By Fred Owens
It's one of my favorite songs, this version by Peter Paul and Mary.
Old Stewball was a race horse,
And I wish he were mine.
He never drank water,
He always drank wine.
His bridle was silver,
His mane it was gold,
And the worth of his saddle,
Has never been told.
I should have bet on Old Stewball. I'd be a free man today.
You
spend a moment dreaming about what might have been -- that cabin you
could have built, that girl you could have kiseed -- and then you smile
through the tears and move on.
Who is Most Qualified to be President. I
would pick Michael Bloomberg, twelve years as mayor of New York City
and also a very successful businessman. To succeed that well in both
politics and finance is quite exceptional. But he's too level-headed to
run for President -- our loss.
Memo to Hillary. Yes,
you are highly qualified but nobody cares. Whenever you say that you
are the most qualified candidate, the voters read "she's old and she's
been around forever." Voters are not grateful and they do not care about
the past. What can you do for us today?
Speaking Tips. Hillary,
never apologize for not being a great public speaker. You're only
reminding us of what we already know. You don't have the gift and we'll
get over it.
Sex Appeal. She doesn't have any sex appeal, but she can send out Katy Perry as a surrogate. That works.
Victory Lap. Hillary
gets a victory lap after clinching the nomination. We're waiting to
hear from the polls. She's probably getting a short-term convention
bounce.
Kevin Sunrise. Kevin Sunrise is a
gardener living in LaConner. He is married to Amy, the famed Buddhist
nun and former librarian. Kevin calls me on Thursday mornings at 9 a.m.
Not every Thursday, but that is our agreed upon time. This week Kevin
said he was worried about Donald Trump. Do you think he can win, Kevin
asked. I said yes, I think he can win..... i mean it's possible, but not
likely. And I urged him to not be worried about it. I'm not worried.
Worrying about Donald Trump disturbs my thinking. Trump is selling fear,
Hillary is selling fear of Trump. And I am not buying. I get messages
from fellow Democrats saying we all gotta vote for her or the world
faces utter ruin and disaster. Well, do not pressure me! Bernie Sanders'
people are also being threatened. They face demands for compliance. And
woe betide the voter who contemplates a third party vote.
Not
me. I am free of all strategy. I encourage all voters to vote their
conscience. Vote for the man or woman who will make a good President.
That's still Hillary in my book. I am president of the Santa Barbara
chapter of Luke Warm for Hillary. We don't get excited. You could do
worse than Hillary. She probably won't screw it up too badly. That's our
way of thinking.
I'm With Her. Maybe. But why
should I be with her? She plays political hardball. If I pledge my vote
today, she simply puts it in her pocket and I never hear from her
again. Call me undecided and sitting on the fence, but call me.
Here
at Luke Warm for Hillary we are in touch with the Never Trumpers, the
Sandernistas, the Libertarians, the Greens, and all wandering
independent minds. Let everyone speak and be heard. Don't give in to any
pressure. Hillary's people are telling me the train is leaving the
station and I better get on board.....Maybe, but I want a good seat in a
private cabin.
Thank you,
Fred
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What follows is a chapter from the Fishtown Blues called the Turkish Terror.
The Turkish Terror Part Nine. Introducing Layla, the Turkish
Terror -- she lives out in Fishtown. Keith Brown is still up on the
roof of the Lighthouse Inn in LaConner, threatening to blow up the bomb in his backpack, but the standoff is coming to a head.
It begins ....
Jimmy pulled himself up through the hatch. “Hey Keith, I saw you on the
roof, thought I’d come up and enjoy the view with you. You got your
boat tied up here someplace?”
“No, it’s back in Fishtown. I walked into town.”
“Say what’s up? It looks like you got this thing goin’ on. All these people looking at you.”
“I need to find Lisa.”
“She isn’t here. Nobody seen her.”
“Jimmy, don’t go against me. Are you one of them now?”
“No way. I’m with you, that’s why I came up here. Ernie Benson is
downstairs behind the bar, he isn’t against you. And you see all these
people watching you – there’s Cindy and Tom, and there’s Barb and Amy.
We’re all your friends. You’re one of us. Nobody is going against you,
but they’re getting worried. You want a smoke? I’ll roll you one.”
“Sure.”
Jimmy sat down, not too close, and pulled a bag of rolling tobacco from
his jeans. He began to roll a smoke for Keith and one for himself.
Keith was sitting down, clutching his backpack with the bomb inside,
veins pulsing on the sides of this face, all tensed up, smelling
un-bathed much worse than usual. But living by himself in a cabin by the
river in Fishtown, he had not much need for soap and hot water.
The Turkish Terror lived with her husband in a stout cabin just
downstream of Keith. She said, “If Keith Brown ever took a bath, I would
show him a good time,” but she was a bold woman, given to experiment.
All the way from Turkey she came to live in Fishtown. “I know the
wonders of tulips and roses,” she said. “The tulip was first cultivated
in my country. It is Turkish. My name is Layla, which means tulip in
Turkish. I am very fond of the fragrances of different flowers and
different men. Some men have an intriguing musky odor or a manly sweat
about them. However Keith Brown is merely disgusting. I like him anyway.
I watch his grimaces and twitches. He would come to our cabin at
sundown hoping for a meal, and I would make him a bowl of beans. Back
then he heard the voices of angels and demons. But the angels have left
him and now he is just mad. I wish he would take a bath.”
It was
the freedom of Fishtown that attracted her. “My husband has money, so I
can afford to go to Nordstrom’s and buy shoes. I am extremely fond of
expensive high-heeled shoes. You might wonder why this is such a
contradiction – to live in a cabin by the river in Fishtown, to chop
wood and carry water and cook over a primitive stove and sit by kerosene
light reading books, listening to the wind, hearing the call of birds
and the murmur of the river flowing at our feet. The river is so
wonderful to me.
“And yet I sometimes make a trip to downtown
Seattle to shop for shoes at Nordstroms. It’s a way to abuse my husband
who gets mad at me for spending his money. You see I despise this man. I
also love him. I am not the least bit crazy like Keith Brown however. I
see the world with total clarity. I have no ideals. I only see the
reality and the reality of human life is a complete contradiction. So I
am not faithful to my husband, instead I spend his money and laugh at
him. He is such a good man.
“I am come here from Istanbul in
Turkey, where the East meets the West. My father was an influential man
in commercial banking. He sent me away because I am a free spirit. He is
an understanding man, but the way I live, he could not have me in his
home to be an embarrassment, to lose his social standing and his money.
It was better for everyone for me to come to America. And you wonder how
a young Turkish woman found this place. Because it was bashert – that
is not a Turkish word, but we use it to mean the fate of your life.
Bashert means what is meant to be, and I was meant to be in Fishtown –
that is how I found it, me sitting by the fire, and dreaming of
alligator pumps with high heels.
“And jewelry, expensive
jewelry,” she added. “So we are a community of hermits in Fishtown, out
of the world, in nature. Keith Brown is our brother. It is the fault of
your culture that you need everything to make sense, to fit together in a
neat pattern, to make progress and good legislation. That is not the
Turkish way. We are a cruel and violent people with a passionate love
for roses and tulips. I am a Muslim which means to have complete
submission and surrender to Allah, but I laugh at God and defy him. I do
not try to resolve these contradictions, because that is the way of
reality.
“But you drove Keith Brown crazy here in America. You
make him fit where he cannot fit. He is an electronic genius with a
pornographic mind. He has no ability to seduce a woman, yet his heart
aches with tenderness for all living things. Little birds nest in the
eaves of his cabin -- he would die for those little birds, yet he built
a bomb, truly he did, because you drove him crazy.
“But this is not my fault. I love him as a man and as a brother, for the way he is -- like me.
“My nipples are large and beautiful. I will remove my blouse and become
more comfortable. Good. I can breathe more easily. I will tell you
about the fishing. We have the five kinds of salmon that come by our
cabin in Fishtown and making their way up the river into the mountains
to lay their eggs on gravel beds in cold ice water, and they die. It is
so tragic. They make love and they die. Of the five kinds, we have
pineapple salmon in the spring which are large and fat, we have
burnt-sugar salmon in the summer which have the reddest meat, we have
the pink carnation salmon which come every two years – no, I get
confused – the humpies and the dogs are coming. But the very best of the
salmon are the silver bullets. These fish are not found in my native
country, but I am not particular. To me a fish is a fish. I am like one
of these birds – the heron stalking in the shallow water. I eat fish
because I live on the river. My husband writes poetry and I catch fish. I
carry this knife with a 5-inch blade. I use it to filet and clean the
salmon. It is not a weapon despite what people say.”
She said
this and one more thing. “I live in town now, in this apartment.
Fishtown is empty. It’s only Keith and Art Jorgenson. Crazy Peter lives
over by Barge Island. Black Dog Allen lives downstream a ways. It’s
lonely out there now.”
Keith Brown smelled of old socks, wood
smoke and cans of Prince Albert tobacco which he bought because it
lasted longer. Art Jorgensen would give him the leaf from his marijuana
plants and he grew a few plants himself, back in the woods, someplace
where the ground was not too soggy, with enough sunlight, not
conspicuous, you could walk right by his plants and not see them. The
cabin had a wood cook stove, used for heat or making meals. Keith had a
float outside his cabin, and an old rowboat tied up to the float,
half-sunk, because Keith just let it rain and didn’t bail out the boat.
It could have been a fine vessel for river jaunts.
Crazy Peter
came by offering strong drink for Keith, which he accepted, but then
Crazy Peter said let’s bail out your boat and take her out. Let me have
it for a week or so, I could sand it down really good inside and out,
make it clean and pretty with fresh linseed oil, keep that wood shining,
make it glide through the water, just touch the oars and let them
breath strong strokes, and you could row up the river in a storm like it
was a Sunday picnic.
Crazy Peter made this offer while they
sipped his home-made rice wine, which was a grade or two superior to
prison hooch, a pale green color made with white rice and white sugar
fermented and mixed with Mountain Dew. Most people said Crazy Peter was
crazy before he started drinking, so it didn’t matter what he drank, but
he was one of Keith’s friends on the river.
The point is, everybody liked Keith. He never hurt anybody, until that summer when he started hearing the voices.
Fishtown was at a bend on the North Fork of the Skagit River. They
called it Fishtown because it was a good place to catch fish. The river
made a nice bend and the water was deep. It was all fresh water, but
only a couple of miles to the mouth at Skagit Bay. The tide came in
twice a day. The water rose and the river stopped moving. It became as
still as the time before the world began, and if there was no wind the
surface was as smooth as glass.
The Swinomish always had a camp
there. The pioneers came and used drift nets in their time and set their
nets on the drift, and built small cabins on pilings to get out of the
weather, cabins built outside the dike, you couldn’t get there except
by boat, or a slim boardwalk with loose boards which ran underneath low
willow bushes, going over the mudflat near to the river itself – a no
man’s land, because the Chamberlains owned the land inside the dike, but
the wetland, some fifty-feet wide between the dike and the river, had
no owner. Out there you were off the map and off the money too. No
deeds, no mortgage, no taxes and no rent. If that isn’t freedom, what
is?
Jimmy knew all this. He wanted to talk Keith out of it, get him to let go, come down, take his medicine, do his time.
“Keith, this is upsetting. People could get hurt.”
“They’re torturing Lisa,” Keith said.
“Look, if you come down off the roof, you could head over to the Frog
Hospital with me and Hitch. We could get some beer, some fried chicken,
some Fritos, head out to the Sand Spit, hook up with Joy and Jellybean,
bring out the drums and have us an old-time U-Bang-Em. C’mon. There’s
nothing but trouble for you here. Leave that package alone – we can come
back later for that.
“Okay, I’m lying. Cops are going to be
asking you a lot of questions. You’re going to jail when you come down,
but it will be easy for you if you just don’t hurt anybody now. Leave
that package and come down. But forget the cops, don’t you see Barbara
Cram down there. She will chew your ass out in a big hurry if you don’t
come down. You don’t want to get on her wrong side, it will be hell for
all of us. “
“It’s only four o’clock,” Keith said. “What about
dinner? I’m hungry. Have Ernie send up one of those roast beef au jus
sandwiches with French fries. I’m really tired.”
“Whatever you want, Keith.”
Don Coyote stirred in the bushes in back of the Garden Club. It was a
good perch, being on the edge of the hill, higher up than the roof of
the Lighthouse, where he could look down on Jimmy and Keith talking. He
could see the others – Larry Yonally and Fred Martin standing in the
middle of the street, Aurora Jellybean twirling her skirt, Barbara Cram
having another smoke with Amy Hahn, Tom Robbins and Cindy Sibanda
noodling on the bench on the landing of the Benton Street stairs, Roger
Cayou and Chico Narkowitz telling lies in front of the LaConner Tavern,
and Brian Healey pacing back and forth in front of the Pier Seven
building when Lane Dexter showed up from Marblemount bearing arms.
“He’s up there,” Brian said.
Lane said nothing, looking around, then, “What about the hill?”
“If you were a hawk…”
“I see a perch up there. You stay here.”
Lane Dexter drove up Second Street, parked in front of the Garden Club,
and walked around to the back, quietly, as he knew how to do that, came
up to Don Coyote crouching in the bushes, tapped him on the shoulder
and said nothing, bearing arms as he was. Don Coyote knew he was bested
but saw Lane to be his ally not his foe. “This is just in case,” Lane
said, patting his rifle.
The End.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My gardening blog is
Fred Owens
