VL-IV: A Sense of Place, pages 314/315

[Robin Landseadel]

On Feb 19, 2009, at 6:56 AM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> Part of my sense of the place of this novel has to do with Zoyd's  
> arrival in Humboldt County. In 80 a for a brief time and again in  
> 86  extending to many years  I had a similar arrival and made a home  
> there. The feeling Pynchon evokes is very similar to my own.

My mother moved to Garberville in 1983, I would visit her up there two  
or three times a year in the 80's & 90's. A lot of my affinity for  
Vineland [and, for that matter, The Crying of Lot 49] is due to that  
sense of place that Pynchon captures:

	Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the
	metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers
	unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first
	caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the
	towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly
	billows, you heard a lot of "Wow," and "Beautiful," though Zoyd
	only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad
	dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of
	height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea.
	They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to
	half a car length, Prairie standing up on the seat gazing out the
	window. "Headin' for nothin' but trees, fish, and fog, Slick, from
	here on in," sniffling, till your mama comes home, he wanted to
	say, but didn't. She looked around at him with a wide smile.
	"Fiss!"

	"Yeah - fog!"

	Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down
	in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the
	open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red
	trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. 	
	Prairie had been watching them all the time and in a very quiet
	voice talking to them as they passed one by one. It seemed now
	and then as if she were responding to something she was
	hearing, and in rather a matter-of-fact tone of voice for a baby,
	too, as if this were a return for her to a world behind the world
	she had known all along. The storm lashed the night, dead
	trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy
	and glistening, the highway twas interrupted by flooding creeks
	and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around
	inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up
	conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down
	from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and
	soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective
	of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation,
	the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at
	last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one
	guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.
	Vineland