Last Saturday morning Rod and I arose early at 4 am, to shower and dress, then make the 2 ½ hour drive over to Lompoc to visit Corey for the day. We count ourselves as very fortunate to be living close enough, still, after all these past 8 ½ yrs, to be able to visit him almost every weekend. Since he transferred to Lompoc and enrolled in the RDAP, we have somewhat further to drive (the drive to Taft from Bakersfield was 40 minutes, and those 5 years we lived in Taft it was only a 10 minute drive to the prison) but it is an enjoyable enough drive and we relax with our morning coffee and enjoy the constantly changing scenery.

When we pull out of our driveway these early mornings it’s still dark out and very quiet, seems the whole world is still asleep. But as soon as we turn on State Hwy 119 after leaving our neighborhood, we join the mostly large semi trucks and the standard white pickup trucks common to those working in the oil industry, travelling this busy highway this time of day. Within an hour the sky lightens as the sun begins to rise over the Central Valley. The emerging dawn is always my favorite part of the drive, its such a treat to watch the dark become light, the brilliance of the sun as it breaks in the east. As we crest the Coast Mountain Range the view of Bakersfield, out there in the distant desert, is beautiful to behold.

I still remember when Corey first arrived at Taft Prison, after a long year in tiny, windowless cells in Spokane County Jail, followed by several similar stopovers along the way to Taft, how I almost cried with joy when he told me, his first nite at Taft, he had walked out to the yard and could see the lights of Bakersfield in the distance! How beautiful it was! This was monumental at that time, having had NO views,and little real "space" to breathe, nothing but cramped, tiny, dark interior spaces in which to live for the previous full year.

As Rod and I neared the coast we looked forward to the fog, and the cooling temperatures. Such a nice reprieve this time of year in particular, when it is still so very hot in Bakersfield. Some days the foggy mist appears gradually, an almost living entity, filmy and opaque, slowly drifting up, over and through the hills and canyons. Other days, like last Saturday, it’s almost like hitting a solid “wall”, it comes on so suddenly, one minute you have nothing but clear road ahead, the next you are enveloped in white and find yourself utterly alone in the opaqueness, barely able to see beyond your nose!

At the end of our visitation day, around 3 pm, when we leave the prison camp for home the sun has long been out, and its an entirely different experience driving back in the bright, sunny afternoon. We have our little routine, always stopping at a Starbucks at Santa Maria, just 20 minutes northwest of Lompoc, for an iced coffee and slice of lemon loaf (for me) and a cranberry scone (for Rod) for the return trip. We then find our favorite country music station on the radio, and settle in as we drive and re-visit the conversations engaged in during the course of the day, the stories we’ve all exchanged, any news Corey has relayed to us about his current week in the DAP, any news Rod and I might have from the course of the previous week.

These weekend visits are still the highlite of each week, for all of us. It’s Corey’s one day in the week away from the restrictions of daily, routine prison life, his opportunity to enjoy vending machine goodies that aren’t available outside of visitation, and mostly a chance to see and interact with someone other than the other men and supervisors he shares space with 24 hours of every day. For Rod and I, these visits, this regular interaction with our son as he serves his lengthy prison sentence, have achieved what we hoped they would, our intended purpose in relocating here to California. I really don’t believe had we stayed behind Corey would have remained as grounded as he has, nor continued to feel in so many ways, still a part of the world beyond the fences. Because of this, despite the 10 years he will have been 'away', we feel confident he will more easily merge into normal life upon release, and more easily move forward, successfully, with his life.

When he was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison for selling marijuana, Corey was young, and so naïve in many ways, as he struggled to deal with the prospect of what the next decade of his life would be. It broke my heart to watch him struggle with the reality he was dealing with. Those truly were the darkest days of my life, his fathers life, Coreys life. The fear of the unknown being the worst of all. As other friends and family fell away over the years, for whatever excuse or reasons, Rod and I resolutely remained committed to making sure our son knew without any doubt we would always be there for him, he need never fear being forgotten or left behind. We knew this was perhaps the most important thing we could ever do, the uncompromising stability our being close by, visiting regularly, would give him, in such a topsy turvy, upside down world as the prison world. Again, we were and always will be, SO grateful we were in a position to be able to do this, many families simply cannot alter the mostly inescapable fact of the separation, of having lives and relationships torn apart, when a loved one goes to prison. We have been here to support Corey, to fight for him when those times arose (and trust me, there have been many times we’ve gone head to head with prison administrators and staff over the years), and simply put, share our lives, as mundane as they often may be. This may not make sense to many, but this perhaps will always be the time in our lives I will always be most proud of. This immutable challenge we faced and overcame.

“Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.” ~ Gail Lumet Buckley