Skyline Boulevard<\/a>), I parked and started walking. Up onto Skyline I went and turned north for San Francisco.<\/p>\nI told myself I’d either walk to San Francisco and disappear into the growing street scene, abandoning the car, family, and all normal life, or I’d turn around, walk back to the car, drive home, and get a job.<\/p>\n
The walk would decide.<\/p>\n
I don’t know what I was thinking. I knew San Francisco was 60 miles away. I had no backpack or tent. I probably had a canteen of water and maybe an apple and a packet of crackers in the embroidered burlap bag one of my friends had made me. I surely had no money. I can’t imagine what I thought I was up to.<\/p>\n
All I knew was that I’d walk until I did<\/i> know. Something would tell me which course I was supposed to take.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
Skyline Boulevard was (and to my surprise, still is) rural and forested even though it borders one of the country’s biggest metro areas. It follows the coastal mountain ridge from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. In some clearings, as you trek north, you can see the Pacific Ocean on one side and the smoggy sprawl of Silicon Valley on the other.<\/p>\n
It was a peaceful refuge from the sterile suburbanization I’d grown up in. <\/p>\n
It was also long, hot, and tiring.<\/p>\n
After a few miles, it really began to dawn on me that 60 miles is a long, long way. After a few more, I felt hungry and dusty and footsore. After a few more … I did the inevitable and turned back. My aching feet sent me more of a message than any mystical “voice” ever did.<\/p>\n
The very next day I found a job<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
It was a horrible job. The kind everybody has to have once, if only as a reminder of what you don’t want to spend your whole life doing.<\/p>\n
My boss at the Burr-gr-Freez, Leonard L. Dweeblputz (not his real name, or the real name of the drive-in, but close enough in spirit), was foul and repugnant. Three or four times an hour he’d reach down and ostentatiously adjust his privates in front of all us little girly employees. If we dropped a hamburger patty on the floor, he made us pick it up and put it back on the grill. And — trust me on this — if you’re ever tempted to order a chocolate-covered banana at a low-budget little dive … um, don’t. Just don’t.<\/p>\n
I got fired after five weeks for calling in “sick” on a sunny Sunday (along with every other teenage layabout in Leonard’s employ, I gather) and was not sorry to lose that job. Not one bit.<\/p>\n
One of my buddies quit a week later by making up an extra-extra big sof-serv cone and flinging it on Leonard’s shoes. Yeah, that was what that job inspired.<\/p>\n
But during my brief and unlamented career as a counter girl, one of the other “here this week and gone the next” employees happened to mention this book called Atlas Shrugged<\/i>. I’d seen it lying around on an end table of some family whose kids I used to babysit, but reading books that parents might read was not my style. I’d paid no attention to it.<\/p>\n
I’d have continued to pay no attention to it except that this fellow Burr-gr-Freez counter girl described it as “a book about what happens when all the intellectuals and artists go on strike.”<\/p>\n
Completely wrong and right up my alley. Read it. And life was never the same.<\/p>\n
So my summer-day attempt to listen for the voice of God up there on Skyline Boulevard led me to a godawful job. Which led me to a novel written by a godless Russian philosopher. Which changed my life.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
One other little thing happened up there on Skyline Boulevard. It really was a little thing and I mention it only in passing. <\/p>\n
There was some sort of private school up there. The buildings, as I recall, were geodesic domes that the students had helped build themselves. I knew domes were cool. But my only<\/i> concept of school — and school students — was what I’d gotten from 12 years in government institutions. While some individual kids were nice or interesting, in mobs they were savage. And had often been savage toward me, the “different,” artsy, misfit type. (And that was something you could tell about me in those days, even at a quick glance.) I literally had no concept that all schools and all kids weren’t like the ones I’d endured. Even schools made of geodesic domes. I thought the buildings were different, but not the people.<\/p>\n
While I was walking up there, the bus from the school came trundling toward me. Seeing me, kids started leaning out the windows. I was all too familiar with that routine. I put my head down and braced for the insults, catcalls, and maybe even thrown objects.<\/p>\n
Instead, as the bus lumbered by, I was greeted with cheers and waves and an overwhelming outpouring of friendliness. <\/p>\n
The bus had passed me before I was able to look up in wonder and realize what had happened.<\/p>\n
I felt bad for not returning the cheer. But later I realized it was the first sign I ever got that the outside world — even the outside world of schoolkids — wasn’t as nasty as it had always seemed to me. The first sign that maybe there was hope for good things from people, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I hadn’t thought about this in years. Then yesterday while sitting on an old-growth log at the end of a gravel road, I remembered it. Now it won’t leave me alone. That’s always a sign I’m supposed to write it down, whether I want to or not, so here goes. —–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mind-and-spirit","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}