Liberty Calls

In keeping with the mixed feelings about the place I expressed yesterday, I had a hard time leaving L.A. today. In my mind, sometimes I am the barnacle, and sometimes I am the ship, but as I rolled out after a quick stop at Von's for some supplies, I definitely felt like something vital was being left behind.

For thematic as well as aesthetic reasons, I decided to listen to Mike Watt's moving, masterful concept album Contemplating the Engine Room as I left Southern California. His nautical/automotive metaphors and analogies of punk rock to the seafaring life struck home for me a lot today, and, of course, dude's still in Pedro. When the rollicking "Liberty Calls" started thrumming from my speakers, I thought: that's me. I'm on liberty call. But anytime anyone has ever thought "I can do whatever I want", reality steps in to remind you that you really can't. Time, money, the limitations of space, the vagaries of geography, the authorities, anything can step in at any time to interrupt your dérive. Fate got hold of me in half a dozen ways today, from unexpected (though welcome) freelance work cropping up in the morning to a massive traffic jam on the 101 at Oxnard that kept me crawling for hours and prevented me from getting as far as I wanted. An ill-advised detour into Santa Barbara also bollixed things up but good: if you're looking for a quick meal and a chance to use the bathroom, never, ever leave the road on a downtown exit. I ended up detouring around a labyrinth of boutique stores for so long that I almost resorted to pissing in one of the many empty drink bottles on the passenger side floor of my car. Luckily, I didn't do it, since if I had, I would surely have ended up standing tall before the Man, who would have thrown a coffee mug at my head and told me to stay out of his beach community. Santa Baby is definitely not my kinda town, though the British gal at Borders who tipped me to a good place to eat was easy on the eyes and the spirit.

However, I spent most of today on the Pacific Coast Highway, which favors you every few miles or so with the most breathtakingly beautiful scenery you've seen since the last breathtakingly beautiful scenery it showed you. Gorgeous, surprisingly pristine beaches, rolling green ranch hills, mountain roads that peak so it looks like you're about to drive into a bank of heaven-shaped clouds: California S.R. 1 is a message from God that he doesn't much mind car travel after all. But nature isn't allowed to show us beauty without humanity responding with something ominous, and the offshore drilling platforms that begin to dot the shorelines around Ventura County seem particularly hostile in light of recent events in the Gulf. Ronald Reagan famously defended their placement by claiming that you could still see the sea, that it wasn't like there was only one frame showing the ocean and someone stuck an oil rig in front of it. But after a disaster like the British Petroleum spill, they seem to loom rather larger than usual; in a classic example of the relativity of distance, when operating within normal standards, they seem like they're uncountable miles off the precious California coast, but when they're hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude, they must seem like they're close enough to touch.

My National Parks pass has already paid for itself as far as I'm concerned. Tonight's my first night car camping; I'm somewhere in the Los Padres National Forest as I write this, watching spooky night work its way westward from Lompoc and Los Olivos. (And reminding me of how George Carlin said that all else being equal, he liked L.A. better than New York because the sun set two blocks from his house.) This internet connection is spotty, but I'm amazed it even exists; I don't know if it's getting something from the ranger station or if there's just some mega-signal coming in from Vandenberg. Thanks to all who have hosted me and hung out with me so far, and I'll see more of you soon. Until then, here's some photos, now on Flickr!

NAMES TO CONJURE WITH: Thanks partly to the fact that so much of this area has been mythologized by Hollywood, almost every place name you encounter seems crammed with meaning: Point Mugu, Zuma Beach (Neil Young's favorite), Port Hueneme, Carpinteria, Camarillo, Montecito, Goleta, El Capitan.