I’m not going to write about the election or politics. For that type of writing read my other Substack: “Sincere American Writing.” However, I will write about my life in this moment.
It’s 7:50am right now in Santa Barbara. It finally actually feels like fall. Cold out, currently drizzling, which is lovely, and hazy gray outside. It reminds me of my eight-month stint living in Portland, Oregon, in late 2010 until summer of 2011 when I was 27/28 and newly sober from alcohol. Twelve long, wild years ago. I remember with vividness those months back then, the thick fog and wet humidity in summer, the consistent drizzle and and/off rain in winter, fall and spring. Winter of 2010—the year the Giants won—it snowed in the city, leaving a paper-thin layer along the streets. The temperature dropped down into the low twenties.
I can still picture Portland in my mind back then: The green Willamette River, those bridges along it. The downtown Pearl District. Burnside. Powell’s Books, which still blows my mind every time I’m up there. For many years after I left PDX in June, 2011, I’d do the 12-hour drive along U.S. Highway 101 in my red 2000 Honda CR-V, listening to various podcasts, playing music, chatting with friends on the phone for hours, listening to audiobooks. I loved that drive, passing Shasta County shrouded (for me) in Northern California romanticism. Far northern California (such as Humboldt County) and the Pacific Northwest always made me think of Ken Kesey, Kerouac, and my own harried, absurd twenties. I followed Kerouac’s “instructions” very literally, and hit bottom in 2010. I did AA up there in Bridge City (Portland) for the very first time. My life started to change. Revelations began to surface beautifully and awkwardly.
But here, now, I am seven weeks shy of turning 40. I live in Santa Barbara, caring for my cancer-sick father. I am in love with a wonderful woman. I have my 6.5-year-old Tuxedo cat whom I cherish beyond anything. I write on Substack. Reading is a constant. I walk dogs. I edit books. I pay bills. Often I try, usually only half-successfully, to avoid politics. I run and use my Japanese stationary bike. My credit card is still being slowly, slowly paid off. Depression has come and gone. Time keeps moving, as we gape at it like fiends, wanting it somehow to stop for just a moment. But it sort of did in 2020, didn’t it?
Dad did a Pet Scan on his lungs yesterday; we should get the results by November 10th. Two weeks ago it was radiation on his recurring brain tumor. Now it may be a new tumor on the lungs. We’ll see. The man is 77. My girlfriend and I are going to backpack in Matilija Canyon in Ojai, where I grew up. My father and I backpacked this area a lot when I was a kid. There’s a precious photo of my dad and I in the early nineties, when I was maybe eight or nine, maybe ten, right before a backpacking trip into the canyon. My dad and I stand side by side, he towering above me, bald, some gray hairs; he must have been about 46, 47 then. Lean and tall and rugged. Piercing blue eyes. He wore a white T-shirt, loose faded blue-jeans and white Reeboks. Dad stood with his palms planted at his waist, elbows arched like wings. Then me, thin and scrawny and short, a smile on my face, golden-blond hair going all directions, my heavy-looking turquoise pack hoisted onto my small shoulders.
In many ways I am still that boy. My father is still that man, towering over me. In other ways our roles have reversed. I am now the one looking down at him, as he slowly closes the book of his life. Backpacking—nature—is one of the great loves my dad passed down to me. It has always comforted me, through ups and downs, thick and thin, childhood and teens and twenties and thirties. I’m certain it will continue to do so throughout my life. I remember backpacking with my father—our final trip together was nearly a decade ago—he always in the lead, his pace slow but steady, just like his father when we hiked with him when I was a little younger, hands clasped behind his back, bald dome gleaming in the spring sun, long legs and white tennis shoes seeming pure in some glorious way. I looked up to him. He was my father. He still is.
That is a pretty picture, isn’t it?
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Michael Mohr