture. I look forward to hanging out in the quiet spot between the 840 and 800 marker in the race map, below.

As for the motorcycle, this morning I checked it with Jamie, the owner of Clairemont Cycle Supply and the oldest independent motorcycle shop in San Diego.

I’ve got a pesky fuel problem. Why the shop in Santa Cruz, who I specifically asked to go over the bike with a fine tooth comb, didn’t catch this, is a mystery. Just goes to show, self-maintenance is the way to go. I shouldn’t have depended on a shop.

The carb isn’t leaking (but it is corroded, like a “normal” old KLR). There’s probably a little leak in the petcock seal so gas is getting into the oil reservoir and creating some exhaust smoke. Not terribly serious, and probably I could go all the way to Cabo like that. But I don’t relish the possibility of needing to stop halfway through my Baja trip to find a mechanic. I’m carrying a carb rebuild kit and the petcock replacement parts, and there are plenty of great mechanics in Baja, but still.

So I’m thinking and rethinking, and will let you know how it goes and how far I get into Baja. Already, I’m 10 days behind schedule and my 30-day trip has now shrunk to 20. I’m looking forward to my time at the ranch to relax, hike, ride horses, and taste tequila.

Yesterday...

I moto’d the 25 minutes north from Mission Bay to Leucadia (a beachside northern suburb of San Diego) to visit with my friend Allan Karl, who is just back from a ride in Portugal and Spain. Allan shipped his BMW 650 to Europe some years ago and finds places to store it between rides. He found a such a place in Madrid this time, and looks forward to returning to continue his explorations. A lot of committed travelers do this kind of thing. Sometimes they purchase a bike in the continent and leave it there.

I know a couple who has a motorcycle in the US, Bulgaria, and Australia. It beats the cost (and wait times and risk of damage or delay) of shipping, especially when you have friends around the world where you can store it. Yay for the internet to connect us! The adventure motorcycling world is full of generous souls who store bikes for each other or loan out extra bikes, too, which is half the reason I have two bikes. Though I use the KLR for travel, at home I consider the KLR a “friend bike.” It’s got scrapes and dents and zip ties holding some of the plastic parts together, and its replacement value is only about $2500 so it’s not like anybody would fear dropping it, which mostly happens at low speed in sand or water crossings or in parking lots when you don’t put kickstand all the way down anyway. I’ve loaned it to several girlfriends from across the country and Canada for whom Death Valley and Baja and the Sierra Nevada—backyard destinations for me—are mind-blowingly exotic.

Allan and I forgot to take a selfie together, go figure. But we did take photos of Dar, his beautiful Bengal cat with the big green eyes and quite the snuggle bunny. Ever curious, she liked my Giant Loop bag and tried to snuggle inside it.

It’s also helpful to talk out what to take and what to leave behind. I overloaded my toolset, and we walked through it and rejected some items, which I’ll leave here in San Diego.

Yeah, the hammer is a reject and also various pliers with wire cutters, because I surely won’t need all of them. The rejects are on the right. This lightens my load by about 10 pounds.

We also talked apps. A few weeks ago I discovered iOverlander, which not only provides a road map with options (twisties, avoids tolls, highways, etc.), but crowdsourced places to stay, including campgrounds. I love that mechanics and gas stations are also marked. Users can add new places, leave reviews, save favorites, and share places with other travelers, a la Yelp and Google Reviews. The paid version ($59/yr) allows you to download maps for offline use, which will be critical during my trip.

Allan showed me Detecht, an app that’s popular with motorcyclists in Europe, that helps you plan your routes, avoid freeways and toll roads, and choose the curviest roads. It lets you save and share routes, too. I’ve been looking for an app that tracks my riding days for a while, and haven’t found one, so this is awesome!

What are your thoughts about the Baja 1000, about motorcycle fuel systems, travel apps, horseback riding, hiking, tequila tasting, and food and wine? Whatever your interest or area of expertise, I look forward to hearing from you!

Pre-coffee packing. Followed by repacking. And repacking again. What did I forget?

Not so many years ago, I lived part-time on a beach south of Mulege, and would sometimes ride it between my US and MX homes. I got used to it. It wasn’t scary, dangerous, or otherwise ominous, “even” for a solo female, despite the constant looks of horror and warnings I get constantly from friends and acquaintances in the US. At home in Baja, I rode my Austrian-made KTM 450 EXC dual-sport, which was a lot more fun and a lot more practical off-road, but it doesn’t have the speed or the tires, or the luggage capacity for this kind of trip. The Kawasaki KLR650 is also considered a dual-sport motorcycle, but it’s a pack mule, and handles freeways and dirt roads with ease. However, it’s tall and difficult to handle in deep sand and water crossings, but manageable, most of the time. It has experienced its share of dunks and sand baths, but gets right back up and goes, every time.

To Highway 1 from Santa Cruz. BTW, I love this LS2 Carbon Explorer helmet. It’s super lightweight with lots of airflow and integrated sunshade, and the (easily removable) bill keeps the sun from blinding me.

Happily, I didn’t set out alone, as my friend Bruce rode out behind me for lunch in Salinas before parting ways. After we set off, he followed me for the 10 minutes to the Shell station just before the Highway 1 entrance to confirm that the straps were tight and that the blinkers and brake lights were visible. I’d put new LED blinker strips down the sides of the back fender to supplement the weak little bulbs that come stock on the bike and they’re quite a lot more noticeable, especially with my Giant Loop Great Basin Bag hanging over the sides of the rear fender.

It’s always fun to see a motorcycle packed for adventure. The main piece of luggage is an upside-down U-shaped soft bag—the Giant Loop Great Basin Saddlebag—that wraps around the rear seat and hangs down on each side. It’s incredibly versatile, designed to strap onto any bike, and I’ve used it on a Moto Guzzi cruiser, a couple of BMWs, and my big sport bike, the KTM 950 Supermoto. Behind the Giant Loop sit two long, narrow bags that hold my camping gear; one is a bright orange compression bag. I also found a set of small front panniers on Temu that hang over the sides of the gas tank. I didn’t expect them to be high quality, but they’re excellent.

Some of the toolkit, buried in a “leg” of the Giant Loop Great Basin. If you’re a tool person you’ll note the gap on that socket rack. I finally found the missing 17mm in a basketful of loose metric and standard sockets at the Gray Bears Thrift Shop in Capitola.

My small top tank bag is a Giant Loop Diablo model that I got from the founder, Harold Olaf Cecil, over a decade ago for a press review, maybe for Women Riders Now magazine. It’s been through hell and back, with miles and miles on all the bikes I’ve ridden in California and Baja, and despite being dunked in a couple of water crossings and suffering the harsh conditions of Anza-Borrego and Baja, it still looks brand new.

Okay! Setting off, a little shaky, I have to remember that I always feel this way before a big trip. Did I remember everything? Did I bring too much? Are all systems go? A tiny hint of nerves twists in my gut, but I insist to myself that it’s excitement and not fear—and give feeling to that space so it won’t unravel me before I even reach the border.

An hour down the road in quaint, old town Salinas, Bruce and I find a diner with outdoor seating and split a Reuben sandwich on marbled rye, juicy with corned beef, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing.

Thanks for the sendoff party, Bruce!

We’ve parked on the sidewalk next to the diner, and my bike smells like gas. Uh oh. Petcock? Carb? Definitely the carb. Not great news, but not surprising. I should have had it rebuilt, but honestly, it was just fine two weeks ago, when I had everything checked out! During lunch, I make a few quick calls to shops I knew when I lived in the San Diego area. GP Motorcycles did great work on my Moto Guzzi and KTM, but they’re a strictly European shop. They suggest an independent shop, Clairemont Cycle Supply, who agrees to order a carb rebuild kit and fix it when I get there. Yay!

Relief—for now. As I hang up, though, I feel a twinge of doubt. This was the last thing I wanted to find on day one, like the trip itself is testing me right out of the gate. My hope is that this will be a minor hurdle, not an omen of what’s to come. I’ve been there, done that, and I don’t want to do it again. Not this time.

South on 101, the sun shines hot through my jacket, keeping me warm despite the cool Pacific breeze. Miles and miles of migrant workers stoop to pick the November crops: red and green lettuce, spinach, kale, and broccoli. Rows and rows of light and dark green stripes flash by, the monotony broken by clusters of humongous, four-legged machinery looming over the scene as if guarding the fields and the workers. It is vast, yet only a glimpse of the 1.4 million acres of Monterey County agriculture—the “salad basket of the world.”

As I watch this scene roll by, warm and isolated in my motorcycle helmet, nothing else to think about right now, I try to imagine a life filled with this hard work—the endless repetition, the smell of dirt and vegetables mixed with pesticides and diesel fuel. I think of myself in the grocery store, thoughtlessly choosing among the piles of shining leaves. It’s humbling to realize how much labor it takes to make even the simplest meal possible. I vow to be more conscious in the future, but I know I’ll forget once I’m home again, going about my routines, surrounded by glossy produce displays, oblivious to the hands that picked each leaf. We take so much for granted—not only the crops and the workers, but the water, the fuel, the machinery, the trains, and the trucks, the entire system that keeps it all running. If we stopped to consider everything, our days would be filled with nothing but thoughts. So we consume mindlessly, without real appreciation, until confronted with the physical evidence of it.

Farmworkers only earn an average of $11,000 a year for their risky, backbreaking work and long hours. More stats and info at this article.

The sun continues to keep me warm as I merge onto 101 from Highway 1, and still it is not a freeway, but a highway with intersections where trucks, tractors, and big rigs wait to cross. I speed up to join a pack of traffic so I’m not solo, to keep myself safe from distracted or aggressive drivers who may not see my single headlight.

The driver of a sedan begins a leftward turn across Highway 101 at Potter Road, while a commercial truck waits to do the same. See the article on safety concerns on this stretch of 101.

A white school bus marked with the name and logo of an agricultural company waits patiently at one dusty intersection, filled with the brown faces of immigrants from Mexico and South and Central America—only the present generation of folks who have worked in these fields for over a century. These immigrants are invisible to most of us, yet vital to our economy. Passing them reminds me of the unseen people, the invisible network that keeps this country running—and of my own freedom, riding by with no plan but my own.

A bus to transport field workers sits empty near a cauliflower field in Salinas. The H-2A visa program for temporary farm workers has provisions to ensure workers coming from abroad are paid for their travel. Reforming the H-2A visa program is one of the several changes included in the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. See the article and more images here.

And now, Paso Robles—a popular spot for Silicon Valley tech retirees—is a monoculture of vineyards, becoming a version of Napa and Sonoma and the Valle de Guadalupe in Baja, where I am headed. It’s a beautiful place, but I mourn the loss of the fruit and nut orchards that used to make this a rich, diverse culture, with all the natural benefits of breaking it up with a variety of other trees, such as erosion reduction and habitat for native birds, pollinators, and insects that help control pests. Couldn’t they have kept just some of them?

Photo courtesy Paso Robles Visitor Center.

Just beyond, the oil rigs pump black gold from the Nipomo Mesa, reminding me that the US pumps more oil than any country in history despite the arguments about it in the election, which was resolved only yesterday.

And now up, up, up the mountain and down, down, down past San Luis Obispo, the sun losing its warmth. I stop at a ranch to layer up with a sweater, quilted lining, and a windbreaker under my motorcycle jacket. While layering up, a couple hauling a huge trailer pulled in, switched drivers, and left. A few minutes later I caught up with them. They were going 70mph, even uphill. Definitely the cruise control was on. Not a great strategy to save gas. My dad taught me to use gravity on the down side to accelerate and take it easy on the up side.

Snowbirds in a “live-in trailer on their way to SoCal or maybe Baja.

Stopping for gas 170 miles into the tank, I put in 4.8 gallons. Yeah wow, I ought to be getting at least 50 mpg and 250 miles on the 6-gallon tank, so indeed, my carb is not leaking a little, but a lot. As I twist the gas cap back on, I feel a knot of worry tighten in my stomach and my mind loops on the problem. It’s a carb rebuild. Cheap. No way it could be a leaky head gasket or a piston issue, right? No. No. No. It can’t be that. I saw the leak in the carb. Still, dollar signs are piling up in my head until I remember my grandmother’s saying, “Don’t borrow trouble.” So I put it out of my mind for now.

With about 50 more miles to Santa Barbara and 250 miles to San Diego, it should hold up fine. Uh huh, it should all be fine. Yes, it will be fine.

The KLR is an old reliable bike and my 2007 model only has about 22,000 miles on it, half of those racked up on trips between California and Baja. There are thousands of these bikes, even much older and with more miles than mine, in cities and riding RTW, affectionately dubbed “The Swiss Army Knife of Motorcycles.”

Having forgotten that daylight savings time ended a couple of days ago, I mistimed my departure and hit Santa Barbara at 5:15 pm. Shockingly, it’s almost dark. Traffic stops, and though most drivers make room for me to split lanes, others are distracted, and the vigilance it takes to constantly stop and start and weave through traffic safely on the white dashed line between the fast lane and the middle (now running at 5-10 mph) is exhausting.

Lane splitting, lane sharing, traffic filtering. Whatever you call it, they do it all over the world, except for in 49 states in the USA. Thanks, California drivers! Photo and detailed article courtesy Twisted Throttle.

I ride only 15-30 mph through the mostly-stopped traffic, two fingers on the clutch lever, two fingers on the brake,. Google Maps tells me I’ll reach my friend’s place at 6:00 pm but, because of the lane-splitting (thank you, Santa Barbara commuters!), I beat the clock and turn off onto a beautiful, wooded byway that follows the curve of a canyon I cannot see exactly when deer crossings are most likely. I ride slowly, letting a car turn onto the road ahead of me to run interference. Finally, I arrive, teetering, vibrating, icy cold, and there’s Yvette’s husband, Mark, opening the gate so I can park, freshen up, and meet Yvette for dinner in town.

Off the bike, I shiver. My body makes me very aware that it vehemently objected to today’s ride. My fingers are stiff, my legs weak, and my neck is sore. Okay, it couldn’t be helped today, but I will not ride so long, so hard, and not in traffic after I hit the border. I promise myself I will take more breaks. My next rides are to San Diego, 4 or 5 hours south depending on the traffic conditions through LA, and then to the border at Tecate, then the Valle de Guadalupe, and then the west coast through Ensenada to San Quintin to Bahia de Los Angeles, or the east coast to San Filipe to Bahia de Los Angeles. I haven’t decided yet. But either way, they should be enjoyable and manageable journeys in slow, 4-6 hour rides broken up with a night or two exploring off the bike.

Zipping off my armored overpants (Olympia Moto Sports) and shedding my jacket (REVIT! Sand) and boots (Forma), I’m ready. Mark drives us to town, thick with traffic like he’s never seen, he says, due to the Jewish Film Festival, Itzhak Perlman and Friends at the Granada (where Yvette works), and the general First Thursday melee. Creeping city traffic, with its lattice-work of one-way streets, tries our patience. We attempt two parking lots before parking on the roof floor of the library parking structure.

Downtown Santa Barbara always exceeds expectations with its architecture, art, and gardens. Artistic lighting creates drama everywhere, casting light and shadow on the stark white Mission-style buildings, the clock tower, the spires, the bell tower, and the myriad archways inviting you into pockets of shops and restaurants, fountains and benches.

How did this unified architecture come to be? Yvette tells me that after a major earthquake in 1925, one Miss Pearl Chase (1888-1979), a very wealthy lady, offered funds to rebuild the city (and Montecito) as part of The American Riviera, in the Spanish Mediterranean style.

I don’t remember if I met my friend Yvette Keller via the Santa Barbara Writers Conference or the Virtual Travel Writing Group I formed in March 2020. A longtime fan of Douglas Adams, Yvette pens 42 Places, a fandom blog, and authored Douglas Adams’ London (a themed walking tour of London). Her husband, Mark is an Apple computer tech genius who works for a cybersecurity firm, and their giant Moluccans cockatoo, Jeremy, can say his name and cluck like a chicken, among other talents.

Jeremy the Cocatoo.

Yvette is not only a writer, but a book narrator and one of those accomplished, artsy, and crafty people with projects strewn around artistically everywhere. On of her artist friends painted a giant California on the wooden fence their grassy inner courtyard where Jeremy perches on sunny days. We take a driving tour of the hills above the city, and after dinner at an Indian restaurant and two cold Coronas, I collapse into a cozy guest room lined floor-to-ceiling with books. What better respite after a long road trip?

November 8, 2024

Today, after a quick jog down the Mesa Steps to watch sunset and stroll the beach, I am back on the road, heading south on 101 to the Mission Bay area of San Diego.

The ocean at the Mesa Steps in Santa Barbara, north of town.

Saturday traffic isn’t so bad, and it’s all freeway to San Diego, with only a couple of slow spots and other motorcyclists to group up with for lane splitting. I can’t keep up with some of them, sport bike riders flying through on the dotted white line so fast I hoped I wouldn’t find disaster ahead. Finally, a rider on a HD Electra Glide booms, with music and a pillion passenger and, for a change, I appreciate the loud pipes to part the way ahead of us. Most of the fast lane drivers are attentive, hugging the left part of the lane to clear space. Some are distracted, taking advantage of the stop and go traffic to text, eat, put on makeup, shave, and I even saw one guy reading on his Kindle. I’m also always on the lookout for drivers who quickly dash between lanes without signaling, thinking that they’ll get just that 10 more seconds ahead.

I think back to living in Europe, in Baja, and visits to Asia and Africa, and how all the drivers make room for scooters and motorcycles, and how much safer and easier and just plain friendlier it is to ride there. With gas prices high and roads narrow, everybody’s friends ride, everybody’s kid and grandma rides. (I started riding at age 14.) All over the world, motorcycling is part of the culture and not a subculture as it is here in the US.

And, I arrive San Diego to visit my friend, writer Elaine Masters and her husband Dave, who used to own a fish market in town. About 7 or 8 years ago, when I lived in this area, Elaine introduced me to her Tijuana dentist. I had some fairly major work done for a fraction of the cost of a dentist in the US and it was a great experience. The office is on the ground floor of a 4-star hotel in a wealthy area of Tijuana, and there’s a Starbucks on the next block, and a mall down the street with all the stores we have in malls here in the US, including an Apple store.

A few years ago we visited the dentist together, making it part of a three day food and wine tour of the Valle de Guadalupe, and I finally got to eat at Deckman’s, a famous farm-to-table restaurant that seemed to always be closed when I came through the Valle. (Another top spot is Finca Altozano.) So we enjoyed food and wine first, then, the dentist. (See Elaine’s article about La Villa de la Valle, which we also visited on that trip.)

Elaine and Dave are are just returning from a scuba diving trip on the islands surrounding Tahiti. Tomorrow, I’ll visit Allan Karl, a fellow motorcycle traveler and writer, author of a beautiful coffee table travelog, Forks: A Quest for Cuisine, Culture, and Connection. I look forward to catching up on his latest trip as he’s just back from riding his BMW 650 around Spain.

Allan is a motorcycle travel, food, and wine writer.

Then the carb gets rebuilt, and I head to Baja, with its endless stretches of wild beauty from the central ridge of the looming Sierra de la Giganta that lies between the waters of the Pacific and the Gulf of California. I know the northern part of the peninsula fairly well, but it’s been a few years. I’m most excited to explore Southern Baja and the Sierra de la Laguna of La Paz and Los Cabos municipality, which is all new to me. Looking ahead, it feels thrilling and humbling, and also provides a necessary head-clearing to mentally outline the next steps in my life’s journey. A new phase, I think, is in order.

Cold to hot: Dressing for drastic temperature swings

The journey will take me from the cool, foggy California coast into Baja’s dry desert heat. My REV’IT! Liberty heated gloves are perfect for chilly mornings, as are the liners for my REV’IT Sand 4 H20 women’s jacket. I have the matching REV’IT pants, but I have to take my boots off, so instead, I’ll wear my old Olympia Moto Sports overpants. [See my review, here.] They zip all the way to the hip, so it’s easy to slip them on and off over my boots. Unfortunately, the company was sold and this item was discontinued.

Once the border is behind me, the temperature will rise dramatically, but safety stays a priority—the jacket and pants are well vented to keep me cool with the superior protection the abrasion-resistant shell and armor provides.

Other gear includes the LS2 Dual-Sport Adventure helmet [review] and my Forma boots [reviewed here].

Baja is safer and friendlier than you might think

Despite what you might hear in the news about drug cartels and gang violence, Baja is much quieter and safer than you’d expect. Over the past decade of solo travel, I’ve never been stopped illegally or forced to pay a bribe. Part of that is just using common sense—I travel on a modest bike, a 2007 Kawasaki KLR650, and don’t flash expensive gear.

The KLR is affectionately known as the “Swiss Army Knife of Motorcycles.” It’s a 651 cc single-cylinder, 4-stroke, liquid-cooled, DOHC, chain drive, and carbureted with a massive (LOL) 42 horsepower at 7,000 rpm, 34 foot-pounds of torque at 5,000 rpm. It’s got a 5-speed manual transmission, hydraulic disc in the front, disc in the rear. Spoke tires are 90/90 R21 in the front, 130/80 R17 in the rear. The wheelbase is 58.9 in. Weight: 432 lbs wet. Fuel capacity: 6.1 gal. Seat height: 35 in. The previous owner lowered it with a super-comfy Corbin seat, a custom windscreen (stitched with baling wire), highway pegs, and installed a smaller front sprocket allowing the bike to allow the bike to reach higher speeds with less engine effort on the freeway. I’m not an aggressive rider, at least on this bike, and hasn’t hampered me in off-road situations faced with sand and water crossings.

When camping, I stick to places that feel safe, like beaches monitored by local ejido families, who charge a small fee to keep an eye on things. I’ve also camped on ranches, and the hospitality of the locals always amazes me. Once, when I hadn’t reached my destination before dark, I asked a ranch family if I could pitch my tent next to their home. They welcomed me, fed me, and refused payment, though they were happy to accept a couple of small flashlights I had brought as gifts for just such occasions. Baja’s warmth comes not only from the sun but from its people.

Don’t skip vehicle and emergency insurance

Even though Baja is friendly and generally safe, you still need to be prepared for the unexpected, just as you would with any trip. I always travel with vehicle insurance from Discover Baja and purchase emergency evacuation coverage with World Nomads, which offers comprehensive coverage for health emergencies, evacuation, and trip interruptions. I also get a Mexican SIM card for my phone and program the Green Angels—Mexico’s free roadside assistance—on speed dial. They can help with mechanical issues or emergencies on the highway, and you can reach them by dialing 078. They can take quite a while, though, and it’s more likely a friendly local or fellow travelers will come to the rescue.

As you see, the 30-day plan is more expensive than the annual plan. This gives me the flexibility to leave my bike in storage ($50/mo) and fly back, which I may do, because I’d like to ride north from the Cabo area to visit the Gray Whale birthing bays in February. And why not? My bike is likely to just sit in the garage between December and February, anyway. Flights to Tijuana are cheap, and the Cross Border Express makes it easy to book a rideshare to San Diego airport where I can catch a flight home.

Motorcycle prep: Comfort and safety

To make long rides more comfortable, I’ve installed adjustable brake and shift levers—a small modification that puts less stress on my hands. My ATLAS Throttle Lock, an alternative to cruise control, also helps. I’ve also upgraded my tail lights to improve visibility, especially since my luggage can block the view from behind. This mod is more for safety while navigating our multi-lane California highways than the two lane Baja roads. And while many riders recommend extra-bright headlights for night riding, I avoid riding after dark in Baja entirely. Livestock often sleep on the road, as many vehicles don’t use their headlights, and truckers tend to drive faster and more aggressively at night. Better to stick to daylight travel and stay safe.

Know who to contact in an emergency

Before heading out, I always register with the U.S. STEP program, which helps the U.S. Embassy keep track of travelers in case of emergencies. I used to carry a GPS tracker, but have found my mobile phone works most of the time, as I stick to the main routes. Of course, I always let my family know where I am, and post updates to social media. The area around Cataviña is particularly desolate, but still, it’s on Highway 1, and most travelers stay the night there. Riders exploring the many remote dirt trails in Baja might consider a tracker with an emergency alert.

Solo, but never alone

Baja has two main roads, Highway 1 and Highway 5. Every time I travel, I meet motorcyclists I know (or know from social media) at gas stations and motels. Sometimes we end up riding together for a time, camping, exploring... at least until our paces differ. Stop at Coyote Cal’s, the Old Mill Hotel in San Quintin, Mama Espinoza’s in El Rosario, the Mission hotel in Cataviña, and Alfonsina’s in Gonzaga Bay (you can camp on the beach), and you’re sure to find kindred spirits. On this trip I’ll explore farther south, and look forward to discovering more gathering places. Sadly, Coco, of Coco’s Corner, passed away in 2022. I’m not surprised to hear reports that this formerly-popular hangout has been abandoned.

In my next posts, I’ll dive deeper into packing strategies, paperwork, insurance, tips for border crossings, places to stay, and packing lists. I’ll also post live updates from the trip. Who knows, maybe I’ll see you there! Subscribe here for updates. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments—I’ve learned a lot from my solo adventures, and I’m happy to share!

Detours, Discoveries, and a Road Unfolding

A preface: This is the first little bit of a very big story of a journey with my brother Jeff to explore West Africa by bicycle. It is a draft, a fragment, and a work in progress. It was 1993, but aside from my work in Silicon Valley, I didn’t use the internet and it wouldn’t have been useful anyway. (Two years later I blogged my American Borders motorcycle journey, a ride around the US borders on a Russian sidecar motorcycle.) In 1993, there were also no digital cameras, so I lugged my SLR along. Jeff and I weren’t really keeping records with any intention of publishing stories, and we didn’t even take all that many photos of each other or ourselves together, which is kind of too bad, but also, not. It was truly about living in the moment every moment! I took photos of the people we met, the villages, the roads, the boats, the beaches, the flora and fauna. But there are no photos for an audience or for sponsors: Here I am here! Here I am there! Pose vertical. Pose horizontal. Hashtag. Tag. Hashtag. The story begins in France, wanders back to Silicon Valley, jumps to Jamaica, hops back to France again, and launches into West Africa. It was fun to look over my notes and craft this draft, this fragment. I hope you enjoy it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story, have a conversation about the experience, and hear about your experiences as a curious explorer, seeking difference or the unknown. And the fact that the unknown is very hard to find these days, isn’t it? I’ll see you in the comments, and maybe on the road somewhere! ~Carla

The idea: A journey takes shape in France

My idea to explore West Africa began in France. In 1988, while working as a technical writer in the Lyon offices of an American company, I spent eight months falling in love with the French way of life. My colleagues were from all over the globe, and we spent weekends exploring, riding the bullet train to Beaune and Paris and driving to Arles and Nice and Lake Geneva. Crossing borders was an adventure that required long stops at heavily-guarded checkpoints, a passport inspection, and a stamp. I learned to ski in the French and Swiss Alps, changed my francs to lira for shopping sprees in Italy and, in November 1989, drove to Berlin when the wall came down, to participate in the celebration.

Lyon is France’s second largest city, and cut through by both the Saône and Rhone rivers. It was here that I first met Senegalese immigrants. Vieux Lyon, or the old village, was a trendy meeting spot for students and socialites alike. Though pockmarked by artillery fire from tanks that had rolled down its narrow, cobblestoned streets during World War II, it remained intact, its medieval and Renaissance glory largely preserved.

A hidden jazz club and unexpected friendships

The city was known for its gastronomie, with restaurants pulling their tables into the streets. But the clubs were literally underground—you had to know where to look. I don’t know how I found Le Hot Club du Lyon. The address led me to an abandoned shopfront with a single bulb illuminating a picture window with a naked mannequin. A doorbell hung from exposed wires beside the door. It seemed improbable that it even worked. The door itself looked frozen to it metal frame, rusted all around. But then a buzzer sounded, and the door lock clicked open. I had to hold still a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dark, and finally saw ahead of me a steep staircase only wide enough for one person. The door clicked shut behind me. I turned, slightly alarmed, but kept moving toward the music. The staircase ended at another metal door, opening into a large cave strung with lights. A bar stood to one side of a stage where a band played a jazzy rock number—something not quite American, not quite French. The bartender looked up, smiled, and waved me in to occupy the only remaining empty seat at the bar. After some difficulty with the noise and my accent, he served me a Campari drink and I settled into the ambience and the music. I loved the place and became a regular, so much so that when I walked through the door I was greeted with raised glasses and shouts, L'americane est arrive!

It was in these bars on the streets of Lyon that I met immigrants from French colonial Africa; Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. A group of Senegalese friends opened my eyes to living in the moment. They radiated joy, their lives filled with music, art, and an infectious positivity that made me yearn to know their homeland.

"You must visit Senegal," they told me, their faces lighting up when I asked them about traveling there. "Our people will welcome you."

Plus ça change…

One reason I love to travel is to explore how people and places are different. I had lived in France for a while, and as I got to know the culture and the language, I learned that the French weren’t really all that different from Americans. Well, okay—they didn’t watch television so much, and the television they did watch was state-funded, such a popular program where an interviewer and an author or artist discussed books or art or films—for an hour—with one commercial break to advertise future programming. They eschewed fast food, spending four hours at dinner (no dinner-and-a-movie culture here), and the waitstaff never rushed them to turn over tables. Everyone shopped every day because the refrigerators were tiny. Or maybe the refrigerators were tiny because they shopped every day. Bread was very important. So was cheese. And wine. Even with all the bread, cheese, and wine, nobody was overweight.

But basically, I found cultural sameness. The bedrock religion was Catholic, and the race Caucasian. They held the same values and perceptions of time, money, and power, though they approached work in a more leisurely way. They had two kids per family and measured status by money and job title. They lived in apartments in cities or houses in the suburbs, and even a middle-class family might own or share a beach condo in Le Lavandou or a ski cottage in Val-d'Isère. If you weren’t good in high school, you were funneled into a trade, but if you got really good grades, you were destined for one of les Grandes écoles.

While it didn’t quite make me yawn—okay, far from it—it wasn’t the mystery it once was. I got comfortable, and comfort has always made me restless. It dulls the edges, rounds out the unknown, turns the extraordinary into the expected. Some people seek comfort as a goal, as a place to land. But for me, comfort has always been a signal that it’s time to move on.

I found I had too much in common with the people around me, too much familiarity in the rhythm of life. I’ve never been drawn to sameness; it’s difference that pulls me in, that keeps me engaged. I want to be in places where I don’t immediately understand, where my assumptions are challenged, where I have to work to figure things out. France had been that for me at first, but now? I knew how things worked.

The call of curiosity

West Africa, though—that was still an open question. What I had learned fascinated me: a culture rooted in the present, where time was elastic, where spirituality was lived rather than scheduled, where hospitality was not an afterthought but a core value. These differences weren’t just intriguing—they were a pull, a call to something I didn’t yet understand but wanted to experience for myself.

I discovered some things: They are animist leaning toward Islamic, value the communal versus the individual, the spiritual over the material, live in the now and the past (ancestors) rather than the now and the future, value oral tradition and community storytelling rather than formal, institutionalized empiric rationalizations, and measure work ethic and wealth in very different ways. Some communities practiced polygamy or, more rarely, polyandry—something I had learned along the way. The music had a different beat. The art was uniquely West African. They saw things differently. I wanted to go there, see these things differently too, experience it for myself. And that didn’t even take into consideration the difference in the landscape, the flora and fauna, the ocean, the earth, and the stars.

A detour in Jamaica: A people far removed

Back in Silicon Valley, I made money and plans. A short vacation in Jamaica with my boyfriend-at-the-time made me even more curious about West African culture. The island was lush, vibrant, and beautiful, but overrun by tourism. We left Montego Bay on a rented Honda Rebel to escape the miles of golf courses, all-inclusive resorts and sugarcane and banana plantations. We passed Jeep tours that rolled through villages, where tourists actually threw candy at children. We rode as far from commercial Jamaica as we could, skirting Cockpit Country to the quiet side of the island, where cruise ships couldn’t dock.

My boyfriend was fluent in Jamaican Patois, having spent much of his teenage years partying in Boston’s J-town. A natural poet, he learned to compete with DanceHall deejays in face-to-face rhyming clashes. His knowledge of the language and culture gave us access to a view of Jamaican life few tourists ever see.

In Treasure Beach, we stayed at Missus Brown’s guesthouse and ate rice and peas, callaloo, and the occasional lobster brought in by a local rasta who snorkeled for his catch every morning—despite his adherence to Ital living. My boyfriend smoked a lot of ganja along the way, which also contributed to the local economy.

Every time he climbed onto the back of the motorcycle, the Rastas exchanged glances. One day an old rasta with a long gray beard and bloodshot eyes clasped his shoulder, shaking his head, “Mon, you must ride.”

To his credit, my boyfriend just shrugged, smiled, and waved goodbye as we roared down the dirt road to find another mountain town or a hidden beach.

I could only take beach-sitting for a day, maybe two, before I itched to explore. After too much time on a palm-fringed shore, I grew restless and found my thoughts drifting back to West Africa. The Afro-Caribbeans in Jamaica—descendants of enslaved people from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and the Congo—had been shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and centuries of colonial rule. In Jamaica, they had forged a distinct identity, but their ancestral ties to Africa had been severed. Here, they were far removed from their country and their culture. My mind wandered. What were people like in West Africa? What were beaches like?

The Senegalese I’d met in Lyon spoke of home with longing, certainty, and a grounded confidence—something that felt very different from what I sensed in Jamaica. In Jamaica, I felt an undercurrent of anger; oppression met with rebellion. The Senegalese I’d met carried no such obvious defiance, no fight against an oppressor. Their connection to home felt unshaken, uninterrupted—though I knew that many West African countries faced their own struggles, caught in cycles of tribal politics and power-hungry warlords.

West Africans seemed to have retained many of their ancestral traditions. From what I had learned, their culture had absorbed a foreign religion, Islam, over time, while holding strong to their animist rituals and a spiritual connection to ancestors. In contrast, Afro-Caribbeans had been suddenly and forcibly severed from their traditions. Perhaps this disruption created a need for reconstruction, leading to movements like Rastafarianism that sought to reconnect with an African past while fusing African spiritual traditions with Old Testament beliefs.

The Road Calls: Preparing for West Africa

Jamaica had intensified my curiosity and determination to explore West Africa. Home again, my plans solidified. I pored over guidebooks, maps, and newspapers. I decided to spend several months in Nice, perhaps finding a short-term tech writing contract, before heading to Senegal to start my West African adventure. I considered motorcycling, but discovered through a fellow traveler who lived in England, that fuel might not be available off the beaten path.

I live for traveling off the beaten path, so bicycling it was. As an avid mountain biker, the thought did not deter me, though I knew it would be hot.

Back to France: Cycling the Côte d’Azur

I left for Nice in the spring of 1993 and found a hotel room while I looked for a longer-term living situation. I was advised by locals to hang out at the train station to find people cruising for tourists to stay in their extra rooms. It was there I met Monsieur Dupuis. The man couldn’t have been a more quintessential Lyonnais with his tweed cap and half-smoked Gauloise protruding from his moustaches. I curled into his tiny, rattletrap Peugeot for the short drive to his property, and as we turned into the place, just uphill from the west edge of town, I couldn’t believe my luck.

The three-story villa sat behind iron gates in an orange grove and where a cool, salt-scented breeze from the Mediterranean Sea wafted past on its way to the Alps. Monsieur and Madame Dupuis had split the villa into shared apartments to rent to students. There were four rooms in the cool basement level with long horizontal windows at eye-level that let in plenty of light from the sunny orange grove. Monsieur Dupuis handed me an ornate key two inches long, the kind of key Americans think of as art, along with a well-practiced lecture that it absolutely could not be lost, as it was irreplaceable.

Thus began a rhythm of cycling, exploring, and long evenings of pétanque and pastis at the edge of the orange grove. Monsieur and Madame Dupuis taught me the kind of Southern French Parisians found it almost impossible to understand, especially as it was also paired with my American accent. I spent my days mountain biking the Alpes Maritimes and exploring the sun-drenched hill towns, lavender fields, and other riches of the Côte d'Azur. Unable to get a short term tech writing contract, I decided to pen a bicycling guidebook to the area, as it lacked one either in French or in English, though it was a favorite spot for France’s favorite sport.

In Nice, I made more friends from the African continent; an Algerian train engineer who became a mountain biking friend and taught me how to hunt chanterelles and a trio of Senegalese who made their living selling wood carvings of African wildlife and busking. It was the first time I’d experienced their music; polyrhythmic rhythms combining enthusiastic vocals, djembes drums, and their ragged 21-string harp called a kora. Alas, they disappeared one day, and I never saw them again, probably deported or evading deportation. But their brightness had further captivated me.

A Brother Joins the Journey

I planned to travel alone, as is my habit, but that spring, my twin brothers—11 years younger—graduated from college in California. Jeremy dove straight into a career, but Jeff found himself at a crossroads, not quite ready for the corporate world. He shared my love of cycling and adventure and I invited him to join me for my last two months in Nice, where we tested our compatibility as traveling companions on the challenging routes of the Alpes Maritimes. Though I was in top shape and thought nothing of cycling the switchbacks 2,500 feet to villages perchés like Gourdon. Jeff, with his long strong bones, his training as a swimmer and water polo player, and his age—in the prime of his life, really—overtook me on every expedition.

I wondered how this would work in the months ahead. Would he be impatient with my slower progress? Almost certainly, I thought. But West Africa was mostly flat, so the heat would be the equalizing challenge. Or so I hoped.

It was getting crowded in my tiny basement apartment and, after a few weeks, Jeff took off over the Pyrenees and into Spain so I could get some quiet time and work on my guidebook. It seems strange now not to be in constant contact, but then it was just how things were. There was no phone service—Jeff was on the road and the only phone I had access to was the Dupuis’ upstairs, and long-distance calls were incredibly expensive. So I didn’t hear from him, or expect to hear from him, except for postcards, which amused and pleased me. He was having his first solo adventure, experiencing all the joy and hardships that come with the complete freedom to explore.

Jeff cycled over the Pyrenees without realizing, or preparing, for the cold, high-altitude weather. A passerby in a car handed him oranges, and others cheered him on. He met a girl in Barcelona, where nobody went to dinner before 11:00 pm. Then another traveler from Sweden or Norway. The backpacking crowd was entertaining, and the Catalan girls were stunning. He accidentally bicycled onto a freeway with no apparent exit for many miles, and climbed a chain-link fence, having tossed his bicycle over it, to get back on the sideroad. He stayed in youth hostels, which were cheap and filthy and noisy. He hadn’t slept, except on the beach and, I suspected, in the beds of Catalan girls or fellow travelers. A month later, he returned triumphant, with the kind of road-weathered confidence that convinced me he was ready for Africa. We prepared our gear, got our vaccinations, and stocked up on malaria pills. We said goodbye to the Dupuis’, celebrated with a last pétanque and pastis, and we were off to Dakar.

Arrival in Dakar: A Bumpy Start

Our arrival in Dakar brought our first challenge: our bicycles had remained in Rome, where we'd changed planes. "Don't worry," the very tired, very sweaty man behind the ancient computer at the Air Afrique office said. We'd waited more than two hours for our bags, and then had been directed to an outbuilding, a shack, really, which was the baggage office. As foreigners, we'd been waved to the front, a disturbing but unilateral decision by the locals who were waiting with astounding equanimity on a rotted, spring-loaded Naugahyde couch, enduring the heat while I made my complaints in halting French. The man behind the computer wore a brown polyester suit jacket over a stained white shirt and a wide tie the color of egg yolks. He didn't bother to wipe the sweat beading off his forehead. At one point, he abandoned the computer, opened a drawer and plopped a stack of paper on his desk, each page barely thicker than the onion skin used for airmail letters. Every page was smeared with blue and black ink and the occasional red stamp.

Jeff and I swatted at the mosquitoes biting our ankles and wrists as the man concentrated, making mmmhum noises and turning one and another page over on his desk, crumpling and smearing them further. I rubbed on more DEET, knowing that the Senegalese mosquitoes carried the malaria virus. We waited in silence; the other complainants slumped on the couches seemed half-asleep. Jeff elbowed me and flicked his eyes to the wall, where a mouse stealthily climbed the bare wood paneling behind the administrator’s head. Finally, the man sighed, sending the mouse rushing to a crack near the ceiling. He looked at us with reddened eyes and stated, with authority, "Aucun problème.”

No problem? I thought. Not for him.

"Quand, s'il vous plaît?" I asked, with a sinking feeling, knowing he was lying. The man had aucun idée.

"La semaine prochaine," he said, and stood up. Next week, at exactly this time.

I rose and looked at Jeff, who read the alarm on my face.

"What?" He said, as we were shooed out of the building to a waiting taxi.

We made the best of our forced pause, finding the address of a promising-looking guesthouse just south of the airport on Yoff Beach. It was late when we arrived, two in the morning, but people were up and about and all dressed up, as if for a celebration. It was a stunning sight. The Wolof people are very tall and very dark, with lithe bodies and smooth skin, high cheekbones and enormous eyes. Every woman looked like an Ebony magazine cover model. Swathed in colorful robes from cleavage to ankles, their aubergine shoulders glowed in the flickering firelight as they sauntered by.

We were surprised at all the activity at this time of night, and hypothesized it was too hot during the day so everyone slept, going about their business at night. We were later told we had arrived during Ramadan. We’d never heard the word and had little idea that Black West Africans were Muslims. As it is forbidden to eat, drink, or even swallow (lots of spitting!) from sunup to sundown, the place was buzzing.

The taxi driver tried to find the guesthouse listed in our Lonely Planet, but the village seemed either under construction or half destroyed—we couldn’t decide which. After many failed attempts at finding any hotel or guesthouse at all, he stopped the car and insisted we get out. We resisted, and there was a tousle as he tossed our bags out of the trunk, but in the end, there we stood, on the packed sand main street at the edge of the town, our bags at our feet, staring out at the half-built or half-destroyed buildings, at the open fires and the starry night.

Hidden in the darkness just off the road, we hadn’t yet been noticed. I saw now that the taxi driver had taken care to eject us far enough off the road so as not to cause a commotion. Very strategic of him, I thought now, with derision.

Teranga: Welcomed by Strangers on the Beach

A young man strolled close by, nodded mechanically, then after a few steps, turned around in a double-take at the spectacle that was us. I suppose Yoff didn’t see many foreigners as it was south of the airport and most travelers stayed in Dakar. Yet here we were, surrounded by a pile of small bags, standing helplessly, and unknown to him, without the bicycles we were helpless, unable to gather them all up into our arms and walk. But to where? The beach, we had decided. But then, the bag problem.

“Vous besoin d'aide?” he asked, walking toward as gesturing to our bags. I said yes, oui, and laughed nervously. The man was beautiful, tall, about Jeff’s age, maybe older, and slim, with that gorgeous Wolof face, high cheekbones, almond eyes, and a smile that revealed perfect teeth. He was thin and, though his white shirt hung off his thin frame, he had the poise of a model or a performer.

Jeff said in English, “What did he say?” and the man repeated, switching to English, “Do you need help? My African name is Daodad, and my English name is David.”

He looked down at our bags and up at our arms, as if he was counting them: four arms, eight bags, two backpacks. Too few arms, given the task at hand. “I am meeting my friends,” he said. “Do not go. I will come back with them to help you.” He walked backwards, holding his finger up, to make sure we understood him.

I was awash with relief.

“Do you think we can trust him?” Jeff asked, echoing my feelings, as we watched David hurry away down the sandy main street, disappearing between two concrete buildings that were bristling with rebar.

Uncertainties and Responsibilities

“Yes, I’m pretty sure,” I said, feeling then an enormous responsibility for my little brother, as if he were the five-year-old I left behind when I was 17. I was 11 when the boys were born and my sister was 10. Celia and I were almost second mothers at that age, and happily cared for them. They were easy babies and happy toddlers, but still needed a lot of managing. “Double the fun, double the trouble,” we used to say, slapping on bandaids and sending them back out to play.

I couldn’t turn off my fiercely protective instincts. When they were little, a doberman pinscher charged us when we walked by a house and, without a thought, I stepped between them as the dog growled and slathered and drooled, baring its sharp white teeth as we walked away. Over a decade later, my brothers visited me in San Francisco, and a random crazy man in North Beach decided to turn his crazy on us. Again, I stepped in to protect my brothers; in fact, I launched at the guy in a fury until they pulled me away, laughing. We walked on to Vesuvios where I calmed my nerves with a margarita.

Jeff and I waited, listening to the waves crash on the beach. It was hot, but the air was fresh and salty. The occasional smell of roasted meat wafted by, and a woman laughed and murmured, her voice an invitation. More groups of women passed by, and then groups of men. They didn’t seem notice us, or chose not to notice us.

“Look up,” Jeff said. The sky was a velvet blanket strewn with crystals, the stars so close we wanted to jump up and catch them. Our necks got tired from looking for familiar constellations, but there weren’t any. Then David returned with four friends who laughed as if they couldn’t believe we were real as they shook our hands. Then they took our bags and led us toward the beach. This was our first encounter with teranga, which in the Wolof language means “good hospitality.”

They installed us on the verandah of a house only steps from the beach with our confusion of possession and laugher and handshaking and promises to come get us in the morning.

Are you sure it’s okay? We kept asking. Whose house is this? Won’t they be surprised we’re on their porch?

It’s okay, it’s okay, David said, patting his hands on the porch in reassurance.

We were too exhausted to argue, and gathered our bags between us to doze uneasily until an incredible yowling woke us, startling us into full fight-or-flight mode. It was the call to prayer from a nearby loudspeaker, the first we’d ever heard, and we had no idea what it was. Finally, it stopped, but we were awake now, watching the day break over the ocean, the blue, glittering, sparkling, dancing ocean across the swath of golden sand.

We waited and, as promised, David and his friends returned shortly after dawn to take us to the guest house, only a few minutes walk away where we rented a concrete hut with a straw roof for about eight dollars a night. We would see David and his friends every day until we cycled south.

Life in Yoff: Learning to Slow Down

The warm Atlantic waters were a revelation after our frigid Pacific, and we swam to explore the nearby island, to the astonishment of David and his friends and everyone on the beach. The locals paddled their narrow boats the short distance to the island to hunt crabs, which they roasted in open fires. But they couldn’t swim. Jeff started teaching David, then Charlie, and then he was surrounded by all the young men from the village that morning and every morning after.

I loved watching him so beautiful and pale and strong in the center of a cluster of the other young men so beautiful and dark and strong, their arms reaching, their heads dipping, and finally kicking and gasping then getting the trick of it and swimming a few yards before they realized they’d actually done it. In their elation they forgot their breath and choked and sputtered and laughed again, there was always so much laughing, so much splashing, the water glittering in the bright yellow sunlight.

A few days later, we nervously led the group in a swim to the island and every one of them made it to the rocky shore, whooping in celebration.

Yoff Beach was a reprieve that allowed us to acclimate to the long journey ahead. Even if the bikes had arrived on our flight, we may have had to spend a week in Yoff, anyway. Navigating the embassy bureaucracy was a challenge. We took colorful little buses into the city to stand in lines, collecting visas for our planned route through Senegal to The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, and the Ivory Coast. Beyond that lay Ghana and Togo, and I had my eye on Cameroon, but there was all of Nigeria between, and that was too far in the future to consider at the moment.

The Wolofs spoke slowly, with a rhythm that, to my ear, sounded closer to an American accent than a Parisian one. They didn’t seem to notice my Southern French dialect. I wondered if it was because the South of France was so much closer, warmer, friendlier. Did they frequent Marseille, Nice, and Lyon over Paris? Also, like most southerners, they seemed to have more patience, more time, more teranga.

Liberia and Sierra Leone were off-limits, I'd learned, by subscribing to The Economist at home. This was pre-internet, pre-cell phones, and information about these countries wasn't easy to obtain.

If I hadn’t known about the troubles in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the US, I would have learned of it in France, where it was always in the news. Or here, in Senegal, when I described our route to the dozens of curious people who asked, “What are you doing here?”

A brutal civil war raged in Liberia, led by Charles Taylor—known as the Butcher of Monrovia—who wreaked havoc for decades and became one of Africa’s most infamous warlords. At the same time, Sierra Leone was in turmoil, locked in a violent struggle for control over its diamond mines. Taylor was involved in that conflict, too. Citizens fled the violence in droves, often with nothing but the clothes on their backs—if they were lucky, with their families intact. At the time, this was far from our minds, but within two months, we would find ourselves skirting the borders of these war-torn countries, then coming face-to-face with a seemingly endless stream of American English-speaking refugees making their way down from the mountains, seeking safety in Guinea and the Ivory Coast.

Preparing for the Ride South

Finally, our bicycles arrived, a little bent and scratched but basically sound. Mine was a Specialized Rock Hopper I’d already had for a few years for mountain biking the Santa Cruz mountains, where I lived. Jeff had purchased a new GT Karakorum, to the admiration of the French cyclists we’d met in Nice. For Africa, he prudently disguised it with duct tape, though we soon realized it wouldn’t have mattered, except it did reduce the damage done by the Italian baggage handlers. Happily, our rugged mountain bikes stood up to the abuse in a way that more delicate road bikes wouldn’t have survived.

We spent a couple of days packing up and reluctantly saying farewell to our new friends. We’d learned a few words of Wolof by then, and thanked them for their teranga as we pedaled away. Our bikes were loaded with camping gear, clothes, medical kit, toiletries, journals, books, camera, everything. The front panniers on each of our bikes were weighed down with clean water, as I was (rightly) paranoid of running out. Jeff rode with the heavier load, but if I thought that would slow him down, I was wrong.

To be continued...

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