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NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Drove RTT to Uncle Lew’s. He’ll be dividing the remainder of the summer between Edinboro, PA – a small, sleepy college town off Lake Erie – and Hidden Valley Camp in Montour Falls, NY. He was very excited to be leaving the circus. I must say, I was too. It really bugged me that I could no longer remember names, could no longer focus on the unique history of each place – what made “them” think this would be a good place for a settlement? – variation on the only question that’s ever seemed to me worth asking: why is this here?
“Towns only have three names on the circus,” Ben told me with a certain dour satisfaction. “Yesterday’s Town. Today’s Town. Tomorrow’s Town.”
I wanted to slap him.
Trip one-way was 1000 miles. Little red Veedub chugged like a champ.
Shoulda been a truck driver. I love road trips. Took back roads whenever possible, still made great time. My idée fix was the frontier, how it had mutated over a hundred years. What’s the difference between Iowa and Indiana after all? Why a civil war, and a hundred years of pushing west. (Very Garcia Lorca.) Towns and small cities show it best, their architecture frozen at the last boom. That boom varies – sometimes it’s the 1880’s, sometimes the turn of the twentieth century, sometimes the 1920’s. But never after the 1920’s. The 1920’s marks the end of pushing the frontier forward. After the 1920’s when people wanted to better themselves they moved to the big city. I’m not sure that move was entirely for the best.
Caught snippits of Michael Jackson coverage on the radio. Story was like a juggernaut and I say this as someone who actually enjoys Jackson’s music. Talk about your sick, self-loathing fucks – and now he’s Jesus, a pedophilic, surgery and Depromine-addicted Jesus. The story just grew and grew fanned by the 24/7 news cycle. Ryan O’Neal must be very pissed that Jackson chose to expire on Farrah’s special day.
Also listened to Books On Tape – Elliott Gould reading Farewell My Lovely. Raymond Chandler is one of those people I wish I’d overlapped chronologically with – from that first tarantula-on-angel-cake metaphor (Miss Haversham alert!) through Marlowe’s hallucinations in the dope fiend doctor’s “sanatorium” to the Othello reference at the very end, I kept thinking, Wow! Wow. What a mind.
First day in Edinboro I hunted down a coffee house and the one I found was the most amazing coffee house I’d ever been in. It appeared to be somebody’s living room! An attractive woman in her forties had to be summoned from the back of the house by her sulky beautiful teenage daughter to fix my double latte. I was the only customer. Another beautiful teenager – male – sat at an adjoining table working on a complicated electronic circuit board. There was a third child too, a beautiful two and a half year old, one of those precocious midgets with a full command of English language syntax but the preoccupations (of course!) of a two and a half year old so that when its mother put it down for a nap – the crib was about ten feet away from my table – it engaged its mother in civilized repartee –
“But why should I take a nap?”
“’Cause you’re sleepy, silly.”
“But I don’t feel sleepy.”
“But you are. You wiggle-squirmed all night long.”
“I feel wet.”
“Then you need to be changed. Why don’t you use the potty?”
“I don’t feel like it yet. Some day soon I will feel like it though.”
“Can’t be too soon for me!”
“Maybe tomorrow!”
“Good!”
“But maybe not tomorrow.”
“Awwww…”
Western Pennsylvania is so incredibly lush and beautiful when you breath on a mirror you leave a green mist.
Jump: Sheldon, IA → Spirit Lake, IA – Next to YMCA: 55 miles
LEFT out of the lot where we came in… LEFT back to Sheldon
LEFT at 4-way stop and arrows to HWY 60 NORTH
RIGHT onto HWY 9 EAST and follow detour to Spirit Lake… arrows to lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
Way circuses work is first they find a sponsor, usually some community non-profit organization along the route they have to take to get from one place to another. That sponsor makes 25% of all phone sales, 25% of all kids’ tickets and 10% of the performance gate. If a sponsor has its act together in terms of organizing and publicizing the event, they stand to make some bank, maybe twenty-five hundred, thirty-five hundred bucks which is good for a Lions Club in the middle of the fly-over.
The sponsor in Sheldon, Iowa had its act together and then some. They sold out every single ticket. Standing room only both shows! They even provided parking monitors to guide audience members from their cars to the Big Top since the circus had set up in the middle of a vast cornfield.
In the middle of Chantal’s trapeze act, a woman walked out trailing a three year old by the hand. “I want my money back,” she told Brandon.
Brandon blinked at her. “What’s wrong?”
“This is not an appropriate entertainment for a young child!”
“I’m sorry?”
“If I wanted see you next Tuesday, I’d go to a strip club –“
“Huh?”
“I’d go to a strip club,” the woman repeated. The odd thing about this woman was that she was smoking hot, really quite lovely, better looking by far than Chantal.
“No, I mean this is Wednesday, isn’t it? Why are you talking about Tuesday?”
“See you next Tuesday, see you next Tuesday,” the woman repeated, lowering her well-manicured hand southward in a kind of demure Michael Jackson crotch grab.
“It’s the initials, dude” said Robin with a fourteen year old’s preternatural ability to ferret out sexual innuendo wherever it may hide, and he was exactly right: see you next Tuesday, C. U. N. T.
“I mean I’m as liberal as anybody. I’ve been to Las Vegas!” the woman continued. “But this is just not appropriate entertainment for my three year old daughter and I want our money back.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Brandon. “The manager will be out here during intermission if you want to ask him.”
After she stalked out, Robin shook his head dolefully. “I’ve sat in every seat in that tent and I’ve never seen anybody’s Tuesday. I’m thinking we should figure out exactly which seat that was and charge extra for it.”
See you next Tuesday! I think I’m in LUV… I mean, it should also work with, “See you next Thursday,” shouldn’t it? But it doesn’t. Is this common parlance? I've never heard it before!
LEFT out of the lot where we came in… LEFT back to Sheldon
LEFT at 4-way stop and arrows to HWY 60 NORTH
RIGHT onto HWY 9 EAST and follow detour to Spirit Lake… arrows to lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
Way circuses work is first they find a sponsor, usually some community non-profit organization along the route they have to take to get from one place to another. That sponsor makes 25% of all phone sales, 25% of all kids’ tickets and 10% of the performance gate. If a sponsor has its act together in terms of organizing and publicizing the event, they stand to make some bank, maybe twenty-five hundred, thirty-five hundred bucks which is good for a Lions Club in the middle of the fly-over.
The sponsor in Sheldon, Iowa had its act together and then some. They sold out every single ticket. Standing room only both shows! They even provided parking monitors to guide audience members from their cars to the Big Top since the circus had set up in the middle of a vast cornfield.
In the middle of Chantal’s trapeze act, a woman walked out trailing a three year old by the hand. “I want my money back,” she told Brandon.
Brandon blinked at her. “What’s wrong?”
“This is not an appropriate entertainment for a young child!”
“I’m sorry?”
“If I wanted see you next Tuesday, I’d go to a strip club –“
“Huh?”
“I’d go to a strip club,” the woman repeated. The odd thing about this woman was that she was smoking hot, really quite lovely, better looking by far than Chantal.
“No, I mean this is Wednesday, isn’t it? Why are you talking about Tuesday?”
“See you next Tuesday, see you next Tuesday,” the woman repeated, lowering her well-manicured hand southward in a kind of demure Michael Jackson crotch grab.
“It’s the initials, dude” said Robin with a fourteen year old’s preternatural ability to ferret out sexual innuendo wherever it may hide, and he was exactly right: see you next Tuesday, C. U. N. T.
“I mean I’m as liberal as anybody. I’ve been to Las Vegas!” the woman continued. “But this is just not appropriate entertainment for my three year old daughter and I want our money back.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Brandon. “The manager will be out here during intermission if you want to ask him.”
After she stalked out, Robin shook his head dolefully. “I’ve sat in every seat in that tent and I’ve never seen anybody’s Tuesday. I’m thinking we should figure out exactly which seat that was and charge extra for it.”
See you next Tuesday! I think I’m in LUV… I mean, it should also work with, “See you next Thursday,” shouldn’t it? But it doesn’t. Is this common parlance? I've never heard it before!
Trimmed my flist. If I took you off and you have strong feelings about it, let me know. One thing though -- I am often politically incorrect and occasionally tactless. Neither is meant maliciously. But I'll be god damned if I'm going to censor myself either in entries or in comments, so if you have a stick up your ass and are looking to take offense so you can puff your little self-righteous feathers, please just drop me, 'kay?
Thanks!
Meanwhile...
I worry because I’ve stopped keeping track of the towns the circus plays. The last one I really remember clearly is Wall and only because Wall is the home of Wall Drugs, that ghastly, yet strangely fascinating roadside attraction heralded on painted wooden signs – not billboards! – in every state of the union. Wall Drug signs are the descendents of those Burma Shave road markers, kind of the way birds are the descendents of dinosaurs.
Robin and I made up a complicated Stephen King scenario about Wall Drugs:
It’s 1934, the height of the Depression, and Dorothy Hustead is quietly going mad. See that pharmacy her pharmacist husband bought in the middle of the Dakota Badlands is a big bust, and she doesn’t know what to do about it. The town – Wall – is named for a strange topographical feature, a sharply eroded ridge that in Indian legend subdivides the lands of the living from the lands of the mostly dead. The place is a desert, parched and dry, and the highway that runs through it is mostly deserted.
The pharmacy has one steady customer at least – an old Indian woman who comes in on a weekly basis for the mercury she uses to treat her tertiary syphilis. The old Indian woman tells Dorothy that that the Devil lives in Lead (a town close to Deadwood,) and advises Dorothy to come up with some incentive so that the Devil will draw up a new business plan –
“You mean she sells the Devil her soul?” Robin asks.
“No, no – the Devil is out of the soul business,” I say. “The Devil has quite enough souls. In fact the Devil is bored with souls. It’s like when you collect beanie babies or Cabbage Patch Dolls – you start out being very excited but eventually enough is enough.”
“So what does she give the Devil instead?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s not important. It’s what they call a McGuffin –“
“A Mc-What?”
“Never mind, never mind, we can fill that part in later –“
The Devil laughs when Dorothy timidly suggests her end of the bargain. “Why, you don’t need my help for that! All you have to do to bring customers is offer them free ice water! I’ll tell you what I’ll do though. I’ll throw in this spell –“
The spell turns human beings into kitsch.
“Of course not every human being who walks into Wall Drugs turns into kitsch,” I say. “The ones that do have to have a particular character flaw –“
“What character flaw?” Robin demands.
“I don’t know, it’s not important –“
“Not important?” says Robin in disgust. “Of course it’s important! It’s probably the most important thing in the whole story. The problem with you as a writer is you leave out all the good parts –“
“No, the problem with me as a writer is I don’t write,” I say softly.
But anyway. That was Wall, that was a week ago and I really can’t remember much else.
June 26
Jump: Chamberlain, SD → Miller, SD – American Legion Complex: 70 miles
LEFT out of the lot… LEFT onto I-90 BUSINESS to downtown Chamberlain
RIGHT onto HWY 50 to Four Corners… RIGHT onto HWY 34 EAST
LEFT onto HWY 45 NORTH to Miller… arrows to the lot on RIGHT as you enter town
Shows: 5pm/7:30pm
Is Ed McMahon a big enough celebrity to round out a funerary trifecta that also includes Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson?
I maintain he isn’t.
Brandon and Tamara argue that he is.
“I mean, who remembers Johnnie Carson anyway?” I ask, flinging my arms about wildly. “Not me. And I’m actually the age where I should remember Johnnie Carson.”
“You’re forgetting about the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes,” Tamara points out. “The Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes is very, very big throughout the Midwest.”
She’s from Indiana. She should know.
Brandon and Tamara are the show’s ticket takers. Tamara’s 24, a cute brunette; Brandon is a couple of years older and 6’7”. Brandon kind of looks like a Civil War lieutenant, a physical type that’s always appealed to me so when Robin trots out his latest variation on The Game, I choose the Brandon option whenever it’s available.
The Game goes like this:
“All intelligent life has been wiped off the planet. It’s up to you to repopulate it,” says Robin.
“I can’t repopulate the planet,” I say. “I’m post-menopausal.”
“What’s post-menopausal?”
“Never mind. Anyway I don’t want to repopulate the planet. Not with human beings anyway.”
“That’s irrelevant,” says Robin crisply. “And being post emancipated doesn’t affect it at all. You have to choose. And your choices are: Adolph Hitler, Michael Jackson or Brandon.”
“Oh, I pick Brandon.”
“That was a trick question,” Robin informs me loftily. “Michael Jackson’s dead.”
“So’s Adolph Hitler.”
“You don’t know that. They never found his body.”
“Oh, I think it’s a safe surmise.”
“Maybe Hitler’s in South America somewhere.”
“He’d be really, really old.”
“Maybe he’s being kept alive on a secret formula of crushed Viagra and the lymph of Jewish virgins –“
“Robin! That joke’s in really questionable taste –“
“Maybe Michael Jackson’s still alive,” says Robin. “Maybe he’s being kept alive with daily injections from the scrotal sacks of 14 year old albinos –“
“Robin!”
“Well, they’re the whitest people I could think of –“
“Robin!”
“Remember when I was scared of Michael Jackson?”
I do indeed. It was back in 2002, during Jackson’s trial in Santa Maria. There was so much media coverage that Jackson was transformed into an archetypal bogeyman. Robin was seven. He didn’t know what Jackson was accused of exactly, only that it was bad and that it had to do with boys just a few years older than him. He made me check his closet and underneath his bed before he’d settle down at night.
“Any guesses what big star is gonna croak today” I ask, changing the subject. “They always die in threes, you know.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “It’s an immutable law of magic.”
“David Carradine.”
“No. Victims of autoerotic asphyxiation are the sole exception to the immutable law of magic.”
“What’s autoerotic asphyxiation?”
“Never mind.”
“Oh, come on, Mom. I know what autoerotic asphyxiation is. It’s when you jack off with a rope around your neck –“
“Robin!”
“Okay. You’ve been picked up by Al Quaida and they’ve sentenced you to be executed. You’re gonna die. But… But… You get to choose how you’re gonna die. You have three choices: you can overdose on heroin, you can get hit by lightening. Or you can die by autoerotic asphyxiation after the biggest orgasm of your life –“
“Robin!”
“You’re right. Mothers don’t have sex lives,” he says and goes off to pet the tigers.
###
I suppose one reason why I’m resistant to the thought that Ed McMahon is the third dead celebrity is because I was never obsessed with Ed McMahon the way I was obsessed with Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.
After Mark and I came back from fruit picking and scamming unemployment in the summer of 1972, we rented an apartment on 41st Street in Oakland, not far from the Berkeley border and mere blocks away from the place where Patty Hearst was kidnapped – famous Patty alert! collect the whole series! The apartment was a bargain! Two bedrooms, a huge kitchen, a big back yard and only $350/month.
We didn’t have to sign a lease. It was a month to month arrangement.
The woman who lived upstairs from us was severely schizophrenic. She’d confided this to me when we first moved in.
Classic case of too much information, I thought. And anyway she seemed perfectly normal.
As if reading my mind the woman said, “See I’m on my meds now. But every summer I go off my meds and, well… I just thought I’d warn you. Do you like the Jackson Five?”
As it turned out I did like the Jackson Five very, very much. Never Can Say Goodbye had become my secret theme song for my fixation on Mark.
The first sign that out neighbor’s meds were wearing off came one night around 2:30am when she played Never Can Say Goodbye fourteen times in succession while clomping around her dining room – first clockwise, then counter clockwise. It was the base line that gave the song away, I couldn’t really make out the singer’s voice. Our neighbor was laughing a lot, talking as though to someone else in the room – although I supposed it was really some aberrant part of her own personality that had separated out. “No,” I heard her screeching. “No-o-o-o-o. I’ll never say goodbye. And they can’t make me.”
Even Mark couldn’t sleep through that.
“Can’t you go up there and knock on her door?” I raged. “Tell her to shut up?”
“No, I can’t go up there and knock on her door,” said Mark for whom laissez faire was not an economic concept but a religion. “She’s obviously having a private moment.”
The next day Mark went out and bought two pairs of cheap wax earplugs.
But of course I wasn’t going to use mine.
And promptly at 2:30am, the concert started again.
It was obvious the vinyl LP had suffered some damage from all that jumping around the night before. There were noticeable breaks in the base line where the record was scratched. This time she played the song thirty-three times. And instead of tromping round and round, she jumped up and down. Five jumps. Then three. Then five again. “I am not a bad girl,” she screamed. “I will not say goodbye. “They will say goodbye.”
The earplugs worked: Mark slept straight through it.
The next night she went back to fourteen again.
By this e my never entirely latent Serious Bitch Potential was manifesting in full force.
“I don’t understand it,” said Mark. “I mean, it’s a total waste of money – the wax ones work perfectly fine – but if you want me to buy the expensive ear plugs, I will –“
“Expensive ear plugs won’t make any difference!” I snarled.
“Well. They would if you used them,” Mark observed mildly.
“I’m not going to use them. She can’t make me use them. She should stop playing Michael Jackson at two-thirty ayem in the morning!” I screamed.
That night she played Never Can Say Goodbye forty-six times.
Thing was I felt a certain horrifying sense of identification with my insane upstairs neighbor. I didn’t want to feel it, I must hasten to add. But how was it that out of all Motown’s vast repertoire she’d picked this particular song to orchestrate her madness? A song I hummed to myself ten times a day while agonizing what to do with my relationship with Mark?
After an entire week without sleep, I was pretty bat shit crazy myself. One night Mark and I got into an argument over who was the greater writer, D.H. Lawrence or John Steinbeck. After Mark quoted Woody Guthrie for the third time, I tried to pick up his dog – a cockapoo who frequently pissed on my clothes to show his contempt. “Well, what do you expect?” asked Mark. “He is a barbarian,” for the animal’s name was Conan.
“What do you think you’re doing?” asked Mark. “Put Conan down –“
The dog growled and snapped at my face.
“If you ever mention Woody Guthrie again, I’m gonna kill your dog!” I screeched. “In fact, I’m gonna kill him anyway. I hate him and I hate you –“
(Credit where credit is due: this was long before the famous magazine cover!)
I lurched towards the open window. Of course we lived at ground floor: if I had been able to throw Conan out the window, he wouldn’t have been hurt. But of course there was no way I could lift thirty-five pounds of furious, writhing dog high enough to get a good aim.
And anyway my true goal was to rouse Mark out of his utter passivity. Other people thought it was bonhomie. I knew better.
This I succeeded in doing.
“Put. Him. Down. NOW,” said Mark, and he pushed me away from the window. I fell backwards against the fireplace mantle. One of its square edges got me in my left temple.
Within 60 seconds there was a lump as big as a tennis ball rising from my skull.
We went to the emergency room. “No insurance at all?” asked the admitting nurse. The ER doc spent exactly six minutes shining a flashlight into my eyes. He didn’t think an x-ray was necessary.
The next night Mark stayed awake with me and on the fifteenth repetition of Never Can Say Goodbye, we called the police together.
They were very familiar with our upstairs neighbor. As was our landlord – she was his sister, it turned out. And the reason why our rent was so cheap.
His voice was cold over the phone. “I really don’t understand why you felt the need to do that,” he said. “It’s never been a problem for anybody else. I mean, I understand it’s a bit irregular. That’s why we reduced the rent. Anyway, I want you out at the end of the month –“
It took me another year to figure out that I could say goodbye to Mark after all.
###
My fixation on Farrah Fawcett was your standard Brunette Amazon Lesbian Crush. I was – am – tall, big-boned. I was born with a white streak that quickly spread to take over my whole scalp. Before it spread, I had very, very dark hair. I am swarthy – “olive skinned,” if you’re being polite.
Farrah Fawcett, on the other hand, was petite and blonde.
Are blondes human?
Serious question. I grew up in New York City where everyone is ethnic. Ethnic people are not blondes. Grace Kelly, Catherine Deneuve, Swedes, Norwegians, every member of Hitler’s defunct Master Race – they’re mutants who somehow managed to rig the genetics game to make it appear as though they’re the big winners in life. They’re not. Natural blondes are more susceptible to all sorts of sinister melanomas while unnatural blondes court non-Hodgkins melanoma every time they reach for the Lady Clairol.
Naturally blondes are an object of erotic fascination for me.
I remember the first time I saw Logan’s Run. Farrah Fawcett had a small, forgettable part in the film. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was instantly transformed. I was Caliban. I was Humbert Humbert. I was the nameless male protagonist of John Fowles’ The Collector. I was every person rendered hideous and misshapen by the sheer weight of a desperate, impossible yearning.
Later that year came the poster. That hair! Those teeth! Those nipples…
Also, of course, that boxy jaw, that horse-shaped face, those rather narrow, foxy eyes. But see, that’s the thing about great beauty – it’s not prettiness, it’s not classical perfection, it’s always flawed. (Back when I was working for People Magazine, I once interviewed a very young Julia Roberts. She wasn’t pretty. In fact, she looked something like a weasel – very long boney face, thin lips, eyes a tad too close together. But then she smiled, and it was like sunlight streaming through grimy stained glass.)
Back then I had girlfriends as well as boyfriends. I did the girlfriends mostly out of a sense of political obligation – this was Berkeley in the 70’s after all and I was a member of the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective, Helping You Make Friends With Your Pussy Since 1971. I worked there a few hours every week, on Tuesday afternoons.
We did pap smears and routine STD checks mostly. Yup – we were practicing medicine without a license. The Berkeley City Health people were happy to look the other way though: every milky microscope slide, every drop of dishonorable discharge was a specimen they didn’t have to take. We also taught women how to look at their own cervixes. This part I didn’t like so much. If God had intended us to look at our cervixes, I figured, they would be on the outside, right?
I liked the looking at pussies part though.
Problem was I didn’t like looking at the women attached to them. They were all very butch at the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective, one big sea of blue work shirts and bandanas.
They didn’t like me either. Every shift ended with an invigorating criticism/self-criticism session. Rickety folding chairs were dragged out, arranged in a big circle. We’d sit on them, go round the room, enumerating our grudges against ourselves and one another. It reminded me of Synanon.
TBC…
Jump: Chamberlain, SD → Miller, SD – American Legion Complex: 70 miles
LEFT out of the lot… LEFT onto I-90 BUSINESS to downtown Chamberlain
RIGHT onto HWY 50 to Four Corners… RIGHT onto HWY 34 EAST
LEFT onto HWY 45 NORTH to Miller… arrows to the lot on RIGHT as you enter town
Shows: 5pm/7:30pm
Is Ed McMahon a big enough celebrity to round out a funerary trifecta that also includes Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson?
I maintain he isn’t.
Brandon and Tamara argue that he is.
“I mean, who remembers Johnnie Carson anyway?” I ask, flinging my arms about wildly. “Not me. And I’m actually the age where I should remember Johnnie Carson.”
“You’re forgetting about the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes,” Tamara points out. “The Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes is very, very big throughout the Midwest.”
She’s from Indiana. She should know.
Brandon and Tamara are the show’s ticket takers. Tamara’s 24, a cute brunette; Brandon is a couple of years older and 6’7”. Brandon kind of looks like a Civil War lieutenant, a physical type that’s always appealed to me so when Robin trots out his latest variation on The Game, I choose the Brandon option whenever it’s available.
The Game goes like this:
“All intelligent life has been wiped off the planet. It’s up to you to repopulate it,” says Robin.
“I can’t repopulate the planet,” I say. “I’m post-menopausal.”
“What’s post-menopausal?”
“Never mind. Anyway I don’t want to repopulate the planet. Not with human beings anyway.”
“That’s irrelevant,” says Robin crisply. “And being post emancipated doesn’t affect it at all. You have to choose. And your choices are: Adolph Hitler, Michael Jackson or Brandon.”
“Oh, I pick Brandon.”
“That was a trick question,” Robin informs me loftily. “Michael Jackson’s dead.”
“So’s Adolph Hitler.”
“You don’t know that. They never found his body.”
“Oh, I think it’s a safe surmise.”
“Maybe Hitler’s in South America somewhere.”
“He’d be really, really old.”
“Maybe he’s being kept alive on a secret formula of crushed Viagra and the lymph of Jewish virgins –“
“Robin! That joke’s in really questionable taste –“
“Maybe Michael Jackson’s still alive,” says Robin. “Maybe he’s being kept alive with daily injections from the scrotal sacks of 14 year old albinos –“
“Robin!”
“Well, they’re the whitest people I could think of –“
“Robin!”
“Remember when I was scared of Michael Jackson?”
I do indeed. It was back in 2002, during Jackson’s trial in Santa Maria. There was so much media coverage that Jackson was transformed into an archetypal bogeyman. Robin was seven. He didn’t know what Jackson was accused of exactly, only that it was bad and that it had to do with boys just a few years older than him. He made me check his closet and underneath his bed before he’d settle down at night.
“Any guesses what big star is gonna croak today” I ask, changing the subject. “They always die in threes, you know.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “It’s an immutable law of magic.”
“David Carradine.”
“No. Victims of autoerotic asphyxiation are the sole exception to the immutable law of magic.”
“What’s autoerotic asphyxiation?”
“Never mind.”
“Oh, come on, Mom. I know what autoerotic asphyxiation is. It’s when you jack off with a rope around your neck –“
“Robin!”
“Okay. You’ve been picked up by Al Quaida and they’ve sentenced you to be executed. You’re gonna die. But… But… You get to choose how you’re gonna die. You have three choices: you can overdose on heroin, you can get hit by lightening. Or you can die by autoerotic asphyxiation after the biggest orgasm of your life –“
“Robin!”
“You’re right. Mothers don’t have sex lives,” he says and goes off to pet the tigers.
I suppose one reason why I’m resistant to the thought that Ed McMahon is the third dead celebrity is because I was never obsessed with Ed McMahon the way I was obsessed with Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.
After Mark and I came back from fruit picking and scamming unemployment in the summer of 1972, we rented an apartment on 41st Street in Oakland, not far from the Berkeley border and mere blocks away from the place where Patty Hearst was kidnapped – famous Patty alert! collect the whole series! The apartment was a bargain! Two bedrooms, a huge kitchen, a big back yard and only $350/month.
We didn’t have to sign a lease. It was a month to month arrangement.
The woman who lived upstairs from us was severely schizophrenic. She’d confided this to me when we first moved in.
Classic case of too much information, I thought. And anyway she seemed perfectly normal.
As if reading my mind the woman said, “See I’m on my meds now. But every summer I go off my meds and, well… I just thought I’d warn you. Do you like the Jackson Five?”
As it turned out I did like the Jackson Five very, very much. Never Can Say Goodbye had become my secret theme song for my fixation on Mark.
The first sign that out neighbor’s meds were wearing off came one night around 2:30am when she played Never Can Say Goodbye fourteen times in succession while clomping around her dining room – first clockwise, then counter clockwise. It was the base line that gave the song away, I couldn’t really make out the singer’s voice. Our neighbor was laughing a lot, talking as though to someone else in the room – although I supposed it was really some aberrant part of her own personality that had separated out. “No,” I heard her screeching. “No-o-o-o-o. I’ll never say goodbye. And they can’t make me.”
Even Mark couldn’t sleep through that.
“Can’t you go up there and knock on her door?” I raged. “Tell her to shut up?”
“No, I can’t go up there and knock on her door,” said Mark for whom laissez faire was not an economic concept but a religion. “She’s obviously having a private moment.”
The next day Mark went out and bought two pairs of cheap wax earplugs.
But of course I wasn’t going to use mine.
And promptly at 2:30am, the concert started again.
It was obvious the vinyl LP had suffered some damage from all that jumping around the night before. There were noticeable breaks in the base line where the record was scratched. This time she played the song thirty-three times. And instead of tromping round and round, she jumped up and down. Five jumps. Then three. Then five again. “I am not a bad girl,” she screamed. “I will not say goodbye. “They will say goodbye.”
The earplugs worked: Mark slept straight through it.
The next night she went back to fourteen again.
By this e my never entirely latent Serious Bitch Potential was manifesting in full force.
“I don’t understand it,” said Mark. “I mean, it’s a total waste of money – the wax ones work perfectly fine – but if you want me to buy the expensive ear plugs, I will –“
“Expensive ear plugs won’t make any difference!” I snarled.
“Well. They would if you used them,” Mark observed mildly.
“I’m not going to use them. She can’t make me use them. She should stop playing Michael Jackson at two-thirty ayem in the morning!” I screamed.
That night she played Never Can Say Goodbye forty-six times.
Thing was I felt a certain horrifying sense of identification with my insane upstairs neighbor. I didn’t want to feel it, I must hasten to add. But how was it that out of all Motown’s vast repertoire she’d picked this particular song to orchestrate her madness? A song I hummed to myself ten times a day while agonizing what to do with my relationship with Mark?
After an entire week without sleep, I was pretty bat shit crazy myself. One night Mark and I got into an argument over who was the greater writer, D.H. Lawrence or John Steinbeck. After Mark quoted Woody Guthrie for the third time, I tried to pick up his dog – a cockapoo who frequently pissed on my clothes to show his contempt. “Well, what do you expect?” asked Mark. “He is a barbarian,” for the animal’s name was Conan.
“What do you think you’re doing?” asked Mark. “Put Conan down –“
The dog growled and snapped at my face.
“If you ever mention Woody Guthrie again, I’m gonna kill your dog!” I screeched. “In fact, I’m gonna kill him anyway. I hate him and I hate you –“
(Credit where credit is due: this was long before the famous magazine cover!)
I lurched towards the open window. Of course we lived at ground floor: if I had been able to throw Conan out the window, he wouldn’t have been hurt. But of course there was no way I could lift thirty-five pounds of furious, writhing dog high enough to get a good aim.
And anyway my true goal was to rouse Mark out of his utter passivity. Other people thought it was bonhomie. I knew better.
This I succeeded in doing.
“Put. Him. Down. NOW,” said Mark, and he pushed me away from the window. I fell backwards against the fireplace mantle. One of its square edges got me in my left temple.
Within 60 seconds there was a lump as big as a tennis ball rising from my skull.
We went to the emergency room. “No insurance at all?” asked the admitting nurse. The ER doc spent exactly six minutes shining a flashlight into my eyes. He didn’t think an x-ray was necessary.
The next night Mark stayed awake with me and on the fifteenth repetition of Never Can Say Goodbye, we called the police together.
They were very familiar with our upstairs neighbor. As was our landlord – she was his sister, it turned out. And the reason why our rent was so cheap.
His voice was cold over the phone. “I really don’t understand why you felt the need to do that,” he said. “It’s never been a problem for anybody else. I mean, I understand it’s a bit irregular. That’s why we reduced the rent. Anyway, I want you out at the end of the month –“
It took me another year to figure out that I could say goodbye to Mark after all.
My fixation on Farrah Fawcett was your standard Brunette Amazon Lesbian Crush. I was – am – tall, big-boned. I was born with a white streak that quickly spread to take over my whole scalp. Before it spread, I had very, very dark hair. I am swarthy – “olive skinned,” if you’re being polite.
Farrah Fawcett, on the other hand, was petite and blonde.
Are blondes human?
Serious question. I grew up in New York City where everyone is ethnic. Ethnic people are not blondes. Grace Kelly, Catherine Deneuve, Swedes, Norwegians, every member of Hitler’s defunct Master Race – they’re mutants who somehow managed to rig the genetics game to make it appear as though they’re the big winners in life. They’re not. Natural blondes are more susceptible to all sorts of sinister melanomas while unnatural blondes court non-Hodgkins melanoma every time they reach for the Lady Clairol.
Naturally blondes are an object of erotic fascination for me.
I remember the first time I saw Logan’s Run. Farrah Fawcett had a small, forgettable part in the film. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was instantly transformed. I was Caliban. I was Humbert Humbert. I was the nameless male protagonist of John Fowles’ The Collector. I was every person rendered hideous and misshapen by the sheer weight of a desperate, impossible yearning.
Later that year came the poster. That hair! Those teeth! Those nipples…
Also, of course, that boxy jaw, that horse-shaped face, those rather narrow, foxy eyes. But see, that’s the thing about great beauty – it’s not prettiness, it’s not classical perfection, it’s always flawed. (Back when I was working for People Magazine, I once interviewed a very young Julia Roberts. She wasn’t pretty. In fact, she looked something like a weasel – very long boney face, thin lips, eyes a tad too close together. But then she smiled, and it was like sunlight streaming through grimy stained glass.)
Back then I had girlfriends as well as boyfriends. I did the girlfriends mostly out of a sense of political obligation – this was Berkeley in the 70’s after all and I was a member of the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective, Helping You Make Friends With Your Pussy Since 1971. I worked there a few hours every week, on Tuesday afternoons.
We did pap smears and routine STD checks mostly. Yup – we were practicing medicine without a license. The Berkeley City Health people were happy to look the other way though: every milky microscope slide, every drop of dishonorable discharge was a specimen they didn’t have to take. We also taught women how to look at their own cervixes. This part I didn’t like so much. If God had intended us to look at our cervixes, I figured, they would be on the outside, right?
I liked the looking at pussies part though.
Problem was I didn’t like looking at the women attached to them. They were all very butch at the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective, one big sea of blue work shirts and bandanas.
They didn’t like me either. Every shift ended with an invigorating criticism/self-criticism session. Rickety folding chairs were dragged out, arranged in a big circle. We’d sit on them, go round the room, enumerating our grudges against ourselves and one another. It reminded me of Synanon.
TBC…
Jump: Sundance, WY → Box Elder, SD – Middle School Grounds: 90 miles
RIGHT out of the lot… RIGHT onto BUSINESS 1-90 EAST
I-90 EAST into South Dakota
Take EXIT #67B when you get to Box Elder… arrows to the lot
I think Box Elder is the place former Prez George Dubya Bush was whisked away to on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. It’s not really a town. It exists so that civilians who work at adjacent Ellsworth Airforce Base will have some place to sleep at night.
Don’t have a clue about the name. Maybe there’s a storage facility where they keep crates of freeze-dried patriarchs. Or freeze-dried POTUS clones. Or something.
Ellsworth Airforce Base is a trip. Every half hour or so a plane takes off – shaped like no plane you have ever seen – crosses the North Pole and hovers over Moscow till someone radios the pilot a coded communication: We’ve decided to leave Putin alone for the moment. Then it flies back. If you fly out at 11am you’re home for dinner.
###
Of course I had to go to Deadwood. It was like a religious pilgrimage. Didn’t see the ghost of Al “Cocksucker” Swearingen swaggering down Main Street but then didn’t expect to. (Swearingen was a real historical personage but a minor one till the HBO series immortalized him.) Was more interested in the old Chinatown, Mt. Moriah Cemetery, the Homestake Mine in nearby Lead (original source of the vast Hearst fortune.
At its inception, Deadwood was that interesting phenomenon, an underground economy insolent enough to invent its own brand of legitimacy. (You can see this same phenomenon in action right now with marijuana.)
Some interesting parallels between then and now for sure. The original Black Friday took place in 1869 and was a result of the Union’s questionable fiscal policies during the Civil War. The Union financed the War by printing money that wasn’t backed by anything. (Sound familiar?) When a group of speculators tried to manipulate the situation, the government was forced to sell 4 million dollars worth of gold that it hadn’t intended to sell. Four million dollars was a lot of money in those days.
In general things were going too fast in those heady days after the Civil War ended. The railroads had created a classic economic bubble. Then came the Chicago fire in 1871, and The Coinage Act of 1873 which demonetized silver.
The economic downturn that followed came to be called the Panic of 1873. It lasted longer than the Great Depression. The railroad boom had ended, and the government needed a new bubble to replace it. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills as early as the 1820’s. Now General George A. Custer was dispatched to the site to confirm the discovery and the treaties that gave the Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux were declared invalid.
Even before that treaty was negated, Deadwood had become a famously lawless mining camp. Nothing of that place is left today. The original wood structures all burned down in the Great Fire of 1899 (the event that finally drove Al Swearingen from the town.) What you see when you walk Deadwood’s streets today are the second wave brick and stone facades, built as the town was struggling to become respectable.
RIGHT out of the lot… RIGHT onto BUSINESS 1-90 EAST
I-90 EAST into South Dakota
Take EXIT #67B when you get to Box Elder… arrows to the lot
I think Box Elder is the place former Prez George Dubya Bush was whisked away to on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. It’s not really a town. It exists so that civilians who work at adjacent Ellsworth Airforce Base will have some place to sleep at night.
Don’t have a clue about the name. Maybe there’s a storage facility where they keep crates of freeze-dried patriarchs. Or freeze-dried POTUS clones. Or something.
Ellsworth Airforce Base is a trip. Every half hour or so a plane takes off – shaped like no plane you have ever seen – crosses the North Pole and hovers over Moscow till someone radios the pilot a coded communication: We’ve decided to leave Putin alone for the moment. Then it flies back. If you fly out at 11am you’re home for dinner.
Of course I had to go to Deadwood. It was like a religious pilgrimage. Didn’t see the ghost of Al “Cocksucker” Swearingen swaggering down Main Street but then didn’t expect to. (Swearingen was a real historical personage but a minor one till the HBO series immortalized him.) Was more interested in the old Chinatown, Mt. Moriah Cemetery, the Homestake Mine in nearby Lead (original source of the vast Hearst fortune.
At its inception, Deadwood was that interesting phenomenon, an underground economy insolent enough to invent its own brand of legitimacy. (You can see this same phenomenon in action right now with marijuana.)
Some interesting parallels between then and now for sure. The original Black Friday took place in 1869 and was a result of the Union’s questionable fiscal policies during the Civil War. The Union financed the War by printing money that wasn’t backed by anything. (Sound familiar?) When a group of speculators tried to manipulate the situation, the government was forced to sell 4 million dollars worth of gold that it hadn’t intended to sell. Four million dollars was a lot of money in those days.
In general things were going too fast in those heady days after the Civil War ended. The railroads had created a classic economic bubble. Then came the Chicago fire in 1871, and The Coinage Act of 1873 which demonetized silver.
The economic downturn that followed came to be called the Panic of 1873. It lasted longer than the Great Depression. The railroad boom had ended, and the government needed a new bubble to replace it. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills as early as the 1820’s. Now General George A. Custer was dispatched to the site to confirm the discovery and the treaties that gave the Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux were declared invalid.
Even before that treaty was negated, Deadwood had become a famously lawless mining camp. Nothing of that place is left today. The original wood structures all burned down in the Great Fire of 1899 (the event that finally drove Al Swearingen from the town.) What you see when you walk Deadwood’s streets today are the second wave brick and stone facades, built as the town was struggling to become respectable.
Jump: Newcastle, WY → Sundance, WY – Rodeo Grounds: 48 miles
RIGHT out of the lot onto FAIRGROUNDS RD… RIGHT onto HWY 16 EAST
LEFT onto HWY 85 NORTH
In Four Corners, LEFT onto HWY 585 NORTH to Sundance… arrows to lot
We left the last vestiges of the Rockies behind in Sheridan. A few miles later – just past Gilette – we hit the High Plains. They weren’t flat the way I’d imagined. And there were trees.
Spent the night in Newcastle where the mosquitoes are as big as lumps of coal. Twelve times a day the trains charge through the center of town, long trains – thirty, maybe forty cars – filled with dull black rocks, so-called “bad” coal because it’s dirty stuff extracted from shale, only good for heating homes and giving those home owners emphysema thirty years hence. Ugly little town, Newcastle. Though I saw my first antelope – herds of them actually. Also many deer. They showed no interest in playing either separately or together – so much for accuracy in national songs.
This morning on our way to Sundance we drove through the prettiest landscape imaginable – rolling hills, peculiarly red earth, green grass, blue chicory. These are the famous Badlands of the Black Hills. I’m not exactly sure why the Badlands are called the Badlands. There are a few dramatic rock escarpments – most famous is the Devil’s Towel, familiar to all Stephen Spielberg fans as the weird rock formation that changed Richard Dreyfus’s relationship to mashed potatoes forever in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Also my cell phone died. For no apparant reason. It's a new phone that I didn't want to buy since it's also a camera and an MP3 player. "I just want something I can make phone calls on," I told the people at the ATT store. "Maybe text every once in a while. You don't have anything like that?"
No, no. They did not.
My old phone didn't do tricks. It also lasted for 5 years.
This new phone does everything but make conversation for me and it lasted all of five weeks. I think AT&T should replace it gratis, don't you? Except there isn't an AT&T store within 700 miles of here. Jerks.
RIGHT out of the lot onto FAIRGROUNDS RD… RIGHT onto HWY 16 EAST
LEFT onto HWY 85 NORTH
In Four Corners, LEFT onto HWY 585 NORTH to Sundance… arrows to lot
We left the last vestiges of the Rockies behind in Sheridan. A few miles later – just past Gilette – we hit the High Plains. They weren’t flat the way I’d imagined. And there were trees.
Spent the night in Newcastle where the mosquitoes are as big as lumps of coal. Twelve times a day the trains charge through the center of town, long trains – thirty, maybe forty cars – filled with dull black rocks, so-called “bad” coal because it’s dirty stuff extracted from shale, only good for heating homes and giving those home owners emphysema thirty years hence. Ugly little town, Newcastle. Though I saw my first antelope – herds of them actually. Also many deer. They showed no interest in playing either separately or together – so much for accuracy in national songs.
This morning on our way to Sundance we drove through the prettiest landscape imaginable – rolling hills, peculiarly red earth, green grass, blue chicory. These are the famous Badlands of the Black Hills. I’m not exactly sure why the Badlands are called the Badlands. There are a few dramatic rock escarpments – most famous is the Devil’s Towel, familiar to all Stephen Spielberg fans as the weird rock formation that changed Richard Dreyfus’s relationship to mashed potatoes forever in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Also my cell phone died. For no apparant reason. It's a new phone that I didn't want to buy since it's also a camera and an MP3 player. "I just want something I can make phone calls on," I told the people at the ATT store. "Maybe text every once in a while. You don't have anything like that?"
No, no. They did not.
My old phone didn't do tricks. It also lasted for 5 years.
This new phone does everything but make conversation for me and it lasted all of five weeks. I think AT&T should replace it gratis, don't you? Except there isn't an AT&T store within 700 miles of here. Jerks.
Jump: Whitehall, MT → Big Timber, MT – High School Grounds: 120 miles
RIGHT out of the lot… follow arrows through town
RIGHT onto I-90 East to Big Timber
Take Exit #367 and follow arrows to the lot…
The circus played 30 dates in Montana last year; Chance Van Zandt guesses that means the market is saturated. Consequently we’re only playing enough dates here now to justify driving through the state on our way to Wyoming and South Dakota. The jumps are over a hundred miles every morning. Plays havoc with my writing schedule.
I write best when I write first thing in the morning. (When I say, I write best… I’m not referring to quality but to the ease with which the words transmit from brain to page. I can never judge the quality of my own writing. It all reads like shit to me while I’m writing it, and it’s only a long while afterwards when I read it over that I think, some of this doesn't suck…) But on these long jumps I’m often driving until noon since I trail Ben and Robin in the RV as it putt-putt-putts along.
“Just take off,” Ben urges. “Livingston’s the prettiest town in Montana, filled with Internet cafes. We’ll be fine.”
But they won’t be fine. Why, look what happened yesterday when for five seconds I took my mind off the RV’s progression up a steep hill that turned out to be the Continental Divide.
They ran out of gas!
My mind had wandered back to that breakfast joint in Kooskia, one table in particular where three old geezers were ruminating over the day’s Special, biscuits, hash browns and gravy. Gourmet meal if you’re toothless! Which the geezers were. They wore overalls. Wisps of brittle, colorless hair encircled their heads like Christ’s crown of thorns.
I couldn’t figure out what they had looked like when they were young.
And this upset me. It’s one of the ways I entertain myself when I’m out in public and have nothing to read. I stare at people, try to see if I can get some fix on what they looked like as kids when their dusty old world was filled with infinite potential. A parlor trick with no particular pay-off, because of course what I think they looked like may or may not be how they actually looked. Though it keeps me amused.
But the trick hadn’t worked with this particular set of geezers. I had fretted at the time, and remembering it, I was fretting now. What if my imagination was drying up? The world would be a very boring place, all I’d have to look forward to would be death or the sixth season premiere of American Idol, whichever happened first –
Bam!
The RV gave a little sputter, backfired once and jerked suddenly on to the shoulder of the road.
Ideal Gas Law in action: fifteen miles per gallon at sea level translates to something less than ten at six thousand feet.
All in all I wish we were spending more time in Montana, I like it here. License plates get it right – the sky really does seem bigger. Still following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, who passed through these parts in the summer of 1805. (Whitehall, the old mining town the circus played yesterday, had some nice murals painted in honor of their Bicentennial.)
One year later the explorers were back in civilization (if St. Louis in those days could qualify as such.) William Clark lived another twenty-five years, going on to become the governor of the Missouri territories. But Meriwether Lewis died only three years after his return, most likely by his own hand. He was thirty-five.
Complicated man, Lewis. Close friend of Thomas Jefferson’s. Alcoholic. Prone to mood swings. The postmodern verdict (popularized by famed plagiarist and Nixon biographer, Stephen Ambrose) is “bipolar syndrome.” But I don’t hold much truck with revisionary medical diagnoses. I think it’s more likely that Lewis took a leak in the wrong Indian graveyard during that final trek through the Lolo Pass. C’mon now – you’ve all read Pet Sematery. You know how that one works.
RIGHT out of the lot… follow arrows through town
RIGHT onto I-90 East to Big Timber
Take Exit #367 and follow arrows to the lot…
The circus played 30 dates in Montana last year; Chance Van Zandt guesses that means the market is saturated. Consequently we’re only playing enough dates here now to justify driving through the state on our way to Wyoming and South Dakota. The jumps are over a hundred miles every morning. Plays havoc with my writing schedule.
I write best when I write first thing in the morning. (When I say, I write best… I’m not referring to quality but to the ease with which the words transmit from brain to page. I can never judge the quality of my own writing. It all reads like shit to me while I’m writing it, and it’s only a long while afterwards when I read it over that I think, some of this doesn't suck…) But on these long jumps I’m often driving until noon since I trail Ben and Robin in the RV as it putt-putt-putts along.
“Just take off,” Ben urges. “Livingston’s the prettiest town in Montana, filled with Internet cafes. We’ll be fine.”
But they won’t be fine. Why, look what happened yesterday when for five seconds I took my mind off the RV’s progression up a steep hill that turned out to be the Continental Divide.
They ran out of gas!
My mind had wandered back to that breakfast joint in Kooskia, one table in particular where three old geezers were ruminating over the day’s Special, biscuits, hash browns and gravy. Gourmet meal if you’re toothless! Which the geezers were. They wore overalls. Wisps of brittle, colorless hair encircled their heads like Christ’s crown of thorns.
I couldn’t figure out what they had looked like when they were young.
And this upset me. It’s one of the ways I entertain myself when I’m out in public and have nothing to read. I stare at people, try to see if I can get some fix on what they looked like as kids when their dusty old world was filled with infinite potential. A parlor trick with no particular pay-off, because of course what I think they looked like may or may not be how they actually looked. Though it keeps me amused.
But the trick hadn’t worked with this particular set of geezers. I had fretted at the time, and remembering it, I was fretting now. What if my imagination was drying up? The world would be a very boring place, all I’d have to look forward to would be death or the sixth season premiere of American Idol, whichever happened first –
Bam!
The RV gave a little sputter, backfired once and jerked suddenly on to the shoulder of the road.
Ideal Gas Law in action: fifteen miles per gallon at sea level translates to something less than ten at six thousand feet.
All in all I wish we were spending more time in Montana, I like it here. License plates get it right – the sky really does seem bigger. Still following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, who passed through these parts in the summer of 1805. (Whitehall, the old mining town the circus played yesterday, had some nice murals painted in honor of their Bicentennial.)
One year later the explorers were back in civilization (if St. Louis in those days could qualify as such.) William Clark lived another twenty-five years, going on to become the governor of the Missouri territories. But Meriwether Lewis died only three years after his return, most likely by his own hand. He was thirty-five.
Complicated man, Lewis. Close friend of Thomas Jefferson’s. Alcoholic. Prone to mood swings. The postmodern verdict (popularized by famed plagiarist and Nixon biographer, Stephen Ambrose) is “bipolar syndrome.” But I don’t hold much truck with revisionary medical diagnoses. I think it’s more likely that Lewis took a leak in the wrong Indian graveyard during that final trek through the Lolo Pass. C’mon now – you’ve all read Pet Sematery. You know how that one works.
June 15
Jump: Kooskia, ID → Stevensville, MT – Corner of Park & Middle Burnt Fork: 155 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… LEFT onto HWY 13/MAIN ST
RIGHT onto HWY 12 EAST into Montana
RIGHT onto HWY 93 SOUTH… LEFT onto STEVENSVILLE RD… arrows to lot
***There is NO fuel after Kooskia until you get to Lolo, MT – 125 miles. We are going to Mountain Time Zone***
June 16
Jump: Stevensville, MT → Whitehall, MT – Ossello Lot – 205 E. Yellowstone
LEFT carefully out of the lot… arrows out of town and back to HWY 93 NORTH
In Missoula, follow arrows and truck route to I-90 EAST
At Whitehall, take EXIT #249 and follow arrows to the lot…
Lolo Pass – a wild stretch of US Highway 12 through the Bitteroot Mountains – is the Garden of Eden so far as America’s great rivers are concerned.
The Lochsa River rises from the confluence of two creeks high in the range – Crooked Fork and the magnificently named Colt Killed. Our old friend William Clark had naming rights: The mountains which we passed to day much worst than yesterday the last excessively bad & thickly strowed with falling timber & Pine Spruc fur hackmatak & Tamerack, steep & stoney our men and horses much fatigued. Here we wer compelled to kill a colt for our men & Selves to eat for a want of meat & we named the South fork Colt Killed Creek and this river we call Flathead River. (Sic)
“Lochsa” means “rough waters” in the Flathead dialect. All three waterways are famously daring white water rafting destinations.
The Lochsa flows into the Clearwater River, the largest of the waterways emptying into the Snake, itself the Columbia’s major tributary. Meanwhile back in Montana, Lolo Creek and its surrounding headwaters are the beginnings of the Missouri River which goes on to merge with the great Mississippi.
So ultimately then the waters on the Idaho side flow west into the Pacific Ocean while the waters on the Montana flow east and south into the Gulf of Mexico. I find that very… poetic is the only word I think of, though it’s not the right word. I guess what I mean is that when I thought about the directions of those rivers for a while I felt as though I was on the verge of understanding a great mystery. Not quite there. But close.
Jump: Kooskia, ID → Stevensville, MT – Corner of Park & Middle Burnt Fork: 155 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… LEFT onto HWY 13/MAIN ST
RIGHT onto HWY 12 EAST into Montana
RIGHT onto HWY 93 SOUTH… LEFT onto STEVENSVILLE RD… arrows to lot
***There is NO fuel after Kooskia until you get to Lolo, MT – 125 miles. We are going to Mountain Time Zone***
June 16
Jump: Stevensville, MT → Whitehall, MT – Ossello Lot – 205 E. Yellowstone
LEFT carefully out of the lot… arrows out of town and back to HWY 93 NORTH
In Missoula, follow arrows and truck route to I-90 EAST
At Whitehall, take EXIT #249 and follow arrows to the lot…
Lolo Pass – a wild stretch of US Highway 12 through the Bitteroot Mountains – is the Garden of Eden so far as America’s great rivers are concerned.
The Lochsa River rises from the confluence of two creeks high in the range – Crooked Fork and the magnificently named Colt Killed. Our old friend William Clark had naming rights: The mountains which we passed to day much worst than yesterday the last excessively bad & thickly strowed with falling timber & Pine Spruc fur hackmatak & Tamerack, steep & stoney our men and horses much fatigued. Here we wer compelled to kill a colt for our men & Selves to eat for a want of meat & we named the South fork Colt Killed Creek and this river we call Flathead River. (Sic)
“Lochsa” means “rough waters” in the Flathead dialect. All three waterways are famously daring white water rafting destinations.
The Lochsa flows into the Clearwater River, the largest of the waterways emptying into the Snake, itself the Columbia’s major tributary. Meanwhile back in Montana, Lolo Creek and its surrounding headwaters are the beginnings of the Missouri River which goes on to merge with the great Mississippi.
So ultimately then the waters on the Idaho side flow west into the Pacific Ocean while the waters on the Montana flow east and south into the Gulf of Mexico. I find that very… poetic is the only word I think of, though it’s not the right word. I guess what I mean is that when I thought about the directions of those rivers for a while I felt as though I was on the verge of understanding a great mystery. Not quite there. But close.
June 14
Jump: Grangeville, ID → Kooskia, ID – Airport: 30 miles
LEFT out of the lot… LEFT onto HWY 95 SOUTH
LEFT again onto MAIN ST/HWY 13 to Kooskia… arrows to the lot
*** HWY 13 has steep downgrades and is very curvy – use caution and go easy on your breaks***
The rare night jump yesterday – everyone is very nervous over tomorrow’s jump into Montana over a menacingly high mountain pass. It was thought the exodus might go better if everybody had a full night’s sleep beforehand.
Also Chance Van Zandt has friends here – 2 Ringling Bros. clowns who spend half the year in New York and half the year managing an upscale lodge for affluent fly fishermen.
Kooskia, Population 526, is certainly an odd place for 2 Ringling Bros. clowns to end up – unless, of course, they grew up here in which case how did they ever get out?
It’s another one of those ruinous little towns that shows evidence of former prosperity, although the how’s and when’s of that prosperity elude me. There’s a good sized hotel downtown, long abandoned, that looks like one of those railroad hotels from the forties although there’s no sign a railroad ever went through here. There’s a vacant theater where rats and assorted vermin perform the Vagabond Opera every night – alas, Humans Are Not Admitted. Two gas stations, good-sized grocery store, motel with a scary sculpture of a large ghostly elk, couple of cafes with For Sale signs on them.
Since we didn’t have to get up at 4am and drive, Ben and I went to one of them for breakfast this morning. Place was packed. A desperate looking waitress with the first manicure I’d seen in weeks served me excellent bacon and toast with rancid butter, while I eavesdropped on the conversations at the tables around me once again trying to get to the root of those timeless questions: why am I me and you you? Is it possible that I am you?
Fire in the forests close to us. Somebody’s grandson needs an attitude adjustment. Obama bankrupting the country again, sticking his nose where it don’t need to be.
“Every time I’m in Idaho I think of the Wobblies,” sighed Ben.
“Who are the Wobblies?”
“You don’t know who the Wobblies are?”
“Well, I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night alive as you or me, but no, I don’t actually know much about the Wobblies.”
“There was once a logger named Big Bill Hayward who read Das Kapital and began organizing all his logging and miner buddies into a labor union he named the International Workers of the World. The mill owners and mine owners hated the IWW and hired the Pinkertons to bring them down. There was a lot of violence. Then the government got involved and lots of IWW activities were declared illegal. Joe Hill was hung on some trumped up charge. Big Bill Hayward would have been hung except Clarence Darrow signed on to defend him. And then FDR got elected. Do you know why all true leftists hate FDR?”
“No-o-o—“
“Because he subverted America’s chance for a true revolution.”
“That’s nice, dear,” I said.
Jump: St Maries, ID → Palouse, WA – Elementary School Grounds: 60 miles
Go out the way we came in… follow arrows and truck route to HWY 3 SOUTH
Bear RIGHT onto HWY 6 WEST into Washington (yes, that state again)
HWY 6 becomes HWY 272 WEST in Washington to Palouse… arrows to lot
Starting a new chapter always makes me twitchy.
To calm myself down, I’m telling myself a story – there’s this circus made up of telepaths, Cirque Cerebrum they call themselves. Maybe there are five of them all total. They formed the circus because they have to travel, the cumulative effect of the same people’s thoughts day after day being toxic to the psyche.
In addition to tigers and elephants, their posters show unicorns and gryphons.
They don’t actually own the animals, and they can’t actually perform any tricks, but they can make audiences imagine that they’ve seen both and so Cirque Cerebrum becomes very popular though strictly an underground phenomenon – no marketing, no advertising, not even any advance notice of the towns they’re going to perform in; just one morning – poof! – the tent goes up and the word spreads like wild fire.
High jinks ensue when PETA decides to protest the exploitation of unicorns.
Today we’re in Palouse, birthplace of the self-leveling planting machine which is used now in 3% of all agriculture. Quite the enchanting little town in the middle of a valley famous for its wheat and barley, it was once a major distribution center; its brick buildings harken back to a prosperous hey day around the turn of the twentieth century. Now they host antique stores, galleries, cafes. I suppose it’s a bedroom community for Moscow 20 miles or so away.
I feel like I'm in an echo chamber. Where is everybody?
Go out the way we came in… follow arrows and truck route to HWY 3 SOUTH
Bear RIGHT onto HWY 6 WEST into Washington (yes, that state again)
HWY 6 becomes HWY 272 WEST in Washington to Palouse… arrows to lot
Starting a new chapter always makes me twitchy.
To calm myself down, I’m telling myself a story – there’s this circus made up of telepaths, Cirque Cerebrum they call themselves. Maybe there are five of them all total. They formed the circus because they have to travel, the cumulative effect of the same people’s thoughts day after day being toxic to the psyche.
In addition to tigers and elephants, their posters show unicorns and gryphons.
They don’t actually own the animals, and they can’t actually perform any tricks, but they can make audiences imagine that they’ve seen both and so Cirque Cerebrum becomes very popular though strictly an underground phenomenon – no marketing, no advertising, not even any advance notice of the towns they’re going to perform in; just one morning – poof! – the tent goes up and the word spreads like wild fire.
High jinks ensue when PETA decides to protest the exploitation of unicorns.
Today we’re in Palouse, birthplace of the self-leveling planting machine which is used now in 3% of all agriculture. Quite the enchanting little town in the middle of a valley famous for its wheat and barley, it was once a major distribution center; its brick buildings harken back to a prosperous hey day around the turn of the twentieth century. Now they host antique stores, galleries, cafes. I suppose it’s a bedroom community for Moscow 20 miles or so away.
I feel like I'm in an echo chamber. Where is everybody?
Jump: Bonners Ferry, ID → Sandpoint, ID – Bonner County Fairgrounds: 35 miles
Go out the way we came in… RIGHT onto HWY 2 SOUTH
HWY 2 SOUTH to Sandpoint
Arrows to fairgrounds…
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
“I da ‘ho? No, you da ho!”
RTT’s favorite joke for the past week became reality yesterday as the Little Circus chugged into Bonners Ferry. Idaho’s where they grow potatoes. Idaho’s where celebrities move to when they want to pretend they’re tired of being celebrities. Idaho’s survivalist ground zero.
A dozen miles or so down the road from Bonners Ferry sits the village of Naples. It’s not officially a town: there’s no post office, no gas station, no city services; just a smattering of weathered houses and a village store in the shadow of the Kootenai foothills, first swell of the western Rockies.
In 1983 a former Green Beret named Randy Weaver moved his family just outside Naples. Weaver was a white separatist with a religious agenda: Caucasians were the true descendents of the lost tribes of Israel. The world was staggering beneath the twin yokes of Marxist bureaucracy and Talmudic capitalism. And despite government propaganda designed to disguise the fact, whites were also the only true minority in the United States, comprising just 8% of the population.
Unlike some of his neighbors, Weaver had no interest in becoming part of a paramilitary organization. He would attack only if provoked. In the meantime he intended to live peaceably with his own family, ignoring the corrupt government and the decadent society that had spawned it, home schooling his children, studying the Bible, receiving prophecy on the wide open mountain top.
The events of Weaver’s life after his move to Naples are too well known to attempt retelling. (One little factoid I found interesting though: there is no “Ruby Ridge.” That place name was made up.)
But, you know, the game I always play in new places is the What Would It Be Like to Live Here game. There are a lot of people in these parts who believe what Weaver believed. And I noticed yesterday that people in Bonners Ferry weren’t nearly as friendly as people in Newport, Washington where the circus had played the day before.
Now I’m the type of person who says, “Hi!” to every person I pass on the street (yeah, yeah – even the homeless ones,) who strikes up conversations with every random stranger that stands next to me on line. Yesterday only one person said, “Hi,” back. The others either averted their eyes or stared straight through me as if I wasn’t there.
When I caught a glimpse of myself in a restroom mirror, I wondered if maybe I’d found out why. Goodness I’m dark! I’ve been cavorting about in full spectrum sunlight for around two full months now, I’m – uh – burnished.
One of my great grandmothers, born in Tunisia, was the color of mahogany even without sunshine. In the only photograph I have of her, her lips are thin but her nose is broad-bridged, squashy. On the basis of our shared DNA, I could have applied to UC Berkeley as an affirmative action candidate. I didn’t, though I knew people with far less legitimate “minority” stake-holder claims who did.
I thought of that grandmother – Arwa, her name was – yesterday as I traipsed the streets of Bonners Ferry. And also of another great-grandmother, Elisheva, the wife of a rabbi. And also of Randy Weaver.
Things get complicated indeed when you’re a descendent of mud people but still think Randy Weaver got a raw deal.
But maybe I’m making something out of nothing. Maybe they all ignored me because I smelled bad or something.
###
Last night I dreamed of Erica.
I was living in some kind of communal apartment and Erica was living there too, barricaded in her room behind a locked door. We were having some kind of party and I wanted Erica to come, wanted Erica to see how popular I was, how sought after. Erica had carelessly promised to come but she hadn’t yet left her room and I was desperately willing her to come out.
Then I found a set of keys that I knew belonged to Erica. I thought: I can use these to unlock Erica’s door. Or I can drive to her house, let myself in, steal stuff from her.
Dream was so vivid that when I woke up I was disoriented for a full five minutes. This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.
Why do some people make the right choices and some people make the wrong ones? Or is it simply a matter of making any old choice at all but at the right time?
Go out the way we came in… RIGHT onto HWY 2 SOUTH
HWY 2 SOUTH to Sandpoint
Arrows to fairgrounds…
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
“I da ‘ho? No, you da ho!”
RTT’s favorite joke for the past week became reality yesterday as the Little Circus chugged into Bonners Ferry. Idaho’s where they grow potatoes. Idaho’s where celebrities move to when they want to pretend they’re tired of being celebrities. Idaho’s survivalist ground zero.
A dozen miles or so down the road from Bonners Ferry sits the village of Naples. It’s not officially a town: there’s no post office, no gas station, no city services; just a smattering of weathered houses and a village store in the shadow of the Kootenai foothills, first swell of the western Rockies.
In 1983 a former Green Beret named Randy Weaver moved his family just outside Naples. Weaver was a white separatist with a religious agenda: Caucasians were the true descendents of the lost tribes of Israel. The world was staggering beneath the twin yokes of Marxist bureaucracy and Talmudic capitalism. And despite government propaganda designed to disguise the fact, whites were also the only true minority in the United States, comprising just 8% of the population.
Unlike some of his neighbors, Weaver had no interest in becoming part of a paramilitary organization. He would attack only if provoked. In the meantime he intended to live peaceably with his own family, ignoring the corrupt government and the decadent society that had spawned it, home schooling his children, studying the Bible, receiving prophecy on the wide open mountain top.
The events of Weaver’s life after his move to Naples are too well known to attempt retelling. (One little factoid I found interesting though: there is no “Ruby Ridge.” That place name was made up.)
But, you know, the game I always play in new places is the What Would It Be Like to Live Here game. There are a lot of people in these parts who believe what Weaver believed. And I noticed yesterday that people in Bonners Ferry weren’t nearly as friendly as people in Newport, Washington where the circus had played the day before.
Now I’m the type of person who says, “Hi!” to every person I pass on the street (yeah, yeah – even the homeless ones,) who strikes up conversations with every random stranger that stands next to me on line. Yesterday only one person said, “Hi,” back. The others either averted their eyes or stared straight through me as if I wasn’t there.
When I caught a glimpse of myself in a restroom mirror, I wondered if maybe I’d found out why. Goodness I’m dark! I’ve been cavorting about in full spectrum sunlight for around two full months now, I’m – uh – burnished.
One of my great grandmothers, born in Tunisia, was the color of mahogany even without sunshine. In the only photograph I have of her, her lips are thin but her nose is broad-bridged, squashy. On the basis of our shared DNA, I could have applied to UC Berkeley as an affirmative action candidate. I didn’t, though I knew people with far less legitimate “minority” stake-holder claims who did.
I thought of that grandmother – Arwa, her name was – yesterday as I traipsed the streets of Bonners Ferry. And also of another great-grandmother, Elisheva, the wife of a rabbi. And also of Randy Weaver.
Things get complicated indeed when you’re a descendent of mud people but still think Randy Weaver got a raw deal.
But maybe I’m making something out of nothing. Maybe they all ignored me because I smelled bad or something.
Last night I dreamed of Erica.
I was living in some kind of communal apartment and Erica was living there too, barricaded in her room behind a locked door. We were having some kind of party and I wanted Erica to come, wanted Erica to see how popular I was, how sought after. Erica had carelessly promised to come but she hadn’t yet left her room and I was desperately willing her to come out.
Then I found a set of keys that I knew belonged to Erica. I thought: I can use these to unlock Erica’s door. Or I can drive to her house, let myself in, steal stuff from her.
Dream was so vivid that when I woke up I was disoriented for a full five minutes. This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.
Why do some people make the right choices and some people make the wrong ones? Or is it simply a matter of making any old choice at all but at the right time?
June 5
Jump: Oroville, WA → Republic, WA – Ballfield: 60 miles
LEFT out of the lot onto HWY 97 SOUTH to Tonasket
LEFT onto HWY 20 EAST to Republic
Arrows to the lot…
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm due to high school graduation
In 1849 Sutter’s Mill incubated a fever that gripped the West coast from California to Alaska. Oroville in northeastern Washington state was part of the fallout, “oro” being Spanish for gold. Not that gold per se was ever found in Oroville. Instead, it was one of the places where prospectors loaded up on augers and axes, handkerchiefs, mosquito netting, sluice boxes, quicksilver and other mining supplies.
Oroville is just three miles away from the Canadian border. Canada is the land of nonprescription codeine and Tim Horton’s chocolate chip muffins. Naturally I opted for an afternoon of international travel.
Canadians have always been picky about who they let over their border. I remember being interrogated by Canadian immigration officials seven years ago or so, back when I was working for ICM. They separated me out from the custom lines, led me into a cramped office.
“What I don’t understand is this,” the official said glancing through my paperwork for the seventh time. “You say you’re going over the Canadian border for work purposes –
“I am going across the border for work purposes,” I avowed.
“But why can’t a Canadian do what you’re being hired to do, eh?”
“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe a Canadian can do what I was hired to do. But the important thing to keep in mind is that a Canadian company hired me to do it instead.”
“But why?”
“You’d have to ask them.”
“Okay. Well, thank you.”
“Does that mean I'm cleared to cross the border?”
“Not yet. Please return to the waiting area.”
This went on for another two and a half hours. At half hour intervals, I’d be invited back into the office where yet another official-looking Canadian would ask, “But why did they hire an American, eh?” I began to wonder whether they weren’t just being passive aggressive because their feelings were so hurt.
Didn’t take quite so long to cross over yesterday but they still made me get out of my car and wait in the Ministry of Love while they ran an extensive background check. They didn’t get the time in the second grade where I stole Anne Babitsky’s lunch money, but I’m pretty sure they got everything else. They let me in anyway.
Both Oroville and Osoyoos, its Canadian counterpart, are resort towns on a placid, silt-filled lake. Interesting to observe their differences – lots of building going on in Osoyoos, lots of tourist stores, trendy restaurants and banks; while Oroville is a hole-in-the-wall and the only vacation accommodations involve seedy lakeside RV parks patronized by guys who really should put their shirts back on.
Was there even a real estate crash in Canada?
June 7
Jump: Republic, WA → Deer Park, WA – Perrin Field: 105 miles
Go out the way we came in… RIGHT onto HWY 20 EAST
RIGHT onto HWY 395 SOUTH to Deer Park… arrows to lot
***There is fuel in Kettle Falls, 45 miles away, and Colville, 52 miles from Republic***
Shows at 2pm/4:30pm
June 8
Jump: Deer Park, WA → Newport, WA – Rodeo Grounds: 35 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… LEFT onto CRAWFORD AVE
Follow detour to LEFT onto HWY 2 NORTH to Newport
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
“So ya come all the way from California to break down here,” cackled the old geezer.
The RV was parked in front of Parts R Us with its hood cracked open – automotive equivalent of picking up the soap in the San Quentin showers. Behind the window you could see the Parts Manager rubbing his hands together, waiting to screw us.
You wouldn’t expect to find a geezer with a well-developed sense of irony in Kettle Falls, Washington, now would you?
The alternator again. It literally fell apart as Ben was driving over Sherman Pass.
Easy fix, of course. But one of these days it won’t be. So I always trail Ben on long jumps, even when he’s puttering along at 35 miles per hour and there’s a line of drivers like a funeral procession behind me. It’s not like I could actually do anything to help him. So I sit in the car chanting I think I can, I think I can – the Little Engine Who Could channeling Descartes – and promising God that this time I really will either go to Confession or fast on Yom Kippur – His choice!
The immense beauty of the Sherman Pass literally left me speechless. A holy place, one of nature’s own cathedrals. (Look at that night sky! It’s just like the planetarium!) There’d been a fire here ten or twenty years ago; the slender silver trunks of all thousands of dead trees still stood among the miracle of fresh green growth. So many deer kept leaping out in front of me, I had to keep one foot on the brakes.
Pass is named for William T. Sherman who came to Washington in the 1880’s to kill Indians. (He’d done really well slaughtering the Confederate Army, you may recall.) There’s no evidence that he set foot in this particular pass however.
Day before the Little Circus had pitched its tent in Republic, just about the cutest little town ever. Republic is another relic of 19th century gold fever, except Republic is the real thing, it actually had gold. Still does: there’s an operating mine there. Plus a downtown with a vintage Dodge City facade and wooden arcades, and a place where you can dig for fossils.
In the Eocene Epoch nearby Curlew Lake was much bigger, covering the spot where Republic is now. Lake bottom was volcanic spew in which various insects, leaves, twigs and the occasional fish had become trapped. Fifty million years later it’s hardened into shale, very easy to chisel open. For $3 plus another $4 to rent the tools, the nonprofit Stonerose Interpretive Center and Fossil Site allows you to do just that.
I took Robin; Jessi the Clown chaperoned the youngest members of the World’s Foremost Unicycling Family. I had fun, not sure about Robin.
We’re so far north now that at 4:30am is very bright even though the sun hasn't properly risen yet. Think of it as reverse gloaming.
Jump: Oroville, WA → Republic, WA – Ballfield: 60 miles
LEFT out of the lot onto HWY 97 SOUTH to Tonasket
LEFT onto HWY 20 EAST to Republic
Arrows to the lot…
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm due to high school graduation
In 1849 Sutter’s Mill incubated a fever that gripped the West coast from California to Alaska. Oroville in northeastern Washington state was part of the fallout, “oro” being Spanish for gold. Not that gold per se was ever found in Oroville. Instead, it was one of the places where prospectors loaded up on augers and axes, handkerchiefs, mosquito netting, sluice boxes, quicksilver and other mining supplies.
Oroville is just three miles away from the Canadian border. Canada is the land of nonprescription codeine and Tim Horton’s chocolate chip muffins. Naturally I opted for an afternoon of international travel.
Canadians have always been picky about who they let over their border. I remember being interrogated by Canadian immigration officials seven years ago or so, back when I was working for ICM. They separated me out from the custom lines, led me into a cramped office.
“What I don’t understand is this,” the official said glancing through my paperwork for the seventh time. “You say you’re going over the Canadian border for work purposes –
“I am going across the border for work purposes,” I avowed.
“But why can’t a Canadian do what you’re being hired to do, eh?”
“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe a Canadian can do what I was hired to do. But the important thing to keep in mind is that a Canadian company hired me to do it instead.”
“But why?”
“You’d have to ask them.”
“Okay. Well, thank you.”
“Does that mean I'm cleared to cross the border?”
“Not yet. Please return to the waiting area.”
This went on for another two and a half hours. At half hour intervals, I’d be invited back into the office where yet another official-looking Canadian would ask, “But why did they hire an American, eh?” I began to wonder whether they weren’t just being passive aggressive because their feelings were so hurt.
Didn’t take quite so long to cross over yesterday but they still made me get out of my car and wait in the Ministry of Love while they ran an extensive background check. They didn’t get the time in the second grade where I stole Anne Babitsky’s lunch money, but I’m pretty sure they got everything else. They let me in anyway.
Both Oroville and Osoyoos, its Canadian counterpart, are resort towns on a placid, silt-filled lake. Interesting to observe their differences – lots of building going on in Osoyoos, lots of tourist stores, trendy restaurants and banks; while Oroville is a hole-in-the-wall and the only vacation accommodations involve seedy lakeside RV parks patronized by guys who really should put their shirts back on.
Was there even a real estate crash in Canada?
June 7
Jump: Republic, WA → Deer Park, WA – Perrin Field: 105 miles
Go out the way we came in… RIGHT onto HWY 20 EAST
RIGHT onto HWY 395 SOUTH to Deer Park… arrows to lot
***There is fuel in Kettle Falls, 45 miles away, and Colville, 52 miles from Republic***
Shows at 2pm/4:30pm
June 8
Jump: Deer Park, WA → Newport, WA – Rodeo Grounds: 35 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… LEFT onto CRAWFORD AVE
Follow detour to LEFT onto HWY 2 NORTH to Newport
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
“So ya come all the way from California to break down here,” cackled the old geezer.
The RV was parked in front of Parts R Us with its hood cracked open – automotive equivalent of picking up the soap in the San Quentin showers. Behind the window you could see the Parts Manager rubbing his hands together, waiting to screw us.
You wouldn’t expect to find a geezer with a well-developed sense of irony in Kettle Falls, Washington, now would you?
The alternator again. It literally fell apart as Ben was driving over Sherman Pass.
Easy fix, of course. But one of these days it won’t be. So I always trail Ben on long jumps, even when he’s puttering along at 35 miles per hour and there’s a line of drivers like a funeral procession behind me. It’s not like I could actually do anything to help him. So I sit in the car chanting I think I can, I think I can – the Little Engine Who Could channeling Descartes – and promising God that this time I really will either go to Confession or fast on Yom Kippur – His choice!
The immense beauty of the Sherman Pass literally left me speechless. A holy place, one of nature’s own cathedrals. (Look at that night sky! It’s just like the planetarium!) There’d been a fire here ten or twenty years ago; the slender silver trunks of all thousands of dead trees still stood among the miracle of fresh green growth. So many deer kept leaping out in front of me, I had to keep one foot on the brakes.
Pass is named for William T. Sherman who came to Washington in the 1880’s to kill Indians. (He’d done really well slaughtering the Confederate Army, you may recall.) There’s no evidence that he set foot in this particular pass however.
Day before the Little Circus had pitched its tent in Republic, just about the cutest little town ever. Republic is another relic of 19th century gold fever, except Republic is the real thing, it actually had gold. Still does: there’s an operating mine there. Plus a downtown with a vintage Dodge City facade and wooden arcades, and a place where you can dig for fossils.
In the Eocene Epoch nearby Curlew Lake was much bigger, covering the spot where Republic is now. Lake bottom was volcanic spew in which various insects, leaves, twigs and the occasional fish had become trapped. Fifty million years later it’s hardened into shale, very easy to chisel open. For $3 plus another $4 to rent the tools, the nonprofit Stonerose Interpretive Center and Fossil Site allows you to do just that.
I took Robin; Jessi the Clown chaperoned the youngest members of the World’s Foremost Unicycling Family. I had fun, not sure about Robin.
We’re so far north now that at 4:30am is very bright even though the sun hasn't properly risen yet. Think of it as reverse gloaming.
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