Day 15, Fri 6/13
On every road there is, trying to leave the Bay Area. Dropping off friends, picking up cars, returning other cars: we drive from San Jose to Sausalito. I get hopelessly lost on the many variations of Sir Francis Drake Blvd, bouncing between 580 and 101, almost taking a detour to San Quentin. But we get out of town by 3 pm, just in time for the Friday traffic.

We’re heading to Vermilion Valley Resort by Mono Hot Springs where we’re meeting CF’s friend Jason (“Sarong” is his trail name) on the Pacific Crest Trail. Jason calls just as we are heading out of town, so we know he’ll be there. This is great, because we were just hoping to show up and get lucky with the timing – tough when you’re trying to coordinate with someone walking from Mexico to Canada. But he’s there, waiting for us. We drive faster.

The 13 Chorus project (now TO DIE IN ATHENS) looms very large in my mind, and Chris’s too. We are both aware that the rewrite places us under the gun in terms of generating new material.

We spend the first 3 hours of the drive making a schedule for next week and going over our notes, musical and dramaturgical, for the rewrite. We’ve actually worked without a set schedule thus far, just using spare time in between traveling to talk over things. But it’s getting too close to have that flexibility any more. It’s an intense work session. We decide we’re going to work three hours a day in and around the workshops at HW, and add no new music after Thursday. We’ll do runthroughs Fri and Sat to prepare ourselves for the rehearsal and the reading Sun.

Chris has questions about the WASPS section being reinserted, and I discover that there’s a way to still have it but make the transition from Oed. at Colonus smoother. It means I am not quite done with rewriting, but it is a cut and a simplification. I want to be as much like O.S. as possible (Lydia playwright) in taking every good suggestion that comes along. I’m not there yet. I so wanted to be done with writing this thing. But this is a really good improvement on the text.

We talk through the new stuff musically up until the Wasps/Persians chorus mash-up. Just as we finish that, we emerge from a miserable stretch of highway into a curving, two-lane rural road. Into the mountains. I resolve to leave the play behind me, at least for 24 hours.

The sun goes down on us as we’re still going up the mountain, and we travel by a variety of lakes and byroads in the Mono area before we finally get to Vermillion. Once we get to the general Mono area, the road is so curvy and beautiful that we’re driving at about 5 MPH. Seven miles on one spur, seven miles on another, past enormous rocks, snowbanks, lakes, and reservoirs. It takes us an additional 2.5 hours once getting to the Mono area to locate Jason and Vermillion, because every misdirection takes at least half an hour each way. No one knows where Vermillion is, but we eventually find two folks from Canada who are familiar with the thru-hiking scene. You keep going, and then you keep going further.

There are signs everywhere for SoCal Edison, and power is being diverted from dams there all the way to my native Los Angeles. Makes me think of the Owens Valley.

We find the resort, marked by a circle of thru-hikers at a fire telling bear stories. Sleeping outside, under the trees.

Day 16, Sat 6/14
I sleep in, even on the ground. The first thing I see is an enormous tree when I poke my head out of the sleeping bag. Waking up at Vermillion, in a thru-hiker’s resort. We connect with CF’s friend Jason, who’s just come out of a ten-day stretch in the high Sierras, and are going to take him to stay at a friend’s condo in Mammoth for two days. We drink coffee surrounded by pine needles, and stare at a drying-up lake.

On the road: we drive from Mono Hot Springs through Yosemite Valley to Mammoth. Yosemite is crammed with tourists, so we don’t get out of the car much – we just take the scenic loop around the valley.

We approach Mammoth via 120, skimming the edges of red and blue mountains, and take Jason to a grocery store in town. He’s eager to resupply. We eat and drink at the condo and make plans for hiking tomorrow.

Day 17, Sun 6/17
Mammoth. Hiking at altitude: harder than it looks. I chicken out of a ten-mile hike across a pass to Devil’s Postpile, and end up sitting and reading Sophocles by Horseshoe Lake. Chris continues the hike and connects with another thru-hiker, Laces, en route – she joins us back at the condo that evening to shower, rest, and do laundry.

We clear the CO2 from our lungs in a hot tub. I’m not going to pretend that this condo thing isn’t fantastic. Chris and Jason talk football (and thru-hiking!) with a group of San Diego tourists, one of whom is another Dara.

After dinner, I discover I can get online, so I take a deep breath and deal with the casting emails. Things seem to have (mostly) worked themselves out, and I’m within a stone’s throw of a final cast. Semele is kindly letting us use their theater, so we have a space for the reading Sunday.

Day 18, Mon 6/18
We drive to Los Angeles today. The choral voice workshop at H-W begins tomorrow.