Will Freeney
Will Freeney
Will Freeney is a writer - primarily of creative nonfiction but also of the occasional poem and short story.
On the Way
Sweeping across the valley floor
here in dust bowl west,
expatriates in their double-wides and single-wides,
their piece-at-a-time pickups
their $2.99 baseball caps from AM/PM
Rolling over the first sets of grassy hills
as brown as any over-baked biscuit
Misled at every switchback,
every rise and concomitant fall,
to think, “We’re almost there.”
Snaking through the scrub oak groves
Skirting the vast wet valley floor
a becalmed inland sea
belying its name - Clear Lake
Resuming the hilly wandering -
a glimpse of Lake Mendocino
Playing the stop-and-go game of
“CalTrans says” up old 101 - smooth concrete freeway
Lurching into shoulderless two-lanes
further encroached on by dozers and backhoes
Swooping through final forested stretches, before the coast’s first harbinger: fog
rising unseen but felt in goosebump-inducing chill,
Plodding across the marshy headlands
along a stretch of highway unchanged in fifty years.
Finally, Eureka (Archimedes would cry),
county seat of Humboldt, mismatched jumble,
middle American mainstreet
roughshod lumberjack, crab shack, fishing fleet ways
propped and suffused with gray market cash
“Green is green.”
The hippie migration gravitates north to a crazy quilt commune that calls itself town,
Snuggled like a furry cat in the lap of its benefactor – HSU: Arcata –
A mainstreet episode of Twilight Zone directed by Wavy Gravy
And here in Humboldt County, my son’s chosen home,
Completing his own immigration
To an anomalous homestead
With a son from the Deep South, who survived to age nine
Despite formative years
With a mom later jailed
For molesting her own twelve-year-old cousin
Plus baby mama and daughter, a second chance effort
That mama supplanted for an interim moment
By a woman homonymous and a drunk Reno wedding
Reconciled and evicted and back in my home
Before moving forever to Humboldt, green Humboldt
All supported by tattoos – my son’s ceaseless inking
His painting aborted in youth and shallowly buried
Beneath a rough mound of oxycontin and beer –
A flow that would wash him straight out of college
And into the arms (and legs) of that
riding-backward-naked-in-his-lap-on-his-motorcycle woman
whose arms he had left just before
over the rise and through the back of that Camaro
CRASH
Motorcycle. Camaro. 15 bones in all
100 miles an hour
6 months in bed
“You’ll never walk again.”
But he did.
Set tile for a living until his knees couldn’t take it.
Convinced a shop owner he’d be a tattoo apprentice.
The news of that wreck
launched me on a quest
to know this boy I never knew
because his mother did not want it so
(and psych majors must know better)
did everything in her perverse power
to prevent me from knowing him,
to prevent him from knowing me,
from age one to twenty-one.