the diary of antoine roquentin

Thursday was my time to leave Sacramento. Christen and I were hanging around in the living room. I’d picked up my rental car hours ago and had finished everything I was to do at the magazine. I was supposed to meet up with Terry once more, but he was having some sort of emergency with his roommates.

The die was cast. I knew I had to leave, but the incipient horror was that it was up to me to determine the exact moment. At least with a train or bus you have to leave at a certain time; however, leaving via car is the most anti-climactic because you choose the time. You have to say, at some arbitrary moment, “Well, it’s time to go.” Which, let it be said, took me hours to work up to. We said our goodbyes, and I just couldn’t believe that it was over. That I wouldn’t see her again for a year. It was just too much.

I burned two CDs for the trip:

The Presets’ Apocalypso

and Beach House’s Devotion.

One happy album and one sad album, respectively. Beach House painfully crooned “please do not go” as I careened down I-80 towards Molly’s house, Google Maps Navigation barking directions at me from my Nexus One, air conditioning blasting.

Driving, it could be said, is just like riding a bike. I felt just fine, especially as the traffic thinned out on 91 and I had a stretch of road all to myself. I continued up 70, through Oroville, trying to race the sun as it set. Its ruddy gaze took in everything—the rushing torrent of farmland, the far-away hills flat and purple, painted on the globe of the sky. The gold-turned-pink of empty fields, grass long-dead from the summer heat, waned to gray as the hours crept by. This was all right. I’d done this all before. Snatches of memory began to return from my last trip to see Molly, where I had made the mistake of bringing Adrian. This time, unlike that trip so long ago, I made it in two hours (not five). Night had almost complely fallen as I wound through the hills around Paradise at thirty miles an hour. Every now and then I’d catch a glance of the grey mountains to the left of the highway, almost completely in shadow under a gray halo of dying sun.

I pulled into Molly’s driveway. The house was exactly as I remembered it, but gleaming with every light on.

It was as if no time had passed. Molly and I stayed up until 2 a.m. talking about everything: literature, writing, education, language, sociology, dysfunctional families, relationships. I’d so missed those talks.

The next day, I wandered into the kitchen to find the family making fresh biscuits. They were flaky and delicious, especially with rhubarb jam. That day, we went down to the lake on her property with her new dog, Cash. Not much more than an overgrown puppy, Molly had only had Cash for about two days prior to my arrival, so we all were trying to get his behavior under control. There were a lot of slobber-covered hands to be washed and “no”s to be said. Despite all his faults, he was an absolutely adorable dog.

Molly’s lake.

Cash bringing back an impossibly large stick.

After we got back from the lake (and changed our clothes that muddy Cash had jumped on), Molly, the family, and I went down to Chico. We walked around the downtown area, spending a lot of time in the used bookstore and talking about Molly’s novels (the completed one in revision and the one in progress). We ended up going to this amazing gelato and candy store, Powell’s, where Molly’s daughter took me on a tour of every single candy variety in the place. I had to try very hard not to buy anything there. After the candy store, we went out for some delicious sushi at this place called the Raw Bar.

Back at the house, Molly was showing me some interesting stuff: books by this really funny cartoonist whose name escapes me without an Internet connection, these amazing RSAnimate videos that I’d never seen before, and giving me an overview of contemporary lit (which I am often undeservingly disdainful of). We also talked about Proust at length, and she seems to be leaning in the direction of reading it. I can’t wait to finish it so I can read some of the wonderful books she suggested (especially from her Philip K. Dick-only shelf).

After everyone would go to bed, I needed entertainment, so I set to talking to people on a certain disreptable website (no, not the one you’re thinking of with the peace sign). I ended up getting caught up in a very interesting conversation about Marxist dialetctic and Ginsburg that lasted well into the night. We ended up planning to meet for coffee the next day before I left for Reno.

On my last day in Chico, Molly, her daughter and I took the dogs and went to this feature of Chico called the Flumes, which are these little manmade rivers about twice the size of a water slide constructed for the Diamond Match Company to float logs down to its factories to make matches out of them. I can’t convey the fresh, crisp, earthy smell in the air, the pleasantly hot sun ameliorated by the cool water flowing next to us.

The flumes.

Alas, the time came when I had to leave. It seemed like I had only just arrived, but I had to return my rental car in three days and hadn’t even arrived in Reno yet.

The Naked Coffee in Chico is, for some reason, much more pretentious than the one in Sacramento ever was. The hipsters lounging on their fixies outside (no joke) were rail-thin and tattooed as hell. I ordered a Thai coffee and ran into Alfredo (odd name, huh) in the back seating area. We ended up getting along quite well—I was making him crack up at the Wikipedia image that is supposed to sum up our generation.

We talked demographics, urbanification, anti-capitalism, socialism, New York, Chico, etc. I needed someting to munch on before I left, so we went to a nearby sandwich place for, well, sandwiches. I was enjoying our conversation so much (and for some reason was loth to leave Chico, perhaps because of its positive associations with Molly) that I invited him to Bidwell Park. As Molly had described to me, the creek that flows through the park is channeled into a large swimming area of fresh water, which was kind of amazing. We walked for a while up the trail as bikers and joggers passed us.

We were both enjoying the conversation so much that he directed me to a place to get awesome iced teas, and we decided to round out the day by going to Upper Park, which he’d been singing the praises of all afternoon.

We drove up to Upper Park rather late in the day, and I was concerned that the sun might set before we arrived, but we beat the sun. We climbed up on top of what he called Monkey Hill, which was a rocky promontory from which the entire valley was visible.

The hill we climbed.

Climbing the hill

Taking in the view

A panorama (stitched together in Photoshop) of the view from the ridge. Here is the bigger version, and the giant version.

The Sutter Buttes off in the distance.

I could see everything: Chico State, the stadium, and the trees that obscured any view of the actual city itself. The “purple mountain’s majesty” was on view to the west, and the Sutter Buttes loomed in the clouds to the south. To say that it was picturesque is an abomination of language: it was like being on top of the universe.

As more people came up the hill, we retreated up further into the hill as the sun set.

Finally, the last wisps of sunlight expired.

I dropped off Alfredo and began my journey to Reno.