Joan Didion - The White Album

Driving a Budget a Rent-A-Car between Sacramento and San Francisco one rainy morning in November I kept the radio on very loud. On this occasion I kept the radio on very loud not to find out what time it was but in an effort to erase six words from my mind, six words which had no significance for me but which seemed to signal that year the onset of anxiety or fright. The words, a line from Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," were these: Petals on a wet black bough. The radio played "Wichita Lineman" and "I heard it on the Grapevine." Petals on a wet black bough. Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations. Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it also occurred to me that the fright on this morning was going to present itself as an inability to drive this Budget Rent-A-Car across the Carquinas Bridge. The Wichita Lineman was still on the job. I closed my eyes and drove across the Carquinas Bridge, because I had appointments, because I was working, because I had promised to watch the revolution being made at San Francisco State College and because there was no place in Vallejo to turn in a Budget Rent-A-Car and because nothing on my mind was in the script as I remembered it.