The Los Angeles River is an unexpected example of the sublime--a vast expanse of white concrete, running dead straight for dozens of miles through the city, one hundred yards wide, with high, ramped banks. Long fins are fitted to the pillars of the numerous white bridges, to protect them during floods. But mostly the riverbed is nearly dry, as in the drag racing scene in the film Grease.
On my first morning at my friend James' in Long Beach, he and I and his ten-year-old son Jordan went on a bike ride down to and along the river, and I paused several times to simply stand and gaze and admire the strange and impressive feature. A few inches of green algaed water flowed in the bottom, the result of recent and, for this time of year, unusual rains. Black-necked stilts and american avocets stood up to their ankles in the water and poked at tiny crustaceans. Great blue herons perched on the occasional bit of flotsam, a tree branch or tire. Seagulls and terns and swallows swooped low over the riverbed, and one seagull dive-bombed a heron over and over.
The night before in Redondo Linda and Bruce had invited friends over for dinner. I stayed only long enough to meet everyone, including a man named Lou, who, after Linda said the word "bicycle" as something we had in common, launched into a monologue about his bike history--beginning with an Italian bike he bought in 1968 for $89, a purchase which outraged his father who thought it ridiculous to spend so much on a bike, but he, Lou, loved the bike, and then his next bike, in 1970, had also been Italian, some name that I can't remember but which Lou said translated as "pile of shit".... After ten minutes he took his first breath and just as he opened his mouth to continue I said, politely, that I had to be going and he looked annoyed at the interruption.... Actually, I would have liked to have stayed, if I could have extricated myself from Lou and taken up with some of the other guests. But I had said I would be at James' at seven.
I arrived forty-five minutes late, and when the front door opened I walked into another dinner party. James' wife Trish hugged me and said, "you're late! where've you been! We didn't know if you were still coming!" She hadn't understood why James hadn't just called me, and he protested that he had, but he had called my home number, and I had to explain that I didn't have a cellphone, and they looked astonished as this was a possibility they hadn't even considered.
Several adults and a half dozen children sat in the living room or out on the back patio and I was introduced around. James gave me a beer and then put meat and fish on the barbeque. "I got salmon for you," he said, "wild Alaska salmon."
Later I found myself on the patio with a woman named Vicki after she had had two cosmos. She told me the long story of her courtship with her husband twenty years before, and how before she'd married him, she had made him go on a two-week bike ride in the Rockies, to see if he would measure up. The key test, apparently, was to see if he would, when the going got tough, give in and ride in the support vehicle; but he never did, he rode all 900 miles, and when they got back she agreed to marry him. He in his turn required her to give up her job at Kellog's, the cereal company, where she was "very successful," and so she did quit, and anyway she wanted to stay home and have kids, which she did, three of them.
Later we played guitar hero in the den. One of Trish's friends, Pamela, a VP in Human Resources at NBC, tutored me on the essentials, and then I tried to play the "easy" version of Foghat's "Slow Ride." The result was largely discordant, but a couple times I briefly rocked out. After all the adults had had a go, ten-year-old Jordan played Metallica's "One," on "medium," and it seemed impossible that anyone could keep up--I couldn't even watch the screen for long without feeling disoriented--but he played flawlessly and afterwards I shook his hand.
James and Trish's other son, Brendon (17) is currently traveling with a jazz singing group and performing in various European capitols. I have his room, a museum to boyhood. Dozens of framed photographs trace the trajectory of his boy's life, the latest a prom photo of Brendon with his ravishing girlfriend Mitzi. Spread about are numerous trophies and plaques for accomplishments in cross country. Two Star Wars posters hang above the bed, and four guitars stand in a corner. The mounted horns of a mule deer hang on another wall, a trophy from a hunting trip with his grandfather; there's also a photo of Brendon with a large wild boar he has just dispatched.
I have occupied a number of rooms in the last three weeks, as I've shuttled from one relative or friend's house to another across the western U.S. And I've talked and reminisced my ass off.... Tomorrow, though, I'll be off to a new land, to new people with whom I have no history. I'm a little anxious.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Will Rogers was really good at rope tricks
In the morning Linda and I went to a coffee house, the Coffee Cartel, to mooch their internet. Behind us on couches a half dozen men and women were meeting in what sounded like the inaugural get-together of a dating support group. One tall and rather glamorous blonde woman said, “so that was my first husband, and that didn’t go well, and then my second husband and I got divorced, but then we got married again....”
Later we drove up along the coast to Will Rogers State Park, in Pacific Palisades. The park was the Rogers’ family ranch, until his widow deeded its 187 acres to the state in 1944 (Rogers died in 1935). Most of the land is scrub-covered hills, but there’s his big rambling house too, bordering a large greensward and polo grounds surrounded by towering eucalyptus trees.
We went on a two-mile loop up to Inspirational Point and a hazy view of Los Angeles and the ocean. But the highlight of the visit was the house tour, led by a docent named Lester, a fiftyish man in jeans and boots and white t-shirt and originally from Brooklyn. He talked almost non-stop for the whole hour and everything he said was worth hearing.
The eight of us on the tour stepped first into the main room, which was long and high with gray and weathered wood-plank walls and wood rafters. Mission-style couches and chairs were scattered about, cowboy art was everywhere on walls and shelves--drawings and sculptures and paintings, several by Charles Russell--two ornate saddles were draped on a wooden form, with a coiled whip hanging off the pommel of one; a stuffed calf stood by the fireplace, over which loomed the mounted head of a full-grown longhorn steer; there was Indian regalia too, an Apache headdress, a couple long pipes, and a portrait of Sequoiah, creator of the Cherokee alphabet. Rogers was part Cherokee himself, born and raised in Indian Territory, before it became the state of Oklahoma.
Will Rogers could afford the big house--two wings, ten or so bedrooms--because for a time in the twenties and thirties he was the most popular entertainer in America. And all his wealth and popularity, his great success, started with a seemingly minor if impressive skill--the man could do some fancy roping.
As a young man he had worked as a cowboy on ranches in Oklahoma, first his father's, then several others till he'd raised a bit of money; he traveled to Argentina to try to establish his own ranch, and when that failed he got a job on a ship transporting livestock to South Africa. In South Africa he put his cowboy skills to a whole different use, hooking up with a traveling wild west show--and thus his entertainment career began. He did what was called a "dumb act," silently roping cows and goats and horses and pretty girls, completing moves that even seen in slow motion in old newsreels seem impossible--say, throwing three ropes simultaneously, one over a galloping horse's front legs, another over its head, a third around the rider. He worked for various wild west troupes--a still quite popular genre in the first years of the twentieth century--before moving to vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Frolics. Here the roping act promised only a brief longevity, so he began to speak as he roped, commenting on the events of the day (he'd read daily newspapers for material). And that was his breakthrough--people loved his folksy charm and humor. The rope tricks eventually became less important: the main thing was to hear what he had to say.
He parlayed the act into a radio and film career (he made 72 films and was the top-grossing star for three consecutive years in the early 1930s); he took up writing and composed a daily column for the New York Times, which was soon syndicated all over the country; he wrote six books and traveled all over the world on lecture tours. Lester, our docent, called him "the first multi-media celebrity."
But if he did less roping in public, he kept his hand in at home. Any vistor walking through the front door was likely to have a lasso thrown over his or her head. Rogers and his wife entertained Hollywood stars, bigwig politicians and industrialists, and they all got the rope treatment, when arriving, when sitting around the living room, when eating at the dinner table, or just whenever they attracted Rogers' attention, which was often. The man was obsessed with roping. In a basket by the door are a couple of his ropes, still ready to go; these were his indoor ropes, as his wife wouldn't let him bring in the dusty ropes he'd been using outside.
The stuffed calf had been a gift from a wealthy friend, who hoped Rogers would shift his rope throwing from his visitors to the calf (which was/is on wheels). Rogers was fond of the gift, wearing the ears right off the calf, but he continued to lasso his guests too (Lester said that today we might say Rogers had ADD; he hardly slept and almost never stopped moving).
Rogers died at the height of his popularity, at the age of 55, in a plane crash in northern Alaska. He'd been headed from Fairbanks to Point Barrow because he wanted to visit the continent's northernmost point. "People in their eighties and nineties will tell you," Lester said, "that they remember where they were and what they were doing when they got the news of his death." The nation mourned.
At the end of the tour everyone shook hands with Lester. We all were half in love with him and wanted him to tell us more stories, but he had to start the next tour so we were on our own.
Later we drove up along the coast to Will Rogers State Park, in Pacific Palisades. The park was the Rogers’ family ranch, until his widow deeded its 187 acres to the state in 1944 (Rogers died in 1935). Most of the land is scrub-covered hills, but there’s his big rambling house too, bordering a large greensward and polo grounds surrounded by towering eucalyptus trees.
We went on a two-mile loop up to Inspirational Point and a hazy view of Los Angeles and the ocean. But the highlight of the visit was the house tour, led by a docent named Lester, a fiftyish man in jeans and boots and white t-shirt and originally from Brooklyn. He talked almost non-stop for the whole hour and everything he said was worth hearing.
The eight of us on the tour stepped first into the main room, which was long and high with gray and weathered wood-plank walls and wood rafters. Mission-style couches and chairs were scattered about, cowboy art was everywhere on walls and shelves--drawings and sculptures and paintings, several by Charles Russell--two ornate saddles were draped on a wooden form, with a coiled whip hanging off the pommel of one; a stuffed calf stood by the fireplace, over which loomed the mounted head of a full-grown longhorn steer; there was Indian regalia too, an Apache headdress, a couple long pipes, and a portrait of Sequoiah, creator of the Cherokee alphabet. Rogers was part Cherokee himself, born and raised in Indian Territory, before it became the state of Oklahoma.
Will Rogers could afford the big house--two wings, ten or so bedrooms--because for a time in the twenties and thirties he was the most popular entertainer in America. And all his wealth and popularity, his great success, started with a seemingly minor if impressive skill--the man could do some fancy roping.
As a young man he had worked as a cowboy on ranches in Oklahoma, first his father's, then several others till he'd raised a bit of money; he traveled to Argentina to try to establish his own ranch, and when that failed he got a job on a ship transporting livestock to South Africa. In South Africa he put his cowboy skills to a whole different use, hooking up with a traveling wild west show--and thus his entertainment career began. He did what was called a "dumb act," silently roping cows and goats and horses and pretty girls, completing moves that even seen in slow motion in old newsreels seem impossible--say, throwing three ropes simultaneously, one over a galloping horse's front legs, another over its head, a third around the rider. He worked for various wild west troupes--a still quite popular genre in the first years of the twentieth century--before moving to vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Frolics. Here the roping act promised only a brief longevity, so he began to speak as he roped, commenting on the events of the day (he'd read daily newspapers for material). And that was his breakthrough--people loved his folksy charm and humor. The rope tricks eventually became less important: the main thing was to hear what he had to say.
He parlayed the act into a radio and film career (he made 72 films and was the top-grossing star for three consecutive years in the early 1930s); he took up writing and composed a daily column for the New York Times, which was soon syndicated all over the country; he wrote six books and traveled all over the world on lecture tours. Lester, our docent, called him "the first multi-media celebrity."
But if he did less roping in public, he kept his hand in at home. Any vistor walking through the front door was likely to have a lasso thrown over his or her head. Rogers and his wife entertained Hollywood stars, bigwig politicians and industrialists, and they all got the rope treatment, when arriving, when sitting around the living room, when eating at the dinner table, or just whenever they attracted Rogers' attention, which was often. The man was obsessed with roping. In a basket by the door are a couple of his ropes, still ready to go; these were his indoor ropes, as his wife wouldn't let him bring in the dusty ropes he'd been using outside.
The stuffed calf had been a gift from a wealthy friend, who hoped Rogers would shift his rope throwing from his visitors to the calf (which was/is on wheels). Rogers was fond of the gift, wearing the ears right off the calf, but he continued to lasso his guests too (Lester said that today we might say Rogers had ADD; he hardly slept and almost never stopped moving).
Rogers died at the height of his popularity, at the age of 55, in a plane crash in northern Alaska. He'd been headed from Fairbanks to Point Barrow because he wanted to visit the continent's northernmost point. "People in their eighties and nineties will tell you," Lester said, "that they remember where they were and what they were doing when they got the news of his death." The nation mourned.
At the end of the tour everyone shook hands with Lester. We all were half in love with him and wanted him to tell us more stories, but he had to start the next tour so we were on our own.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Wanda in Redondo
Interstate 5 north, into the vast belly of the LA beast, is a wide and crowded and fast and noisy highway, riven unrelentingly by exit and on ramps. Big semi-trucks, SUVs, sports cars with vanity plates pile onto the freeway and fill the lanes, riding close upon each other, front to back, side to side. Tail lights light up and the vehicles pack even closer together as the pace suddenly slows from 70 mph to 40 then to 20; soon, though, the speed climbs again, at least till the next slow down.
Close to the broad interstate stand big signs for motels and restaurants, seedy apartment buildings, crowded strip malls, and one car dealership after another (a malevolent business, considering); the hills are blanketed with swarms of cube-shaped, stuccoed houses.
In the one hundred miles between San Diego and Los Angeles, only the open land of Camp Pendleton, a Marine base, provides respite from the sprawl; but the sky over the base is filled with helicopters, and tanks rumble over the hills, and then one comes upon the twin domes of San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, safe enough, supposedly, but ominous nonetheless.
Just before Pendleton I pulled off into a Rest Area, and here too the fruits of overpopulation were manifest. All the parking spots were taken, and I had to wait for someone to leave. Fifty people, almost all of them either Asian or Hispanic, loitered outside the bathrooms, smoking, eating snackfood from the vending machines, holding the hands of small children. Displayed on a bulletin board nearby were dozens of photos of missing children, most of them teenaged girls.
After two and a half hours of brutal, frightening driving, I arrived in Redondo Beach, greatly relieved to be off the road and out of the van.
I had come to a house two blocks from the beach to see my aunt, Linda, and her boyfriend, Bruce, who were visiting from Maryland. The house belongs to Wanda, who’s 96 and the mother of Linda’s late husband Steve, who died in 1993. Wanda has recently been moved to an assisted living situation, but the family is keeping the beach house for the time being.
Inside the small three bedroom house one steps back in time. The decor, the lamps and chairs and cabinets and appliances, date from the 1950s and 1960s. Pale pink and dark maroon tile in the bathroom. Wood paneling and a corner bar and an ancient Philco regrigerator in the den. Norman Rockwell prints and a crotcheted owl on the walls, quilts on two-single beds in the guestroom. And throughout the house the framed and fading photographs of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—family artifacts now bereft of their long-devoted caretaker. Little if anything seems to have changed in decades, though time has worn down the home’s features and fixtures. Supposedly the house is worth a million dollars, but probably the next owner will tear it down and build something fresher and bigger.
Ryann, my cousin, came over after getting off work. She works for an insurance company, managing offices in Pasedena, Mission Viejo, and Phoenix. I asked if she liked her job, and she smiled and said, “yes, I’m good at bossing people around.” She’s 32, witty, competent, and beautiful. She showed me two faint lines on her forehead, the scars of a recent bike accident on the boardwalk, in which she had hit her face on the handlebar basket. Later her boyfriend Chris came over for dinner and I wasn’t sure he deserved her.
Before dinner we went to see Wanda. She lives in a house only a mile or so away, inland, with another elderly white lady, Olivia. They are cared for by Ellen, a middle-aged Filipino woman, who is on-site six days a week and overnights, and Richard, a young Hispanic man, heavily tattooed, who mostly attends the women during the day and who told Bruce that he neither swims nor drives. The house has room for more residents, as many as six, but one recently died.
Wanda was sitting on a vinyl couch watching tv when we arrived (all the couches and chairs were either vinyl or plastic-covered). She was sunk down into a corner of the couch, a small woman with wispy white hair. Her walker stood beside her with a full water glass in a cup holder. Linda and Ryann and Bruce each gave her a kiss and when I was introduced we shook hands and I sat down in a chair next to her. She said, “aren’t you in the Navy?”
Her hearing is quite poor so it took several shouted disclaimers to correct her impression. Still, she was reluctant to let it go. “I really thought you were in the Navy,” she said, as if disappointed in me. Then she asked, “so what do you do?” When I told her I was a professor, she said, “very impressive” and nodded her head in approval, and I felt that I had come through for her after all.
We watched the network news and Wanda said some man looked familiar, and he did look a lot like Henry Kissinger but he wasn’t. She gestured at the television and said, “that thing is always on.” She leaned over and told me that she and Olivia don’t talk much (neither can hear well) and she gets bored. She drew out the last word and came down hard on the concluding d, to emphasize her annoyance. Ryann visits her a couple times a week, but of course Wanda wants more and who wouldn’t. Linda and Bruce have seen her often during their visit, and Bruce does crossword puzzles with her, though some days she’s not quite up to it.
I liked her. She had questions to ask and things to say—some of which were reasonable, some maybe delusional, as when she referred to a disappointingly bad dog show she had attended but Ryann said it had actually been a session of pet therapy. Wanda pointed to her knees and said they weren’t working today, but she bore her occasional frustration with what seemed a matter of fact good nature. Still, she has been whittled down quite a ways, and that I imagine is no picnic.
Close to the broad interstate stand big signs for motels and restaurants, seedy apartment buildings, crowded strip malls, and one car dealership after another (a malevolent business, considering); the hills are blanketed with swarms of cube-shaped, stuccoed houses.
In the one hundred miles between San Diego and Los Angeles, only the open land of Camp Pendleton, a Marine base, provides respite from the sprawl; but the sky over the base is filled with helicopters, and tanks rumble over the hills, and then one comes upon the twin domes of San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, safe enough, supposedly, but ominous nonetheless.
Just before Pendleton I pulled off into a Rest Area, and here too the fruits of overpopulation were manifest. All the parking spots were taken, and I had to wait for someone to leave. Fifty people, almost all of them either Asian or Hispanic, loitered outside the bathrooms, smoking, eating snackfood from the vending machines, holding the hands of small children. Displayed on a bulletin board nearby were dozens of photos of missing children, most of them teenaged girls.
After two and a half hours of brutal, frightening driving, I arrived in Redondo Beach, greatly relieved to be off the road and out of the van.
I had come to a house two blocks from the beach to see my aunt, Linda, and her boyfriend, Bruce, who were visiting from Maryland. The house belongs to Wanda, who’s 96 and the mother of Linda’s late husband Steve, who died in 1993. Wanda has recently been moved to an assisted living situation, but the family is keeping the beach house for the time being.
Inside the small three bedroom house one steps back in time. The decor, the lamps and chairs and cabinets and appliances, date from the 1950s and 1960s. Pale pink and dark maroon tile in the bathroom. Wood paneling and a corner bar and an ancient Philco regrigerator in the den. Norman Rockwell prints and a crotcheted owl on the walls, quilts on two-single beds in the guestroom. And throughout the house the framed and fading photographs of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—family artifacts now bereft of their long-devoted caretaker. Little if anything seems to have changed in decades, though time has worn down the home’s features and fixtures. Supposedly the house is worth a million dollars, but probably the next owner will tear it down and build something fresher and bigger.
Ryann, my cousin, came over after getting off work. She works for an insurance company, managing offices in Pasedena, Mission Viejo, and Phoenix. I asked if she liked her job, and she smiled and said, “yes, I’m good at bossing people around.” She’s 32, witty, competent, and beautiful. She showed me two faint lines on her forehead, the scars of a recent bike accident on the boardwalk, in which she had hit her face on the handlebar basket. Later her boyfriend Chris came over for dinner and I wasn’t sure he deserved her.
Before dinner we went to see Wanda. She lives in a house only a mile or so away, inland, with another elderly white lady, Olivia. They are cared for by Ellen, a middle-aged Filipino woman, who is on-site six days a week and overnights, and Richard, a young Hispanic man, heavily tattooed, who mostly attends the women during the day and who told Bruce that he neither swims nor drives. The house has room for more residents, as many as six, but one recently died.
Wanda was sitting on a vinyl couch watching tv when we arrived (all the couches and chairs were either vinyl or plastic-covered). She was sunk down into a corner of the couch, a small woman with wispy white hair. Her walker stood beside her with a full water glass in a cup holder. Linda and Ryann and Bruce each gave her a kiss and when I was introduced we shook hands and I sat down in a chair next to her. She said, “aren’t you in the Navy?”
Her hearing is quite poor so it took several shouted disclaimers to correct her impression. Still, she was reluctant to let it go. “I really thought you were in the Navy,” she said, as if disappointed in me. Then she asked, “so what do you do?” When I told her I was a professor, she said, “very impressive” and nodded her head in approval, and I felt that I had come through for her after all.
We watched the network news and Wanda said some man looked familiar, and he did look a lot like Henry Kissinger but he wasn’t. She gestured at the television and said, “that thing is always on.” She leaned over and told me that she and Olivia don’t talk much (neither can hear well) and she gets bored. She drew out the last word and came down hard on the concluding d, to emphasize her annoyance. Ryann visits her a couple times a week, but of course Wanda wants more and who wouldn’t. Linda and Bruce have seen her often during their visit, and Bruce does crossword puzzles with her, though some days she’s not quite up to it.
I liked her. She had questions to ask and things to say—some of which were reasonable, some maybe delusional, as when she referred to a disappointingly bad dog show she had attended but Ryann said it had actually been a session of pet therapy. Wanda pointed to her knees and said they weren’t working today, but she bore her occasional frustration with what seemed a matter of fact good nature. Still, she has been whittled down quite a ways, and that I imagine is no picnic.
Friday, June 27, 2008
I prefer St. Paul to San Diego
In San Diego I got off the highway at College Avenue and found the last house I lived in before moving in with Jenifer and Naomi in 1986. The neighborhood, and the whole city for that matter, seemed strangely naked—it’s the lack of big trees; there is much more sky here. Nearby was another former home, a one bedroom apartment I’d shared with friend James: he took the front room, I took the back, he got the mattress, I got the boxspring.
I drove the length of El Cajon Blvd, feeling strangely giddy and discomfited. The city that exists in my memory is limited to selected streets and buildings....but driving along I saw places that had long disappeared from my head, places where forgotten things had happened—maybe just buying motorcycle parts or going grocery shopping, but sometimes something more fraught. Twenty-five years ago at a strip mall on 54th and El Cajon I had sat outside a theater on the curb feeling dizzy and nearly undone, after fleeing the gory denouement of The Hunger, a vampire film with David Bowie.
I stopped at another former apartment on 49th, then at our last pre-Minnesota place, on Campus Avenue. On that wide street I was suddenly back with seven-year-old Naomi, walking her to the bus stop on a cool, foggy morning.
In Balboa Park I ambled through the Botanical Building, admired the big eucalyptus trees, bought an ice cream at the stand where I used to buy Naomi ice cream, by the giant tree she used to climb on but now there’s a fence around it.
I hadn’t been in San Diego in fifteen years, and had had no particular desire to visit; once here I discovered I hadn’t changed my mind. It was a little interesting to see the old homes and neighborhoods but also pointless. I’d pull up to an apartment and think, yep, there it is. The places, the city, they’re not significant anymore; this was home so long ago that I can hardly imagine what that must’ve felt like, to be at home here. A visit offers some nostalgia, maybe a few correctives to memory (a questionable benefit), but mostly I just felt homesick for Minnesota, my real place where my real people live.
Luckily, though, I do have a couple real people left here in San Diego. After Balboa Park I drove to a residential neighborhood perched on a long ridge and found one more house, a one-story rambler with lemon trees in the yard, occupied by friends Clinton and Annie and their two sons Trevor (15) and Andy (13). Clinton and I had worked on boats together through most of the 1980s, but I hadn’t seen him in over fifteen years. A little risky to visit people from whom you have so long been separated, but it turned out quite well.
Annie is a graphic designer, a freelancer who works out of a lovely sunroom built onto one side of the house. She’s smart and arty and a good cook and has impeccable taste and appeared to be a calm and effective mother. Her two boys are almost SoCal cliches, tall and thin with shaggy, water- and sun-damaged blonde hair; they skateboard and surf and play soccer. Trevor is a bit quiet/surly, but then he’s fifteen; he’s apparently an excellent surfer, and they just learned that one of his drawings had won a first place at the Del Mar Fair. Andy is a little more personable, but then give him a couple years. Aided by his mother, he explained to me how he had recently broken his pinky finger in a horseplay incident. After dinner, when we were still talking at the table, he draped himself across his mother’s lap, far too big for her but she didn’t complain.
Clinton is seemingly unchanged, despite a few wrinkles—his Lancashire accent is undiminished by time, and his proclivity for “takin’ the piss out of” people (that is, teasing, or “winding ‘em up”) is intact. I was long a main target, and it seems that sons were ready made for this type of affection. He no longer works on boats but applies his woodworking skills to houses, mostly new ones. In his own house there is much evidence of his talent—the dining room table, the front door, a television cabinet, and more. The garage is full of his tools and equipment, and he drives an Astro minivan with the backseats pulled out to accommodate his work gear.
His true passion, though, is for soccer, or for football, as he persists in calling it. He has been a Manchester United devotee since childhood, and was still reveling in their recent winning of the Champions League final. He’s currently following the Euro 2008 tournament, despite the fact that England does not have a team in the competition. There are televisions all over the house, as much for soccer-viewing as anything else.
I’ve been here at their house two days now, sleeping in the van in the driveway, and coming in for the morning to sit with Annie in her sunroom, each on our own computer. The boys are at lifeguarding camp, and Clinton is off at work, doing the wood trim in a massive house being built for some “rich focker.” Yesterday he helped put in the front door, a huge eight by ten foot slab that rotates in the middle; it took eight guys to lift.
As in Boise with Grandpa, as in Las Vegas with Rob, as in Borrego Springs with Larry and Sinda, I have been welcomed and well-treated here, and as each time before I am reluctant to go. I settle in easily and I enjoy hanging about the house....
But of course I don’t want to abuse such hospitality. This afternoon I head north for Redondo Beach and the next visit.
I drove the length of El Cajon Blvd, feeling strangely giddy and discomfited. The city that exists in my memory is limited to selected streets and buildings....but driving along I saw places that had long disappeared from my head, places where forgotten things had happened—maybe just buying motorcycle parts or going grocery shopping, but sometimes something more fraught. Twenty-five years ago at a strip mall on 54th and El Cajon I had sat outside a theater on the curb feeling dizzy and nearly undone, after fleeing the gory denouement of The Hunger, a vampire film with David Bowie.
I stopped at another former apartment on 49th, then at our last pre-Minnesota place, on Campus Avenue. On that wide street I was suddenly back with seven-year-old Naomi, walking her to the bus stop on a cool, foggy morning.
In Balboa Park I ambled through the Botanical Building, admired the big eucalyptus trees, bought an ice cream at the stand where I used to buy Naomi ice cream, by the giant tree she used to climb on but now there’s a fence around it.
I hadn’t been in San Diego in fifteen years, and had had no particular desire to visit; once here I discovered I hadn’t changed my mind. It was a little interesting to see the old homes and neighborhoods but also pointless. I’d pull up to an apartment and think, yep, there it is. The places, the city, they’re not significant anymore; this was home so long ago that I can hardly imagine what that must’ve felt like, to be at home here. A visit offers some nostalgia, maybe a few correctives to memory (a questionable benefit), but mostly I just felt homesick for Minnesota, my real place where my real people live.
Luckily, though, I do have a couple real people left here in San Diego. After Balboa Park I drove to a residential neighborhood perched on a long ridge and found one more house, a one-story rambler with lemon trees in the yard, occupied by friends Clinton and Annie and their two sons Trevor (15) and Andy (13). Clinton and I had worked on boats together through most of the 1980s, but I hadn’t seen him in over fifteen years. A little risky to visit people from whom you have so long been separated, but it turned out quite well.
Annie is a graphic designer, a freelancer who works out of a lovely sunroom built onto one side of the house. She’s smart and arty and a good cook and has impeccable taste and appeared to be a calm and effective mother. Her two boys are almost SoCal cliches, tall and thin with shaggy, water- and sun-damaged blonde hair; they skateboard and surf and play soccer. Trevor is a bit quiet/surly, but then he’s fifteen; he’s apparently an excellent surfer, and they just learned that one of his drawings had won a first place at the Del Mar Fair. Andy is a little more personable, but then give him a couple years. Aided by his mother, he explained to me how he had recently broken his pinky finger in a horseplay incident. After dinner, when we were still talking at the table, he draped himself across his mother’s lap, far too big for her but she didn’t complain.
Clinton is seemingly unchanged, despite a few wrinkles—his Lancashire accent is undiminished by time, and his proclivity for “takin’ the piss out of” people (that is, teasing, or “winding ‘em up”) is intact. I was long a main target, and it seems that sons were ready made for this type of affection. He no longer works on boats but applies his woodworking skills to houses, mostly new ones. In his own house there is much evidence of his talent—the dining room table, the front door, a television cabinet, and more. The garage is full of his tools and equipment, and he drives an Astro minivan with the backseats pulled out to accommodate his work gear.
His true passion, though, is for soccer, or for football, as he persists in calling it. He has been a Manchester United devotee since childhood, and was still reveling in their recent winning of the Champions League final. He’s currently following the Euro 2008 tournament, despite the fact that England does not have a team in the competition. There are televisions all over the house, as much for soccer-viewing as anything else.
I’ve been here at their house two days now, sleeping in the van in the driveway, and coming in for the morning to sit with Annie in her sunroom, each on our own computer. The boys are at lifeguarding camp, and Clinton is off at work, doing the wood trim in a massive house being built for some “rich focker.” Yesterday he helped put in the front door, a huge eight by ten foot slab that rotates in the middle; it took eight guys to lift.
As in Boise with Grandpa, as in Las Vegas with Rob, as in Borrego Springs with Larry and Sinda, I have been welcomed and well-treated here, and as each time before I am reluctant to go. I settle in easily and I enjoy hanging about the house....
But of course I don’t want to abuse such hospitality. This afternoon I head north for Redondo Beach and the next visit.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Apparently John Wayne liked cheese
At the Roadrunner Club pool, a big blonde woman sat on the steps in the shallow end, in water up to her chest. Her large, sun-burnished bosom bulged from a black one-piece. I dove in at the deep end, then pulled myself back out and sat on the edge with my legs in the water.
Across the pool the woman said, “You look too young to live here.”
I answered “Unfortunately,” which immediately afterwards struck me as odd. I don’t often wish to be older than I am. I told her that I was visiting friends, then I said she looked too young too, partly because she did, partly because it seemed the polite thing to say.
Her parents live at the Roadrunner, she told me, and she had come out from San Clemente to look after her mother, who had fallen at the pool. She, the mother, had been scanning the pool chairs for her husband and not watching where she was going, when she inadvertently stepped into one of the small side wells of the jacuzzi; she broke her upper arm and dislocated her shoulder. I winced but the daughter laughed and shook her head. “And just two weeks ago my father had to be air-lifted to Brawley after being bitten by a rattlesnake.” She laughed again.
She told me that when not having accidents her parents enjoy hiking and birdwatching. “They put out bits of raw chicken on their deck for the roadrunners here,” she said. “Have you seen them?” I have seen them, skulking among the landscaped cactuses, then dashing away when spotted; they’re large birds, something like a lanky crow in size. I’ve never seen one fly though I think they can. “If my father forgets to put out the meat,” the woman said, “the birds come to the sliding door and tap on the glass with their beaks.” I thought, I’d like to see that, an impatient roadrunner.
The weather had moderated ten degrees or so, and in the evening Larry and I went for our first and only hike, in the hills west of town. Picking my way down a slope of loose rock and cholla and agave and barrel cacti, I felt an overwhelming sense of at-homeness. The Borrego Valley makes me feel right with the world....
Back at the house, Sinda had made John Wayne’s Favorite Casserole for dinner. She got the recipe off the internet: lots of cheese, eggs and butter, highlighted with bits of green chilies. "You know, Capper," Larry said, "The Searchers is a very important movie for Sinda." We ate on tv trays in the living room, watching hiking video Larry had shot when I visited in January. More than once his commentary in real time would be followed almost immediately by identical remarks on the recording. “Spectacular!”
At the end of the evening I had to say good-bye, which I did with affection and great reluctance. The longer I stay in Borrego, and the more time I spend with Larry and Sinda, the more I want to stay.
In the morning I packed up and headed east towards and into the Cuyamaca Mountains. The climb was slow and steep and the temperature gauge rose to a worrisome but not dangerous level. Late in the morning I hiked three miles, first along a trickle of a creek, where fire had damaged but not quite killed oak and holly trees, and then up through brushy scrub to Oakzanita Peak. Along the creek birds flew between the half dead trees, picking off flies. I spotted a pair of acorn woodpeckers, birds whose head coloring always makes me think of clowns. Lizards scattered on the dusty trail, frantic to escape me though they really had little to fear.
On top, the rocky knob offered a long hazy view of hills and mountains in all directions. Three vultures and a red-tailed hawk soared overhead in big circles. When I set off on the return hike the vultures banked low to have a closer look at me, and I looked up and said, “fuck off.”
Back in the van, I headed down into San Diego for a strange afternoon of remembering places and episodes long lost and forgotten.
Across the pool the woman said, “You look too young to live here.”
I answered “Unfortunately,” which immediately afterwards struck me as odd. I don’t often wish to be older than I am. I told her that I was visiting friends, then I said she looked too young too, partly because she did, partly because it seemed the polite thing to say.
Her parents live at the Roadrunner, she told me, and she had come out from San Clemente to look after her mother, who had fallen at the pool. She, the mother, had been scanning the pool chairs for her husband and not watching where she was going, when she inadvertently stepped into one of the small side wells of the jacuzzi; she broke her upper arm and dislocated her shoulder. I winced but the daughter laughed and shook her head. “And just two weeks ago my father had to be air-lifted to Brawley after being bitten by a rattlesnake.” She laughed again.
She told me that when not having accidents her parents enjoy hiking and birdwatching. “They put out bits of raw chicken on their deck for the roadrunners here,” she said. “Have you seen them?” I have seen them, skulking among the landscaped cactuses, then dashing away when spotted; they’re large birds, something like a lanky crow in size. I’ve never seen one fly though I think they can. “If my father forgets to put out the meat,” the woman said, “the birds come to the sliding door and tap on the glass with their beaks.” I thought, I’d like to see that, an impatient roadrunner.
The weather had moderated ten degrees or so, and in the evening Larry and I went for our first and only hike, in the hills west of town. Picking my way down a slope of loose rock and cholla and agave and barrel cacti, I felt an overwhelming sense of at-homeness. The Borrego Valley makes me feel right with the world....
Back at the house, Sinda had made John Wayne’s Favorite Casserole for dinner. She got the recipe off the internet: lots of cheese, eggs and butter, highlighted with bits of green chilies. "You know, Capper," Larry said, "The Searchers is a very important movie for Sinda." We ate on tv trays in the living room, watching hiking video Larry had shot when I visited in January. More than once his commentary in real time would be followed almost immediately by identical remarks on the recording. “Spectacular!”
At the end of the evening I had to say good-bye, which I did with affection and great reluctance. The longer I stay in Borrego, and the more time I spend with Larry and Sinda, the more I want to stay.
In the morning I packed up and headed east towards and into the Cuyamaca Mountains. The climb was slow and steep and the temperature gauge rose to a worrisome but not dangerous level. Late in the morning I hiked three miles, first along a trickle of a creek, where fire had damaged but not quite killed oak and holly trees, and then up through brushy scrub to Oakzanita Peak. Along the creek birds flew between the half dead trees, picking off flies. I spotted a pair of acorn woodpeckers, birds whose head coloring always makes me think of clowns. Lizards scattered on the dusty trail, frantic to escape me though they really had little to fear.
On top, the rocky knob offered a long hazy view of hills and mountains in all directions. Three vultures and a red-tailed hawk soared overhead in big circles. When I set off on the return hike the vultures banked low to have a closer look at me, and I looked up and said, “fuck off.”
Back in the van, I headed down into San Diego for a strange afternoon of remembering places and episodes long lost and forgotten.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Grapevine Canyon
As Larry and I drove west up into the mountains, the temperature dropped into the nineties. We leveled out in Ranchita, a wide plateau scattered with small houses with trucks parked in the dusty yards.
We soon turned off onto the sandy Grapevine Canyon Road. Larry said, “so, Capper, this is the old way down to Borrego, the way the Indians used and later the ranchers. And now it’s the proposed route for a massive powerline to San Diego.” Most of the locals oppose the powerline, which will cross Anza-Borrego State Park, but Larry says it’s probably inevitable.
The newer road to Borrego Springs, which we had just used, climbs right up the mountains’ eastern face in tight curves, carved and blasted into the steep slope. It took ten years, 1952 to 1962, to complete the road, which provided a much more direct route to Borrego. The old road, though, descends more gradually and sensibly along the bottom of Grapevine Canyon, passing several springs before coming out onto the desert floor at Yaqui Well.
“Did you see that sign?” I asked Larry.
“Oh, yeah,” he said braking, "I wanted to show you that.” He stopped and backed up and we got out. “A bit of backcountry protest art,” Larry said, gesturing at a poster-sized image of Osama bin Laden holding a machine gun and wearing an SDG&E jumpsuit (SDG&E=San Diego Gas and Electric, sponsors of the planned powerline). Handwritten beside the sun-faded image was a short commentary that used the word “liars” repeatedly.
We passed several small ranches, the houses accompanied by eucalyptus trees, a few cows or horses, often a backhoe. We paused at Angelina Spring, where a single large cottonwood stood, a sure sign of water in the desert. In the canyon bottom, desert willow crowded in on the road. As we lost elevation, big catclaw bushes appeared, then tall sprays of ocotillo, finally the dangerously named teddy bear cholla. We had reached the wide mouth of Grapevine Canyon, a delta plain spread out in the shadow of Grapevine Mountain, one of a string of brown peaks running off eastwards.
At Yaqui Well we got out and walked up a bouldery slope, weaving among the cactus. The last of the day’s light was moving rapidly up the opposite ridge, making a stark division on the mountainside between late-day yellow and the brown of dusk. We stood and watched till the sunlight reached the highest peaks, until only a single contrail in the sky above was still lit.
Back at the house Sinda had made dinner for us, pasta and salad, but before we sat down attention turned to Vargas, whose terrarium rests on a counter in the dining room. He was hiding under one of the three rocks. Larry said, “so, Capper, you see one of the great things about having a scorpion is that you never know where it is.” I could imagine that not being such a great thing, but we went ahead and each made a guess about which rock Vargas was under. Then Sinda took the top off and reached in to lift up her rock. Larry stepped back and said “Sinda,” a single word of warning and worry.
She had chosen right--Vargas stood up, curled his tail and sidled halfway up the small depression in the dirt. “Ok, put it back,” Larry said. He doesn’t like to expose Vargas against his will, preferring to wait till the scorpion emerges on his own. Sinda used the edge of the rock to coax Vargas back to the bottom of the depression--Larry made a noise--and then she put the rock back on top of him.
After dinner we watched The Piano Teacher, a disturbing story about a woman who has mother and sexual issues. Back at the trailer I had to watch some Sports Center before I could go to bed.
We soon turned off onto the sandy Grapevine Canyon Road. Larry said, “so, Capper, this is the old way down to Borrego, the way the Indians used and later the ranchers. And now it’s the proposed route for a massive powerline to San Diego.” Most of the locals oppose the powerline, which will cross Anza-Borrego State Park, but Larry says it’s probably inevitable.
The newer road to Borrego Springs, which we had just used, climbs right up the mountains’ eastern face in tight curves, carved and blasted into the steep slope. It took ten years, 1952 to 1962, to complete the road, which provided a much more direct route to Borrego. The old road, though, descends more gradually and sensibly along the bottom of Grapevine Canyon, passing several springs before coming out onto the desert floor at Yaqui Well.
“Did you see that sign?” I asked Larry.
“Oh, yeah,” he said braking, "I wanted to show you that.” He stopped and backed up and we got out. “A bit of backcountry protest art,” Larry said, gesturing at a poster-sized image of Osama bin Laden holding a machine gun and wearing an SDG&E jumpsuit (SDG&E=San Diego Gas and Electric, sponsors of the planned powerline). Handwritten beside the sun-faded image was a short commentary that used the word “liars” repeatedly.
We passed several small ranches, the houses accompanied by eucalyptus trees, a few cows or horses, often a backhoe. We paused at Angelina Spring, where a single large cottonwood stood, a sure sign of water in the desert. In the canyon bottom, desert willow crowded in on the road. As we lost elevation, big catclaw bushes appeared, then tall sprays of ocotillo, finally the dangerously named teddy bear cholla. We had reached the wide mouth of Grapevine Canyon, a delta plain spread out in the shadow of Grapevine Mountain, one of a string of brown peaks running off eastwards.
At Yaqui Well we got out and walked up a bouldery slope, weaving among the cactus. The last of the day’s light was moving rapidly up the opposite ridge, making a stark division on the mountainside between late-day yellow and the brown of dusk. We stood and watched till the sunlight reached the highest peaks, until only a single contrail in the sky above was still lit.
Back at the house Sinda had made dinner for us, pasta and salad, but before we sat down attention turned to Vargas, whose terrarium rests on a counter in the dining room. He was hiding under one of the three rocks. Larry said, “so, Capper, you see one of the great things about having a scorpion is that you never know where it is.” I could imagine that not being such a great thing, but we went ahead and each made a guess about which rock Vargas was under. Then Sinda took the top off and reached in to lift up her rock. Larry stepped back and said “Sinda,” a single word of warning and worry.
She had chosen right--Vargas stood up, curled his tail and sidled halfway up the small depression in the dirt. “Ok, put it back,” Larry said. He doesn’t like to expose Vargas against his will, preferring to wait till the scorpion emerges on his own. Sinda used the edge of the rock to coax Vargas back to the bottom of the depression--Larry made a noise--and then she put the rock back on top of him.
After dinner we watched The Piano Teacher, a disturbing story about a woman who has mother and sexual issues. Back at the trailer I had to watch some Sports Center before I could go to bed.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Roadrunner Club
Last night when we were on the rooftop deck, a pack of coyotes started up nearby, yipping and howling, their surprisingly high voices carrying in the still air. They paused, then started again as if they could not suppress a collective lament. In Borrego people with small dogs have to be careful. I wonder what a coyote makes of a bichon frise, besides a meal.
In the morning I went for a walk around the Roadrunner Club. The streets and cul-de-sacs of doublewides are interrupted and softened by a par 3 course lined with big palms and willows and non-native conifers. White-winged doves murmur in the palms, and mallards stand beside a shaded pond. The green, well-watered strip forms a rough circle through the Club, and seems more like a park than a golf course. Workers were out in utility golf carts, collecting downed branches, raking leaves, and mowing the already short grass.
Only one person was playing, a man in his seventies with an awkward, truncated swing. He stood in a tee box and hit one ball after another towards a not too distant hole. A coyote ran out into the open to sniff at a ball that had just come to a stop. Unimpressed, it sauntered on across the fairway, pausing only briefly to look over its shoulder when another ball fell nearby.
The Roadrunner Club is less than half occupied this time of the year. There are a few full-time residents, but most people use the trailers as vacation homes in the winter months. You have to be at least fifty-five to own at the Club. Most of the current residents seem active types: they golf, some bicycle around the grounds, they take water aerobics at the pool, they gather for potlucks in the Clubhouse. Driving around in their golf carts,they stop often to chat and laugh with their neighbors. Most of them fall into the golden years category: over sixty, under seventy-five, post-career, pre-the-ravages-of-old-age.
The state of the grounds, as well as the vibe at the Roadrunner falls somewhere between country club posh and trailer park seedy. It’s just right, bourgy comfortable, well kempt but not pretentious. I want to move in, and I don’t want to wait.
Prices are reasonable, and numerous “coaches” are for sale. One two-bedroom, two-bath unit, with new hardwood floors and new appliances, was going for just $42,500. Larry’s trailer, which is relatively down at the heels (though still charming, in a pale paneled-wood sort of way), is worth half as much. The catch is you have to pay $600 a month in club fees, though considering the pool and golf course, that doesn’t seem so bad.
Larry inherited his trailer from his father, Mac, a career Air Force man. Supposedly Mac’s ghost still occasionally makes appearances at the trailer, at least according to more than one past visitor. But I’ve never seen him. Larry says he would have approved of my short hair.
Larry and Sinda moved out to the trailer from San Diego almost twenty years ago. Before long they had a house built, and the two-bedroom trailer became Larry’s office and library and a place to house visitors. In every room there are crowded and sagging bookshelves, variously devoted to science fiction, rock music, Japan, China, postmodernist fiction, natural history.... And no stretch of wall is free from high, tottering piles of records, vhs tapes, cds, or more books. In the closets are numerous boxes of cassette tapes, retired but not discarded. It’s a trash house of texts.
A framed picture of Mark Twain hangs on one wall, of Johnny Cash on another. On the refrigerator is a thirty-year-old 8x10 of Sinda holding a machine gun and striking a Patty Hearst pose.
Since moving out to the desert they’ve commuted to San Diego (two and a half hours away) to teach, going into town for three days a week and staying at a motel. They’re now both nearing retirement and only teach spring semester.
Late in the morning I went for a swim with Larry and Maggie. I swam ten laps to try to make up for my recent sedentary ways. At eleven the thermometer at the pool read 102, a noticeable improvement over the 110 at the same time two days ago. I’m not kidding--102 or 104 feels manageable in comparison to temperatures above 110. One hundred sixteen feels ridiculous;after a very short time you just laugh, realizing there’s no way, and quickly move indoors.
The four of us, Sinda too, went for lunch at the Red Ocotillo, a restaurant housed in a small quonset hut. Curved ceilings are cool. I had the Large Mixed Green Salad dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette and festooned with kalamata olives and I was pretty happy.
In the morning I went for a walk around the Roadrunner Club. The streets and cul-de-sacs of doublewides are interrupted and softened by a par 3 course lined with big palms and willows and non-native conifers. White-winged doves murmur in the palms, and mallards stand beside a shaded pond. The green, well-watered strip forms a rough circle through the Club, and seems more like a park than a golf course. Workers were out in utility golf carts, collecting downed branches, raking leaves, and mowing the already short grass.
Only one person was playing, a man in his seventies with an awkward, truncated swing. He stood in a tee box and hit one ball after another towards a not too distant hole. A coyote ran out into the open to sniff at a ball that had just come to a stop. Unimpressed, it sauntered on across the fairway, pausing only briefly to look over its shoulder when another ball fell nearby.
The Roadrunner Club is less than half occupied this time of the year. There are a few full-time residents, but most people use the trailers as vacation homes in the winter months. You have to be at least fifty-five to own at the Club. Most of the current residents seem active types: they golf, some bicycle around the grounds, they take water aerobics at the pool, they gather for potlucks in the Clubhouse. Driving around in their golf carts,they stop often to chat and laugh with their neighbors. Most of them fall into the golden years category: over sixty, under seventy-five, post-career, pre-the-ravages-of-old-age.
The state of the grounds, as well as the vibe at the Roadrunner falls somewhere between country club posh and trailer park seedy. It’s just right, bourgy comfortable, well kempt but not pretentious. I want to move in, and I don’t want to wait.
Prices are reasonable, and numerous “coaches” are for sale. One two-bedroom, two-bath unit, with new hardwood floors and new appliances, was going for just $42,500. Larry’s trailer, which is relatively down at the heels (though still charming, in a pale paneled-wood sort of way), is worth half as much. The catch is you have to pay $600 a month in club fees, though considering the pool and golf course, that doesn’t seem so bad.
Larry inherited his trailer from his father, Mac, a career Air Force man. Supposedly Mac’s ghost still occasionally makes appearances at the trailer, at least according to more than one past visitor. But I’ve never seen him. Larry says he would have approved of my short hair.
Larry and Sinda moved out to the trailer from San Diego almost twenty years ago. Before long they had a house built, and the two-bedroom trailer became Larry’s office and library and a place to house visitors. In every room there are crowded and sagging bookshelves, variously devoted to science fiction, rock music, Japan, China, postmodernist fiction, natural history.... And no stretch of wall is free from high, tottering piles of records, vhs tapes, cds, or more books. In the closets are numerous boxes of cassette tapes, retired but not discarded. It’s a trash house of texts.
A framed picture of Mark Twain hangs on one wall, of Johnny Cash on another. On the refrigerator is a thirty-year-old 8x10 of Sinda holding a machine gun and striking a Patty Hearst pose.
Since moving out to the desert they’ve commuted to San Diego (two and a half hours away) to teach, going into town for three days a week and staying at a motel. They’re now both nearing retirement and only teach spring semester.
Late in the morning I went for a swim with Larry and Maggie. I swam ten laps to try to make up for my recent sedentary ways. At eleven the thermometer at the pool read 102, a noticeable improvement over the 110 at the same time two days ago. I’m not kidding--102 or 104 feels manageable in comparison to temperatures above 110. One hundred sixteen feels ridiculous;after a very short time you just laugh, realizing there’s no way, and quickly move indoors.
The four of us, Sinda too, went for lunch at the Red Ocotillo, a restaurant housed in a small quonset hut. Curved ceilings are cool. I had the Large Mixed Green Salad dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette and festooned with kalamata olives and I was pretty happy.
Monday, June 23, 2008
I do not know you, Kung-Fu
After a late morning swim, I went alone to Los Jilbertos and sat down at an orange formica table to eat a plate of tacos. A thin, slight man in baggy cotton pants and sandals came in to the small restaurant. I could see his face only in quarter profile but thought he looked familiar. His countenance was mild but disdainful, his complexion, even his lips, a uniformly tanned shade of pale mud. He ordered in a quiet voice that did not carry.
I took a bite of taco but did not take my eyes from him. His haughty demeanor and long fingernails bespoke careful and long-term debauchery, pursued with phlegmatic cruelty. He took some time to explain to the woman behind the counter what he wanted and ended with a single, slightly louder and unsmiling word: “comprende?” The woman answered “comprendo” but looked confused, as if he had asked for something untoward. When he turned sideways to reach into his pocket, I thought, that’s Peter Fonda, who I recently saw on tv pitching a seven cd collection called “The Summer of Love” and looking wasted.
But when I got a better look, I realized that the man wasn’t Peter Fonda but David Carradine. Grasshopper. Kung-Fu. The singer of “I’m Easy.” Uma's Bill. Carradine stepped to the sideboard and filled two small plastic cups with pickled carrots, then waited for his order, motionless as a spider anticipating its prey. When his food was ready he took the white bag from the woman and headed for the door. He saw me and nodded, raised his hand in single-finger supercilious acknowledgement. But then he hesitated, stayed his hand halfway. “I thought I knew you,” he murmured in a quiet voice. No, you do not, I thought but did not say. No, I am not one of your minions, David Carradine, and I have not and will not be party to your corruption.
After my close encounter with celebrity evil, I proceeded to Larry and Sinda’s house. In response to the 112-degree heat, they were reposed on living room couches, Maggie too, soothed by a-c, holding tall drinks and watching a French film. That might sound a bit decadent too, but the mood was much friendlier than David Carradine’s Dementor vibe.
Just after the sun set we went on a drive up towards Coyote Canyon. A local rich person has bought up big chunks of open land in the Borrego Valley, named these parcels, collectively, Galleta Meadows, and sprinkled the lands with numerous life-sized pre-historic creatures. He commissioned a sculptor to build the two dozen or so sheet metal animals--camel-like, elephant-like, turtle-like, and more--and install them in the fields in small groups. They stand in the dead grass, rusty in the heat, strange and intriguing anomalies.
We drove into a lemon grove, down a long corridor of the trees, which grow together in a solid phalanx twenty feet high. At the far edge we got out, and I walked among the trees looking for ripe fruit. At my approach, big cicadas scattered out of thick-growing branches, bouncing off my hat and face and arms. Larry found me and we drifted out of the trees to the edge of the desert, where irrigated monoculture gives way to a far more interesting mix of creosote and catclaw and ocotillo.
Later back at the house, after dark, we all went up to the rooftop deck. Jupiter stood low over the southeastern horizon. Swathes of Milky Way stretched across the big sky. I lay down on a bench and spotted a couple falling stars before Maggie spilled her drink on my head.
Larry said that in Japan there’s a new and popular genre, the cell phone novel. Content arrives via text messaging, either the whole novel at once (the works tend to be shorter than conventional novels), or in installments. A Japanese aficionado told Larry that one of the best things about cell phone novels is that you can delete them immediately after finishing reading. Throwaway literature. I don’t know.
I took a bite of taco but did not take my eyes from him. His haughty demeanor and long fingernails bespoke careful and long-term debauchery, pursued with phlegmatic cruelty. He took some time to explain to the woman behind the counter what he wanted and ended with a single, slightly louder and unsmiling word: “comprende?” The woman answered “comprendo” but looked confused, as if he had asked for something untoward. When he turned sideways to reach into his pocket, I thought, that’s Peter Fonda, who I recently saw on tv pitching a seven cd collection called “The Summer of Love” and looking wasted.
But when I got a better look, I realized that the man wasn’t Peter Fonda but David Carradine. Grasshopper. Kung-Fu. The singer of “I’m Easy.” Uma's Bill. Carradine stepped to the sideboard and filled two small plastic cups with pickled carrots, then waited for his order, motionless as a spider anticipating its prey. When his food was ready he took the white bag from the woman and headed for the door. He saw me and nodded, raised his hand in single-finger supercilious acknowledgement. But then he hesitated, stayed his hand halfway. “I thought I knew you,” he murmured in a quiet voice. No, you do not, I thought but did not say. No, I am not one of your minions, David Carradine, and I have not and will not be party to your corruption.
After my close encounter with celebrity evil, I proceeded to Larry and Sinda’s house. In response to the 112-degree heat, they were reposed on living room couches, Maggie too, soothed by a-c, holding tall drinks and watching a French film. That might sound a bit decadent too, but the mood was much friendlier than David Carradine’s Dementor vibe.
Just after the sun set we went on a drive up towards Coyote Canyon. A local rich person has bought up big chunks of open land in the Borrego Valley, named these parcels, collectively, Galleta Meadows, and sprinkled the lands with numerous life-sized pre-historic creatures. He commissioned a sculptor to build the two dozen or so sheet metal animals--camel-like, elephant-like, turtle-like, and more--and install them in the fields in small groups. They stand in the dead grass, rusty in the heat, strange and intriguing anomalies.
We drove into a lemon grove, down a long corridor of the trees, which grow together in a solid phalanx twenty feet high. At the far edge we got out, and I walked among the trees looking for ripe fruit. At my approach, big cicadas scattered out of thick-growing branches, bouncing off my hat and face and arms. Larry found me and we drifted out of the trees to the edge of the desert, where irrigated monoculture gives way to a far more interesting mix of creosote and catclaw and ocotillo.
Later back at the house, after dark, we all went up to the rooftop deck. Jupiter stood low over the southeastern horizon. Swathes of Milky Way stretched across the big sky. I lay down on a bench and spotted a couple falling stars before Maggie spilled her drink on my head.
Larry said that in Japan there’s a new and popular genre, the cell phone novel. Content arrives via text messaging, either the whole novel at once (the works tend to be shorter than conventional novels), or in installments. A Japanese aficionado told Larry that one of the best things about cell phone novels is that you can delete them immediately after finishing reading. Throwaway literature. I don’t know.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Borrego karaoke
Looking out the window at the mountains, which rise up all around Borrego Springs, I feel more than a little frustrated. I want to get out there and hike. On the other hand I don’t want to die.
Yesterday in the afternoon, when the temperature reached 117, I went out on a brief walk in the field next to the house, among the creosote and brittlebush. I stood still and felt the unrelenting sun, felt the heat pressing in on me. It would be easy to panic if caught somewhere far from shelter. Last summer a man died when he tried to walk just a mile from his disabled car to refuge. He even had a bottle of water with him, though I suppose it didn’t help that he lacked shoes.
Around lunchtime, another friend of Larry and Sinda’s, Maggie, arrived from San Diego. She’s a colleague at San Diego State University (where all three teach in the English department) and had come out to the desert to celebrate her 60th birthday.
After a lunch of crab quiche and salad, we spent much of the afternoon in the living room, talking, listening to songs that Larry thought we should hear (including several by the band Gogol Bordello), and watching part of a documentary on The Who, as well as footage of Larry and Sinda’s granddaughter, Ella. Gin and tonic flowed freely.
At the pool in the early evening I tried to work off some of my unused hiking energy, swimming several laps. Then I put my hat back on and cowered low in the water to limit my exposure to the sun. Even though the temperature had dipped to 110.
After the sun set we headed to Carlee’s, a bar and restaurant in town, for food and karaoke. When we arrived, a young man with a goatee was singing “Strangers in the Night.” He hesitated momentarily when he got to the line “doo bee doo bee doo,” but then had a self-conscious go at it. In the course of the evening he would be the only person under sixty to perform, and the only one to show even the slightest timidity.
We sat at a table just a few feet from the karaoke corner, where the young man stood behind a small monitor singing Sinatra. I politely divided my attention between him and the menu.
When he finished, the karaoke master (or whatever the term is), a stout woman with tall white hair, called out the name Leon. A man with a white beard and a Hawaiian shirt tight around the middle performed two Eagles songs, including “Peaceful, Easy Feeling.”
Next was Todd, a man with long, lank hair, a ragged beard and sun-cured complexion. He took the microphone and proceeded to slur his way through The Temptations’ “My Girl,” skipping words and lines when he got behind, sticking with a monotone delivery throughout. Larry, always generous, said he liked his style, describing it as “dadaesque.” Later, Todd performed an understated version of the Trogs’ “Wild Thing.”
The karaoke master, Donna, sang too (as did her husband, Harold, who sat at the bar and filled in during lulls, choosing talky standards). In response to a request, Donna sang her signature song, “Live Close By,” striding up and down, belting out the chorus with an infectious brio:
Live close by
Visit often
That’ll work
That’ll work for me
Live close by
Visit often
Save us both a lot of misery
Larry took a turn, singing two songs and not bothering for either to look at the monitor. His first number was Dean Martin’s “Memories are Made of This.” He glided about the small performance space with the élan of an experienced crooner, switching the microphone from hand to hand, hitting each vocal mark spot on: “one man....one wife.... a love that lasts through life.” For his second selection he chose Elvis’ “Love Me,” a song he often sings on karaoke nights. When he returned to the table Sinda took his hand and said, “that was really good, Larry.” He looked a little abashed but also pleased with the compliment.
We watched a woman named Darlene sing “I Fall to Pieces,” then left just as Harold was coming to the front to have a go at “Georgia on My Mind.”
Yesterday in the afternoon, when the temperature reached 117, I went out on a brief walk in the field next to the house, among the creosote and brittlebush. I stood still and felt the unrelenting sun, felt the heat pressing in on me. It would be easy to panic if caught somewhere far from shelter. Last summer a man died when he tried to walk just a mile from his disabled car to refuge. He even had a bottle of water with him, though I suppose it didn’t help that he lacked shoes.
Around lunchtime, another friend of Larry and Sinda’s, Maggie, arrived from San Diego. She’s a colleague at San Diego State University (where all three teach in the English department) and had come out to the desert to celebrate her 60th birthday.
After a lunch of crab quiche and salad, we spent much of the afternoon in the living room, talking, listening to songs that Larry thought we should hear (including several by the band Gogol Bordello), and watching part of a documentary on The Who, as well as footage of Larry and Sinda’s granddaughter, Ella. Gin and tonic flowed freely.
At the pool in the early evening I tried to work off some of my unused hiking energy, swimming several laps. Then I put my hat back on and cowered low in the water to limit my exposure to the sun. Even though the temperature had dipped to 110.
After the sun set we headed to Carlee’s, a bar and restaurant in town, for food and karaoke. When we arrived, a young man with a goatee was singing “Strangers in the Night.” He hesitated momentarily when he got to the line “doo bee doo bee doo,” but then had a self-conscious go at it. In the course of the evening he would be the only person under sixty to perform, and the only one to show even the slightest timidity.
We sat at a table just a few feet from the karaoke corner, where the young man stood behind a small monitor singing Sinatra. I politely divided my attention between him and the menu.
When he finished, the karaoke master (or whatever the term is), a stout woman with tall white hair, called out the name Leon. A man with a white beard and a Hawaiian shirt tight around the middle performed two Eagles songs, including “Peaceful, Easy Feeling.”
Next was Todd, a man with long, lank hair, a ragged beard and sun-cured complexion. He took the microphone and proceeded to slur his way through The Temptations’ “My Girl,” skipping words and lines when he got behind, sticking with a monotone delivery throughout. Larry, always generous, said he liked his style, describing it as “dadaesque.” Later, Todd performed an understated version of the Trogs’ “Wild Thing.”
The karaoke master, Donna, sang too (as did her husband, Harold, who sat at the bar and filled in during lulls, choosing talky standards). In response to a request, Donna sang her signature song, “Live Close By,” striding up and down, belting out the chorus with an infectious brio:
Live close by
Visit often
That’ll work
That’ll work for me
Live close by
Visit often
Save us both a lot of misery
Larry took a turn, singing two songs and not bothering for either to look at the monitor. His first number was Dean Martin’s “Memories are Made of This.” He glided about the small performance space with the élan of an experienced crooner, switching the microphone from hand to hand, hitting each vocal mark spot on: “one man....one wife.... a love that lasts through life.” For his second selection he chose Elvis’ “Love Me,” a song he often sings on karaoke nights. When he returned to the table Sinda took his hand and said, “that was really good, Larry.” He looked a little abashed but also pleased with the compliment.
We watched a woman named Darlene sing “I Fall to Pieces,” then left just as Harold was coming to the front to have a go at “Georgia on My Mind.”
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The word "hot" is not sufficient
By the time I reached the small town of Mecca, at the southern end of the Coachella Valley, I was frantic for something cold to drink. I’d been driving across the Mojave for six hours, and the water I had with me was hot, matching the 112-degree air temperature. In a convenience store I gulped down a Naked Juice and felt better, at least for a little while.
I had meant to leave Las Vegas at four in the morning, to drive down to Borrego Springs, and should’ve left even earlier. But I didn’t drag myself from bed and get on the road until almost six; by eight the temperature had already risen above one hundred degrees.
The route from Vegas to Borrego leads through rugged and beautiful desert, descending gradually, over three hundred miles, towards the Coachella and the Salton Sea, which is nearly two hundred feet below sea level. I passed through wide valleys dotted with creosote and yucca, by the high sandy ridges of Kelso Dunes, alongside the jagged Coxcomb Mountains on the edge of Joshua Tree, through just two miniscule towns, Amboy and Desert Center, both nearly deserted. Near Mecca I came to the first signs of human activity, orange and date groves, watered by a canal from the Colorado River. In a large field of grape vines a scattering of big and variously colored umbrellas protected farm workers, who crouched beneath, pruning or picking.
I’ve made the same drive many times in the winter, usually taking two days because I stop so often to explore and hike. But on this day I impatiently ticked off the landmarks one by one, wanting to just get along, to get through. Unlike the Joads, who had to cross the same desert, I wasn’t carrying a dead grandmother in back, but I still felt anxious, watching the odometer, the temperature gauge. There were few other cars on the road, and not one without air-conditioning, like me. Listening to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, especially the stories of his near starvation, added to the apocalyptic mood. Mecca was a great relief; I’d felt almost done for. My feet and hands were swollen up, my head was feverish and achy, and hot water was doing nothing for my substantial thirst.
From Mecca I had only another hour to Borrego Springs, where I’m visiting friends Larry and Sinda. Just after noon I pulled up at a mobile home trailer, in the Roadrunner Club, and hoped Larry had left the door open as promised (he and Sinda would be gone till later in the day). Luckily he had. I don’t know what I would’ve done otherwise; I had contemplated a stay at the small public library in town, if it was open. Inside the trailer the temperature was a cool and comfy ninety. An immense relief. By mid-afternoon the outside temperature had risen to 116, and a stiff wind only exacerbated the feeling of being oven baked.
Later, Larry showed up and we had a swim at the Roadrunner Club’s pool. I wore a hat and sunglasses and pasted myself in a corner just shaded by a palm tree.
Larry and Sinda have a house on the other side of town, and keep the trailer (which at one time had been Larry’s father’s) as an office and sometime guest lodge. After our swim we went over to the house, where first off I was introduced to Vargas, their new scorpion. I peered in the terrarium, but Vargas--named after the faux-Mexican character Charlton Heston plays in Touch of Evil--was hiding under a rock. It was the fourth in a series of scorpion companion pets, each named Vargas, one of who had lived for two years in captivity. Sinda had found the pale creature the day before at a local furniture store.
It was crawling across an open patch of floor, and Sinda grabbed a leather bowl and coaxed it inside. Leaving the scorpion safely confined, she thought, she went to the front of the store to ask for a bag. The salesperson’s eyes bulged apprehensively, and she was all for abandoning the premises. But she gave Sinda the bag. However, when Sinda returned to the back of the store the bowl was empty. After a little scouting about she re-discovered the scorpion and managed to bag it. She had planned to take it outside and let it go, but then decided to take it home, as she and Larry have both enjoyed the company of past Vargases. “But this time, Larry,” Sinda admonished, “you can’t over-feed it.” The last one Larry, mesmerized by its killing and eating technique, had plied with too many crickets, and it had died.
He agreed to be more careful this time, but told Sinda it would still need to feed. He turned to me, already with a plan, and said, “So Capper, we’ll go out a little later and see if we can capture some insects. Vargas will only eat then if they’re alive.”
Later we did manage to find a couple flying bugs, more wings than body, but Vargas would not come out to eat them, not at least while we watched.
I had meant to leave Las Vegas at four in the morning, to drive down to Borrego Springs, and should’ve left even earlier. But I didn’t drag myself from bed and get on the road until almost six; by eight the temperature had already risen above one hundred degrees.
The route from Vegas to Borrego leads through rugged and beautiful desert, descending gradually, over three hundred miles, towards the Coachella and the Salton Sea, which is nearly two hundred feet below sea level. I passed through wide valleys dotted with creosote and yucca, by the high sandy ridges of Kelso Dunes, alongside the jagged Coxcomb Mountains on the edge of Joshua Tree, through just two miniscule towns, Amboy and Desert Center, both nearly deserted. Near Mecca I came to the first signs of human activity, orange and date groves, watered by a canal from the Colorado River. In a large field of grape vines a scattering of big and variously colored umbrellas protected farm workers, who crouched beneath, pruning or picking.
I’ve made the same drive many times in the winter, usually taking two days because I stop so often to explore and hike. But on this day I impatiently ticked off the landmarks one by one, wanting to just get along, to get through. Unlike the Joads, who had to cross the same desert, I wasn’t carrying a dead grandmother in back, but I still felt anxious, watching the odometer, the temperature gauge. There were few other cars on the road, and not one without air-conditioning, like me. Listening to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, especially the stories of his near starvation, added to the apocalyptic mood. Mecca was a great relief; I’d felt almost done for. My feet and hands were swollen up, my head was feverish and achy, and hot water was doing nothing for my substantial thirst.
From Mecca I had only another hour to Borrego Springs, where I’m visiting friends Larry and Sinda. Just after noon I pulled up at a mobile home trailer, in the Roadrunner Club, and hoped Larry had left the door open as promised (he and Sinda would be gone till later in the day). Luckily he had. I don’t know what I would’ve done otherwise; I had contemplated a stay at the small public library in town, if it was open. Inside the trailer the temperature was a cool and comfy ninety. An immense relief. By mid-afternoon the outside temperature had risen to 116, and a stiff wind only exacerbated the feeling of being oven baked.
Later, Larry showed up and we had a swim at the Roadrunner Club’s pool. I wore a hat and sunglasses and pasted myself in a corner just shaded by a palm tree.
Larry and Sinda have a house on the other side of town, and keep the trailer (which at one time had been Larry’s father’s) as an office and sometime guest lodge. After our swim we went over to the house, where first off I was introduced to Vargas, their new scorpion. I peered in the terrarium, but Vargas--named after the faux-Mexican character Charlton Heston plays in Touch of Evil--was hiding under a rock. It was the fourth in a series of scorpion companion pets, each named Vargas, one of who had lived for two years in captivity. Sinda had found the pale creature the day before at a local furniture store.
It was crawling across an open patch of floor, and Sinda grabbed a leather bowl and coaxed it inside. Leaving the scorpion safely confined, she thought, she went to the front of the store to ask for a bag. The salesperson’s eyes bulged apprehensively, and she was all for abandoning the premises. But she gave Sinda the bag. However, when Sinda returned to the back of the store the bowl was empty. After a little scouting about she re-discovered the scorpion and managed to bag it. She had planned to take it outside and let it go, but then decided to take it home, as she and Larry have both enjoyed the company of past Vargases. “But this time, Larry,” Sinda admonished, “you can’t over-feed it.” The last one Larry, mesmerized by its killing and eating technique, had plied with too many crickets, and it had died.
He agreed to be more careful this time, but told Sinda it would still need to feed. He turned to me, already with a plan, and said, “So Capper, we’ll go out a little later and see if we can capture some insects. Vargas will only eat then if they’re alive.”
Later we did manage to find a couple flying bugs, more wings than body, but Vargas would not come out to eat them, not at least while we watched.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Rob and I have a great lunch
Rob and I were about to get in his car and escape into air-conditioning when he pointed across the street and said, “mobile car wash.” Behind a white Subaru, a panel van was parked, with a green garden hose snaking out of its open back doors. A young man had finished the wet portion of the job and was now wiping the Subaru down with a chamois cloth.
I’d driven to Rob’s work so we could go to lunch at Kilroy’s, home of the World’s Greatest Hamburger. Unduly influenced by this claim (a self-serving one, yes, but supported by the Food Network), I had decided to compromise my dietary and moral principles.
Inside we were greeted simultaneously by two young women, one femme, the other butch. The latter, short and short-haired, looked daggers at the former, as if to say, "what are you doing, you officious pain in the ass.” She elbowed the longhaired woman out of the way and took us to a booth and handed us big menus. Thus began an intense relationship with Tiffany (according to her nametag), and my sense was that by the end of the meal that had I proposed she would’ve accepted. I still might go back.
I ordered the basic Kilroy burger, keeping it simple, and I was indeed impressed. Classic, toasted bun, medium-rare half-pound patty, just the right amount of charcoaly flavor, red onion and lettuce (no tomato=no salmonella, not a bad idea), mayo on the side--all this added up to a satisfying hamburger experience. For a side I had the choice of baked beans or cole slaw. When I asked Tiffany for a recommendation, she paused as if this was an important question, as if she was trying to decide what was best for me, knowing me as she did, then answered “cole slaw.” I said, "ok,”and our eyes locked for just a moment. Rob and I also ordered a basket of shoestring fries.
We ate and talked about Harry Potter, Catholicism, and the pleasures of legal contracts, among other topics. When my water glass was empty, Tiffany brought an icy pitcher and set it down with a smile that seemed to say, ”there’s more where that came from.”
When we stood up to leave I made a point of seeking out Tiffany, who was taking an order at another table, to say thank you. Her smile was wistful, as if she too was glad to have met, yet sad that things were coming to an end so soon. The longhaired waitress tried to horn in from across the room, calling out “thank you, guys,” but I ignored her.
Back at Rob’s roomy office I sat down in the client chair while he went on his computer to get me directions to a public library branch. The fierce air-conditioning made one yearn for a light jacket. Rob looked professional and competent, dressed in white shirt and tie, sitting behind a desk spread with stacks of legal documents pertaining to various cases. I wanted to stay and watch him be a lawyer, but he said he doubted I’d find it entertaining.
At dusk, after Rob came home from work, we drove up to Red Rocks for a hike; Peyton Manning came too. With the sun down, the warm air was almost comfortable rather than hostile. We walked up a small canyon, past small reedy pools of water that Peyton splashed through with obvious pleasure. Phainopepla, dark, crested birds, and sparrows moved about in the small willow trees. The rock is indeed red, a deeper more astonishing shade of blood red in the fading light of dusk. The rock rose up in great bulbous masses, like hardened blobs of wet sand. We climbed upwards over stone slabs until nearly dark, then turned and looked out over Las Vegas to the east, where yellowy lights were coming on in the vast sprawl.
On the way home we got take-out at Viva El Taco!, one of the many excellent Mexican food stands located in gas station convenience stores. None of that Taco Bell Express or Subway bullshit. On the counter sat big, freshly re-stocked trays of pickled carrots and sliced radishes and cucumbers; I filled several small plastic cups with these treats, then waited patiently while a young man in a red baseball cap turned sideways made my burrito. Rob bought a twelve-pack of Tecate, and when we got home and spread out the food on the coffee table and opened our beers and put on The Shawshank Redemption and made Peyton Manning lay down, I was happy and contented.
I’d driven to Rob’s work so we could go to lunch at Kilroy’s, home of the World’s Greatest Hamburger. Unduly influenced by this claim (a self-serving one, yes, but supported by the Food Network), I had decided to compromise my dietary and moral principles.
Inside we were greeted simultaneously by two young women, one femme, the other butch. The latter, short and short-haired, looked daggers at the former, as if to say, "what are you doing, you officious pain in the ass.” She elbowed the longhaired woman out of the way and took us to a booth and handed us big menus. Thus began an intense relationship with Tiffany (according to her nametag), and my sense was that by the end of the meal that had I proposed she would’ve accepted. I still might go back.
I ordered the basic Kilroy burger, keeping it simple, and I was indeed impressed. Classic, toasted bun, medium-rare half-pound patty, just the right amount of charcoaly flavor, red onion and lettuce (no tomato=no salmonella, not a bad idea), mayo on the side--all this added up to a satisfying hamburger experience. For a side I had the choice of baked beans or cole slaw. When I asked Tiffany for a recommendation, she paused as if this was an important question, as if she was trying to decide what was best for me, knowing me as she did, then answered “cole slaw.” I said, "ok,”and our eyes locked for just a moment. Rob and I also ordered a basket of shoestring fries.
We ate and talked about Harry Potter, Catholicism, and the pleasures of legal contracts, among other topics. When my water glass was empty, Tiffany brought an icy pitcher and set it down with a smile that seemed to say, ”there’s more where that came from.”
When we stood up to leave I made a point of seeking out Tiffany, who was taking an order at another table, to say thank you. Her smile was wistful, as if she too was glad to have met, yet sad that things were coming to an end so soon. The longhaired waitress tried to horn in from across the room, calling out “thank you, guys,” but I ignored her.
Back at Rob’s roomy office I sat down in the client chair while he went on his computer to get me directions to a public library branch. The fierce air-conditioning made one yearn for a light jacket. Rob looked professional and competent, dressed in white shirt and tie, sitting behind a desk spread with stacks of legal documents pertaining to various cases. I wanted to stay and watch him be a lawyer, but he said he doubted I’d find it entertaining.
At dusk, after Rob came home from work, we drove up to Red Rocks for a hike; Peyton Manning came too. With the sun down, the warm air was almost comfortable rather than hostile. We walked up a small canyon, past small reedy pools of water that Peyton splashed through with obvious pleasure. Phainopepla, dark, crested birds, and sparrows moved about in the small willow trees. The rock is indeed red, a deeper more astonishing shade of blood red in the fading light of dusk. The rock rose up in great bulbous masses, like hardened blobs of wet sand. We climbed upwards over stone slabs until nearly dark, then turned and looked out over Las Vegas to the east, where yellowy lights were coming on in the vast sprawl.
On the way home we got take-out at Viva El Taco!, one of the many excellent Mexican food stands located in gas station convenience stores. None of that Taco Bell Express or Subway bullshit. On the counter sat big, freshly re-stocked trays of pickled carrots and sliced radishes and cucumbers; I filled several small plastic cups with these treats, then waited patiently while a young man in a red baseball cap turned sideways made my burrito. Rob bought a twelve-pack of Tecate, and when we got home and spread out the food on the coffee table and opened our beers and put on The Shawshank Redemption and made Peyton Manning lay down, I was happy and contented.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
In Las Vegas with Peyton Manning and Harry Potter
In the late afternoon yesterday, when the temperature had cooled to a 103 or so, I went for a short neighborhood walk. Dark paved roads, pale cement sidewalks, high cinderblock walls, gravel yards the color of dried-blood, tan stucco houses; occasionally a small desert tree made a dollop of faded green in the muted landscape. You can see the reason for Las Vegas’ bright famous signs.
Not that I’m complaining, or much. It’s beautiful here, in a desert-y, oven-y way.
Most of the day I spent inside reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. At lunch I paused to watch Team America, a film I’d never seen. America, Fuck yeah! Peyton Manning was home with me, most of the time supine on the cool tile by the front door; but when I went into a different room he got up and followed and we chatted amicably. We went out to the backyard for a short time, but while I sat in the shade reading, Peyton Manning insisted on laying down in the full sun, on patio stones I found too hot to walk on. I tried to get him to move into the shade with me but he saw no point. So before long I took us both back inside, worried for his health.
Alix and I had started listening to the Harry Potter on the way out to Idaho. We got through about a third of the book, but then she flew home with the cds, because she can’t be separated from her Harry Potter and I understand that. When I arrived here at Rob’s I found the print book on a shelf and took it down and started reading. And while I have some reservations about Rowling’s writing, the plot pulled me right along and by the end of my second day here in Vegas I’d finished the book, because why else does one come to Las Vegas but to sit alone inside a quiet house with a dog and two cats and read all day?
After I finished the book I felt worked over, emotionally exhausted, and that’s when I went for my walk, because I wanted to think about what I thought about the book.
The book’s theology is a bit muddled, I think. There’s an afterlife, apparently, occasionally someone says “Thank god!”, and they celebrate Christmas, but there’s never, as far as I can remember, mention of a deity. I get that a fully fleshed out religion would have required substantial digression, but still, I wanted to know how the story’s quasi-Christianity fit into the Wizarding experience.....
Harry is a Christ-figure, that’s clear enough, but one who suits a modern sensibility, in particular the strong desire for a happy ending: he sacrifices for the good of others, but he doesn’t have to die, only to be willing to die. Christ is a loner in the end, but Harry gets the girl.
And three children, a family. And family is what it seems to me the books are mostly about, finally. Yes, it’s a story of youthful prowess and independence, like most children’s literature, but more I think it’s a story of parents and children. It’s about what kids want from parents: reassurance and love and support. Harry, Voldemort, and Snape are all more or less parentless, and they struggle accordingly. But Harry is saved by that one year of parental devotion, Snape by his love for Lily, while Voldemort apparently never got a hug and so turned out mean. All you need is love.
And those moments when love, especially the love of parents for children, is expressed, those are the parts of the book that choked me up: Mrs. Weasley’s grief over Fred’s death, Neville’s grandmother’s pride in his feats in the last battle, Xenophilius Lovegood’s fear for his captured daughter Luna, and the scene at the very end when Harry reassures his anxious young son, Albus, about the imminent Sorting at Hogwarts. I’m getting all watery-eyed just thinking about it....
When I got back from my walk Rob was home, and he guided me through my first Wii experience. I took the “Joe” avatar, despite the fact that I don’t wear glasses or a goatee. In tennis I flayed away like an idiot, both on screen and off. Rob and I, as doubles partner, were beaten in each game we played. Turning to golf, I did a little better—shooting par on my first hole, while Rob triple bogeyed. Thanks, Joe.
We went off for take-out from Archi’s Thai Bistro a couple strip malls down the road. Back at the house we filled our plates and sat down on the couch to watch the tv. Peyton Manning stood beside the coffee table as we ate, next to me with his muzzle inches from my plate, garnishing the pad thai and curry with dog breath. I pushed him away and soon he lay down, his demeanor suggesting that he hadn’t really expected me to share anyway.
Rob and I stayed up late watching one episode after another of the fourth season of West Wing.
Not that I’m complaining, or much. It’s beautiful here, in a desert-y, oven-y way.
Most of the day I spent inside reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. At lunch I paused to watch Team America, a film I’d never seen. America, Fuck yeah! Peyton Manning was home with me, most of the time supine on the cool tile by the front door; but when I went into a different room he got up and followed and we chatted amicably. We went out to the backyard for a short time, but while I sat in the shade reading, Peyton Manning insisted on laying down in the full sun, on patio stones I found too hot to walk on. I tried to get him to move into the shade with me but he saw no point. So before long I took us both back inside, worried for his health.
Alix and I had started listening to the Harry Potter on the way out to Idaho. We got through about a third of the book, but then she flew home with the cds, because she can’t be separated from her Harry Potter and I understand that. When I arrived here at Rob’s I found the print book on a shelf and took it down and started reading. And while I have some reservations about Rowling’s writing, the plot pulled me right along and by the end of my second day here in Vegas I’d finished the book, because why else does one come to Las Vegas but to sit alone inside a quiet house with a dog and two cats and read all day?
After I finished the book I felt worked over, emotionally exhausted, and that’s when I went for my walk, because I wanted to think about what I thought about the book.
The book’s theology is a bit muddled, I think. There’s an afterlife, apparently, occasionally someone says “Thank god!”, and they celebrate Christmas, but there’s never, as far as I can remember, mention of a deity. I get that a fully fleshed out religion would have required substantial digression, but still, I wanted to know how the story’s quasi-Christianity fit into the Wizarding experience.....
Harry is a Christ-figure, that’s clear enough, but one who suits a modern sensibility, in particular the strong desire for a happy ending: he sacrifices for the good of others, but he doesn’t have to die, only to be willing to die. Christ is a loner in the end, but Harry gets the girl.
And three children, a family. And family is what it seems to me the books are mostly about, finally. Yes, it’s a story of youthful prowess and independence, like most children’s literature, but more I think it’s a story of parents and children. It’s about what kids want from parents: reassurance and love and support. Harry, Voldemort, and Snape are all more or less parentless, and they struggle accordingly. But Harry is saved by that one year of parental devotion, Snape by his love for Lily, while Voldemort apparently never got a hug and so turned out mean. All you need is love.
And those moments when love, especially the love of parents for children, is expressed, those are the parts of the book that choked me up: Mrs. Weasley’s grief over Fred’s death, Neville’s grandmother’s pride in his feats in the last battle, Xenophilius Lovegood’s fear for his captured daughter Luna, and the scene at the very end when Harry reassures his anxious young son, Albus, about the imminent Sorting at Hogwarts. I’m getting all watery-eyed just thinking about it....
When I got back from my walk Rob was home, and he guided me through my first Wii experience. I took the “Joe” avatar, despite the fact that I don’t wear glasses or a goatee. In tennis I flayed away like an idiot, both on screen and off. Rob and I, as doubles partner, were beaten in each game we played. Turning to golf, I did a little better—shooting par on my first hole, while Rob triple bogeyed. Thanks, Joe.
We went off for take-out from Archi’s Thai Bistro a couple strip malls down the road. Back at the house we filled our plates and sat down on the couch to watch the tv. Peyton Manning stood beside the coffee table as we ate, next to me with his muzzle inches from my plate, garnishing the pad thai and curry with dog breath. I pushed him away and soon he lay down, his demeanor suggesting that he hadn’t really expected me to share anyway.
Rob and I stayed up late watching one episode after another of the fourth season of West Wing.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
I stay inside, mostly
In Rob’s house, all species are equals. There’s an easy camaraderie between him and his wife Jocelyn and the two cats, Santino and Heidi, and Peyton Manning the Dog II. Rob and Jocelyn are in charge to some degree, as they can open the back door and fill food bowls, but they don’t take an authoritarian, parental approach. The five are friends and they live like roommates who are close but not too demanding. Everybody does his or her own thing, and no one seems to have undue expectations.
Peyton Manning the Dog tends to dominate the home atmosphere, mostly because he is the youngest and most active, a frenetic creature who likes to play tug of war with pet toys, the torn remains of which are scattered about. Occasionally Peyton lunges at a passing cat, but this is more playful than threatening, though the cats don’t necessarily appreciate the attention. He enjoys licking my legs and feet, which I understand but still discourage. When I first arrived, he almost knocked me down, leaping up to bang chests as if we had just shared some moment of athletic victory. I wasn’t ready and staggered backwards; he tried again, but I just couldn’t quite manage.
Santino is the same color as the gray couch and unfortunately I’ve sat on him a couple times. Heidi wears a bell and is appealingly compact and short-haired. She is markedly smaller than Santino, but doesn’t hesitate to cuff him if he displeases her; this despite the fact (or maybe because) he’s her son.
I spent the day in the house with the cats, reluctant to go out into the 106 degree heat. Rob and Jocelyn had gone off to work, Peyton to his twice weekly dog daycare site, where for ten hours he can run around inside an air-conditioned facility with twenty or so other dogs. If it’s good for small children, and it is, why not for dogs? He comes home worn out with pleasure.
In the evening Rob and I went out to eat at El Taco Fresco, a small restaurant in a sandy-colored strip mall. I had a bean burrito and cheese enchilada combo with rice and beans. Why does too much food continue to seem a good idea, though always afterwards it’s clear it’s not?
We ate in a bar, The Money Place, connected to the restaurant by an interior door. We sat at the bar, on a side without video poker consoles, and watched Game 6 of the NBA Finals, a disappointingly one-sided game, though we both wanted the Celtics to win. Around the other side of the bar a baseball game was on, and a large blonde woman shouted, “Fuck the Padres?”
She had paused from playing tabletop shuffleboard. The long wooden playing surface stretched along one side of the room, and a bald-headed man kept shaking sand down its length before each of his turns.
Rob and I talked about the legal profession (particularly his own work), about politics, about basketball. . . . Someone yelled “the Lakers suck!” and soon after we watched the Celtics celebrate. Kevin Garnett seemed to have lost his mind.
Back at the house we watched a portion of a West Wing episode that Rob wanted me to see for a Hemingway quotation, something about how we are all broken but some become stronger where the broken places heal over. Hopefully, I suppose. Peyton Manning came over and lay down on my feet and exhaled a sigh so contented it could only have been uttered by a dog.
Peyton Manning the Dog tends to dominate the home atmosphere, mostly because he is the youngest and most active, a frenetic creature who likes to play tug of war with pet toys, the torn remains of which are scattered about. Occasionally Peyton lunges at a passing cat, but this is more playful than threatening, though the cats don’t necessarily appreciate the attention. He enjoys licking my legs and feet, which I understand but still discourage. When I first arrived, he almost knocked me down, leaping up to bang chests as if we had just shared some moment of athletic victory. I wasn’t ready and staggered backwards; he tried again, but I just couldn’t quite manage.
Santino is the same color as the gray couch and unfortunately I’ve sat on him a couple times. Heidi wears a bell and is appealingly compact and short-haired. She is markedly smaller than Santino, but doesn’t hesitate to cuff him if he displeases her; this despite the fact (or maybe because) he’s her son.
I spent the day in the house with the cats, reluctant to go out into the 106 degree heat. Rob and Jocelyn had gone off to work, Peyton to his twice weekly dog daycare site, where for ten hours he can run around inside an air-conditioned facility with twenty or so other dogs. If it’s good for small children, and it is, why not for dogs? He comes home worn out with pleasure.
In the evening Rob and I went out to eat at El Taco Fresco, a small restaurant in a sandy-colored strip mall. I had a bean burrito and cheese enchilada combo with rice and beans. Why does too much food continue to seem a good idea, though always afterwards it’s clear it’s not?
We ate in a bar, The Money Place, connected to the restaurant by an interior door. We sat at the bar, on a side without video poker consoles, and watched Game 6 of the NBA Finals, a disappointingly one-sided game, though we both wanted the Celtics to win. Around the other side of the bar a baseball game was on, and a large blonde woman shouted, “Fuck the Padres?”
She had paused from playing tabletop shuffleboard. The long wooden playing surface stretched along one side of the room, and a bald-headed man kept shaking sand down its length before each of his turns.
Rob and I talked about the legal profession (particularly his own work), about politics, about basketball. . . . Someone yelled “the Lakers suck!” and soon after we watched the Celtics celebrate. Kevin Garnett seemed to have lost his mind.
Back at the house we watched a portion of a West Wing episode that Rob wanted me to see for a Hemingway quotation, something about how we are all broken but some become stronger where the broken places heal over. Hopefully, I suppose. Peyton Manning came over and lay down on my feet and exhaled a sigh so contented it could only have been uttered by a dog.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
And why have I come to the desert in June?
The sun came up and morning makes me feel right with the world even when I haven’t slept much. I headed south through rolling hills, and every hundred feet or so a rabbit turned away from the side of the road and stepped slowly back into the bushes, as if to snub me.
I soon came to U.S 50, the famed Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first ocean to ocean auto route. More recently Nevada state marketers have named it the Loneliest Road in America—not exactly misleading but certainly an exagerration.
The Diamond Mountains rose to my left; I came over Pancake Pass, then down and then up to Little Antelope Pass in the White Pine Range. Soon after I turned onto a gravel road that led to Illipah Reservoir hidden in the sagebrush hills.
As scenery the reservoir was disappointing—a sickly algae-green color, small and shrunken from a considerably higher highwater mark—and yet a number of people were camped on a bluff above the water, and several others were down on the barren shore, standing fishing next to their pick-up trucks. I parked on a small knob surrounded by sagebrush and got out, and indeed I could understand the appeal. The air was clear and morning sharp; for the moment there was no wind, just quiet and stillness, and you could see a long ways. Nearby an old man stepped out of a trailer and walked to a lawn chair stationed on the verge of the low bluff above the lake. He sat down and just sat. Pretty soon a young boy came out of the trailer and ran down to the old man and played around his chair. The old man reached out and put a hand on his head.
When traveling alone I tend to notice—and idealize—just about any human contact. The day before in a non-chain convenience store I’d seen a tall woman wearing Wrangler jeans and carrying a baby reach down to her four-year-old boy and put her hand over the top of his close-cropped head; she turned his head to the left then with a rough but not too rough shove impelled him towards the Men’s room door while she kept moving towards the Women’s. No hesitation, no breaking stride, no words; she knew what she was doing and the boy knew what was expected.
Around the town of Ruth the pale green land changes color. Rust-colored ridges, long and uniform, rise up hundreds of feet, the tailings from more than a century of copper mining. I followed a rough road up to an overlook on the verge of Liberty Mine, a vast, terraced, open pit a half mile across and nearly as deep, shading in color from almost white to dark orange. It’s amazing how much earth people can move around, given enough time and heavy equipment. To counter any misgivings, a sign at the overlook listed the many crucial items in a typical house that are made of copper. So shut up.
In the largish town of Ely I stopped for gas, then maps at the Visitor’s Bureau. North of town I drove up into the Schell Creek Range, the last four miles on a dusty gravel road to the East Creek campground in Humboldt National Forest. At road’s end I found only one other vehicle, a pick-up belonging to two young guys on a butterfly survey for the Forest Service.
I set off uphill, on a fading two-track, sweating in the afternoon heat. Sage gave way to mesquite trees, then a few pines. Above me a high rocky ridge ran north south, dotted with just a few small remnants of snow. I was lower than in the Ruby Mountains the day before, and I missed the alpine scene and snow. Here the ground was dry and crumbly, and the occasional dessicated cow pie told of grazing rights. Deer pellets were everywhere. Humans constituted a third megafauna, though I found only a few footprints, no droppings.
I climbed the slope to near the foot of cliffs, where the faint trail disappeared, then traversed to a ravine thick with mesquite and made my way back down. I found a pair of leather hiking boots, so curled and shrunken by age and weathering that it was hard to imagine they had ever been large enough to fit a person’s feet. I wondered how long they had been in that spot, snowed over and then thawed out, over and over again.
The walk was short, a couple hours, since I still had a ways to go to get to Las Vegas at a reasonable hour. Back in the van I headed south, back through Ely, then down long lonely stretches of road prefaced by signs that read “Next gas 109 miles” and then “Next gas 92 miles.” The elevation descended steadily, and the temperature rose. I thought the van was running hot, filling the cabin with hot air, but no, it was just as hot outside. In a dry heat the wind does nothing to cool you off. The radio said 103. I’d forgotten what that meant, what it felt like, and I wondered why I had thought it would be a good idea to spend late June in the Mojave and the Sonoran deserts.
I came out of the last canyon and spotted the vast Vegas sprawl just at dusk. Heavy traffic carried me through the city to the southeast side and Rob’s house.
I soon came to U.S 50, the famed Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first ocean to ocean auto route. More recently Nevada state marketers have named it the Loneliest Road in America—not exactly misleading but certainly an exagerration.
The Diamond Mountains rose to my left; I came over Pancake Pass, then down and then up to Little Antelope Pass in the White Pine Range. Soon after I turned onto a gravel road that led to Illipah Reservoir hidden in the sagebrush hills.
As scenery the reservoir was disappointing—a sickly algae-green color, small and shrunken from a considerably higher highwater mark—and yet a number of people were camped on a bluff above the water, and several others were down on the barren shore, standing fishing next to their pick-up trucks. I parked on a small knob surrounded by sagebrush and got out, and indeed I could understand the appeal. The air was clear and morning sharp; for the moment there was no wind, just quiet and stillness, and you could see a long ways. Nearby an old man stepped out of a trailer and walked to a lawn chair stationed on the verge of the low bluff above the lake. He sat down and just sat. Pretty soon a young boy came out of the trailer and ran down to the old man and played around his chair. The old man reached out and put a hand on his head.
When traveling alone I tend to notice—and idealize—just about any human contact. The day before in a non-chain convenience store I’d seen a tall woman wearing Wrangler jeans and carrying a baby reach down to her four-year-old boy and put her hand over the top of his close-cropped head; she turned his head to the left then with a rough but not too rough shove impelled him towards the Men’s room door while she kept moving towards the Women’s. No hesitation, no breaking stride, no words; she knew what she was doing and the boy knew what was expected.
Around the town of Ruth the pale green land changes color. Rust-colored ridges, long and uniform, rise up hundreds of feet, the tailings from more than a century of copper mining. I followed a rough road up to an overlook on the verge of Liberty Mine, a vast, terraced, open pit a half mile across and nearly as deep, shading in color from almost white to dark orange. It’s amazing how much earth people can move around, given enough time and heavy equipment. To counter any misgivings, a sign at the overlook listed the many crucial items in a typical house that are made of copper. So shut up.
In the largish town of Ely I stopped for gas, then maps at the Visitor’s Bureau. North of town I drove up into the Schell Creek Range, the last four miles on a dusty gravel road to the East Creek campground in Humboldt National Forest. At road’s end I found only one other vehicle, a pick-up belonging to two young guys on a butterfly survey for the Forest Service.
I set off uphill, on a fading two-track, sweating in the afternoon heat. Sage gave way to mesquite trees, then a few pines. Above me a high rocky ridge ran north south, dotted with just a few small remnants of snow. I was lower than in the Ruby Mountains the day before, and I missed the alpine scene and snow. Here the ground was dry and crumbly, and the occasional dessicated cow pie told of grazing rights. Deer pellets were everywhere. Humans constituted a third megafauna, though I found only a few footprints, no droppings.
I climbed the slope to near the foot of cliffs, where the faint trail disappeared, then traversed to a ravine thick with mesquite and made my way back down. I found a pair of leather hiking boots, so curled and shrunken by age and weathering that it was hard to imagine they had ever been large enough to fit a person’s feet. I wondered how long they had been in that spot, snowed over and then thawed out, over and over again.
The walk was short, a couple hours, since I still had a ways to go to get to Las Vegas at a reasonable hour. Back in the van I headed south, back through Ely, then down long lonely stretches of road prefaced by signs that read “Next gas 109 miles” and then “Next gas 92 miles.” The elevation descended steadily, and the temperature rose. I thought the van was running hot, filling the cabin with hot air, but no, it was just as hot outside. In a dry heat the wind does nothing to cool you off. The radio said 103. I’d forgotten what that meant, what it felt like, and I wondered why I had thought it would be a good idea to spend late June in the Mojave and the Sonoran deserts.
I came out of the last canyon and spotted the vast Vegas sprawl just at dusk. Heavy traffic carried me through the city to the southeast side and Rob’s house.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Northern Nevada deserves more attention than it gets
Before I left Boise, Grandpa gave me a white envelope with my name, first and last both, written on it in all capitals. Back in the early 80s when I would take a bus up from San Diego to see him in L.A., he started giving me these envelopes of cash, a ten back then, a couple twenties in recent years. He never says a word about the contents, just hands me the envelope as if it’s something irritating that he needs to get shut of.
At dawn I headed back down to Mountain Home, then south across the Snake River and into the vast sagebrush. The high desert rolled away and away, to the brown Owyhee Mountains to the west, uninterrupted in all other directions. Yellow flowers of balsamroot stood low among the pale green and ubiquitous sage. Occasionally I spotted grazing bands of pronghorn antelope; once a coyote dashed across the two-lane highway. Ravens hopped away from ground squirrel roadkill as I passed by.
Down near the Nevada border, on the lands of the Shoshone-Paiute tribes, wetlands lined the road. Yellow-headed blackbirds perched on narrow green reeds, and through the open windows I could hear snatches of their songs. In a damp field a hundred white-faced ibis poked at the ground with their long, curved beaks; another group of the dark birds appeared overhead, looking to land. The road climbed into a jumble of hills and soon I came to Wildhorse Reservoir, where white pelicans and Clark’s grebes and double-breasted cormorants floated on the still water.
Beyond the reservoir I came upon a swarm of amber-colored grasshoppers crawling and hopping on and covering the warm roadway. The loud crackling sound of their carapaces popping beneath the wheels of the van was disturbingly pleasing. I passed over several swarms, some just a couple hundred yards long, one two miles. Later when I stopped I found that the van was splattered orange and green a foot or so up on either side, as if I’d driven through mud.
Late in the morning, I reached Elko, a substantial town which, like many other northern Nevada towns, feels quintessentially “western.” I don’t know exactly why, but I suspect it has something to do with the signs: maybe it’s the dry air, maybe it’s nostalgic foresight, but in Elko and Ely and Winnemucca many signs from the fifties and sixties survive. Large and metal and light-bulbed or neoned, they depict cowboys and miners and dancehall girls, advertising casinos and motels and restaurants. The Silver Dollar. The Buckboard Inn, The Stockman’s Hotel. Peg-leg Annie’s. Jew Jake’s.
I got gas and paid $4.09, a low price if I’d only known. It would rise and rise again as I proceeded south through the state. The day had grown hot and hazy and oppressive, and I was feeling tired and bored with myself. I drank a Coca-Cola and my mood improved.
From Elko, I drove into the Ruby Mountains, up Lamoille Canyon to a dead-end where rocky peaks rose to ten and eleven thousand feet; large patches of snow remained not only up high but all the way down to the road. The parking lot was busy with Sunday visitors, but few strayed far from the fast stream at the bottom of the canyon. I found a trailhead sign that read “Island Lake 2 miles” and decided to give it a try. The path switchbacked up out of the canyon, and soon I was crossing steep snowfields, digging my feet sideways into the soft snow and hoping not to slip. (Alix, this wasn’t really dangerous: losing my footing would have meant sliding down to rocks and maybe getting a few scrapes, but certainly not death.) A small wooden bridge crossed a fierce torrent of snow melt; small streams, a foot or two wide, popped up out of the snow all over the open slope, sometimes taking to the path for a stretch.
Eventually I reached a bench that held small Island Lake, still encased by ice except for an open sliver along one bank. On the opposite side a jagged peak loomed. I kept on upwards, trudging over the ridged, sun-softened snow—now uninterrupted except for an occasional boulder or pine tree—up into a bowl surrounded by high black-rock mountains.
Lower down I found a small open spot and sat down for a rest in the shade of two pines. The air smelled of the trees and of melting snow, and I felt happy. I was reading a few pages from Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds when a dog appeared suddenly just a few feet away. For a moment I didn’t realize what exactly I was seeing—it was shaggy and wide and tailless and reminded me of those scary dog-like creatures in the film Willow. It trotted up, put its wet, muddy muzzle in my lap, then turned away when I didn’t immediately respond. A couple came up over a small ridge and yelled something at the dog.
Back down in Elko, I headed west and soon after south, on 278, a townless stretch of 150 miles, across wide valleys and up into hills covered in squat junipers. At dark I stopped at Garden Pass (elev. 6686) and parked in a wide pull-out. The end of game 5 of the NBA Finals was just listenable through the AM radio night static. I made a bed in the back, read for a bit, tried to sleep, but spent the night in an unreasonably jumpy state. Alix preferred campgrounds to the lonely, solo spot, such as Garden Pass, and she’s got something there. There’s also something to be said for company, and I was missing hers.
At dawn I headed back down to Mountain Home, then south across the Snake River and into the vast sagebrush. The high desert rolled away and away, to the brown Owyhee Mountains to the west, uninterrupted in all other directions. Yellow flowers of balsamroot stood low among the pale green and ubiquitous sage. Occasionally I spotted grazing bands of pronghorn antelope; once a coyote dashed across the two-lane highway. Ravens hopped away from ground squirrel roadkill as I passed by.
Down near the Nevada border, on the lands of the Shoshone-Paiute tribes, wetlands lined the road. Yellow-headed blackbirds perched on narrow green reeds, and through the open windows I could hear snatches of their songs. In a damp field a hundred white-faced ibis poked at the ground with their long, curved beaks; another group of the dark birds appeared overhead, looking to land. The road climbed into a jumble of hills and soon I came to Wildhorse Reservoir, where white pelicans and Clark’s grebes and double-breasted cormorants floated on the still water.
Beyond the reservoir I came upon a swarm of amber-colored grasshoppers crawling and hopping on and covering the warm roadway. The loud crackling sound of their carapaces popping beneath the wheels of the van was disturbingly pleasing. I passed over several swarms, some just a couple hundred yards long, one two miles. Later when I stopped I found that the van was splattered orange and green a foot or so up on either side, as if I’d driven through mud.
Late in the morning, I reached Elko, a substantial town which, like many other northern Nevada towns, feels quintessentially “western.” I don’t know exactly why, but I suspect it has something to do with the signs: maybe it’s the dry air, maybe it’s nostalgic foresight, but in Elko and Ely and Winnemucca many signs from the fifties and sixties survive. Large and metal and light-bulbed or neoned, they depict cowboys and miners and dancehall girls, advertising casinos and motels and restaurants. The Silver Dollar. The Buckboard Inn, The Stockman’s Hotel. Peg-leg Annie’s. Jew Jake’s.
I got gas and paid $4.09, a low price if I’d only known. It would rise and rise again as I proceeded south through the state. The day had grown hot and hazy and oppressive, and I was feeling tired and bored with myself. I drank a Coca-Cola and my mood improved.
From Elko, I drove into the Ruby Mountains, up Lamoille Canyon to a dead-end where rocky peaks rose to ten and eleven thousand feet; large patches of snow remained not only up high but all the way down to the road. The parking lot was busy with Sunday visitors, but few strayed far from the fast stream at the bottom of the canyon. I found a trailhead sign that read “Island Lake 2 miles” and decided to give it a try. The path switchbacked up out of the canyon, and soon I was crossing steep snowfields, digging my feet sideways into the soft snow and hoping not to slip. (Alix, this wasn’t really dangerous: losing my footing would have meant sliding down to rocks and maybe getting a few scrapes, but certainly not death.) A small wooden bridge crossed a fierce torrent of snow melt; small streams, a foot or two wide, popped up out of the snow all over the open slope, sometimes taking to the path for a stretch.
Eventually I reached a bench that held small Island Lake, still encased by ice except for an open sliver along one bank. On the opposite side a jagged peak loomed. I kept on upwards, trudging over the ridged, sun-softened snow—now uninterrupted except for an occasional boulder or pine tree—up into a bowl surrounded by high black-rock mountains.
Lower down I found a small open spot and sat down for a rest in the shade of two pines. The air smelled of the trees and of melting snow, and I felt happy. I was reading a few pages from Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds when a dog appeared suddenly just a few feet away. For a moment I didn’t realize what exactly I was seeing—it was shaggy and wide and tailless and reminded me of those scary dog-like creatures in the film Willow. It trotted up, put its wet, muddy muzzle in my lap, then turned away when I didn’t immediately respond. A couple came up over a small ridge and yelled something at the dog.
Back down in Elko, I headed west and soon after south, on 278, a townless stretch of 150 miles, across wide valleys and up into hills covered in squat junipers. At dark I stopped at Garden Pass (elev. 6686) and parked in a wide pull-out. The end of game 5 of the NBA Finals was just listenable through the AM radio night static. I made a bed in the back, read for a bit, tried to sleep, but spent the night in an unreasonably jumpy state. Alix preferred campgrounds to the lonely, solo spot, such as Garden Pass, and she’s got something there. There’s also something to be said for company, and I was missing hers.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
We go to Payette to see Sean
To the west of Boise towards Oregon, the broad, irrigation-green valley lands are bordered by brown badland hills, a dramatic contrast on a hot sunny day. We drove out to Payette, Mike and Rosemary and I, along hayfields and cow pastures, to see Sean, Mike's son and my cousin. We stopped at a pull-out to read two plaques, one commemorating the site of a long gone fort built during the Nez Perce War in 1877, one remembering nineteen men who died nearby in a military air transport crash in 1958. In the shade you could smell honeysuckle, but in the ninety degree sun you just smelled dust and heat.
On the drive I learned that Rosie, Grandpa's girlfriend, had made a living for most of her life as a bartender in various Boise establishments, in particular the HiHo Club downtown. All over Boise people will still recognize her from those days, especially cowboy musicians, who often played at the HiHo. Boxcar Willie played a number of gigs at the club too, back in the sixties and seventies; taking a shine to Rosie he wrote a song about her, called "Rose."
In Payette we picked up Sean at his mother's house. He's a dark-haired young man, black Irish, with a small black chin beard and a heavy scruff after a few days without shaving. He wore a black t-shirt with an image of a skeleton riding an old-fashioned bicycle, the word "Cycledelia" written above. And black pants just below the knee and big skater shoes. He talks slow and smiles big, and whenever I see him I want to put my arm around his shoulders. He's working as a cook at two cafes, the Apple Bin in Fruitland for breakfast and lunch, DJs in Ontario for dinner. We talked about the difficulty of saving the yolk when frying eggs.
In Ontario we had a late lunch at Portillos Mexican Family Restaurant. The plates were massive, nearly the size of trash can lids. Rosemary had one of the combination options: Hagrid-sized chalupa, tamale and taco, rice and beans; we could have puut the plate in the middle of the table to share and it would have been enough. I don't know the explanation for such gargantuan portions; maybe it's what the local diners expect. I had a couple fat cheese enchiladas. Sean had carne asada tacos, new to him, and he didn't like the cilantro. Mike had arroz con pollo, and later back in the car said he found a hair in his food. Rosemary asked what color, and he said white. "That was your hair," she said.
Afterwards we dropped Sean off at DJs, next to the Rodeway Inn beside the interstate. He would be cooking till eleven. We drove back to Boise, stopping briefly at a wildlife refuge on the Boise River.
At the house, Rosie was sitting on the couch watching the U.S. Open. "Your grandfather's in the bedroom," she said, laughing. "I couldn't get him to watch golf with me. He's back there with his Lawrence Welk." (I didn't need to be told; the set was blasting, as it always is when he's watching.) He's been a Welk fan for many decades. When I visited as a kid sometimes I'd watch with him and Grandma, but more often I'd escape outside or to another room.
I sat down at the dining room table. Rosie provided a running commentary on the drives and putts of the golfers. When Tiger Woods made an unlikely chip-in from the rough, she said, "did you see that?" I did. Together we watched the replay over and over. After the shot Woods had laughed and looked embarrassed.
This was my last day in Boise. Everyone said they wished I could stay longer, as they do everytime I visit. But I left the next morning, headed south towards Nevada.
On the drive I learned that Rosie, Grandpa's girlfriend, had made a living for most of her life as a bartender in various Boise establishments, in particular the HiHo Club downtown. All over Boise people will still recognize her from those days, especially cowboy musicians, who often played at the HiHo. Boxcar Willie played a number of gigs at the club too, back in the sixties and seventies; taking a shine to Rosie he wrote a song about her, called "Rose."
In Payette we picked up Sean at his mother's house. He's a dark-haired young man, black Irish, with a small black chin beard and a heavy scruff after a few days without shaving. He wore a black t-shirt with an image of a skeleton riding an old-fashioned bicycle, the word "Cycledelia" written above. And black pants just below the knee and big skater shoes. He talks slow and smiles big, and whenever I see him I want to put my arm around his shoulders. He's working as a cook at two cafes, the Apple Bin in Fruitland for breakfast and lunch, DJs in Ontario for dinner. We talked about the difficulty of saving the yolk when frying eggs.
In Ontario we had a late lunch at Portillos Mexican Family Restaurant. The plates were massive, nearly the size of trash can lids. Rosemary had one of the combination options: Hagrid-sized chalupa, tamale and taco, rice and beans; we could have puut the plate in the middle of the table to share and it would have been enough. I don't know the explanation for such gargantuan portions; maybe it's what the local diners expect. I had a couple fat cheese enchiladas. Sean had carne asada tacos, new to him, and he didn't like the cilantro. Mike had arroz con pollo, and later back in the car said he found a hair in his food. Rosemary asked what color, and he said white. "That was your hair," she said.
Afterwards we dropped Sean off at DJs, next to the Rodeway Inn beside the interstate. He would be cooking till eleven. We drove back to Boise, stopping briefly at a wildlife refuge on the Boise River.
At the house, Rosie was sitting on the couch watching the U.S. Open. "Your grandfather's in the bedroom," she said, laughing. "I couldn't get him to watch golf with me. He's back there with his Lawrence Welk." (I didn't need to be told; the set was blasting, as it always is when he's watching.) He's been a Welk fan for many decades. When I visited as a kid sometimes I'd watch with him and Grandma, but more often I'd escape outside or to another room.
I sat down at the dining room table. Rosie provided a running commentary on the drives and putts of the golfers. When Tiger Woods made an unlikely chip-in from the rough, she said, "did you see that?" I did. Together we watched the replay over and over. After the shot Woods had laughed and looked embarrassed.
This was my last day in Boise. Everyone said they wished I could stay longer, as they do everytime I visit. But I left the next morning, headed south towards Nevada.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Alix goes home, Grandpa tells a story
Alix left yesterday. At the airport she cried just before we parted at the security gate. She said, "I wasn't going to cry." I choked up afterwards, as I watched her pass through security, first taking off her bracelet and earrings then wrestling her full backpack and bag onto the conveyor. Ever since that time in Alaska, about ten years ago, when I broke down and sobbed before putting her on a plane, I've tried to be more composed at airports. "I thought I was going to die," she said afterwards.
Alix and I traveled well together, and I'm going to miss her company. Plus, she took the Harry Potter cds with her, the last book, after having hooked me in.
In the early afternoon before she left, she and Rosemary went off to Panda Express and brought back several styrofoam containers of food. Afterwards I got Grandpa's permission to break out the family photographs. For a man so meticulously organized in most parts of his life, it's surprising that the photos are uncataloged, mixed up in numerous cardboard boxes and two ancient suitcases. I couldn't find the sixties era, but the thirties and forties and fifties were well represented. Alix said, "why didn't we do this before? I could spend all day looking at these pictures."
In the evening, after calling Alix during her layover in Denver, I sat on the back patio with Grandpa and Mike, and Grandpa soon settled into a storytelling rhythm, moving from one Nebraska childhood story to another, many of them revolving around his father. One I hadn't heard before. It's not so much about his father, though he plays a small part. In the late 1920s and early 1930s his father for a time worked as a truck driver, driving loads between Omaha or Grand Island and small towns like Spalding and Greeley, hauling farm equipment, groceries, whatever people needed. He often took Grandpa, his oldest child, along with him, partly for company, partly because he couldn't read and Grandpa could help with the invoices and paperwork. I'll try to let Grandpa tell of one particular trip to Grand Island:
We got down there in the afternoon and headed to the warehouse part of town. I had a friend with me, this kid I'd been chumming around with that summer, and Dad let him come along. He was a few years older than me, fifteen, I think; I was twelve.
Well, after waiting around for awhile, I asked Dad if we could go off on our own. He said, "that'd be ok, I suppose. But don't be gone too long."
So off we went, poking around here and there, doing this and that, I don't know what, just what boys do, I suppose. Eventually I noticed that it was getting dark, and I said we should go back. I was a little worried that dad would have something to say to me, but when we got back he wasn't there. We looked all around, but we couldn't find him. Turns out he was out looking around town for us.
Anyway, we decided that we'd go off to this park we knew about, and maybe we'd spend the night there and then come back in the morning and find Dad. So off we go, and pretty soon we get to the park. It's a big park, lots of trees, some woods, but we find a bench out in the middle, in the open and set down. We figured we could take turns laying out and sleeping on the bench.
But after awhile here come this police car, shining a spotlight out into the park. We get down low so he won't see us. He comes by a couple times, then gets on his loud speaker. "Alright," he says, "all you fellas in there I want you to come out and line up here on the street. I don't want any trouble, I just want you to do it now."
Well, after just a minute here come all these men out of the trees, like bedbugs when the light comes on. We hadn't seen one of them, didn't know anyone else was in the park, but pretty soon there was fifty of us standing out in the street beside the police car. The officer said, "ok, all of you start walking down this way, and when you get to that corner take a right and keep going." So we started off, and the polce car drove behind us slow, its headlights on us.
When we come to the police station they had us line up and go through a sort of receiving procedure. When you got up to the desk another officer said, "empty your pockets," and he'd put all your things in a sack and write out your name on it. I guess they didn't want any knives in there or something like that.
Well, then they had us all go into this big room, not a thing in it, not a chair or a bench, with a bathroom at the far end. We, my friend and I was the only kids, the rest was all men, in their twenties and older. I don't know why they put us in there too, but they didn't say anything about us being kids.
I remember there was this one guy, pretty well dressed, which made him stand out in that crowd. He took his pants off and laid them out carefully on the floor and then walked up and down on them to get a good crease. The damnedest thing.
They'd left the door to the room open, a big iron gate, but around three in the morning someone came along and closed it, and then everything felt entirely different.
In the morning they brought us each a piece of bread and a bowl of oatmeal, but no milk or anything to go in it. Then they took us outside and the head police officer spoke and said, "alright, all of you go on down this street here, then go left on Dodge, then take the next right and keep on going out of town. I don't want to see any of you here again, and I mean it."
Well, we all set off together, a big ragged bunch, and pretty soon me and my friend we cut away on our own and headed for the warehouses. Dad was there, and I thought he was going to give us hell, but when he heard what had happened he was what you might call lenient....
Grandpa laughed, then teared up, as he often does when speaking of his father, a man dead for seventy years.
Alix and I traveled well together, and I'm going to miss her company. Plus, she took the Harry Potter cds with her, the last book, after having hooked me in.
In the early afternoon before she left, she and Rosemary went off to Panda Express and brought back several styrofoam containers of food. Afterwards I got Grandpa's permission to break out the family photographs. For a man so meticulously organized in most parts of his life, it's surprising that the photos are uncataloged, mixed up in numerous cardboard boxes and two ancient suitcases. I couldn't find the sixties era, but the thirties and forties and fifties were well represented. Alix said, "why didn't we do this before? I could spend all day looking at these pictures."
In the evening, after calling Alix during her layover in Denver, I sat on the back patio with Grandpa and Mike, and Grandpa soon settled into a storytelling rhythm, moving from one Nebraska childhood story to another, many of them revolving around his father. One I hadn't heard before. It's not so much about his father, though he plays a small part. In the late 1920s and early 1930s his father for a time worked as a truck driver, driving loads between Omaha or Grand Island and small towns like Spalding and Greeley, hauling farm equipment, groceries, whatever people needed. He often took Grandpa, his oldest child, along with him, partly for company, partly because he couldn't read and Grandpa could help with the invoices and paperwork. I'll try to let Grandpa tell of one particular trip to Grand Island:
We got down there in the afternoon and headed to the warehouse part of town. I had a friend with me, this kid I'd been chumming around with that summer, and Dad let him come along. He was a few years older than me, fifteen, I think; I was twelve.
Well, after waiting around for awhile, I asked Dad if we could go off on our own. He said, "that'd be ok, I suppose. But don't be gone too long."
So off we went, poking around here and there, doing this and that, I don't know what, just what boys do, I suppose. Eventually I noticed that it was getting dark, and I said we should go back. I was a little worried that dad would have something to say to me, but when we got back he wasn't there. We looked all around, but we couldn't find him. Turns out he was out looking around town for us.
Anyway, we decided that we'd go off to this park we knew about, and maybe we'd spend the night there and then come back in the morning and find Dad. So off we go, and pretty soon we get to the park. It's a big park, lots of trees, some woods, but we find a bench out in the middle, in the open and set down. We figured we could take turns laying out and sleeping on the bench.
But after awhile here come this police car, shining a spotlight out into the park. We get down low so he won't see us. He comes by a couple times, then gets on his loud speaker. "Alright," he says, "all you fellas in there I want you to come out and line up here on the street. I don't want any trouble, I just want you to do it now."
Well, after just a minute here come all these men out of the trees, like bedbugs when the light comes on. We hadn't seen one of them, didn't know anyone else was in the park, but pretty soon there was fifty of us standing out in the street beside the police car. The officer said, "ok, all of you start walking down this way, and when you get to that corner take a right and keep going." So we started off, and the polce car drove behind us slow, its headlights on us.
When we come to the police station they had us line up and go through a sort of receiving procedure. When you got up to the desk another officer said, "empty your pockets," and he'd put all your things in a sack and write out your name on it. I guess they didn't want any knives in there or something like that.
Well, then they had us all go into this big room, not a thing in it, not a chair or a bench, with a bathroom at the far end. We, my friend and I was the only kids, the rest was all men, in their twenties and older. I don't know why they put us in there too, but they didn't say anything about us being kids.
I remember there was this one guy, pretty well dressed, which made him stand out in that crowd. He took his pants off and laid them out carefully on the floor and then walked up and down on them to get a good crease. The damnedest thing.
They'd left the door to the room open, a big iron gate, but around three in the morning someone came along and closed it, and then everything felt entirely different.
In the morning they brought us each a piece of bread and a bowl of oatmeal, but no milk or anything to go in it. Then they took us outside and the head police officer spoke and said, "alright, all of you go on down this street here, then go left on Dodge, then take the next right and keep on going out of town. I don't want to see any of you here again, and I mean it."
Well, we all set off together, a big ragged bunch, and pretty soon me and my friend we cut away on our own and headed for the warehouses. Dad was there, and I thought he was going to give us hell, but when he heard what had happened he was what you might call lenient....
Grandpa laughed, then teared up, as he often does when speaking of his father, a man dead for seventy years.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Grandpa and Rosie
Alix slept in the living room, I got the spare bedroom. When I got up at seven she retreated to the bedroom, not reappearing till the morning was well-advanced. Rosie bunked with Grandpa--their usual arrangement, I assume, but she seemed a little sheepish about sleeping over, what with the young people in the house.
In the morning, before Grandpa appeared, Rosie told me that they were getting married, "in October or November." Janie had already broken the story the day before, almost the first bit of family news she'd shared. "Your grandfather's getting married," she'd said. "Again." But she and everyone else seems to approve of Rosie, mostly, and consider her a great improvement on the previous wife, Audrey, who lasted only a couple years and who Janie calls "a golddigger." After Audrey Grandpa had said he would never marry again, but as a good Catholic he's apparently uncomfortable with unauthorized cohabitation.
Rosie told me she had become a Catholic herself, since meeting Grandpa. She's 78 to his 88, a little sharper and quicker, at least physically, than him, but he's certainly in charge. They met dancing, which they continue to do three nights a week, at the Eagles lodge. The women far outnumber the men at these events, and Grandpa had told me before that he was kept busy on the dance floor trying to service them all.
With some emotion, Rosie told me that Grandpa was the nicest man she'd ever met. "He's so considerate, always looking out for me." I'd call it controlling, but she takes it as affection and why not. She looks out for him too, cooks for him, puts her hands on him a lot, loudly repeats things that people say since Grandpa can't hear well. And she listens to him with great attention, laughing Ed McMahon-style at each pause. "I just love to hear his stories," she told me.
Grandpa and Rosie went off to the doctor in the morning, so Rosie could get shots to ease back pain that has cropped up this week (interrupting their dance schedule). She's hoping to improve before driving up to Lewiston later this week for an Eagles event. State branches of the Ladies Auxiliary the Eagles meet annually to compete in performing "The Ritual"--the prescribed agenda and language of an Auxiliary meeting, with parts taken by the President, Vice-president, etc, four or five positions all together, including Chaplain (Rosie's part). In the competition the woman are judged on how well they remember and act out "The Ritual." During the day Rosie occasionally studied from a small white book, working on her part.
Alix and I soon went off with my uncle Mike and Aunt Rosemary, and Rosemary's two-year-old granddaughter, Rylee, to tour Boise. We drove around the older, leafier parts of town, out to Lucky Peak Reservoir, back to Ann Morrison Park in town for a walk among trout ponds. We ate lunch at a Basque restaurant downtown, Bar Gernika. I had tortilla de patatas and croquetas, Alix a lamb grinder.
In the afternoon, Rylee's mother, my cousin Kristen came over, and more visiting was accomplished, mostly sitting on the back patio looking out over the backyard. Grandpa picked dead leaves off the plants and flowers scattered in beds around the yard, then watered. The rest of us drank beer or soda and watched him. The sun slowly sank towards the western horizon. I got up and twirled Rylee in the grass, until her laughter turned to mews of fear, then I stopped and she staggered about dizzily. Then she said, "do it again."
Late, after everyone had gone home, Alix had me take her out to look for something to eat. Periodically she requires warm food cooked by strangers. Most everything was closed, so we settled on Sonic, mostly because Alix said she liked their commercials and had never eaten there. She ordered chicken fingers but didn't finish them. I had a vanilla milk shake and left not a drop.
In the morning, before Grandpa appeared, Rosie told me that they were getting married, "in October or November." Janie had already broken the story the day before, almost the first bit of family news she'd shared. "Your grandfather's getting married," she'd said. "Again." But she and everyone else seems to approve of Rosie, mostly, and consider her a great improvement on the previous wife, Audrey, who lasted only a couple years and who Janie calls "a golddigger." After Audrey Grandpa had said he would never marry again, but as a good Catholic he's apparently uncomfortable with unauthorized cohabitation.
Rosie told me she had become a Catholic herself, since meeting Grandpa. She's 78 to his 88, a little sharper and quicker, at least physically, than him, but he's certainly in charge. They met dancing, which they continue to do three nights a week, at the Eagles lodge. The women far outnumber the men at these events, and Grandpa had told me before that he was kept busy on the dance floor trying to service them all.
With some emotion, Rosie told me that Grandpa was the nicest man she'd ever met. "He's so considerate, always looking out for me." I'd call it controlling, but she takes it as affection and why not. She looks out for him too, cooks for him, puts her hands on him a lot, loudly repeats things that people say since Grandpa can't hear well. And she listens to him with great attention, laughing Ed McMahon-style at each pause. "I just love to hear his stories," she told me.
Grandpa and Rosie went off to the doctor in the morning, so Rosie could get shots to ease back pain that has cropped up this week (interrupting their dance schedule). She's hoping to improve before driving up to Lewiston later this week for an Eagles event. State branches of the Ladies Auxiliary the Eagles meet annually to compete in performing "The Ritual"--the prescribed agenda and language of an Auxiliary meeting, with parts taken by the President, Vice-president, etc, four or five positions all together, including Chaplain (Rosie's part). In the competition the woman are judged on how well they remember and act out "The Ritual." During the day Rosie occasionally studied from a small white book, working on her part.
Alix and I soon went off with my uncle Mike and Aunt Rosemary, and Rosemary's two-year-old granddaughter, Rylee, to tour Boise. We drove around the older, leafier parts of town, out to Lucky Peak Reservoir, back to Ann Morrison Park in town for a walk among trout ponds. We ate lunch at a Basque restaurant downtown, Bar Gernika. I had tortilla de patatas and croquetas, Alix a lamb grinder.
In the afternoon, Rylee's mother, my cousin Kristen came over, and more visiting was accomplished, mostly sitting on the back patio looking out over the backyard. Grandpa picked dead leaves off the plants and flowers scattered in beds around the yard, then watered. The rest of us drank beer or soda and watched him. The sun slowly sank towards the western horizon. I got up and twirled Rylee in the grass, until her laughter turned to mews of fear, then I stopped and she staggered about dizzily. Then she said, "do it again."
Late, after everyone had gone home, Alix had me take her out to look for something to eat. Periodically she requires warm food cooked by strangers. Most everything was closed, so we settled on Sonic, mostly because Alix said she liked their commercials and had never eaten there. She ordered chicken fingers but didn't finish them. I had a vanilla milk shake and left not a drop.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
At Chuck and Janie's in New Plymouth
Late in the morning Alix and I drove an hour west to New Plymouth, down the short main street and out past town a mile to the Park View Cemetery. A funeral had just finished and a long line of cars and pick-ups was coming out.
I first came to New Plymouth when I was thirteen or fourteen and stayed with my great-grandmother, Grandma Liz, in her small green house with her small, gray husband, Shorty. I ran around town with cousins, a suburban youth surprised by and smitten with a small town filled with people to whom I was related. I took Alix to Grandma Liz's headstone first. We visited my grandmother Barbara, too, and her son, my uncle Kelly. Alix said, "it's so sad," and it was, but somehow comforting too, to have them marked down there in the grass.
We drove past Grandma Liz's old house, then Chuck and Janie's (a great uncle and aunt) two blocks away. I could see Janie through one of the front windows standing at the kitchen sink and decided we'd go ahead and drop in unannounced. When she came to the door she didn't recognize me for a moment, but then she did and opened the screen door and told us to come on in.
"Sit down, sit down," she said. "Can I get you kids something to drink? I'd offer you lunch but we just finished and there's nothing left." She laughed apologetically. Later she gave us ice cream cones from the freezer. Alix and I did sit down on a small couch in the small living room, after shaking hands with Chuck, who sat limply in the corner of another couch opposite. A clear plastic tube snaked from a humming oxygen machine in the corner to Chuck's nostrils. He was pale, his eyes red and red-rimmed, but his voice was strong. He's had heart trouble and just recently was diagnosed with leukemia. Blood transfusions every couple months apparently keep him going. He's 86, Janie 81.
We spent most of the afternoon at the house, visiting. After awhile Janie called Jeanette and Nig, another octogenarian aunt and uncle pair, and fifteen minutes later they were over, despite Jeanette's recent broken hip. "The doctor wants me to use a walker," she confided, "but a cane works good enough." She seemed not the least discouraged by her injury, though a little surprised. She's a sharp, active woman, white-haired but seemingly little affected by age.
Janie too. She's slight, weighing less than a hundred pounds, irreverent and skeptical, something of a smart-ass. When the subject of camping came up, in connection with our journey out from Minnesota, she said she did not like to camp. "That's over for us, thank God. There was all that getting ready and the packing up, which takes forever, and then when we'd get there he"--she jerked a thumb at Chuck, saying "he" with affectionate disdain--"he and the other guys would just go off fishing, while I had to do all the setting up. Then he comes back hungry and I gotta cook. And while I clean up he and his buddies sit and drink beer and play cards and tell lies." She laughed. Chuck said, "I always liked camping."
Just the day before one of Chuck and Janie's grandkids had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. "They both have wierd names," Janie said, shaking her head ruefully, "and I can't keep them in my head." She paused. "The girl's is Nev something--it's heaven spelled backwards." I said I'd read that Nevaeh was becoming quite popular. "But how do you pronounce that?" she said. We tried several variations but were unable to settle on a consensus.
The boy's name she couldn't remember at all. She pulled on her ear and thought for a moment. "It's in that wooden Indian song," she said. It took me a minute, but the clue was sufficient. "Elijah?" I asked. "Yeah," she said,laughing, "that's it. Where do they come up with these names?" Janie's kids are Rick and Sue and Chuckie.
Janie warmed up two big muffins and sliced them into strips and we sat at the dining room table drinking soda. Nig told us that he had both new eyes and new knees. He's a tall man, well-groomed. Alix liked his subtle pompadour, a gray wave rising gently from his temple. He said he'd now been retired for twenty years--he'd been a high school prinicpal, a school supertintendent--and that retirement had been a whole other busy career.
Somehow the subject turned to smoking, and it came out they had all been smokers for most of their lives. Janie still is. She didn't start until she was thirty-five, though. "I tried before," she said, "but I just didn't like it. When I was in nursing school there was a smoking room and all the girls smoked--it was like they wanted us to--but I just couldn't stand it. Later, though, after I had kids, I took it up." Alix said that she smoked and Janie immediately brightened. "Let's go back on the patio," she said. Outside Janie smoked four cigarettes to Alix's one. I took a picture of them together, each smiling and holding a cigarette up to the side.
Soon after Alix and I said our good-byes and headed back down to Boise. At my grandfather's house, his girlfriend Rosie opened the door and invited us in. Their new dog, a bichon frise named Lacey barked at us, until her bark collar zapped her, and then she yelped as if someone had stepped on her. After the greetings we all sat down at the dining room table and began a new round of visiting.
I first came to New Plymouth when I was thirteen or fourteen and stayed with my great-grandmother, Grandma Liz, in her small green house with her small, gray husband, Shorty. I ran around town with cousins, a suburban youth surprised by and smitten with a small town filled with people to whom I was related. I took Alix to Grandma Liz's headstone first. We visited my grandmother Barbara, too, and her son, my uncle Kelly. Alix said, "it's so sad," and it was, but somehow comforting too, to have them marked down there in the grass.
We drove past Grandma Liz's old house, then Chuck and Janie's (a great uncle and aunt) two blocks away. I could see Janie through one of the front windows standing at the kitchen sink and decided we'd go ahead and drop in unannounced. When she came to the door she didn't recognize me for a moment, but then she did and opened the screen door and told us to come on in.
"Sit down, sit down," she said. "Can I get you kids something to drink? I'd offer you lunch but we just finished and there's nothing left." She laughed apologetically. Later she gave us ice cream cones from the freezer. Alix and I did sit down on a small couch in the small living room, after shaking hands with Chuck, who sat limply in the corner of another couch opposite. A clear plastic tube snaked from a humming oxygen machine in the corner to Chuck's nostrils. He was pale, his eyes red and red-rimmed, but his voice was strong. He's had heart trouble and just recently was diagnosed with leukemia. Blood transfusions every couple months apparently keep him going. He's 86, Janie 81.
We spent most of the afternoon at the house, visiting. After awhile Janie called Jeanette and Nig, another octogenarian aunt and uncle pair, and fifteen minutes later they were over, despite Jeanette's recent broken hip. "The doctor wants me to use a walker," she confided, "but a cane works good enough." She seemed not the least discouraged by her injury, though a little surprised. She's a sharp, active woman, white-haired but seemingly little affected by age.
Janie too. She's slight, weighing less than a hundred pounds, irreverent and skeptical, something of a smart-ass. When the subject of camping came up, in connection with our journey out from Minnesota, she said she did not like to camp. "That's over for us, thank God. There was all that getting ready and the packing up, which takes forever, and then when we'd get there he"--she jerked a thumb at Chuck, saying "he" with affectionate disdain--"he and the other guys would just go off fishing, while I had to do all the setting up. Then he comes back hungry and I gotta cook. And while I clean up he and his buddies sit and drink beer and play cards and tell lies." She laughed. Chuck said, "I always liked camping."
Just the day before one of Chuck and Janie's grandkids had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. "They both have wierd names," Janie said, shaking her head ruefully, "and I can't keep them in my head." She paused. "The girl's is Nev something--it's heaven spelled backwards." I said I'd read that Nevaeh was becoming quite popular. "But how do you pronounce that?" she said. We tried several variations but were unable to settle on a consensus.
The boy's name she couldn't remember at all. She pulled on her ear and thought for a moment. "It's in that wooden Indian song," she said. It took me a minute, but the clue was sufficient. "Elijah?" I asked. "Yeah," she said,laughing, "that's it. Where do they come up with these names?" Janie's kids are Rick and Sue and Chuckie.
Janie warmed up two big muffins and sliced them into strips and we sat at the dining room table drinking soda. Nig told us that he had both new eyes and new knees. He's a tall man, well-groomed. Alix liked his subtle pompadour, a gray wave rising gently from his temple. He said he'd now been retired for twenty years--he'd been a high school prinicpal, a school supertintendent--and that retirement had been a whole other busy career.
Somehow the subject turned to smoking, and it came out they had all been smokers for most of their lives. Janie still is. She didn't start until she was thirty-five, though. "I tried before," she said, "but I just didn't like it. When I was in nursing school there was a smoking room and all the girls smoked--it was like they wanted us to--but I just couldn't stand it. Later, though, after I had kids, I took it up." Alix said that she smoked and Janie immediately brightened. "Let's go back on the patio," she said. Outside Janie smoked four cigarettes to Alix's one. I took a picture of them together, each smiling and holding a cigarette up to the side.
Soon after Alix and I said our good-byes and headed back down to Boise. At my grandfather's house, his girlfriend Rosie opened the door and invited us in. Their new dog, a bichon frise named Lacey barked at us, until her bark collar zapped her, and then she yelped as if someone had stepped on her. After the greetings we all sat down at the dining room table and began a new round of visiting.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
This time Alix survives Craters of the Moon
This morning we smell like day-old smoke. Last night Alix made us tomato sandwiches for dinner, then opened small plastic containers of potato and macaroni salad bought at a fancy grocery store in Bozeman. We sat in the dark by the fire, a little cold nonetheless; the temperature had dropped down into the thirties.
We set off early again, and Alix barely stirred in her bed. She had closed the back curtains so I used the side mirrors to back out of our campsite.
I woke her a couple hours later to see Mesa Falls, a 114 foot cascade south of Yellowstone. We had earlier passed through West Yellowstone, the most touristy town in the western U.S.--dozens of motels and souvenir shops, gear stores and outfitters, helicopter rides, even an IMAX theater where one can have the Yellowstone "experience" before actually visiting the park. A visit that did not seem to me at all alluring, considering the hordes funneling into the adjacent park.
We walked down a trail to a catwalk perched above the brink of the wide falls. Mist floated up and enveloped us; the air smelled of crushed water. Alix said, "do I look like an idiot?" My down jacket, which she was wearing, was long enough to cover her skirt, making it appear as if she was wearing just leggings. No, I said, the outfit, along with her Robin Hood boots, made her look as if she was on a fashion shoot. She vogued briefly. "What about me?" I said. "This looks ok, doesn't it?" I gestured at the black long underwear I wore beneath my shorts, a look I considered hikerboy chic. She shook her head and grimaced. "No."
By lunch time we had reached the moderately large town of Idaho Falls, where we ate downtown at the Snakebite Restaurant. The mood and food was hipster bourgeoise, apparently a growing demographic in some parts of Idaho, having drifted down from Montana (on the other hand I just read a newspaper story about the growing "Open Carry" movement in these parts. Apparently it's not illegal to wear a gun on your hip, and, according to one interviewee, preferable on hot days to the shoulder holster; a sweaty gun pressing against the underarm can be unpleasant.)
After lunch we walked to two thrift stores, first the Idaho Youth Ranch, then Deseret Industries (the latter a Mormon concern). The Ranch was a bust, but at DI Alix found a a green pair of cowboy boots and a grey hoody appliqued with the single word "Mom." Still, she didn't like the place. When she was trying on the boots, a young man had sidled up and said, "those look great on you." That didn't sound too awful to me. "Yeah," Alix said, "but he held eye contact just a little too long. Like what am I going to say, 'thanks, let's go somehwere and make out'?"
From Idaho Falls we headed west on U.S. 20, out across a vast sagebrush flat, just south of snowy mountains rising up to our right. The sky was blue blue, dotted with puffy clouds, Simpsons' clouds Alix called them. But the temperature was only in the lower fifties and a fierce wind was blowing. At a lonely rest stop a weather station gauged the wind at thirty to forty miles per hour, with gusts to fifty. It was cold.
We passed through Arco, the first town in the U.S. powered by nuclear energy, and soon after stopped at Craters of the Moon National Monument. We had visited the park together before, when Alix was eight; on a walk she had fallen and cut her hand badly on the sharp black lava rock. When I couldn't stop the bleeding we had to turn to a ranger at the nearby visitor's center. I'd wrestled her into temporary submission while he cleaned bits of black grit from the deep cut. On this day we went on a careful walk a short distance into a lava field. I took a picture of Alix holding up her hand to display her scar.
We continued westwards, from sagebrush into dry foothills, coming after a couple hours to the town of Mountain Home. We had decided to seek a motel, so Alix could do her hair and I could shave, prior to meeting relatives the next day. However, there was some difficulty about choosing a motel. Alix prefers something reassuringly familiar, such as Sleep Inn, while I am drawn to the older, independent and much cheaper sort of motel. Unfortunately, Alix associates this latter type with the Bates Motel and sordid crimes. "Too creepy" was her repeated assessment.
We thought to maybe please us both with a Super 8 or a Motel 6, but that meant driving another hour to Boise, which we did, and where we indeed found a room at a Motel 6. Later, though, after we'd eaten Taco Bell, and Alix had discovered she had no shampoo and conditioner, and nothing good was on television, and we had listened for several hours to loud Middle Eastern music coming from the room below, she said, "this was a mistake."
Motels do sing siren songs of hot water and HBO, but camping is actually more satisfying.
We set off early again, and Alix barely stirred in her bed. She had closed the back curtains so I used the side mirrors to back out of our campsite.
I woke her a couple hours later to see Mesa Falls, a 114 foot cascade south of Yellowstone. We had earlier passed through West Yellowstone, the most touristy town in the western U.S.--dozens of motels and souvenir shops, gear stores and outfitters, helicopter rides, even an IMAX theater where one can have the Yellowstone "experience" before actually visiting the park. A visit that did not seem to me at all alluring, considering the hordes funneling into the adjacent park.
We walked down a trail to a catwalk perched above the brink of the wide falls. Mist floated up and enveloped us; the air smelled of crushed water. Alix said, "do I look like an idiot?" My down jacket, which she was wearing, was long enough to cover her skirt, making it appear as if she was wearing just leggings. No, I said, the outfit, along with her Robin Hood boots, made her look as if she was on a fashion shoot. She vogued briefly. "What about me?" I said. "This looks ok, doesn't it?" I gestured at the black long underwear I wore beneath my shorts, a look I considered hikerboy chic. She shook her head and grimaced. "No."
By lunch time we had reached the moderately large town of Idaho Falls, where we ate downtown at the Snakebite Restaurant. The mood and food was hipster bourgeoise, apparently a growing demographic in some parts of Idaho, having drifted down from Montana (on the other hand I just read a newspaper story about the growing "Open Carry" movement in these parts. Apparently it's not illegal to wear a gun on your hip, and, according to one interviewee, preferable on hot days to the shoulder holster; a sweaty gun pressing against the underarm can be unpleasant.)
After lunch we walked to two thrift stores, first the Idaho Youth Ranch, then Deseret Industries (the latter a Mormon concern). The Ranch was a bust, but at DI Alix found a a green pair of cowboy boots and a grey hoody appliqued with the single word "Mom." Still, she didn't like the place. When she was trying on the boots, a young man had sidled up and said, "those look great on you." That didn't sound too awful to me. "Yeah," Alix said, "but he held eye contact just a little too long. Like what am I going to say, 'thanks, let's go somehwere and make out'?"
From Idaho Falls we headed west on U.S. 20, out across a vast sagebrush flat, just south of snowy mountains rising up to our right. The sky was blue blue, dotted with puffy clouds, Simpsons' clouds Alix called them. But the temperature was only in the lower fifties and a fierce wind was blowing. At a lonely rest stop a weather station gauged the wind at thirty to forty miles per hour, with gusts to fifty. It was cold.
We passed through Arco, the first town in the U.S. powered by nuclear energy, and soon after stopped at Craters of the Moon National Monument. We had visited the park together before, when Alix was eight; on a walk she had fallen and cut her hand badly on the sharp black lava rock. When I couldn't stop the bleeding we had to turn to a ranger at the nearby visitor's center. I'd wrestled her into temporary submission while he cleaned bits of black grit from the deep cut. On this day we went on a careful walk a short distance into a lava field. I took a picture of Alix holding up her hand to display her scar.
We continued westwards, from sagebrush into dry foothills, coming after a couple hours to the town of Mountain Home. We had decided to seek a motel, so Alix could do her hair and I could shave, prior to meeting relatives the next day. However, there was some difficulty about choosing a motel. Alix prefers something reassuringly familiar, such as Sleep Inn, while I am drawn to the older, independent and much cheaper sort of motel. Unfortunately, Alix associates this latter type with the Bates Motel and sordid crimes. "Too creepy" was her repeated assessment.
We thought to maybe please us both with a Super 8 or a Motel 6, but that meant driving another hour to Boise, which we did, and where we indeed found a room at a Motel 6. Later, though, after we'd eaten Taco Bell, and Alix had discovered she had no shampoo and conditioner, and nothing good was on television, and we had listened for several hours to loud Middle Eastern music coming from the room below, she said, "this was a mistake."
Motels do sing siren songs of hot water and HBO, but camping is actually more satisfying.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
We liked Billings
In western North Dakota in mid-June the night begins to give way to the day about 4:30 am, even on overcast mornings. I woke with the first light, fought with it for a time, then finally gave up and descended to the cabin and quietly lowered the top.
We set out at six, Alix still unconscious in her bed, where she stayed most of the morning. When she finally rose at ten, she said that the previous four hours on the road had been "a perfect sleep."
While she slept I listened to am radio, first to a station out of Dickinson, North Dakota. Local news, corn and cattle prices, and other bits were occasionally interrupted with single songs, like Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and "Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World." The DJ, a man named Jefferson Clark, personalized the names of singers, referring to them as "Bobby Dylan" and "Johnny Denver." He read a long list of events that had happened on the current date, starting back in the 1940s and moving towards the present. In 1969 Warren Burger was confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; in 1994 Left-Eye, in a fit of jealous rage, had burned down the mansion of boyfriend Andre Rison, then a wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons.
After the AP news came "The Files of Jefferson Clark," apparently a daily feature. This morning's topic was how Jefferson carries his money. He likes to use cash and usually has between $40 and $150 in his wallet. As for the wallet, he doesn't like how "a big wad feels on my hind-end." Plus, the bulge does not flatter his figure, as he is "built low to the ground." He prefers to carry his wallet in a front pants pocket. From his own practices he turned to women and their crazy habits, in particular the mystery of the purse. Apparently women just toss their money into their giant purses with everything else they own. Jefferson told about his mother's huge purse and how when a child he had once weighed it out of curiosity.
At a commercial break, in a campaign ad, Senator Max Baucus bragged about his work on the Farm Bill.
I found another station, this one out of Terry, Montana, and listened for a time to the call-ins to The Trading Post. Someone wanted a bumper for a 1973 Chevelle. Good luck, I thought. Someone else was selling twelve cockatiels. An elderly man, who spoke slowly and with a voicebox mic, had several items to offer for sale, including a dresser and mirror and "almost new cover-alls about my size."
The sky cleared mid-morning as we followed the Yellowstone River across eastern Montana, beautiful beautiful country. Cottonwoods lined the river, and an occasional ranch house and barn stood in the bottomlands surrounded by hayfields. On either side of the river valley low bluffs rose; beyond them the plains rolled away green with the recent rains. I got off the interstate for stretches and followed two-lane roads closer to the river.
We reached Billings at lunch time, perfect timing. Alix directed me downtown to Sarah's, a Mexican food place where you order in the back at a window to the kitchen. An old woman took our orders and shouted them to the cook. I had a bean and cheese burrito, Alix taquitos with guacamole. Very good.
A few blocks away we discovered one of the great thrift stores of North America, a huge St. Paul de Vincents. Downstairs a vast array of furniture and appliances, upstairs clothes, household items, and sundries. Alix found a Nike track jacket, a pair of hot pink slip-on flats, "a ridiculous green 80s belt with a huge gold hook clasp," a second belt, and four pairs of earrings--for $8. Woo hoo! As we took to the highway again, Alix basked in that particular high that comes from thrift store success.
We stopped later at another thrift store in Livingstone, but it fell short of the high standard set by in Billings. Alix did get a purple scarf, as her hair--that is, what to do with it--is starting to become an issue.
We paused in Bozeman in the rain before turning south off the interstate to follow the Gallatin River down towards Big Sky. The road travels through a lovely, narrow valley, heavily wooded, and repeatedly crosses the fast stream. We spotted kayakers shooting down the rapids.
We stopped for firewood before settling in for the night at a secluded national forest campground, Swan Creek, on a wooded site on the tiny, noisy stream.
We set out at six, Alix still unconscious in her bed, where she stayed most of the morning. When she finally rose at ten, she said that the previous four hours on the road had been "a perfect sleep."
While she slept I listened to am radio, first to a station out of Dickinson, North Dakota. Local news, corn and cattle prices, and other bits were occasionally interrupted with single songs, like Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and "Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World." The DJ, a man named Jefferson Clark, personalized the names of singers, referring to them as "Bobby Dylan" and "Johnny Denver." He read a long list of events that had happened on the current date, starting back in the 1940s and moving towards the present. In 1969 Warren Burger was confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; in 1994 Left-Eye, in a fit of jealous rage, had burned down the mansion of boyfriend Andre Rison, then a wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons.
After the AP news came "The Files of Jefferson Clark," apparently a daily feature. This morning's topic was how Jefferson carries his money. He likes to use cash and usually has between $40 and $150 in his wallet. As for the wallet, he doesn't like how "a big wad feels on my hind-end." Plus, the bulge does not flatter his figure, as he is "built low to the ground." He prefers to carry his wallet in a front pants pocket. From his own practices he turned to women and their crazy habits, in particular the mystery of the purse. Apparently women just toss their money into their giant purses with everything else they own. Jefferson told about his mother's huge purse and how when a child he had once weighed it out of curiosity.
At a commercial break, in a campaign ad, Senator Max Baucus bragged about his work on the Farm Bill.
I found another station, this one out of Terry, Montana, and listened for a time to the call-ins to The Trading Post. Someone wanted a bumper for a 1973 Chevelle. Good luck, I thought. Someone else was selling twelve cockatiels. An elderly man, who spoke slowly and with a voicebox mic, had several items to offer for sale, including a dresser and mirror and "almost new cover-alls about my size."
The sky cleared mid-morning as we followed the Yellowstone River across eastern Montana, beautiful beautiful country. Cottonwoods lined the river, and an occasional ranch house and barn stood in the bottomlands surrounded by hayfields. On either side of the river valley low bluffs rose; beyond them the plains rolled away green with the recent rains. I got off the interstate for stretches and followed two-lane roads closer to the river.
We reached Billings at lunch time, perfect timing. Alix directed me downtown to Sarah's, a Mexican food place where you order in the back at a window to the kitchen. An old woman took our orders and shouted them to the cook. I had a bean and cheese burrito, Alix taquitos with guacamole. Very good.
A few blocks away we discovered one of the great thrift stores of North America, a huge St. Paul de Vincents. Downstairs a vast array of furniture and appliances, upstairs clothes, household items, and sundries. Alix found a Nike track jacket, a pair of hot pink slip-on flats, "a ridiculous green 80s belt with a huge gold hook clasp," a second belt, and four pairs of earrings--for $8. Woo hoo! As we took to the highway again, Alix basked in that particular high that comes from thrift store success.
We stopped later at another thrift store in Livingstone, but it fell short of the high standard set by in Billings. Alix did get a purple scarf, as her hair--that is, what to do with it--is starting to become an issue.
We paused in Bozeman in the rain before turning south off the interstate to follow the Gallatin River down towards Big Sky. The road travels through a lovely, narrow valley, heavily wooded, and repeatedly crosses the fast stream. We spotted kayakers shooting down the rapids.
We stopped for firewood before settling in for the night at a secluded national forest campground, Swan Creek, on a wooded site on the tiny, noisy stream.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Frontier village people
In Jamestown, North Dakota, yesterday we were lured from the highway by the worldest's largest buffalo. Beneath its massive head, we took turns posing for the same photographs taken by tens of thousands since the creature first went on display in 1959.
The buffalo stood on a cement apron on the edge of Frontier Village. Small wooden buildings, fronted with a boardwalk, lined the town's single street. We stepped first into the insurance office and I leaned over a rail and pretended to operate an old timey adding machine. Hilarious.
In the jail we briefly occupied one of the two cells, acting out another set piece of tourist theater. In the Dentist's office a man mannikin stood with drill in hand looming over a seated woman mannikin, who looked up at him in blank-faced terror. The heavy make-up around her eyes gave her a haunted look. Her wig and long white gloves suggested that maybe she was a recluse forced out into society by a toothache. A sign on the wall said that the dentists of Jamestown sponsored the exhibit "in memory of our pioneer dentists."
In the saloon two mannikins, a floozy and a bartender, stood behind the bar. The former had bright red hair similar to Alix's and wore a black boa around her neck. The bartender was shorter and clearly had started life as a woman. He was wigless but wore a bowler hat, as well as a vest and bow tie; his thick black walrus moustache could not hide the delicate features of a pretty woman mannikin. I went behind the bar and stood between them for a picture.
At the other end of the bar mounted up on the wall was the large head of a deer, which unlike the employees seemed to be period specific. Much of the fur had fallen away from the head, and its lips had pulled back revealing its teeth and giving it a menacing, rabidic expression.
Across the street from the saloon we entered Louis L'Amour's Writing Shack. On a wall, behind plexiglas, were displayed dozens of his paperback western novels. Alix signed a petition to have him honored with a U.S. postage stamp.
After the brief excitement of Frontier Village, we continued west on Interstate 94, listening to episodes of Fresh Air on Alix's ipod. We drove through several rainstorms and passed New Salem Sue, world's largest holstein. Just at dark we reached Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drove five miles north from the interstate,through rugged coulees and hills, to a campground. We spotted several real buffalo along the way.
At our campground site, we popped the top, then Alix set out our modest dinner of sandwiches and chips. We'd had a late lunch at a Green Mill in Fargo (after discovering the downtown restaurants Alix had searched out on the internet were all closed on Sundays).
I took the top bunk, Alix the lower, and she had me read aloud the first chpater of The Golden Compass before we went to sleep.
The buffalo stood on a cement apron on the edge of Frontier Village. Small wooden buildings, fronted with a boardwalk, lined the town's single street. We stepped first into the insurance office and I leaned over a rail and pretended to operate an old timey adding machine. Hilarious.
In the jail we briefly occupied one of the two cells, acting out another set piece of tourist theater. In the Dentist's office a man mannikin stood with drill in hand looming over a seated woman mannikin, who looked up at him in blank-faced terror. The heavy make-up around her eyes gave her a haunted look. Her wig and long white gloves suggested that maybe she was a recluse forced out into society by a toothache. A sign on the wall said that the dentists of Jamestown sponsored the exhibit "in memory of our pioneer dentists."
In the saloon two mannikins, a floozy and a bartender, stood behind the bar. The former had bright red hair similar to Alix's and wore a black boa around her neck. The bartender was shorter and clearly had started life as a woman. He was wigless but wore a bowler hat, as well as a vest and bow tie; his thick black walrus moustache could not hide the delicate features of a pretty woman mannikin. I went behind the bar and stood between them for a picture.
At the other end of the bar mounted up on the wall was the large head of a deer, which unlike the employees seemed to be period specific. Much of the fur had fallen away from the head, and its lips had pulled back revealing its teeth and giving it a menacing, rabidic expression.
Across the street from the saloon we entered Louis L'Amour's Writing Shack. On a wall, behind plexiglas, were displayed dozens of his paperback western novels. Alix signed a petition to have him honored with a U.S. postage stamp.
After the brief excitement of Frontier Village, we continued west on Interstate 94, listening to episodes of Fresh Air on Alix's ipod. We drove through several rainstorms and passed New Salem Sue, world's largest holstein. Just at dark we reached Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drove five miles north from the interstate,through rugged coulees and hills, to a campground. We spotted several real buffalo along the way.
At our campground site, we popped the top, then Alix set out our modest dinner of sandwiches and chips. We'd had a late lunch at a Green Mill in Fargo (after discovering the downtown restaurants Alix had searched out on the internet were all closed on Sundays).
I took the top bunk, Alix the lower, and she had me read aloud the first chpater of The Golden Compass before we went to sleep.
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