Yesterday: Right Lane Only

They say that time travel is impossible, that we can't travel back and forth in time. Well, some squirrelly subatomic particle might be able to streak down some sort of quantum funhouse tunnel to its own past, the physicists say. But the rest of us can't do it.

Still, sometimes you can visit the past without any time travel at all. Because the past never really goes away.

See, Uncle Joe died a couple of weeks ago, so last week I had to go to Turlock for his funeral. Joe was my mother's brother. Despite Mom's occasional pointed suggestion to "Go see Uncle Joe," I hadn't laid eyes on him in 15 years. He'd been living in a rest home 120 miles away and was barely cognizant.

And we'd never been all that close, though Joe had been fun to be around when I was young. He was quick with a joke and had a cool old Ford Model A pickup that I liked to ride in.

My family visited him in Turlock once or twice a year; come a particular Sunday, my parents would pile my sister and I into a massive Buick Electra and drive from the Bay Area to visit family near Turlock and Modesto and other spots around the northern San Joaquin Valley. Mom and Dad had both grown up around there, so we could visit both sides of the family on one trip.

All of that was decades years ago; in recent years I never went out of my way to visit any relatives except Mom. (Dad died many years back.) But Larry and Lorene, Joe's two kids, had come to Mom's funeral last year and had been very kind to us. So when word of Joe's death spread out through the family grapevine, I decided to return the favor. And I traveled a different route than usual.

If you ask Google Maps to plan a trip for you from Santa Cruz to Modesto or Turlock, its preferred solution takes you up through the Bay area and then east on 580 over the Altamont Pass. It's a brutal route of fast and heavy traffic and massive moving walls of double-trailer semi-trucks that sweep down steep grades at breakneck speed. I've always gone that way because it was fastest -- even though I hold the wheel in a death grip half the way there.

Forty-five years and 20 million Californians ago, my parents also took the Altamont Pass to get to the San Joaquin Valley. But it was a walk in the park in those days. There were few trucks, no giant SUVs, and light traffic.

We'd peel off the highway (it wasn't 580 back then) somewhere around Tracy and take the farm roads and two-lane highways across the valleys to all the little towns and farms and junctions where we had family. Our whale-sized Buick had the road to itself, or it seemed that way to an eight-year-old. We'd drive miles and miles through fields and orchards, stop at dusty country stores for glass bottles of Orange Nehi or Coca Cola pulled from chest-like red Coke coolers full of ice water. The bottles always dripped on you.

Those days are gone, I thought to myself, but there has to be a better way, a calmer way, to Turlock than 580. I had the whole day off for Joe's funeral. There was no hurry. So for once I plotted a course to Turlock that kept me on quieter roads.

Rain was falling as I kissed Rhumba goodbye around 7:30 a.m. and took off. I headed south to Watsonville on Highway 1 through heavy traffic, turned off at Riverside Drive and pushed my way through Watsonville traffic until I crossed the bridge over the Pajaro River. I hung a left onto a street called San Juan Road....

...And all the city traffic dropped away. I was out in the country before I knew it. The road -- now a highway -- took me down a winding green valley under misty sky. Away from the road were farm buildings, berry fields, pasture. Wooded hills rose in the distance. Within a mile of leaving town, all other cars vanished. The world was peaceful, green, and all mine.

It was beautiful. Big sloppy raindrops pattered on the windshield like silver coins. Warm, wet air poured in the open window. The road stretched ahead enticingly, sharing a new secret around every curve.

Sometimes when you're in heaven, you're lucky enough to know it. And I knew it.

San Juan Road took me to Highway 101, which led me to Highway 156 a couple of miles later. And 156 took me through the kind of high, grassy hills that are the trademark of the California coast. In summer the grass dries out and the hills turn golden-brown. But now, in the wet season, the grass was bright green and short, like some golf course that went on for miles. Cows grazed quietly under heavy-headed oaks.

My luck held. 156 is a two-laner, and it was as quiet as San Juan Road. The road avoids all towns, even skirting Hollister by a mile. Except for a brief glimpse of a bloated mansion on a far hilltop, there was nothing along that road that wasn't pure old California highway. I cruised its undemanding curves at my speed of choice, which is all of about 55. It's a pleasure to drive when the road is open and no one's pushing you.

We (the car and I) joined Highway 152 at Casa Del Fruta and headed over Pacheco Pass, past empty hills and the giant reservoir and down into the wide flat San Joaquin and finally to Los Banos, where we hung a left on Mercer Springs Road and made a 35-mile straight shot north to Turlock along ploughed fields and winding rivers, and through old, slow-moving country towns like Stevinson and Hillmar with hardly a McDonald's in sight. It could have been 20 years ago, except for a few dusty-looking housing developments outside of Los Banos hung with frantic banners advertising NEW! LOWER! PRICES!!

I have never enjoyed a drive more. But eventually Turlock hove into view. I found the church, and the relatives.

As far as funerals are concerned, my mom's family knows the drill. Mom came from a big Portuguese family of seven brothers and sisters, and they started dying at intervals about 20 years ago. Grandma passed somewhere in there, too, at the age of 97.

The clan always gathers and the uncles always stand together before the service and exchange sober welcomes that the rest of us don't hear. Except that all the uncles are dead now; Joe was the last. But I found myself in a small group of fiftyish and sixtyish men standing off to one side of the pews -- the oldest male first cousins from each branch of the family, all of them now grandparents except for me. We have become the uncles.

I'm not much like any of my cousins, but we all enjoy each other's company. There's a common streak of down-home, block-headed goofiness that runs through the entire clan; we recognize it and are drawn to it in each other. I think it comes from the old country.

Anyway, now that I am one of the Uncles, I know what they talk about at funerals: kids, jobs, money, and vacations. What else did I expect?

So we had the funeral and the priest preached the promise of resurrection, which is always a winner, and we followed the hearse out to the cemetery. Turlock has pushed out towards Highway 99 with new districts of tract homes and big-box shopping centers. But the procession wended through the old town, down streets lined with giant trees that keep the sun off the roofs in the summer and bring the temperature down 10 or 15 degrees. Out at the cemetery, the priest spritzed some holy water on the coffin and we all headed off to the most important part of the festivities: PARTY!

Twenty years ago, when Uncle Tony blazed the trail by being the first uncle to die, we didn't really know what to do after his funeral. So by reflex we do what Portagees always do: bring food over to Tony's house. And beer. And wine. Pretty soon 50 or 60 well-irrigated relatives were holding tumblers of red and plates of ham and Portagee beans and macaroni salad and linguica, yakking and gossiping at the top of their lungs. In short, there was a hell of a party going on. So I was confused when I found Aunt Mary sobbing in a corner.

"Tony's dead, and I'm having such a good time," she told me, wiping her eyes. "I just don't know if we should be doing this."

"He would have wanted it this way," I assured her. And that was true: if some other uncle had died instead, Tony would have been out there in the crowd with a gallon of wine on his thumb, pouring.

That was the first and last time anybody questioned the funeral/party ethic, and we've had ten or twelves good ones since then; uncles- and aunts-by-marriage get the treatment too, if they're popular.

None of us cousins lives in Turlock anymore, so we went to a catering hall for the reception instead of somebody's rec room. Fortunately Larry and Lorene had picked a Portagee caterer, and he knew what to do. The wine flowed freely; it was neither too good nor too bad, but it was all red. And he served Portagee beans, the best I ever had. Bastards wouldn't give me the recipe.

So we ate and drank and laughed to excess and speeches were made. Old acquaintances were renewed and new ones were made. ("You're whose son?"). I'd planned on sitting with Cousin Steve, but sat instead with Aunt Mary and Cousin Bob because Steve and his massive entourage had gotten lost coming over from the cemetery. And you had to get a seat if you wanted to start eating. We're Portagees; we don't wait for anybody to tell us to start.

Aunt Mary is the last and most ornery of the old family, and she's probably going to live forever as the ornery tend to do. She's 90, lives alone and still drives, says whatever she's thinking and never worries about the consequences. On the plus side, you can say anything to her because she's too busy talking to listen. And she reminds me of my mom a little. And I miss Mom.

As usual nobody cried -- well, Larry choked up a little, but that's okay -- but people took turns telling stories about Joe, as much as we knew. It was good to get to know him as others knew him. One noisy old Portagee in a cowboy hat got up to leave, swearing, "I could tell you all some stories if I felt like it!"

"Well, why don't you?!"

"Okay, I will!" And he stopped halfway to the door and told stories about when he was a teenager, and him and Joe and five other valley boys who swore eternal friendship would do things like move outhouses in the middle of the night so that the victim would fall straight into the hole when he came out to take a crap. "There's a lot more I could tell you," he swore, "But I better not." And he left.

A little later the rest of us left, too, after toasting Joe's memory with Madeira. Turlock was something like the hub for our family for many years, but like I said before, nobody lives there now. We all had other places to be that night, 40 or 50 or 120 miles away.

So I hugged and shook my away out the door through a forest of arms and hands and headed home down rain-soaked backroads and state highways again, through Hilmar and Stevinson and Los Banos as the rain broke up and twisted thunderheads turned to chrome in the west. I traversed the hills, crossed the Pajaro into Watsonville, and left the past behind again. If that's ever possible to do.

I pushed the car up Highway 1 toward Santa Cruz and we came down the hill into Aptos as sundown neared and the western sky turned pinky-orange. And the B-52s came on the radio and said everything else that needed saying, and I beat time on the steering wheel:

Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
around the world the trip begins with a kiss

Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without wings, without wheels
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without anything but the love we feel