My Only Very Occasional Commute.

Yesterday was what counts as an unusual day in quarantine.

It was cold and rainy in the morning. There was some work I needed to do that absolutely 100% could not be done from home. I’d gotten all three permissions I needed to go into the office, so I did my old commute.

Where I live in Marina (just north of Monterey), the Pacific Ocean crashes down cold and heavy on windy beaches and giant sand dunes. As you move east, my dumpy little beach town is all strip malls and smoke shops, and then the University with its hundreds of old empty buildings left over from when this was a 20th Century Army base. Those buildings, most of them long abandoned barracks, have been left largely to age and collapse quietly in the salty air. Ghost places. Keep moving east and you get to where I live; the weird little overly planned out subdivisions of leftover base housing. Pretty little streets and culs-de-sac that you can just tell were a mid-century fever dream of Americana.

From there I drove east, to where the town ends because the land becomes a cliff’s edge as it drops fast down into the Salinas Valley. I love that part of the drive. A Thelma & Louise plummet down a narrow tendril of two lane road. You can see all the way across the valley to the eastern edge of peaked green hills where the clouds hang out on rainy days and the sky is bright purple like an hours old bruise.

Down on the valley floor, I made a left and headed north toward the city. This is my favorite part of the drive and I like to roll my windows down as I shoot past fields in my little car. The fields change week to week and sometimes ever day to day. The air so often smells like celery or broccoli. And on wet days like yesterday, the air has been wiped clean by the rain and the whole world has that wonderful, deep wet-dirt odor. A smell rivaled only by cut grass of the first few minutes after rain hits concrete.

I always make sure that I take a moment to look into the fields and see the distant bend figures working the fields. No matter the weather or the state of a deadly airborne transmissible disease, they’re there. Because they have to be and because all of us need them to be. Without being saccharine, the folks like that are why I do the job I do. I didn’t prepare for this job (working for a tiny medical school), but I like doing it because I know that helping to grow these medical people will have downstream effects, that eventually it will make other people’s lives better. People like the ones I see in these fields.   

The drive was nice, but also the affirmation. It’s really quite amazing what a nice clean rain can do for the world and for one’s spirits.

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