Tales from California: The Final Day

My flight was boarding in five minutes, and I didn’t have time to cry.

Just two hours ago, Kathy had dropped me off at the Sacramento airport. Between then and now, I had called home and talked with Mom. My oldest brother Eric had been in the hospital for over a week, due to appendicitis and complications thereof. He had just been told he needed another surgery. Mom sounded exhausted in every way. Although I’m far too accustomed to family members being in dire medical condition while I’m away on a trip, dealing with it has not gotten much easier. But I didn’t have the time or the place for a proper breakdown, so I was sitting on a bench near my gate, reading Jane Eyre intently and trying to bottle up the emotional buildup of two crazy weeks in California. 

Travel is intense. It slips under your skin. It burrows into your heart. Your mind longs for the familiar in an ever-changing landscape, but all you get is wet salty rope mooring boats over black water, and huge strands of kelp tangled on a sandy shore, and new faces trying to sort you out and find you out and bring you out as you flit from city to city, coast to coast. Travel drains. Travel renews. Travel makes the sky seem a different color, and makes home seem a distant dream, a close-up call, a whisper in your ear. A seagull cries, flying high over the mist that’s rolled up over your eyes. Every airport is the same. Time does not pass, but it rushes by on fleet feet and you wonder how you got here and where you’re going and if you will ever want to go home. If you do go home, will you ever want to leave?

My boarding group was called. I put away my book, hoisted my backpack, and shuffled toward the plane. I held up the line to take a photo of a truly Californian sign, pictured at the top of this blog (I explained to the people behind me that I was from Missouri, which is my excuse when I ever do anything ridiculous). I found a window seat near the front of the plane, which has never happened before with my cheap-seat tickets. I began to relax.

The last that I saw of California was a tapestry of wetlands beneath me and a flock of birds, tiny white petals fluttering over the brown landscape. Then the clouds swallowed me up, and my trip to California came to a close. I was on my way to Oregon.

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