God ain’t told no one to kill their son’s on Highway 101, No one ever mistook it for any of its more glamorous cousins. It has no crossroads for any opportunistic devil to ply his trades, only T junctions that lead you either to either fall into the pacific ocean, or to head inland towards whatever trouble lays to the east. The 101 runs from just north of Los Angeles around Santa Barbara, and goes right up the pacific coast line, through Oregon and terminates almost at the Canadian border in Washington state. Much of it is in disrepair. It runs 1540 miles and 5 years of my life. Sometimes I deviated, sometimes it did, but somehow we always managed to meet again, where the road meets the ocean and the sun kisses the sea.
No, I didn’t pick a sexy road, a famous road. There have been no songs written about it, no one sings its praises nor builds up its mythos. It attracts a few tourists to its various little towns in the summer, but is not a huge vacation destination. Perhaps the 101’s biggest claim to fame is Big Sur which was the subject of a 1962 novel by Kerouac. Jack spent time there in the cabin of his friend (and fellow beat) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, moving among the intertwining lives of Neal Cassady, Ginsburg and the revolving casts of beats, wives and freaks that bounced between the wild coast of Big Sur to the dirt and trouble and excitement of San Francisco. Maybe no one cares so much about these bohemians and their exploits nowadays. It feels as if their struggles and triumphs are retreating into the rear view mirror of the past, yet I remain entranced. I am as devoted to Kerouac and Ginsburg as I am to Patti Smith and Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Elizabeth Cotten: all of them unknown heroes and heroines of my scattered existence.
Wolfy, the children and I were safely huddled in the RV, escaping on the road together. We found the weather too hot inland, and camping was not easily available. The four of us sat in Castiac Lake Campground. The campfire was crackling in the baking night air, as coyotes howled as shrill and desperate. Their screams echoed in my head. I wondered if I sounded that desperate as I was being beaten back in Tokyo, and felt the shame creep up my spine. Surely the people who heard were as disturbed as I was by this choir of coyotes, and I felt a sudden sense of desperate horror as I realized that anyone who heard must have been been desperate as I was to finally lose consciousness and lay in a quiet stupor.
Snakes slithered in the dust. I poked my foot out towards a harmless brown grass snake, but he ignored me with all the nonchalance of something that crawls on its belly and lives underground, yet considers itself close enough to the top of the food chain that the ankles of desperate women don’t hold much attraction.
The heat was intense and choking. A tin can home like the Jamboree was no match for the heat of California in early summer so Wolfy pointed us towards the coast, towards Santa Barbara and the 101. I often think if our exact route could be traced in blue going east and red going west, the spaghetti mess of our meanderings would make some wonder if we had lost our minds.
We were whip ‘o the wills, tumbleweeds, wild horses with the lash of fear driving us onwards running away from the danger that carried itself over telephone wires and email enquiries. My husband was getting insistent. I had not turned up at his sister’s place, nor had I got on the plane back to Tokyo. I told him we were safe, that I had left him and I wanted a divorce. I kept emails open to keep on reassuring him we were fine. I sent him careful non-location identifying photos of the kids. I repeated I had left him due to his abuse and I wanted a divorce. He told me in no uncertain terms that he would never ever divorce me. “Katy-chan, Ill never divorce you. The only way out of the marriage is to the family graveyard in Chiba.” The only way out was in a box. We kept on going. I resolved he would never see me again, or the kids. We were free. No more living on tenterhooks, no more abuse, no more pain, no more beatings, no more worrying if he was going to kill us all. No more walking the streets at 3am with two kids because it was too dangerous to go home. It was over.
We headed west until we had no more west just ocean, and turned north on the 101. We were usually lost at this point in time. My new position as copilot and navigator was stressful to say the least. I got us lost in Los Angeles, lost in Castilac, lost getting to the coast. To be fair on myself American road sign makers have only a tenuous grip on geography. Their signs are too early, or too late, ambiguous or just plain wrong, and always confusing. To get onto the 101 from that point there is a slip road, you have to slip off to the left. An unusual move at the best of times. You pull onto black top road and head on up a two lane road. It sometimes widens at this point to two lanes either way. Sometimes narrows to just cliff face and two lanes and ocean drop. There are no guard rails, the overhang threatens to push large RV’s and semis off into the sea which crashes onto the rocks below, whipping itself into peaks and frenzies, tidal pools and currents. The road itself is in poor repair.
After we travelled it Big Sur got cut off entirely when the 101 in the area collapsed in 2017, along with a bridge, cutting the residents off from the outside world, and destroying any hope of tourism. It was mended, and keeps on crumbling, most recently this month when a large v shaped section dissolved into the sea, flattening trees and alarmingly sending rocks and detritus tumbling. No one was hurt which is a miracle all in itself. The road is the only alternative to an alternate route which adds a couple of hundred miles onto what should be a 46 mile trip, but at least not totally cutting off the town from the outside world. Burn scars and global warming rains do not help the stability of Highway 101, it is treacherous driving sections of it at the best of times, but with the risk of collapse, there are parts I always feel unwilling to take a chance on. The old world is falling away, dissolving, I guess travellers don’t have the right to chase impossible views.
The bridges in the area appear dangerous. They all seem one wrong wind or over-enthusiastic semi away from total collapse. I have never been fond of bridges, not bridges over water, troubled or otherwise, not bridges over land, not little ones, or large ones, long and suspended or small and stout legged. No, I am not fond of bridges. The Bixby bridge made my heart leap. This is not my kind of excitement.
The weather cools almost immediately as you take this highway, it can be burning hot on inland routes, but cool and breezy next to the gigantic air conditioner which is the pacific ocean. The sea can be breathtakingly beautiful. It is the same kind of untamed as any dry land vast expanse. Dangerously isolated, haunted, ghost ships creaking on the waves, smugglers hiding barrels in the coves and by the small wooden jetties of calmer inlets.
The steel Bixby Bridge loomed ahead. I would really rather not, but there is no way but onwards, and looked over at Billy and he set jaw and steely eyes, both hands on the wheel, hunched forwards, peering through the windscreen, glancing in the rear view mirror and occasionally shouting at drifting cyclists wrecklessly meandering into our path as they toured the coast gawping at California. We were not tourists. We were never tourists, though I was more interested in enjoying the journey than bitching about it, like Billy was apt to do. It was our life. Even here, at the start, this was our life. Fish jumped under the bridge as birds of prey soared high above. My heart felt at home.
I was desperate to go to Big Sur, and tried to recount the novel in a jumble of words and images, animatedly trying to whip up interest from one grown man and two small children. “You know, Billy, Neal Cassady was a bit like you, he was infamous for doing a lot of speed and he sure could rap. The dead bus Pranksters called him Speed Limit.” Billy’s serious face cracked into a smile. “Speed Limit. I like that. Speed Limit,” he chewed it over digesting the words. “He was Kerouac’s muse, his brother. His crush, I think. He had words. He could talk. He could talk but didn’t write. Ginsburg was obsessed by him.” He could talk, but he couldn’t write. I can write but I can’t talk, the mirror image of Neal. He went fast and I am stultified and silent. I wonder what alchemy would have happened if the two of us had been in the same room. Would he have picked up a pen and written at long last? Would I have discovered the gift of the gab? Or would he have stood talking at the brick wall of my consciousness as I stared back silent and unyielding?
Big Sur appeared suddenly on the road, it’s city sign faded and cracked, the roads narrowed. We needed gas.
Billy decided that it was a tourist trap and would not let me look around. He would not let me walk through antique shops, or stop for ice cream. He wanted out of there. My heart broke. I was in Big Sur and I was forbidden to explore. I wanted to get out and look. Kerouac, man. I didn’t ask for much, but his sullen face and refusal to meet my gaze told me it was not worth pushing. We filled up with gas, I had to listen to Billy complain and bitch about tourism and hipsters and the rich. I tuned out and we drove on.
Big Sur disappeared behind us in the dust and haze of early June. I thought I saw the ghost of Neal Cassady shake his head sadly and wave to me, as he turned his canvas jacketed shoulders, and pulled up his collar round his chin. I waved back. He understood. Some men just don’t, some just don’t get it.
February 2021 –
I used to write under the Pen Name Detroit Richards. I am still the same broken woman with a head full of fire and a life full of sadness. I’ve decided to put some of my old writing back up. Losing The Paltry Sum was devastating, but I am back. Slowly, surely I am returning to myself. Perhaps with a mixture of the old and the new I can find a path towards something that looks like happiness. It might not be the old kind of deep joy in the road and the USA, it might be something sadder, more lonely and more lost than I could ever imagine, but perhaps it can still be something. My old novel, Tracked, is sitting ready to be edited. This is my old self, pushing forward into a new time. I am not sure there is much of a spark left, I suppose the only thing left to do is to try. The mind hides from itself when the pain is too real, too bright and too sharp. I need to summon myself up from the fog of trauma and one step at a time, move towards the future, whatever that looks like from here.