11/19/18: traffic

Monday, 11/19

Put my head down and did 500 km/310 miles from Beechworth to Bathurst (some M31, then Muttama Road to Old Gundagai Road to A41 and post M31 that was just a beautiful ride). I’m now west and a little north of Sydney, and some of the greatest motorcycle roads in NSW are just a hop and a skip away. I was informed this morning that there is something called “Schoolie” (there you go again, Australia) and it appears to be the equivalent of spring break, so presumably the Gold Coast is full of sorority ladies reading endless books so I might just wander up there and check that out. I have to bring the bike back a week from tomorrow, Tuesday, then I have a day in Sydney and fly home on Thursday the 29^th. Can hardly believe that six weeks away is down to just 10 days, but it’s been 4,000 miles of a-m-a-z-i-n-g and I couldn’t feel more fortunate to get to do this. 

Today I had my first real encounter with livestock on the road. Like, they were just hanging out there, and I for real had to eventually weave through them while they looked at me. I had a BURNING desire to get off the bike and talk to them but when this mother cow came toward me and I realized just how big these cows were (HUGE--I just looked it up and they probably weighed about 1,500 pounds each holy schnikes) I decided discretion was the better part of valor. 

No zoom, this guy just coming at me. 

Zoomed because COWS.

A car came up behind me and I waved it past because COWS. In this picture the calves's mother/guardian was just starting to chase this lil'guy down and look at how BIG these things are my goodness.

This is from Sunday night, and I held a day to reread and make sure I wanted to share it and so I did and I think I do.

Sunday, 11/18

It’s just on the verge of dusk here, and I’ve come outside with a glass of wine, some excellent bread from the Beechworth Bakery, a decent stinky cheese, some blueberries, and red, puffy eyes, because not 20 minutes ago I was sobbing, those great, big, heaving, uncontrollable sobs—I finally forced myself to stop before someone heard me and eyebrows were raised. (Don’t worry, Mother! And no, Father, it was not because you won another game—defeat only fuels the fires of my passion for victory.)

This morning I made my plan for the day: I’d read a book then go for a walk then maybe a nap, maybe a little more reading, and then bread and cheese at “home” for dinner since the restaurant here is closed on Sundays and I felt like a night in. Everything went according to plan at first, and I read Joan Silber’s Improvements on a blanket under a tree in the sunshine. I liked the book—readable stories and interesting voices—and then there will a bajillion birds on my walk and I went through town and took my time at the grocery store and wandered around a bit. A beautiful day—tons of sunshine and blue skies, and I found a bottle brush plant in the exact shade of red as the yarn I purchased yesterday (fittingly called “bottle brush red”*).

I got back to the motel and I was hot from the walk so I figured I’d rest for a minute and read through a couple of the samples of books I’ve downloaded and see if any seemed interesting. Four hours later I was bawling my eyes out. Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers is an unbelievable book—so affecting, so tender, so poignant—and I will say no more on the topic as it’s clearly too fresh what with the Kleenex still in my hand. (I cry at books ALL the time, in case this seems alarming—I can remember being at the office one day, describing to Cheryl a particularly moving scene from The Golden Compass and tearing up again just thinking about it, and someone (you know who you are, BRANDON) looking over in disbelief—“Are you crying about a children’s book?” Yes. And any of you who remember where you were when Lee Scoresby and Hester—well, I won’t spoil it for the rest of you but that is an excellent book.)

Anyway. I love books. I love stories. I love going places and meeting people and experiencing things all without having to leave my chair, and I love having thousands of these adventures literally at my fingertips, lined up one after another. I have pretty much always been this way—when I was kid, the librarians gave me a pass on the max checkout limits, and one spring break I brought an entire separate suitcase to Key West, just for books, because we were going to be there for a WEEK and do you know how many books I can read in a week? (A lot of books—I don’t think I got through all 27 that I brought but if that doesn’t tell you how nervous I was about running out of things to read I don’t know what will. I remember distinctly doing the math, over and over—7 days, 3 books a day, but then best to add two days’ more for insurance—will that be enough???)

So here’s a question I've been asked a bit: why am I here?

I had a bit of a hard time going into my senior year of college. I didn’t know what I would do post-graduation, and while everyone told me I should be a lawyer (way back then I had a smart mouth and a penchant for getting into arguments, oh, wait…), something about law school just didn’t feel right. (I’m pleased to know in retrospect that I would have made a terrible lawyer.) William and Mary had some byzantine graduation requirements that were meant to be focused on getting one a true liberal arts education, so I had gotten in the habit of padding my schedule with creative writing classes since they were always an easy A which freed up time for me to think about how Chemistry fit into a liberal arts curriculum. (ARTS, you jerks.)

Spring of my junior year, the English Department (which is where I had a work-study assignment and to say that I loved it does not even begin to get at the meaning of the word love) announced a visiting writer would be running a creative writing class the next fall and that he would choose his class from submissions only—no open enrollment. I think I’d taken every other writing class by then so in order to get some cushion in the fall, I needed to submit a story.

My beloved roomie (Hi, skfloo!) and I stayed in Williamsburg that summer, working a couple of jobs each: both of us at Paul’s and then she had shifts manning the phones at the Hospitality House, which was a fancy hotel, while I fulfilled a life-long dream working behind the register at a convenience store, Sentry, which was just on the other side of the parking lot from where we lived. We lived in a motel that had been converted into apartments, if by converted it meant that instead of charging by the night they charged by the month and there was no housekeeping. In retrospect, that was weird, as was the fact that the King & Queen Motel was fairly coveted off-campus housing and we were considered lucky to be there. We shared a room, of course, and we had a living room and a little kitchenette and we had some pretty excellent parties there plus when I got up in the morning after one of those nights, more often than not Woodlief was on our couch and so it was easy enough to sit on his legs until he woke up and made room so we could watch SportsCenter on repeat for three or four hours. Our next-door neighbors were a couple of super-seniors on the football team and they were decent guys and once a week or so we’d hear them yelling from their apartment, “WHAT TIME IS IT” and we’d go to the wall and yell “GAME. TIME.” and that meant they could come over for beers. Those were the days.

At some point, either before my junior year ended or during the summer, it is a mark of how much I assumed it would happen that I don’t remember when it did, I received notification that I’d been admitted to David Bradley’s creative writing workshop for the fall. I’d researched him, of course, which is how I recognized him when we both happened to be standing in front of the beer coolers in my Sentry one night in August. I wasn’t working, but I still bought beer there (legally, Mother!) because did I mention across the parking lot. David Bradley, was, I assume, recently arrived in Williamsburg to prepare for the semester and perhaps wondering what the fuck he had walked into as some of the campus is part of Colonial Williamsburg and so not only were there tourists taking pictures while students were sitting on the steps of the Sunken Gardens, frantically finishing homework or cramming for a test, it was also not unusual to have a class with someone who worked part-time in CW and thus came to class in uniform, on the way to or from a shift, and I do mean literally in uniform.

David Bradly was easy to recognize because he was arguably the only black person in the greater Tidewater area wearing a balding afro, a giant bushy beard, and spectacles I am pretty sure he used solely for the purpose of peering over them at people, a technique which was highly effective. We must have been pre-partying or something because, acting against type, I addressed him. “You must be David Bradley,” I said, cleverly.

“I am,” he replied, peering at me over his glasses. “Who are you?”

“I’m Casey Cornelius,” I said brightly, “I’m in your class this fall.”

He managed to peer even further over his glasses, and said slowly, “You’re Casey Cornelius?”

I admit I had been expecting this as my name could be for a lady or a gentleman and the story I’d submitted had been about baseball, so I just said “Yup!”

He looked at me again, and my hand to god this story is completely true, and looking back, if you’re going to be a visiting writer at a college you may as well go around doing shit like this, and he said “So, Casey Cornelius, what are you going to do with your life?” This is standing in front of the beer coolers in a convenience store, a convenience store which was also attached to a Subway and another true story is that as badly as I wanted to, even when there were no customers, I was not allowed behind the counter at the Subway because I was, and I quote, “not a trained sandwich artist.”

I gave him the only response I had, which had seemed to please everyone else, and said I was going to be a lawyer. He peered at me even further and then he said the words I have thought about ever since: “No. You, Casey Cornelius, you are going to be a writer.”

I don’t remember anything else about that encounter except he made a joke about how he hoped we wouldn’t have to fight over the last can of Foster’s as whoever had been working that day had clearly not been in the mood to restock the coolers, slacker, and then it was over and he was gone and I went back to the King & Queen and whatever party we were going to that night.

I’m sorry to say I didn’t acquit myself very well in David Bradley’s class—I was having a bit of a hard time in general that fall—but either my first story had been enough or he saw something in the rest of my submissions and so he encouraged me to apply to creative writing programs for grad school. I did not know there even was such a thing, but as the glossy brochures from law schools piled up on my desk (in those days, a woman with a pretty good score on the LSAT was a medium-warm commodity), I stayed in bed longer and longer, engineered a very awful break up with my very perfect boyfriend, and didn’t do much to deserve the unswerving love and compassion my best friends and roommates Shan and Goggin showed me, well, by the time I got out of bed it turned out there were only two creative writing programs still taking applications.

Going to an MFA program in creative writing didn’t make me a writer—I discovered there a passion for teaching, really—but it showed me I could write. I am giving myself little while to figure out what I want to do next, and it’s been fun to have the freedom to write like this the past few weeks. I know I want to travel more, and that I’ve enjoyed sharing this journal, and that reading The Great Believers and sobbing uncontrollably reminded me that another great passion of my life is, and has always been, stories.

And so I am here for two reasons: 1. This is the hemisphere with good motorcycling weather, and 2. The past year or so has been intense—nothing particularly interesting or dramatic, just a LOT going on and me trying to keep the plates spinning and throwing candle after candle into a bonfire and never stopping to think. So I’m here to think, to treat candles as sources of light instead of as fuel, and to air out my brain in a way that makes me happiest—on a bike, chasing animals, and learning allllllllll the fun facts.***

*I know! Red! It’s such a beautiful color and since the possum yarn I got was of a similar weight** and gray, I figured it didn’t make sense to get more gray (and there wasn’t a black dye lot), so…RED. Truly, this trip has changed me! (Not really—red had always been the only color I like.)

**Yarn weight/ply generally determines what you can do with that yarn—you don’t make a sturdy sweater out of lace-weight silk; you don’t make an intricate shawl out of workhorse wool. When I’m buying souvenir yarn I tend to gravitate to finer yarn as whatever you make from that generally signals more effort, which is why I still have some lace-weight qiviut (muskox!) yarn hanging around from a trip to Banff about 47 years ago. It’s also lavender so…we'll see. But I will always remember that trip because of it.

***I didn’t even get into this BUT the echidna is the only other egg-laying mammal besides the platypus and this whole developing of the pouch (like it’s TEMPORARY) and producing milk without having nipples—there are some weird fucking animals and I encourage you to read all about them and their adorable little selves. (Also they have no teeth!!!)

Pictures!

Sunday night's sunset in Beechworth was so lovely. I still keep going to bed before the stars really get going, though. 

This is what I mean about the unflattering road signs: I only got this picture because I was walking but what the heck, Australia.

Hahaha do these exist everywhere? AND WHY NO OXFORD COMMA YOU ANIMALS.

Legit don't understand this.

Yeah, this guy again. I have the long RokStraps so in theory I could have put him on the back...but the airport situation would likely pose a problem. :( 

SOMEDAY, LIL'KNOBBY-KNEED COW, IMA COMING BACK FOR YOU. (Did you know cattle can live for as long as 22 years???)

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