The Sonoma getaway plan was to soak at a hot spring, eat well and hike up a mountain I'd eyed when I was at Chalk Hill in 2020. A slightly early anniversary trip, planned long before the calendar filled up with weekend gigs and Kwame’s work travel schedule went nuts. In recent weeks, we’ve had more than a few days of coming home mainly to do laundry and repack.
Driving up, we learned the hot springs resort where we intended to go — one of the more homey ones that allows day use without a spa treatment — wasn't opening this season due to a botched surfacing job. Instead, we headed to Sonoma Valley Regional Park to get our feet on the ground before checking in to our lodging for the night.
I finally started to relax an hour into the walk, my dark mood finally starting to crack a bit. Wildflowers, oak canopies, lush green fields and an abundance of birds — nesting American Kestrels and Red Tail Hawks! California Quail! — continue to be the best medicine these days. I just haven’t been able to shake the noxious cloud of the Supreme Court draft-opinion regarding Roe v. Wade.
I don't have an abortion story to tell, but it doesn't matter. I know plenty of women who do. As it is, old echoes of the dread I've felt at various times in the past are easy to call up. Was I pregnant? Might I be? Those days curled up, looking at the wall, wondering what I would do, playing out various scenarios, realizing very clearly I didn't want a child at that time or with that person. Not yet. Not ever, as it turned out, but my choice in the matter was always implicit.
Really, it's all of what this means for women: The deeper darker echoes of lifetimes of patriarchy. The current stark reality that our democracy feels as fragile as a house of cards. Injustice, period. I keep seeing the word “rage” bandied about and that's exactly what this feeling is.
This moment feels undeniable. Only denial is another pandemic.
"There's no Covid in Sonoma," I whispered to Kwame across the dinner table are our idyll, code for the lax masking and distancing that seemed to be the norm outside of the Bay Area. The dining room had a nice hum of people laughing and chatting, savoring wine, celebrating birthdays: A temporary bubble of ease, absent of war, pandemic and compromised Supreme Courts.
If only everyone could live in such a world.
"Days like this you should be able to get above the clouds," a ranger told us as we prepared to hike up Bald Mountain (one of more than 50 summits in the state with that name!) in Sugarloaf Ridge State Park the next day. The summit, we’d read, boasted a 360-view of Sonoma County, Marin along with much of the rest of the Bay Area.
Outside was gray and drizzly, which no one was complaining about given our moisture-starved state. The fields we walked through were bright and green dotted with purple and yellow wildflower. Creeks trickled and streamed and most of the trees were leaved out, but many had charred trunks and branches. The 2017 Nun Fire nearly burnt the entire valley we were in and nearby Kenwood and Glen Ellen to the ground.
As it turned out, the actual clouds never lifted. Our pants and shoes were soaked by the time we got to the windy mountain top where an interpretive panel keyed out the the view we couldn’t see beyond the grey mist. It was too cold and windy, too, so we went back to the trail and sat under a madrone sheltered from the wind to eat our sandwiches.
Another couple walked past us on their way up, and came down just as quickly, stopping to chat. They were visiting from Toronto, they told us, on their own mini-vacation. After marveling over how beautiful everywhere was, even without the hoped-for view, they asked how we were feeling about our country.
"What do you think is the way forward?" he asked.
"Move to your country!" I replied. We all laughed, then grew sober. “Show up, march, vote, donate….”
She told us about several friends who stopped visiting the US during the last administration.
We all shook our heads, wished each other well, then headed back down the mountain.
The following Saturday, we drove up to Mt. Tamalpais, one of those viewpoints on the Bald Mountain summit map that was hidden in the clouds. The Marin sky was bright blue, scoured by the the 25mph wind that was gusting when we pulled up to West Point Inn .
The Inn is an amazing place from a different era. Built in 1904 at the westernmost terminus of the Mt. Tamalpais Scenic Railway, there’s no electricity. Unless you have special needs — or a lot of gear — you have to hike or bike to get there. We had a lot of music gear. For a number of years now, we’ve played music for a WPI Mother’s Day Pancake Breakfast each May, one of those quirky gigs that we love doing for both its location and the whole all-hands-on-deck ethos of the volunteers who run the Inn Association. We drive up a day early, have dinner with the crew, and everyone gets up early to be ready to do their respective jobs during Sunday’s breakfast, an important fundraisers for the Inn. This would be the first such breakfast since Covid.
This year, we were assigned one of private cabins instead of an upstairs room.
"That one’s haunted," a volunteer said as she handed us the key to “The Honeymoon Cabin.” "It has a story." Then she waltzed off.
"What!" I said. Kwame was unfazed, but I was a little shaken. I grew up in a house where my dad and sisters reported seeing ghosts. For years, I went to sleep covering my ears and eyes. I didn't want to see a ghost then or now!
The cabin was down a stone walkway and had an amazing view of the entire San Francisco Bay. There was also a large, black-and-white photo of a man hanging over the fireplace.
Later that evening, over lasagna and salad, the volunteers filled us in on its history. The cabin was built by Dr. Henry Washington Dodge, one of the few male survivors of the Titanic. He originally built the cabin as a refuge from the city and his survivor's guilt. In that day and age, women and children first was still a thing. There was a lot of question as to how he managed to get into one of those lifeboats. Whether it was his shame or PTSD, Dr. Dodge committed suicide less than a year after his mountaintop cabin’s construction. In the decades since his death, a handful of visitors reported strange apparitions.
"I don't think he's around," Kwame said. And didn’t seem to be. While the wind blew all night, we slept without incident.
When I woke up Mother’s Day, the gales had subsided into the 10-15mph range by morning, the cabin was cold. Outside, it was deemed too cold and windy to play in our usual spot on the on the Inn’s porch. Instead we set up in the communal living room area and put one of the speakers out the window. Over the morning, more than 700 people would still hike or bike up, a good number of those cueing up to eat, and warm up, inside.
“If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society. ... while we celebrate modern Mother’s Day in this momentous year of 2020, it’s worth remembering the original Mothers’ Day, and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must make their voices heard.” — Heather Cox Richardson (May 9, 2020)
Spending the better half of the day playing music for the pancake breakfast felt like an apt way for me to commemorate this fraught Mother’s Day both politically and personally. My Mom was lovely and … more begrudgingly than willingly maternal. I can see now that Phyllis Jane Crverich Crooks did her best given that she was first generation, born in the middle of the Great Depression, raised during WWII, and didn’t yet have the right to her own credit card for some years after I came along.
Structure helped her cope: she scheduled our breakfast menus like our chores: MWF for cereal, Tue-Th eggs and toast, with Saturday and Sunday mornings reserved for pancakes or waffles, using the same Bisquick baking mix. Add an egg, some oil and milk and voila! I ate so many pancakes growing up that I rarely want them as an adult.
Mom was done with the enterprise by the time I was 15, when I was already finding a lot of my solace out in nature, too angry to admit I needed her. Instead, that year, I rode a bus to to Planned Parenthood to get some of helpful guidance. I thought I was responsible, but was ignorant in so many ways, mystified at the level of the clinician’s concern and care. In the decades since, my gratitude for Planned Parenthood has only multiplied exponentially.
Years later, Mom and I were JUST barely coming around to getting to know one another when she passed away. Nearly two decades later, Mother's Day is definitely complicated for me. That said, her ill-fated Catholicism, her internalized sexism, her hard death, the deep grief in the wake of losing her, all led me to Buddhism, which puts a lot of emphasis on repaying one's debts of gratitude to one's parents, no matter how thorny the relationship, for the simple and immense fact of giving you life. So yes, I sure ate and enjoyed a pancake or two today. And I took in the beautiful view and I thought of Phyllis Jane and I thanked her for my life…and I sure as heck sang my heart out. Even when the wind blew more clouds in, obscuring the view once again.
I’ve no plans to climb a mountain this coming weekend. But there is a nation-wide Women’s March this Saturday May 14, 2022, in partnership with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Ultraviolet, and MoveOn in protest of the threats to our self-determination. Let’s do this.