=| The Estonian Roadwraith ...
She just popped up last spring. I was gassing up on the PCH just south of the Pepperdine campus in Malibu after a shopping trip to Green Angel, thinking the $4.50/gallon I was paying was a personal record.
Standing not 15' from where I'm feeding the car is a young woman with a backpack bigger then she is. It's a bad stretch to catch a ride = narrow, hard to stop ...
"Where you heading?"
"Alaska!"
She had me. Motioned her to come stow her gear in the back of the Benz and I'd get her up into Ventura County. I figured her for a college student taking off for The Trip she'll tell her grand-kids about.
"Where you coming from?"
"Estonia."
She wasn't kidding.
Threw the pack on the back seat and as we tooled north she unfolded a world map with her path marked ... east from the Baltics across the old Soviet Union, south across the Gobi and the mountains of western China, across the Korean peninsula, a north-south traverse of Japan, and finally a flight from Tokyo to LA ... good lord, this woman is a friggin' Trooper !
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She was genuinely surprised that I not only had heard of Estonia, I knew where it was and something of its history. Not twenty-four hours in the country and she thinks we're all dumbasses ... the road is just starting its first serious stretch of Beautiful north of LA and she's awe-struck. Wants to know about Indians ... "Do they all live in tipis?" I kid you not ... I understand this, it is vestige of a social movement stemming from bad fiction she's drawing from, somewhat akin to Trekkie phenomenon (they're everywhere, like Deadheads), not uncommon among euros.
"No, they live just like us. Except they're Indians." Someday she'll understand what she heard.
Took her home where she met met Pinay, African, & Hungarian women ~all of them accomplished, worldly people who could hardly believe what this Traveler was doing (me too, frankly ~ ). She swam in a heated pool, took long hot shower, slept in real bed ~ 'felt like a princess.' Flew in last night from Tokyo, ended up at a Buddhist monastery, and I snagged her soon as she got set up on the PCH. Next day we went up the road a piece and she met the Chumash Ethnobotanist. Welcome to America.
Two people more physically different would be hard to imagine. He's dark-skinned, thick, she's light as day, ethereal. They sat a few feet apart in a darkened room with Rottweilers and small children moving about, telling each of their childhoods a world apart. Carina's family saga is of Stalin and the Gulags. Her entire family was shipped off, and it took years to make their way back, moving among forest communities in the Coldlands ... only her grand-mother made it back.
Ethnobotanist and his brother were among the last wave to be passed through the meatgrinder of the assimilationist boarding school, their hair cut and language washed from their mouths. This after years of foster homes brought on by their presence at the end of the Alcatraz Occupation. Parallel colonialization experiences ~ Gulags or Boarding Schools, purpose was the same. They understood each other perfectly, didn't have to say anything more. I sat silently on the floor between the Rotts, listening, watching ... on the wall behind me were swordfish blades, symbolizing the Ethnobotanist's familials. I could see the arc of both these lives quite clearly, and I knew I was in a gitchi powerful place.
I gave her over to these Chumash and she headed north through the fires to Alaska and beyond.
You gotta see where she is ~ and where she's been ~ for yourself ...
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