With HippyChick at the wheel turning the key, the pickup started on the fifth try. Melpomene, Thalia and I sent healing into the greasy innards of the truck, and by the time we reached the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, HippyChick was cooing about the sudden surge in performance and torque. We took badly maintained, little-used fire roads up the side of the mountains. This was making all the horses grumpy, but I didn’t want to risk any unnecessary exposure.
We reached the summit, and saw stretched out below us a huge lake reflecting the pure blue of the sky, adorning the purity with infinite temporal variations, depending on the cloud cover, the wind, the joyous leaping fish and the will of Gaia. Lake Tahoe was held in the tender hands of the surrounding snow-clad peaks. Since the partial extinction of 2020, the traffic jams and other human execrations had been sent back to Hades, and you could almost imagine a Washoe paddling a canoe over to the burned-out, ruined casinos.
Pee is the prime mover of much of human activity, so we decided to pull into a deserted campground by the lake, to “stretch our legs”. The moment we stopped, Melpomene was out the door. She stripped naked, and jumped into the lake. She swam out so far she was nearly invisible, and she plunged down under the water. A few minutes later she swam back to shore, with a thirty-pound lake trout in her hands. Dinner.
We built a fire in an old campground grill, and HippyChick lit up a marijuana cigarette, while the fish was steaming in a bed of bay leaves soaked in lake water. HippyChick also produced a bag of marshmallows, which we toasted over the fire on sappy pine sticks, until they were golden brown, following her strict instructions.
Now, on Shaula, we do not have a sense of taste, so this was new to me. I experimented by eating a hot, molten marshmallow on the right side of my mouth, while sucking on a sour lemondrop on the left side. Then I tried a kalamata olive from a jar that HippyChick had brought. I was completely lost in the minutia of taste buds, and when the time came to try the fish, I was in ecstasy. Even HippyChick and MouthBreather said it was the best meal they had ever had.
Thalia ate grass in a meadow, with the other horses, but she didn’t complain. She was finding her own bliss.
There was no time in the schedule for sleep, so HippyChick agreed to let Melpomene take the wheel for the drive down the mountains into Sacramento. Since we were now in a more populated area, we followed the major highways. There is safety and anonymity in a crowd.
From Sacramento, we headed south on Interstate 5, and cut across to Livermore, and then left on 680 and a skip over on Mission to the Nimitz Freeway. Merging on to 237 was either to the right or to a commute lane on the left, so Melpomone took “the fast lane.”
HippyChick did not tolerate speeds over sixty, so we had some hypertensive commuters behind us. We could sense their anger and frustration. Thalia added to the tragedy by defecating over the half-door at the back of the stock trailer. “Greetings from Shaula,” she said to Melpomene and me.
That was the only time ever, before or since, that Thalia told a joke.