Driving down the state from Ukiah to San Diego turned out to be a pleasant sightseeing journey with time spent alone with one of my sons. Heading back home to Ukiah, however, was a journey of an entirely different sort: This leg of my journey, without a doubt, turned out to be a "A Spiritual Trip."
Before heading north, I spent two days in my son’s apartment on the third floor of a building on fraternity row, which should explain why I found it nearly impossible to sleep. I’m fairly sure I was the only person on the street keeping a schedule fit for human beings. Everyone else, it seemed, was up all night partying.
My son and I spent the first day scrubbing the bathrooms and the second stocking the empty kitchen cupboards. But after two nights of using my pillow to deafen the sounds of the non-stop partying coming from the street outside, I was ready to hit the road. Some old friends in Santa Monica had offered me use of their couch. They warned me I’d have to put up with some fumes because their apartment was being painted but they promised an extremely quiet night.
I eagerly headed onto the freeway connecting San Diego with LA. Between the two cities, the one thing that caught my attention was the sight of a company of Marines at Camp Pendleton, just a few hundred yards from the freeway, practicing search and destroy maneuvers, a reminder that others are experiencing a far different view of reality from mine.
I arrived outside the Bunshaft’s apartment at exactly 1:08 in the afternoon. (It is definitely odd how my mind recalls some random details and not others.) It was great to reconnect with my friends. Because we have known one other for so long, we feel totally comfortable and without any pretense in one other’s presence. Alex was preoccupied with her astrology practice, which she operates out of their apartment so Bob and I went for a walk. Bob has been a high-powered executive in the music world who has never denied his spiritual side. As we walked through Ocean Park, he told me about his recent trip to Southern India where he had gone to study with a woman named Chalanda Sai Ma. While there, he had also seen the well-known Sai Baba known as the "Miracle Guru" who, people say, produces jewels out of ashes in the palm of his hand.
I’m not apt to believe miracles that I don’t see with my own eyes, but I could see my old friend had changed and that his transformation was real. He had integrated a deep silence. As he spoke about spiritual awakening taking place in the world, he was much more centered than I’d remembered. When the two of us returned to the apartment, Alex informed us she’d planned to attend a satsang (a gathering) held by a man called Adyashanti. All she knew about him was that her friends had told her he was an extremely engaging speaker and a learned spiritual guide. "I think we’ll all enjoy it," she said, "I insist." It was obvious she was not taking "no" for an answer. "I’ll pay—it’s my gift."
We arrived at the satsang after the small church had been filled, but found three seats together near the back. Adyashanti turned out to be a complete surprise. When we first saw him take the stage, for one thing he wasn’t an East Indian as I had imagined, given his name, but a vibrant Westerner in his forties with short gray hair and amazingly bright eyes that sparkled with an unnerving clarity.
Adya, as he is called, spoke without using the "spiritual speak" of a guru, but in very real and to-the-point language about the underlying truths of existence—mostly about finding the silence that exists beneath the surface of things. What was interesting was the longer he spoke the more the church took on the quality of silence he was speaking about.
After his opening talk about the simplicity of finding this silence, Adya invited members of the audience to come up, one at a time, to the stage to sit in the chair beside him. The people asked questions about various spiritual experiences. At one point, while discussing with a woman her struggle to find the deeper meaning of life, he described his own struggle as a seeker of truth. He recounted a time when he was a student at a Zen monastery where he was the first to show up at morning meditation practice and the last to leave at night. He said he was always trying harder than anyone to get to where he was going.
"Struggle" was something I related to and before I even thought about it I felt my hand go up. Adya waved me up to the stage where I suddenly found myself sitting in the chair next to him speaking into a microphone to the assembled audience. "My whole life I’ve felt like I’ve been struggling. It’s like I’ve been riding on a train chugging along the tracks on a long journey, always struggling to get somewhere." I found myself looking into his eyes as I spoke, feeling somehow that I was in the presence of someone with real knowledge. Then I heard him say, "think of me as the train wreck."
I felt a kind of "whoosh" of understanding. I immediately "got" what he meant. There was no doubt. He was speaking the Truth, with a "capital T" about me. Then he said, "you can stop—you can get off the train." Instantly, I felt a great relief. I understood that all the struggle, all the searching I’d been doing, had gotten me nowhere even after all those years spent riding the train. Whatever it was I was looking for I already had. Then he suggested I simply walk away from the train wreck.
That night on the Bunshaft’s couch I fell into a deep sleep. I awoke at 2:00 in the morning and there in the living room I experienced the silence Adyashanti had spoken of. It was all around me. I was hoping it wasn’t an experience caused simply by the paint fumes. But it seemed to be a real and palpable silence. And, like he said, it was in everything. So I tested it: I looked at the jamb around the doors to the balcony. The silence was there too.
After another day in Santa Monica and another night spent on the couch, I headed out. When I was back on the road again I found my journey northward to be unusually pleasant. I took Route 1 along the coast witnessing some of the most extraordinary scenery on earth. That night I stopped in Big Sur at a roadside inn called Deetjen’s and fell into a deep sleep in my small bungalow while a fire in the fireplace warmed the room. The next morning, after a blueberry pancake breakfast, I climbed a path along a stream up to a ridge overlooking the Pacific. There I sat down in a meadow just to take in all the miraculous beauty around me,
surprised at how much of it I was noticing.
I was at the same height as the top of the fog hanging above the ocean. It looked as if the view stretched into infinity: There was no horizon, only the sea and the sky melting into one another.
Since I have always been someone who likes to always be "doing" something, sitting on a path and taking the time to notice the world around me was a very new and different experience for me. But the best part about the simple experience of feeling the silence is how it comes not from striving to find it, but from doing just the opposite.
The last time I drove the length of the State of California was in a Volkswagen Microbus, which I’d painted with a brush and some available paint—white on the bottom with an orange roof. I remember someone telling me that the colors made the van look like a Howard Johnson’s motor inn. I should note that I wrote the words "You are me," on the back panel just above the engine. The year, you might have guessed, was 1969.
I was fresh out of the Army, back from Vietnam where I had (many of us had) read about the hippies and the "Free Love" movement that had sprouted up in California while we were doing our time in the service. I remember a fellow soldier out in the boonies passed around a copy of LIFE magazine with a story filled with pictures of girls wearing long skirts made from Indian fabric and tie-dyed shirts and boys with long hair and beards. These scenes taken on communes seemed, a half-a-world away, to be nothing short of paradise. We all wanted to be there.
It had taken me two months to grow my beard out and my hair was still not as long as I wished it was when I left LA for parts north. I had met a girl who made her own clothes and a dog we picked up a dog who we named "Thoreau" after Henry David. I built a bed in the back of the van and we carried our food with us together with a five-gallon olive drab Jerry Can of water and a Coleman camp stove, which we used wherever we stopped at State and National Parks. Travelling at the speed of a Microbus, and contending with numerous breakdowns along the way, the trip took us about two months to traverse the state.
Last week I headed south in our pick-up with my younger son, Andrew, with the truck’s bed packed with a coffee table, a set of stereo speakers and assorted stuff to furnish his (and his brother’s) college apartment in San Diego.
More than thirty years after the trip in my VW bus, my head was in a far different place. But I have to say that this trip filled me with much the same kind of excitement. I guess no matter how old we are we never get over the thrill of a road trip. This time, my underlying mission was to document, just for my own satisfaction, the "State of California."
We left much later in the morning than I would’ve liked but luckily missed the Santa Rosa traffic build-up by being too late instead of too early—which was just fine, just so long as we missed it. Our first stop was Mel’s Drive-in on Lombard Street in San Francisco, which gave us the needed "sugar rush" to get through the city to parts south.
I was most interested in getting at least as far as the open fields of Salinas, probably because I’m continually re-reading John Steinbeck and it gives me a good feeling just to see the places he wrote about and to realize that nothing much has changed with them in more than half-a-century. Sure, there are housing developments encroaching on the fields of beans and spinach and everything else grown in that part of the state, but it was heartening to see the fields that were there then are still being plowed now. When you see the workers with bright colored cloths tied around their foreheads or wearing straw hats on their heads, bent over in the fields it seems like time had stopped just after Steinbeck wrote his books.
After Salinas, where Highway 101 lies down flat as a pancake and stretches out for a bit, the driving becomes pure fun with lots of breathing space and plenty of time to take in the scenery. Since I was doing the driving, my son was reading the map. Our truck, thankfully, doesn’t have any sort of built in Satellite mapping system so we plotted our estimated destination loosely to be at Pismo Beach, a place that seemed comfortably far south enough to make us feel we were making progress towards San Diego without rushing the trip. We had plenty of time before my son’s classes started for the Spring so we were in no hurry whatsoever—something I think should be a prerequisite for any road trip.
What I noticed beginning with the flat farmland and moving farther south, was the gentle eventual rolling up of the land—as if the earth had been pushed towards the south with a giant rolling pin. Somewhere closer to San Luis Obispo than Salinas, the road begins to contain curves as well as hills. About half-way between the two places, we’d decided to stop at a place recommended to us—the not very well-known but ideally situated Seacrest Motel in Pismo Beach,
The name Seacrest, says it all. It’s a long narrow motel-shaped motel perched like a seagull with its wings spread on the edge of a cliff above the ocean. We’d called ahead to make a reservation via cell phone. Calling ahead to check for vacancies is a luxury I didn’t have in the VW van in 1970. By the time of our arrival it was dark and I was ready to sleep.
Waking up with the waves breaking on the ocean below our balcony was a wonderful feeling. It made me realize that if there’s anything at all possible to miss living in Ukiah, it’s the smell of salt air and the sound of the sea. After breakfast we drove down into town and walked out to the end of the fishing pier and watched the power of the Pacific waves roll in. The waves were unusually large and from the vantage point of the pier we naturally tried to imagine what the experience of a 40-foot Tsunami must be like.
The most beautiful stretch of Highway 101, and of almost any road I’ve been on in California, runs between Pismo Beach and Santa Barbara. The mountains are soft and round like the tops of clouds, covered mostly in grass dotted with oaks. Closer to Santa Barbara the highway parallels the ocean. The big waves rolling in had brought out schools of surfers all along the coast.
Somewhere between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles the idea came up to visit the Getty Center museum. The buildings, for anyone who hasn’t been there, in my estimation are the best part. As far as the art goes, the museum seems to own one of every famous artist in history as well as all the old furniture money can buy. Both my son and I found the Japanese garden interesting. As we stared down at the garden maze from above, my son asked, "Did you do it?" "Do what?" I asked. "The maze. It’s much easier to do it from here than walk through it." I was reminded that it’s possible to learn something every day—especially from a teenager.
Afterwards we walked out onto one of the huge cantilevers, which extend out over the Hollywood Hills. The view that day was crystal clear; we could see all the way to Long Beach and beyond. We spent a long time there, just staring in awe out over the endless miles of houses, office buildings and the roads that connect the various parts of Los Angeles.
When we were ready for the final leg of our journey, we took the tram back to the underground parking lot, fired up the truck and pulled into a traffic jam that extended all the way from Hollywood to San Diego.