UNDER ORION'S BELT

As we drove into the Carrizo Plain from the south end, past the oil rigs and pump jacks in Maricopa, I could see that this was not going to be the verdant spring visit I had anticipated.  The land looked beat up and tired.  Soda Lake was dry.  The lumpy hills of the Temblor Range were devoid of vegetation.  And the washboarded road was playing havoc with our little camper/van.  Nevertheless we pushed on. And I became entranced once again with the sheer size and austere distances we were traversing.  And here and there I could see bursts of color.  A splash of goldfields in the chaparral.  A small bunch of roadside poppies.  A lupine or two.  These were the plants that were somehow hearty enough to reach full bloom.

 But our ultimate goal was to get a campsite in the KCL Campground, get settled in, and come up with a new strategy for exploring the Carrizo.  The campground in question has only about ten sites, and even fewer trees.  Questionable water (high in nitrates).  And a resident pair of Great Horned Owls who dwell in the large eucalyptus there.  As fate would have it, all the sites were taken.  Including a group site full of boy scouts from Santa Margarita. 

 In all the times I have camped here I have never seen a ranger of any type (it is managed by the Bureau of Land Management) nor are there any fees charged so, as unobtrusively as possible, we parked our van over to one corner of the camp and no one seemed to notice or to care.  In fact, the resident campers were downright friendly.  Across the way, Ren was traveling with her 16-year old cat, pretty much living out of her car.  She looked to be in her late 40s perhaps, in sloppy t-shirt and cargo pants.  Probably a real looker at one time but now missing four of her front teeth, and quick to tell us about her family’s ups and downs. 

 Next to us were two women who looked like researchers.  They had vials and killing jars and other various paraphernalia, and after talking to one of them, Sara, turned out they were, indeed, researchers trying to re-introduce important pollinators back into the valley.  Meanwhile, on the far side of the camp, live music was emanating from a campsite with two young men and two young women.  Fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar.  Bluegrass music and songs that laid down a quiet soundtrack to the afternoon.

 Ren was having trouble putting up her tent so one of the bluegrass boys came over to help.  Sara went to loan her a mallet.  Meanwhile, a pair of campers who came in late, asked us if they could set up behind our van and, of course, we said yes.  Later on I loaned them a table so they wouldn’t have to cook on the ground.  A Scout leader who had locked his keys in his car was appreciative when we gave him a wire coat hanger. Throughout the camp there seemed to be a real feeling of camaraderie and appreciation for where and who we were. 

 As the sun disappeared over the dark hills to the west, the hooting of the owls provided an impromptu chorus for the bluegrass players.  Campfires popped up all around us, and I had visions of the migrant camps in The Grapes of Wrath.  And when darkness took over, Orion rose into the center of the sky as if to watch over us and protect us all.  The Carrizo Plain no longer seemed austere and foreboding.  Our little campground was a beacon of goodwill and good feelings against the cold April night.  A small group of human beings huddled under a living canopy, pinpoints of light and life in a vast and seemingly endless landscape.  Under  Orion’s belt, we were caught up in the mystique and the magic of this raw and beautiful plain

Revisiting the Field

 

This morning I discovered where I was on Christmas Day of 1967.  I’ve been digitizing old slides, plowing through the memories, and there it was.  A picture of a bathtub in the Los Altos Hills dated 12/25/67.  The tub was on its side, having served dutifully as a cattle trough for many years, I am sure.  Beside it was an old wooden gate.  There were brown hillsides and a few oaks. And far in the background, I could see vestiges of the San Francisco Bay and the megalopolis surrounding it.  I have no other recollections of that afternoon but I bet I can reconstruct it pretty well.

That morning I would have spent with my family down in the flatlands of Mountain View, happily opening presents and sharing that all too rare feeling of togetherness.  My parents were no doubt worrying about the lengthening of my hair.  And my proclivity for wearing an old Army field jacket everywhere.  Little did they know that only a week before, I had dropped acid for the first time. Had spent the night in a crash pad in Santa Cruz with close friends, listening to Jefferson Airplane on headphones and being overwhelmed with color and sound. Feeling an overwhelming peace with the world, even as the spector of Vietnam lurked on the fringes.

But this was Christmas morning and I wasn’t high...yet.  And I cannot, for the life of me, remember any of the presents I may have gotten that morning.  But I’m sure we prolonged the process because it was that one time of the year that we were truly family.  We would have cleaned up all the wrapping paper, deciding which ribbons to keep.  Gone off and made inventory of our newly opened gifts.  And I might have stuck around until lunch time.  But at some point, one of my friends must have called me and said, “hey, we’re going up to the Field today.  Come join us!”

The Field was a large chunk of open space in the Los Altos Hills, a piece of land that had probably been a

sprawling ranch at one time but now seemed abandoned save for one big water tank at its crest.  The rest was quintessential California terrain.  Rolling land with dead gray grass, dotted with gnarled and twisted live oaks, bay laurel and chaparral.  We had “discovered” it about a year earlier while driving around the back roads getting stoned.  No one ever seemed to go there.  The land was open and inviting.  So we just called it “the Field” and began making regular pilgrimages there.  It was especially inviting in the spring when the grasses were a verdant green, and the mustard was blooming amid the apricot orchards.

More than likely on that Christmas afternoon, Phil and his sister Nina would have come by.  Or maybe my old buddy Stan.  Or any of about half a dozen co-conspirators who would whisk me away to our haven in the hills, smoking weed all the way as we climbed the winding roads beyond Foothill College and into the eucalyptus-tinged air of the coast range.  I am sure Nina would have been with me.  I was madly in love with her at the time.  She was my hippie ideal.  Skinny to a fault.  Long brown hair combed down straight.  Sharp features and deep, brown eyes.  Dark Italian skin to match my Greek-bred melanin. Short skirts.  All done up in paisley and beads.  Full of clever asides and laughter.

Our little group would have turned off the paved road onto a short, dirt drive ending at a locked aluminum gate and, to the right, a small opening in the neglected barbed wire fence.  From there it was a short walk uphill, toward the water tank, where we could all sit and smoke and look out over slate gray water of the bay, the winding sloughs, and the industrial onslaught that was usurping the shoreline.  We were likely bundled up against the December chill, but feeling the warmth of our companionship, the unspoken bonds, the outright laughter, and the blessing of many years spent together, nurtured by the same little community at the base of the hills.

Eventually the time would come to get up, lightheaded and silent, and walk back down the hillside toward the vehicle or vehicles that had brought us to this secret place.  And I think that was when I saw the old bath tub, lying on its side, rust stained and forgotten.  But a fitting memento to this place where the Ohlone once roamed, where the Spanish created a sprawling land grant that was eventually taken from them, and parceled out into farms and ranches overlooking the Valley of the Heart’s Delight below.  And now this precious little bit of acreage that was somehow spared the incursion of the wealthy.  The rambling ranchers and sprawling “starter castles” now hovering over what was soon to become the Silicon Valley.

But that Christmas Day was such a pivotal moment for all of us.  An exclamation point on the Summer of Love.  The lead-in to a year filled with intense highs and lows.  Assassinations. The fear of Selective Service.  Nixon as president. The joy of outdoor concerts, zoned-out camping trips, great bands at the Fillmore.  And toward the end, the dissolution of my romance.  The heart ache of once again being alone and having to navigate a world in confusion.  And a future that seemed both hopeless and hearkening.

 

*Afterthought:  “The Field” has long since been subdivided and filled with high-end homes, but a portion of it still remains as Byrne Park.

 

 

 

The Manic Marriage

 

I had been a park ranger all of two weeks and I was already in love.  Not just with the gorgeously carved landscape of the Pinnacles that rose up all around me, but with a young lady who lived about 300 miles away.   I had met Karen the previous year when I was hitchhiking through Big Sur and needed a place to stay.  I wandered into her campsite and we ended up sharing a sleeping bag together under towering coastal redwoods….after which I made several hitch hiking forays down to the Orange County town of La Habra where she lived.  She was barely eighteen at the time, and I was a not-much-more worldly wise twenty-three, living on mescaline and unemployment checks in Santa Cruz, California.

 So here I was, now gainfully employed and with a spacious 12’ x 16’ one-room cabin, tucked amid the sycamore trees and chain ferns of Bear Gulch, in the shadow of the rugged High Peaks.  Within a month I had my own car, an old Plymouth Valiant, and the notion to drive down to La Habra forthwith to bringeth my fair damsel back with me to our little domicile in the chaparral.  And so it came to pass.  Karen took up residence with me in the cool days of late February as I learned my trade as an interpretive park ranger.

 There was only one catch.  We had to keep the fact that I was living in sin a secret from the strict Baptist park superintendent and the even stricter Mennonite head ranger.  So Karen stayed hidden indoors most of the time, or would venture out disguised as just another tourist schlepping around the park.  I’m not sure what made me think we could carry on this charade for very long because within weeks the head ranger’s two sneaky little sons figured it out and quickly reported our indiscretions to daddy.  Even more quickly, I was confronted by said father and told, in no uncertain terms, that I’d better get rid of the girl or get married.  As I was still in a trial period and in danger of losing my dream job, I had to make a hard and fast decision.

 “Well, I guess we’ll get married” was the obvious choice.  And the quickest way to accomplish our union was to head for Reno, Nevada where we could tie the knot within 24 hours.  But we did not want to do the deed alone.  We wanted some of our close friends to share in the festivities.  So we contacted Stan, Steve and Pam who readily agreed to participate in the celebration.  So the stage was set.  We gassed up the Valiant one mid-March afternoon and headed north for the two hour drive to Stan’s house.  We smoked at least one joint along the way.

 When we reached our destination, which was Stan’s parents’ house in Los Altos, we found him sitting halfway up an apricot tree, stoned out on acid.  Nevertheless, he eagerly jumped in the back of the Valiant and off we went for our second pickup….Steve and Pam in San Francisco.  They lived out in the avenues somewhere and were ready and willing when we finally found their apartment.  They joined Stan in the back seat as we made a beeline over the Bay Bridge, and east toward the Sierra Nevada.  Over the next few hours, much weed was circulated through the Valiant’s vinyl interior, and spirits were very high as we climbed ever upward.

 As darkness descended so did some unanticipated snow, and soon enough we were forced to find a set of chains somewhere so we could continue on our madcap marital adventure.  It was through sheer will that the five of us, in our spaced out condition, were able to install said chains and continue our journey to “the biggest little city in America”.  We pulled into Reno close to midnight, found a cheap motel, and rented a room for all five of us.  Karen and I took one bed, and Stan, Steve and Pam took the other.  But any semblance of sleep was to elude us as we congratulated ourselves on having made it over the mountains by taking mescaline.

 Came the dawn and we miraculously found the county courthouse where, after filling out the necessary paperwork, Karen and I were wed in a ceremony so brief I cannot remember any of it.  I do remember driving back up the Sierras, this time in bright sunshine.  We stopped somewhere near Donner Summit where we all got out and had a snowball fight.  Then back into the car for the drive down into San Francisco to drop off Steve and Pam, and then on down to the Peninsula to disgorge Stan not far from the tree we picked him up at.  But still before us was the two hour drive back down to the Pinnacles and our little cabin of dreams.  We arrived just as the late afternoon sun was throwing long shadows through the live oaks and gray pines.

 But here is the kicker.  After settling back down to domestic bliss, I was never asked to show a marriage license nor any other proof that we were legally wed.  We could have faked it, and we probably should have.  The marriage lasted just over two years, after which we amicably separated and I bought a copy of “How to Do Your Own Divorce in California”.  I learned how to do all the paper work myself.  Karen was a dutiful respondent. She and I split up our record collection, and she took the dog, and I returned to my life as a solitary ranger in a strange land.  In the end, the divorce cost me $18 in filing fees.

 And don’t think this valuable lesson was not taken to heart.  A couple of years later when I had fortuitously met another lady friend, and I was just about to move to southern Utah for a job at Canyonlands National Park, the two of us agreed to buy a couple of cheap rings, and masquerade as an old married couple.  Of course, the ruse worked.  And in the long run it was a lot less complicated and a lot less painful than making a midnight run to Reno.

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas 2020

 

It’s 7 o’clock on Christmas morning.  The house is still asleep.  Outside a milky blue glow to the east silhouettes the trees and telephone poles.  No snow this year.  Just an icy stillness beyond the windows.  I am the first one up, as always, so I have already played Santa and stuffed the stockings that now hang distended from the mantle.  In a few hours all the packages underneath the tree will have been opened, their wrappings scattered about for the cat to play with.  But for now, there is a look of perfection, a kind of symmetry in all the squares, rectangles and oddly shaped bundles under the tree.

 The silence of winter,  The memories gathered over seventy Christmases.  Yuletides in the desert.  Yuletides by the sea.  And the almost ancient family ones in the heart of suburbia, when petty differences and misunderstandings were temporarily set aside for the laughter and comfort of home.  And mom was Mom.  And dad was Dad.  And the siblings were not a nuisance but necessary cogs in the familial wheel.

 The lites shine brightly this morning in spite of the decades.  Each ornament seems to have its own story so that the tree becomes an anthology of little vignettes and events, bound by the turning earth and all the people I love and have loved, and all the places I have been like this one, with a decorated tree in a corner of the room, on a cold morning in December and the beginning of another winter.

The Skylight

Several nights a month the full moon pokes its opal colored dome over the Grand Mesa, and slowly ascends into the Colorado night sky, losing both its warm hue and imposing size along the way.  As it rises ever higher, it gradually floats over Mantey Heights, sending milky shafts of light through the skylight in our bathroom.  Depending upon the time of year and the moon’s position in the sky, the light will slide down along the wall and into our bathtub or it may tickle our towel rack before reaching the floor. For a few hours, it becomes a celestial night light both calming and intriguing, and I look forward to its arrival every month.

 I have always wondered why more houses do not have skylights.  Why more people don’t eschew electricity for that natural light. When I was a small child in San Francisco, we had a skylight in our upstairs bathroom.  It was one of those kind that had chicken wire inside the glass that made a pattern of hexagons across the ceiling.  My grandmother’s old house in the City had one too.  Always emitting that clean, airy glow even through the numerous foggy days in the Richmond District.

 And when we moved into our new house just one year ago, I was immediately delighted to see that small rectangle of glass on the bathroom ceiling.  Since our bathtub was not fully functional, I put a dozen or so house plants in and around it, and it has become a nursery, the plants sending their tendrils upward toward the skylight and reveling in the humidity from the nearby shower.  And speaking of the shower, there is a real pleasure in soaping up under its steamy and streamy output, while looking up at a window of deep blue sky where I can gain some measure of what the day may be like outside. Sometimes I can watch the movement of whispy clouds overhead as I rinse the shampoo from my hair. Even on winter days when the snow lies heavy over the top of the skylight, the glow still filters through as if I am caught under some weird avalanche.

 But it is those moonlit nights that I love the best.  As I lie in my bed looking into the bathroom, the light slowly enters.  I’m never quite sure what part of the wall it will decide to invade, but it always makes a shaft that mirrors the skylight above it.  When I move in for a closer look, it seems as if the plants are swaying and reaching toward the ephemeral glow. There is a vibration of illumination. 

I know it is all reflected light from the sun and I can appreciate the science of it all. But mostly I can be grateful for that skylight where, for a few hours every month, I can capture pieces of that rather holy moonlight, and make it my own

Riding the Steel Bronco

Aside from a few commuter train rides from Los Altos to San Francisco, the first real train trip that I ever took was from Thompson, Utah to Oakland, California.  It was early January of 1975.  Three months earlier I had accepted a park ranger job in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park and I was determined to take my live-in partner Susan with me.  This time we would pretend to be man and wife to avoid the quickie Reno marriage that I had endured as a very naïve seasonal ranger several years before.  In October, 1974, we left our home in the Salinas Valley with Susan driving her old VW bus, while I wrangled the small U-Haul truck with my Datsun pickup hooked to a tow bar in the rear.

We had determined to head to southern California first to retrieve some of Sue’s belongings before sequestering ourselves in the canyon country.  All went relatively well until we got to Santa Barbara.  I noticed that the U-Haul was driving erratically and when I pulled over to check it out, I was appalled to find out that somehow the Datsun had jack-knifed into the tow bar which had impaled itself to the Datsun’s front  bumper.  As fate would have it, we were rescued by a young mechanic in a nearby garage who separated said vehicles, but that left us with three vehicles to deal with and only two drivers. Realizing our dilemma, the mechanic told us we could leave the Datsun with him and pick it up at our convenience.  So, taking a huge leap of faith, we left my little pickup with a complete stranger in Santa Barbara, and continued on to Canyonlands.

By early January we had made arrangements to take the train back to California to retrieve my truck.  By that time, my friend Tom Ferrell had gone down to Santa Barbara on his own, rescued the Datsun, and had driven it back to Pinnacles where he was stationed.  These were the days before AMTRAK.  Our only option was to pick up the Steel Bronco, the northbound Denver & Rio Grande passenger train in Thompson, Utah, and make a couple of transfers to get us to our destination.  My district ranger Dave Minor dropped us off at the snowy platform in Thompson.  We were the only two people there when the train pulled in late in the afternoon.

It was the dead of winter and the cold night was only minutes away.  Sue and I were riding coach, of course, so we sat side by side sharing a blanket over our legs, watching as the hulking Bookcliffs turned into a long, jagged silhouette outside of Green River, then disappeared entirely. But we looked upon it all as just another romantic adventure.  We had only been living in Canyonlands for a few months, and already the sublime isolation and magic landscape had won us over.  We were feeling a little naughty as she gave me a hand job under the blanket as we rolled along.  We got to Ogden, Utah just before midnight and had to get off the train and board a bus to Salt Lake City where we picked up another west bound train around 1am.  I slept fitfully feeling cold drafts whenever anyone entered our car.  I remember waking up in Elko, Nevada and seeing snow falling.  But eventually we made it all the way to the bay area, got a ride down to Pinnacles, and retrieved my much-missed Datsun pickup, which was not too much the worse for wear.

After a day or two of visiting friends, we began the drive back to the Needles. I’m not sure where we slept that first night but I remember going through Cove Fort, Utah very late the following night with snow falling. Only a few pieces of Interstate 70 were complete so we were on and off of frontage roads most of the way, but happily reached our destination with two vehicles now at our disposal and a weird little adventure behind us. After all these years, I still love the sound and the feel of a train rumbling through the dark desert night as the steel rails rock me to sleep, and the mysterious darkness beckons.

 

And Then There Was Elizabeth

 And then there was Elizabeth.  She was part of a San Francisco State poetry group that would meet at our little house on Geary Street back in 1969.  I was 22 and she was 30.  I was smitten almost immediately.  And somehow, we ended up together.  I had only lost my virginity about a month previous, and was feeling sexually inept but she was pretty and pretty patient with me and not at all aggressive.  She hung out with a fascinating group of people, all of them nearly a decade older than me, and some of them holdovers from the beat generation.  Most of them were into poetry and music.

 Barbara was kind of frumpy, short, wore glasses, and was married to Larry, an intense black man who played the flute.  Dorothy was the real beauty of the group with high cheek bones, perfect skin and a patrician air about her.  She was married to Donald, another black man who sported a huge Afro and was very outgoing.  There were several others as well whose names I no longer remember, although I do remember the couple that decided to name their child Amadeus, and remember thinking “Oh, he’s gonna love that when he gets older!”

 Most of them lived either in Berkeley or Oakland.  Elizabeth worked over there as a bank teller.  She liked my poetry, and apparently liked me as well because we spent quite a bit of time together, and I had no money and no vehicle.  She pretty much schlepped me all around in her old sedan.  Elizabeth was from southern California originally and had a thing for Bob’s Big Boy burgers, so one night we drove all the way down the peninsula to Mountain View so that I could have a Bob’s Big Boy Burger, which I had never had before.

 Another time I joined her and her friends for a day at the beach, somewhere down near Santa Cruz.  It was a pretty intimidating group, and I mostly just hung out with them and smoked dope, and listened to their conversation, much of it political.

 In November of that year, we all joined in a huge anti-war march through the streets of San Francisco.  There were an estimated half a million people who began the march downtown and ended up in Golden Gate Park.  There we were serenaded by the Youngbloods and other local bands.  I really felt like I was part of something so much bigger than me and that, despite my poverty and reliance upon others, I would get by.  In December she and I went to the ill-fated rock concert at Altamont, took mescaline, and sat way on the edge of the crowd.  The vibes were just too creepy and we left before the Stones took the stage. Back at the Geary Street house, things were turning ugly between myself and my room mates.  I was spending more time at Elizabeth’s place in Oakland, a two-story Victorian in a rundown section of town near the freeway.

 In spite of the rather bohemian group she hung out with, Elizabeth played it straight pretty well.  After all, she was a bank teller.  I liked going places with her but sometimes felt the age disparity between us.  As it happened, I abandoned the Geary Street house the following January and ended up moving down to Santa Cruz where I would spend the next year living on mescaline, unemployment, and the kindness of strangers.  Although we continued to see each other, the divide between us grew.  When I took up with a local girl that pretty much ended it.

 Eventually I got a job with the National Park Service.  And over the years, Elizabeth and I would see each other occasionally.  Some times we would sleep together, other times we’d just pass each other on the same road.  Ironically she ended up working for the Park Service as well.  We finally lost touch all together.  But I’ve been thinking about her lately, wondering if she is still around.  If she ever thinks back to those tumultuous times in the bay area when we shared in the energy, the uncertainty, the passion and the pain of a decade’s end. In light of what is happening now in 2020, it seems so distant and almost quaint by comparison.  But she got me through an equally difficult time way back when, and for that I will always be grateful.