I’m back from a two-week vacation in my homeland, inasmuch as I have one. I had gotten the idea to go a few months ago, partly because I wanted to see family and friends, partly to shake myself out of the torpor I’d fallen into in Washington. After we sold my grandmother’s house, I was ready to settle in and take it easy for a while, and I did: eating too much, drinking too much, and watching too much TV. The scarcity of blogging over this period was largely because there wasn’t much interesting to say.

I realized, after a while, that I had to get up and try to rebuild my life, but for some reason I never had the appetite for it. I’m sure part of this was the trouble that was continuing to plague my family — my brother-in-law’s lymphoma, my sister’s thyroid condition, and various other problems that have developed. And unlike with the grandmother situation, there really wasn’t anything I could do to help. So it’s hard to get excited about doing anything, when I can’t be doing what I wish I were doing. But also, in our age when people can choose their extracurricular activities, they tend to form them around their passions — mountain biking, philosophy, chess, Jesus, or whatever — and I seem to have no passions left. Going to California was, in a way, like visiting my old self, back when I had them.

I flew into San Francisco, and when I arrived I realized I’d been away so long that the scenery looked distinctly alien to me. I remember back in the ’70s, in the first few years after we moved there, my mother would sometimes remark on how strange some part of the landscape looked — the hills that turned gold in the summertime from dried-up grass, the high fog in a sheet a hundred feet above the ground — which seemed perfectly ordinary to me. But looking at the city from the airport’s elevated people mover, I saw what she meant. In my mind’s eye, both California and Washington are covered with greenery; but I forget how bare and dessicated California’s plant life is, epitomized by the palm tree, that great tufted needle that provides neither shade nor shelter. It’s beautiful in its way, but it takes some getting used to. On the other hand, going east never seemed to take much of an adjustment. I imagine that’s because all of us Californians grew up with an idea of a “normal” landscape that looks eastern, or even European. I remember as a child learning the signs of the four seasons — autumn leaves, winter snows, etc. — that I almost never saw in real life.

Early in my trip I visited a cousin in Healdsburg, a small town in northern Sonoma County. I had never been there before — strange to think now how the northern edge of my universe used to be somewhere in Terra Linda — but the ecosystem was much the same as in Marin, with that familiar summer smell of dry meadow grass, and Himalayan blackberries growing wild for anyone willing to brave the thorns. The Bay area, unlike Washington, was having an unusually cool summer. It’s hard to convey to outsiders with “sunny California” in their heads just how chilly and gray S.F.’s summers are even in normal years, and this year it just sort of gave up and started impersonating British Columbia. I was prepared for this — I remember the morning I dressed for the flight, noticing how odd it was to put on socks for the first time in months — but it was still kind of a shock to the system. I remember one evening I did laundry, and hung up some of the clothes in my closet to dry; in the morning they had barely changed, as the house had spent the night enveloped in sea fog.

In San Francisco I also visited the California Academy of Sciences, one of my favorite places when I was a child, which had been completely rebuilt since my last visit there. I went to a lot of science museums on my road trip two years ago, and I recognized the changes as part of larger trends: more high-tech, more interactive, more ecological, and lower on cathedral-like open space. It was hard to accept that my old neoclassical museum was gone, but there were some cool additions. Pathways led you through an ersatz mangrove swamp, where uncannily large sharks and rays swam beneath your feet. The African Hall had most of the same dioramas, but they moved in some live animals to illustrate the variety of habitats there, including their longtime flock of South African penguins. And, though the carpeting didn’t exactly go with the pristine marble hall, it sure helped mute the yelling children.

The alligator pit — now called the “Southern swamp habitat” — now had an albino alligator, which was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. The building now also has a landscaped roof that visitors can walk around on. Mostly it’s covered with tough, uninteresting ground cover, but they designed it with window-covered mounds that, according to the signs, are meant to echo San Francisco’s hilly landscape. To me, what they most recalled was the old Zeiss projector that used to be in the center of the planetarium, which has now gone digital. I understand why the technology is obsolete, but — but!

After five days of tramping around the Bay area, I drove to L.A. Staying on the PMC email list can come in handy, and that’s how I landed a house-sitting gig in Pasadena for the week. The house belongs to Rob Muthiah, former pastor and current Azusa professor, and being there reminded me of both the good and the bad of the church experience. I had been to the house for the last small group I attempted to be in, which was studying the epistle to the Colossians along with Colossians Remixed. I didn’t like Colossians Remixed, and it sort of overshadowed Colossians itself, so I gave up on the group after a few sessions. But after that, when I went on my road trip, Rob told his parents in North Dakota to put me up if I ever went through there; and they did, feeding me baloney sandwiches and giving me the run of the house when they took off on a preplanned trip somewhere. That almost unthinking generosity is one of the things I miss most, in this untrusting town.

The house itself had a kind of wholesome, idyllic feel to it. Unlike with most California houses, the original builder had chosen to sacrifice square footage for the sake of the back yard, which takes up about half the property and is shaded by a magnificent live oak. It’s a tiny house for a five-person family, but the yard clearly functions as a living space, with patio furniture, toys, a firepit and a detached garage all living under the tree. That had a sort of civilized Mediterranean feel to it, as did the fact that the house’s only television was tucked away in a closet, while the small living room was dominated by a piano and a pile of percussion instruments.

In Pasadena the weather turned hot again, and I took more than one opportunity to run off to the beach. There, California starts showing the character that the tourists know it for. I remember walking the sidewalk near Venice Beach behind a woman who was wearing, by God, Daisy Dukes with a bikini on top. And sun-kissed skin so hot it was getting reddish at the shoulders. And a pink purse, and cowboy boots. As I walked along behind her, marveling and just how short shorts can get on someone with no hips, she almost got plowed into by a bronze young man on a bicycle. He apologized, but she smiled at him, and he looked pleased to have attracted the attention of such a vision.

The beach itself has a parking lot surrounded by a simple wooden fence; and as I walked by it one evening, I saw a man in a kungfu outfit and straw hat climb atop one of the fenceposts, and stand there in deep concentration, as if gathering himself. As I watched discreetly, he abruptly took off running along the thin edge of the fence’s planking, and went about ten yards before he dropped off. It would have been cool to say he was some kind of martial-arts master, but he looked like he was having trouble keeping his balance. He got back on the fence though, and tried again. He was, I suppose, practicing.

But anyway, I didn’t do much sightseeing in L.A. My main business was seeing people I knew. In many ways, the relative lack of passions on my part made it easier. I went to church, and had deep conversations with friends, and hung out with my old boyfriend, and was aware of a lot of things coming up that used to frustrate me that didn’t really bother me any more. It made it easier to appreciate the good things, but I knew the frustrations were because I was really trying before, and now I was just passing through.

My mellow got a bit disturbed when I had breakfast with Telford, on my last day in California. I hadn’t seen him since the first day of my road trip, and I was wondering why he hadn’t updated his website since then, and had barely published anything. (OK, there was a book, but given the pace of publishing that was surely done by then.) There has, in fact, been a lot of drama going on in his life, which I don’t feel at liberty to discuss, but all the catching-up led to an intense three-and-a-half-hour breakfast. And it didn’t surprise me that Telford, of all the Christians I know, made the most direct effort to get me to come back to the church. When someone looks soulfully into your eyes and tells you the church needs your gifts, it feels scroogy to decline. But I also knew that I had been there, and done that. Only God knows what he wants from me, if he wants anything.

And then a long journey home, and then back to the grind. Where does all this leave me? Annoyingly, not very far from where I started. But I did do one thing since I got back: join Facebook. I’ve been alone too much for too long.

Let’s see, where was I? Oh yes, I had just left Santa Barbara. I went on up Highway 101 to the picturesque seaside town of Pismo Beach.

Let me say that, until this trip, I had never gone camping by myself before. My mother had always handled these things as I was growing up, and as an adult I’d never particularly wanted to camp. I like being in nature, but the camping part of camping — pitching a tent, sleeping on the ground, and worst of all, having no plumbing — had never particularly appealed to me. But I knew that traveling for three months on no income could get awfully expensive, so I called upon the PMC network and borrowed or bought the equipment, up to and including the tent.

The tent was loaned to me by a man approaching middle age, who had used it years earlier on his bicycle trip to Alaska. (Such jockitude is remarkably common at PMC, as bookish as everyone is.) When he’d first offered it to me, he was careful to set low expectations for it, saying, “Well, it’s a tent. It’ll keep the rain off.”

When I first left L.A. I stopped by his house and picked it up. He wasn’t there, but his wife was, and she attempted to show me how to put it together. Except it had been so long since she’d done it that she couldn’t really remember, and her five-year-old son was “helping,” which only made things more confusing. I was filled with dread when I tried to pitch it at Carpenteria Beach, but somehow it went up quite easily. It was a sort of modified umbrella design, with two curved rods crossing over the top and two supporting rods that bowed out sideways. I only put in three of them, but it seemed like enough to hold up the tent, so I slept in it peacefully enough, given the trains and all.

So I was pretty confident when I got to Pismo Beach. Although my first problem was finding the campground. Unlike in Carpenteria, there were a number of them to choose from, in varying degrees of development, and some were already full. But eventually I found one, which I think was also in a state park, separated from the beach by a row of trees. It was also pretty busy, and I felt a bit self-conscious walking by the other campers in my Starbucks-in-Santa-Barbara outfit. But I found a bare site, looking rather open and exposed but habitable enough.

I decided that since the first raising of the tent was so easy, I’d try to do it the proper way, which was to put in all four rods as it lay flat and then pop it up. That was how the tent’s owner had done it, his wife told me; he could get it up in five minutes. So I figured I should be able to do that, and as usual, pride goeth before a fall.

I got lost in the confusion of sleeves that ran across the tent, and had to pull rods out and try again. It grew darker. My wrist started to itch. I realized mosquitoes were buzzing all around me, and that patch of thick grass behind the campsite must be swamp. Perhaps that was why no one had claimed my spot before. And then I heard a train rumble by. After the previous night I had sworn that I would not camp next to railroad tracks ever again, but here they were deviously hidden by trees.

It kept getting darker, and harder to see what I was doing. I did not have the means to light a fire. And so, with a mounting sense of humiliation, I forfeited the $20 entrance fee, gathered up the tent (I would not realize until much later that I’d left a rod behind) and headed into town to look for a motel.

I was still conscious of cost, so I sought out a slightly run-down motel that was off the main road, with the requisite Indian guy manning the counter. I asked him if he had a room available, and he asked me how many people were in my party.

“It’s just me,” I said.

He gave me the strangest expression, which I’ll never forget. He stared at me and drew back slightly, looking shocked and almost … disgusted. As if I’d put in a special request to stock it with wall chains and Vaseline. But he recovered himself and checked his computer, and told me all he had left was a room with two beds for $85.

That’s about as cheap as it gets in these California tourist towns, so I told him I’d take it. He asked me if I wanted to see the room first.

I hadn’t expected that question. (It’s not unusual with cheap motels, as it turned out.) “Um… sure.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he said, and disappeared out the back door.

I was getting freaked. Why was he acting so strangely? What had I done wrong? And for the second time that evening, I fled the scene. I jumped into my car and drove off without meeting him, which turned out to be just as well because I was illegally parked.

I found another motel, this one rather nicer actually, for the same price. I lay down on the bed and tried to reassure myself that this whole comedy of errors didn’t mean that I was a total idiot. I was just learning, I told myself. You make these mistakes, you pay the money, and that way you learn not to do it again.

This came to be a theme on the road, as much as anything else. By leaving my routine life I was in some ways liberated, but I was also leaving my field of competency. I had come to L.A. as a northern Californian, a business reporter who didn’t know anything about business, and later a churchgoer who didn’t know anything about church. But after nine years, I had earned a certain seniority, not a high station in life but respectable enough. Now — I saw clearly for the first time — all that was gone. I was back to the beginning, learning everything anew.

It occurred to me that this might be harder than I thought.

I spent my first night on the road — May 1 — at Carpinteria State Beach near Santa Barbara.

That sentence seems almost unbearably romantic, and in a way it was. After the nightmare of disentangling myself from my apartment and my landlord, I set up my tent in twenty minutes, and felt strangely free from the worries of shelter. It was a little less romantic, though, when I realized that the beach was right next to a railroad crossing, and the train-horns blasted periodically until one a.m.. So I was a little bleary when I got up in the morning, put on incongruously citified clothes, folded up my tent, and went to a Starbucks to meet Telford Work.

I hadn’t really talked to him in over a year, and I hadn’t seen him in the flesh in three. But back in December he’d come across my post about his book — much to my surprise, since he’d long insisted he didn’t have time to read blogs — and had sent me a friendly email, not actually discussing the subject of the post but seeming to assure me that there were no hard feelings. So as I was planning my trip, I called him and set up an appointment.

We spent a while catching up, and talking about my decision to wander for three months. I had been a little worried that he’d disapprove, but in fact, he was envious. I encountered that reaction a lot, actually. I guess a lot of people, burdened by responsibilities, harbor a secret dream to chuck it all and throw things to God, or to fate.

We couldn’t seem to avoid having a theological discussion, however, and this time I was preoccupied by the issue of reciprocity. I’d been thinking about it since about a month earlier, when I’d talked with a church friend about my urge to travel. I said that, among other things, it might have something to do with my creeping sense of estrangement from the church. People had always been so warm and giving towards me, but lately I’d felt as though people were pulling away, and didn’t seem to have time for me.

She said, kindly but straightforwardly, that people needed more reciprocation. I had been asking a great deal of my friends and hadn’t been giving that much in return. I said I wanted to, but I never felt there was anything I could do for them; I feel like I don’t have much to give really. She said, simply, “You should ask.”

They were hard words, but seemed to get to the meat of the matter. I felt like Telford and the Mennonites and other Christians that I know had done so much for me, and had never asked for anything in return. And yet, at the same time, they ask for everything. Or rather, their invisible master, on whose behalf they gave and gave of themselves, wants my soul.

I told Telford, as we sat in the coffee shop, that I didn’t believe in sola gratia, at least not as it is usually understood these days. Gifts are, in one sense, free; but in fact if you think about how gifts operate in real life, they come with a great web of social pressures and expectations attached. In fact, as in the parable of the ten thousand talents, an unwarranted gift can make a person more obliged rather than less.

It is not, however, particularly acceptable to say this among Christians, so I wasn’t surprised when Telford disagreed with me. He did not like how manipulative I was making God sound. But I wonder if, really, it is even possible or desirable for human beings to relate outside of some code of reciprocity. I told Telford, in fact, that I felt that the one-sided nature of our own relationship had poisoned it, and was the ultimate reason why we hadn’t been talking.

He disagreed with that too. There was nothing wrong, he said, it was just that he’d been overstretched and needed to spend more time with his family. I’m sure that was true enough — he’d been overstretched ever since I’d met him — but I haven’t heard a word from him since our meeting in May, and because I was always the taker and not the giver there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. And one impression that left me, that perhaps partly explains why I’m in my grandmother’s attic right now, is that ultimately no ties are stronger than those of blood.

Yet since then, the church has only done more for me. They loaned me camping equipment and moving help as I prepared for the trip, and offered shelter and more moving help after I returned and relocated to Washington, and prayers all the way along. And I wrestle with a debt I feel like I can never repay. It’s a lot like the U2 lyric: “I’ll give you anything that you want, except the thing that you want.”

How much giving is worth a soul?

It was in November that I woke up one morning with the conviction that I should leave town. At first, the internal commandment was extreme: quit your job, give away your belongings, and go on the road. But I don’t feel so spiritually attuned as to trust all my impulses like that, so I waited, and thought about it, and discussed it with people. I decided that it would probably be better to take leave rather than quit, and that, at any rate, the onset of winter wasn’t a good time to wander the country outside of coastal California. So I waited. And yet the urge stayed with me, a constant itch.

On the weekend of MLK day, I decided to go to Joshua Tree National Park. Readers with long memories may recall that the first time I went there, I was awed but a bit intimidated by its desolation. I went back there a few more times, though, and I started warming to the place. And on that weekend, it really did seem like a place to go out and meet God.

Going there on a holiday weekend, however, reminded me that it was less a biblical wilderness than a tourist attraction. When I went to Hidden Valley, one of its most magical trails, it was bustling with families, their children shouting the way children do. Why is it that only grownups seem to crave silence? I wondered. Perhaps for children, favorite places are to be climbed over and explored, not admired in silent awe. And if silent awe strikes you, no amount of noise from other kids will make a difference.

Behind the Hidden Valley campground I saw a vast plain, Lost Horse Valley. It was the densest forest of Joshua trees in the park — dense by desert standards, that is, which means that you can walk freely among them like sculptures in a museum. In fact, the desert is filled with things that look like trails, rivers of pale sandy earth winding between the trees and mesquite bushes; and one of them seemed to come up to where I was standing.

I started off, knowing that what I was following was probably not a real trail. It didn’t bother me though, because on the broad open plain I could see the giant rocks that framed Hidden Valley wherever I went.

Despite the sweeping views, the desert can also feel oddly like a giant room, especially on a day in January when it’s room temperature. The sandy ground seems like the floor of a barn, or a circus. I meandered about, sometimes aiming for a particularly large and handsome tree, wondering what types of creatures I might run into. The ground, in fact, was so carved with burrows that at times it felt like walking on a honeycomb. I was afraid some of them belonged to tarantulas. That’s my biggest fear in the desert — tarantulas.

Because it had rained recently, though, I came to feel like much more of a threat to these underground creatures than they to me. Often when I stepped near a hole, the burrow would collapse under my feet. I started to feel guilty about destroying these animals’ homes, so I turned back toward the great rocks.

I moved on in this desultory way, still dodging tourists. Eventually I came to the south end of the park, at Cottonwood Springs. This region has no Joshua trees, and looks more like the desert of Western movies, a land of scattered shrubs and small cacti. A trailhead begins at an oasis of fan palms, and winds slowly up a hill.

As I walked up the hill, my legs felt tired. I was out of shape. Since I’d stopped dating John I hadn’t gone hiking as much, and hadn’t been going to the gym as much to keep myself in shape for hiking. On the right side of the path, as it rose, the land began to fall away. I looked down and saw something that looked like another trail.

I knew, again, that it was probably not a trail. But it was so invitingly low, and flat, and it seemed to be heading back to the parking lot at the oasis.

The lower path was broader and flatter than the trail, and had steep slopes on either side, adding to the odd feeling of being indoors while I was outdoors. It was entirely devoid of people, and utterly quiet. I began to suspect that it was, in fact, a dry streambed. I suspected this even more strongly when my way was blocked by a pile of boulders, looking as though they had washed there in a flood.

But out of some cussedness, I squeezed past them and went on. I knew I was heading back toward the parking lot. I was convinced I could find my way back, if I could just find I place where I could get up and see beyond these banks.

As I walked, my eye caught a dot of color on the ground. I stopped and peered at it. It was a flower, tiny, purple, and perfect.

There were not supposed to be flowers yet. The pamphlet had said wildflower season started in February. But as I went on I saw more tiny purple flowers on the ground, as well as blue ones, pink ones, vetch-like yellow ones in shrubs. The delicate beauty in the midst of stony desert was astonishing.

Finally I saw a swelling in the ground before me that I could climb. I walked up and looked around me. Desert, more desert, a ridge of hills to the right. Where was I? I did not know. And for the first time since I’d arrived at the park, I saw no sign that human beings were ever here.

I wasn’t sure what to do. Oddly enough, I didn’t think to simply turn around and go back the way I came. I took a few steps forward. Then I heard voices.

I saw them coming about fifty feet ahead of me — a small group of hikers about my age. And after a day of trying to avoid people so I could be alone with the desert, I walked straight toward them.

The seeming leader of the group — a harried-looking man with brown hair — saw me coming.

“Don’t follow us,” he said. “We’re lost.”

“So am I,” I said. “But it’s better to be lost with people than without.”

He couldn’t argue with that, so he ignored me. He and his friends discussed possible ways back. They thought — as I did — that the parking lot was somewhere behind the ridge to the right. The question was how to get through it.

They tried one cleft between two peaks, but it was impassable. They went on and looked at another, with me still following like a duckling. They started up.

The man turned to me and said drily, “Well, you can follow us and we’ll all die. Or you can stay here and die alone.”

I said I’d rather not die alone. It occurred to me that he was just embarrassed by the whole thing. Here he’d gotten his group lost, and now another witness had come along.

He and his friends made it to the top of the pass ahead of me. He turned back to me and cried, “It’s here!” and disappeared down the other side of the slope.

The pass was not, in any way, made for the human foot. Getting up involved picking a convoluted path between boulders and thorny bushes, and getting down the other side was even more alarming, since any slip of the foot could send you tumbling down a hundred-foot slope. Because I picked my way up slowly and carefully, the other party was already out of sight as I crept downhill. I wondered, abstractly, how long it would take for me to be discovered, if I should fall. Yet strangely enough, I was not really frightened. I was just concentrating very, very hard on the task at hand — the next step, the next handhold, the next bush to disentangle myself from. And then I was at the bottom, a stone’s throw from the parking lot.

I drove back to the north side of the park and to the nearest town, found a Sizzler, and ordered a large shrimp dinner. When the plate arrived in front of me, I felt a rather unfamiliar sensation of gratitude. I’ve never been very good at gratitude, or the Christian tenet that God is always to be thanked for everything, even as he gets blamed for nothing. But at that moment, I was grateful for the park, for the trees, for the flowers, for the group of hikers, for the dinner, for being lost and found again. I felt, somehow, that it was exactly what I’d come there for.

And I knew, more surely than ever, that I was going to take my journey.