According to the calendar function of my wireless handheld telephone device, summer is nearly gone, but I wouldn't know it if it was. Working strange, schizophrenic hours deep in the cavernous labyrinth underneath an exclusive golf resort has left my internal clock blinking a vacant and questionable 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.
In the resort business, weekends are times for full-tilt money harvesting, with easy pickings crowding the gates for a little planned recreation and debauchery. To contend with the waves of flush duffers who stream in expecting the highest standards of service possible to man, they staff the various departments to the gills for whatever action comes our way. This makes things difficult for those of us who tingle with wanderlust and desire random excitement.
There are no normal schedules here, no way to predictably do the summery things that couples do. Wild music festivals, too loud for regularity are never scheduled on randomly alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays, Mondays and Wednesdays, or any combination that business dictates.
The real bitch of the situation is that there are an incredible variety of scenes, climates, geography and fascinating creations within a three-hour drive of the Monterey Peninsula. To list them here would push me to a second page, a ridiculous notion for a column of this nature. There are easily enough epic excursions and investigations within a day's drive to keep a wandering dreamer inspired for countless wide-eyed moons.
All of this inescapability, combined with the constant chill and fog that enveloped the Monterey Peninsula has me feeling upside down, spun out and frantic to know simple things that I took for granted in the Rocky Mountains. What month is it? What day? When? When there are no changes at all for months to the environment, no subtle weather patterns to observe, combined with the fact and I don't have a Saturday and Sunday for free ranging, then the days that I do get off when the weekenders fade feel token and cheap.
Being granted only non-consecutive, midweek days off of work has forced me to do some creative rambling. Getting Away From It All has become a concentrated, condensed run for freedom that must be well planned or suffer a midstream abortion due to the requirement that my desk be manned at a prescribed early hour the next day. Ballgames are budgeted only for five innings and three beers, raft trips for only fast, short rivers like the McCloud, Trinity, or the Upper Sacramento. Long black roads to nowhere, a tank of high octane, and a big bag of jerky becomes a study of map and clock function matrixing. There is a point of vanishing return out there on the horizon that I must keep well in mind, or else go too far, past the point of return without a sick call or a plea against unreasonable traffic.
There have been many close calls, many incidents where my natural urge to linger and soak has forced me to play catch-up at high speed, on winding night roads through wine and deer country.
These scattered, nervous glimpses at natural freedom, shortened as they are, are my only non-electronic, sensory oriented way of finding out what time of year it is.
Unlike monochromatic and singular Monterey, most other towns and places within a double album's drive give way to the time honored sequence of seasonal change. San Francisco, that vibrant and spastic birdcage hosts a discernable spring. Rising above the fog belt and into the sun tanned Hollister Hills; sweat dripping from my brow confirms to me that it is July. Northward, into the grape hills with it's vines so neatly spaced, like rolling perfection, the fruit will wither with fall's strong breath. Shasta rips into the blue Northern Sky frosted and gleaming at winter. This I can understand. The seasons end, renewal begins. But not in Monterey, old same and timeless Monterey.
Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a weathered blue bench at Dos Geckos in Mount Shasta City, California on the borrowed laptop of the finest burrito man in the north state.
