Whew. It’s been an intense week. I’m glad you’re here.
Eight days ago, my housemate Lilly and I got into a pretty bad crash on our drive back east.
“You know when you ask Google to ‘do a barrel roll’?” I tell a friend. “It was kind of like that.”
(Everyone is totally totally fine! No one was hurt. Everyone is somehow very much okay.)
My response to the shock (you know me) is to make as many jokes as possible with the sheriff and the paramedics and the insurance agent, and I’m wired in an adrenaline-rush-pick-up-roadside-litter kind of way for a few hours until we collapse at a motel that night (contents of the kitchen’s utensil drawer: one knife and one paintbrush).
It’s completely crazy and deeply scary, but there is no time to process anything because we are now stuck in Lovelock, Nevada, a middle-of-nowhere desert town known only for its casino. There is literally, comically no way out of this place. There are no buses, there are no taxis, there are certainly no Ubers. And at this point I still have all of my worldly possessions in the trunk of my Corolla, which is sagging in some salvage lot nearby.
Options are slim but spirits are high when Lilly and I resort to handwriting notes and sticking them on trucks’ windshields in the hopes that someone, anyone, can give us a ride to Reno. Eventually we just wander around town and ask any stranger if they know someone driving west. Sorry kids, they say, Lovelock is a bad place to break down. Yes yes, we say, we know — can you point us towards some ice cream?
It’s a strange lesson in human capacity that even under pretty grim circumstances, you still get buoyed along by little moments of hope and joy. For a terrible situation, it was best case scenario, I’ve been saying. But it was still a terrible situation. And also? if anyone could make fun with it, we certainly could too.
Long story short, tldr, AI overview: Lilly’s dad makes the 10-hour round trip to pick us up. My stuff just barely fits in the trunk of his Mach-E, and I am deeply deeply grateful. It’s a wonderful testament to EV drivers everywhere that as I doze in the backseat on the drive back, whenever I awake he is still talking about battery capacity.
(Funnest fact! The last time Lilly’s dad rescued her from Nevada, she was escaping the 2023 Burning Man’s flooding grounds, efforts that made her the subject of a local documentary.)
We return to the Bay and spend a day mired in insurance calls and tow bills and all of the logistical horrors that follow this physical one. (A real line from a Progressive agent: “so looks like you have limited collision insurance — do you know what that is? Because I have no idea what that is.”) We want to push on! Both of us need to be in Massachusetts the next week, and we make backup plans B through L-M-N-O-P (rental car? fly halfway? horses?).
Ultimately, we decide we’ll have a mini West Coast roadtrip in her car and then fly east. We leave town and — you guessed it! — immediately hit standstill traffic. We are finally forced to stop moving forward.
At this point, I will admit vibes have been better. Lilly announces that we need some alone time, and we pull off by the water and go for long walks.
We drift back together after a while and sit on a stump in the shade. A man and a dog walk by. A stack of hay bales rests by an old barn.
“At the end of a long journey,” Lilly breaks the silence, “some communities make travelers sit in just one place for 24 hours.”
“They must sit,” she says, “and wait for their shadow to catch up with them.”
The sun arcs over the water.
Without talking, we return to the car and drive, very slowly, back to Berkeley.
I put on John Craigie’s “Dissect the Bird.” We cry quietly.
I think it is the first moment I fully process that we had almost died.
And we have not.
And now we have not.
We wait for our shadows.
There is so much more
My mom visits a couple weeks ago and we go to the World Dog Surfing Championships, and then we volunteer at the Grateful Dead and Co show in Golden Gate Park. It is so wonderful. There is a magical moment when we leave the concert early to get to our volunteer shift and walk through the crowd. They’re still jamming, and everyone in this tie-dyed and flowing mass is so completely transfixed on the stage, dancing and jumping and so young and so old and so wholly there — so free and so in love with this shared moment.
I prepare to leave this house. Again. I sit naked on the roof and read Vonnegut. The Campanile chimes out a melody in the distance. We say nice things. We make confessions. We all start wearing ties. I say my goodbyes and give my hugs and slip out, and the conversation continues. Someone moves into my room. I give them the tour. How is this place real? they ask. Who’s actually in charge of the dishes? they follow up.
Yesterday was — tomorrow will be too.
(The chicks outside our kitchen window.)
The house climbs Grizzly Peak for the sunset.
“This is so beautiful,” I say. “Why don’t we come here all the time?”
“There’s always next summer,” someone responds.
“There’s always regrets,” says another.
“I think our 20s will be heartbreaking,” someone writes in the hall outside my room. “Just a series of falling in love with places and people, and then they will be gone or you will be gone, and everyone is just moving and moving and moving on.”
I suppose this is true. And also, I like eating ice cream sandwiches. Some things are good.
I am feeling ready in a way that surprises me.
“The last great Kingman tradition,” someone else has written, “is leaving.”
And so I do.
It’s been a wonderful summer. I feel so full. I am so excited for the rest of all of our lives.
1,2,3 go!
Thomas