Sacramento solitude: Notes on the first long roll of the sea.

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

— Henry David Thoreau

There’s something oddly thrilling about going to a place that others despise.

Sacramento, if not despised, at least seems to be dismissed by other Californians as easily as a younger sibling is from a sleepover with your best friends. When I told a man on the bus in San Francisco that I was headed down to his state capital for a couple of nights, he said – without skipping a beat – “Make it one.”

When I pressed him for details, for some kind of explanation, he offered, “It’s smaller, and not as interesting.”

While he was the first to question my next destination in the Golden State, he certainly wasn’t the last. “You’re going where?” new friends asked all weekend. “Why?”

There was an easy answer to their challenge – to write a couple of hotel reviews and pump up the bank account a little more before India. But there was something else, too. I came to revel in silence; to be in a place where I know no one and no one knows me. I came to process, to start working through the 15,000+ words of notes I took this weekend at Book Passage. I came to think or not think, whatever my mood; to speak or not speak.

I came for that thing called solitude. 

So here I am, sitting on a U.S. mail crate-turned-bench in Old Sacramento and not saying a word.

The Wild West-like façades of the buildings appear so fragile that a single breath might tip them over. Americana-themed bunting has been swooped along the edge of balconies, and I keep waiting for the mounted policeman I saw earlier to come trotting past me on his steed – for it’s here he obviously belongs, not outside the Westfield shopping mall five blocks away.

It’s strange to be in this little corner of the city that seems so determined to hang onto the past, filling its shops with barrels of salt-water taffy and history displays, when everything in me is leaning towards tomorrow, leaning into the future – hanging onto every moment of solitude, and yet delighting in a single, spine-tingling thought:

Tomorrow, I step on a plane bound for Delhi.

I had quite a different conversation on the bus Sunday night. The guy sitting next to me and I got to talking, after there was an issue with my ticket. He told me he’d named his wallet Earl, that his next tattoo would be a white knight chess piece (“Because I am one”), and that every weekend, he travels two and a half hours north to Santa Rosa, to work at a sandwich shop.

But what intrigued me the most about Alex was the way he seemed to commemorate moments – whether it was by covering Earl with stickers from significant points in his life, or by keeping photos of memorial plaques on his iPhone. One of these was a memorial called “The Lone Sailor” at Lookout Point, at the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Part of the plaque reads:

“A ship heading for sea passes directly by this spot…Here the sailor feels the first long roll of the sea, the beginning of the endless horizon that leads to the far Pacific. There is one last chance to look back at the city of San Francisco, shining on its hills, one last chance to look back at the coastline of the United States, one last chance to look back at home.”

I’m not sure if Alex noticed how much I was moved by those words, for I didn’t really let on about the impending move ahead of me. But I was grateful nonetheless, and humbled, that a stranger on a bus might be able to provide me with the perfect words to describe my time in Sacramento:

A chance to feel the first long roll of the sea; one last chance to look back at home.

And indeed I have felt the first stirrings of the sea beneath my feet here, the very sea that will carry me tomorrow to the country I can’t wait to return to. When I’m walking through the Capitol building’s rose garden, the scent of citrus and pine trees hanging in the air; when I’m lingering in a graffitied tunnel, where a banjo player picks a mournful, stirring tune, I can feel it.

The sea is beginning to roll, the tide beginning to change and shift directions, just like my life did this weekend. But before it does, I’ll be soaking up this one last night of solitude.

Because apparently – if San Franciscans are to be trusted – that’s just about all there is to do in Sacramento.