35 Years of Equinoxes

Memory works in strange ways.

Spring of 1975 was my second semester at Cornell, and I started taking the courses I had planned as steps toward the major. One of these was introduction to geology, which I remember as being taught by a Professor Swan, although in fact his name was (and is, I have just found out) Cisne; which of course means swan in Spanish, a language I did not know in 1975.

So I should approach my memories of spring 1975 with some degree of skepticism: clearly, my later knowledge of Spanish transformed what I knew that Spring into something I could not have known for at least three more years.

But some things about that spring are very memorable, and even if they have been transformed, the sensibility they convey is, I am sure, true to that first Cornell spring.

To return to geology: the lecture I was enrolled in met at eight or nine in the morning. My inability to make it to calculus sections scheduled at 8 AM for the entire fall semester had impressed on me the need to solve the intractable contradiction between Cornell's optimism and my reality, which even then dictated late nights and delayed mornings. So instead of attending my assigned lecture, I went to the second lecture of the same material, which I remember as meeting at 11 AM.

Associated with the course was a laboratory section, and here again, I took the approach of seeking a time I would absolutely be able to attend, signing up for what seemed to be a relatively unpopular Saturday lab.

Which, it then transpired, secretly met on Tuesday evenings. Why secretly? because Cornell had set aside two nights a week-- Tuesdays and Thursdays-- for exams held during the semester, called prelims, not midterms. So meeting on one of these evenings created the possibility that two things would happen at once. So every historical record says I attended lab on Saturday, but that was true only on the rare occasions when we went on a field trip that required daylight.

For me, the evening lab was even better than my Saturday goal. By evening I was awake and just beginning the long night, and so I expected a semester of success. Geology promised to be my favorite course.

And it didn't disappoint me, not just because of all this, but because it was where I met Rus. My memory of meeting him is one of the details I am suspicious of; while I know the entire story, I am not certain I have located it at the right point in the semester. In my memory, the first lab session, while we were all meeting each other, was when another woman in anthropology and I decided to follow up the class by going off to College Avenue for coffee. Rus, already a year ahead of us in anthropology, walked with us down the path that led from the engineering quad across the creek and down to College Avenue.

Where we found that so many people had the idea of a late night coffee that a line wound out the door and down the block. As we paused to think about what to do, Rus issued his famous invitation to come to his apartment down the block, where, he told us, there should be chocolate chip cookies he had made that day, if his room-mates had left them. After a few moments hesitation, we headed over (and yes, there were cookies).

I cannot be sure what week this was. I remember walking across a campus glazed with ice from a sudden storm; weeks of early spring warmth, dinner with Rus and his room-mates, the shared pain of studying for archaeology prelims in what surprisingly turned out to be the class I enjoyed least, and probably in consequence, did worst in.

By March 21, when we both returned from spring break, we had spent enough time talking about music, archaeology, and life around the Great Lakes. We count our first anniversary from March 21, 1975. And so as I write this we have spent 35 years engaged in a long conversation that still is threaded through with talk about music, and archaeology, and places we both have been.

I have no trouble remembering this anniversary, because it comes on the day when the day finally catches up with the length of the night. From here on, light grows at the expense of dark and the days grow warmer, the evenings start later, and I am able to work in harmony with the rest of the world.

What a long strange trip it's been...

to borrow a line from one of the songs that runs through my head whenever I am on the road.

Driving California takes a lot of time. I don't actually know how long the state is in miles; but in hours, from here north you can drive more than six hours without running out of state, and the same six hours won't get you to the Mexican border on the south. The state is more than fourteen hours long; in the time it would take to go from end to end, I could have driven from Boston to Chicago.

Which I realize doesn't mean that these two distances are the same. The size of a space measured in time has no direct relationship to the length that might be measured by a surveyor.

That was especially obvious as we rambled in a loose circuit from here to Santa Barbara and back. The Salinas valley stretches out forever, seeming an endless succession of fields nestling in the loops of the river. As we drive through here, the 70 mile an hour speed limit apparently the minimum for locals and truckers, we can see bands of rain and sunlight for miles ahead. Driving north through this slow terrain, we decided to leave our normal route through the Santa Cruz mountains and instead followed the Carmel valley northwest.

In truth, the time it took to reach Carmel along this route was far less than the Santa Cruz way would have taken, especially since we would doubtless have run into the ironically named rush-hour traffic, falling into lanes of cars inching forward painfully slowly. But as the miles rolled by on what at times was a one-lane road, deserted for tens of miles not just by other cars, but even any livestock, the fifty plus miles of this diagonal line taken at 30 miles per hour seemed to last for most of the afternoon. Around each new bend, live oaks covered in California's version of Spanish moss, fields of native chaparral and grassy pastures succeeded one after another. Where the road cut through the rocky hillside, thin beds of sandstone folded over themselves, or standing tipped almost vertical, gave way to cobbles and pebbles eroding out from loosely consolidated clay. More than any part of our journey, this new segment of road seemed vast and the possibility that it might simply go on and on hovered over us.

In contrast, driving across the hills from Half Moon Bay to San Mateo as the sun went down behind us over the Pacific Ocean seemed to take no time at all: charging back into the Bay Area traffic maelstrom erasing the sense of peace that the Pacific, grey and churning, nonetheless created. As the sun sank low each evening we spent on the ocean-- Half Moon Bay, Carmel, Cambria, Santa Barbara-- the most distant edge of the water turned glossy and silver. After the rain swept through, clearing the air of all dust, whitecaps were clear across the entire width of these bays, striking distant cliffs and rocks offshore.

One ocean, the same everywhere, yet constantly different. In the moonlight deep indigo blue crested in whitecaps as stylized as a Japanese print. In the honey light of the setting sun, where San Gregorio Creek stained the Pacific with a perfect semi-circle of brown sediment, rings of pure turquoise and aqua led out to the grey edge of the sky. With the full sun briefly shining from an almost artificial blue sky dotted with white puffs of clouds, ocean reflecting blue and white and grey and pink and yellow as the morning sun streamed down over the mountains to the east.

What remains: a line of whelks, most bone white, one showing flecks of brown. A banded stone, washed by the ocean. A piece of coral, tumbled so long in the surf that the facets made where branches broke off are glassy to the touch. The sound of the ocean, not trapped in the shells but in my memory. Rain in sheets joining sky and ocean. The spectrum of color briefly shimmering on the right. And everywhere green.