Quadruple-six. Betty the car's mileage jumped more on this trip than it likely had in the past five years, and I waited carefully for these crazy numbers to roll over!
I celebrated my longest-ever drive by cracking open, finally, this decade-old bottle of dark Speedway Stout. Now, beer this old is notorious for beginning to taste like cardboard, but for me, it was a taste geared to register as victory.
Above: A lovely old photo on Chuckanut Drive, of an early century car joining the first great wave of American road trips. Chuckanut Drive is my other, and first, favourite scenic drive, which I used to take as a commute to and from Bellingham.
But for me, a re-entry into the world of cars is not complete without addressing, re-exploring, and paying respect to perhaps the greatest "potion" of our era, and its many varieties and derivative products --- a brew of insane power, which we now totally take for granted, but which only Earth can make in its true form, with the help of time: oil.
Above: At La Brea, "wild" petroleum, a decidedly underworld substance, bubbles to the surface in sticky black cauldron-like pools toxic to most life. The energy of sunlight locked into perhaps its most condensed form, at the very end of the cycle of uptake, growth, decay and coagulation made possible by the natural drive of Life, oil congeals, binds, and hoards --- native tar traps, kills, and preserves animals and plant matter just as it binds in combustive solar fire. In contrast, water dissolves, cycles, and releases. Water supports most life, while only certain strains of bacteria can feed on petroleum.
I've felt a strange affinity to oil, in a spiritual or animus sense, for a long time. Since childhood, really, when I felt both attracted and repulsed by it as I hung around Dad while he worked. The stuff sat in jugs everywhere. And when Dad put oil in a car and the engine appeared to drink it, the effect was so visceral ....I puked!
My passion reignited in high school, when a trip to Texas due to Gram's passing coincided neatly with a petroleum science unit. After stomping about on active "grasshopper" field pumps in Texas (Mom thought I looked rather manic, and of course I did, for I was alive with discovery and the medicine of spiritual revelation), I got to see the workings of a refinery, probed my two families' oil history, and worked with an oil tycoon animus figure named Alirio Moyer.
One of the miracles of petroleum is the many forms it can take. It is part of a great spectrum, really, with gasoline and oil being somewhere in the middle of the chemical rainbow known as hydrocarbons. At the light and fluffy end is methane, a gas whose molecules have only one carbon atom, while at the heavy end is asphalt, whose molecules can have sixty carbons linked together in great chains that grip tight and only reluctantly squirm around each other.
Any given crude oil has a hybrid blend of many different hydrocarbon molecule types. Heavy stuff sinks inside a salt-dome well; any liquid ends up an average of molecule lengths in how viscous or runny it is; and gases form their own layers on top and escape at the first opportunity.
From fine and runny to ...chunk-style!
For our school petroleum unit, Dad graciously gave me a sample of the heavy variety to take to class --- or heavy marine fuel, which is close enough to the real thing. When I told him of the class's squeamishness, he told me to joke to them: "Down there, we spread that stuff on toast!"
Our ability to create magical uses from crude depends on our talent for separating this odd, variable substance into brackets of weight, and then further into purer substances like butane or kerosene --- depending on the finickiness of the use or machinery. This is done via a kind of distillation process, in what's called a "cracking tower".
Just look at all this stuff. There's reason enough for oil to be, if not outright revered, then exploited around the world.
Being a witch and mage, it's natural for me to work with personified animus figures on my spiritual path, if not outright deities. But it's rare that "somebody else's god" exactly matches my needs, thus the (according to some "experts" and more than a few Muggles, rather dubious) tendency to make mine up. Uh-huh, sure: We mages know that imagination, or "making up", is nothing more than channeling and combining archetypes.
In working spiritually with oil, I could work with a spiritual gender-double and mentor, like Alirio the tycoon. I could also work with a collective historical deity, like the Lord of the Underworld, Pluto (or possibly Hades), whose realm oil forms near; Pluto, especially, also rules wealth (i.e. "plutonian", "plutocrat"). But for me, oil is so very much its own thing, rife with its own personality and power qualities, I'd rather honor its own "deva", spirit or god/dess. Was there ever a deity of oil? Not, it seems, for "rock oil" or petroleum, although the spirit of the Persian Nafta, "naptha", may get close. Just as Rinda served me well as a Nordic ice goddess while I conceived of Issa as the divine form of specifically Absolute Zero, I allowed Oil to be its own divine self --- or in my case, herself. I call her Aleria, or sometimes Aleria-Naftha.
For super-serious stuff, it seemed more proper for me to work with a goddess, rather than a tycoon animus. Just as with electricity, Juice Austin the superhero was fine on a mundane daily level, but for full-on electromagnetic shaman work, I needed to get in touch with Avo Rayo, or Grandmother Lightning --- Big Mama, herself.
Not that Aleria is a nice, fluffy goddess. This is oil, here. She's dark, sneaky, entrapping, somewhat toxic (especially in big quantities), mysterious, incredibly powerful and seductive, and will ignite if you fuck with her. She can lend a lot of energy to your goal, but rely too much on her, and you'll get ensnared, and either die, or turn first into a tool of destruction yourself. In the end, of course, Aleria will scoop up all our remains, our bodily fossil garbage, and add us to her underworld hoard of coal and oil, at least those of us not claimed as fossils and dust by the Rock folk of Earth. If she has parents, I imagine her most likely the meeting of Gaia and Pluto, at once of the Earth and of strange subterranean flame. I see her with utterly coal-black skin and a disturbing, serpentine face. Another historical equivalent to Aleria-Naftha might be Bia, Greek goddess of raw power and energy, one of Zeus's strong-armed handy-maidens and the only one powerful enough to bind Prometheus to his rock prison... very fitting, since oil indeed binds the power of flame deep inside layers of ancient rocks.
In any case, Oil as Goddess is indisputably badass. Did I mention, we are indebting ourselves to her gift, and paying the price, every day? The world can never get back those gallons of gas I spent to get to and from Portland. To honor Oil among Earth and all other devas and spirits is to be aware, the goal of any serious spiritual path, and most importantly to keep us from taking such a fantastic power and gift for granted. I can't speak or choose this for the myriad tycoons investing the planet. But I can choose for myself.
Mind you, do I wish I had a more convenient and less oil-reliant means of fast transport than a car?
I'm a witch. Of course I do.
Postscript: Oct. 25th, The drive back to Puddletown!
I hated to leave Port Townsend, since my tiny vacation had been fun, and I was still unused to the open road. But after checking maps twice, I took Highway 101 home along the Hood Canal. Forecast was rain, so I opted out of a Coast road trip ... though it might have been safer! Sure enough, crappy weather caught me midway along the canal stretch. People drove like maniacs at freeway speed, and I just kept pulling over to let them by.
A lone driver, my friend Tim reminded me later, has no respite (he was thus extra proud of me for handling it, he said). Already bound for Portland after dark, I made myself take a respite at Hoodsport Coffee. It was cosy in there, with a kind of autumnal altar over a fake fire.
Yes, please, a caramel mocha... but I'd foregone ice cream in Port Townsend, and wanted some now. What, I asked, was the "Spirit of 101" flavor? T'was their coffee-base ice cream. Yes again! It had hazelnut flavor in it! So, coffee all the way, and I hoped I wouldn't be too jittery. I savored the ice cream, and saved half the mocha for the road.
Scenic 101 got plainer. Then bigger. All at once, it was a freeway. Near Olympia, just as I was getting antsy about when and where I would peel off onto I-5, the Shadow struck! Traffic ahead came to a dead stop. I sabotaged my own efforts by pumping my brakes madly to flash the lights and warn the drivers behind me.... and as a result, didn't stop in time: Betty was loaded with my junk, the road was slick, and I felt a sickening drop in my stomach as I realized a collision was inevitable. A rake of tires failing to grab the pavement as the brakes locked, and bamp! Right into the SUV ahead. I had that moment of, "No, NO! How could I? Stupid, stupid! My lovely car!!" And, "Holy shit, it can happen fast." In truth, it was only a nudge, at a rather low speed. But it still felt like quite a jolt (yes on the seatbelt), and I shudder to think what could happen at any higher speed!
One of the photos I immediately took upon jumping out, in case of need of the insurance company. (No need, thank Hecate and Aleria.) I kept remarkably logical and cool while assessing it all with the struck driverand another guy --- probably shock adrenaline seeing me along. My radiator wasn't even damaged, though I couldn't be certain at the moment, being unable to open the hood, and I drove with my toes crossed the whole way home, in the dark and rain on I-5!
As it is, my friend and I later joked that my snarky personality is rubbing off on Betty the car.
Sorry for scaring your dogs, buddy. In the best of all outcomes (short of me braking more astutely), this poor old fellow came out of it unhurt, his car came out unhurt, and I came out unhurt! Said he: "If you're all right with it from here, I'm all right with it." A big Whew! to the Universe, with a healthy gratitude that my first road "oops" -- unlike that of too many Americans -- wasn't any worse, and a fresh respect for the power, speed, and responsibility commanded by a car.
The remainer of the trip, I-5 in the dark and rain at literally breakneck speeds, went smoother than that one dead-slow incident, thank Gods. I couldn't be sure, at the rest stop, if the rainbow-hued runoff under Betty was antifreeze or hot oil, and decided the sooner I headed for the safety of my friend's home, the better! Squinting into the night. Huge trucks passing me. Rain on the windshield, hands trying to stay relaxed on the wheel, and too. damn. fast. I got to my friend's place on 92nd feeling seriously grateful, but later that night, tears came as the road rush wore off. I cursed my doofusness, and most of all worried over the fate of my car, which I can't afford to haul into autoshop or replace any time soon. (A couple weeks later, a big hug to friend Tim, who helped me open the hood and verify that aside from cosmetic bumper snark, Betty is indeed fine.) Drivers: Slow the ro¥k down, leave twice as much ro¥kin' following distance as you THINK you need, and wear your stinkin' ro¥kin' seat belt. Oh, and don't be a dunderhead.
Kind of makes me hesitant to imagine flying a broomstick unshielded at 110 miles per hour.
To this I would add, some place that tests you. A place that scares you just a little bit.
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