On August 24th at 3:20am, an earthquake struck Napa, California.  Cabinet doors flew open.  Bottles and glasses tumbled onto tile floors.  Containers of  leftovers jumped from refrigerator shelves onto floors.  Outdoor sculptures walked.  Bricks fell from a chimney injuring a sleeping boy.

The currency of injury in a disaster is commonly calculated in dollars, that is, millions of dollars.  The soft calculation of human vulnerability eludes quantification.

I’m currently in Napa, fourteen days post-earthquake, in my friends’ great room.  Their broken glass and sticky food mess is now a tale for dinner conversations.  The gas fireplace in the corner, although twenty inches from its proper perch, looks solid, the only evidence of its displacement a gouged hickory floor.  Fruit trees, vineyards, and soft hills stretch northward and disappear.

We feel safe, on solid ground.  We hike.  Our conversations weave through travel tales, recipes, grandchildren antics.  Yet, the effects of the earthquake show in the Napa Register feature articles, the portable water tank in the driveway, and a repairman’s arrival — like flies at the table.

I hate to say it, or even think it, but an earthquake event does reveal how annoying are flies at a picnic table, how frustrating are cancelled flights, and how worrisome are droughts, not to mention the awful results of betrayals and vitriolic outbursts out of the mouths of people with whom we share space — on airplanes, in grocery lines, at family tables.

“I just can’t go there,” says a favorite friend.  Exactly.  Why walk through a chasm when you can walk along a clear path?  “What’s done is done,” says my brother.  “I stick to now.”

Forward, my friends.  Let’s go forward, I say.

“If you fall on your face, you’re still moving forward.”  — Victor Kiam.

When I was a child and summertime shifted to school time, I rebelled mightily.  My mother would  do everything but pour ice water on me to raise me from my bed.  I fussed about my clothes.  I didn’t like this color or that sock.  My shoes were too clunky.  I didn’t need a jacket.  I dawdled at breakfast. I drug my feet right to the front door and down the sidewalk, across Hillside Drive, down the steps and past the estate along the shaded road leading to Hoover Elementary School.

My mother sent me out the door with a kiss and good wishes for the day, closed the door, prayed I would actually arrive at school, and waited for the principal’s phone call. In those days we children walked to neighborhood schools.  No one worried about our being abducted.  We children all converged onto one safe road that led past an estate whose grounds looked something like Calloway Gardens.  

The estate’s grounds captivated me.  I knew every hidden entrance, every hole in the fence, every break in the shrubbery.  I allowed the estate gardens to abduct me on warm, sunny mornings.  It was easy to succumb and slip away from my schoolmates and brothers.  I’d sit down to tie my shoe or hang back while the others walked on ahead.  Like Peter Rabbit I’d slip through shrubbery or squeeze through a gate to explore winding garden paths through boxwood mazes and perennial beds until the gardener caught me at the koi pond.

The gardener was a quiet Japanese man who, in broken English, always asked me why I wasn’t in school.  I’d usually lie and say school was closed or school was opening later.  Who knows what went on in the background.  The mistress of the estate surely played a role.  Perhaps she was the one who called Mr. Lyons, the principal, each time.

Mr. Lyons would eventually appear and walk me to school and my classroom.  On my worst day-dreamy days, I’d do nothing but draw doodles all over my papers, write poems, or plot my next escape.  I was eight years old and long term consequences about being unprepared for the world of work meant nothing to me.  I was already reading Mother’s books and Daddy’s newspapers.  Worksheets and beginner books bored me.

My sweet, cuddly second grade teacher once left her notebook on her desk.  I saw her notes on me.  I was apparently socially awkward, withdrawn, and recalcitrant.  I preferred painting endlessly at the classroom easel and writing limericks.  She had difficulty getting me to focus.  I stared out the window.  I wanted to skip recess.  I passed all my tests and scored high on the California Achievement tests but wasted time in class.

My witchy, anxious-ridden third grade teacher slapped me for refusing to read aloud “Run, Spot, run. Stop, Spot, stop.” books.  This stinging event happened in front of my reading circle group.  I ran home and refused to ever return to school, ever again!

The slapping must have been the final straw for everyone.  Mother put me in her Chevy and drove us to school where I sat in a reception area while she talked to Mr. Lyons in his office.  Thereafter, I attended third grade at Hoover Elementary as Mr. Lyon’s special student in his office at my very own special desk.

Sometimes I still dawdled, but not so much. Sometimes I slipped into the estate garden but only to walk a purposeful detour along its more interesting paths to school.  I didn’t want to be late and I didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Lyons.

My step-daughter Michelle and I were visiting on the phone in May when she surprised us with this: “We received a recall notice for our van. Guess what? Something is wrong with the park shift lock!”

My head quickly shifted to a scene in our driveway five years ago. Our three-year-old grandson Jacob had climbed into the van behind the driver’s wheel and succeeded in releasing the park shift lock. The van rolled forward on the incline while Jacob steered it toward his father and grandfather who were standing next to the greenhouse. Jacob’s dad ran toward the van, opened the driver’s side door, and mashed down the emergency brake at the last second. Jacob’s grandfather, by crab walking sideways and pushing against the van’s hood, managed to get out the way just before the van stopped against the edge of the greenhouse.

“Dad, I was driving!” Jacob shouted.

With a catch in his voice Grandfather mumbled, “Once I was run over by a bicycle but never before by a van!”

Dad didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. “Jacob, what were you doing? How did you get your foot on the brake? Are you okay? I told you not to get in the car!”

We tried to sort it out. Jacob didn’t appear to be precocious. He was just a little feller with an adventurous spirit. Maybe he stepped on the brake pedal and moved the shift lever. His dad thought perhaps he himself had failed to put the car in park, not that that idea made sense.

Since no one was injured, we breathed sighs of relief, rebuilt the edge of the greenhouse planter, and admonished Jacob for climbing into the car to pretend drive. The incident joined other family lore about mishaps and unsolved mysteries.

Note, we never once wondered if the vehicle had a faulty shift lock. See how trusting we are about auto manufacturers? Since we average 15,000 miles per year in our Toyotas, Acuras, and Hondas, we need to feel safe in them. Safety recalls happen to other people.

But here it is, published in September 2013, the answer to an oddity which could have turned deadly had circumstances shifted slightly: a steeper incline, a locked driver’s side door, a crippled grandfather. Five years had passed between our incident and the recall notice. In our denial we had failed to report the incident and thus are a bit chagrined by our naïveté.

________
Toyota Announces Voluntary Recall of Certain Sienna Vehicles

September 26, 2013
TORRANCE, CA September 26, 2013 – Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc. today announced that it will conduct a voluntary safety recall involving approximately 615,000 Sienna minivans from Model Years 2004-2005 and 2007-2009 to address problems with the shift lever assembly.

Because of the potential for damage to the shift lock solenoid installed in involved vehicles, there is a possibility that the shift lever could be moved out of the “P” position without the driver depressing the brake pedal. This could result in a vehicle roll-away.

All known owners of the subject vehicles will be notified by first class mail to return their vehicles to a Toyota dealer for replacement of the shift lock solenoid with a new one.

Detailed information is available to customers at http://www.toyota.com/recall and by calling the Toyota Customer Experience Center at 1-800-331-4331.

Robert Frost left us thinking about two paths converging and our taking the less traveled one. I’ve always wanted to discuss this idea with the poet. One path coverages with another so continuously, finding a less traveled one could be as elusive as containing a cloud.

I’ve placed a photo at the bottom of the page of a less traveled road. Deer graze along its edges. Ranchers drive Ford 250’s from mile section to mile section. Sportsmen hunt in the adjacent fields. Electric poles and barbed wire line the roadway. The road itself has been well groomed, graded and graveled.

Less traveled compared to the highway three miles to the west and less traveled than the street I live on, this road is not silent. I hear my shoes crunching on the roadbed. The “bobwhite” calls of quail and the gobble of a turkey mix with birdsongs. Tall grass rustles in the pastures.

The people who live along this road go to their grandchildren’s ball games, care for ailing neighbors, manage flood control, teach school, repair machinery, support their churches, and buy groceries. With every use of this road to town, to the funeral home, to church, to school, go people with plans and concerns.

The people I know along this road have chosen to live here because they grew up nearby, worked elsewhere, and returned to open a B&B on a hill overlooking a small lake. That’s why I know them. We stay at their B&B.

This isn’t a road in a place I would choose to live. I like city life and its stimulating choices. But I also like retreats where I can feel centered. I like knowing I can catch a plane, rent a car, and drive three hours to be at this quiet but not silent place with its less traveled road, with its deer, quail, and wild turkeys, with its rolling pastures and sweeps of wild flowers.

In the city the wheels in my head barely halt even when I sleep, but in this country place where people are spaced miles apart and the horizon stretches into forever, my mind turns off. I can sit quietly without jumping up to do chores. Here I am not in charge of clean linens, or breakfast, or weeding. Here I don’t maintain the lane or manage the fishing dock.

Believe, me. I find God everywhere, not just at quiet retreats. I, however, sometimes need to drop my organized life in order to feel how spiritually intact I really am.

We are on hugging terms with our hosts who are tethered to this place of refuge. “Alice,” I said, “thank you for making such a place for us and others. It is work, I know, but it is also a gift.”

As for Robert Frost, I want to say, if I were coming out of the woods on a snowy evening, I, driven by curiosity, might also choose the less traveled road, but not always. Sometimes I have had to travel along worn pathways to get to a less traveled one.