Walking

The sun isn't up yet.  Not even close.  Abbey is too tired to move, even when I dump the crunchies in her bowl.  The woodstove went cold about midnight.  My wool socks, fleece pants, t-shirt and fleece sweatshirt constitute the most pajamas I have worn in ages.  Yet I am still cold.  If I roll my head in either direction, if I stretch my legs, if I move my body at all, I find the bed all around me cold.  Who knew when I moved in here that I would actually use the giant 70s sunshine California king comforter as a blanket.  I had saved it, from house to house, since Boulder Creek, to hang on my wall or ceiling.  As a decoration.  Now it provides a little extra warmth.  I never thought, living in Northern California, that I would need more warmth than a thick down comforter could provide.  I mean, this is a Mediterranean climate, right?  

Mediterranean climate.  Wet.  Very wet in the winter.  Mold.  Wet firewood.  Puddles everywhere.  

The new place I live in is a yurt.  That's a picture of it up above.  

It is surrounded by pygmy forest.  The thing about pygmy forest is podzillization.  Did I spell that right?  Blogger doesn't think so.  Did I tell you about this already?  Oh well, sorry about that.  "Pygmy" - the word means little, small, something to that affect.  In this case it describes a forest that may have been growing for 100 years, but has not gotten very tall in the effort.  Not for lack of trying, but every time the trees put their roots down, they find podzillized soils - a hard pan layer of clay like soil a few feet below the surface.  A layer so hard, so dense, that the roots can't get through.  So with shallow roots, a tree that is 100 years old can only grow a few feet tall. Now the yurt is located in "transitional pygmy", so, thankfully, there are some tall trees around too.  But, also thankfully, there are lots of short trees, so, thankfully, there is a lot more light than I was previously dealing with in the thick of the redwoods. 

I have no real indoor plumbing.  Well, I have a sink, but I do my best not to pee in it.  So when I have to pee, I go outside.  One of the best surprises about the yurt, besides the view of the moon and stars out the dome in the middle of the night, is the view of the moon and stars in the middle of the night when I stumble outside in the crisp wet cold to pee.  Orion is hanging around, as he likes to do in the winter.  For us Northern Hemisphere folks anyway.  It is nice to be able to see him again.  I think if I had to pee outside all my life and didn't spend the last few years living in a thick redwood forest valley and the first many years in light polluted cities and suburbs I would have a better knack for naming more of this winter sky's occupants.  In the meantime, it is enough, while half awake, and relieved, to marvel at the beauty of the crisp dark sky dotted with stars or a big round glowing moon.  

Back to it though.  The floor is cold.  The bed is cold everywhere around me except where Abbey is.  She doesn't know what she is missing, having to sleep on top of the covers.  I hope to keep it that way.  Some nights she is so tired from work that she won't leave her own bed on the floor.  Nights aren't too bad. I load the stove with wood and go to sleep toasty and warm, and at a ridiculously early hour for all of you who have known me a long time.  Work takes it out of me.  Mornings, before sunrise, are hard.  Scramble out of the cold bed into my slippers (yes - slippers and socks), find the headlamp. and build a fire in the stove.  Using a firestarter and a propane torch like any good boy scout who has access to technology would.  Scramble back into bed.  Too soon the alarm goes off again.  I smack it a couple of times, then find my senses just in time to make some lunch, feed the dog, fix a quick bagel, and grab the headlamp again in order to find my way to the car. Usually at this point I am wearing long johns under my clothes, a wool cap, gloves if I can find them.  Some mornings if I am industrious I go do the trick I learned from my Mainer friend - start the car early, let it run while I build my breakfast, let it warm up.  Did I mention that the sun ain't up yet?  Well, it ain't.  And I am tired.  

Some mornings I wish I was headed to an office all day. A cubicle.  Give me a nice warm cubicle.  Let me swivel in an orthopedically correct swivel chair all day.  Let me stare at a computer screen.  Let me worry about carpal tunnel.  Okay, maybe that's most mornings.  That feeling can last all the way through my NPR filled 10 minute commute up the coast, past the view of Noyo Harbor and the Pacific Ocean, past the sky beginning just barely to turn pink in spots, past the coffee hut where amazingly good coffee is only a dollar, and they love to give Abbey biscuits as she sticks her head out the window from behind my driver's seat.  It lasts all the way into the office, past the point when my boss tells me who I'm walking with that day, which creek we are going to.  Sometimes it fades as I load my waders into the truck, or as I marvel at the still cold temperatures (okay, I know, it's really only in the 30s, but it's a wet cold) and the beautiful sunrise hanging over Fort Bragg, CA.  Sometimes it lasts past the point of putting the waders on, grabbing the measuring stick, entering the initial entry into the palm pilot.  Some days it take the first beautiful riffle or pool to bring me to my senses.  Some days I am in pain walking the creeks half the days, sore from the days before, hating every log I crouch under.  But infallibly, every day has at least one moment of revelation - check out that log, look at the way the moss is growing out of it like a thick glowing green carpet.  Look at the beauty of the way that rare sunshine glints off of the water as it flows downstream.  

That's the first month of work.  Walking, marvelling at the beauty of my surroundings.  Feeling and appreciating the soreness in my legs, a reminder that I haven't been walking up enough creeks lately, climbing over and crawling under enough fallen logs, stumbling over enough cobble, hopping across enough chest deep channels cut through bedrock, scaling enough short walls of rock next to waterfalls, wandering up enough beautiful rivers, searching for enough fish.  I've been at this job since the beginning of November.  We expected we would begin seeing fish around Thanksgiving.  Now we've spent all of December wondering where they are.  Beginning to wonder if we will ever see fish.  Or redds for that matter.  Where the hell are the fish and redds?  

Oh.  There's one.  See that area that looks like something came along and swept the bottom of the creek, moving rocks and gravel around, cleaning it of algae and silt, digging a large wide hole in the bottom of the creek, spilling rocks downstream in the process.  Well, a female salmon did that.  Probably a coho salmon, based on the shape of the dig and the time of year.  That's Jon next to the redd.  Asa took the picture.  The fish finds a good spot, digs out an area of gravel, and lays her eggs in the area near where the "pot" (that's the hole part) transitions into the spilled area of cleaned gravel (the "tailspill").  

Our job is to walk the creeks around here, looking for redds, and, ideally, fish.  We measure the redds, we poke, prod, capture, tag, measure, and generally monitor the fish.  We record all we can about there location, size, species, and the characteristics of the redds we find.  We compare what we find out about the population of migrating salmon in this area via redd counts to what we find out when we trap and count fish on their way upstream from the ocean and downstream when they are done being juveniles.  We haven't seen many fish in the rivers yet.  A few here or there.  Not nearly as many as folks who have done this job before have expected. We are still waiting for more good rain storms.  Not the type that sprinkle for a day.  The type that pound on a tin roof so hard you can't hear yourself think.  The type that make the creeks run swollen in their banks and brown with silt (hopefully not too much silt).  The types of storms typical of Christmas and New Year's in Northern California.  The type that flood roads, that wash away hillsides.  The type that saturate the ground with inches and inches of rain in a day or two.  The type that get the creeks so wet and full that they don't go shallow again. They stay full, rushing heavy all winter.  They stay brown for a few days, and you can't see anything.  Then they turn green.  An opaque green.  That's when the fish start moving.  At least that's what we guess.  The thing about these fish, I am starting to think, is that they like to mess with the people who are trying to monitor them.  

So we are trying to monitor them, and they are maybe messing with us.  And we are waiting for more rain, because we are guessing - maybe we know, even, to a point that the research has been done, the patterns have been established - we know that when the rains swell the rivers to a constant point called "bankfull" - the rivers are full to their normal winter banks - well, that's when the fish will move.  But folks, it's winter.  It's wet outside.  It's been raining.  Just not enough.  It's making me smile to have  job that makes me ask for rain, and to have a last name like the one I have.  

We spend part of our time at the traps.  We have two places on two different rivers where any fish that is on it's way upstream gets temporarily trapped.  When these traps are working right, the fish cannot get by without entering the trap.  And once they enter they can't leave.  One place is an old salmon egg collecting station on the South Fork of the Noyo River.  The facility used to be a bomb shelter.  At least I think it used to be a bomb shelter.  It feels like it used to be a bomb shelter.  

Across the river next to the egg collecting station is a weir, or dam, or spillway.  Fish can't, during most normal river flows, get over it.  They are forced to turn and climb the fish ladder into the egg collecting station.  Once they are inside they can't get back out, and they are trapped in the channel you can see on the right side of the photo above.  The channel is blocked by a removable gate.  The fish wait in the channel until we show up to net them, tag them, record some info about them, and release them upstream.  This is me measuring a fish just after tagging it.

We also trap fish at the weir on Caspar Creek.  This is more of a floating barrier that rises as the stream flow rises.  Fish are diverted into a holding pen with a one way door.  They also get to wait until we show up to tag them and release them upstream.  This way, on both these rivers, theoretically, we know the gender, species and size of every fish that enters that river and it's tributaries.  When a coho salmon is done spawning, it dies.  With luck, we find the carcass (which we also have the pleasure of tagging) and with more luck we can check the tag on the carcass and determine when this fish entered the river.  

The other big part of my job, the part which we spend most of our time doing, is walking the creeks.  As I mentioned before, it's not your normal, every day walking.  There's no flat surfaces, most of the way.  The best you can hope for is a bit of a game trail next to the creek for 30 feet.  Into the water, out of the water.  Wading through ankle deep, knee deep, belly deep water.  Constantly using the measuring stick for balance.  Marvelling at the feeling of cold that surrounds my legs, and the fact that it's temperature alone, and not the wetness of the water, that I am feeling.  Maybe a little sweat in the socks and long johns.  Splashing into the creek at the beginning of the day, while frost still covers many of the valleys, an the warmth of the morning sun is just starting to try to break through.  Huddled in layers of polypro and fleece, wool, and sometimes a rain jacket.  Waders.  I haven't had more than one day yet in a dry suit - this is me enjoying my drysuit during training.  

Fun stuff.  They fill with air as you enter the water.  A giant floating stay puffed marshmallow man.  

Walking.  Stumbling.  Crawling.  Stooping.  Climbing.  It's fun work.  Fish or no fish.  I saw my first salmon in the river last week.  It was amazing.  A female was working on building a redd, and as we walked up to the redd, we didn't see her.  We stepped in the water and the fish swam quickly away from us, upstream into a sheltered pool.  We hung around for a while, waiting quietly on the bank, and the fish swam a little ways out of its hiding spot.  We were able to see it was a female, and to get a general estimate of her length.  We noticed that the bottom of her tail - the lower caudal peduncle - was very worn, whitened.  Based on the size of the redd, this was understandable.  She had been hard at work for a while, using her body and tail to move gravel, to dig the pot, to clean the gravel - the substrate - of small sediment, so when she lays her eggs and a male comes along and fertilizes them, the eggs will be washed in clean cold oxygenated water, and the eggs and the fish that they become will not be suffocated by fine silt. I had been waiting to see a fish, and it was wonderful to finally see one at work, spawning.  Carrying on the survival of her endangered species.  

It made me sad too, in that she was just one fish.  We did see a male hanging out in the pool above her redd, so there was hope that her eggs would get fertilized.  But these creeks, according to locals, used to be filled to the brim with salmon, such that you could walk across their backs, such that a horse would refuse to ford a river for fear of the commotion that was happening in the water.  

Now we walk, we search, we hope, we count.  We try to be scientists, to remain as counters, observers. I try.  I try to have the ability to count without putting too much thought into the numbers.  What we are counting goes into a database.  Ideally this style of counting is done all over the regions where salmon spawn.  Ideally, we form a big picture.  We want to know, I think, in the end, what we can do to help these fish reestablish their populations.  We want to know if they are reestablishing their populations.  We don't have a ton of historical data on these fish.  Sometimes, only stories of horses that weren't willing to ford these rivers.  So it's hard to set goals, it's hard to understand what we are hoping to see happen.  Maybe the world has changed so much, there's no going back.  It's all fascinating to me right now, to do work that offers just a small piece of what will hopefully continue to be a very useful big picture.  When it comes to restoration, and helping fish, and counting fish, I am sure there will be a lot more to say before I am finished with this job.  

Thanks to Asa Spade for the photos and videos.  

the only constant

Age. My gray hairs have increased. I'm feeling it in my lower back. I am getting senile. I can hear a ringing in my ears. I'm old. No, wait. I'm not old. I'm only 31. Wait, I am not yet 31. I am almost 31. Almost. I mean, I am writing this now, as a probable stand alone Part 1, because I have a feeling that Wednesday night (as well as Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights) I will be unable to type. Maybe because my fingers will be broken, from bad bets, debts, love, or rocking out. Maybe just because I will be too drunk, stoned or both to work the keyboard. But hell, it's my birthday.
My 31st birthday.
To be honest, I don't much care. I am hardly aware that I am turning 31, except that here it is my favorite time of year again, and I begin to wonder, for the first time, do I enjoy autumn so much because I am a Libra, because it is my time, because I was born during this time of year? Or is it because of the change that is in the air during this season? Or maybe I am fooling myself, and I have never really had a strong preference for autumn before moving to Mendocino, where the season means harvest, and harvest means bounty in so many senses. And, well, it starts to rain again. Which gets me back to change. I guess, in truth, that's probably why I like autumn so much. Change is in the air again.
In New Hampshire, where I lived for a bit, the leaves change. Actually, I got an email today from a close friend who spent yet another summer in the beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire. She sent photos and a short description of a hike up to Franconia Ridge, where it had snowed for the first time this year. And it was no small dusting for a first snow. There was snow, it was almost heavy on the leaves in places. I remember having a birthday in the New Hampshire mountains, and smiling to think that it was snowing near me, that it was practically winter as I celebrated with my friends.
Here in Northern California, it does not precipitate from approximately May until October. You get the occasional freak rain in June, and well, it rains a tiny bit in September sometims. But last week was the first rain that actually made the ground wet here. And there is more to come this week. Autumn here in Mendo means lots of things. The biggest might be that farmers everywhere are harvesting their crops - big buds of outdoor marijuana are coming down to be trimmed and sold, or smoked green - grapes all over the vineyards are going into vats to be stomped, filtered, sometimes sulfated, and put away to ferment into the regions award winning wines. Farmers markets are still going strong. Every home gardeners tomatoes are bursting off the vine. And there's a big one I am excited about this year that I haven't meditated on too much before - the salmon are begining to run in the creeks. Not yet, but as soon as the ground gets a bit saturated with rain, and the river levels begin to rise again, these fish will return to the place of their birth, the fresh water rivers through the north coast, to spawn and (mostly) to die. Sure the steelhead will often live to spawn another day. But the king, the coho, the pink, they will make that single, ridiculous, strenuous, blindly determined trip up the rivers from whch they were born, over logs, small dams, past predators, through pools and riffles, fighting current the whole way, to carry on their own tradition.
I am thinking more about this journey this year than I ever have before. Because as of tomorrow I am leaving my current job as a camp caretaker, sacrificing rent free housing and a guaranteed year round paycheck, to monitor the salmon's journey. I am taking a job as a fisheries techician, wading creeks to count, measure and identify salmon redds this winter. A redd is a nest that the female salmon builds and lays her eggs in. It is made up of cleaned small cobble pebbles in the midst of a quickly flowing area of freshwater stream. She travels upstream quite a ways from the ocean of her adulthood to the spot where she will build this redd, then immediately sets to work forming the nest with her tail. It is an amazing story that I won't get into right now. Really, I probably don't have the credentials to tell you the story of a salmon's journey. Maybe no human actually does. But, hell, we should try at least. And I will, one day. In the meantime, know that these fish are born against heavy odds in freshwater creek habitats on the West coast and a bit inland. They spend the first year of their life growing up in the small pools and riffles of inland creeks, feeding on aquatic macroinvertebrates and their adult forms, growing big enough to migrate downstream where they change to adult smolts, head out into the ocean, and spend the next few years migrating around the entire Pacific. At some point they return to the exact creek from which they were born, spawn, and die.
I have gotten a job counting their carcasses. Tagging the dead fish for species identification. Finding the redds they create to lay their eggs in, measuring them, identifying the species of fish that created them, recording it all for the Department of Fish and Game (I like that fish come first in that name). I will be working 4 ten hour days a week. Wearing a dry suit for most of that time. Do you know what a dry suit is? I didn't either. I have still never worn one. It is a goretex suit, I believe, that keeps you completely warm and dry while immersed in cold water, unlike a wetsuit, which keeps you warm and wet, and is much harder to put on and take off. I will be following creeks, climbing over logs, searching for evidence of salmon who have spawned. Tagging their corpses, measuring their redds. I will be keeping an eye out for wild edible mushrooms, too. Most of all, I will be seeing the drainages of Mendocino county come to life with the water brought on by winter. I will get to see these rivers go from calmly flowing creeks to swollen masses of moving water, silt, branches and energy. This is one of those jobs where during the interview they ask if you have experience working in inclimate weather conditions. I do. Funny thing is, I think I am actually looking forward to the rainy part of it. But ask me again in the spring.
I guess the whole point is, it's autumn. It's time for change. Leaves change (even here a bit), rain begins, fungus sprout, rivers begin to swell, fish begin to migrate. I seek difference in my life. Okay, no, really, I do that all the time. Maybe I am more of a Sagittarius than a Libra. Nah, here I am writing a blog. I seek creative outlet. The reason I desire change in my life so often is that I am indecisive. Or who knows. Really maybe I am just a dreamer like my Mom and my bro have said. I acknowledge that I have this habit - I have no idea where I get it - of not being able to stick to one path for too long. In the most literal sense I am the type of hiker that hates having to return by the same route. I am always seeking a new path, though, in a both literal and figurative sense, I am always glad to arrive home again.
Happy autumn. Be the change you want to see in the world. Or in your life.

Where the hell has all the rock gone?

"I think it was hearing Elliot Smith that made me want to play music."

So said a friend of mine in the bar tonight. I was having a beer with him, discussing musicians, bands and labels from our past and present. He is always telling me that he wants to rock, and I have to explain to him that these days I have been putting most of my musical energy into...my banjo. Old-time music, folk, bluegrass. Not rock. The thougt catches me for a moment, and causes me to shed a single tear into my beer. I then turn to a more immediate and importabnt matter - who was it that caused me to want to rock in the first place?



I did, shortly, realize who it was that had that all so familiar and great affect on me, the planting of that desire to rock. And I told him. I just have to say that I am listening to probably number one on the list (of course it was a joint effort) right now - and I am going to give you a quote from the song I am currently hearing

"Get into the groove for you've got to prove your love to me."

No. Not Madonna. Actually, I still don't really like Madonna.



First I said Neil Young. (The funny thing, actually, is that he didn't actually ask me to tell him who caused me to want to rock, I just felt that I had to...). Then I remembered that I didn't really get into Neil Young until after I moved to San Francisco. I wasn't into Neil Young in college. Oh, man, did I have a lot to learn back then.

But no, truth be told, it wasn't Neil that started it all.

I think it was a band called Sonic Youth.

Dirty.

One hundred percent, swimsuit issue, nic fit, chapel hill,

drunken butterfly. That might of been the start of it all. I mean, really though, credit has to be given where credit is due - SY was not at all alone. The Velvet Underground, Yo La Tengo, Superchunk, Sebadoh. Neil eventually made it in there. But to hear the wall of guitars, the alternate tunings, the sonic ambient wallpaper of Lee Ranaldo's background behind a cutting Thurston Moore out of tune solo. To fall back into the depth of the howling backdrop, to climb out on the simple innocent girl lyrics of Kim Gordon, and to relish in the comfort of Steve Shelley's constant, dependable beat.

People talk about punk rock - anger, angst, energy, enigmas, enemas, stage stunts, more anger, bottles breaking, screaming, distortion, fast beats. Or maybe that's just how I hear it. Punk, it's urban grit, it's intent to demolish and rebuild, it's no holds barred assault on the norm. To me Sonic Youth took the essence of punk and put it inside of a container. They have different sized holes on the container taht they can open, for different lengths of times. SOme of the holes have filters on them. Actually, I guess maybe their guitars are the switches.

It's not punk, it is punk, it was punk. It was a parallel to punk. This rock that calmed, soothed, built, demolished, surfed, wrecked, had immaculate orgasms of sound while causing the biggest headaches almost immediately before or after, it was a key to me, a template on which to hear everything else. It has been more than 10 years since I first heard Dirty. After which I heard Daydream Nation, Goo, Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star, Washing Machine, then I got into Daydream Nation again, then I heard Sister, Evol, Screaming Fielsd of Sonic Love, NYC Ghosts and Flowers, A Thousand Leaves, thoses really experimental EPs from a recording session in Europe...seems to me their gear had been stolen shortly before at a festival in Southern Califronia.

"We're gonna kill, the California girls..."

(the song - I named a beer after this song, Expressway to Your Skull - just started)

Lee Ranaldo - From Here to Infinity

Sonic Youth Live (at some high school in Maine?)

and at some point, I got their really early, 1987 (was it their first maybe?) self-titled album. Steve Shelley had not yet joined the band - their first drummer was a guy named Richard Edson. Who later went on to star in a Jim Jarmusch movie - I want to say Strangers in Paradise, but it might have been Down by Law.





Does anyone else out there feel their life significantly changed when they learned that during the take of Sister Ray that was released on White Light White Heat John Cale and Lou Reed were turning their amps up as far as they could go to try and rock more than the other guy? I don't know...when I read about that, when I listened to some of the songs that the Velvet Underground did...I shivered. The grit of that band gets you in your soul. It's amazing, though. I can't think of anyone, I guess I don't know of anyone, any band, historically, that did what they did. The VU took simple songs like Heroin and added intent to them. Filled them out with emotion and lyrical depth. It seems like they laid the groundwork for performance in pop, that they crafted an art of storytelling that went along with their music, that was their music. Their songs create a place, and put you there - sonically and lyrically. The Velvet Underground was a band that could lead you from the dark side of an alley, a shadowy basement, to a sunlit field of daisies, up the brownstone, into a room, late at night, somewhere in the midwest, with a radio playing rock and roll, and you're young and you're hearing it for the first time and you don't, dear God, want your parents to find out. They painted thoughts of the color of a lovers eyes, they spoke of desire, deep addiction, relief from the hit, the future, the past, the postal service and long distance desire. When I got my copy of the banana box set, in college, I had just started doing a radio show at the college radio station. I had a 4-7 am time slot. I played just about every song on it for a specialty show I did during the semi-annual fundraiser. I didn't get any calls, but I had a great time. For a long time, whenever I needed to feel anything, to think at all, I listened to the Velvet Underground.



When I was in high school, an older friend of mine asked me about a hat I had on. "Is that a Superchunk hat?" She was a year or two older than me, and much cooler. She was an art student, a friend of a friend who was a grade ahead of me and often drove my friends and I into Baltimore for the first Thursdays free open art galleries night. In this friends' car was where I first heard Nevermind. These people meant a lot to me. It's funny to think back, to wonder if any of the talented artists I knew back then became artists, or should I say remained artists, if they settled into classic American family life, or maybe became investment bankers. But, that night, this particular girl asked me about my hat. It wasn't a Superchunk hat, I told her. I had to admit, kind of ashamedly, that I didn't know who Superchunk was. I was wearing a hat that I had gotten at a Matthew Sweet concert. It had been a kick ass show, on the Superdeformed tour - that's what the hat said "Superdeformed". This was the days of the Girlfriend album, and I have to say, that album and the guitar playing on it certainly came close to causing me to really want to rock. It made a small contribution to my rock nature.

I cannot remember this girl's name. I can remember that we were at a Stranger Than Fiction show, at JHU, and that STF was playing in front of a giant projection screen showing movies, in black and white, of something. Not movies, really, more like images. This was the first of many, many times that I was to see a band doing this, and I have to say it was always cool, as far as I remember. I also recall that the lead singer for Stranger Than Fiction had a giant dreadlock - one dreadlock, that flapped up and down on his face as he sang. I think. I remember thinking they were pretty good, but kind of, it seemed, into themselves. Well, I guess they rocked, so why not? I didn't know a ton about really rocking properly then. I am pretty sure I do now, but I can't say I have yet mastered the art of being really into myself on stage. It's sort of a state of transcendence you have to reach - through lots of practice, I think - that causes you to be able to leave your own body while you are rocking to rock along with yourself. I think when you can hit this point, you can probably master your stage presence, lose yourself, become the rock. And if I remember right, that's kind of what these guys were doing.

It turned out to be a good show. One of many that led me down the alley of distortion, into the basement of darkness and periodically the garden of light. I later learned who Superchunk was. I somehow found them, maybe, I think actually, because of this girl's question about my hat. Driveway to Driveway was my favorite song for years. Slack Motherfucker. Precision Auto. Package Thief. It's funny to think about all the good bands that came off of Merge Records, and how Superchunk was always my favorite. Neutral Milk Hotel? Anyone? I never really got into them. Superchunk. I saw them at Lollapalooza one year. Mac said that the liter bottle of water he was drinking from was actually filled with vodka. I almost believed him. Straightforward rock and roll. Fast, hard, fun, bad asss, sweet. Blend a ballad into a big rock song sound. One of two bands I felt was really talking to me, kind of soundtracking my thoughts and life, for a long time.

I remember sitting on a chair, downstairs from the porch at Kent St, singing "Think: Let Tomorrow Bee", playing it on guitar, knowing the girl I really dug at the time was sitting upstairs on that very porch, probably able to hear everything I sang. Singing, it, without admitting it, really, to her. And damn if Lou Barlow's words didn't hit too close to home.

Nowadays, I listen to bluegrass, old-timey, folk, mostly. I've gone all soft. I don't fall in love with women who I am friends with anymore. Or at least I try not to. It's hard. Hell, you can't get away from heartbreak, musically speakin anyway. To tell the truth my favorite songs these days are about trains, and drinking, and, well, they all seem to be in a minor key. Most of them anyway. So I play the banjo. So I have gotten into fiddle music. I still reserve the right to rock.

Maybe I got old. Shit, I didn't I? When did that happen? But do you know what? The wheel turns, the spokes come around. I was standing on the porch at my friends house recently. Two guys I know and I had just finished playing some music together. Trying to cover a couple of Woody Guthrie songs, maybe a fiddle tune, some folky originals. You know - fiddle banjo and guitar. We got to talking, and for some reason someone mentioned the Melvins.
"Holy shit, you know the Melvins?" "Fuck yeah, man, I totally rock out to the Melvins. They fucking rule." Or something along those lines. All three of us, we had Melvins records that we worshipped for a bit. But something in me, something intuitive, made me want to go deeper. I asked if either of them had heard of Sleep.

"No fucking way." "You listen to sleep?" "Holy shit."

I mean, come on. Sleep. It's where rock evolved for me. The Melvins, Sleep, Electric Wizard, Black Sabbath...we stood on the porch for a good half an hour running through bands who had planted that dark seed in us, or helped it to grow. The deep rock. The badass rock. The 52 minute long song, Jerusalem. What more do you have to play? 52 minutes. Named after the holy city of eternal jihad. Shit.

A guitar player, a banjo player, a fiddle player. What are all three of us doing in Mendocino? Sometimes I ask this question. More often I ask, why doesn't one of us play guitar, one play bass, and one play drums? Why don't we have the time to rock, or the ability? Do we have the ability, actually, if we would just try. One of us rocks by himself, and sometimes with other people. He doesn't really have a day job. I sort of envy him. But I could be rocking right now, with him, if I wanted. I am not.

My friend who never asked me about what music caused me to rock - his band went on later tonight, and I got to hear them play a couple of songs. They followed a blues harmonica band, super tight and amazing, from Louisiana. They played fast, they played hard, they sang about angst. They had interesting changes, distortion. People didn't seem to know what to think, exactly, but they didn't leave either. It was great to see some rock in Mendocino. They were out of practice, the crowd was small, the whole effect was strange. It didn't seem to fit. As I got into my car to drive home I scrolled around on my Ipod looking for some Sonic Youth, something to rock to. I found I hadn't loaded most of the albums I wanted to hear. I was pissed at myself, and I swore to stay up way too late tonight loading some good rock music onto my hard drive. Thanks for joining me in that. I drove away from the Caspar Inn marvelling at the amount of folk I have learned to appreciate, the amount of reggae I tolerate, and the distance I now felt from the rock which was once the center of my musical life.

Rock is Dead. Long Live Rock.

To be continued....

The Turn of the Wheel, the Floating of the Magic 8 Ball

Should I write in this blog tonight?

"It is certain."

What should I write about?

"Yes. Definitely."

The answers from the Magic 8 Ball are inevitable. The end of the song is inevitable. The fall of the thrown object is inevitable. The erosion of soil by water and wind is inevitable. Dusk is inevitable, so is dawn. Love seems to be inevitable, hate as well. Unfortunately, despite the best of our hopes and intentions, war seems to be inevitable. But time is inevitable. Healing is inevitable. Peace is inevitable. The balance of all things seems to be inevitable.

Maybe all that happens to me in my life is inevitable. Maybe everything that happens to us is just fate, destiny, and we have no control. Certainly, it is inevitable that we end up wondering what the hell it is all about.

Will any of this get easier?

"It is certain."

Is there an absolute to our future, already predetermined? With the talk on climate change these days, it seems that everyone has a way of modeling our future. Apparently all of the Artic Ice Shelf will be gone, melted, by either 2050 or 2020. 2020 is not that far away. What if I was thinking of buying a piece of land next to the ocean, or a bay for that matter? What if I live there? Is it going to be under water in 13 years? Or 43 years? Is this going to effect property values? Is there a way that someone can predict this for me? Can we create an entire digital model of the world to show us the inevitable future?

I have been hearing a lot lately about modeling the environment, predicting the future using digital technology. It's amazing, just using a program like Google Earth, to think of just how much information has now been digitized, and what we can foresee, it seems accurately, using this technology. We can see the oceans rising, the storms getting worse, the weather gettting warmer everywhere. The bays flooding, the mosquitoes multiplying. We can model the continued population growth. We can show what will happen, too, if we change our ways, keep striving for a better world, a healthier world, a more aware and balanced way of living on this planet.

Should I go to sleep?

"My reply is no."

Tonight is the open mic at Caspar Inn. I need to practice, to play music that I have written, to take it there to that open mic one of these Sunday nights. Tonight my guitar is off with the naturalists and my banjo is short a string. I should probably be restringing it. But I'm here, on this keyboard, looking for something.

I sometimes can't believe the emptiness of nighttime. I think I am finally beginning to realize why so many folks go to sleep before 10 pm. It's 9:50 right now. I can only imagine an hour ago, the fading twilight sky and the trees through the skylight above my head. Now I look up and see myself reflected in a mirror of black. Out the window in front of me, and to my left, is another night of the darkest night that I have ever known. I remember streetlights now as a strange, unnatural brightness. I remember being in New York City around Christmas this year, going back, late, to a friends' place to crash. I couldn't find an unlit shadow on the entire street to step into for a moment. I walked by the Fox News building and really had to take a piss. Th place was lit up so well, there was not even a dark crack in the sidewalk.

There's a twisted corkscrew of a tree in my yard, like I said. What does that tree do at night, I wonder? What ghosts, if any, haunt this forest where I live. Is ghosts even the right word? Perhaps the spirit that inhabits the nighttime of the forest is not a ghost of any sort. What does a corkscrew tree think about? How did it become so twisted, anyway? We talk about the growth of trees reacting to climactic conditions, like krumholz, gravitropism, phototropism = plants growing in a certain way in response to the environment. Bending at the will of the wind, growing directly up in response to the force of gravity, or leaning precariously out from a hillside or ledge to better feel the sun. Maybe there is a force, a spirit, a ghost in the night that moves to different degrees each night, and some of the plants respond to this. It feels like this, sometimes, to me. I can see reflections of something like this in the way trees grow here. Sometimes, it seems, influenced by some hidden force while all the other trees nearby remain untouched. Maybe there are nights that the energy here in this forest is more amplified, or bent in a different direction. Maybe there are only certain organisms that respond to this energy at all.

Ghosts in the night or not, it does get damn dark in the redwoods. As a naturalist I was responsible for walking a group of kids around without flashlights in the dark for an hour once a week. The "Night Hike". A great time to teach about owls, raccoons, predator prey relationships, coyotes. bats. Many many times during my nighthikes I would be guiding the kids on a trail by the feel of the trail under my feet alone. And more than a couple of those times I had to use a flashlight to guide my group around a bush that I had blindly led us into. There's a good Wendell Berry quote I can never get quite right:

"To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

Dark here, like anywhere, is deep, mysterious, unknown. A blanket cast over the earth to block us from the sun for half of every day to remind us to be kind to each other. A blanket filled with pinholes created by the hummingbird's beak and claw marks from the mountain lion. On some nights, a gaping hole left by the head of the turkey vulture. The dark is deep, enveloping. We found fire and crowded around it, we have to know what is there, we have to be able to see. We see, we create heat to stay warm. We barbeque.

We are humans. It is inevitable that we act like humans.

Sleep is inevitable.

Is anyone even reading this still?

"Ask again."

The Flow of the River and the Turn of the Wheel

I am lucky enough to live in a second growth redwood forest, about 10 miles inland from the northwest Pacific coast. The "Village of Mendocino" (as I understand it, it is a registered "village") is a short 25 minute drive from me, albeit that's really only a 10 mile drive, and almost half of it is on a dirt road.

The village itself is located on a beautiful peninsula which forms the north side of the Big River Bay. Big River was named for the size of it's trees. Mendocino was formed on the industry that those trees created. Around 1852, a ship called the Frolic wrecked on the rocks near what is now Mendocino. At the time, there was I believe one rancher living in the area, along with a number of Pomo indigenous folk. The ship was bound for San Francisco, bearing goods from China. Silks, teas, maybe some opium. A version of the story that I've heard is that the owner of the ship sent a representative to the area from San Francisco to claim the lost goods. When this representative arrived, he met a bunch of well dressed, very stoned native folk. Who didn't give the silks back.

But, this guy was sharp, and figured not to make a wasted trip. He took a canoe trip up Big River with the rancher and realized that there was enough lumber in the gigantic Coast Redwood (sequoia sempervirens) that he saw to build San Francisco. And probably build it again, you know, if there was, at some point, an earthquake, and the entire city burned down. Well, that last part might be an exaggeration. But sometimes, history gets kind of unbelievably exaggerated.

Did you know the folks who first saw the giant Coast Redwoods of San Francisco marveled at the sight of the immense trees and believed wholeheartedly that there was no way we would ever be able use that much wood. Now, we've got about 3% of the old growth that was here in 1852 left in Northern California. But then again, no one really knew what a chainsaw was back then. Yet alone a helicopter, or a logging truck for that matter. What takes one guy and 45 minute used to take many and at least 2 days. The chopping down of one immense tree.

Well, through it all, Big River's watershed was mostly cut. For the last half of the 19th century, slowly. Then 1906, and the inevitable earthquake and fire did burn down San Francisco, and around that time, the Industrial Revolution got married to human consumption and a population boom began and, well, now I live in a second growth redwood forest. The stumps here are amazing. There is one old growth tree left that we can hike to, and certainly there are rumors of at least a few more that do not have trails to them. Some of them are supposedly along the Big River. One of these days, one of these hot days, I am hoping to take my dog and an old pair of tennis shoes and walk the river, upstream for a bit, looking for good swimming holes and hidden grandmother trees.

Big Tree is the name of the remaining old growth tree that we have. All of the monumental ones that have trails to them also have names. I was recently in Redwood National Park, in the Prairie Creek area (a campground with lots of elk nearby), and I saw another Big Tree.

Actually a bit Bigger than ours.

Also a Corkscrew tree. And trees that seemed to be marked with the names of famous foresters - one was for Gifford Pinchot - who were a part of a famous school of Forestry, the name of which is currently slipping my mind. Our Big Tree, here at the Woodlands, is apparently altered by the weather of 1200 years or so on this planet. Some time ago the top of this tree was knocked off by giants (or possibly lightning or wind.) So, although redwoods can reach 370 feet in height (they got that "tallest living organism" clout),

Big Tree now sits at a tiny 120 feet. Never mind the gigantic fire scar cave in her base, or the 16 foot diameter base. Shit. Redwoods are virile, if anything. When a part of them gets roughed up by some wind, fire, flood, they usually go with the what does not kill me makes me stronger bit. Even if they get killed, actually. Big Tree is just one of example of the resilience of redwoods. When she lost her top, she just sprouted a new one. This type of tree is affectionately known as a spike-top. Say about 6-8 feet in diameter at 120 feet in height, then, suddenly, a new sprout, maybe a 40-60 foot tall, 2 foot in diameter trunk sprouting from the top of the old tree. Apparently, a tree such as Big Tree, so massive in size, yet missing half of it's original growth, when felled, comes crashing down hard and is very likely to splinter, causing tens of thousands of board feet of very valuable lumber to explode into shards of worthless redwood. So, we have an old growth tree in our second growth forest. I never saw it, but I've been told that there used to be a sign next to Big Tree that said something to the effect of "This tree left for your enjoyment by Georgia-Pacific Lumber Company"

I recently took a bike ride down the haul road along Big River. This is an amazing trail - I can, if I am feeling motivated, ride my mountain bike 12 miles from my house, following generally the course of the river, all the way to town. It doesn't take much more than an hour, and it's all flat and even somewhat downhill. I decided to ride down a bit, to an area where a trail cuts over and across the river. There are supposed to be some good mountain biking areas across the river, an old orchard as part of it, with a loop that crosses the river and heads back towards camp upstream. I haven't yet had the guts to try it by myself - tales of the good fruit that still hangs from the trees in this abandoned orchard (now on State Park land) are accompanied by tales of the bears that enjoy eating said fruit. Probably the same bears that occasionally raid our dumpsters. Abbey, I am sure, would scare away any and all bears that decided to threaten me. But this day I decided not to cross the river to go exploring, but instead to go into town for a burger at a new restaurant that opened at my favorite (and the only) place to see live music in this area.

The trip down to the crossing is kind of fun. Even though it's flat, and friendly, and really bikeable by just about anyone, there are some spots where you can coast down short hills and feel a bit tricky gaining some speed through former mud puddles and quick speed dips in the trail. It is serious single track for a good bit, and a large part of the ride is swerving to avoid various thimbleberries, salmonberries, and the occasional stinging nettle or poison oak. After that it opens up into wide road, with an old gravel base and enough space to drive a small truck through. Down past the crossing the Haul Rd. Just gets wider and more heavily used.

I feel lucky to live at the point on Big River that I do. The river, as it passes our camp, is just big enough to form some really good swimming holes. About 4 that I know of, at this point, with at least of 2 of those being well known in the area and well travelled. I once spent some time on the phone with a columnist from the Guardian, giving him the low down on a couple of the better known holes for his yearly Northern California swimming holes article. He seemed to know more than I did, even, about some of the holes.

The same holes that we swim in provide great shelter to migrating salmon during their winter trip upstream, and to the juvenile salmon on their trip downstream to the saltwater of their adult time. A few years ago, a large, approximately 6 foot diameter redwood fell across the river just downstream of the parking area for the swimming holes here. After a heavy flow of water through the river during the next winter, the tree was pushed to one side and now hangs parallel to the flow of the river, next to a large pool that was formed partially by the presence of the tree and the disturbance it caused in the bank when it fell. From my house I can easily walk down the hill and onto this redwood. If I am feeling it I can jump 5 feet or so down into a pool that is about 7 feet deep, and swim a short distance across to a small beach on the other side.

Even better is a spot that is further off in the woods along one of the rivers in my area. Pretty easily accessible by bike or hike, but the type of swimming hole that makes you work for it just a bit. At the hole I am referring to, my first year, I got there with a few friends of mine who had been many times previous. When they crossed to the beach they all gasped. Typically there is a rock ledge at this swimming hole which you can jump off of, about 6 feet into a hole that is a bit deeper than that. My first experience of this hole had a large redwood pinned on top of this rock, in such a way that you could climb up easily onto it's trunk from the shallow part of the river, and walk up to the base of the tree that was sitting on top of the rock. From where you stood it was at least a good 12 feet down into the same pool. It was a great jump for the summer. Sitting on the beach across from the tree, it was hard to imagine the gentle river of summer flowing in such a way that would place that large tree on top of that rock ledge. But the next winter it was gone. And the next winter the same river flooded much of it's watershed during heavy rains.

Once I had the chance to take a kayak and canoe trip down the river with a number of friends. We left from camp during the last moderately high flows of the spring. It took us all day and a lot of beer, but we made it to the beach just south of Mendocino. Along the way I was surprised at how long the river seemed to wind past gravel beaches and overhanging forests, rippling through turns with short, deep holes and long spread out shallow sections that scraped the bottoms of our boats. Then, all of a sudden, the ripples had ended, and the water pooled up like a lake with a current, flowing as one massive pool towards the ocean. I eventually stuck my hand in and tasted the water - salt. Big River is 8 miles of coastal estuary, the longest undeveloped estuary on the west coast, I believe. 4 miles more of freshwater salmon run and you reach the Woodlands. Past the Woodlands is miles and miles more of undeveloped, moderately logged Jackson Demonstration Forest, a whole story for another time that I still have much to learn about myself.

Two days after my bike trip I took the opportunity to join the naturalists here in a boat trip up Big River from the mouth as far as we could go in a few hours, then back. I got to paddle a sit on top kayak - a 13' Prowler, made by Ocean Kayak. It was a good craft, but it was impossible for me to keep up with 8 people in an outrigger. They were nice enough to wait for me. While the bike trail carved a tunnel through the thick shrubby undergrowth of the freshwater river and its floodplain, the boat trip took us through a few miles of the lower estuary - a wide open canyon with walls of redwood forest on either side and long spread out grasslands and marshes spread out on either side. The folks I was with spotted a red white and blue beach ball sitting on one of the marshes which I recovered and we enjoyed for a bit. We saw a harbor seal hauled out on a partially sunken redwood log. The seal just sat there and checked us out as we paddled by. Two other seals swam in the river nearby. Amazingly enough, the birds that we passed did not seem bothered by our proximity. We got pretty close to a few turkey vultures and a number of cormorants which were perched on branches that emerged from the river, drying themselves. We also saw a number of baby ducks and their folks, and I got to see an osprey defending its nest from a raven on my way back downstream.

It was amazing to think about the transition that the river makes between the big, open, brackish estuary we were paddling through, and the tight, winding, rippling river that I had recently ridden along. I hope to connect the two via boat, bike, or both, soon. I guess it is time for me to learn to paddle (and roll) and skirted sea kayak, in order to go further faster. I also hope to spend more of my time off this summer exploring some of the Mendocino coast by kayak.

Trees. Water. More trees. What more could you wish for. Well, after a few years of living deep in it, perhaps some sunshine. Maybe deserts. But that's a story for another time. For now, I awake each morning to look out my windows at a second growth tree that has decided to grow like a corkscrew. For some reason. I stare at this tree most mornings, and on some moonlit nights, and wonder what the hell it is doing growing like that. I try to take a minute to breath in the view that I get to have. That tree, tall, twisted, linear, beautiful...to me it is a reminder that I am lucky, that I live somewhere unique, beyond the wall, a bit up the river, down the dirt road. And that I have a trees seem to sometimes have a twisted point of view too.

Words from the woods.

The Ghost of a Husky

It's been awhile since I've been on my bike. So long, actually, that I've forgotten my bike's name. I know I named my bike at some point. I have a few very vivid memories about mountain biking from my naturalist days in the Santa Cruz mtns. One would be Wren telling me how great her new clip in pedals were. I still think of that, every time I am trying to climb single track and I choke going towards a log I know I can ride over, and I would have to clip out, if I had ever bought those awesome new clip pedals and shoes that I still, one day, probably will buy. For the power. And yeah, I'll probably fall down more once I do.

The second vivid biking memory is when Swamp told me the name of his bike. It was Nimbus, I do believe. I decided at that moment, in order to even have a chance at defeating Swamp in the bike portion of the triathalon, that I must also name my bike. Actually, it had nothing to do with beating him in the race, but everything to do with making me seem cooler in the eyes of, well, me. And yeah, I didn't beat him in that portion. As a matter of fact I think he won the whole damn thing. But hell, he was riding a high geared touring bike, and I only got second cause I was a better swimmer and had slicks and a higher geared crank set for my mountain bike.

I decided, yesterday, to get on board old what's-his-name, do some memorial day appreciation of the forest I live in, see how the old legs were holding out. Did some climbing, did some walking, did some dismounting for little tiny logs I should have easily conquered. Rode across a couple of bridges I have balked at before, did a couple of short tiny jumps just to see how it felt. Tried to ride down a set of wide, long stairs that were almost a hill anyway, and managed to scare myself into grabbing the brakes halfway down. Which only resulted in being awkward and uncomfortable, not painful, because I was already going slow out of fear. If there is one mantra I have while biking and trying to be tricky about it, it is "Speed is your friend". It's the same mantra I always forget until after I stop and yell at myself for being a wuss. Abbey always looks at me funny when I yell at myself. Here's a picture of Abbey looking at me funny.

So I ride my bike for a while. I remember the wonders of pedals and moving fast. The breeze blows in my eyes, the dust kicks up behind me, the trees blur into a green river. As I ride along the low road past Camp One a Great Blue Heron (GBH BFD) takes off in the beaver pond and flies towards the end of the pond, headed in the same direction I am. I smile, and pedal a bit faster, realizing I am keeping up with the beautiful bird. It perches on a downed tree for a moment, and I slow to check it out. It immediately takes off again and I feel a bit bad for disturbing it's late afternoon time. Probably it was doing some fishing, enjoying the peace and quiet, and I have to come zooming in like some vicious predator, out to eat it or at least ruin it's relaxation. Same with the kingfisher I saw today. Didn't appreciate me and the work truck driving by, had to fly around in a tizzy, looking for a perch to dissappear onto. I wish there was a way to tell the birds to chill, I just want to watch them for a bit. But then, I guess my dog would eat them.

After a bit of climbing, my lungs have had it on the hill, and I decide one good push was enough, time to head home, do it again in a day or two. I turn around and head down the same single track I just climbed. About halfway down I realize I feel great again and I am having a blast. I take a turn at the bottom of the trail, away from home, and do another small climb and some flat riding along the creek on the camp road. I stop at the dog hole and encourage Abbey to take a drink and fetch a few sticks in the deep pool. She does so, and I am just about sure, at this point, that she will sleep well tonight. Not only did she get a good 6 miles of running in just now, but she spent at least half the day down at the river swimming holes hanging out with random groups of people, who I am sure were introducing her to their own dogs and throwing sticks for her. It was Memorial Day, and it seems like everyone from the coast who had the day off drove out to Big River to welcome the summer and honor veterans of wars past and present by getting drunk or just soaking up sun at the river. A true tradition in the land of the free.

We head back towards home now. It's been a long work and play day for both of us, and I am looking forward to a beer, some dinner, and a good night's sleep as well. Coming up the final hill around the camp office, Abbey takes off for a minute. When I whistle, she shows up right away, but this time with another dog in tow. I stop, and they are checking each other out, real friendly like. The other dog is a beautiful young husky, trailing about 8 feet of green rope, torn at one end. When I notice the rope I figure immediately that this dog must have gotten away from it's owner down at the river, maybe even followed me and Abbey up here. But then something very strange happens. A white SUV with an official looking sticker on the door pulls into camp. The red emergency lights on top of the cab are on, but not flashing. They pull up to me and I recognize the man in the passenger seat. I introduce myself, telling them I work at the camp, asking if there is anything I can do to help them.

"Well, there's a vehicle that rolled up on the road back there," they explain, referring to the entrance road into camp, a long 4 miles of newly gravelled (hence very slippery) two lane dirt track, "and we are looking for one of the passengers from that vehicle."

"Is everyone alright?" I ask.

"Yes, but apparently, a dog was thrown from the back of the vehicle when it rolled, and the owner went to look for the dog."

"Huh. What kind of dog was it?" I ask, with my dog and the mystery husky standing right next to me.

"He didn't say." They call on the radio back to the scene of the accident, and find out that the dog was...a husky!

"I haven't seen any guy, but I have the dog right here." I tell them. It's a very friendly dog, so we tie it's rope to the fence near the office and they go looking for the guy. I take a ride down to one of the swimming holes to do the same, but I don't have any luck finding him. When I get back, I go to my house and bring the dog a bowl of water. I notice he has a tag on. His name is Satarius and there is a local phone number. I go back home, call the number, and reach the roommate of the dog's owner, who takes down directions. He says he doesn't know where the owner is, but he suspects that yes, he was at the river today. He says he will come get the dog.

I am very relieved that the dog is okay and will get home no problem. I relax, have my beer, make my dinner, and I am sitting watching a movie when my friend Scat (see photo below)comes to the door. He lives 3 miles down the road, further in camp at the Gatehouse in Camp 2. He is one of the naturalists. Scat is not his real name. He tells me that he just got back from driving a random guy to the pavement. Hmmm...

While Scat and friends were sitting, drinking and bbqing in Camp 2, a good 3-4 miles down deeper into the camp from where the vehicle rolled, and was righted by the fire department, and was able to drive away with all passengers except the dog owner intact, a random guy walked into Camp 2. This never happens. Camp 2 is, as I mentioned, deep in camp. And even where I live is a good 4 miles from any pavement, and another 6 miles of pavement to town. Well, this guy walks into camp, and Scat says "Hi. Can I help you?" Which is what you say when someone shows up at your camp, which is often an outdoor school for 6th graders with overprotective parents, and you really don't know this person and are wondering just what the hell they are doing way out in the middle of nowhere, walking, without a car, not hiking or biking or anything.
"Hi. Can I help you?"

"No you can't help me, nobody can help me, damn it." The guy responds angrily, in so many words.

"Oh. Well, umm, are you lost? Cause you are a bit far from anything? Do you want a beer?"

Scat, in his worldly hospitable ways (this man is a commendable man when it comes to hospitality, this Scat) manages to calm the guy down, and gets his story out of him while giving him a ride out to the pavement, about 8 miles from Camp 2. Apparently, this is the guy with the lost dog (you hadn't figured that out yet, had you?). When the truck rolled (trucks tend to do crazy things on loose gravel, like going completely sideways, and rolling) the guy's dog was thrown from the back of the truck, and I guess knocked unconcious. This guy gets out after the accident and sees his dog lying on the ground, not moving. Not really sure of the details, but apparently the guy thought his dog was dead. So he got real pissed at his friends, especially the driver, and walked off to ditch his dead dog in the bushes. Yeah, I guess that's what people do here, they throw their dead dogs in the bushes at the side of the road. Without checking to see if the dogs are breathing. What the fuck? I mean, even if the dog was dead, who leaves their dog in the bushes in the middle of nowhere?

After leaving the dog in the bushes somewhere, I am guessing this guy was real pissed off and decided to walk home rather than go back to his friends. Or perhaps, when he decided to go back to his friends, they were already gone. Well, the guy ended up in Camp 2, and Scat ended up giving him a lift to the pavement. I would like to think the guy made his way home safely, and found his dog, perfectly alive and probably a bit hungry, waiting for him.

This isn't the first time, and I am sure it won't be the last. Ask me about the stranded mushroom picker sometime.

Maybe I will name my bike Satarius. Does anyone know where that name comes from? I guess I will go google it.

Everything up till now - Yesterday

Do you remember the scene, or multiple scenes, from the movie "Goonies", during which Chunk (wasn't that the fat kid's name?) was asked by the evil criminals to tell them "everything"? Chunk rattles off all of his life story. God, what a classic joke. Still makes me laugh. At some point he confesses about being in a movie theater, and making puking sounds. And this causes everyone else to puke.

I puked this morning. Been a long time. I wasn't even that hungover. I think it was the half of a camel light that I smoked last night. God does my body hate cigarettes these days. But man if my mind doesn't love them. That's a vice, I guess. That's the way I grew up, that's the way I prioritized, for way too long. Putting mind before body, trying to live fast, die young, or at least sacrifice personal health, when necessary, for experience. What the hell?

I turned 30 last October. The revelations just won't stop. Here's one - retirement could actually be fun. So could everything from now until then, no matter what that everything turns out to be.

Here's another - being out of shape and inactive, at any age, is bad for the soul.

Here's another - naps are nice.

And another - naps are nicer when taken after doing something that makes you want to rest. Something, say, other than napping.

Way back when I was in college, I started a journal about smoking. I wrote in it whenever I was feeling a particularily high level or low level of appreciation for that number one vice, nicotine. I turned out some good thoughts. Probably a good 10 entries about how important it was for me to quit. How much I valued my health. Well, let's just say that consistency in that area was not my strong point, and still probably isn't. I stopped writing in that journal after the repetition of themes got tedious. Quit for health, smoke for introverted poetic creativity, quit for health, smoke for pain, quit for love, smoke for evol, quit for health, smoke to fill the void of time between thoughts.

So now, unintentionally, I am writing about smoking again. Well, fuck that. Let's get back to the puking.

It's like a gag reaction I get, some mornings, after smoking. A bad gag, then some phlegm, then I move on. Today was different. Today I puked.

The worst part is, I had just brushed my teeth. So I blew chunks, then I had to brush my teeth again. Hell.

Well, in the end, the puking sucked, and the cigarette was very unsatisfying and completely pointless. Broke my latest 2.5 week smoke free streak. This year was going to be the year, damn it.

The puking sucked, but if other events of last evening played a part, well I complain less. Cause I had a great night. I'd like to think it was a bit representative of summer nights here in the redwoods of the Mendocino Coast.

I love my Job.

A long day of work making campers happy - unclogging a clogged septic pipe - I can now add that skill to my resume. Also, checking the water system. Then, oooh, another clog, this time in a pipe between a sink drain and a grease trap. Speaking of puking, ever seen the inside of a grease trap? Damn, I really wish I had a picture to show you. Instead, here's a cute one of my dog.

Yeah. See, at work, I have to sometimes deal with grease traps. But I get to have my dog with me. And when the grease trap is done, I say, "Abbey, Up Up", and she, as damn awesome as a dog can be, jumps into the back of the work truck and rides with me wherever I am bound. Lucky dog.

I digress. A long day of work, clogged drains, clogged drains, water systems, and then a friend rents one of the Camps for his wedding reception and, last night, I have to decide between two different Memorial Day Weekend bbq kind of things, or a nap. I choose, as you may have guessed from the puking story above, to attend one event, then the other, then the first one again. And then work this morning. Damn, another thing I learned when I turned 30 - I can't quite handle this anymore.

These are the People in My Neighborhood

My goal, once I decided against the nap, was to get to the farm, maybe stopping along the way to visit the folks in camp who were celebrating matrimony. The trip to the farm is nice, because there are options. Farmer Cas is a really good friend and neighbor of mine. Actually, barring the folks I work and live with, he is my closest neighbor. Which means he is 3 miles away as the crow flies, or a half hour drive, all on dirt roads. But like I said, there are options. Take the wide, dusty, well travelled dirt road out of camp to the pavement, then turn right, and follow the narrow, well travelled, not too well maintained, county dirt road to the farm gate. Or, take the narrow, moderately maintained camp road 3 miles to the back of camp, deep in the dark redwoods, where it is always at least 5 degrees colder than at my house, where there are ghosts and maybe werewolves, then cross the sketchy looking bridge, turn around, and head up the not really maintained, but hardly ever driven, back road to the top. Get to the gate at the top, get out, open the gate, get back in, drive through the gate, get out, close the gate behind you, turn a hard right, drive 100 feet, get out, open the farm gate, get back in, drive through the gate, get out again, close the farm gate behind you, drive another couple miles of not really all that well maintained, kind of rutted, dirt road to the main part of the farm. Watch for pigs and guinea hens.

I chose the latter. I sometimes go the other way in order to avoid the tedium of the extra gate. Or really, maybe I go that way cause I don't want to get out of my car to deal with the gate, cause I am afraid. Of the ghosts, of werewolves, of Sasquatch. Yeah, I believe in Sasquatch. I don't believe Jack Black's interpretation of Sasquatch, or any of that bullshit from "Drawing Flies" about communing with the Bigfoot. I believe that Bigfoot is out there, and probably, he is pissed. You know, habitat loss and all. I'm pissed about it. Imagine how Bigfoot feels. So I don't want to run into Bigfoot in the middle of the night. Not literally run into, though that would suck too, cause I imagine it might be like hitting a moose, where the low bumper on my car hits bigfoot in the ankles or knees, then his massive torso goes through my windshield and I go squish.

Suitcase Sliding

Well, I made it to the farm. I did stop to say hi to the matrimonial celebrators on my way. I borrowed some of their food and a Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout, damn good thick stout from Anderson Valley Brewing Company. Yum. At the farm, I had another beer. Then I stepped onto the deck, and said hi to some good folks, including Jubal, who seemed a bit dustier than he usually is. Also, I noticed the farm four wheeler was parked near the deck, trailing a line of webbing from behind. Someone was trying to talk Dano into doing something that at first glance seemed kind of stupid. But, well, I was soon to recall how stupid sometimes also means fun.

Jubal put on a motocross helmet and a pair of work gloves and sat down on a folded pad directly on the middle of an open suitcase. He placed his ass on the ridge and his feet in two corners of the suitcase. Cas backed the ATV up so Jubal could reach the strap of webbing, and Luke jumped on the back of the ATV to be the "spotter". For posterity's sake, I guess.

The ATV started slowly moving forward, the slack in the webbing dissappeared, Jubal grabbed a PBR that someone handed him, leaned back and held on to the strap. The suitcase, with Jubal in it, slid across the grass, gradually gaining speed. The ATV and then the suitcase reached the dirt road, and they picked up speed and dissappeared into one of the back fields. About 5 seconds later, the ATV shows up, coming down a slight rise, with Jubal still astride the open suitcase, sliding along the dirt, probably at about 15 mph. By this point, he had lost his beer. It was beautiful. Four wheelers, spilled PBR, Jubal waving one hand like he's in a rodeo, hanging onto the strap with another. Cas turns and heads onto the lawn again, unwittingly driving over a hole that the farm dogs had dug. The front of the suitcase hits the doghole, and Jubal does a graceful shoulder plant onto the lawn. Ouch.

Needless to say, I had to give it a try. I did. I couldn't quite master the turns. I also tried riding half of a water drum, which proved a bit unsteady. So, suitcases make really good sleds when pulled behind an ATV. Gloves and a helmet are a must. Jubal managed to plant on the same shoulder again later. Hope the pain was worth the glory, buddy. In the end I took only one ride. The suitcases ended up as targets, later, when another friend surprised us with the 9 mm that he had brought to the party. Hell, I had never shot a pistol before. It was surprisingly easy.

No, that's not how I ended up hungover. Probably had nothing to do with puking this morning, other than helping me to work up a further thirst. But damn, I had to share. Riding a suitcase, while being towed behind an ATV, on a farm in the middle of the redwoods? Hell yeah. Never thought I would get the opportunity to do such a thing. Yeah. That's right. And afterwards we shot at stuff, drank beer, and ate bbq. Don't stereotype it.

So, slackers. Come visit Mendocino. You cannot ride suitcases in the city. Or wait, maybe you can.

The suitcase dirt track, off to the right. That yellow van used to be a chicken coop.