drafting for essay

reflections on travel--soon to become academic-y.

I’m sitting with my Uncle, Anthony, in Stanford Village, eating tall pastrami sandwiches at Cameron’s, our favorite deli in the area. Whenever I come up to see my Uncle at his home in San Mateo, the town in northern California where I was born, we make a stop. We used to come down as a family every winter, all of us piled into the Accord for a three day road-trip. Those were good times. My brother and I would entertain ourselves in the backseat. We would bring books to read, play Tetris and Donkey Kong on Gameboy. I was amazed by how many cars we passed. I would fill pages documenting each brand, the color and shading. Silently, I would be rooting for the dark blue Accord, our family vehicle, to win out. But I never gave any sign of this. As official recorder, I had to remain impartial. I took my job very seriously. With each car I saw, the world seemed bigger and more mysterious. Then at night there was the excitement of the hotel, some new city we’d never been to before. There was something magical about that, like the world had expanded viscerally, changed in a fundamental way. I remember the strange thrill of opening a fresh bar of soap in the hotel bathroom (need to develop this). Odd little things like that are what I remember. When I was young and on those road trips, the simplest things--a latenight stop at Denny's in Eugene, a morning drive through the Red Forest Hills as we entered California--seemed full of wonder.

When I think of San Mateo I see us driving up to my Uncle’s home on 217, Sunset Terrace. The too-dry pale grass of the lawn. It is a broad, one-floor brick property, with a corner garden of polished rocks, browns and white and silver. From his backyard you can see all of Monroe and Foster City, in the flat distance the green-blue Oakland hills. Everything washed-out slightly from the long stretch of nothing-but-sun from February to November. The Foster City racetrack, where my Uncle and I used to watch the horses on Saturday mornings, has closed down, the huge plot of grass grown tall and brown-white.

My Uncle swirls a fry in a puddle of ketchup, holds me in a long, sober gaze. There is no anger in his eyes, no emotion to speak of. This is his serious face, the look he gets when a) he’s trying to bluff in poker (always unsuccessful), or b) I have just said something that makes him feel concerned. He becomes very still in these moments, almost comically so. Every inch of his body slows to a crawl—including, it seems, his thoughts—in order to remain composed. A Zen-like stillness overtakes him. It’s both amusing and slightly unnerving. I mean, make no mistake, he is staring at you. My brother coined it ‘The Look’ when I was six and it stuck. I can rib my Uncle about it, and he’ll laugh, but this can never take place while he is actually giving The Look, only well after.
In these moments, my Uncle’s humor becomes insanely dry. Today, for example: I’ve just told him that I am dropping out of school, that I’m flying to Naknek, Alaska to do unknown things to recently slaughtered salmon; that after this I will take my earnings and backpack for nine months around the Maritime region of Eastern Canada. He’s quiet for, I don’t know, two minutes (an hour?), stirring that soggy fry the whole time, then he says, slowly, “When does the great adventure begin?” Not a cock of the eye, nothing.
“I’m flying to Naknek next week.”
“What happens to school?” He says this softly, his dark brown eyes scrunched, a little pained.
“I’ll go back in a year,” I tell him. But the truth is I don’t know. In the last few months
"Why Eastern Canada?" My Uncle tugs on his lower lip with his incisors, pulling the skin up half an inch then releasing it. Now, this is a fair question, a good one in fact. Why ? I knew little about the region apart from reading Annie Proulx's 'The Shipping News' in high school, and of course the TV show Anne of Green Gables, filmed on Prince Edward Island just off the coast of Nova Scotia. In Canada, everyone knew Anne of Green Gables. When I told my friends from home about this trip, they focussed on this point. "You'll have to make sure to bring a dress," Dottie, my old friend, said. "Oh, don't worry about that," I responded, as my friends laughed. Images of Ann frolicking in lush green fields filled our heads as youths. She was always wearing some new quilted dress that her mother had made for her.