The house I am staying in has a few masks decorating the walls. There are 8 masks in 3 rooms, I believe. I thought it would be interesting to describe them. Here is the first one.

This is likely the first mask you would see. As you enter the house it is directly facing the front door. The mask is near the center of the wall of the dining area next to the door to the kitchen. It is placed at the height of top of the kitchen doorway. There is a bit of space around it, separating it from the other pieces on this wall. Also, there is another mask to the right of it near the corner. I’ll describe that mask another day.

This mask is carved from a single piece of wood, and it is old and worn. Most of its surface is rough wood, with some evidence that it was once painted or perhaps scorched or burned to darken it. The forehead is domed, almost a quarter of a sphere, and there are raised rings at the temples. Where the ears would be are two small holes on each side. Perhaps for ears, or perhaps for straps. I don’t know because I haven’t seen the back. The eyebrow is formed by a hard right angle cut that goes back to the plane of the face, where the eyes are. These are two circular bore holes close to the nose. The nose is narrow acute triangle that reaches to a rounded point. The nose also has a single small hole bored through, as though pierced. The lower part of the face descends and narrows smoothly to the chin. A small mouth is at the point of the chin below, forming an “o”. The mouth itself is chipped, no longer having a perfectly smooth o. Overall the mask is a fairly calm one with smooth lines and soft edges.

More miles more smiles. Or, in our case, less miles less weird stuff.

During the drive today, I saw a bit fewer things than expected but not anything out of statistical expectation based on yesterday’s observation.

Very succintly, yesteday the drive was 383 miles, and today it was 285 miles. Since there were 8 interesting things seen yesterday, if the rate is the same, we expect to see 6 today. I like error bars, so 6 ± sqrt(6) or 3-9 remarkable things expected.

Without further delay, here’s the report.

• The Human Bean, which in this instance is a coffee shop. That’s not the remarkable part. I distinctly recall someone on MB recently using the term, I think in some identifyably Oregon context. ⊕ Maybe I made that up. I can’t find where I saw it. Before that it was a phrase sometimes heard in my house growing up. Not much heard by me after leaving there. Maybe it’s an Oregon thing? Hard to back that up.
• “Fish Viewing Area.” This has got to be about the most Oregon (or pacific northwest) thing ever. You don’t notice these things until you’ve been away for a while and realize that you didn’t see anything like that anywhere else in all the other places that you’ve been.
• The adult shops. I was in Portland a month ago and there were quite a few. My recollection is that is actually usual. I was expecting to see some similar number on the drive this time, but there were only few, in the places I remember them being. I think I have enough to do, but I suppose I could do some counting to estimate the prevalence here vs other places.
• A whole lot of rain. Very on-brand for Oregon, but also kind of unusual for mid-May. Thank goodness for Rain-X!

Seeing 4 remarkable things is a little low, but maybe 8 was a bit high yesterday. Small numbers are trickly like that. I’ll get another shot in a couple of weeks when traveling in the reverse direction back south.

The road is a great place see things.

• A “sheisty” little train. CFNR was so maligned I think because of some graffiti on the cars?
• Shasta “Lake” looking maybe the lowest I’ve ever seen it. At the overpass just before the 705 N exit, I could see the Sacremanto river in its channel that is often under up to 50 feet of water (just eyeball guessing the high waterline depth from a speeding car). I wonder what we would get if we sized the Southwest water system today, after an additional ~80 years of weather observations?
• Mt. Shasta covered in powdered sugar, looking very nice.
• The roadside political commentary: state of Jefferson (been there for years), Biden is Weak (new one to me). Personally don’t particularly want to draw any more attention to either of those, but great big road side signage is hard to not comment on.
• And the roadside statuary: cow with calf, and the dragon. Both have been there for quite a few years now.
• Saw three small airplanes taking off in a row. The last being the slowest, but probably has the best view from a huge panoramic dome windshield.
• The huge burn scar north of Redding, it seemed to go on for miles. Not sure which fire or year that was from.
• Someone wearing what looked like an animal skin print rug, poncho style, and maybe it was a large Ikea grocery bag balanced and draped over their head? I couldn’t even see the person walking inside this getup.

Stay tuned for a similar update tomorrow from the rest of the journey.

I’ll be road tripping north today, and on past trips I noticed that some towns feel faster to get out of than others. I’m finally taking a moment here to notice it a bit more.

On past road trips I’ve noticed that different places have different departures times, and its route dependant. Some shorter, some longer. The exit tomorrow is longer, one of the longest I know. The other “longest exit” is getting off Long Island to head back upstate. Takes forever.I don’t feel like I’ve really gotten out the door until I’m on I-5 Interstate 5, USA. That’s about 1.5 hours drive from where I start when there isn’t any traffic. There is always traffic.

Something peculiar about it is that this particular exit is the fast one, even though it adds 30 minutes (according to the maps) to the total time vs another faster-in-total route. The other faster overall route takes 30 more minutes to feel like I’ve “left”, bringing it to about 2 hours. Feels like an eternity.

In looking for patterns in this, I noticed that both places I mentioned already, the Bay Area and Long Island / NYC, are very large metropolitan areas. Maybe it’s that I don’t feel that I’ve left until I’ve crossed some frontier of the metro area. That sounds like a natural thing to think. And it holds up when I think about different size places I’ve lived. It also survives the test of exiting town via the nearest frontier; in my case a southerly exit is the quickest.

But the journey began when I left my house, so what does the city have to do with it?

📝 In Writing Life Stories: How To Make Memories Into Memoirs, Ideas Into Essays And Life Into Literature by Bill Roorbach there is an exercise from chapter 1 about first sentences. These aren’t limited to the very first sentence in the piece, it could be the beginning sentence in the chapter or segment too. The goal is to look at a bunch of them, pick some personal favorites, and determine why they work.

I won’t reproduce my list in entire. These aren’t even my favorites, just ones that I wanted to comment on.

I wonder what is the speaker’s true name. Why are we using this name instead of that one? Ishmael is an exotic feeling name today, whether that was true or not in the 1850s I don’t know. It’s such a short sentence to contain all that. I think it’s a great success. My spouse disagrees.

This is a very odd place to bring our focus when the title character is such a mythically great monster. Why is he concerned about goats at all? It has a bit of whimsy. I feel like I am seeing the old ram through someone else’s eyes, with some of their thougts about it. There is background here, judgementalness and prior history with this goat in particular.

This is a very unusual wording given that we are purportedly reading a manuscript written in 1327, translated into French. And why is this what the author, a monk, is bringing our attention to? Seems very unusual, personal, a memory.

After examining first sentences more than I had before, opening sentences need a couple of things to really succeed. They need a bit of crunchy specificity (thanks Tim!). A good opening sentence has a touch of mystery. It opens the door a bit further, maybe in a surprising way on what you already know about the story. There should be a noticeable question in your mind when you read it: why is this the aspect that the author chose? It should illicit a response of curiosity, and a desire for resolution. It launches (or re-launches) the “story” in the direction that it eventually goes. The shorter the better the sentence, often times the better.

There is a companion exercise to take a similar look at my own first sentences. I still have to do that one.