Nomadic Near Mineral, California

We'd about grown into that sand-colored,

four-door Chevy, minus extras,

rented-trailer-with-curtains in tow. My mother

had had it; even my father

was fed up to here with his own

big adventure, now halfway through.

He'd wanted to go to the mountains.

(It's easy enough, after all, to get hooked:

ten days gone, stepping from high virgin meadows

onto asphalt's a shock. Cars are steerable bubbles, houses

miraculous caves carved right out of air.

One craves this reentry more, more.)

Anyway, he'd wanted to go to the mountains.

And he hadn't found what he'd hoped,

or, even worse, perhaps had?

Our last camp this first time out

was on Lassen ("extinct," the brochures said)

and now we zig-zagged down

the road to our next kind of home.

I remember glimpse after glimpse

of hazy, hot-looking flatness—

Down and down…

In the back seat, my younger sister

was busy being invisible, as she would be for years.

My older sister, fourteen or fifteen, I think,

just sulked the whole trip, away from her friends.

And I, in the meantime, the only kid with glasses,

had my nose in a paperback novel,

concealed from my mother.

It was all about the Woodstock

Nation, music and nature,

and people older than I was

smoking dope and screwing.

It was a pretty good book.

Down and down, glimpses of the only

river I’d ever find down there…

Though we did have to stop from time to time—

my dad would step out and pace,

mom watching him nervously and steadily—

he said, to let the brakes cool.