Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Jun 27, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: Not according to plan

Nothing about this post is according to plan. It’s late, for a start. And I had planned to write about my writing history. Something different cropped up, and here I am. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I guess. Maybe.

This afternoon we were about to make our usual pilgrimage to the storage shed. Due to a bout of insomnia that had me awake until three and then cat insanity that woke me up just as I finally started to nod off, I wasn’t very refreshed when the phone woke me up about four hours later. I couldn’t even wake Don up, but he sprange out of bed around one or so and proclaimed himself willing to travel. We started to pull out of the gate around two-thirty.

There was a short delay. There, clogging the street, was yet another spurious mobile home that had just been pulled out of the park. This time it was half a double-wide.

Don turned to me and said, “Let’s follow it!” And that is exactly what we did.

This giant lumbering vehicle–the world’s biggest snail with its house on the back–trundled down city streets, taking up a lane and a half and scaring the willies out of other traffic. I realized that the tail vehicle was actually behind us, and pulled over to let it pass. Then we resumed our tracking of the mobile home. It trundled and rattled some more until it joined the freeway, where we trundled along behind it at a speed that, should I have attempted it without a mobile home to hide behind, Don would have been most cross.

Approaching a busy on-ramp, I worried about tangling up in merging traffic, so I slowly coasted past the monster and, even going at considerably less than the speed limit, soon saw it fade into my rear view mirrors. Okay. I would have to drop back, somehow. Then I saw something in my mirrors: something flapping. My saddlebags were open. Oops.

Figuring that I had enough time, I pulled off at Zanker Road. I took a look at the freeway to see if I could see the snail passing beneath the overpass, but I didn't. It was looming down Zanker Road, instead. I could not have planned this better if I'd tried, which I wasn’t. A cop car appeared from nowhere and tucked in behind the guard vehicle. Okay.

Don was still tootling along patiently behind, so I tagged along and the oddball convoy progressed into the rural outskirts of Milpitas. If the strengthening reek were anything to go by, we were heading in the general direction of the dump. We pootled along. I think the average speed was 20 mph. Pootle, pootle. The cop car turned onto a dirt road and vanished in a puff of smoke.

Eventually the convoy turned off. I had enough time to see where it went: “Zanker Materials Processing Facility.”

This was no convoy. It was a funeral parade. They are turning our mobile homes into mulch and scrap metal.

So much for “they might be used for farmers in the Central Valley.” Yet another palliative lie.

We turned around and I pulled us off into the dilapidated, unkempt parking lot of a disused pollution control plant. It was too late to go to the storage shed, and I was too tired to ride well. Before long, a security guard showed up. He was from India, had a wonderful accent, and we spent the next hour talking to him.

First we talked about personal philosophies. It started with him explaining that even though it was not in his job description, he would stop to see if people needed help (like us) because we were human beings. Before long you might have thought we’d known each other for years. He told us about his family. And arranged marriages and how families are “run” in his culture. It’s different from mine, but fascinating, and there's a lot of wisdom in what he had to say.

He doesn’t know exactly how old he is, because back then birthdays were reckoned by “it’s the rainy season” and not by specific dates.

After he had told us about himself and his family, he invited us to talk about ourselves, or not, as we chose. It felt like a formal ritual: “First I talk and then, if you have time and are so inclined, I’d love to listen to you talk.” It is not like my culture where everyone talks at once. First him. Then you. I got the idea after a while. You don’t just interject. You listen. Then you talk.

We talked for exactly the correct length of time. He told us that we made his day by talking with him. In actual fact, he made ours as well. He distracted me from depressing thoughts about houses being turned into particle board or landfill.

Then we went to Alviso and had a picnic beside the water.

Today was not the day we planned, but it was the right sort of day. It was not according to plan…and yet, somehow, I have this sense that it was.