I’m indigenous to this continent, but I am not Native American. Unlike the wives, I pump the blood of neither Creek nor Sioux. I am a product of the distilled gene pool. I am a Jew.

But I was born in America, nourished on its produce, and I am more of here than anywhere. My favorite foods are new world natives: potato, tomato, avocado, blueberries, corn. All beans except fava. Chocolate.

I am at home here. I feel connected to the land.

The tropics are lovely, and vegetation is sweet, but that fertility mutes the conversation I want to hear. Only when I stand like a gnat on the floor of Death Valley, or sit by the redundant ocean, or crunch into a monotonous Alaskan path, do I begin to detect the dialogue between the planet and the universe.

We are lush in Northern California, but we quake. We reside at the sliding clash of two continental plates and the planet often shakes off our elaborations. We are rockbound and fissured. We edge the ocean but we are spared the music vacuum of the beach.

Or so it should be. But we clutter ourselves. We add bells and whistles and mirrors, features and feathers and automobiles, till we’ve gimmicked the visual and gummed the aural and we perform these crazy dances of disconnection, from each other and from place. Just last month:

I had almost completed my twenty-minute walk to the train station one morning, a little bothered by headache but otherwise feeling fit, when a driver pulled her car to the curb near me, to ask for directions. It was a big old car – a Chevy I think – with a weather-worn dullness to its mismatched paint and cellulite in its chrome bumpers. It had mushy shocks and it rocked toward me as it stopped.

“Excuse me: can you tell me how to get to College?”She looked Latina or Filipina. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, small-nosed, chubby-cheeked. She could be any age from thirty to forty-three.

“The street?” I asked, to distinguish it from the university. She nodded. “Oh (lord). Well, you have to get all the way to the other side of town… Let’s see: you need to turn around and go a couple of miles in the opposite direction, then head left up the hill for about half a mile…”

“So I turn up here and…?” She looked up at me with a beseeching smile and a creasing brow. I realized in that moment that she had absolutely no concept of topography. Wanted me to give her the number of streets and turns from Sacramento & Cedar to College Ave. I looked in her face and started again:

“No, no. It doesn’t matter what street. You have to turn around and go back the way you came for a ways, and then up toward those hills. See?” and I swung my right arm around and aimed behind me to where the coastal range climbs to the next county.

She wasn’t getting it. She leaned toward me and tried to look where I was pointing, but I’m sure the frame of the car window got in her way. Her world was asphalt and her controls were foot pedals. She didn’t perceive the hill-to-bay slope of the land. Meanwhile my light was green. My train doesn’t wait. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I have to go.”

(Of course it was more complicated than that. I felt bold, setting limits, but I also felt bad. She felt chagrined and then cheerfully defiant. “Fuck you very much,” she mumbled, polite in tone but under her breath, as she maneuvered her boat of a car around the corner and started, roughly, to follow my directions.

(Her name was Josie, and she was harried because she was stealing moments away from a work errand, desperately seeking a small store on College which sold her best friend’s favorite candy. Cindy was nauseated from chemotherapy, and only craved the caramels from there, and Josie was determined to purchase a quantity of the stuff for her. She didn’t have much time, though. She had to get back to her job in Oakland. She was agitated.

(It’s true she was clueless about topography, but she had other talents. She was a good friend to Cindy, a wonderful mother to her two small children, a successful wife. I didn’t accomplish anything by desisting in giving her help. Except I made my train.)