Mill Valley 08/20 (start)

I leave tomorrow morning. On the road. Steinbeck did it with Charley, Hope with Crosby, and Lucy with Desi, but I will be accompanied by a new CD player and a cell phone. If the trip proves as intensive as the planning and preparation, it'll be a helluva trek.

My immediate concern is over the road closures which may lie ahead due to the forest fires in Tahoe, Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming - my planned route. Interestingly, some conservationist groups have become vociferous in their opposition to fighting these fires. They claim that forest fires are natural and necessary ecological occurrences, and there is no reason to spend millions of dollars and risk lives merely to protect homes which should never have been built there in the first place. Something to ponder as I sit comfortably in my house, situated 3 miles from the San Andreas Fault.

Two day ago, I attended an Ansel Adams exhibit at the San Francisco MOMA, to get in the mood so to speak. The photographs were from his earlier work (and curiously one urban photo, that of a deserted Broad Street, New York City, ca. 1949; oddly enough, the city of my destination). But I was struck by what the curator wrote on the final plaque, "It is clearer to us now than it was a century ago that this understanding and affection (for the natural world) must extend not only to those supernal landscapes that we preserve as great outdoor museums, but equally to our own modest and precarious gardens, and even, if we can imagine it, to the right-of-way of our superhighways." If this perspective were thumbing a ride on the side of the road, I'd say 'hop in'.

PS: I wonder if Ansel Adams ever took photographs of forest fires.