Jesus Wept -- John 11:35
“I’m so tired,” Keith said, peering over the edge of the roof. He sat down. No one heard him yell about the bomb.
Ernie Benson, the Lighthouse Inn bartender, was a jovial even-tempered man, voted “LaConner’s Best Bartender” year after year for fixing you a good drink and steering you out the door in a nice way when you had enough.
Ernie was also a big man, tall and round and he had a problem, seeing Keith take the ladder up to the roof. “This is really screwy,” he said. But he had to climb the ladder and lift up the hatch to peek out and find out what Keith was doing up there.
“Keith, what’s going on? You can’t be up here.”
“I’m so tired,” Keith said. “I need to find Lisa. I need to find out if she’s alive. Did you kill her? Are you an agent?”
“It’s me, Ernie. You need to come down.”
Police Chief Larry Yonally was driving down First Street when he saw Keith on the roof of the Lighthouse, thinking he was a worker or something. Taking a closer look, he recognized Keith’s balding head and his scruffy beard in profile, and his signature dark brown combat jacket covered with magic marker quotations from the Old Testament.
“Oh shit,” he said. “We gotta get him down.”
Larry began thinking, “If I blow the cop whistle on him he might just get worse. I have to parse this thing out. He’s up on the roof, and we have to get him down easy and no one gets hurt.”
But Keith saw Larry and his adrenalin surged. “It is the curse of Babylon,” he raged. “I will tear it all down. The CIA has a secret prison under this building and they’re keeping Lisa in a cell. I have to know if she’s alive.”
Keith was talking loud enough now, people on the sidewalk heard him and looked up. Larry was thinking, “Geez, now we got a situation.”
He pulled the police car in front of the library across the street. He got out of the car and stood in the street, “Keith, it’s me. You know who I am, right?”
“Larry, yeah, I see you. Well, see this knapsack. I have a bomb. I have the power now. It is time for the truth. Jesus guides us all. And I will smite thee and free the minions.”
Larry had to counter the threat, “Nobody’s gonna smite nobody. Smiting is against the law and we just don’t do that kind of thing around here. Put down the backpack and come down right now.”
“If I come down, the CIA will torture me just like they are torturing Lisa.”
A crowd gathered. In LaConner a crowd is six or more people, but it had all the dimensions of a crowd, milling about, hesitant, seeing the cop, seeing the man on the roof, and wondering who it was.
Amy Hahn the librarian looked out the window from her desk, confirming her hunch – it was going to be a weird day, but weird in a good way? Maybe, because it was time for the truth – the Man with the Explosive Device gets to set the agenda, at least for a while. “Reality is a beautiful thing,” Amy said. There was a bench on the sidewalk outside the door where she could watch. “I’ll take a look-see,” she said, “first shoo the children home.” But none were present.
It’s like if you had the money, you could hire an aeroplane to do your message in skywriting. Keith didn’t have the money, but he could tinker with electronics, and he knew that he could build a bomb, and further, people like Larry knew he could build a bomb, and now he only had to convince them of the righteousness of his cause. They would join him in his battle with the anti-Christ.
“Written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond, saith Jeremiah, chapter twenty-two, verse one. See, I have it written on the back of my jacket, and the people will now the truth,” Keith cried.
Larry was looking steady, projecting calmness with his posture, not reactive, not tense, breathing easy.
Fred Martin, most sublime Methodist, genteel Rotarian, compassionate, conservative, pharmacist and former mayor, came from behind the counter at the drugstore and went out to the street. He looked up and saw Keith. He saw Larry and he walked over to confer.
“There’s time, I’m going to move slowly,” Larry said to Fred. “If I tell the people to move back, they’ll become alarmed. If I call the sheriff for back up, he’s just going to barge in and take over and shoot the man. People could get hurt.”
Fred responded with papal dignity, “Don’t call the sheriff. Keith is a sick man. This is our show in LaConner. We can get him down easy.”
Larry nodded, staying focused, gauging the crowd.
“We need to get everybody out of the Lighthouse,” Larry said.
“I can do that,” Fred said. He walked slowly over to the restaurant door, walked in, and came out a few minutes later. “No one is in there but Ernie and he won’t leave. The cooks and waitresses are out in the parking lot.”
Keith was mumbling quietly, swinging his backpack, watching birds fly overhead.
Barbara Cram, with her hoarse and hacked voice and her indifferent haircut, was the loudest woman and the best meat-and-potatoes cook in LaConner. An un-paid and un-appointed social worker, she was once awarded the Girl Scouts Medal for First Degree Meddling in the Affairs of Other People. She got a phone call at her home on Fourth Street up on the hill. She usually found out the LaConner gossip minutes before it even happened, so she was on this one like right now. Into the phone she said, “Keith Brown? That crazy bastard. I’m coming down.”
She grabbed her cigarettes and lighter, came down the hill, right down the Benton Street stairs and took it all in. “I’m gonna help.”
She strode up to Larry and Fred. “This is going to be a long day. You fellas could use a cup of coffee, I’ll bet.”
“Yeah, sure, Barbara.”
With that she left the major domos and walked right into the Lighthouse Inn despite Larry’s cry, “Hey, don’t go in there.”
She came out five minutes later with a tray of coffees, looked up at Keith, said “How’s the weather up there, handsome?” and started to pass around the cups.
Stern now, Larry demanded, “Unauthorized bystanders need to stay at least one hundred feet back from the incident.”
“Don’t be a jerk, Larry. He isn’t going to hurt anyone,” Barbara said.
“But he might.”
Brian Healey closed his shop for the nonce. Located in the Pier Seven building, which a lot of people considered bad luck in the first place, he seemed to think it was funny to name his business “Cheap Trinkets for Tourists” explaining, “well, that’s what people say anyway.” But business was awful, and people suspected the cause was actually his personality.
Brian walked over to the scene, looked up at Keith and said, “Shoot him.”
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
Jeremiah, 17. 9
Tom Robbins and Cynthia Sibanda were skipping down the Benton Street stairs whistling the theme from the Pink Panther. Cynthia was a black-skinned beauty and Tom Robbins was a Virginian by birth, so gallantry came to him naturally. Together they would make romantic history. They stopped at a landing half-way down the stairs, being at eye-level with the Lighthouse Inn roof across the street.
Keith spotted Tom and Cynthia, saw their happy smiles, and began to shout. “Beelzebub, meet thy doom. “
“You horse’s ass,” Tom called back and considered that a kind of praise, for his love of horses going away and that’s what you see when they go away, like a mare with glistening, chestnut-brown firmly muscled hips, like two Brazil nuts in a creamy nougat. Tom coulda wrote a book about a horse’s ass and you would learn things you never knew were there.
And somehow, like the other bystanders, he did not sense approaching death. Keith did have a bomb. And he might detonate the device, and people might be killed and injured, and yet no one took it seriously, let alone Tom Robbins, who was a serious man for all that.
“Cindy, we can sit here on this bench on the stairway landing, being halfway up and halfway down,” Tom said. He knew about the hidden plum tree next to the landing, behind the rampant blackberry vines. There, under the plum tree, was a shrine to Saint Bridget, just a small statue amid a tiny clearing, a place for votive candles. No one knew it was there except Tom, and he only suspected it. “Saint Bridget was a holy woman and the patron saint of folks like you and me,” he told Cindy. “She will protect us, although I believe more in circus monkeys.”
“Monkeys are like gods in my home in Zimbabwe,” Cynthia said, “ but we also love Princess Diana as well as Michael Jackson. Is that man going to blow up his bomb?”
“No, my African beauty, although he has the madness and power of Shaka Zulu. Fate has done Keith cruelly and people have made him small. This is his revenge, his day in the sun. Let us repose and hear his words,” Tom said.
Keith almost winked, “Beelzebub, you will fear me. I call you out. We will both be destroyed this day.”
Tom cried back, “Monkey’s uncle!”
Behold, I will make thee a terror to thyself, and to all thy friends.
Jeremiah, 20: 4
Big Janet kept playing Pac-Man on her stool at the LaConner Tavern. She had to pee really bad, but she was approaching the All-Skagit-Valley Points record and she determined to stick it out.
Roger Cayou and Chico Narkowitz came out of the LaConner Tavern to watch. “This is going to be good,” Roger said. “I could really use a slice of watermelon right about now.”
Chico took a broader view. He pushed back his hat, tilted his head skyward and held forth, “It kind of reminds me of World War II. After Pearl Harbor, we got afraid that the Japanese Navy might send submarines up through Deception Pass to invade Skagit Bay and conquer LaConner. I mean, it could have happened. So the Coast Guard had us build a concrete artillery defense camp out on Goat Island to repel the invaders and that’s what I did during the war – keep those guns ready.”
“A waste of time,” Roger said. “Those Japanese never came near.”
“Darn right, they stayed away. We had those big guns on Goat Island and scared ‘em off. So I would call us a winner.”
“So?”
“So we’re going to sit on this bench, and you eat your slice of watermelon and we’ll scare off the demon that’s driving Keith Brown to madness. That’s how we keep our town in a good way – just hold on fast and keep a good spirit.”
Keith Brown, on the roof of the Lighthouse Inn, with a credible explosive device in his backpack, knowing this was his last day as a free man, had the strength of ten men. The air had a burning clarity. His skin glowed with violent bliss. He spread his arms wide like Christ crucified. “I have never been so alive,” he said.
Down on the street, at ground zero, Larry looked around at the gathering, “I guess everybody is here. Maybe we can talk him down.”
But everyone was not there. What about Don Coyote? Don Coyote was not on the scene. He was watching from behind a hedge in back of the Garden Club. Don Coyote, it should be explained, was a real person. He watched and saw many things, but, like a leopard in Africa, he was rarely seen.
That left Jimmy and Hitch and Aurora Jellybean some ways off, a bit south of the drama, not yet sucked in. “Larry don’t want us around,” Jimmy said.
“Will anyone get hurt?” Aurora asked.
“It’s only a hoot,” Hitch said
.
“I don’t like watching, we should head back,” Jimmy said. “Keith is my friend and he’s a bum. He should get a job mowing lawns. Like in the spring when we go picking daffodils at Lefeber’s, you can make $50 a day doing that. Zappa does even better because he’s all cranked up. I’ve seen Zappa pick 8,000 daffodils in a day. That’s $80 and you’re rich. The point is you work every day in March, all muddy and wet and cold, and the wind is blowing and you get too tired to think. That’s why I like it. You just walk and pick, walk and pick, it’s like total Zen. Your mind is empty. No worries and no fear. But Keith won’t go, he just sits out there at Fishtown looking at old porno magazines. Crazy enough, I guess. Now he’s going to get on the news. I hate it. KIRO-TV will get here, and then it all goes ballistic. We gotta keep this in town, act like nothing much is going on. This is our show. If everybody stays cool we can talk him down.”
“So you need to do something, Jimmy,” Hitch said.
“Yeah, Jimmy, you’re the man,” Aurora said.
______________________________________________________
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Note. For people who don’t live in the Skagit Valley, several commercial farms in the valley grow hundreds of acres of tulips and daffodils for the fresh market. Daffodils are harvested in March, tulips in April. Big crews of farm workers pick all these flowers, one at a time. In 1982, this labor was still performed by local residents. Zappa was a champion picker, although the legendary “Kathy” surpassed even him, going over 10,000 flowers a day more than once.
Don Coyote. Don Coyote is a real person, but that is not his real name.
Disclaimer. The resemblance of any characters in this story to actual persons is a coincidence and not intentional. No offense is intended either. If this story can rise to the level of good beach reading, the author will be very satisfied.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Friday, July 06, 2012
Insanity is Contagious
Insanity is contagious.
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22
On that summer afternoon in 1982, Joy Helen Sykafoos made potato latkes for Marc Zappa in her float house on the Sand Spit. It was a one-room curtained cabin, the bed was in sight and at hand and the swallows were twittering on Dunlap Bay.
“You have everything I need,” Zappa said. His drug-addled brain said go, and Joy said stop but with the smallest of doubts. Her refusal had a quavering note. “I have very little,” she answered. “My heart is empty.” She gripped the table tightly as Zappa swiped up the last potato crumb from his plate.
An unusual glimmer of clarity came to Zappa’s mind, “I think maybe I’m coming on a little too strong. Well, I’m very stupid. I mean we could go for a walk or something.” Devious again and sheepishly he said “I guess, I’m begging.”
“Don’t be a beggar, just leave. Look, you can come back some time, okay? Get out of here.”
Now she gripped him on his wrist, and not quavering, nor hostile she said “Go.”
He stepped out on to the dock. She followed. He paused, “Remember that time this spring. Didn’t I get this feeling that you....”
“Go”
“Have you seen Jimmy?"
“Jimmy and Hitch were on their way into town.”
“I gotta find Jimmy and tell him about this dream. I was hearing voices.”
“Go,” she said.
Then she reached up and kissed him.
I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair,
Floating like a zephyr on the summer air.
Aurora Jellybean looked in the mirror. “Aurora Jellybean is not my real name because I am not a real person,” said. She smeared the bright cherry-red lipstick across her mouth and puckered up her lips and gave the mirror a wet, smacking kiss. “I used to be a girl from Ballard and I had a real name. I was Elizabeth Holtzman and I grew up playing hop scotch on the sidewalk with my friends. I was a real person, but then Tom Robbins put me in his book and I became one of his characters. I like living in his book because you meet giant lizards and walking jelly rolls and fairy-tale queens and talking mules. Francis, the Talking Mule, I always liked that movie, but he isn’t in the book. I will go to Tom Robbin’s house right now today and tell him I want Francis the Talking Mule to go into his next book, otherwise I will get mad. And I want a heron that lays golden eggs in the book, and holly trees that grow rubies, and a lemonade fountain.”
Aurora Jellybean put down her lipstick. “I think I will have a glass of wine,” she said.
Aurora went to the frig and found her chilled Chardonnay. Ah, rosy-cheeked Aurora! Not in the beauty and bloom of youth, her brown eyes glistened with sorrow, her cherry-red lipstick could not quite conceal the lack-luster droop of her mouth, when long-back she pouted like a Shirley Temple doll, now she was alone more and more often, drinking wine by the window, drawing valentines on colored paper with cut outs and she mailed them to Charlie Krafft, and maybe Charlie Krafft would come to see her, but he never came. Brian Healey used to come and knock on her door, if he was drunk enough, and she would let him in. Brian was practically a Republican and not the nice kind either. His self-loathing balanced her despair. They flopped like beached fish on her maroon brocade bedspread. He was gone before she woke up in the morning and she only felt the headache.
“I’ll never let Brian Healey in the book. He’s a real person and I hate him,” she said.
She looked out the big picture window facing Swinomish Channel. She had a cozy apartment in the back half of the building where the Waterfront Café used to be.
“I am an artist. I create wonderful paintings of beautiful children playing in a garden of flowers. My life is imagination. I am a pillow for the comfort of humanity. I am a friend to seals and snails and silver bells. I lie under the cedar trees and spiders spin webs in my hair. I am the pink oyster shells of a dream island in Skagit Bay.”
This reverie banished the headache caused by her dalliance with a stupid man. She got up and dressed, selecting baubles and various velvets from her many-drawered dresser. “I will take a stroll,” she said to her imaginary cat. Out the door she walked to the front of the building on First Street in downtown LaConner.
And as Aurora Jellybean put on her baubles and velvets, preparing to step out, Jimmy and Hitch rounded the corner of Douglas Street, leaving behind them the sanctified odor of the Moore-Clark fish food factory, and facing the beckoning welcome of tired old downtown LaConner, once famous for dogs sleeping in the street, famous for gentle Swinomish men who got their beer in town, famous for the fifty-year sleep of a Brigadoon village, now wakened by artists and poets, now blossoming, at least in the view of some people, into what they hoped to be a major tourist attraction.
Jimmy and Hitch paused at the south end of First Street.
They faced a street that echoed with ominous possibilities, two facing rows of western-front buildings, going four long blocks -- the Nordic Café, where farmers smoked Camels and drank coffee at the round table in the early morning , the Barbershop Exchange where Roberta Nelson sold gifts and made skeptical comments, the One Moore Store where Bud “Foghorn” Moore served ice cream while he plotted promotions for the LaConner Chamber of Commerce, the North Fork Books where Ben Munsey placed a used copy of Finnegan’s Wake as a doorstop, and claimed to have read every word of Doris Lessing, and the LaConner tavern, where Roger Cayou, from the Swinomish tribe, was explaining to Chico Narkowitz, grandmaster of the Wagon Wheel Lodge, just exactly why the tribe had placed a carved image of a white man on the stop of the Swinomish totem pole – above the bear and the wolf and eagle and the killer whale.
“You shouldn’t have a white man up there, Larry,” Chico said. He called Roger Larry because Chico had this habit of calling everybody by the first name that popped in his head. He said it was easier than remembering.
Roger, with a merry twinkle in his good black-hued eye, and the submarine vision of a sea lion in his smoky-blue damaged eye, smiled through a few missing teeth and still managed to look like the smartest guy in the room. (He was Hitch’s uncle, by the way.) “We carved a figure of Franklin Roosevelt on the top of the totem pole because he built us some houses in the Depression. These were the first regular white houses we ever had.”
“So, why don’t you put me on the totem pole?” Chico asked. “I let some of your relatives stay at the Wagon Wheel Inn, didn’t charge ‘em hardly anything. “
“I could paint your face on the side of my truck, how’s that?” Roger said.
In the tavern, near the door, Big Janet ignored everybody, her 225-pound lesbian hulk of a football body hunched over the Pac Man video game and she yelled, “I’m getting past 225,000 points, which will be the all-time LaConner record – anybody comes near me, I’ll rip their head off.”
Down the street Cecil Bruner dusted crystal glasses in the Den of Antiquity and found a piece of sheet music with an old tune, Cattails a Plenty, “such a sweet song,” she said and she began humming.
Red Reynolds adjusted his wig and went back to sleep in his lawn chair in front of the Flying Barn pottery studio.
Fred Martin, the sublime Methodist, the most perfect Rotarian, with soft-pink cheeks and wispy thinning hair, adjusted heart remedies on his shelf of pharmaceuticals at the LaConner Drugstore. He had been the druggist since 1955. He was a kind and understanding man, if a bit stern at times, and he wore his pants a little too high.
Amy Hahn was the librarian at the LaConner library. Getting that job made her so happy she began to grow freckles, but on this day in July she knew something was up. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was different, some kind of hum in the air. I swear – I don’t like to admit this – but it seemed extraterrestrial.”
Then there was the Rainier bank, the Lighthouse Inn restaurant, the Black Swan café, the Post Office, the Pier Seven building, Pearl’s operatic restaurant, and finally the Frog Hospital itself, the Quonset Hut, LaConner’s anchor store, selling rib-eye steaks to prosperous fishermen, selling socks and sweaters, beer, ice, and a few good vegetables, potato chips and Fritos, Sophie’s special fried chicken, D batteries, shoe laces, Campbell’s soup, Snickers bars and much more. But Mr. Grobschmidt, the proprietor, did not serve on that day. He was gone fishing someplace. Instead, Roger Byrn manned the produce aisle, polishing the tomatoes, “such lovely girls” he said as he patted them into place.
Above this all, going up the Benton Street stairs to Second Street on the hill, just two doors down from the Methodist Church dwelt author Tom Robbins, who was not the Magic Christian, but who sponsored the Fighting Vegetables volleyball team.
Tom looked up from his writing desk and said to Cynthia, his cupcake of the month, “Something funny is going on down there on First Street. I can’t write anymore. The characters want to quit the book and go downtown. If my characters quit I have no book. I may as well follow them. Maybe we’re all going to end up in somebody else’s book."
“Tom, it’s all love,” Cynthia smiled, “put your notebook in the refrigerator. Let’s go see the circus.”
Jimmy and Hitch could see the Quonset Hut, past the ominous stretch of shops. They had to run the gauntlet to get to the beer. They girded their loins. “You see, we’re like warriors of old, like Achilles in the Iliad, facing the foe,” Hitch said, “We’re going after the great whale himself, that was Moby Dick.”
“How do you know that shit?” Jimmy said.
“You think I’m a Indian I don’t read. But I read everything, Hemingway, Faulkner, Mark Twain, Moby Dick, all the American stories. I quit high school so I could read books.”
“Why you telling me this now?”
“You think I’m a dumb Indian.”
“You are dumb, and you all look like each other and you don’t even have last names – Bob Joe Paul Jim Billy Frank.”
“Y tu mama.”
“Huh?”
“Y tu hermana….You don’t even know Spanish. You’re a dumb Dutch monkey.”
Jimmy and Hitch just stood there and smiled at each other.
“But it’s a little different today, like it won’t be the way it used to be,” Jimmy said. “We gotta watch out.”
“We could stop at the tavern and talk to Roger,” Hitch said.
“No, Roger knows what’s going on, but we’re going to see it ourselves,“ Jimmy said with a surprising confidence.
Destiny. It’s the kind of word that came in your head when you’re more than halfway through a 12-pack, peaking with alcoholic pleasure, about to hit the sand dunes on the Sand Spit, about to howl in the surge beyond language, yet today of all these summer afternoons, Jimmy felt destined, and he would feel it sober in a small lifting of his chest, that he could rise up and face it square, and that he was a man for all that and not some concoction of what other people said about him.
That’s when it happened. At 2:20 p.m. Keith Brown strode into the Lighthouse Inn carrying his backpack over one shoulder and found Ernie Benson wiping off cocktail glasses, getting ready for the evening trade.
“Isn’t there a trap door up to the roof in there?” Keith asked, pointing toward the storage room behind the brown.
“Yeah, sure.” Ernie said, not thinking.
Keith walked right past him strongly, into the storage room and quickly to the ladder and quickly up the ladder, throwing off the trap floor and clambering on to the roof with his back pack. Keith looked around, put the trap door back on the roof, and then stretched to the sun quietly, breathing deeply, in the last five minutes of what remained of his sanity.
Then he walked to the edge of the roof and called out to the street below, “I need you to bring Lisa. You bring her to me now, I’ve got a bomb in this bag. I will blow this place to kingdom come unless you find Lisa and bring her to me.”
_______________________________________
Notes. This is a story. Any resemblance to real people is a coincidence. Here are the seven segments so far written. You can find all of this on the Frog Hospital blog. Or I will send you the whole story via e-mail attachment.
1.The Ponderous River. The Ponderous River is the title of the opening segment of this story. It comes from a poem by Clyde Sandborn. Clyde had quit drinking and gone to live in Big Lake, but I have a feeling he will be showing up in LaConner as the plot thickens.
2. Skunk Cabbage Blues. Robert Sund probably sang this tune on his autoharp. Can you hear it?
3. Joy Helen Sykafoos goes to a Wedding. Joy comes back from Oklahoma.
4. Under the Volcano. Also called the Wisdom of Charlie Berg.
5. He’s Out at Fishtown. He is.
6. Insanity is Contagious, which you have just read and I hope you liked it.
7. Jesus Wept. The title of next week’s installment is “Jesus Wept,” which is a verse from John’s gospel, 11:35. This is the chapter where Jesus comforts Martha and Mary on the death of their brother Lazarus, and then he raises Lazarus from the grave.
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Friday, June 29, 2012
"He's Out At Fishtown"
By Fred Owens
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
― Saul Bellow, Herzog
“Have you seen Keith Brown? He’s been looking for Lisa again. He came to the Lighthouse and started giving Ernie Benson a hard time. This is putting me on the spot -- I gotta watch out for him now.” It was Larry Yonally asking.
“He’s out at Fishtown,” Jimmy said, leaning into the window of the police car.
Larry was the LaConner police chief. He had one full-time deputy and a part-time reserve officer on his staff, which was enough to keep the peace in a town of only 650 souls. Larry had slicked-back dirty blonde hair and pretty blue eyes. He was close to thirty in age, but he wore a 12-year-old grin at times. He had a prepubescent pudginess in his torso, like he had been eating large boxes of buttered popcorn at the movies. That was how he looked -- youthful. Thankfully, Larry did not compensate for his physical immaturity by assuming a tough-guy pose.
A tough-guy cop would never do in LaConner -- you had to just go easy on people, let the drunks find their way home after the tavern closed, maybe just walk into the bar around midnight and say a quick hello, but not stick around, not watching people like a cop, but just being officer friendly – Larry did that well. He kept the peace. That was his job.
He lived with his wife in a doublewide on Caledonia Street in South LaConner and kept his police “vehicle” (cops like to say “vehicle” instead of “car”) parked in his driveway face forward, ready to go, being on-call at odd hours.
But this was day time. He drove down Caledonia to South First Street and saw Jimmy and Hitch walking down the middle of the road, which people did because there was no sidewalk and no traffic either. But Larry spotted them and waited at the intersection to ask about Keith Brown.
Keith was certifiable. He lived out in Fishtown and had been out there for ten years already. In the fabled saga of Fishtown, 1982 was part of the “Empty Years.” The poets and artists who had enriched the river cabins had since departed. Charlie Krafft had taken a studio in Chinatown in Seattle. Steve Herold started a graphic arts business, also in Seattle. Beau Diller and his wife, the Turkish Terror, had rented a house in LaConner. Paul Hansen was still on the river, but he was occupying a decent rental, meaning a house with electricity and plumbing, up at Al’s Landing.
That only left Keith and Art Jorgensen and the empty cabins between them. Art was becoming a true hermit, he never came into town, and you never saw him go anywhere. He just stayed in his cabin and worked a little on his boats. He was a master craftsman, woodworker and sculpture. He was just not projecting out into the world.
So that left Keith all by himself at the other end of the boardwalk, with no one to talk to and he began hearing the voices again.
A lot of people wondered where Fishtown was and how to get there, and the poets always said if you look for it you won’t find it, but if you don’t look for it, well there it is.
Anyway, you had to walk across Ken Staffanson’s field, which he rented from the Chamberlain family, to get to the cabins. Or you could drive up to Margaret Lee’s farm at the top of Gages Hill, where Margaret kept a few dairy cows and she had the finest river, bay and skyline view in all of Puget Sound. But you needed her permission to drive up there and park your car, and then traipse down the hill and then get on the boardwalk which was built to go around a gigantic rock and there you were – in Fishtown. Charlie Krafft would come out to Margaret Lee’s farm and when he got to the boardwalk, he would gratefully say hello to the blackberry branches which fell over the path, and he would greet them, each branch, and carefully push them aside, so they might spring back into place – that was the kind of place that Fishtown was. But Charlie and the others were gone and Keith was by himself.
Charlie said, “Keith only made any sense about half the time. You would be talking about something, like fixing a hole in the boat, or going into town for groceries and having a normal conversation, and then in a split second it was like you were on the north pole of Mars -- totally disconnected. But we were all like that back then, so it didn’t matter.”
Keith was no artist but he had his projects – building solar collectors that empowered 5-watt tiny light bulbs and collecting manure for methane-powered generators, which he built from scrap parts and then, by candle light on windy winter nights, he read mail order catalogs fat as phone books for obscure electric diodes. He could turn a lawn mower into a computer or vice versa, a real electronic genius.
But people got busier and had less time for long talks with Keith. They stopped hanging around all day – they had paying work and lived in town, and Keith just got crazier and paranoid in a bad way. He started talking about the anti-Christ and the CIA and how his mail was being intercepted by the FBI and how he would be going on a special mission to restore the True Order of the nation, and how there were bodies buried underneath the Lighthouse Restaurant in LaConner.
He spoke with Jesus as well, and became conversant with the thunderous condemnations of Old Testament prophets and he began writing their instructions and verses in felt-tip pen on his brown field jacket, and then on side of his van -- “Woe unto you,” quote Jeremiah. And, going into town -- a small town where people had a great deal of patience for eccentricity – he began to worry people and then to frighten them. “I hope he gets all right,” someone might have said. “I hope he doesn’t have a gun.” Other people said Keith would never hurt anyone, but they said it with less confidence.
Larry knew Keith Brown and he hoped to monitor the situation, but the reports were disturbing – Keith was looking for Lisa again and that could be very bad.
Jimmy and Hitch didn’t have any fresh insight to offer Larry and he drove off.
“What’s wrong with Keith?” Jimmy asked.
“Nothing,” Hitch said.
“But Larry is worried.”
“Well, he’s a cop.”
Jimmy and Hitch continued down Caledonia Street on their journey to the Frog Hospital.
Two key South LaConner personalities lived on the north side of Caledonia Street. Guy Anderson, the famed artist, lived with his piano and cats in a self-designed hutch with large blank canvases and the luscious ivory-white pigments of man-loving torsos in celestial poses.
The basal granite of LaConner’s hill began even in his backyard and swelled upward steeply to the Sacred Heart Catholic church, built in 1899, but Guy Anderson was of and for the people of the South LaConner lowlands. He would greet Jimmy and Hitch with a broad smile, and Jimmy didn’t feel small or look at his shoes.
“He’s one of us,” Jimmy said.
“Guy is all right” Hitch said.
But Caledonia Street had the dynamic tension of a border region between the lowlands of South LaConner and the hill. The two adventurers, bound for the Frog Hospital, turned the corner on Caledonia going one block westward to the Don Wright estate, he being the flipside of Guy Anderson’s aesthetic, he being called Don Wrong by Sam Cram, he being for many people the defining personage of South LaConner, defined by his yard’s abundance of un-pruned blackberries concealing rusted riding lawnmowers and old tires, surmounted near his front door by the most gorgeous abundant climbing yellow roses which were the envy of every serious gardener in town, and yet all he ever did for those roses was flip filter cigarette butts on them on his way out the door to his job as a fork-lift operator at the Moore-Clark fish food factory right next door to his house.
It was a blue whale of a building, the old Moore-Clark warehouse, with mighty timbers of old-growth fir beams, a cathedral space filled to the rafters with 100-pound sacks of fish pellets -- pellets made from the guts of dead fish, ground up, processed, vitaminized, packaged, shipped around the region, and fed to nursery stocks of new-born fish that would one day die themselves and be fed to the next generation.
Moore-Clark and the 25 men who worked there, including Don Wright on his fork lift, were an essential part of the cycle of fishing life in Puget Sound and the wages were good too. It smelled like dead fish and it smelled like money to the townsfolk.
And the smelt loved it. Schools of tiny smelt flooded Swinomish Channel in winter months, dining on the unfiltered effluvia of Moore-Clark’s fish food factory. So the big fish ate the little fish out in the ocean, but then the little fish came back to eat what remained of the big fish. It went round and round, and a man could stand on the dock with a pole and a jigged hook and catch a mess of smelt for his dinner, being a part of this grand drama. And sail boats slow-motored past rafted gillnetters on the channel, past purse seiners, past dinghies and skiffs, underneath sea gull skies.
Jimmy and Hitch walked by the Moore-Clark warehouse. They saw Don Wright on his fork lift. He said hello, nodding his dark-rimmed glasses and his gimme hat and his pre-grizzled beard. Don was maybe half-redneck. He drank as much beer as anyone on the Sand Spit, but he had a job too.
“What are we going to do about Keith?” Jimmy asked himself, but out loud. “He’s my friend. If he comes into town and he tries to find Lisa, this could get pretty bad.”
“Trouble comes when it comes,” Hitch said. “Just listen to the voices.”
Potato Love
Orville Riggles grew red potatoes on the west side of Mount Vernon. He was stubborn about that, growing three acres of spuds, which you couldn’t do. The real farmers grew 40-acre fields of potatoes and had the equipment for that – plows, drills, and harvesters. And home gardeners planted a few 50-foot rows and put the potatoes in their root cellars
.
But three-acres didn’t make sense – way too many potatoes to eat yourself, but way short of a commercial profit – Orville Riggles didn’t care about that. He was a good enough welder to build his own harvester complete with hydraulic fittings. By God, he was his own man for all that.
Marc Daniel, being his own man for all that, came by Riggle’s farm that July day in 1982, to pick up a sack of new red potatoes. He made an offer to pull weeds for an hour or two, but Riggle’s just waved him off and handed him a big sack.
Marc was learning to be organic and countrified, but he mainly fueled his interests with cocaine deals. You buy the cocaine, you step on it, you sell it, and you can keep plenty for yourself and buy a quart of Wild Turkey bourbon into the bargain.
He was from New Jersey and he talked very fast and loud, between cigarettes, hoarsely shouting, walking and stomping from car to field, to shack, back to town, running his mouth, three steps ahead of all-out crazy, and going too fast for the law which had not seen his likes in these parts.
Marc Daniel had just enough sense to stay out of jail, and people called him Zappa because that’s what he looked like. “I look more like Frank Zappa than he does,” he said and he grinned and shouted and kept talking.
He drove out to the Sand Spit with his sack of new red potatoes, hoping to see Joy Helen Sykafoos, hoping she would make him some potato latkes like his mother made him back in New Jersey. You make latkes with shredded potatoes and grated onions, bound with flour, salt and eggs, fry them in hot oil until they get crispy brown on the outside and melting warm inside. Just like home.
Joy was home on her float shack. She cooked on a two-burner stove fueled by a 5-gallon propane tank. She had three beautifully seasoned cast iron skillets in different sizes. And she had curtains, not dainty, but feminine, and the red heart tattooed on her forearm to remind her about not being a fool for love.
Guys like Zappa would barge in – or try to. But Joy would slam the door shut and scare them off, mumbling something about witch craft and herbal potions, which wasn’t true, but it worked, because she did not, not, not want that kind of company.
The trouble is that Zappa came all the way from New Jersey with a head of cocaine-fueled steam and made it all the way into her one-room kitchen and cabin. She had to feed him to get rid of him. He was too skinny. He talked all day and he never ate. Someone needed to take care of him.
“This was meant to be,” she said. “I will make you latkes. But you understand, I am part Indian. I am from Oklahoma. I’m not your mother and I don’t know how to cook latkes.”
“But you said it,” Zappa answered. “It was meant to be.”
His eyes were on the bed.
Subscriptions. We need your help to continue this story. Please go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001.
Plot Summary. Today’s passage is the fifth installment in a story about Jimmy and Hitch, two Sand Spit shack dwellers on the outskirts of LaConner, a small fishing and tourist town at the mouth of the Skagit River in Washington state. In the story, Jimmy and Hitch are making a beer run to the Frog Hospital, which is their nickname for the grocery store in the Quonset hut in downtown LaConner. Along the way they keep running into people they know, which is what happens in a small town, but things are going to get dicey and even dangerous. Today’s installment concludes with the pair coming round the corner from the Moore-Clark warehouse and about to enter downtown LaConner -- it’s gonna get complicated, and it might seem that they never make it to the Frog Hospital. I don’t even know myself, and I’m the guy who’s making this all up. I should re-state that Jimmy and Hitch are fictional characters, although some of the people they meet, like Don Wright, are as real as rain.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
7922 Santa Ana Rd
Ventura CA 93001
By Fred Owens
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
― Saul Bellow, Herzog
“Have you seen Keith Brown? He’s been looking for Lisa again. He came to the Lighthouse and started giving Ernie Benson a hard time. This is putting me on the spot -- I gotta watch out for him now.” It was Larry Yonally asking.
“He’s out at Fishtown,” Jimmy said, leaning into the window of the police car.
Larry was the LaConner police chief. He had one full-time deputy and a part-time reserve officer on his staff, which was enough to keep the peace in a town of only 650 souls. Larry had slicked-back dirty blonde hair and pretty blue eyes. He was close to thirty in age, but he wore a 12-year-old grin at times. He had a prepubescent pudginess in his torso, like he had been eating large boxes of buttered popcorn at the movies. That was how he looked -- youthful. Thankfully, Larry did not compensate for his physical immaturity by assuming a tough-guy pose.
A tough-guy cop would never do in LaConner -- you had to just go easy on people, let the drunks find their way home after the tavern closed, maybe just walk into the bar around midnight and say a quick hello, but not stick around, not watching people like a cop, but just being officer friendly – Larry did that well. He kept the peace. That was his job.
He lived with his wife in a doublewide on Caledonia Street in South LaConner and kept his police “vehicle” (cops like to say “vehicle” instead of “car”) parked in his driveway face forward, ready to go, being on-call at odd hours.
But this was day time. He drove down Caledonia to South First Street and saw Jimmy and Hitch walking down the middle of the road, which people did because there was no sidewalk and no traffic either. But Larry spotted them and waited at the intersection to ask about Keith Brown.
Keith was certifiable. He lived out in Fishtown and had been out there for ten years already. In the fabled saga of Fishtown, 1982 was part of the “Empty Years.” The poets and artists who had enriched the river cabins had since departed. Charlie Krafft had taken a studio in Chinatown in Seattle. Steve Herold started a graphic arts business, also in Seattle. Beau Diller and his wife, the Turkish Terror, had rented a house in LaConner. Paul Hansen was still on the river, but he was occupying a decent rental, meaning a house with electricity and plumbing, up at Al’s Landing.
That only left Keith and Art Jorgensen and the empty cabins between them. Art was becoming a true hermit, he never came into town, and you never saw him go anywhere. He just stayed in his cabin and worked a little on his boats. He was a master craftsman, woodworker and sculpture. He was just not projecting out into the world.
So that left Keith all by himself at the other end of the boardwalk, with no one to talk to and he began hearing the voices again.
A lot of people wondered where Fishtown was and how to get there, and the poets always said if you look for it you won’t find it, but if you don’t look for it, well there it is.
Anyway, you had to walk across Ken Staffanson’s field, which he rented from the Chamberlain family, to get to the cabins. Or you could drive up to Margaret Lee’s farm at the top of Gages Hill, where Margaret kept a few dairy cows and she had the finest river, bay and skyline view in all of Puget Sound. But you needed her permission to drive up there and park your car, and then traipse down the hill and then get on the boardwalk which was built to go around a gigantic rock and there you were – in Fishtown. Charlie Krafft would come out to Margaret Lee’s farm and when he got to the boardwalk, he would gratefully say hello to the blackberry branches which fell over the path, and he would greet them, each branch, and carefully push them aside, so they might spring back into place – that was the kind of place that Fishtown was. But Charlie and the others were gone and Keith was by himself.
Charlie said, “Keith only made any sense about half the time. You would be talking about something, like fixing a hole in the boat, or going into town for groceries and having a normal conversation, and then in a split second it was like you were on the north pole of Mars -- totally disconnected. But we were all like that back then, so it didn’t matter.”
Keith was no artist but he had his projects – building solar collectors that empowered 5-watt tiny light bulbs and collecting manure for methane-powered generators, which he built from scrap parts and then, by candle light on windy winter nights, he read mail order catalogs fat as phone books for obscure electric diodes. He could turn a lawn mower into a computer or vice versa, a real electronic genius.
But people got busier and had less time for long talks with Keith. They stopped hanging around all day – they had paying work and lived in town, and Keith just got crazier and paranoid in a bad way. He started talking about the anti-Christ and the CIA and how his mail was being intercepted by the FBI and how he would be going on a special mission to restore the True Order of the nation, and how there were bodies buried underneath the Lighthouse Restaurant in LaConner.
He spoke with Jesus as well, and became conversant with the thunderous condemnations of Old Testament prophets and he began writing their instructions and verses in felt-tip pen on his brown field jacket, and then on side of his van -- “Woe unto you,” quote Jeremiah. And, going into town -- a small town where people had a great deal of patience for eccentricity – he began to worry people and then to frighten them. “I hope he gets all right,” someone might have said. “I hope he doesn’t have a gun.” Other people said Keith would never hurt anyone, but they said it with less confidence.
Larry knew Keith Brown and he hoped to monitor the situation, but the reports were disturbing – Keith was looking for Lisa again and that could be very bad.
Jimmy and Hitch didn’t have any fresh insight to offer Larry and he drove off.
“What’s wrong with Keith?” Jimmy asked.
“Nothing,” Hitch said.
“But Larry is worried.”
“Well, he’s a cop.”
Jimmy and Hitch continued down Caledonia Street on their journey to the Frog Hospital.
Two key South LaConner personalities lived on the north side of Caledonia Street. Guy Anderson, the famed artist, lived with his piano and cats in a self-designed hutch with large blank canvases and the luscious ivory-white pigments of man-loving torsos in celestial poses.
The basal granite of LaConner’s hill began even in his backyard and swelled upward steeply to the Sacred Heart Catholic church, built in 1899, but Guy Anderson was of and for the people of the South LaConner lowlands. He would greet Jimmy and Hitch with a broad smile, and Jimmy didn’t feel small or look at his shoes.
“He’s one of us,” Jimmy said.
“Guy is all right” Hitch said.
But Caledonia Street had the dynamic tension of a border region between the lowlands of South LaConner and the hill. The two adventurers, bound for the Frog Hospital, turned the corner on Caledonia going one block westward to the Don Wright estate, he being the flipside of Guy Anderson’s aesthetic, he being called Don Wrong by Sam Cram, he being for many people the defining personage of South LaConner, defined by his yard’s abundance of un-pruned blackberries concealing rusted riding lawnmowers and old tires, surmounted near his front door by the most gorgeous abundant climbing yellow roses which were the envy of every serious gardener in town, and yet all he ever did for those roses was flip filter cigarette butts on them on his way out the door to his job as a fork-lift operator at the Moore-Clark fish food factory right next door to his house.
It was a blue whale of a building, the old Moore-Clark warehouse, with mighty timbers of old-growth fir beams, a cathedral space filled to the rafters with 100-pound sacks of fish pellets -- pellets made from the guts of dead fish, ground up, processed, vitaminized, packaged, shipped around the region, and fed to nursery stocks of new-born fish that would one day die themselves and be fed to the next generation.
Moore-Clark and the 25 men who worked there, including Don Wright on his fork lift, were an essential part of the cycle of fishing life in Puget Sound and the wages were good too. It smelled like dead fish and it smelled like money to the townsfolk.
And the smelt loved it. Schools of tiny smelt flooded Swinomish Channel in winter months, dining on the unfiltered effluvia of Moore-Clark’s fish food factory. So the big fish ate the little fish out in the ocean, but then the little fish came back to eat what remained of the big fish. It went round and round, and a man could stand on the dock with a pole and a jigged hook and catch a mess of smelt for his dinner, being a part of this grand drama. And sail boats slow-motored past rafted gillnetters on the channel, past purse seiners, past dinghies and skiffs, underneath sea gull skies.
Jimmy and Hitch walked by the Moore-Clark warehouse. They saw Don Wright on his fork lift. He said hello, nodding his dark-rimmed glasses and his gimme hat and his pre-grizzled beard. Don was maybe half-redneck. He drank as much beer as anyone on the Sand Spit, but he had a job too.
“What are we going to do about Keith?” Jimmy asked himself, but out loud. “He’s my friend. If he comes into town and he tries to find Lisa, this could get pretty bad.”
“Trouble comes when it comes,” Hitch said. “Just listen to the voices.”
Potato Love
Orville Riggles grew red potatoes on the west side of Mount Vernon. He was stubborn about that, growing three acres of spuds, which you couldn’t do. The real farmers grew 40-acre fields of potatoes and had the equipment for that – plows, drills, and harvesters. And home gardeners planted a few 50-foot rows and put the potatoes in their root cellars
.
But three-acres didn’t make sense – way too many potatoes to eat yourself, but way short of a commercial profit – Orville Riggles didn’t care about that. He was a good enough welder to build his own harvester complete with hydraulic fittings. By God, he was his own man for all that.
Marc Daniel, being his own man for all that, came by Riggle’s farm that July day in 1982, to pick up a sack of new red potatoes. He made an offer to pull weeds for an hour or two, but Riggle’s just waved him off and handed him a big sack.
Marc was learning to be organic and countrified, but he mainly fueled his interests with cocaine deals. You buy the cocaine, you step on it, you sell it, and you can keep plenty for yourself and buy a quart of Wild Turkey bourbon into the bargain.
He was from New Jersey and he talked very fast and loud, between cigarettes, hoarsely shouting, walking and stomping from car to field, to shack, back to town, running his mouth, three steps ahead of all-out crazy, and going too fast for the law which had not seen his likes in these parts.
Marc Daniel had just enough sense to stay out of jail, and people called him Zappa because that’s what he looked like. “I look more like Frank Zappa than he does,” he said and he grinned and shouted and kept talking.
He drove out to the Sand Spit with his sack of new red potatoes, hoping to see Joy Helen Sykafoos, hoping she would make him some potato latkes like his mother made him back in New Jersey. You make latkes with shredded potatoes and grated onions, bound with flour, salt and eggs, fry them in hot oil until they get crispy brown on the outside and melting warm inside. Just like home.
Joy was home on her float shack. She cooked on a two-burner stove fueled by a 5-gallon propane tank. She had three beautifully seasoned cast iron skillets in different sizes. And she had curtains, not dainty, but feminine, and the red heart tattooed on her forearm to remind her about not being a fool for love.
Guys like Zappa would barge in – or try to. But Joy would slam the door shut and scare them off, mumbling something about witch craft and herbal potions, which wasn’t true, but it worked, because she did not, not, not want that kind of company.
The trouble is that Zappa came all the way from New Jersey with a head of cocaine-fueled steam and made it all the way into her one-room kitchen and cabin. She had to feed him to get rid of him. He was too skinny. He talked all day and he never ate. Someone needed to take care of him.
“This was meant to be,” she said. “I will make you latkes. But you understand, I am part Indian. I am from Oklahoma. I’m not your mother and I don’t know how to cook latkes.”
“But you said it,” Zappa answered. “It was meant to be.”
His eyes were on the bed.
Subscriptions. We need your help to continue this story. Please go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001.
Plot Summary. Today’s passage is the fifth installment in a story about Jimmy and Hitch, two Sand Spit shack dwellers on the outskirts of LaConner, a small fishing and tourist town at the mouth of the Skagit River in Washington state. In the story, Jimmy and Hitch are making a beer run to the Frog Hospital, which is their nickname for the grocery store in the Quonset hut in downtown LaConner. Along the way they keep running into people they know, which is what happens in a small town, but things are going to get dicey and even dangerous. Today’s installment concludes with the pair coming round the corner from the Moore-Clark warehouse and about to enter downtown LaConner -- it’s gonna get complicated, and it might seem that they never make it to the Frog Hospital. I don’t even know myself, and I’m the guy who’s making this all up. I should re-state that Jimmy and Hitch are fictional characters, although some of the people they meet, like Don Wright, are as real as rain.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
7922 Santa Ana Rd
Ventura CA 93001
Thursday, June 21, 2012
The Wisdom of Charlie Berg
By Fred Owens
This is a continuation of the journey of Jimmy and Hitch to the Frog Hospital. It takes place in LaConner, in July of 1982.
“Only against death does man cry out in vain.”
― from Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Jimmy and Hitch left the wedding in Pioneer Park and came down the hill to South First Street, right there by Clayton James’s studio.
Jimmy had a sense of deep well-being as he came upon South Fourth Street. “This very spot,” he said to Hitch, “is the heart and soul of LaConner. There is some kind of magic in this spot, right here on this little street. It’s river magic. There are underground channels of water here. It just seems so mystical and so good and right.”
Jimmy felt so good that he had a troubling thought.
“Hitch, we’re all going to die,” Jimmy said.
“Nope, Swinomish people don’t ever die. We’ve always been here,” Hitch said.
“We’re all gonna die,” Jimmy said. “Just look up.”
“It’s a bird, it’s a plane…” Hitch said.
“No, look at Mount Baker. See? Over there. It’s a volcano and it’s going to explode and send a wall of mud and ice racing down the valley at 60 miles an hour and we’re all going to die,” Jimmy said.
“Not me,” Hitch said, “I have bird friends. The swallows will come and save me. When the mud flows, I will just fly away.””
“Okay, but I gotta think on this,” Jimmy said. “We could ask Clayton James….”
“Not Clay Man, he’s too happy,” Hitch said.
“Okay, we can ask Charlie instead,” Jimmy said. So they walked a little further to Charlie Berg’s house. Charlie was in the front yard dismantling a 1957 DeSoto. The DeSoto had a two-tone paint job. The body was aquamarine blue, and the roof was candy-copper-red.
“Old Man, Owl Man, Charlie Berg,” Hitch cried out by way of greeting. “Are we all gonna die?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “We live under a volcano and we’re all going to die. That’s why I keep these lawn chairs in the front yard. This is how I figure it – when she blows, the mud and ice come racing down the valley, first Concrete, then Lyman, Hamilton, Sedro-Woolley, one town after another all swallowed up, cows flung about like matchsticks, sirens blasting, people racing around, but not me – when I see that mud flow coming at LaConner I just sets me down in this lawn chair and watch the show. The End. We go out with a bang. It will be like the last surfer riding the biggest wave.”
Charlie had a brain the size of Buckminster Fuller and a milky cow-eyed kind of look on his face – that comes from seeing in all four directions, as he explained it – “I can see things in a vision, so I try never to focus. I let the rainbow dance and I can see all the colors.”
Charlie was dismantling the DeSoto. “I’m going to compost the entire car. I will lay out the fender panels in the sun, and these flocks of crows will come and chip off the paint, and then the metal will slowly rust and melt into the ground. Then blackberries will eventually consume the engine block. It will take a few hundred years to compost a DeSoto, so I better get started right away.”
“That makes sense,” Jimmy said, “but I think we’ll all be dead by then. Except Hitch.”
“After you guys die, I’m coming to take the car,” Hitch said.
Charlie’s house was the hippie capital of South LaConner, not the house itself, but the long chicken coop by the side. When you got to town with a backpack, you flaked out in Charlie’s chicken coop. You could stay there for a while until whatever happened next. Truman and Mary had the house before Charlie took it over. Truman played the violin and Mary was crazy. Mary slept with a lot of guys and Truman got mad about that and he couldn’t play nice songs on the violin anymore, so they split up. That’s when Charlie and his wife moved in. She made infused herbal vinegars on the back porch and Charlie studied recycling from Zell Young in Mount Vernon, who was a legend in that field. Somehow they made living and Charlie’s projects mushroomed all over the lot.
Jimmy and Hitch left – they still wanted to get some beer at the Frog Hospital. A little bit further down South Fourth Street, Dean Flood was coming out of his house, working his way down the wheel chair ramp to his car. His legs were in metal braces and he struggled with crutches.
“Hey Dean, how goes it?” Jimmy said.
“Helloow, whts foe thr ddlls ggd,” Dean said a big smile.
“I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Jimmy said.
“I fesh ths ewotuf, rssdd, is sat so?” Dean said, and he became annoyed because he had to repeat himself over and over again. People couldn’t understand him ever since the car wreck that crippled him. Guys came to hang out with him at his house and watch TV and women were solicitous of his well-being, but Dean was looking at life in a wheel chair. He took a remarkably cheerful attitude anyway.
“Lkosoow, rrtheiosui, g’bye,” he said and climbed into his car drove off, wandering erratically on the wrong side of the road.
“Geez,” Jimmy said when Dean left in his car. “I couldn’t handle it if I was him.”
“You’re not him,” Hitch said. “If you were really luck you might be me, but you’re not."
“We’re all gonna die,” Jimmy said.
Lipstick On Your Collar
Lipstick on your collar told a tale on you.
Lipstick on your collar said you were untrue.
Bet your bottom dollar you and I are through
Cause lipstick on your collar told a tale on you, yeah.
-- Connie Francis
Harriet’s cabin was perched on pilings over the edge of the breakwater on Swinomish Channel. She looked out her window to see sailboats motoring quietly out to Skagit Bay, and she heard the small waves lapping on the sea weed under the pilings. Harriet’s white underwear, neatly pinned on the clothes line, flapped gently in the afternoon breeze. It was high summer in the Skagit Valley. Blackberries were ripe for picking everywhere. The cabbage plants had spent their soft yellow blossoms and were forming seed pods. The tulip fields over by Beaver Marsh Road were falling down brown and ready for digging. Tourists flooded downtown LaConner slurping ice cream cones.
Harriet watched the passing of this season with complete approval, to her as natural as the exhale after the inhale, as natural as the dust on the gravel road next to her cabin. “Someone kicks up the dust, the wind moves it around, then it settles back down again,” she said to her cat. Harriet preferred speaking to her cat. She liked people well enough, but only to look at from a distance.
Joy Helen Sykafoos left the wedding and raced down the Sand Spit gravel road. She wasn’t mad or upset, she always drove that way. She came screeching to a halt in front of Harriet’s cabin.
The problem, as she saw it, was that she was thinking about Jimmy and she was pretty goddam sure that he was not thinking about her. This was intolerable. She only liked him a little bit, but he ought to be pining away for her, at least by her standards.
“Harriet, we need to talk,” she said, and this cry brought Harriet out of her repose and come to the door of the cabin. “Joy, look at the wild roses over there,” she said, but Joy got right to the point.
“Harriet, why do men act that way?” Joy asked.
“Because they fear death,” Harriet explained.
“Death?”
“Men fear death. That is why courage is so important to them, because without courage they are only boys crying for their mamas.”
“So Jimmy is just a boy?”
“And he’s not worth the trouble. He needs to find his courage again. He needs to accept death. When that happens he will be a good lover.”
“What happened to your man?”
“He’s gone. Died really. You end up alone. If you’re lucky like me, then you have this nice place. I’m up early every morning. In the summer I get up at 5 a.m. The sun is bright and it’s so quiet out here. I have children. I have grandchildren. What do I need? I make spaghetti and I cook cauliflower for dinner. I make eggs for breakfast. I feed the cats. I watch the sky and the sailboats.”
“But Jimmy?”
You’re too young to understand,” Harriet said. “Just be kind to him. Have a heart. I see him when he comes walking back from town late at night – he wants to be a man, he has that goodness, let him breathe.”
“Well….”
“I like your skirt, it’s got that frilly edge. It moves like the wind. For a woman – to hell with men – if you have good movement you have beauty and you have strength. Now, can I take a closer look at the turquoise?” Harriet asked. Joy held out her wrist with the turquoise bracelet -- such silver gleaming around the blue stone that held all colors deep and fine, catching the gleam of the sunshine on this summer afternoon.
Notes. Under the Volcano is a classic novel written by Malcolm Lowry and published in 1947. It tells of the despair of a British man with a minor diplomatic assignment in Mexico. He lived in Cuernavaca “under the volcano,” that is, in the shade of mighty Popocatepetl – an active volcano over 17,000 in elevation.
Connie Francis wrote and sang Lipstick On Your Collar in 1959. The tremendous power and sensitivity of her singing voice stems from a childhood in New Jersey. People, even urban people, come from the land where they are born, and New Jersey is as real as it gets.
Talking Points. Will Jimmy and Hitch ever get to the Frog Hospital? Yes, but there’s trouble brewing, in a bizarre plot that involves druggist Fred Martin, police chief Larry Yonnally, and Keith Brown, a long-time Fishtown
resident who has finally gone over the edge. It’s a dangerous situation but it might be that Jimmy saves the day.
Subscriptions. We need your help to continue this story. Please go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001.
.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
7922 Santa Ana Rd
Ventura CA 93001
Friday, June 15, 2012
Joy Helen Sykafoos Goes to a Wedding
By Fred Owens
Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch were walking into town to buy some beer at the Frog Hospital and this was turning into a very long journey. The time is July, 1982.
Jimmy and Hitch made off from talking with Robert Sund under the Rainbow Bridge. They went around the corner, past the boat launch, past Tom and Esther Clark’s house, going down Sherman Street past the warehouse, walking in the street under the shade of moss-covered maples that grew on the steep north slope of Pioneer Park. There was no traffic except Joy Helen Sykafoos when she pulled up in her VW van. She must have come back from a long trip, being glad to see Jimmy and Hitch and saying hi.
She was coming back to her float shack on the Sand Spit landing and she was glad to be home again and rid of the road dirt.
Joy admitted that she was from Oklahoma, from the town of Ardmore. “It wasn’t much, growing up there,” she said, “nothing but red dirt. I hope I never go back.”
“Well,” Hitch smiled, “you can take the Okie out of the mistletoe but you can’t dress … I forget how that goes.”
“I’m part Indian,” Joy said.
“Which part?” Hitch asked “Everybody in Oklahoma is part something. The red dirt got on the tires of your car – look you can see it.”
The VW van had red dirt stains, and big blue letters running down the side saying “Mexico Me Encanta.”
“Why do you have Spanish?” Jimmy asked.
“I was going to Mexico. I wanted to look the part,” Joy said. “But I didn’t go. I ended up back in Ardmore again – that’s a long story.”
Jimmy was looking at his feet. He was bashful. Joy was good-looking in a way – pretty, but she could have been softer. She had black hair with loose curls, fine skin but not pale, a figure not petite or too big either, it only depended on how she felt that day. And she had a red tattoo of a heart on her forearm. “I got the tattoo when I was back in Ardmore. The heart is for love,” she said. “Someday my prince will come -- only I don’t really believe that. I married Ralph eight years ago and he drained all the love energy out of me, but I guess I’ve been driving all day and no one to talk to. What are you fellas up to?”
“Not much,” one of them said.
“I got back just in time for the wedding. Are you going?” she said in a happy way. “They’re getting married in Pioneer Park in the pavilion. Alan and Karen are getting hitched. Paul Hansen is saying the vows. You can come.”
Jimmy and Hitch worked that one over. Free food and beer were definitely a plus. Alan and Karen lived tucked back in the willows just off Sullivan Slough. You couldn’t find their place unless you knew where it was. Jimmy sometimes paddled over there in his canoe to visit. He knew about the wedding. He knew the wide open nature of the invitation, but he hung back – maybe it was happiness of a wedding.
Hitch felt the same way, he said, ”I’ll just go home,” nodding his head toward the Swinomish reservation across the channel.
But Joy said to get in and they drove around to the park entrance and came into the picnic shelter for the festivities with balloons and children running around.
Karen was the prettiest, tallest red-headed woman in the Skagit Valley, she had red-golden curls and Irish skin. Alan was a redhead too. Marriage was a blessing. Paul Hansen came to officiate. He had a poet’s voice, loud and ranging, he could go from a deep baritone to a high-pitched whine. He wore cordovan shoes and a wool herringbone suit jacket, the only river rat who ever wore a tie, so he said the vows. Hansen was half Tao and half I Ching and he had penetrating eyes. Someone brought deviled eggs, plus entire picnic tables covered with pies, and a huge salmon barbecue, and a jug band playing banjo. Alan and Karen wore white flowing clothes and they danced round and round.
Joy felt wonderful. She began tapping her feet. Jimmy and Hitch could have drunk and ate all day but they hung back like they didn’t belong. Joy looked at Jimmy like he’ll never come and dance with me in a hundred years. But I’ll go over and kick his ass, she thought, “Why are you ashamed, Jimmy? You got shoes, don’t you? You got feet, you can move. Do you hear the music? What’s wrong with you, Jimmy Dee Fish Face?”
“She’s right, you gotta face like a fish, maybe a dog salmon with a hook nose,” Hitch said.
Jimmy mumbled and shrank down. He was a bum and his artist spirit inside was like a beaten boy. He made careful drawings of snow geese and herons, but no one ever saw them. He wanted to make mosaics or carve stone into the forms of heroic Greek women. He studied the shapes and colors of Swinomish totem art -- the strong shapes and primary colors of the bear and the eagle carved in cedar, but he was a bum who lived near a trash pile, and Joy was making him feel small for trying to make him feel big.
She put her arms on her hips and saw right through him. Okay, she said to herself, I don’t do saucy, but I’m going to do saucy right now. She made a smile and gave a toss of her hair and a slide to the side of her hips. Now Jimmy was really scared, but Hitch was not.
“Joy Jolly Go Lightly, do you love me?” Hitch said with a big grin. Jimmy punched him. Joy was disappointed, she put the sauce back in the pot and gave the two of them a long, sad, tender glance and walked to her VW van and drove back out to the Sand Spit.
“I guess we ought to go,” Jimmy said.
“She likes you,” Hitch said.
“No she doesn’t,” Jimmy said. “Let’s go.”
They headed down the hill and got to Fourth Street and saw Charlie Berg working on a car in his front yard.
Meanwhile Joy Helen Sykafoos pulled her VW van up alongside Harriet’s cabin and wanted to have a talk with her.
(to be continued)
Photo. The remains of Harriet’s cabin. The remains of Harriet's cabin on the Sand Spit. I never knew what her name was actually. This little cabin was perched on pilings on the edge of the breakwater, across from the entrance to Shelter Bay. There was an old woman who lived there -- she was friendly, but she never seemed to talk with anybody. And she always had her underwear neatly pinned on the clothes line outside.
Subscriptions. We need your help to continue this story. Please go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001.
Thank you very much.
Fred Owens
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
7922 Santa Ana Rd
Ventura CA 93001
By Fred Owens
Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch were walking into town to buy some beer at the Frog Hospital and this was turning into a very long journey. The time is July, 1982.
Jimmy and Hitch made off from talking with Robert Sund under the Rainbow Bridge. They went around the corner, past the boat launch, past Tom and Esther Clark’s house, going down Sherman Street past the warehouse, walking in the street under the shade of moss-covered maples that grew on the steep north slope of Pioneer Park. There was no traffic except Joy Helen Sykafoos when she pulled up in her VW van. She must have come back from a long trip, being glad to see Jimmy and Hitch and saying hi.
She was coming back to her float shack on the Sand Spit landing and she was glad to be home again and rid of the road dirt.
Joy admitted that she was from Oklahoma, from the town of Ardmore. “It wasn’t much, growing up there,” she said, “nothing but red dirt. I hope I never go back.”
“Well,” Hitch smiled, “you can take the Okie out of the mistletoe but you can’t dress … I forget how that goes.”
“I’m part Indian,” Joy said.
“Which part?” Hitch asked “Everybody in Oklahoma is part something. The red dirt got on the tires of your car – look you can see it.”
The VW van had red dirt stains, and big blue letters running down the side saying “Mexico Me Encanta.”
“Why do you have Spanish?” Jimmy asked.
“I was going to Mexico. I wanted to look the part,” Joy said. “But I didn’t go. I ended up back in Ardmore again – that’s a long story.”
Jimmy was looking at his feet. He was bashful. Joy was good-looking in a way – pretty, but she could have been softer. She had black hair with loose curls, fine skin but not pale, a figure not petite or too big either, it only depended on how she felt that day. And she had a red tattoo of a heart on her forearm. “I got the tattoo when I was back in Ardmore. The heart is for love,” she said. “Someday my prince will come -- only I don’t really believe that. I married Ralph eight years ago and he drained all the love energy out of me, but I guess I’ve been driving all day and no one to talk to. What are you fellas up to?”
“Not much,” one of them said.
“I got back just in time for the wedding. Are you going?” she said in a happy way. “They’re getting married in Pioneer Park in the pavilion. Alan and Karen are getting hitched. Paul Hansen is saying the vows. You can come.”
Jimmy and Hitch worked that one over. Free food and beer were definitely a plus. Alan and Karen lived tucked back in the willows just off Sullivan Slough. You couldn’t find their place unless you knew where it was. Jimmy sometimes paddled over there in his canoe to visit. He knew about the wedding. He knew the wide open nature of the invitation, but he hung back – maybe it was happiness of a wedding.
Hitch felt the same way, he said, ”I’ll just go home,” nodding his head toward the Swinomish reservation across the channel.
But Joy said to get in and they drove around to the park entrance and came into the picnic shelter for the festivities with balloons and children running around.
Karen was the prettiest, tallest red-headed woman in the Skagit Valley, she had red-golden curls and Irish skin. Alan was a redhead too. Marriage was a blessing. Paul Hansen came to officiate. He had a poet’s voice, loud and ranging, he could go from a deep baritone to a high-pitched whine. He wore cordovan shoes and a wool herringbone suit jacket, the only river rat who ever wore a tie, so he said the vows. Hansen was half Tao and half I Ching and he had penetrating eyes. Someone brought deviled eggs, plus entire picnic tables covered with pies, and a huge salmon barbecue, and a jug band playing banjo. Alan and Karen wore white flowing clothes and they danced round and round.
Joy felt wonderful. She began tapping her feet. Jimmy and Hitch could have drunk and ate all day but they hung back like they didn’t belong. Joy looked at Jimmy like he’ll never come and dance with me in a hundred years. But I’ll go over and kick his ass, she thought, “Why are you ashamed, Jimmy? You got shoes, don’t you? You got feet, you can move. Do you hear the music? What’s wrong with you, Jimmy Dee Fish Face?”
“She’s right, you gotta face like a fish, maybe a dog salmon with a hook nose,” Hitch said.
Jimmy mumbled and shrank down. He was a bum and his artist spirit inside was like a beaten boy. He made careful drawings of snow geese and herons, but no one ever saw them. He wanted to make mosaics or carve stone into the forms of heroic Greek women. He studied the shapes and colors of Swinomish totem art -- the strong shapes and primary colors of the bear and the eagle carved in cedar, but he was a bum who lived near a trash pile, and Joy was making him feel small for trying to make him feel big.
She put her arms on her hips and saw right through him. Okay, she said to herself, I don’t do saucy, but I’m going to do saucy right now. She made a smile and gave a toss of her hair and a slide to the side of her hips. Now Jimmy was really scared, but Hitch was not.
“Joy Jolly Go Lightly, do you love me?” Hitch said with a big grin. Jimmy punched him. Joy was disappointed, she put the sauce back in the pot and gave the two of them a long, sad, tender glance and walked to her VW van and drove back out to the Sand Spit.
“I guess we ought to go,” Jimmy said.
“She likes you,” Hitch said.
“No she doesn’t,” Jimmy said. “Let’s go.”
They headed down the hill and got to Fourth Street and saw Charlie Berg working on a car in his front yard.
Meanwhile Joy Helen Sykafoos pulled her VW van up alongside Harriet’s cabin and wanted to have a talk with her.
(to be continued)
Photo. The remains of Harriet’s cabin. The remains of Harriet's cabin on the Sand Spit. I never knew what her name was actually. This little cabin was perched on pilings on the edge of the breakwater, across from the entrance to Shelter Bay. There was an old woman who lived there -- she was friendly, but she never seemed to talk with anybody. And she always had her underwear neatly pinned on the clothes line outside.
Subscriptions. We need your help to continue this story. Please go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001.
Thank you very much.
Fred Owens
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
7922 Santa Ana Rd
Ventura CA 93001
Thursday, June 14, 2012
The remains of Harriet's cabin on the Sand Spit. I never knew what her name was actually. This little cabin was perched on pilings on the edge of the breakwater, across from the entrance to Shelter Bay. There was an old woman who lived there -- she was friendly, but she never seemed to walk to talk with anybody. And she always had her underwear neatly pinned on the clothes line outside.
The story is becoming a tale of Nearly Normal Jimmy's long journey from the Sand Spit to the Frog Hospital to buy some beer. In the last installment, Jimmy and Hitch spoke with Robert Sund underneath the Rainbow Bridge. The story continues when they meet Joy Sykafoos and go to a wedding in Pioneer Park -- that becomes very interesting.
What does this have to do with Harriet and her cabin? I don't know, but I'll figure it out.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
skunk cabbage blues
FROG HOSPITAl
The Skunk Cabbage Blues
By Fred Owens
I got them lonesome dying skunk cabbage blues -- Robert Sund
Dunlap Bay, July, 1982. Swallows danced over the water. “They eat mosquitoes,” Jimmy said. “They make a burst of wing-dash, rise up, then go down, grab a bug in their mouth, then make another wing-dash. Nobody can fly like a swallow.”
“But you can’t see the mosquitoes,” Hitch said, “so how do you know?”
“Just figure it out,” Jimmy said. “There’s bugs up there and swalows have to eat. That’s dinner. They’re not putting on a show for fun.”
“They’re having fun,” Hitch said with determination.
“We need to get some supplies,” Jimmy stated, as if he was in charge. It was time to walk into town, already dressed, bring an empty rucksack, no wristwatch to check, but it was day time and the store was open – making a run to the Frog Hospital.
That’s what Clyde called it – the grocery store in a Quonset hut owned by Mr. Grobschmidt. Clyde thought Mr. Grobschmidt looked like a frog, and since that’s where they kept all the beer, he called it the Frog Hospital, which made sense in the river rat school because you could get what you needed at the Frog Hospital – 12-packs of Schmidt’s beer, Fritos, and Sophie’s fried chicken.
“Sophie’s chicken is the chef de cuisine, which is how you say it if you were educated.”
“I’m not,” Hitch said.
“Not what?” Jimmy asked.
“I dropped out of high school,” Hitch said. “I didn’t like it.”
“I got an idea. What if we can find Robert Sund and maybe he will give us one of those Floating Fivers,” Jimmy said.
“Old Robert Sund,” Hitch said. “He talks a lot.”
Robert was the poet of the city. He invented the Floating Fiver one evening shooting pool at the LaConner Tavern. The concept was simple – if someone could float a five dollar beer in his direction, then he could have more beer. Many people came to believe in the floating concept. “You see, money is like currency, it flows like the river,” Robert explained, although it never seemed to float past him.
The odds were against Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch getting a five-dollar bill from Robert, but these Sand Spit warriors didn’t know Quit – they were making a beer run to the Frog Hospital and that’s all there was to it.
“You see, this is America,” Jimmy explained. “It’s the land of opportunity. You just gotta keep your eyes peeled and the natural abundance will come to us.”
With Clyde out of town, Jimmy and Hitch considered the parking lot franchise. For a few dollars Mr. Grobschmidt would let Clyde sweep the parking lot.
“But that’s Clyde’s thing. I can’t take his job. Besides, it doesn’t suit me,” Jimmy said.
“You don’t have a suit,” Hitch said.
They got up and started moving toward town, less than a mile down a gravel road which ran alongside the breakwater and Swinomish channel, past blackberry brambles and sparsely grown sand hillocks, past Harriet’s cabin.
“Did you ever talk to her?” Jimmy asked Hitch. Harriet was an old woman. She made a friendly wave from her cabin door. Her underwear was neatly pinned to the clothes line like it always was.
“Harriet washes her underwear every day. Maybe she wants a boyfriend.” Hitch said.
“Not me,” Jimmy said.
Coming into LaConner, past a field of cabbage plants, past the almost shut-down hulk of the New England Fish Company cannery and they came to the grandest edifice of all LaConner – the beautiful Rainbow Bridge.
There was Robert Sund, the poet of the city, under the bridge, leaning against the trunk of an old madrone tree, smoking a cigareet in his straw hat and faded blue chambray shirt, wearing those cheap black cotton slippers from Chinatown. Past 53 years of age, his beard was long and white, and Robert was singing to the clouds,
“I got them lonesome dying skunk cabbage blues,
Yellow dreams of heart-ache,
Lonesome lovers want to drown,
From them old dying skunk cabbage blues."
“Hey Robert,” Jimmy and Hitch sang out like in a chorus.
“Hail the Sand Spit Warriors,” Robert exclaimed.
“Jimmy, mighty oarsman, Hitch, swallow friend.”
Jimmy and Hitch approached and Robert declaimed, swelling to a height of almost ten feet.
“I am the heir of Walt Whitman and a first cousin to Gandalf.
I row the marsh and the sweet yellow iris calls my name.
I sing the tide and work the wind up the river,
To Disappearing Lake, around Bald Island,
Returning on the ebb of tide and through Hole-in-the-Wall.
Aflame with thirst, I drive my oared skiff to the LaConner Tavern,
To shoot pool and quaff pitchers of Olympic beer.”
“Robert, you talk like a poet,” Hitch said.
“I am the poet of the city”
“LaConner only has 600 people.”
“Yet I am the poet of the city, the bard of the river,
Singer of the Salish Sea, I hear the music
Of Samish, Snohomish, Skykomish, Stillaguamish,
And all rivers with salmon – of these I sing.”
“Robert, we’re on our way to the Frog Hospital to get some supplies, and we were wondering….”
“Poverty is a blessing, we are anointed as brothers,
Beer comes to those with imagination,
Only believe and a half-rack will be ours.”
“Ours?” Jimmy said. “I don’t know about that, but hey, Robert, if we get what we need we can always share it with you.”
Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch continued walking into LaConner. Robert remained at ease by the madrone tree and he began blowing smoke rings as he exhaled his cigareet.
“I got them lonesome dying skunk cabbage blues…..”
The Rainbow Bridge, joining LaConner with the Swinomish Reservation, is painted a bright industrial orange. Its many-riveted steel beams arch gracefully over the saltwater channel.
Underneath the Rainbow Bridge grows an ancient madrone, paler orange of peeling bark and leather leaves. The madrone always grows near the saltwater.
(to be continued)
Notes. What’s going to happen next on Jimmy and Hitch’s long journey into town? They will be going past Clayton James’ studio. He’s been building a bread oven out of recovered bricks. And Charlie Berg’s chicken coop is right next door. Charlie is out in the yard composting a 1957 DeSoto.
Will Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch ever get to the Frog Hospital? And how will they get the money for their “supplies”?
The Rainbow Bridge. The Rainbow Bridge was built in 1957. Harry R. Powell, the bridge designer, should be celebrated as an artist equal to any other in LaConner’s history. It is no wonder that Robert Sund perched himself under the bridge for his cigareet. Read Harry Powell’s on words on the bridge at the bottom of this message.
Subscriptions. We need your help to continue this story. Please hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001.
Thank you very much.
Fred Owens
· From the Puget Sound Mail July 17, 1957.
In his own words, Powell describes how he got the idea for the design of the bridge.
“The obvious way to replace the existing LaConner Bridge, which was built about 1916, would be with a swing span similar to the existing bridge, except that its construction would be more modern without the load limitations that the present bridge has, with quicker operating motors and electrical controls, so that the bridge could be opened and closed with a shorter interruption of vehicular traffic. My firm was commissioned to design such a structure for the county. As there were Federal Funds involved in the construction of this bridge it had to meet the approval of the Bureau of Public Roads and the State Department of Highways. Both of these agencies were very cooperative and contributed many valuable ideas to the design of the final structure.
“We did all the preliminary work for a swing bridge on the site of the existing bridge and anticipated that we would have to detour traffic during construction of the new bridge. The detour was not too happy a situation but was one that would have to be lived with if a new swing bridge was to be built in the location of the existing bridge….
“After the preliminary studies were made on the swing span and approaches, I was at the site with Hjalmar Walberg who was then County Engineer. Standing on the existing bridge looking towards the Park and thinking of the problems that a low level bridge occasioned, I mentioned to Mr. Walberg that we should have a study on a high level bridge between the rock out-crops on the City Park and the Indian Reservation. I told him it was a beautiful opportunity to get an arch bridge in there and that it would have the following advantages over the construction we were discussing. First, there would be no equipment maintenance and no need for a bridge tender; second, we would have no piers in the stream to bother navigation; third, I believed that we could get a much better looking bridge on the site. I asked him how that would affect his road alignment and his statement was that this was a much better location for the bridge and that eventually the City of LaConner would come to that conclusion.
“We made some studies on an arch bridge and found out that a flexible fixed arch was the type that suited this location the best. This type of arch is not particularly common. There are presently two bridges of this type with long spans in this country and one or two in Europe. There is one being designed over the Fraser River, which design was probably the result of the construction of the LaConner Bridge.
“After we worked up our preliminary estimates and designs for the arch span we submitted it to Mr. Walberg and the County Commissioners who agreed with us on the analysis of this problem and who gave us every consideration and cooperation during the design and construction of this bridge. We had the pleasure of meeting with the Commissioners, the Mayor and the Council, and interested citizens of LaConner at a public hearing of the new bridge. The proposal to change the location of the bridge was a new and radical idea to both the Council and the people of LaConner, and it was gratifying that they went along with us on this new location. I made the remark at this meeting that when the bridge was completed on this location they would be happy with the new structure…..”
Powell concluded that an engineer gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build something so good and so true, and the Rainbow Bridge was his dream.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
7922 Santa Ana Rd
Ventura CA 93001
The Skunk Cabbage Blues
By Fred Owens
I got them lonesome dying skunk cabbage blues -- Robert Sund
Dunlap Bay, July, 1982. Swallows danced over the water. “They eat mosquitoes,” Jimmy said. “They make a burst of wing-dash, rise up, then go down, grab a bug in their mouth, then make another wing-dash. Nobody can fly like a swallow.”
“But you can’t see the mosquitoes,” Hitch said, “so how do you know?”
“Just figure it out,” Jimmy said. “There’s bugs up there and swalows have to eat. That’s dinner. They’re not putting on a show for fun.”
“They’re having fun,” Hitch said with determination.
“We need to get some supplies,” Jimmy stated, as if he was in charge. It was time to walk into town, already dressed, bring an empty rucksack, no wristwatch to check, but it was day time and the store was open – making a run to the Frog Hospital.
That’s what Clyde called it – the grocery store in a Quonset hut owned by Mr. Grobschmidt. Clyde thought Mr. Grobschmidt looked like a frog, and since that’s where they kept all the beer, he called it the Frog Hospital, which made sense in the river rat school because you could get what you needed at the Frog Hospital – 12-packs of Schmidt’s beer, Fritos, and Sophie’s fried chicken.
“Sophie’s chicken is the chef de cuisine, which is how you say it if you were educated.”
“I’m not,” Hitch said.
“Not what?” Jimmy asked.
“I dropped out of high school,” Hitch said. “I didn’t like it.”
“I got an idea. What if we can find Robert Sund and maybe he will give us one of those Floating Fivers,” Jimmy said.
“Old Robert Sund,” Hitch said. “He talks a lot.”
Robert was the poet of the city. He invented the Floating Fiver one evening shooting pool at the LaConner Tavern. The concept was simple – if someone could float a five dollar beer in his direction, then he could have more beer. Many people came to believe in the floating concept. “You see, money is like currency, it flows like the river,” Robert explained, although it never seemed to float past him.
The odds were against Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch getting a five-dollar bill from Robert, but these Sand Spit warriors didn’t know Quit – they were making a beer run to the Frog Hospital and that’s all there was to it.
“You see, this is America,” Jimmy explained. “It’s the land of opportunity. You just gotta keep your eyes peeled and the natural abundance will come to us.”
With Clyde out of town, Jimmy and Hitch considered the parking lot franchise. For a few dollars Mr. Grobschmidt would let Clyde sweep the parking lot.
“But that’s Clyde’s thing. I can’t take his job. Besides, it doesn’t suit me,” Jimmy said.
“You don’t have a suit,” Hitch said.
They got up and started moving toward town, less than a mile down a gravel road which ran alongside the breakwater and Swinomish channel, past blackberry brambles and sparsely grown sand hillocks, past Harriet’s cabin.
“Did you ever talk to her?” Jimmy asked Hitch. Harriet was an old woman. She made a friendly wave from her cabin door. Her underwear was neatly pinned to the clothes line like it always was.
“Harriet washes her underwear every day. Maybe she wants a boyfriend.” Hitch said.
“Not me,” Jimmy said.
Coming into LaConner, past a field of cabbage plants, past the almost shut-down hulk of the New England Fish Company cannery and they came to the grandest edifice of all LaConner – the beautiful Rainbow Bridge.
There was Robert Sund, the poet of the city, under the bridge, leaning against the trunk of an old madrone tree, smoking a cigareet in his straw hat and faded blue chambray shirt, wearing those cheap black cotton slippers from Chinatown. Past 53 years of age, his beard was long and white, and Robert was singing to the clouds,
“I got them lonesome dying skunk cabbage blues,
Yellow dreams of heart-ache,
Lonesome lovers want to drown,
From them old dying skunk cabbage blues."
“Hey Robert,” Jimmy and Hitch sang out like in a chorus.
“Hail the Sand Spit Warriors,” Robert exclaimed.
“Jimmy, mighty oarsman, Hitch, swallow friend.”
Jimmy and Hitch approached and Robert declaimed, swelling to a height of almost ten feet.
“I am the heir of Walt Whitman and a first cousin to Gandalf.
I row the marsh and the sweet yellow iris calls my name.
I sing the tide and work the wind up the river,
To Disappearing Lake, around Bald Island,
Returning on the ebb of tide and through Hole-in-the-Wall.
Aflame with thirst, I drive my oared skiff to the LaConner Tavern,
To shoot pool and quaff pitchers of Olympic beer.”
“Robert, you talk like a poet,” Hitch said.
“I am the poet of the city”
“LaConner only has 600 people.”
“Yet I am the poet of the city, the bard of the river,
Singer of the Salish Sea, I hear the music
Of Samish, Snohomish, Skykomish, Stillaguamish,
And all rivers with salmon – of these I sing.”
“Robert, we’re on our way to the Frog Hospital to get some supplies, and we were wondering….”
“Poverty is a blessing, we are anointed as brothers,
Beer comes to those with imagination,
Only believe and a half-rack will be ours.”
“Ours?” Jimmy said. “I don’t know about that, but hey, Robert, if we get what we need we can always share it with you.”
Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch continued walking into LaConner. Robert remained at ease by the madrone tree and he began blowing smoke rings as he exhaled his cigareet.
“I got them lonesome dying skunk cabbage blues…..”
The Rainbow Bridge, joining LaConner with the Swinomish Reservation, is painted a bright industrial orange. Its many-riveted steel beams arch gracefully over the saltwater channel.
Underneath the Rainbow Bridge grows an ancient madrone, paler orange of peeling bark and leather leaves. The madrone always grows near the saltwater.
(to be continued)
Notes. What’s going to happen next on Jimmy and Hitch’s long journey into town? They will be going past Clayton James’ studio. He’s been building a bread oven out of recovered bricks. And Charlie Berg’s chicken coop is right next door. Charlie is out in the yard composting a 1957 DeSoto.
Will Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch ever get to the Frog Hospital? And how will they get the money for their “supplies”?
The Rainbow Bridge. The Rainbow Bridge was built in 1957. Harry R. Powell, the bridge designer, should be celebrated as an artist equal to any other in LaConner’s history. It is no wonder that Robert Sund perched himself under the bridge for his cigareet. Read Harry Powell’s on words on the bridge at the bottom of this message.
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Thank you very much.
Fred Owens
· From the Puget Sound Mail July 17, 1957.
In his own words, Powell describes how he got the idea for the design of the bridge.
“The obvious way to replace the existing LaConner Bridge, which was built about 1916, would be with a swing span similar to the existing bridge, except that its construction would be more modern without the load limitations that the present bridge has, with quicker operating motors and electrical controls, so that the bridge could be opened and closed with a shorter interruption of vehicular traffic. My firm was commissioned to design such a structure for the county. As there were Federal Funds involved in the construction of this bridge it had to meet the approval of the Bureau of Public Roads and the State Department of Highways. Both of these agencies were very cooperative and contributed many valuable ideas to the design of the final structure.
“We did all the preliminary work for a swing bridge on the site of the existing bridge and anticipated that we would have to detour traffic during construction of the new bridge. The detour was not too happy a situation but was one that would have to be lived with if a new swing bridge was to be built in the location of the existing bridge….
“After the preliminary studies were made on the swing span and approaches, I was at the site with Hjalmar Walberg who was then County Engineer. Standing on the existing bridge looking towards the Park and thinking of the problems that a low level bridge occasioned, I mentioned to Mr. Walberg that we should have a study on a high level bridge between the rock out-crops on the City Park and the Indian Reservation. I told him it was a beautiful opportunity to get an arch bridge in there and that it would have the following advantages over the construction we were discussing. First, there would be no equipment maintenance and no need for a bridge tender; second, we would have no piers in the stream to bother navigation; third, I believed that we could get a much better looking bridge on the site. I asked him how that would affect his road alignment and his statement was that this was a much better location for the bridge and that eventually the City of LaConner would come to that conclusion.
“We made some studies on an arch bridge and found out that a flexible fixed arch was the type that suited this location the best. This type of arch is not particularly common. There are presently two bridges of this type with long spans in this country and one or two in Europe. There is one being designed over the Fraser River, which design was probably the result of the construction of the LaConner Bridge.
“After we worked up our preliminary estimates and designs for the arch span we submitted it to Mr. Walberg and the County Commissioners who agreed with us on the analysis of this problem and who gave us every consideration and cooperation during the design and construction of this bridge. We had the pleasure of meeting with the Commissioners, the Mayor and the Council, and interested citizens of LaConner at a public hearing of the new bridge. The proposal to change the location of the bridge was a new and radical idea to both the Council and the people of LaConner, and it was gratifying that they went along with us on this new location. I made the remark at this meeting that when the bridge was completed on this location they would be happy with the new structure…..”
Powell concluded that an engineer gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build something so good and so true, and the Rainbow Bridge was his dream.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
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Ventura CA 93001
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
The ponderous river, kinda huge and quiet, Molding mud in silence. --Clyde Sanborn
Nearly Normal Jimmy woke up on a mound of Schmidt beer cans. He didn’t remember a thing. That was good. And it didn’t hurt either – that’s why he liked living out on the Sand Spit – no rocks or anything, nothing but soft sand and moss-covered logs to fall down on.
It was a Sunday morning in July in 1982. The tide was up and the old logs cluttering Dunlap Bay rose a foot or two off the mud bottom. The sky was cloud-free and the hot sun came up early . Jimmy got to his feet and stretched. “Kee-rist, I’m going back to bed,” he said and he stumbled back into the cabin and slept until noon.
Jimmy’s cabin was just past the young, tender willows, on the edge of the bay. The mound of beer cans was tidier than it seemed. If he had some fried chicken from town, he gave the scraps to Herk, his big black dog. So there was really no trash and the air was fresh anyway. No one else lived out there except Clyde and Clyde was gone.
This was a time in the life of Clyde Sanborn that most people forgot about. Clyde, a charming man with a velvet baritone voice, was attractive to more than one woman, but Linda was the one who stuck around long enough to reform him. She got him to quit drinking and move off the Sand Spit. They took an apartment in Big Lake, which was far enough from the river to give Clyde a new start in life. And he got a job -- that was amazing – Clyde going to work as a clerk in the Washington Unemployment office in Mount Vernon -- where a lot of his friends who were fairly often unemployed themselves, would come in for the weekly check and see Clyde behind the counter in a clean shirt and regular shoes. “And I tell you,” Nearly Normal Jimmy said. “Clyde must be the unhappiest man on earth since he quit drinking. You should see the look on his face. I’m taking bets he won’t last until Labor Day.”
He said that to Hitch, a friend who sometimes shared soft summer nights on the Sand Spit. Hitch was a Swinomish man and a leader of the Clan of Men Who Walk Slowly into Town. And for being a quiet and gentle man, his words counted when he spoke, “Clyde will be all right.”
“I was just saying that,” Jimmy replied. “Don’t get mystical on me, and don’t Bogart the Fritos.” He reached over and grabbed the bag from Hitch. That was breakfast, and the afternoon stretched out before them.
“You shoulda been there last night,” Jimmy said. “I was at the Lighthouse and Ernie Benson was mixing free-style cocktails for me and Barbara Cram, we just had a good time.” “Yeah, Barb, she’s all right,” Hitch said. “But she was getting on my case – you know how she does that, saying Jimmy, when are you going to make something of your life -- stuff like that. Barb will get right in your face. I told her my life is on the river. All I need from town is beer and cigarettes …. well, food, but otherwise what do I need? I got it all here.”
“It’s all here,” Hitch said, looking around.
“We got blackberries in the summer and salmon in the winter and we can order up a hundred pounds of potatoes from Midnight Produce. If I need firewood, it just comes floating down the river. I explained all that to Barb, which she already knows anyway, and we drank a lot of Ernie’s cocktails. I don’t remember too much after that except walking home pretty late, “Jimmy said.
The Sand Spit didn’t really belong to anyone. One hundred years ago it had been where the Skagit River came around the bend and swept into LaConner. But they built a breakwater from the hill at Pioneer Park out to McGlinn Island and diverted the river around it, and so the sand piled up where the river once flowed, and then after a while the willows and alders began growing. You couldn’t farm it and nobody really had title, so it was rent-free for shack dwellers and river rats and a few old cars that might have worked at one time or another, and a landing where people from Fishtown tied up their skiffs -- plus LaConner’s only communist trash pile. “It’s a communist trash pile,” Jimmy explained to his visitors, ”because anybody can make a contribution and somebody might haul it away to the dump but otherwise it just stays here and it belongs to nobody.”
That was his explanation. But Jimmy sometimes got nervous, thinking maybe some fastidious townsfolk might make inquiries, or there would be too much talk, like maybe those bums ought to work for a living instead of smoking dope all day. Maybe they ought to clean up that mess. Jimmy kept his eyes and ears opened for such vibrations – that was his role in the scheme of things, to warn the river rats.
“I keep my eyes peeled,” he said.
“Like a banana,” Hitch said, “but you don’t look like a banana.”
“Hitch, you don’t make any sense,” Jimmy said.
“White people are crazy,” Hitch said.
“Let me finish. My job is to keep my eyes peeled. I try to see trouble coming before trouble sees me,” Jimmy said.
“You wouldn’t see trouble coming if it fell out of the sky. You couldn’t see Godzilla if he farted in a hurricane,” Hitch said.
“Yeah, but I can make it home when it’s darker than inside of a skunk’s ass,” Jimmy said.
“You might make it half-way home, but you fall down, get up, fall down again, you only don’t get lost because you’re not going anywhere,” Hitch said.
“You’re right. I never get lost, because I’m always home.” Jimmy said, “and this is the best place anyone ever lived.”
“That’s right,” Hitch said, “but you forgot to mention the clams -- lots of clams around here.”
“Hitch, you got to shave off that Fu Manchu mustache, it’s way too ugly,” Jimmy said.
“Ugly? Not half as ugly as your mama’s mustache,” Hitch said.
“Your mama is fatter than a whale, she couldn’t fit through Deception Pass at high tide,” Jimmy said.
“Your mama….”
The Sand Spit wasn’t on the map. It was where the Skagit River used to be, and the River might come and take it back some day. (to be continued)
Note: “Midnight Produce” refers to the practice of helping yourself to the bounty of a farmer’s field. Also, some people are wondering whether this is all true or if I just made it up. My advice is just enjoy the story. Poems by Clyde Sanborn can be found here. If you find a map of LaConner on the Internet, you can see the Sand Spit as an un-marked stretch of land south of Pioneer Park. McGlinn Island now belongs to the Swinomish tribe -- I guess it always did. Ask someone else about these legalities, and a NOAA chart will give a more accurate rendition of the area, although even those charts can be out of date, because the Skagit River keeps moving around.
Subscriptions. What will Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch do next? Will the Buddhist ever come back to the bar? And will Ben Munsey jump over any more fences? No, he won’t, but Singin’ Dan still has an oar in the water. ….. We need your help to continue this story. Please go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001. Thank you very much.
Nearly Normal Jimmy woke up on a mound of Schmidt beer cans. He didn’t remember a thing. That was good. And it didn’t hurt either – that’s why he liked living out on the Sand Spit – no rocks or anything, nothing but soft sand and moss-covered logs to fall down on.
It was a Sunday morning in July in 1982. The tide was up and the old logs cluttering Dunlap Bay rose a foot or two off the mud bottom. The sky was cloud-free and the hot sun came up early . Jimmy got to his feet and stretched. “Kee-rist, I’m going back to bed,” he said and he stumbled back into the cabin and slept until noon.
Jimmy’s cabin was just past the young, tender willows, on the edge of the bay. The mound of beer cans was tidier than it seemed. If he had some fried chicken from town, he gave the scraps to Herk, his big black dog. So there was really no trash and the air was fresh anyway. No one else lived out there except Clyde and Clyde was gone.
This was a time in the life of Clyde Sanborn that most people forgot about. Clyde, a charming man with a velvet baritone voice, was attractive to more than one woman, but Linda was the one who stuck around long enough to reform him. She got him to quit drinking and move off the Sand Spit. They took an apartment in Big Lake, which was far enough from the river to give Clyde a new start in life. And he got a job -- that was amazing – Clyde going to work as a clerk in the Washington Unemployment office in Mount Vernon -- where a lot of his friends who were fairly often unemployed themselves, would come in for the weekly check and see Clyde behind the counter in a clean shirt and regular shoes. “And I tell you,” Nearly Normal Jimmy said. “Clyde must be the unhappiest man on earth since he quit drinking. You should see the look on his face. I’m taking bets he won’t last until Labor Day.”
He said that to Hitch, a friend who sometimes shared soft summer nights on the Sand Spit. Hitch was a Swinomish man and a leader of the Clan of Men Who Walk Slowly into Town. And for being a quiet and gentle man, his words counted when he spoke, “Clyde will be all right.”
“I was just saying that,” Jimmy replied. “Don’t get mystical on me, and don’t Bogart the Fritos.” He reached over and grabbed the bag from Hitch. That was breakfast, and the afternoon stretched out before them.
“You shoulda been there last night,” Jimmy said. “I was at the Lighthouse and Ernie Benson was mixing free-style cocktails for me and Barbara Cram, we just had a good time.” “Yeah, Barb, she’s all right,” Hitch said. “But she was getting on my case – you know how she does that, saying Jimmy, when are you going to make something of your life -- stuff like that. Barb will get right in your face. I told her my life is on the river. All I need from town is beer and cigarettes …. well, food, but otherwise what do I need? I got it all here.”
“It’s all here,” Hitch said, looking around.
“We got blackberries in the summer and salmon in the winter and we can order up a hundred pounds of potatoes from Midnight Produce. If I need firewood, it just comes floating down the river. I explained all that to Barb, which she already knows anyway, and we drank a lot of Ernie’s cocktails. I don’t remember too much after that except walking home pretty late, “Jimmy said.
The Sand Spit didn’t really belong to anyone. One hundred years ago it had been where the Skagit River came around the bend and swept into LaConner. But they built a breakwater from the hill at Pioneer Park out to McGlinn Island and diverted the river around it, and so the sand piled up where the river once flowed, and then after a while the willows and alders began growing. You couldn’t farm it and nobody really had title, so it was rent-free for shack dwellers and river rats and a few old cars that might have worked at one time or another, and a landing where people from Fishtown tied up their skiffs -- plus LaConner’s only communist trash pile. “It’s a communist trash pile,” Jimmy explained to his visitors, ”because anybody can make a contribution and somebody might haul it away to the dump but otherwise it just stays here and it belongs to nobody.”
That was his explanation. But Jimmy sometimes got nervous, thinking maybe some fastidious townsfolk might make inquiries, or there would be too much talk, like maybe those bums ought to work for a living instead of smoking dope all day. Maybe they ought to clean up that mess. Jimmy kept his eyes and ears opened for such vibrations – that was his role in the scheme of things, to warn the river rats.
“I keep my eyes peeled,” he said.
“Like a banana,” Hitch said, “but you don’t look like a banana.”
“Hitch, you don’t make any sense,” Jimmy said.
“White people are crazy,” Hitch said.
“Let me finish. My job is to keep my eyes peeled. I try to see trouble coming before trouble sees me,” Jimmy said.
“You wouldn’t see trouble coming if it fell out of the sky. You couldn’t see Godzilla if he farted in a hurricane,” Hitch said.
“Yeah, but I can make it home when it’s darker than inside of a skunk’s ass,” Jimmy said.
“You might make it half-way home, but you fall down, get up, fall down again, you only don’t get lost because you’re not going anywhere,” Hitch said.
“You’re right. I never get lost, because I’m always home.” Jimmy said, “and this is the best place anyone ever lived.”
“That’s right,” Hitch said, “but you forgot to mention the clams -- lots of clams around here.”
“Hitch, you got to shave off that Fu Manchu mustache, it’s way too ugly,” Jimmy said.
“Ugly? Not half as ugly as your mama’s mustache,” Hitch said.
“Your mama is fatter than a whale, she couldn’t fit through Deception Pass at high tide,” Jimmy said.
“Your mama….”
The Sand Spit wasn’t on the map. It was where the Skagit River used to be, and the River might come and take it back some day. (to be continued)
Note: “Midnight Produce” refers to the practice of helping yourself to the bounty of a farmer’s field. Also, some people are wondering whether this is all true or if I just made it up. My advice is just enjoy the story. Poems by Clyde Sanborn can be found here. If you find a map of LaConner on the Internet, you can see the Sand Spit as an un-marked stretch of land south of Pioneer Park. McGlinn Island now belongs to the Swinomish tribe -- I guess it always did. Ask someone else about these legalities, and a NOAA chart will give a more accurate rendition of the area, although even those charts can be out of date, because the Skagit River keeps moving around.
Subscriptions. What will Nearly Normal Jimmy and Hitch do next? Will the Buddhist ever come back to the bar? And will Ben Munsey jump over any more fences? No, he won’t, but Singin’ Dan still has an oar in the water. ….. We need your help to continue this story. Please go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your $25 donation. Or write a check for $25 made out to Fred Owens and mail it to 35 West Main St., Suite B #391, Ventura CA 93001. Thank you very much.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
A Buddhist Walked into a Bar
Rick Epting walked into the LaConner Tavern one night in the late spring of 2002. He had been in town for the poetry festival. His poet friends were gathering at Nell Thorn’s pub, but Rick decided to go down market and have a Rainier on tap at the LCT as the locals called it.
Gordy Bell occupied a stool midway and he gave out a Hey to Rick, so they joined company and began to drink the beer, paunch and paunch, side by side. Gordy was a hands-on working man of a liberal persuasion. He ran LaConner’s public works crew, fixing potholes and such. There were two men on his crew, Lynn Berry, wide and squat, an expert with the weed-whacker and twice as smart as he looked, and that other younger guy Brian who looked good but wasn’t really that smart.
Anyway, Gordy had but public works aside for the day and was enjoying the view – although sitting on a bar stool all he saw was the bartender and all those bowls of lottery tickets – meaning he enjoyed the view in his mind, maybe thinking of some good day he had out on Skagit Bay on his boat, and secret places near Hope Island where he could trap the best crabs.
It was that far-away look that grabbed Rick’s attention, and the reason he grabbed a stool next to Gordy, Rick being a word guy, and Rick being a guy who had spent most of last two days listening to poets who were all gathering at Nell Thorn’s to detox from the word-fest with plenteous booze.
“So, Gordy, how does it look?” Rick asked. Gordy raised his glass in response. “I just finished the poetry festival,” Rick began, “I got all these thoughts buzzing in my brain. I got that feeling like a balloon head. I’ve been a musician, you remember Future Pastures? That was my group. Then I helped with the Ducks when they played at Rexville Grange, or you can go back all the way to the beginning of hippie world at Toad Hall in Bellingham, I was there. Then I worked at the newspaper. I interviewed various Berentsons serving in public office. I visited Bud Norris in his county commissioner some-time-Democrat, sometime-Republican office with his feet up on the desk. I convinced Norris to deny the nuclear power plants proposed for Sedro-Woolley, although I can only a take a little credit for that one – but I was part of it. And the Food Co-op, I helped get that going when all they had was 25-pound sacks of brown rice and a cup full of brewers yeast, when the broken down hippies – I mean the hippies in their broken down cars – came in from Walker Valley to spend their food stamps and one of them always needed a jump start to get back to camp. I helped that to go. And I prayed, or I should say I learned not to pray. I learned to be a Buddhist, which means I learned to be the Buddha, I learned we’re all the same inside, what do you think, Gordy?” Rick was very earnest.
Gordy smiled beatifically and said, “Let’s move over by the window, we can watch the tide come in, it’s a 12-foot tide today.”
The LaConner Tavern sits on Swinomish Channel and the back part of the tavern, past the bar and the pool tables, opened to picture windows of the ever-changing current of the channel – four movements of the water, and those four being in, out, up and down, meaning the tide comes in and then it goes out, the water rises and then descends, in a rhythm that only the stars can truly understand, those four movements joined by the sublime non-movement, slack tide, when the surface of the water takes on a mirror finish on a windless day and stillness reigns.
So Gordy steered Rick over to a table by the window and the waitress brought them two more flagons. The sunset burnished the sky over the Swinomish Reservation across the channel. “There be Indians,” Gordy intoned, pointing across the channel.
“No, I can’t see them,” Rick replied. “You can’t see them with your eyes wide open,” Gordy said.
Rick closed his eyes and began chanting, “Om, Om, Om.”
“Now, see the salmon,” Gordy said. “They come up from Padilla Bay in flocks and herds and schools, splashing and leaping, mad with sex and desire, salty and driven by wind, they come into the channel and then down the channel, and past the tavern right here, and they go around to Hole-in-the-Wall and then up the river.”
“I can’t see any fish,” Rick cried now in anguish.
“Close your eyes,” Gordy said. “Forget about now. Times goes forward and backward just like the tide. There was lots of salmon back then. Turn your head back one hundred years. Can you see the salmon now?”
“Yes,” Rick said, “I see them leaping!”
Jimmy Schermerhorn walked in to the bar, saw Gordy and Rick and came by to say Hey. Jimmy didn’t drink anymore, he just came in to use the men’s room, but he pulled up a chair for the moment. “Hey, Rick, how did you like the poetry festival?”
Rick said, “It was awesome. The poets chanted and we could see the salmon leaping.”
Later, Rick drove back to his home in Mount Vernon and Gordy went back to his bar stool. He asked the waitress, "Who was that guy I was talking to?”
Gordy Bell occupied a stool midway and he gave out a Hey to Rick, so they joined company and began to drink the beer, paunch and paunch, side by side. Gordy was a hands-on working man of a liberal persuasion. He ran LaConner’s public works crew, fixing potholes and such. There were two men on his crew, Lynn Berry, wide and squat, an expert with the weed-whacker and twice as smart as he looked, and that other younger guy Brian who looked good but wasn’t really that smart.
Anyway, Gordy had but public works aside for the day and was enjoying the view – although sitting on a bar stool all he saw was the bartender and all those bowls of lottery tickets – meaning he enjoyed the view in his mind, maybe thinking of some good day he had out on Skagit Bay on his boat, and secret places near Hope Island where he could trap the best crabs.
It was that far-away look that grabbed Rick’s attention, and the reason he grabbed a stool next to Gordy, Rick being a word guy, and Rick being a guy who had spent most of last two days listening to poets who were all gathering at Nell Thorn’s to detox from the word-fest with plenteous booze.
“So, Gordy, how does it look?” Rick asked. Gordy raised his glass in response. “I just finished the poetry festival,” Rick began, “I got all these thoughts buzzing in my brain. I got that feeling like a balloon head. I’ve been a musician, you remember Future Pastures? That was my group. Then I helped with the Ducks when they played at Rexville Grange, or you can go back all the way to the beginning of hippie world at Toad Hall in Bellingham, I was there. Then I worked at the newspaper. I interviewed various Berentsons serving in public office. I visited Bud Norris in his county commissioner some-time-Democrat, sometime-Republican office with his feet up on the desk. I convinced Norris to deny the nuclear power plants proposed for Sedro-Woolley, although I can only a take a little credit for that one – but I was part of it. And the Food Co-op, I helped get that going when all they had was 25-pound sacks of brown rice and a cup full of brewers yeast, when the broken down hippies – I mean the hippies in their broken down cars – came in from Walker Valley to spend their food stamps and one of them always needed a jump start to get back to camp. I helped that to go. And I prayed, or I should say I learned not to pray. I learned to be a Buddhist, which means I learned to be the Buddha, I learned we’re all the same inside, what do you think, Gordy?” Rick was very earnest.
Gordy smiled beatifically and said, “Let’s move over by the window, we can watch the tide come in, it’s a 12-foot tide today.”
The LaConner Tavern sits on Swinomish Channel and the back part of the tavern, past the bar and the pool tables, opened to picture windows of the ever-changing current of the channel – four movements of the water, and those four being in, out, up and down, meaning the tide comes in and then it goes out, the water rises and then descends, in a rhythm that only the stars can truly understand, those four movements joined by the sublime non-movement, slack tide, when the surface of the water takes on a mirror finish on a windless day and stillness reigns.
So Gordy steered Rick over to a table by the window and the waitress brought them two more flagons. The sunset burnished the sky over the Swinomish Reservation across the channel. “There be Indians,” Gordy intoned, pointing across the channel.
“No, I can’t see them,” Rick replied. “You can’t see them with your eyes wide open,” Gordy said.
Rick closed his eyes and began chanting, “Om, Om, Om.”
“Now, see the salmon,” Gordy said. “They come up from Padilla Bay in flocks and herds and schools, splashing and leaping, mad with sex and desire, salty and driven by wind, they come into the channel and then down the channel, and past the tavern right here, and they go around to Hole-in-the-Wall and then up the river.”
“I can’t see any fish,” Rick cried now in anguish.
“Close your eyes,” Gordy said. “Forget about now. Times goes forward and backward just like the tide. There was lots of salmon back then. Turn your head back one hundred years. Can you see the salmon now?”
“Yes,” Rick said, “I see them leaping!”
Jimmy Schermerhorn walked in to the bar, saw Gordy and Rick and came by to say Hey. Jimmy didn’t drink anymore, he just came in to use the men’s room, but he pulled up a chair for the moment. “Hey, Rick, how did you like the poetry festival?”
Rick said, “It was awesome. The poets chanted and we could see the salmon leaping.”
Later, Rick drove back to his home in Mount Vernon and Gordy went back to his bar stool. He asked the waitress, "Who was that guy I was talking to?”
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Ben Munsey leaped over the fence
Ben Munsey leaped over the fence that June day in 2002. He crashed the party at the Museum of Northwest Art in LaConner, the annual fundraising auction fueled by high-ticket prices. Munsey didn’t have the money and he didn’t believe he should have paid anyway.
Docents guarded the front gates of the museum that fine summer evening, smiling at the ticket holders, but glaring at street urchins like Munsey.
“I’m too told to be an urchin, I’m past fifty years now. I teach English at Skagit Valley College, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay $150 to eat shrimp off an ice sculpture and speak nonsense with nobodies from Seattle who come to the valley to ride their bikes past fields full of sweating Mexicans picking strawberries. I live here. I’ve been here a long time, before they built this museum. There was an apple tree right here, the tree was here for years, in a field of tall grass, before they built the museum, which I call a mausoleum, a burial place for the living art which once graced this little town, before the swells came and bought it up, and the before the docents came to keep out the riff-raff. But I am talking to myself,” Munsey said.
He spotted Singin’ Dan, who used to live on the river, a former river rat like himself, a denizen of Fishtown and Shit Creek, a slum dog drummer on Bald Island summer nights. “Dan, I thought you didn’t live here any more,” Munsey said.
“Well, I don’t live here anymore,” Singin’ Dan said, “I sort of got married and I sort of live in Olympia now.”
“Okay, so maybe we can sort of get a beer or something,” Munsey said.
And they stood there on the sidewalk, watching the patrons ensconce from polished vehicles. “Pretty soon they’ll have valet parking,” Singin’ Dan said.
Then it was like – not a plan, no, without any intention, or desire, or any voice of complaint or rebellion, but as natural as the tide rising that Munsey and Singin’ Dan drifted around to the back entrance of the museum, where the busboys unloaded the catered dishes, where the portable fence was installed to guard the premises on this special fund-raising evening -- a fence that looked like a double dare to two old hippies.
Munsey and Singin’ Dan – years later they both said “I thought it was your idea” – but it wasn’t anyone’s idea, more like the purest of action, despite being much too old for such a stunt – they leaped over the fence, Singin’ Dan easily and thinner, but Munsey with a beer-filled paunch dragging over the top rail.
It felt like robbing a bank, Munsey said later, you might spend twenty years in prison, but for a few seconds you feel more freedom than you ever felt in your life – like a vision of ecstasy, like breaking the law is even breaking the law of gravity and you’re flying.
They dashed right into the main gallery of the museum, to the fountain of ice festooned with dainty bowls of shrimp and smoked salmon and real wine glasses for the white wine, people talking in summer dresses and heels and linen sport coats, juggling napkins, and some idiot playing the guitar in the corner to give it that lah-di-dah flavor.
Munsey and Singin’ Dan filled up their dainty plates, but the matron came barreling down – it was Kathleen Willens in a stern, very stern voice who came bearing down with the brunt of the law, because she had been told by the bus boys that two old hippies had crashed the gate and leaped over the fence.
In truth, Munsey and Singin’ Dan stood out from the crowd and, besides that, Willens knew them for who they were, knew that Munsey and Singin’ Dan needed to be watched and suspected. She marched up to them and asked to see their tickets, knowing as well as the skies above that they did not have any tickets
Willens could have let them stay, if only for a hoot. How did all that art get to the musuem if it wasn’t for a hoot?
But the hoot was over, there was no more drinking sake at Fishtown. No, by the summer of 2002 it was all in the can, under lock and key at the museum, and creatures like Munsey and Singin’ Dan may as well move on down the road. If you don’t have a ticket that’s just too damn bad.
What is a Poem? I wrote this little prose poem to prove a point. For the seventh time, I was not invited to read my words at the Skagit River Poetry Festival. The nominating committee gets completely anal about their selections. They turned me down because I'm not a poet and I don't write poetry, which is pretty goddam picky if you ask me...... This obsession with classification and genre really gets pathetic..... I happen to be a writer who does not fit well into any category....Do you know how many times they wouldn't hire me at the newspaper because they thought I was a poet? The newspaper says I'm too much of a poet, go away. Then the poetry committee says I'm not a poet because I have committed acts of journalism -- excuse me for complaining. Have a great day.
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Fred Owens
35 West Main Street, Suite B #391
Ventura CA 93001
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Docents guarded the front gates of the museum that fine summer evening, smiling at the ticket holders, but glaring at street urchins like Munsey.
“I’m too told to be an urchin, I’m past fifty years now. I teach English at Skagit Valley College, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay $150 to eat shrimp off an ice sculpture and speak nonsense with nobodies from Seattle who come to the valley to ride their bikes past fields full of sweating Mexicans picking strawberries. I live here. I’ve been here a long time, before they built this museum. There was an apple tree right here, the tree was here for years, in a field of tall grass, before they built the museum, which I call a mausoleum, a burial place for the living art which once graced this little town, before the swells came and bought it up, and the before the docents came to keep out the riff-raff. But I am talking to myself,” Munsey said.
He spotted Singin’ Dan, who used to live on the river, a former river rat like himself, a denizen of Fishtown and Shit Creek, a slum dog drummer on Bald Island summer nights. “Dan, I thought you didn’t live here any more,” Munsey said.
“Well, I don’t live here anymore,” Singin’ Dan said, “I sort of got married and I sort of live in Olympia now.”
“Okay, so maybe we can sort of get a beer or something,” Munsey said.
And they stood there on the sidewalk, watching the patrons ensconce from polished vehicles. “Pretty soon they’ll have valet parking,” Singin’ Dan said.
Then it was like – not a plan, no, without any intention, or desire, or any voice of complaint or rebellion, but as natural as the tide rising that Munsey and Singin’ Dan drifted around to the back entrance of the museum, where the busboys unloaded the catered dishes, where the portable fence was installed to guard the premises on this special fund-raising evening -- a fence that looked like a double dare to two old hippies.
Munsey and Singin’ Dan – years later they both said “I thought it was your idea” – but it wasn’t anyone’s idea, more like the purest of action, despite being much too old for such a stunt – they leaped over the fence, Singin’ Dan easily and thinner, but Munsey with a beer-filled paunch dragging over the top rail.
It felt like robbing a bank, Munsey said later, you might spend twenty years in prison, but for a few seconds you feel more freedom than you ever felt in your life – like a vision of ecstasy, like breaking the law is even breaking the law of gravity and you’re flying.
They dashed right into the main gallery of the museum, to the fountain of ice festooned with dainty bowls of shrimp and smoked salmon and real wine glasses for the white wine, people talking in summer dresses and heels and linen sport coats, juggling napkins, and some idiot playing the guitar in the corner to give it that lah-di-dah flavor.
Munsey and Singin’ Dan filled up their dainty plates, but the matron came barreling down – it was Kathleen Willens in a stern, very stern voice who came bearing down with the brunt of the law, because she had been told by the bus boys that two old hippies had crashed the gate and leaped over the fence.
In truth, Munsey and Singin’ Dan stood out from the crowd and, besides that, Willens knew them for who they were, knew that Munsey and Singin’ Dan needed to be watched and suspected. She marched up to them and asked to see their tickets, knowing as well as the skies above that they did not have any tickets
Willens could have let them stay, if only for a hoot. How did all that art get to the musuem if it wasn’t for a hoot?
But the hoot was over, there was no more drinking sake at Fishtown. No, by the summer of 2002 it was all in the can, under lock and key at the museum, and creatures like Munsey and Singin’ Dan may as well move on down the road. If you don’t have a ticket that’s just too damn bad.
What is a Poem? I wrote this little prose poem to prove a point. For the seventh time, I was not invited to read my words at the Skagit River Poetry Festival. The nominating committee gets completely anal about their selections. They turned me down because I'm not a poet and I don't write poetry, which is pretty goddam picky if you ask me...... This obsession with classification and genre really gets pathetic..... I happen to be a writer who does not fit well into any category....Do you know how many times they wouldn't hire me at the newspaper because they thought I was a poet? The newspaper says I'm too much of a poet, go away. Then the poetry committee says I'm not a poet because I have committed acts of journalism -- excuse me for complaining. Have a great day.
the annual spring subscription drive.
Save Frog Hospital!
Actually we don't need saving and we face no crisis, but we sure could use a few checks. Subscription revenue keeps the editor from getting cranky. It makes me feel good. It helps me to point out the good things going on in our trouble world. Subscription revenue prevents the harsh tones of self-righteousness. It helps me to make my point without preaching.
So please make out a check to Fred Owens for $25 and mail it to
Fred Owens
35 West Main Street, Suite B #391
Ventura CA 93001
Or, much easier, go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Attachment Parenting
Frog Hospital – May 11, 2012 – Unsubscribe anytime
ATTACHMENT PARENTING
By Fred Owens
Attachment parenting is the latest fad. The tenets of attachment parenting are as follows: 1. No strollers, carry the infant at all times. 2. No cribs, bring the baby to your own bed. 3. Keep the child on the breast for a long time, with no early weaning.
When I read about this "exciting new trend in parenting" -- there was something familiar about it, something that rang a bell, and then I remembered -- attachment parenting is nothing but a re-hash of Third World poverty-induced family habits..... This is something I saw everywhere when I was in Africa -- nobody uses a stroller, they don't have the money, none of those Babys-R-Us geegaws either. In Africa, babies are carried on their mother's back, all day long, or their older sister's back, all day long.
In Africa, people live all in one room and sleep on the floor, very commonly. Babies don't have cribs, they lie next to their moms and dads, or very nearby, surely not in some other room -- there is no other room.
And babies are on the breast everywhere in Africa. Who has the money to buy formula?
So we have this curious situation in America where relatively affluent mothers, from choice and not from necessity, are adopting the child-care practices of Third World mothers who really don't have a choice.
I don't object to the practices of attachment parenting per se, but I think this connection with poor African women should be acknowledged.
I only advise young mothers and fathers to trust their own judgment and trust their own instincts. Babies thrive in a relaxed atmosphere.
Obama is a Lucky Man
Obama is a lucky man to have Mitt Romney for an opponent, and Obama will win easily in November. But I am totally dissatisfied with Barack Obama, and I have no place to go. I have no leverage with this man. He doesn't need my help, he doesn't need my money, and when he wins a second term, he won't be working for me.....So the best thing I can do is put my efforts elsewhere, and local issues seem like the best place to go..... I wrote a story in the local paper about the condition of the sidewalks which are crumbling all over. Los Angeles is ten years behind schedule on sidewalk maintenance.
Where did all the money go? Yes, sidewalk maintenance is a totally non-exciting topic but a much better use of my time than going to an Obama election rally.
Alley Cruising in Venice. I have also spent more than 8 hours this week on a personally-guided tour of all the alleys in Venice, the Los Angeles neighborhood where I am staying right now. Again, this is not a glamorous topic, but it’s real. I have taken notes and photos, and discussed the alleys – their uses and abuses – with local residents. I will write another story about alleys for the local paper.
I was walking down the alley – it’s quiet and bare. There’s no traffic – it’s much quieter than the street. The pavement is cracked and crumbling but not really in bad shape. I would call it serviceable. I need to find someone in a motorized or hand-propelled wheel chair and ask them if the Venice alleys are navigable – if they are usable – but they seem okay.
I didn’t see any nasty garbage or fast-foot debris. No foul odors, no creepy corners -- basically folks are picking up after themselves. I saw one unleashed dog. He was a very old fellow, just limping along and no harm to anyone. The good thing is the very widespread custom of dog-owners cleaning up after their dogs – you don’t step in it very often.
I saw one furtive drug transaction – maybe it was drugs – but the young woman handed something to the young man while they both looked around to see if anyone was watching. I just kept walking.
Apart from that one dubious transaction, after some 8 hours of alley walking, I saw only good people going about their business - - like fixing cars and so forth. The alleys are safe.
I saw nasturtiums, wild fennel, lantana, geraniums, and various weeds and wildflowers springing from cracks in the pavement. I did not see any rats, raccoons, possums, feral cats, nor coyotes, but they are surely present. There’s an old saying, which I just made up, “You may not see the coyote, but he sees you.”
This is boring. Boring is good. The alleys in Venice are in good shape, so you can check that one off your list.
Unfortunately Unemployed. The thing is, I’m out of work. So here’s how I spend my day – I budget 45 minutes each morning for anger, resentment and depression because I am not a fully evolved person. My current resentment is against Obama and George Clooney for sponsoring a $40,000 per plate fundraiser -- I don’t like the way this makes me feel small.
But we move on. I look for gainful employment naturally, but that doesn’t take up the whole day. That’s why I come up with volunteer community-service work as a way to fill out my day in a positive manner – like my sidewalk and alley project. I strongly urge and recommend to any who is unemployed like I am right now – do not sit at home waiting for the phone to ring, stewing in your own juices. Get out of the house and do something. If you can’t find paying work, then do volunteer work.
I would say more, but that would be preaching – and we never do that at Frog Hospital.
Thank You. Thank you, Harriet Spanel for your subscription check. Harriet is the former state senator from Bellingham, Washington.
Save Frog Hospital!
Actually we don't need saving and we face no crisis, but we sure could use a few checks. Subscription revenue keeps the editor from getting cranky. It makes me feel good. It helps me to point out the good things going on in our trouble world. Subscription revenue prevents the harsh tones of self-righteousness. It helps me to make my point without preaching.
So please make out a check to Fred Owens for $25 and mail it to
Fred Owens
35 West Main Street, Suite B #391
Ventura CA 93001
Or, much easier, go to the Frog Hospital blog and select the PayPal button
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Saturday, May 05, 2012
Yard Art. I made this display of yard art when I lived on the old farm up in Ventura. The plant is a cilantro. In back of the plant is a rectangle holding the pale moon, which I painted, and both sit upon an old oak chair. In the background we see more old chairs and the outer edge of the chicken coop. This is how we make our yards beautiful – by taking stuff that is already there – that’s the key – don’t be going to the store and buying things – the key to yard art is artfully re-arranging what you already have. In fact, you can live your whole life this way.
Friday, April 13, 2012
People are like Plants
People are like plants. They need water, nourishment, sunshine, and a certain amount of attention. The cells of people are made of the same stuff as plants -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, iron and copper ( I hope I got that right ) ...... I think plants need a few trace elements as well -- zinc, molybdenum..... Anyway, that's what my botany book says. It was published in 1963, and the author himself says further research might change the list of the essential cell-building elements. But it would still be safe to say that YOU are LIKE a TULIP in many respects.
The First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another............. Says who? What if the universe had a leak?
A Wet Spring in Southern California. We had a dry and mild winter, but it seems to be raining well enough this spring – even today, pouring down, where I am staying in the Santa Monica Mountains. The hills are bursting with green grass and the yellow of wild mustard. I saw rocks tumbling off the hill by the highway -- I hope it doesn’t slide.
Mudslides, Earthquakes, and Brush Fires. We have mudslides and earthquakes here, as you know, but the ones that people fear, the ones they talk about with dread, are the fires, the brush fires that can race faster than a car. Just yesterday, I was having coffee with Mike and he said why doesn’t the grounds crew clean up the pine needles that are heaped by the stream -- pine needles are good tinder and set ablaze by the smallest spark during the hot, dry months of late summer.
Bad Weather. Chicago had eighty degree temperatures in March and violent tornadoes sprung up all across the Midwest -- it was much too early in the season. Heat records were broken. Is it global warming? Or is it God’s vengeance? Or does it just happen sometimes?
I won’t settle that question here, but say that no matter what explanation makes sense to you, if we have extremes of weather, we need to be prepared and work together. We need to work with the people who don’t agree with. Tornadoes can kill Republicans and Democrats equally and they might come in unusual places and at unpredictable times. If you live in Oklahoma, you know the drill, but people in California haven’t got a clue.
But what if a tornado did spring up in California? Would you know what to do? Lots of people in California are prepared for an earthquake -- but perhaps a kind all-over preparedness might be better – and a determination to survive, along with a spiritual acceptance of events beyond our control.
I support the climate-change hypothesis, that human activity has become a major cause of it. That’s one of the reasons I am studying the botany text – so that I can make a serious inquiry into the works of climate scientists, because I will never say I “believe” in climate change. The word belief in this context is a casual but damaging mis-use of language.
I’m smart enough, and you are too -- to actually read some of this stuff, and follow the logic and test the scientific evidence -- I think we kind of have to do that -- because it’s not a matter of faith, it’s a matter of rational skepticism.
Or maybe it is the plagues of old Egypt come to visit us and punish the wicked -- either way, it’s best to keep a battery-operated radio on hand, plus some canned goods, and maybe five-gallons of drinking water.
And a couple of one-pounds cans of coffee. If I had a hot cup of coffee in the morning, I could face the Apocalypse.
The First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another............. Says who? What if the universe had a leak?
A Wet Spring in Southern California. We had a dry and mild winter, but it seems to be raining well enough this spring – even today, pouring down, where I am staying in the Santa Monica Mountains. The hills are bursting with green grass and the yellow of wild mustard. I saw rocks tumbling off the hill by the highway -- I hope it doesn’t slide.
Mudslides, Earthquakes, and Brush Fires. We have mudslides and earthquakes here, as you know, but the ones that people fear, the ones they talk about with dread, are the fires, the brush fires that can race faster than a car. Just yesterday, I was having coffee with Mike and he said why doesn’t the grounds crew clean up the pine needles that are heaped by the stream -- pine needles are good tinder and set ablaze by the smallest spark during the hot, dry months of late summer.
Bad Weather. Chicago had eighty degree temperatures in March and violent tornadoes sprung up all across the Midwest -- it was much too early in the season. Heat records were broken. Is it global warming? Or is it God’s vengeance? Or does it just happen sometimes?
I won’t settle that question here, but say that no matter what explanation makes sense to you, if we have extremes of weather, we need to be prepared and work together. We need to work with the people who don’t agree with. Tornadoes can kill Republicans and Democrats equally and they might come in unusual places and at unpredictable times. If you live in Oklahoma, you know the drill, but people in California haven’t got a clue.
But what if a tornado did spring up in California? Would you know what to do? Lots of people in California are prepared for an earthquake -- but perhaps a kind all-over preparedness might be better – and a determination to survive, along with a spiritual acceptance of events beyond our control.
I support the climate-change hypothesis, that human activity has become a major cause of it. That’s one of the reasons I am studying the botany text – so that I can make a serious inquiry into the works of climate scientists, because I will never say I “believe” in climate change. The word belief in this context is a casual but damaging mis-use of language.
I’m smart enough, and you are too -- to actually read some of this stuff, and follow the logic and test the scientific evidence -- I think we kind of have to do that -- because it’s not a matter of faith, it’s a matter of rational skepticism.
Or maybe it is the plagues of old Egypt come to visit us and punish the wicked -- either way, it’s best to keep a battery-operated radio on hand, plus some canned goods, and maybe five-gallons of drinking water.
And a couple of one-pounds cans of coffee. If I had a hot cup of coffee in the morning, I could face the Apocalypse.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Hoodies?
Gratitude. Thank you, Barbara Z, for renewing your subscription to Frog Hospital. Your check for $25 is very gratefully received.
Barbara Z is one of many intelligent, socially-concerned subscribers to the Frog Hospital newsletter. You can join this excellent team. For more information on our spring subscription drive, see the bottom of this newsletter.
Ted P. from Boston sent a check. He's been with Frog Hospital since the beginning, in 1999. He sends me postcards from far away places like Cuba or Finland, but he gets around and sees the world. I got to know Ted years ago, in 1993 when I lived in Boston and belonged to the local Tikkun group.
Spring. I left the dahlia farm in Ventura after 17 months. I had hoped to stay long enough to see the sweet peas blooming again because I had worked on that crop all winter. But things didn't work out. I was replaced by another fellow -- I guess you could say he shared the owners' vision, while I did not.
I landed on my feet, and I think that's why I like living in southern California so much. The day after I left the farm, I secured a six-week job restoring two gardens in Altadena, at pay better than I was making on the farm, so I guess that's all right.
It's landscaping work, which pays a lot better than farm work, except it's not steady. You have to hustle and network and accept it that down periods will come and nobody calls. But I put my rate low enough to catch the market and there is more work out there -- I'll find it. They might even find me -- whew!
The weather has been good. We had some decent late-winter rains, so the hills might green up a little bit.
Hoodies?
The only time I ever got beat up by a cop I was wearing a hoodie. This happened in January 1976 in a suburb of Orlando ( not Sanford, but nearby ). It late at night. Wearing a hoodie, you can't see the face too well. I compounded the error by thrusting my hands in my pockets -- a stupid move. The cop worked me over with his night stick. A young man should know -- keep your hands visible and don't cover your face. That's been my custom ever since......... Orlando was kind of a nice place in 1976, before Disney World blew the place all to hell. But back before that it was a sleepy southern time, and we were there that winter, just hanging out in the park downtown, enjoying the sunshine......... The thing is -- what was I doing wandering around at 2 a.m. in the morning? That's when I ran into the cop. I decided, after this one-sided altercation, that I just ought to get off the street and stop hanging around.... Shortly after this, I asked my sweetheart to marry me, and we had two children and the rest is history.... That's how it worked for me.
But I'm still careful about where and when I put on a hoodie. It shows very poor judgment on the part of Trayvon Martin's supporters to be using the hoodie as a symbol of righteousness. I stand with Trayvon and his supporters, and I say keep your face free where I can see all of it and keep your hands out of your pockets and pull up your pants.
And, jeez, I wouldn't ever go back to one of those cracker-barrel redneck towns in Florida. The cops didn't hate Trayvon,. They weren't glad he died, but there's seems to a lot of evidence that they took the easy way out, like how can we resolve this situation with the least amount of paperwork and expense. Because a homicide in a small town is a huge problem. First of all, they don't have their own full-time homicide investigator, so they need to bring one in from the big city, some wise-guy know-it-all who takes over the investigation and makes everyone else look like a bunch of hicks. So they don't want to do that.
What I think is that Trayvon Martin is lying dead on the sidewalk and the cops are strategizing on a plausible scenario and a way to wrap this thing up -- Self Defense! Yes, that could work, and that's where the racial prejudice comes into play. Trayvon Martin. His people are not well-connected. They won't fight the ruling. We can spare ourselves a lot of paperwork.
Not forgetting the expense of a murder trial that could absolutely ruin the budget of a small town in Florida. So they had reasons -- they wanted that self defense ruling. They were all sweating in their socks. They knew their careers were at stake......Or they just wanted to go home that awful night, and maybe they just didn't care enough about the youth bleeding, now dead, on the sidewalk.
the annual spring subscription drive.
Save Frog Hospital!
Actually we don't need saving and we face no crisis, but we sure could use a few checks. Subscription revenue keeps the editor from getting cranky. It makes me feel good. It helps me to point out the good things going on in our trouble world. Subscription revenue prevents the harsh tones of self-righteousness. It helps me to make my point without preaching.
So please make out a check to Fred Owens for $25 and mail it to
Fred Owens
35 West Main Street, Suite B #391
Ventura CA 93001
Or, much easier, go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button.
Cops in Florida. Okay, back to my essay about cops in Florida. It seems that this little town in Florida might be one of those shit-heel places where the mayor's brother gets arrested for running a meth lab, and the town treasurer is embezzling the funds, and the town council members are all first cousins to each other. These places exist and they have lousy cops and the harsh glare of national publicity is what they deserve.
But I wouldn't smear the whole region. Not every small southern town is like that -- some are just as good as anyplace on earth -- you know, Mayberry, with Andy Griffith and Barney Fife -- that's not a total fairy tale, it's real and it's the flip-side to this sordid tale from central Florida.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
7922 Santa Ana Rd
Ventura CA 93001
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