The Great Salt Lake Occupies 2,500 square miles of Utah northwest of Salt Lake City.  It was once part of the much larger Lake Bonneville, now the Bonneville flats, which 18,000 years ago extended across 20,000 square miles including parts of Idaho and Nevada.

The lake is famous for its high salinity which varies between 10 and 25%, second only to the Dead Sea of Israel, but like the Salton Sea in California, the water tends to be rather smelly and this is not a great place for swimming or sunbathing.

This didn’t stop early settlers to the salt lake valley from making it a sunbathing attraction.  Early Mormon pioneers built Saltair, a place that what would come to be known as the “Salt Palace” and boardwalk which was a western attraction for people in the late 1800’s.  There were carnivals to rival Atlantic City and Coney Island there.  This all in all is not surprising as contrary to a lot of belief, those of the Mormon faith are all about fun, dancing and music. 

The Salt Palace was a grand Dame sitting beautifully lakeside serving up five star foods and became a place where the people of the Salt Lake valley could show off their cultural achievements to visiting dignitaries, journalists and passers through.  Balls were held there, coming out parties and weddings. 

“It’s early morning at the Lake Point railway station.  The sun has yet to fully emerge from behind the Oquirrhs, but the dry August heat has already announced its arrival.  You sit with your siblings in the cramped seat on an eastbound rail car.  Scores of your neighbors and townspeople pack the aisles and platforms.

It’s August 15, 1903: Official Tooele County Day at Saltair Pavilion.  The county’s entire population, it seems, has boarded the train’s ten passenger cars to visit the most thrilling resort in the west.  Try as it might, the blistering heat can’t spoil the excited spirit aboard the crowded coaches this morning.  The train lurches forward.  You’re finally on your way.

You watch out your window as the train rounds the mountain and approaches the legendary edifice.  Rising from the lake at the end of a mile-long trestle, Saltair seems fascinatingly out of place.  The sight of its onion domes and ornate archways against the lake’s bare backdrop startles your senses.

You’ll spend the day swimming in the lake’s salty waters, trying—but failing—to sink. You’ll watch the sunset from the narrow bathhouse arcs.   By the time you board the train again, the pavilion will be ablaze in lights and awash with the scents of corn dogs and popcorn.” –Borrowed from a reflection by Clint Thomsen

However with the advent of trains and through-travel Salt Lake City while it remained a western “metropolis” lost some of its glamour as a stopping point.  The gold rush contributed to this as well.  California grew and in reality had more wonders to offer travelers from the east.  The Salt lake declined as Utah grew and spread out from her early settlement center and the Salt Palace sat and declined like Mrs. Haversham, waiting in her abandoned glory for her groom to show, which he never did…,he had moved on. 

I remember several years ago watching The cult masterpiece “Carnival of Souls” (Herk Harvey.1962) in which an organ player takes a position in Salt Lake City and is inexplicably drawn to the old Salt Palace.  The mood was intentionally creepy.  It was a great suspense story in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock.  It had early shades of what would become David Lynch’s trademark weirdness.  A story that whispered of the supernatural and left you unsettled. 

This movie incidentally is considered to have some of the best footage of the historic Saltair as it was filmed 8 years before the original building and boardwalk were destroyed by fire.  The convention center that replaces it today is nowhere near its majesty and magnitude.

 However it is the creepy feeling that I most associate with the whole of the Salt Lake.  A certain dreariness.  A certain haunted feeling that you cannot put your finger on.  When there I feel as if were I to stay too long my story would switch to something like a Bronte novel.  Some tragedy would occur that would not necessarily have a good explanation to the outside world, but would affect me just the same. 

Part of it I think is the fact that The Great Salt Lake is a dead sea.  What used to be an inland ocean teaming with life as evidenced by fossils all over Utah of sea creatures and plant life has dwindled to the 2500 square miles we have left of dense salt filled water.  It is so salient that one can float in it and it is almost impossible to drown…unless you swallow water.  It is a dead place and feels like one. 

Interestingly enough the people who inhabited the southern Salt Lake region, the Utes are related to the Paiutes who inhabited the region of Mono Lake which borders California and Nevada.  Both Mono Lake and the Great Salt Lake are places whose spiritual energy gives me a bad feeling.  I cannot think of spending the night in either place.

While it is the Ute Indians that the state eventually took its name from, the northern area of Utah was inhabited by the Sho Shoni tribes. The Goshute Sho Shoni about 900 in number lived in the valleys and mountains west and southwest of Great Salt Lake, with the remnants of their bands located in and around the small settlement of Ibapah, Utah, today.

The natives of the area mostly skirted the Salt Lake. Native American cultures used the freshwater marshes and streams around the lake for hunting and fishing and although it is a vitally live area in terms of water fowl and brine shrimp, the lake itself mostly served as a natural divide in tribal areas between the Shoshoni and the Utes.  The lake was treated as a dead zone and people who went there were mostly outcast. The Spaniards were the first to record the lake.  the Dominguez-Escalante expedition Reaching Utah Lake in 1776, were informed by Indians that it was joined to a much larger lake to the north whose waters were “harmful or extremely salty wherefore . . . anybody getting a part of his body wet instantly feels severe itching around the wet part.”

This did not change much when the first settlers to the area came.  The Mormon settlers to the area used the islands of the lake for isolation and while they later built a boardwalk and playground by the shores, nothing really stuck there.  It was a cursed place. As evidenced by fire and financial ruin.  The current incarnation of Saltair, the convention center is no exception.  The business is most often closed and recent economic problems in our country have had their effect on it.

Nowadays most of the income from the lake comes in the form of salt extraction, travelling down I-80 you will see mountain after mountain of salt the sun glinting off it like a pile of especially bright snow.  Morton signs abound.  The state leases the salt extraction pond sites to the salt companies so the state of Utah itself receives income from the harvested salt.

Standing at the edge of the lake one gets the sense that they are staring into a deep cut into mother earth.  A weeping sore that has no bandage.  It is a sad place, that smells rotten and does nothing more than remind you that there are rips in our earth that we cannot repair.  On this, my most recent trip to this area I am especially aware of this.  I am in a state of mind to wonder if other areas like New Orleans will soon become wounded reminders of our affect on earth, especially with the newest oil rig blow up.  Will people notice them as such, or will we continue on tearing and hurting our environment and in turn ourselves until it is all too late?

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By: Chris

We started our six hour trek on a Friday afternoon. There is one small road from Quito out to the beaches. It winds its way through the jungle, in the process, carrying you from 9000 feet to sea level. The drive, like much else in Ecuador, is as dangerous as it is beautiful. For hours I sat on the edge of my seat, as we raced around corners on the two lane mountain road, in pitch black.

Sal had started this trip off with his usual reticence. He had a lunch to attend the following day. He had heard how dangerous the night time drive to the beach was. As we ate lunch in a cheap little café in Quito’s tourist district, Mariscal, he listened quietly as Christian and I talked off-handedly about how fun this particular weekend at the beach was supposed to be, and what a shame it was that we were going to miss it. This was Ecuador’s Independence Day weekend, a celebration of Ecuador’s independence won after defeating Spanish royalist forces in 1822.

On this weekend, over a million Ecuadorians would travel to the coast to celebrate the victories of their ancestors. The result is a raucous 3 day party on the beaches for “la gente”. Christian (an Ecuadorian himself) and I were intent on joining them. So we talked to each other about the experiences we were missing out on. How this was a once in a year opportunity. There would be women everywhere. The booze was cheap. The food was delicious, and fiestas would blast into the night along all the bars, set literally in the sands of the beach. Sal dismissed us, rolling his eyes, and reminding us of his more “adult” responsibilities. Sal actually has a real job here, in Quito. Christian runs a hostel/bar in Mariscal, which is a nice mixture of work and play. I am what I like to describe as “enthusiastically unemployed”, on an indefinite vacation following my escape from military life.

So Christian and I gave up our efforts to convince Sal to do what was best for him. We wasted the hours of the day away, walking the streets of Marizcal, having some drinks, eating some hot dogs covered in potato chips (a local delicacy), and buying pirated 2 dollar DVD’s. Time passed, and we had simply resigned ourselves to a quiet night in Quito, among the small group of people who had actually decided not to make for the coast. And then Sal, who had spoken only the occasional word in the last few hours, stood up and made an announcement.

“Alright guys, pack your bags for 3 days. We need to get going if we are still going to make the beach in time to enjoy it. I’ll drive, you guys get gas. Deal?”
I stood, stunned and stupefied. A small moment passed. “Yeah, deal!”
“Ok”, he continued, “let me call this lady, cancel lunch, make up some excuse and get rolling.”
————–
Two hours later Christian and I were screaming as Sal’s SUV veered around sharp mountain turns.
“GO! GO!”
“No, don’t go! You don’t have the space!”
“CURVE!!!!”
We found ourselves in the middle of a deadly game of chicken in the dark jungle between Quito and Atecames. Sal had started this drive off with apprehension, having heard the tales of wild drivers on this twisting, narrow road. It didn’t take long before he had become infected with the wild lust that seemed to grip all the Ecuadorian drivers.

“Move over you fuck!” Sal screamed out his window, “I will end your miserable god damned life, move over!”
Christian and I exchanged knowing glances. We were both thinking the same thing: what the hell had we gotten ourselves in to?

This game of “chicken” I speak of is quite simple. The road to the beach is only two lanes wide, and winds through the mountains, covered on all sides by thick vegetation. The road typically doesn’t straighten out for more than a hundred meters before the next curve. It is impossible to see anything coming around the next curve. But the cars are all going different speeds, and the Ecuadorians are not a people known for their patience, or their caution. Cars veer into the opposing lanes of traffic to pass each other. The idea is to try and make it around the car in front of you before a car, or bus, or eighteen wheeler comes flying around the curve to meet you. This was frightening enough, but the real danger laid in the drivers coming the opposite way. We had no way of knowing, as we took one of these curves, that a crazed driver wouldn’t be on a collision course with us in our lane.

At first we were frightened at the boldness of the Ecuadorians on these roads, as they passed each other on curves, at high speed, with no way of knowing what would be coming around the other side. Only an hour in to the drive Sal was giving them a run for their money. Christian and I served as a sort of judging panel, advising Sal through our adrenaline fueled screams as to what his decision should be. The final call of course, was his.

We came upon another slow driver. A rickety old station wagon with no backdoor, full of blankets and boxes, held in by a precarious tangle of bungee cords.

Sal leaned to the side, peering anxiously around. I knew he wanted to pass.
“I can’t see where the next curve is, it’s too fucking dark” I cautioned him.

On this drive I served as the voice of reason. Or, as the others would tell the story, “the grandma”. My heart had dropped into my stomach the moment I saw my first Ecuadorian driver veer past another in the opposing lane of traffic, oblivious to the possibility that something might be barreling around the curve at him.

Sal bounced nervously in his chair, gripping the wheel “yeah, yeah, I know” he muttered.

We rounded a curve, and came upon a straightaway. We looked ahead, didn’t see any oncoming traffic.
“Ok, go!” Christian yelled.
I followed “yeah, take it!!”

Sal dropped the SUV into overdrive, the engine roared, and we raced past the station wagon, veering back into our lane right before the next curve. We stared, steely-eyed, at the road ahead. This was one of our safer passes—the best you could ask for on this drive.

We rounded a few more curves and approached a bus. Many Ecuadorians get around the country by taking buses that cost only a few dollars apiece. As these bus drivers race through the mountains, the passengers sleep in these crowded sardine cans, apparently unconcerned with the many brushes with death they will experience.

This particular bus was only mildly aggressive– driving fast, but only passing when it was truly safe.

“We should stay behind this bus” I advised, “He’s keeping good pace, and if someone comes shooting around corner in our lane, he will take the crash”. In high stakes situations, It won’t take long before anyone will find themselves wagering their lives against those of others.

Sal kept looking ahead, peering around the side of the bus. I knew he wouldn’t listen to me. I knew because I had pitched this same idea for the last six buses we had come upon. Yet Sal had roared past each one. I was perfectly content adding an hour to our drive time in order guarantee our safety.

But I’ve known Sal for awhile, and I knew what he was thinking: you assholes prodded me all day long to take this road trip. Now we will do it on my terms.
“Bah!” Christian blurted out, “I don’t want to stay behind this thing for three more hours.”

I had been outvoted, Sal would make the pass shortly.
The engine roared again, and Sal swerved into the oncoming lane—no traffic. Good. We had a good 100 meters clear before the next turn. But the bus driver must have felt slighted by our attempt to pass. When we had almost reached the halfway point on the bus he picked up to match our speed. A curious course of action, considering that any possible collision would surely take him out with us.

“You dick!!” Christian screamed, “He’s not letting us pass!”
“Drop behind!” I yelled.
“Beat this fucker!” Christian broke in.
Sal jammed the pedal into the floor and the SUV lurched forward. We sped alongside the bus, a pair of screaming titans taking up the full road as we raced towards the turn.

I opened my mouth, ready to tell Sal to step on it harder, when a pair of head lights drifted around the corner, and lit our faces.
“Car! Drop back!” I yelled.
“Go!” Christian screamed.
“Stop!”
“Go!”
“STOP!!”
“GO!!!!”

Sal raced ahead of the bus, slipping in front of it just feet before the oncoming car passed us, horn blaring.

We all sat back in our seats, and looked at each other– hearts racing, adrenaline surging, with our hands gripping our door handles like vices. And then we broke into roaring laughter.
“Holy shit we almost died!”
“I can’t believe it, oh my God, that bus almost got us killed.”
“Ok, ok, let’s chill out for a bit, that was a big dice roll.”

We all agreed, as our laughter died into chuckles. We would play it safe now. No more high speed passes. No more jostling for position on the constricted road. Just nice, tranquil travel.

But it was too late for such conservative talk. We had already tasted the sweet nectar of mortal danger. We had three more hours of mountain driving to go, and we were all addicted to the thrill of this high stakes contest.

Our chuckles and comments eventually died into silence, and our relief quickly turned to boredom. After fifteen minutes of staying in our lane, behind another driver, watching the Ecuadorians race past us, we reached a silent consensus. We leaned forward in our seats, peering around the sedan in front of us. We would have to pass him and two other cars all at the same time—they were too close to each other to squeeze in.

“Pass?” I asked.
“Yes!” they responded in instant unison.

And so we passed those three cars, and countless others as we tore our way through the mountains. The night was dark, but the bits and pieces of jungle lit up by our headlights were breath-taking. Huge palm leaves, and vines, and tall grass, all drenched in rich, vibrant shades of green. When we weren’t screaming, racing past cars, we would stare and marvel at the illuminated sections of jungle before us. In these parts of Ecuador one always has a sense of being surrounded by something more permanent, and more beautiful than yourself—the trees seem to stare down at you, whispering in your ear, reminding you: you are just another little animal in this place, and when you are snuffed out like the smallest rabbit, we will persist without you, unconcerned.

As the hours passed we soon became accustomed to the regular high speed pass, and even the occasional insane driver, who would fly past us with no headlights. This happened on multiple occasions, and soon the things that had made us tense with fear were now making us howl with laughter. But just when I thought we may have been completely gripped by the madness, another man put us in our place, reminding us of our amateur status. And our mortality. I’ll never know this man’s name, but he drove an eighteen wheeler, dragging a huge gas tank as his cargo. He came upon us as we rounded another curve, by this time beginning our descent out of the mountains.

“What the fuck is this guy doing?” Sal said, peering into his mirror.
“Oh shit, this guy is nuts!” Christian piped in, with an unusual nervousness in voice.

I turned around just in time to see the gas tanker fly by our car with a booming rumble. He was passing us on a sharp curve, in the oncoming lane. He flew ahead of us and swerved back into his lane. We could hear horns blaring ahead, as little Kia squeezed past the tanker, having barely avoided being squashed.

We gazed ahead.
“I never saw his brake lights come on once,” Sal murmured.
“Let’s just let this crazy guy go,” I said after a brief pause.

But Sal kept pace, about 200 meters behind him. I didn’t argue. We were all driven by a grim curiosity to see just what this man would do. He didn’t disappoint. On the next straightaway the gas tanker swerved into the oncoming lane to pass another set of cars. As we did, a bus came around a turn. We watched their lights move towards each other from behind.
“Oh no” Christian said with a deadening thud.

We all saw it. The tanker wasn’t slowing down. He was speeding up, moving towards a bus full of people.

For a moment nobody in the car spoke, as we watched the disaster unfold in front of our eyes. I had figured that eventually we were going to see a crash on this six hour drive, and this was going to be it.

“He’s going to hit that guy” Sal broke in.

He was right, they were about to collide head on. There was nowhere for either of the behemoths to go, and they were going too fast to stop.

“That tanker is full of gas!” I screamed with realization.
“Brake, brake!” Sal slammed on the brakes, but we all knew that 200 meters was too close if that gas tank exploded. We braced for a crash, and maybe more. I readied myself to duck my head below the dashboard as the distance between the vehicles closed.
The two sets of lights converged.

And then… nothing. The bus disappeared from view, and then rumbled past the back of the of the gas tanker. The bus driver had managed to slip past the tanker by going into the grass, only inches from metal and gas monstrosity.

I released the air I’d been holding in my lungs.

“Hey, let’s let him go this time”, I said.
“Ok, good idea”, Sal replied.

An hour later we reached our destination—a small coastal town known as Atecames. We drove slowly through a maze of run-down buildings, and small store fronts along narrow gravel roads. We were hopelessly lost in a labyrinth of farmacias, liquor stores, and cheap hostels. It must have been Christian who decided to open his window for fresh air. This benign action proved a good fortune. The sounds of distant music and crowds instantly permeated our vehicle. Sal turned the radio off, and began following the noise. As we made one turn after another the sounds of fiesta grew, and our anticipation swelled.

We made a right, and in an instant we emerged onto main road, and found our car sitting in a massive sea of flesh. The road running alongside the beach was packed elbow to elbow with Ecuadorians who came to the weekend celebration, most of them already healthily intoxicated. After six hours of deadly driving through the pitch black jungle, we had arrived at one of Ecuador’s fabled beach fiestas. Our night was just beginning.
Christian cracked open the last bottle of rum in the backseat.

“Let’s go boys!”

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Sierra Valley 2010- Grace Rhuad

By: Grainne Rhuad

There was a time in my life when I had decided never again to camp.  It came after a particularly bad camp-out in which every single soul in my group of 6 got the stomach flu, or food poisoning.  This resulted in the worst night ever and was followed by the worst 3 hour drive home ever.  As I was the unlucky soul well enough –or practiced enough at driving while puking on winding roads, it was with satisfaction and glee that I helped set the tent on fire when we all got better. 

It took 8 years for us to overcome our camping PTSD but in the end none of us could resist the siren call of tents, fires and smores. 

Even still camping is not my first choice of ways to travel.  When some family members returned from an Audubon camp in the Sierra Nevadas with pictures my first thought went to all the rustic cabins that were in the backgrounds of the pictures.  Roughing it with a bed sounded good to me so I called around to see what kind of price I could get for cabin camping. 

I was excited and my mouth began to water when I heard the nightly menu of food offered at the lodges of some of these places.  Pine nut encrusted Lamb chops.  Lake trout almandine and ratatouille cous cous for the vegetarians amongst us.  Followed by ginger cake and mountain berry clafoute.  I was sold on the menu. 

Then came the price tag: $1276.00 for a three night stay.  After I caught my breath again I hung up the phone cursing the cabin people for leading with majestic food choices designed to make my mouth water and following up with such ridiculous prices.  The fact of the matter is with very little planning I could make all that stuff myself over an open fire and the top cost depending on cuts of meat would be about $300 for 3 nights, that’s including campsites, groceries, bug spray and gas.  It was a no-brainer, we were tenting it. 

The area we were headed to was one that I had never been to before although I am a Californian born and raised.  Nestled in between the mountains and valleys of the Sierra Nevadas between state Hwy 49 and state Hwy 70 is a region dotted with crystalline lakes and streams and rivers.  It is full of granite rocks arranged as if giant children had a rock flinging contest one afternoon and never cleaned up and Pine trees are mixed in with surprisingly enough, Aspen and unsurprisingly, Manzanita of all kinds. 

Maidu Petroglyphs-Grainne Rhuad

The First People who lived here were lost and have an unrecorded history.  The Maidu who followed them spoke of them and drew pictures of them but again the Maidu’s language was mostly lost due to head prices put on the Maidu during the gold rush era.  Maidu means ‘Man’ so like many of the first people their name as given to the white settlers was simply “People”. It is a little misleading to say the area was settled by the Maidu as the Maidu were a huge clan consisting of many breakaway clans.  California is unique in that there was a lot of mountains and valleys to separate people.  So very often you will find that many clans like the Paiute, the Miwok and the Yahi were all technically the same tribe but had forgotten, separated or left due to the vast land and availability of sustenance.  The Maidu in this area were mostly driven away and exterminated due to gold mining operations so it is unclear exactly which tribes inhabited the area and when. Through epidemics brought to them by the colonizers, and by bounties placed on their lives by the government, the Maidu population dropped from 10,000 to 330 individuals in a matter of three decades.  There are petro glyphs left by the Maidu, Much of the petro glyphs look like maps or lists, things to tell people where they had been and what they had found. 

This is gold rush country.  The nearest “town” which is actually a small Ghost Town catering to tourists is Downiville.  Downiville, the first state Capitol of California, was first settled 1849 headed by a William Downey, a Scotsman who came out with other 49ers but like most of those who truly made money off the rush he provided services to gold miners and set up a town. By 1851, the camp had a population of 5,000. Several large nuggets were discovered over a period of time, the largest weighing 427 pounds, including its quartz matrix, and was sold for $90,000. Like so many other mining towns of that era, Downieville began to decline and by 1865, it was clear the end as a mining town was near. The Town has the dubious distinction of being amongst the first in California (after it was made a state) to hang a woman.  The legend attached to a building adjacent to the bridge where she was hung tells of a drunken man who tried to take advantage of a lovely young Mexican woman, ‘Juanita’.  When he sobered up the next day and supposedly came to apologize she killed him.  She was found guilty on the spot and drug out and hung from the bridge crossing the river.  Like most struggling ghost stories the town likes to play up the ghostly legend but most people readily admit Juanita doesn’t haunt the spot.  Mark Twain lived in and around the area while he was trying his hand at gold mining (at which he failed dismally) and during the time he was conceiving ‘Roughing It’ and ‘American West’

It was during this time period, that the area became a vacation destination Hot Spot with spas and resorts popping up along almost every creek and river.  With several hot springs nearby, entrepreneurs made use of the bathing craze and opened up spring baths.  One of the best still survives, at Sierra Hot Springs, which also boasts a lithium pool, good for whatever ails you!

It was a perfect area for turn of the century get-a ways.  It is about 2 hours away from everything north of San Francisco making it a good place to travel up and away from the heat in a time when there were no air conditioners and no cars.  Much of the roads still reflect these horse and wagon roots with their narrowness and horse path –path  of least resistance- meandering. 

The names of the towns and way stations are sounds that you would expect from the turn of the century; reflecting either what happened here like Bullet’s Bar or what you could expect, like Grassy Lake-which is exactly as it sounds. 

Basset Station

One of these places that have been in business since 1871 is Basset Station.  Jacob and Mary Bassett purchased the Howard Ranch from Chis Tegerman. In 1871, they opened The Bassett’s House Resort high in the Sierras (elevation 5400 ft) where Howard Creek joins the Yuba River. Since then, Bassett’s has been a stage stop, hotel, telegraph station, logging camp; saw mill, and gas station. It has been a haven for sheep herders, cattleman, loggers, miners and others working in the
mountains. Today’s Basset Station is the centrally located gas and convenience store which reflects its mountain roots.  There’s a wooden bar out front for eating and drinking and a gas pump on the top of a hill.  Ice cream and beer are served here side by side and you can get free water from the hose, but have to hike down to the bottom of the drive to use the facilities. 

Basset Station May 2010

The place we chose to camp was almost at the top of the pass, a privately owned campground called Lakes Basin.  This at one time was an upscale resort, with a lodge, a kitchen, bathhouse, and tent-cabins as well as regular cabins.  What remains now looks a little like ancient ruins –if you ignore the drain pipes in the middle.  Almost all of the camp areas had their own little ruin and we ended up pitching our tents on the foundations of a high-up round tent-cabin which probably in its first incarnation looked a little like a yurt.  Nearby there was archeological gold galore in the form of broken bottles, burn-out kitchen implements and rusted cans, rusted things of all sorts that we could make up stories about. 

The real prize of this campground was the abandoned pool.  A waterhole that had been built up with granite steps had been left to decline for all of these years.  However there was something magic about stepping into this lost swimming pool of the anciently rich, diving off their ruined steps and basking in the cool water that had at one point delivered the gold that made California the “Golden State” 

There were so many hikes in this area both short and long and it was an area of such beauty that I began to wonder what had made it decline as a destination?  Why were there so few people even now in the beginning of August when the place looked like it should be a canoeing, fishing bird-watching Mecca?  It was the topic of most of our made-up camp-fire ghost stories.  It made excellent fodder; this was a place of peace and relaxation until…Zombie Goldminers!! Or everyone in who’s who made their way here in the summer until the year they found a child abandoned by Gold Lake who looked especially hairy and grew into the only known cross-over caused by the unholy union of Sasquatch and a woman.  

Of course these were just stories and I did wonder why this area was so unpopulated even by tourists.  The gold rush in this area did play out pretty quickly and winters as it turns out while not the harshest are quite hard in this area.  Roads even now are not very good in the winter and most locals as I learned who live here year-round use snowmobiles to get around.  Probably the moving of the State Capitol from Downiville to Sacramento took a lot of full time upwardly mobile residents out of the area.  There is no denying that this is Alpine living and while it is beautiful it is rough in the winter, even with modern facilities.

It was the event of the ski resorts in the Lake Tahoe region that is responsible for a lot of the population decline.  Only about a half an hour away by vehicle, the ski resorts pulled in tourists that a back country region couldn’t compete with.  As a result a lot of those who wanted to live and work in the area relocated in order to make a living either from the ski industry or the supporting communities.  Also Lake Tahoe itself is such a stunning summer destination that so many people simply make it there and decide it is the most beautiful prize of the Sierras and go no place else.  If what you are looking for is beautiful shoreline, swimming and nightlife really there isn’t much reason to go any deeper. 

But what you are missing is this:

Gold Lake 2010- Grainne Rhuad

High Mountain lakes

High mountain lakes are stunning things.  Typically they are small and deep being carved out centuries ago by glacial movement.  They are incredibly clear, cold and beautiful, like a natural diamond.  They reflect whatever is around, so if you come upon one surrounded by pines you will see an emerald lake.  If the lake you reach is slightly higher and above tree line you will be stunned by the most azure lake you have ever seen and spend your afternoon gazing into it from giant granite rocks like the lizards you will also find there. 

Wildflowers

I was surprised stunned and enchanted by the display of wildflowers to be found absolutely everywhere at such a late time in the summer.  Everyplace else I have been in California even in the mountains, mostly has their wildflower display played out by this time.  But here I was surrounded by the blues of lupins, the yellows of the Indian Paintbrush, the white of Yarrow the brilliant red of the out of this world snowflower. 

Wildflowers @ Lakes Basin Campground 2010- Grainne Rhuad

All this really shouldn’t have been a surprise to me.  Two of my family members had been up earlier in the year to attend the Audubon’s birding camp at the San Francisco state’s research camp which was about 4 miles up the road from us.  Every year this camp hosts break-away classes on field subjects wildflowers, painting, mushrooming and birding which is also excellent in this area.  Pixar offers a camp here every year because the artistic opportunities are out of this world in this area.  The classes as it turns out are so popular they go online for offering at midnight and are usually filled within an hour.  People sit up punching buttons hoping for a chance to get in to the classes. 

We didn’t know all that, we had been lucky enough to get in on a scholarship which was won by essay.  But on a brief afternoon visit we got the lowdown from the resident camp instructor who was kind enough to allow all of us to tour around and see the sights we had missed earlier in the year.  We were also given head’s up that a nest of (grosbeaks) had hatched since the last time we had been there, which was a surprise as everyone had thought the grosbeak they were watching was a male.  Just goes to show, the magick of spending a summer watching things unfold in the sierras surprises even the teachers. 

Craycroft Building, Downiville, CA -Grainne Rhuad

On the way home from camping we decided to take a break in picturesque Downieville.  A place that has an old-town main street specifically designed for photo-ops for tourists.  The main strip is about 3 blocks long and host a museum a library that is open two times a week and the obligatory theatre that used to be a whore house along with plaques to dearly departed women of the night. We were suckered in by the delicious smells of a taquera.  We should have paid more attention to the name of the restraint which was “Cocina Del Oro.”   The name didn’t lie as apparently the proprietors felt their food was made of gold.  Either that or customers should part with their gold to get it.  The food was only passably good and 1 “large” taco was $3.00 it should be noted that large amounted to 2 ½ inches in diameter and the only difference between the large and the small was the shredded cabbage included with the large.  I would recommend passing on the siren song of the taco at this place.

As we left I again pondered on why this place is so underused.  Unlike other areas of the Sierra Nevadas there are less State parks, more private property and privately run campgrounds recreation areas.  There is something about this area that feels like a great secret and perhaps that is how it is meant to be kept.  A place where families go generation after generation but don’t tell others.  There aren’t enough amenities for this area to end up in Sunset Magazine or any other western travel recommendation. There is barely mention of it in the Camper’s Bible ‘California Camping’ (Moon Outdoors)-Tom Stienstra.  It neither praises nor disparages any of the camp areas.  All of which are wonderful.  No attempt has been made to upgrade campgrounds with anything more than pit toilets, it doesn’t have the popular 1980’s upgrades that other state parks have like coin operated showers or flush toilets, and there are no camper programs or interpretive hikes.  All this protects this place in a way.  Keeping it feeling like a land just out of reach. However I worry, with California voters having to make decisions on how to pay for our budget and land deals being tossed around in popular areas like Sinkyone wilderness.  I worry that the protection provided by lack of knowledge may also be the thing that allows the demise of areas like this.  We cannot vote to protect someplace this large that we only know of as “close to Tahoe”. 

It is a double edged sword, secret, harder to get to areas.  It is perhaps the best news that it is mostly private land.  Let’s just hope that those who own it regard their charge as a sacred one.

Subversify

 http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/pujunan/maiduindianhist.htm

http://www.mechoopda-nsn.gov/

http://www.bassetts-station.com/

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Skookum Volcano @2010 Karla Fetrow

By:  Karla Fetrow

Preamble to Privilege

If you are an atheist and you see something so beautiful, you want to give thanks for it, who should you credit?  This was what I asked my traveling companion as we entered the Wrangell/ St. Elias reserve.  After weeks of rain and washed out roads, the sun had finally decided to behave for a day, and lift the perpetual cloud coverage that historically enjoyed clustering around the turbulent ridges of the Wrangell mountains.  All human ingenuity simply does not rise to the occasion when faced with the spectacular masterpiece of nature’s inspirations.  “You must be my lucky charm,” he answered.  “This is my third trip and the first time I’ve been here when it wasn’t raining.”

The mountains and I sometimes seem to hold a communion.  If I go out of my way to visit one, it usually graces me with its presence, although I don’t seem to be very successful at holding back Cook Inlet rain.  For whatever reason, a sublime graciousness, or simply very good timing in a territory well known for flash floods and shifting water tables, we were allowed a full day of clear sky to explore our new surroundings.

Our mission was to view the extinct volcano located thirty-five miles along the Nesbesna Road, which connects with the Richardson Highway about ninety miles from Tok.  Extinct, as in dead, as in never again to tremble in fire and molten lava.  Scientists say there are no truly extinct volcanoes, just dormant ones. Skookum’s dormancy is the twisted skeleton of primordial upheavals, the blackened bones of ancient rages fallen away with tears of stone.  Its cliffs appear like dark soldiers guarding the gates of a time more distant than all our collected and analyzed memories.  Under the shadow of Skookum, there is only the small, the impotent.  There is only the reminder that no matter how great we believe ourselves to be, there is something far more powerful rumbling beneath the mantle of an evolving Earth.  Here is the violent underworld, the declarative statement of what is and its monument to what has been.

Off the Beaten Path

public use cabin @2010 Karla Fetrow

Not everyone who is planning a road trip would consider a drive up the Nesbesna Road a privilege.  The guide books describe the camp grounds as “primitive”.  That is to say, there are no RV hook-ups and no modern plumbing.  In fact, the last electric line you’ll see for the rest of your trip will be just as you turn at the junction.  The campgrounds, however, are well maintained.  They each have a picnic table, a fire pit and a clean outhouse.  There are also a number of public use cabins that can be reserved with nothing more than a phone call to the parks and recreational department, and are absolutely free.  All you have to do is hike into them. Camping trails are carefully marked, but the best way to find your designation is to keep one eye on the mile posts and the other on your guide map.

It’s remarkable how much we take for granted the placement of electric lines into our field of vision.  In fact, my eyes played tricks on me for the first twenty miles, refusing to believe there were absolutely no black, straight lines separating my field of vision from the landscape.  It does something to you, witnessing this undisturbed line of sight.  You become suddenly aware of what it must have been like before we placed ourselves in little square boxes to look through.  The world becomes larger, more integrated and personal.  It breathes.

hiking Nesbesna Trail @2010 Karla Fetrow

Once my eyes had become convinced they were not hallucinating, my ears became troubled.  Once we’d started up the trail to our cabin, I realized there was absolutely no noise beyond the gusts of wind stirring the branches, the occasional screech of a raven or magpie, and our canteens rattling against our belts.  There was no distant hum of vehicles traveling down the highway, no planes murmuring through the sky, no mechanical sounds at all.  My usually over-stimulated nerves relaxed and I even enjoyed the steaming pants of the dogs when they returned after chasing down a squirrel.

Our next two days would be staged from an old homesteader’s cabin with candles to light us and reading material for company.  I slept their lives, I think, dreaming of a woman’s loneliness in her isolation.  She fretted over some quilting pieces she’d cut and that had gotten wet from the torrential rain.  One by one, she took them out and hung them over the pot-bellied stove to dry, or draped them along the window sill.  I woke up, thinking of those quilt pieces; how each one symbolized a piece of her life; a new dress, a blouse she’d put together from a pattern, the useful bits hoarded, saved and cut with exacting precision.

Quiet cabin time @2010 Karla Fetrow

It had been raining when we arrived and was raining when we first awoke, but as we settled down to our first cup of coffee and began planning our day, the sky cleared.  All at once, the tentative agreement to try out one of the lakes for a little fishing turned into a definite plan to drive along the Nesbesna to the end of the road.  It was volcano viewing time or bust.

Nesbesna begins as a buckling, casually paved road, filled with pot holes just waiting to surprise you, and gets worse.  The pavement crumbles into gravel.  The gravel buries into mud or washes away with the frequent flash floods.  Culverts to keep the road from washing out, fail, and in places, the creeks take over.  How do you cross a creek when there is no bridge?  You look for the shallowest spot and keep driving.  Don’t even think of stopping for a moment to change your tactics.

Other than a couple of wash-outs, the road stayed in fairly good condition as far as the volcano.  Instead of taking the trail to its rim, however, we had another goal in mind.  We wanted to see the Nesbesna gold mine.  We stopped at a small store a few miles before the end  of what the State of Alaska assures us is a maintained road and asked if the flood had done any more damage.  “Oh yes,” she answered.  “There’s a far more difficult place to cross just ahead.”

Nesbena gold mine @2010 Karla Fetrow

She was right.  Other than a few wavering tire tracks, it was difficult to call our path a road at all.  We were as often bumping cautiously through streams as wide as rivers and every bit as volatile, as we were driving on high ground.  We ground over the top of lava rock strewn land slides.  Finally, we turned a bend that not only carried us into a higher elevation, but a less turbulent landscape.  The shelves of the road spread out to peaceful bursts of wild flowers nodding on grassy turf and gently rolling hills falling away into deep lakes and beyond,  the distant mountain range.  We had come as far as we could by road to the Nesbesna gold mine.

Greater than Gold

Carl Whitman staked the claim that became the Nesbena gold mine in 1926.  The mine operated until 1945.  By that time, 73,000 tons of gold ore valued at $1,870,000 had been shipped to the Tacoma, Washington smelter.  Only limited, small scale extraction has occurred since that time.

Nesbena Mine is privately owned, but the Ellis family who reside on the property, allow hikers who are polite and leave no trash to clean.  The trail is easy, four miles of slow grade and magnificent views.  For the more adventurous, there is the one mile hike straight up the mountain to Rambler mine.  The guide book says the trail is steep.  From our experiences, we learned the guide book has a tendency to understate.  If it says a trail is boggy, it means you’ll be wading knee deep through mud and marsh.  If it says it’s steep, you’d better have a bit of climbing gear. We had no gear.  We took the longer, but easier trail.

It was there, on that high road, with the snarling ancient volcanoes in front of us and the spilling Wrangell mountains cascading across a deep gully filled with lakes and tundra, that I heard Earth’s music.  It breathed in and out like a soft lullaby.  Above the low winds that whistled through the mountainous tunnels, it sang, each rustling breeze another note on a celestial pipe organ.  First man, in his lowly attempts to imitate this natural melody, blew through a reed and discovered the delicious pleasure of creating music.  What a marvelous gift, and yet that first man was not the one who truly bestowed it.  Sweet earth, in all her complexities of emotion created that first melodious sound.

flight service in Nesbena @2010 Karla Fetrow

Most of the Wrangell/ St. Elias National Park is inaccessible by vehicle, although there are plenty of charter plane services.  They will fly you out to any one of a number of magnificent spots where the fishing is everything you dreamed about, the wildlife is abundant and the rock climbing only for the hardy, but be sure to bring a tent and enough food for your stay.  There are no facilities.  If flying doesn’t feel affordable but you still want to get away from it all, it’s time to put on your hiking boots. During the summer months in Alaska, you don’t have to worry about it getting too dark to see, so a leisurely stroll can occur any time of the day with plenty of time for additional activities.  In fact, it’s a great time to throw away your clock for there won’t be any appointments to keep, your cell phone isn’t going to pick up a signal and you won’t get to watch the six o’clock news.

On our way in to the mine, we met absolutely no one, although we had taken the easiest route.  The old structure perched precariously into the hillside didn’t impress us.  It looked much like any other mine, with the river of raw, oxidized mine trailings still scorching the ground, but the mine shafts, located over a thousand feet up a sheer rock face, did.  We wondered how those  brave little men had worked there.  There were no signs of cable hitches although some sort of trolley device had to have been used.  My friend shook his head with wonder.  “They would have to pay me a helluva lot of money to go up there.”

mine shaft in cliff @2010 Karla Fetrow

Maybe it wasn’t so much the pay, but the experience that kept them doing the impossible in a place that time had forgotten.  Maybe in their turn of the twentieth century world, they were as weary of the modern invention, as worn out with war, as disillusioned with social pressure as we are today.  Maybe it wasn’t the gold at all, but the escape and a dream of boundless freedom.  The forty four miles of broken, washed out highway we crossed in a four wheel drive vehicle, they walked, with a wagon and mule team.

On our way back to the campsite, we saw exactly what was meant by shifting water tables.  Many of the gushing creeks we had to cross going in had already dried to a trickle.  At the broader ones, hikers were removing their shoes and socks and motor homes were unloading their four wheelers to cross.  Clouds had already started moving back in, so we felt we had gotten the best of the camping experience.  Once the rains returned, so would the rampant rivers.  Once the rains began, the four wheelers and hikers would have to wait until the waters ebbed to cross back over.

It was good timing, but I was still reluctant to leave.  It was the telephone and electric lines, the way they cut into the vision, reminding me we live in a grid work of square boxes and have for so long, we don’t even see the way the lines move across our vision, giving us a sense of measured and squared orderliness in a rioting, turbulent world of hills, curves, dips and virulent colors.  We spend so much time communicating, we never take the time to commute with nature.
I felt there must be someone I should thank for this incredible beauty.  Perhaps the Department of Transportation for not attempting to make this road least traveled more accessible, although they didn’t create the rapidly fluctuating water table.  Perhaps the Department of Parks and Recreation for the well marked trails and comfortable cabins, although they didn’t fill the lakes with fish or produce the abundant wildlife.  Perhaps the kindness of the local people who allowed the occasional visitor to cross their lands, although they weren’t the ones who raised Skookum out of the ground, terrible in its ancient eruptions and still biting with monstrous teeth into the sky.  There must be something greater, wiser, than tiny man with his drawing books and rulers, declaring his dominion through electricity and communications.  Something you only hear in the stillness uninterrupted by artificial sound.  Something you see when the clouds clear and there is only unbroken sky.  I can’t say I understand the mysteries of Earth; I’m not even sure if I want to.  I don’t know how it is that I was privileged to see nature in all its rapture.  I just want someone to thank.

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When the Land was Settled

I live at the edge of the rain forest, a delicate land with sweeping glaciers behind me, thunderous waterfalls and rivers, and  the long, yawning arm of the Cook Inlet, its gray waters booming in then ebbing, leaving thick silt-laden mudflats.  The Matanuska Valley spreads below me, weaving north, lush with black, loamy soil and sunlit havens.  This forest begins its journey on the Washington Coast, wanders up Canada, nestled between the coast and the Rockies, which turn into the Chugach once you reach Alaska, and branch off to include the Panhandle.

We have an average two hundred seventy seven days of precipitation in my rain forest home.  The first settlers who came here with their shrubs, their trees, the vegetables they hoped to grow, found it very difficult to grow much of anything.  Carrots, they discovered, grew well, as did potatoes, snap beans and cabbages.  In fact, it was rather astonishing how well cabbage could grow.  It wasn’t long before people were growing forty to fifty pound cabbages that were nothing more than runners-up in the state fair cabbage growing contest.

Their mammoth sized ability was accredited to three things, the extremely nutritious soil, the twenty four hours of summer sunlight, and the consistent rains.  Other cold weather vegetables were tried, with varying degrees of success, and the list of things you could grow and eat in Alaskan soil became longer.  Rhubarb and strawberries were highly successful and soon became a fruit staple for the winter months, along with jellied indigenous berries.

Nearly every indigenous plant in rain forest Alaska is edible.  There are two poisonous ones; water hemlock and wild celery.  Even some of the most annoying plants have beneficial qualities.  The stinging nettle, which can cause rashes almost as bad as poison ivy when in contact with the skin, can be harvested and dried, contains niacin, and adds a delicious flavor and extra fiber to your foods.  The devil’s club, well named for its thick thorns on both the stems and the leaves,  unpleasant even to the indiscriminate tastes of goats, and with bright red, poisonous berries in the fall, is actually a member of the ginseng family.  Although the roots only contain one tenth the medicinal properties of ginseng, they can still be boiled and made into a rejuvenating tea.

Another tea that early pioneers began making for their spring tonic, was the plant they called Labrador Tea, also known as leatherleaf.  It’s properties kept them vigorous enough to ward off the yearly summer transits of colds and viruses.  They also discovered that the curled, tender shoots of the fennel fern, which grows to a size reminiscent of a primordial forest in the summer, was a delicious dietary supplement.  The fireweed, which grows over six feet tall and is so aggressive you have to beat it back from your front door, has all the vitamins and properties of spinach.  A type of very spindly willow with salty tasting stems and branches, contains natural aspirin.

young fennel fern

The variety of wild berries in the Alaskan rain forest are astonishing.  Raspberries, high and low bush cranberries, salmon berries, crow berries, currents, high and low bush blueberries and rosehips grow in abundance, each species flourishing in its favored location.

An Era of Change

There wasn’t a great deal of variety to the early Alaskan diet, but it was healthy.  Depending largely on the indigenous plants, dried staples,  fish and game, they were able to maintain robust, thriving homes, even if it wasn’t such a robust economy.  Not all their efforts to transplant bushes and shrubs from their home states were fruitless.  Douglas Firs, mountain ash, and honey suckle bushes slowly took root, as did crab apple trees and lodge pole pines.

The slow transition brought new astonishment.  Earthworms, transplanted with the soil brought in with the non-native shrubs, found refuge through the winter and slowly formed new colonies.   Where the soil had been cleared and exposed to the sun, the perma-frost began to drop from just a few inches, to as far as a foot or two below the surface.  Lilac bushes, May Day trees, Canadian cherries,  that had once shrunk and withered in their contact with the permanently frozen sub-surface, found room to stretch their roots and multiply.  The Alaskan tomato, once doomed for failure, became the epitome of success in Alaskan agriculture.  Sweet apples began to bloom and drop their fruits.

Hilltop view

Even the indigenous trees were affected.  Because of their shallow root system, the trees in the north-western edge of the rain forest did not grow very tall.  The frigid winds snapped their tops and knocked the taller trees over.  The warmer soil allowed them to grow so tall that even people living no more than a mile or so from the Cook Inlet, had to climb halfway up the tree line to get a view of the sluggishly moving water; a view that had once been taken as much for granted as watching the chick-a-dees flitting past your window.  The warming trends brought a lushness to the edge of the rain forest that had not previously existed.

The changes brought both welcome and unwelcome migrations.  Honey bees, which previously had been unable to survive, were imported by bee keepers and thrived quite well in the milder climate.  The first hummingbird to migrate this far north, in 1990, astonished biologists so much it was arranged to have the bird captured and sent back to its southern habitat before winter hit.  Since then, hummingbirds have been spotted on a regular basis each summer in Anchorage.

Trumpeter swans and Canadian snow geese, whose numbers had once been threatened, found comfortable summer homes in the warming Alaskan rain forest.  The tiny Sitka deer, once reserved to the Panhandle Islands, are slowly finding their way to the mainland as the temperatures warm more to their tastes.

A drawback has been hitch-hiking insects that also have also been able to survive.  Although many of the standard pests, like cockroaches, ticks and fleas; introduced through suitcases and airborne pets; were not able to survive the winters, a very nasty spider called the brown recluse, did.  Until the brown recluse managed to take up official permanent residence, Alaska had no poisonous spiders.

birch trees in life and death

Ten years ago, the spruce beetle ravaged the Cook Inlet’s spruce, leaving thousands of acres of dead standing trees.   This migrating beetle had never come this far north before as the climate had always discouraged it, but now it had found a lush, thriving rain forest.   A few years ago, huge stands of birch trees died from a worm infestation, also introduced by the changing climate.  Although the devastation wasn’t quite as great as the spruce beetle kill, which decimated ninety percent of the spruce, many of the dead birch from the rampaging insects are still standing.

Modern Perspective

Although the devastation stunned us, nature has a way of quickly replenishing her rain forest.  The new spruce that have gone up in the wake of beetle destruction, are fuller, thicker, more deeply green than their parents had been.  The surviving birch spread their branches more comfortably in their added space.  It is a rain forest that adjusts quickly to change for the changes only add to its ability to support life.

Its indigenous plants are some of the hardiest and fastest growing in the world.  A stalk of grass can push itself through a crack in fresh pavement within a matter of weeks.  Our soil is fertile, black as loam, heavy with water.  While the glaciers melt or shift south-east, they expose new virgin soil that continues to be watered by the massive ice fields behind us.  We have the potential to become one of the world’s bread baskets; or do we?

rapidly growing ferns and devil's club

The Matanuska Valley, first settled by farmers, and the fore-runner of Alaskan agricultural technology, seems to have abandoned a large part of its dream to become an independent food supply for Alaskans.  Producing farms have sold out to a housing industry that went on a rampage of pre-fab homes, to strip malls, hotels, restaurants and souvenir stores.  Giant highways laid waste to the farm land and marshes to accommodate for the one million visitors the valley hoped to see each summer.

The Department of Transportation hasn’t taken a minute to examine their impact on global warming.  While the black top superheats the soil, miles of wetlands are changed into shallow marshes, and natural marshes dry up, ruining the habitat of water fowl, tiny frogs, trout and grayling.  In clearing a row of birch, they destroy the entire infrastructure for a system as the birch, like the aspen, have interconnecting roots that support each other.  You cannot kill one healthy birch, without several others going down.

As a food supplier, much of the Matanuska Valley is being wasted in the preparation for another population explosion and rejuvenated tourism industry that shows no immediate indication of returning.  The revenue the legislative committee is pinning its hopes on is a natural gas pipeline.  One hundred million dollars has already been placed with a Canadian based firm for incentive monies.  The problems involved are multiple, especially since Alaskans have good memory.  The proposal was to run a line adjacent with the existing oil pipeline; a line so so corroded and lacking in upkeep, it has sprung numerous leaks throughout the last ten years.  It was decided this couldn’t be done without considerable cost.  The proposal would leave the Alaskan people dependent on just one energy and one avenue for generating income, just as the oil companies had done.  Early experiences with natural gas companies had resulted in an attempt to remove the sub-surface rights of home owners.  The existing gas companies, that promised its customers cheap energy, began blessedly enough, with very cheap prices, although in recent years they have spiked their rates so high, there is no difference between paying for natural gas or electricity  for heating.

Matanuska Valley farm @Rayanne

Senator Mark Begich claims Alaska has the opportunity to lead the world as a major supplier of energy.  His main anxiety is in making sure the other countries of the world will not interfere with his energy plans, somehow managing to imply that the US was never the culprit in shooting down environmental controls.  There is absolutely no record, however, of Begich going on the band wagon to support Iceland when it was the leader of alternative energy, with resources much the same as our own.  Iceland’s current economic failure can’t exactly be blamed on cheap energy.  It had everything to do with failed banking enterprise, but because they went bankrupt, it’s easy to dismiss their energy policy as a failure.

Despite the recent oil spill on the Mexico Gulf Coast, Senator Begich still supports off shore drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.  Like the Superior Judge who decided just because one off shore rig blew didn’t mean others well, he believes Alaska should take the gamble.  Nor is he overly concerned about the environmental impact an enormous open pit mine would make on the marine life in the Bristol Bay if Northern Dynasty has its way and the Pebbles mineral extraction mine is constructed.

proposed site for Pebbles Mine

Alaska doesn’t need the archaic industry of oil and gas exploitation.  It has numerous waterfalls for accessing hydrogen.  It has hot springs and volcanoes offering their thermonuclear resources.  It has voracious winds and powerful tides, all of which can be harnessed.  Alaska can and should rely on its natural, renewable resources for energy.

The world can and should rely on its renewable resources for energy.  There are natural gas deposits everywhere and the areas that have it in abundance are just as eager to develop it as Alaska.  One monopoly over a non-renewable resource doesn’t cancel out another.  It’s only swapping kings.

Alaska should not imagine it can attain to leadership by lowering its Clean Water standards to accommodate large scale mining.  The Bristol Bay, at the mouth of the Cook Inlet is a pristine eco-system, harboring shrimp, salmon, whales, puffins, eagles, seals, sea lions in its waters, with beavers, moose, bears, wolverines, foxes and wolves along its shoreline.  The leach field, filled with mercury and harmful trace minerals will run into the salmon streams, which run into the bay and consequently, the Cook Inlet.

We have an amazing rain forest, one that has gone through many striking, rapid changes over the last fifty years to accommodate for the changes of introduced flora and fauna and to the melting perma-frost.  We could become leaders in fresh water conservation.  We could become leaders in  clean foods, untainted by chemical additives, pesticides, hormones and synthetic stimulants.  We could grow clean foods, liberated from corporate manipulations.

Alaska is a young land, barely out of its infancy.  It has miles of untouched, unexplored territory.  It needs a young voice, one that is aware that it’s time to usher out the old policy of ransacking for riches and introduce a new one that shows love and respect for the bounties it has given us, and will continue to give as long as we treat the environment gently.  If we are to be a leader, than it should be as an example of how we adjusted; like the metamorphosis of our rain forests; to the effects of climate change and created something just a little more beautiful and wholesome than had been there before we etched our permanent footprints.

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Photo By Brandy Coe

OldSchool

A Tribute To Grandfathers  and Small Towns
By Unfamous R. Brown

Some people want to grow up so fast, so they can become Artists, Drifters, Fighters, Musicians, Bikers, Rebels, Brothers, Sisters and Lovers. There seems to be some kind of due to be paid, or used to be! Now it seems  there just aren’t near as many people that understand the meaning of “Old School”. Well, I’m into my thirties now and have always called myself Old School and although i may not be that old, I finally earned it! They are tearing down my home town school, Perkins-Tryon Highschool to build a new one in the name of progress!

Photo By Brandy Coe

I for one, understand progress especially in a school.  However, I can’t help but be a little sad and reminiscent. I remember the small town Friday night football games under the bleachers where you got your first kiss, to the fights in smokers alley or skippin’ school to go the end zone to play video games and eat atomic fireballs until you were sick! Even though this wasn’t a politically correct academic curriculum, it was a small community that knew everyone.  Your kids could stay out until dark and know there wasn’t much trouble that could be gotten into.   However, like I said, it’s official.   They are now making T-Shirts that say “I’m From The OldSchool” and in the name of progress I am finally “Old School”. For an old Outlaw Gypsy like me, this is of the highest accolade !

Perkins, Oklahoma,  a humble town (established 1889, the population in July 2008 was 2,396) has given many people a place to call home and plenty of memories! The history and Native American heritage of Perkins runs thick and red as the Cimarron River which runs just south of town and occasionally floods the little red dirt river city called Perkins, Oklahoma.

Photo By Brandy Coe

Prior to being Perkins, the territory was once Called “Italy” and “Cimarron”. It has had it’s fair share of outlaws and travelers. It was home to Frank “Pistol Pete” Eaton,  born in Connecticut in 1860. Frank Eaton’s  vigilante father was shot in cold blood when he was only 8 years old by 6 former confederate soldiers known as the “regulators”. It is said that Frank (Pistol Pete) was raised by Indians and was going to make sure he avenged his fathers death. At 15 years old, Pistol Pete out-shot the cavary’s best marksmen! Famous quotes in midwestern United States related to Pistol Pete are “I’d rather have a pocket full of rocks than an empty gun” and “Hotter than Pete’s pistol”.  In his teens, it is said that he was faster on the draw than “Buffalo Bill”. Pistol Pete, at the tender age of 17, was a deputy U.S. marshal for the ” hangin judge” Judge Isaac C. Parker, when he started tracking down his fathers killers. One of Pistol Pete’s father’s friends would say to Pete, “My boy, may an old man’s curse rest upon you, if you do not try to avenge your father.” Nineteen years later he would avenge his fathers death. Five of the six gunmen died from his pistols while the 6th member only escaped his pistol by getting killed in a card game . He finished living Life at the ripe old age of 97, after becoming author of 2 books, the first of which was,  “Veteran of the Old West”  Thirty years after his death, the second book “Campfire Stories: Remembrances of a Cowboy Legend  Pistol Pete”  was published. They were the stories he would tell on his porch in Perkins.  In all,  Pete was a scout, cowboy, and the living likeness of the Oklahoma State University mascot.

Photo By Elizabeth Whittington

Outlaws like William Blake, “Tulsa Jack”, Charlie Pierce, George “Bitter Creek” Newcomb, “Little Bill” Raidler, and George “Red Buck” Waightman run through the history of Perkins. Members of the notorious Bill Doolin gang and Dalton brothers gang, also known as the Oklahombres, and The Doolin Dalton Gang traveled through regularly and had a shootout with lawmen in another town just east up the Cimarron River. Called Ingalls, the story is that  in 1893, the Dalton and Dooling gang were holding up at the city hotel. It was called The “Ransom Hotel” as Ingalls was known for outlaw gangs of cowboys as well. Just 8 miles west of Perkins is “Horsethief Canyon” on the south side of the river, where the tributaries of the Cimarron cut a V Shape opening through the bluff. This place is full of stories about robbery hideouts, hidden money still buried and all types of outlaw and gunfighter history.

On the other side of the silver dollar, ” BIBLIOGRAPHY: (David Sasser, Perkins, Okla.: A Place to Call Home, A History Through the 20th Century) David Sassers book,  “Perkins A Place to call Home’ speaks of founders like U.S. Sen. Bishop W. Perkins, for whom the town was named, and members of my family, along with several other founding families of Perkins.

Photo By Brandy Coe

Memories of sitting on the corner wtih my grandpaw Jack Moser, also known on the C.B Radio as “Apple Jack”, selling watermelons, apples and fruits out front of his old and retired store full of antiques. The store, also know as C.A. Moser and Son general store, provided gas, grocery’s, auto repair, and fishing bait. They took credit and I.O.U’s and offered “delivery on credit” via my grandfather Jack Dewayne Moser. He began his career as a salesman for Nabisco, after spending a short time at college. He also became mayor and firefighter, and had a strong John Wayne, Clint Eastwood sense of things. Providing the help that they could for the small growing community ultimately became but a pebble falling off of a step in the ever growing progress of a small town.

Also, Perkins is home to the Iowa Tribe Indian Nation. In their language, the tribe is called “Bahkhoje”; pronounced Bah-Kho-Je; meaning grey snow because of the tribe’s traditional winter lodges covered with snow, stained grey from hearth fires. They originated in the Great Lakes region of the globe and broke into other tribes moving into the south and the west. The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma is headquartered in Perkins  The Iowa Tribe is doing some great things with programs like Bah Kho-Je Xla Chi or Grey Snow Eagle House: Eagle Rehabilitation Program working with golden eagles and bald eagles. They are a strong and proud people with good reason.  They have seen as much progress as Perkins with the Bahkhoje Housing Authority. They own a truck stop, a gas station, a smoke shop, casino , and an off-track wagering facility. They have their own police force with numbers growing. They have done well working hand in hand with the people of Perkins to progress in a positive way. This little bitty city is packed full of what is now to be called oldschool history and heritage.

Being the “Black Sheep” of the family, I broke out of the small town as soon as I could. Riding with outlaw motorcycle clubs paying my dues , playing in bands ,writing music, tattooing, working on the road searching the bottom of every bottle and every highway hole in the wall for the title “Oldschool” like so many drifters, musicians, outlaws and all around gypsies from small towns have.  All the while, it would be where I was from, and the memories and stories I had to tell about where I am from, that would define “my oldschooledness”. A small little territory on the Cimarron with big dreams that never leaves your heart. Perkins, I am proud to say I Am From The OldSchool. And Amen to progress!

As a lot of drifters on the road, I found “religion”, but not a religion that is anyone’s but mine. Like so many on the road often do when traveling on a rattling, rumbling, war pony, I could hardly hear myself think, much less have anyone to talk to. For awhile on the road,  I felt forsaken, like I was alone in the ever changing world that that I was no part of. That’s when I met The Forsaken Few Mc “Outlaws 1% Mc” support club, from Jackson County in Altus, Oklahoma of which I was a probate (probationary member). The Few went on to educate me in what I will call (BrotherHood 101) lessons on serving drinks correctly, respect, and what is to be a brother as a probate. You are the clubs slave to earn their respect, as they will earn your trust and respect. They will educate you on laws, bi-laws, and rules as there  are a lot of politics and things that can’t be spoken of and are unspoken mysteriously between brethren.

In finding my religion on the road, I found myself drifting towards the open road alone and free; to not be a part of this club family life anymore, but to be a part of a family of drifters, gypsies, and biker’s who love the simple things in life. It was all about hanging out with traveler companions and sharing stories of travels and brew with some folks you know and some you don’t. As I rode on it became a matter of  trying to find out who I was. I found myself remembering home. “Perkins”.  I must have been getting older.

Thoughts of my grandfather speaking of The Secret of Life being “Work.” Ha. I always thought to myself, that old man is crazy.  Work  is no secret to life.  Well,  turns out I think he’s right.  You have to work at everything you do.  I mean in the aspect of working on a friendship, working on a relationship,  working on your family or just plain working,  you have to work at everything you do. That’s what I think he meant, anyway.

I can still remember the first fishing/camping trip on the Cimarron river with Apple Jack, my great grandfather.  We would plan for a week! Of course it would take a week to make all the “trotlines” (heavy duty fishing twine with 12″-16″ inch long hook leaders spaced about every 18″-24″inches) that we would run all the way across the river and back again a few times.  Then we would bait all the hooks with “crawdads”(crawfish) that we would “sane”(dragging a net from two ends through shallow water) out of a shallow drying pond from the hot Oklahoma sun.  We would load buckets of crawdads in the truck as we would get bait and prepare, like i said, All Week ! Finally, school would let out on Friday.  Me and great grandpaw were goin’ fishin’ on the Cimarron!

I  rode my bike as fast as i could behind the old C.A Moser Store where my great grandparents lived. Jack and Winnie Moser owned a quaint, one bedroom home. Grandmaw Winnie would never let us leave the house  without eating something. Grandpaw and I felt it was always good luck to eat fried catfish and fried potatoes prior to fishing. After eating a hardy meal of fried catfish and taters, we would load up the fishin’ poles and buckets of crawdads and head to the river.  We  got there in the evening, so it was imperative that we set up camp first.  Then we would get out the homemade wine and fishin’ poles and we would set and get half drunk on the river bank and we would tell fish stories most of the night while we were getting our poles wet for the big fishing weekend!

After we had gotten hardly any sleep, we got up Saturday morning and cooked a couple hot dogs on the campfire and proceeded to unload our little flat bottom river boat. We gathered up plenty of bait, all of our trot lines and two thermoses full of coffee as we worked all day running trot lines back and forth across the river in the hot hot sun. Grandpaw would cuss and get irritated about the way I was doing things. He was a you do it my way kinda’ guy! But after all the hooks were baited, we were proud of what we had accomplished and we were sure this was going to be the best fishing trip ever!

As we ate sandwiches and drank some more homemade wine, my grandfather passed on the knowledge of the fisherman’s knot on the bank of the Cimarron that day. I didnt realize how much that lesson would mean to me until later on in life when I passed it on I to my own children and how such a simple thing could mean so much to me. Well as the day went on we would check and check and check our trotlines only to find out that they weren’t bearing the fruit of fish, but we were bound and determined to catch fish and have a good weekend so we baited and baited the trotlines  all day and half  the night. We decided to lay down and get some sleep. Me and grandpaw couldn’t sleep so we decided to make some beans on the campfire and being a young boy and being curious I asked, “Grandpaw how did the Cimarron get it’s name?” Grandpaw could make me believe anything. He went on to answer, “Well, two cowboy’s were camping by the river and were cookin’ beans.  They got to talkin’ and forgot about the beans and when the beans started to burn and simmer, one cowboy jumped up and grabbed the pot and threw the beans into the river and said ‘simmer on’. Hence, Cimarron.” Yes I know I was gullible, but my grandfather told me the truth later on in life after i had already found out for myself that Cimarron derives from a Spanish word meaning “wild or unruly” a name surely given for the wild and unruly characters it took to tame the land.

A little later that night as it would turn to what i like to call Dark Dark; when it’s so dark you can’t see your nose; I asked my grandpaw “Were you ever in a war?”  He proceeded to tell me, “Yes.” I asked, “Which one?” Grandpaw said “the civil war”.  Wow, this was exciting already because I had just been on a family vacation to the south south and spent two weeks going to civil war battle sites. Very indulged, I asked “what did you do in the war grandpaw?” He proceeded to tell me that he had pulled  cannon’s by himself  in the civil war. As he was telling me this intriguing story, we heard something. Was it… Was it… Yes!  It was one  o’clock in the morning and the fish were going crazy. We could here them splashing and fighting our trotlines with everything they had. We spent all night pulling fish off and baiting lines. Finally, half way through Sunday we had enough fish and were very sunburned and exhausted. We packed up by sunset and headed home.

At home later that night I had to ask my grandfather Dewayne former mayor of Perkins,  of whom I was raised by, about Grandpaw Jack’s term in the civil war pulling cannons. “Ha ha ha,” laughed my grandfather, Dewayne, who i still call to this day “DooDad”; a name I had given him at a very young age for a type of crackers named doodads he delivered as a Nabisco salesman.  DooDad said  “you will believe anything my dad tells you.   He was never in the military ha ha ha.”

Grandpaw Apple Jack took advantage of me believeing everything he said. Apple Jack had false teeth that he showed me how to remove at a very young age. Even though my teeth would not come out,  I believed for years they would. Grandpaw Jack also went on to tell me that the warning signs on the side of the road that say Watch for Fallen Rock were basically signs that an Indian chief had made to look for his son “Fallen Rock” who had went on his walk into manhood and never returned. That old man never stopped tormenting us grand kids. I think that’s why we love him so much! No more fish stories though. Here are the  facts of his life.

History of Jack Melford Moser and obituary compliments of “The Perkins Journal” local Perkins news paper.

Jack Melford Moser born 1907 , 99, died on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Jack was born on May 23, 1907 in Saginaw, Mo. to C.R. Moser and Ellen Marie (Harryman) Moser. He married Winnie Jane Dodson on June 1, 1929 in Stillwater, Oklahoma. She preceded him in death on February 27, 1999.

He was raised in an area called Sheep’s Hollar, north of Joplin, Missouri. He was the first of ten children; he had five brothers and four sisters. His father worked in the strip mines. His father also farmed with his grandfather in Missouri until 1919.

At the age of 12, he moved to Drumright, Okla. to work in the oilfields. His family followed and they lived east of Drumright for two or three years. The family later moved to Quay, Okla. He had to quit school and help support the family by working as a farmer and butcher. He went to work at a bakery in Yale, Okla. for $1.00 a day.

He met Winnie Dodson in Cushing, Oklahoma and they were married on June 1, 1929. After their marriage, the couple lived in Yale, Oklahoma and he worked in the bakery and as a sharecropper. They moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1936 and he worked in the Rainbow Bakery. He also worked at Douglas Aircraft during WWII.

In 1947, they moved to Perkins, Oklahoma. There they bought the general store from his brother Charlie Moser, who had bought the store from their father. C.A. Moser had opened the store in 1936. He retired from the grocery business in 1962. He operated Moser’s Trading Post well into the 1980’s and he enjoyed his favorite pastime, fishing, well into his 90’s.

My grandfathers will always be  heroes to me and a part of a more simple society. Perkins has had its changes for sure, from hanging outlaws at the old hanging tree south of town to now being home to a flourishing town and part of Native American and outlaw history. Perkins, Oklahoma is just proof that there are still small town values and something left on this rock we live on and have been a part of.

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By Jane Stillwater

After attending the closing authors’ breakfast at the 2010 Book Expo last week and listening to Jon Stewart, Condoleezza Rice and John Grisham talk about their new publications, it was time to fly back home to Berkeley — loaded down with 50 pounds of free books.  Hauling 50 pounds of free books through the New York subway system to JFK airport in 90-degree heat is a daunting task.  Trust me, I know.  This is the third time that I’ve done it.  Thank goodness for roll-away luggage but still…they obviously built those subways back before there were elevators.

To get down to below street-level with all those books, there’s a trick to it.  You gotta stand at the top of the subway entrance and look pathetic until someone offers to help carry your suitcase down all those stairs.  Usually it’s a young African-American, Latino or Arabic male whose mama has raised him right — to be polite and helpful to little old ladies in distress.  But I digress.

Laden down with lots of stuff, I checked out of my hostel and started to head for the 28th Street station on the Lexington line — and was immediately stopped by some young Latino guy in a dark gray suit, a dark blue dress shirt and a pink silk tie.  “Would you like me to drive you to the airport?” he asked.

Would I? Yeah, duh.  But how much would it cost?

“Fifty-five dollars.  No tip.  I’ll pay the bridge toll.”  Hmmm.  Nah.  Too expensive.  But still….  It would be really nice not to have to lug around all these books.

“I’ll flip you for it,” I replied.  “Do you want heads or tails?”

“Tails.”  It came out heads.  “I’ll do it for 50 dollars.”  Heads again.  “I’ll do it for 50 dollars and buy you a cup of coffee on the way.”  Heads again.  Sorry about that.

But I was still seriously dreading taking that two-hour ride on the subway with all those books.  “Look,” I said, “how about you drive me to JFK but stop by Second Avenue on the way there.  I have an errand to run.”

“Done.”

Whenever I can, I always stop by B&H Dairy on the Lower East Side, on Second Avenue between Seventh Street and St. Marks Place.  I’ve been addicted to their kosher rice pudding since 1965.  B&H used to be run by a Jewish family.  Then it was run by a Puerto Rican family.  Now it is run by a family that appears to be Ukrainian.  But B&H is still kosher — and still delicious (they also make an excellent borscht),

Anyway, Edward, my sharp-dressing Lexis-driving gypsy cabbie, waited for me outside B&H and then we were off to the airport and he started telling me about his life story.

“My grandmother was born in El Salvador and she came up here to work as a housekeeper and she really missed her family and so she moved back home.  But then the people she had worked for here missed her and said that if she came back to New York, they would sponsor my mom and me to move here too.  I was about one year old at that time.  And now I’m a college graduate and an accountant.”

“So why did you decide to do this instead of that?”

“I like to move around.”  Me too!

Then we got to talking about El Salvador.  “I loved El Salvadore,” I said.  “Archbishop Romero’s grave, Mayan ruins, Pollo Campero chicken….”

“Pollo Campero!  You know that they’ve got one in Queens now?”  Get out of town!  “Want to go see it on the way to the airport?”  Good grief, yes.

But then we got lost.  Lost in Queens.  It was so very Fran Dreiser.  It was SO Ugly Betty.  America Ferrera, where are you when we need you!  We drove around for a whole hour.

“Sorry,” said Edward.  No problem.  I got my very own windshield tour of Queens.  How cool is that.

Then we both got the Pollo Campero chicken dark-meat two-piece special with a side of fried plantains.  The chicken was a bit dry.  And then Edward got me to the airport on time.  And then my plane was two hours late.

Pollo Campero.  In Queens.  Who would have thought.

PS:  If you ever need a ride to the JFK airport, some rice pudding or a windshield tour of Queens, here’s Edward’s digits (he gave me his card):  347-414-0230.  He’s not really a genuine gypsy cabbie because he’s all licensed and stuff but he is the only almost-gypsy I know — besides myself.

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Red and Black Rose @ Rocky Brown 2010

By Karla Fetrow

The Magic of a Word

There are some words that capture your imagination immediately; that trigger the mind with want; even need.  An indiscernible craving fills you for something not truly remembered, but desired.  This was the way I felt the first time I heard the name, “Jucitan”.  Pronounced “WHO-chi-tawn”, it sounded like the wind, whispering its secrets and like the ghosts of an ancient world mourning for a fable.

The first time I saw the name, Juchitan, it was broadcast across the top of a stark, black and white poster.  Underneath the label was the portrait of a man with numerous hands covering his eyes, his ears, his mouth and strangling his throat.  “Where is this town?”  I asked my companion.  “What is its significance.”  He admitted, he didn’t know.

It was the third year following the peso crash.  My translating job was gone.  The American businesses that had utilized my services no longer wished to invest in Mexico.  For awhile, we supported ourselves through buying perfumes in Mexico City and selling them in Puebla, along with the wire work handcrafts we made.  At first, it was enough, but as the crash deepened, Puebla was no longer big enough, varied enough to keep us in business.  Once everyone had bought a certain number of perfumes, bracelets and hand bags, there was no need to purchase more for awhile.  We needed to find some new towns, some new clients, who would set aside a small part of their grocery money to feed their vanity. We began traveling.

Traveling often meant hitching a ride on the big trucks to save the cost of bus fare.  We never knew where they’d drop us off, but if it was near any town at all, it would do.   It didn’t matter to us; small town, big town; even villages had the potential to trade a meal and a place to sleep for a new necklace and pair of earrings.  We had become nomadic, pushing south toward Guatemala until we ran out of merchandise, then returning to Mexico City to start the cycle again.

One day, who knows when as it was a day like any other, with a steaming sun flattening the tall grasses, and the cracked sky etching out palm trees in the distance, our driver, who hadn’t been very talkative the entire trip, suddenly pulled over.  “This is as far as I’m going today,” he informed us.  “It gets hot out here.  Too hot.  I’m going to take a nap and finish up tonight when the air is cooler.”  We looked at each other uncomfortably as we opened the door.  There was no one.  No traffic, no gas stations, no thrown together shacks selling food and beverages, only a gravel turn off that dropped sharply out of sight.    “If you take that gravel road down to the bottom of the hill, there’s a village,” he said helpfully.  “You can probably find something to eat and a place to stay for the evening.”

That sounded appealing.  Hunger, a constant companion, was currently clamoring for attention.  We left our host, who was already climbing into the bed at the back of his cab, with a final gracias and adios, and shouldered our back packs.  The walk was several kilometers, but the grade was easy.  It turned and slipped gently, bit sharply into the sides of thick, moist earth, the prairie grass bending over and waving, casting glistening shadows over the trail.  A flight of parakeets startled, their bright colored bellies shooting about like lighter than air pin balls.

The village was much like any other; small, wooden shacks or bamboo housing spread over a concrete foundation; the smell of fresh tortillas scorching the air, a cantina where a few worshipers crouched in fold up chairs around card tables stamped with  “Corona” signs.  A Brahma bull browsed casually nearby, tethered to a fence post.  We skirted carefully around it and pulled up chairs at an empty table.

The proprietor had a large grin.  “What will be your pleasure?”  He asked, apparently already filled with pleasure at having two strangers patronize his establishment.

“A tecate and a coca cola for the senorita,” answered Victor.  When the proprietor’s eyebrows shot questions in my direction, Victor added, “she is a little girl, yet.  She still likes soda pop better than beer.”

While he hastened to comply, he murmured gently as he set down the bottles, “a soda pop in hot weather can feel good.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Some people never do get around to much else, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.”

We could see that he was settling down to visiting with us and asking some questions about the busy outside world heard only in rumors at his door, so Victor quickly took the time to ask him if there was anyplace we could get something to eat.

“As a matter of fact,” said the man, “my Isabella has some fresh beans and rice on the stove right now, along with a plate of hot empanadas.”

The menu sounded good and we ordered.  As we replenished our diets, we fed the good senor’s own appetites for news, philosophies and discussion.  The evening stole in with scarcely any notice beyond the refreshment of a cool breeze.  We inquired about a place to sleep and the Senor offered his home for the evening.

We were happy to notice that his house was probably one of the best accommodations in town.  It was made of bamboo, with large, paneless windows draped over with netting, a snug, thatch roof and concrete floor.  There were various hammocks slung throughout the room he led us into, as though he was accustomed to having overnight guests.  In the morning, after some more beans and rice, with a bowl of melon and pineapple thrown in for variety, Victor asked our host when the next bus arrived in the village.   The senor shook his head.  “No buses come here,” he explained.  “But a truck comes through here every day to take people into Juchitan who want to do business.”

That name; dropping like a bulging bubble of water from a faucet; splashing with a clear, tinkling sound.   Victor and I looked at each other in amazement, then he asked, clearing his throat, “you live close to Juchitan?”

“Why yes,” we were told, “it’s only about thirty kilometers away.”

When All is Foreign

Something stirred us deep inside.  The ride, packed into the back of a truck with twenty other people on their way to the market, we scarcely remembered.  The sensation was like that of traveling home after a long and wearying journey, realizing soon the bends and dips will carry you to familiar landmarks.  Only there was nothing familiar about this journey, unless you counted the recesses of sub-conscious thought; that area that longs for what has not yet been articulated.

In the heat of day, the early afternoon, the plaza was barely alive.  We approached a market woman selling candies and asked where we should sell.  She shrugged.  “Sell where you like,” she told us.  “no one will bother you.”

That was some information well worth digesting.  We had never heard of a town where street vendors weren’t bothered.  We were always told, inevitably to move on or to battle for a spot in the local market.  Cautiously, we explored the small park and decided to set up shop at its entrance.  The market lady immediately came around to see what we were selling.  “Jewelry!” She exclaimed excitedly.  “You’ll do well.  We all like jewelry here; and perfumes,” she added a little wistfully.

Victor promptly took an interest in the woman’s candies, then after buying some, offered her a discount on any of the perfumes.  Her eyes snapped with pleasure as she blessed us then returned to her stand, cradling her new treasure.

As the sun settled on the horizon, the town came to life.  Juchitan is a lady of the evening, elegant and well-attired, in flowered dresses and hair piled high.  Our initial amazement at being told we could sell unhindered, turned to astonishment at the crowds that gathered quickly and eagerly around our stand.  In the middle of our success, the thong around us suddenly parted and a tall, incredibly beautiful, Spanish appearing woman stepped up to inspect our wares.  Nobody spoke as she handed a basket she was carrying to a young girl who had been following her, and bent down to examine some earrings.  They waited breathlessly as she opened a bottle of perfume and carefully sniffed its contents.  She frowned a little as though puzzled.  “American?”  She ventured.

“The senorita brought them from the United States,” explained Victor, pointing at me.

“They have no alcohol.”

“The senorita says alcohol is bad for your skin.  These are essential oils.  You only need a drop or two.”

“I see.  Does the senorita speak Spanish?”

“Si, hablo espanol,” i told her.  I’m not often shy, but I always fall just a little bit in love with beautiful women, something that  seemed to amuse Victor.

She smiled as though she understood the quick glimpse of admiration.  “Underfed senorita, what else do you do beside carrying essential oils across the border?”

“I make earrings, necklaces, bracelets.”  I pointed out the ones that were mine on the stand.

“You own your own business.  You speak your own mind.  You must be a Juchitan woman.”

While I pondered her remarks, she bought several items and handed them to yet another member of her entourage.  “Do not stay at the hotels here in town,” she advised us.  “They will charge you much and you will lose your profits.   There is another hotel town the road about two kilometers from here where all the traveling sales people go.  They will not rob you.  They will ask reasonable rates.  Knock at the gate and tell them Senora Alcazar has sent you.”

When she left, I noticed several young people fell in behind her, walking quietly and respectfully, carrying baskets of fruit, beverages, packages of food and merchandise.  When she left, the real sales began.  We stuffed our pockets so full of money, we were afraid of it falling out on the sidewalk.  When we ended the evening, we had sold all the gold wire earrings we had made and half of the perfumes we had carried with us.

We were a little nervous about walking down the street with our expanded pockets, but nobody even turned and glanced at us.  We hailed a taxi which took us to the hotel the Senora had advised us to visit, and knocked on the door.  As the lady had said, the gate opened wide when we pronounced her name.

Our quarters were modest; a double bed in the middle of a tiled floor, with a small, painted table and two matching chairs, but the price of the accommodations was modest as well.  Most of the tenants were sleeping in hammocks outside their rooms.  It was insufferably hot, even with the ancient ceiling fan spinning lazily around.  We wished we had hammocks as well.  We opened the door, deciding we didn’t really need that much privacy.

During our first days in Juchitan, we didn’t really take much time to assess our surroundings other than noticing an enormous fondness for jewelry.  Everyone wore it; children, teens, businessmen, market women, farmers and wives.  We were even asked to make baby bracelets; specifically with red beads and amber, to ward off evil.  I strung together half a dozen a day, and the mothers studied the patterns patiently, trying to decide which one would be the most effective against bad spirits.

It was only after a few visits between Mexico City and Juchitan, that we began to notice other subtle differences that made Juchitan society a little different than the norm.  It began with Pacifico.

Pacifico was the hotel’s maid.  While we were slowly noticing the strong family structure behind the hotel’s operation, Pacifico was noticing us.  By our third visit, he had become bold.  He would saunter into the room any time he noticed we were crafting jewelry, sit down on the bed beside us, try on several pieces, and generally bribe us out of a gift by promising us the cleanest, freshest sheets, which he rarely delivered.

My first thought concerning Pacifico was that he was the most badly spoiled maid I had ever seen.  He skipped the rooms he didn’t want to clean.  He spent long hours pouring over our beads when he was supposed to be laundering clothes.  He hid from the Senora up on the roof when he thought she might send him on an errand.  Sometimes, she would hunt him down, dragging him by the ear when she found him, scolding and telling him what a worthless servant he was, but she never would fire him.

I finally asked one day, when he had become so chummy he had started borrowing my blouses, how it was that the Senora put up with so much of his foolishness.  “Don’t you know?”  He asked, fluttering his eyelashes.  “I’m special.”

This didn’t enlighten me.  “How are you special?”

“Manita, isn’t it apparent?  Somos hermanas.”

“You’re special because you’re gay?”

“Si.  The Senora will never get rid of me.  I bring her luck.”

We rarely saw the Senora at first, unless she was chasing down Pacifico.  One day, this all changed.  A scandal occurred on the upper floor when the Senora discovered her husband had been renting an apartment for free to a young prostitute in exchange for her favors.  While the Senora chased the prostitute out into the yard with no more than the ragged ends of some clothing hastily thrown together in a shopping bag, Pacifico hid behind our door.  He peaked out the window, obviously pleased that her husband’s ear was the one she was dragging about today instead of his.  “You sit in the hammock and take care of the babies,” she scolded.  “That’s all that you’re good for.  I’ll run the hotel”

She plopped two small children into his lap, then hustled off, probably in search of Pacifico.  The husband jiggled the babies a couple of times, secured them into one end of the hammock, then promptly fell asleep.  “Isn’t the Senor the proprietor?”  Whispered Victor.

“No,” said Pacifico, placing a finger to his lips and beckoning us to the far end of the room.  “The Senora is.  The men own nothing in Juchitan.  Everything is run by the women.”

Later that day, the Senora invited me over for coffee.  “You are an American, yes?” I nodded.  “I am an American, too.  I live in North America.  That makes me an American.”  She laughed as though she had told a good joke.

“You are different.  You are from another country, but in many ways, you are not so different.  You speak two languages, Spanish and English.  So do I, Spanish and Zapotecan.  You have learned a trade.  I also have a trade.  You have different customs.  You cut your hair and wear men’s pants, but you follow rules.  I too, have rules.”  She nodded significantly toward the upstairs rooms.

“We are Zapoteca.  We have been here before the Mayans, before the Aztecs.  We are the first people.”

The Land of the Two-Headed God

The Zapoteca god of creation has two heads, one turned to the east, the other the west.  One is feminine, the other masculine.  In its four arms, it balances the planets, and rotates them around in a galaxy of stars.  The upper torso has breasts, and the lower; thick, stout legs; both masculine and feminine. The child born both masculine and feminine is blessed because this child has the closest attributes to the duo-sexed god.  The women are more blessed than the men, for the women understand the first growing spark of life and painful joy of giving birth.

“Among the Zapoteca, it is far more important to have baby girls than baby boys.  The women have the most wisdom.  They run the businesses, the schools and the homes.  When a baby girl is born, the best of everything is given to her; the best food, the best clothes, the best education.  The boys; what would you have done with them?  They waste their gifts.  They drink.  They are careless with money.  They get into foolish brawls.  It’s better not to allow them too much.

“Each time a Juchitan woman makes a successful transaction; a new business deal, puts a child through school, marries off a daughter, improves her home, she buys a piece of gold jewelry to symbolize her success.  You are a Juchitan woman and you should wear some gold now,” she advised.  “If you do not wear gold the god of fortune will think you despise his gifts. ”

“How does Pacifico bring you luck?”  I asked her.

“When a child is born a homosexual, he will never forsake his family.  The other boys will run off and marry, maybe even forgetting to pay their respect, but the homosexual does not.  He will always be there for his mother, his father, his unmarried sisters.  How much luckier could a family be?  Now, if a homosexual can bring his family so much luck, than by all practical purposes, a business can certainly profit from his presence.  People will see him and think, ‘ah, this family is so clever and successful, they were able to afford the services of a homosexual,’ but as you can see, Pacifico is a very poor worker.”

“Then how can he be lucky?  He is wasting your money for his wages.”

She smiled.  “He brought you, didn’t he?  He was once in the employ of Senora Alcazar and she sent you here.  You wear boy’s pants and cut your hair like a boy, but you are not a boy.  You are a senorita.  You have a companion, but he is not your husband.  You are foreign, and that will surely bring me luck.”

It was difficult to believe, in the marvelous new affluence Juchitan provided for us, that here was the center of revolution.  The image of the strangled man slipped from our memories as we settled deeper and thicker into genial life of Juchitan society.  Having left family to help family survive, we discovered a new family, a gentle family, covered with gold bangles and flowers.  We slumbered peacefully in the rhythm of afternoon coffee with the Senora, small children playing by our doorstep, our evening sales prosperity, and Pacifico’s furtive visits.  I introduced my best friend, a young Mayan girl named Lola.  The Senora clucked worriedly over her.  “You are too small,” she said.  “Your family didn’t take care of you.”

“Everyone is small in my family,” protested Lola.  “It’s the way we are.”

“Then you didn’t get enough to eat.  You are Mayan.  You should be taller, stronger.  What has happened to your proud people?”

She didn’t say this as a question, but rather as a mournful, nostalgic statement.  The Zapoteca memory is long and lingers beyond the transitory currents of recent history.  It remembers what was, while painfully conscious of what is now.  The Senora knew.  Juchitan knew, while war rumbled and gossiped in the background.

The war came to us.  We heard the first shots.  It was late in the evening.  We were in our quarters, stringing beads, preparing ourselves for the next day’s sales when the guns were fired.  The hotel was immediately shut down, the gates closed, and everyone instructed to stay in their rooms.  Victor, however, couldn’t stand the suspense.  He bribed Pacifico to let him out so he could find out from the neighbors what was happening.

The ruling government in Mexico City had replaced Juchitan’s chamers of local government with their own members.  The people of Juchitan were taking them back.  During the next few weeks, we saw bloodshed in the streets, soldiers standing guard around the government offices, and nightly protests.  One night, we were told to either pack our stand and return to the hotel, or join the protesters who were surrounding the zocalo.  We joined the protesters.  That night, the crowd threw rocks and bricks at the palace, and the rebels stormed the doors.  The military was thrown out, and the favored representatives of Juchitan reinstated.  “This is the way it always is,” explained Pacifico.  “The government comes and takes over our offices, and we throw them out.  They come again and again, but we throw them out.  This is our war.”

The war spread.  Rebels created road blocks and hijacked buses.  Troops lined their tanks around the Capital City of Oaxaca.  The seeds of discontent blew into the hot southern wind, settling in Mexico’s federal district, and blossomed.  The war continues.  It blows north, disguised under a hundred faces, a hundred excuses.  It gnashes at the borders, using drugs to elevate its status, but it is most critically and essentially a war against a culture that calls itself the first people.  It is a war against a two-headed god, both male and female, against an amazing society where women are dominant, where the men rarely work but will lay down their lives for their matriarch leadership, and where having a homosexual child is the greatest blessing the gods can bestow on a family.  It is a war against beauty.

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Matanuska Bridge @ Rocky Brown

By Karla Fetrow

From Wagon Trail to Highway

Tell any New Alaskan you plan to take a drive up the Richardson, and it will be immediately assumed you’re referring to that meandering strip of road between Valdez and Fairbanks, giving you access to Wrangell St. Elias Park; an astonishing wilderness enclave and the largest National Park in the United States.  However, say this to any died in the wool, veteran Alaskan, and that person will immediately know that you mean you’re planning to use the road that was once the only passage into Alaska.

The Richardson underwent a great deal of metamorphosis over the years.  It was first punched out as a wagon trail for gold prospectors in the late 1800′s.  The monies appropriated for this project came grudgingly.  The US Government and budget watching citizens were still not convinced that the purchase of Alaska was a wise investment, and still referred to it as “Seward’s Folly”.  However, gold was already being removed from the Port of Valdez at an astonishing rate, and newspapers were ringing to the sound of Klondike gold in the Dawson Creek beds and along the Alaskan border.  There was one major problem.  The primary routes leading to the gold camps were on Canadian soil, and two of them, the Ashcroft and Edmonton, for the entire length.

In 1898, as the gold rush was at its peak, the U.S. Army sent exploration teams to Alaska to locate a practical “All-American” route. The main corridors under initial consideration were the Susitna and Matanuska Valleys at the head of Cook Inlet, and the Copper River area.  Heavily promoted by the Pacific Steam Whaling Company, a transport trail was carved out over the top of Valdez Glacier.  Beside the regular government crew and surveyors, much of the architecture of this extremely hazardous route was turned over to destitute prospectors who labored for fifty dollars a month, plus board.  With nothing, really to spend their money on, many of the workers finished this initial ninety-three miles through gnashing cliffs, treacherous avalanche areas and unstable glacial ground, with enough cash to start their lives over elsewhere – but many more died in the attempt.

spilling glaciers @ Karla Fetrow

The highway, which closely follows this early trade route through Thompson Pass is still a harrowing journey winding past wide mouthed gorges, crystalline waterfalls, and boulders standing like stone age sentries.  In seven miles, your vehicle has climbed 2,500 feet.  The highway idled in its infantry, but not for long.  In 1903, gold was discovered in what is now the town of Fairbanks, and the push to extend the wagon trail into interior Alaska hit the political floor.  The trade route, that had begun as a means of connecting the Port of Anchorage and the Port of Valdez by land, was becoming a spider web, with the summit town of Glenallen as the center.  From Glenallen, you could turn southeast to Valdez, south central to Anchorage, or north west to Fairbanks.  Not far from Glenallen, is yet another branch of the now diversified Richardson; the turn off for Tok Junction; the last Alaskan outpost before crossing the Canadian border.

The Richardson politely refrained from calling itself the Richardson once it crossed over into Canada, primarily because the Canadians had already built their own rudimentary road and called it the Dawson, but for many long years, if you were traveling north by highway, you were taking the Richardson.

I can see Canada! @Copyright Karla Fetrow

The Parks Diversion

This was all before the Parks Highway was built.  Some strange sense of etiquette required that the name “Glenn” that was used to designate the road that had previously connected Wasilla, Anchorage and the Kenai Pennisula, be preserved by calling the tattered, interrupted, broken road left in the wake of creating the Parks, “the Old Glenn”.  This generously included the passage through Butte and its winding intent toward Sutton and Chickaloon, while the four lane speedway that bypasses the gently nestled rural communities as it trundles happily between the Matanuska Valley and Anchorage, is  the “New Glenn”.  The New Glenn disappears somewhere in Wasilla, but it’s not known where.

The creation of the Parks Highway, which cuts nearly a hundred miles of travel time between Anchorage and Fairbanks, did more than change the name and demographics of Alaska’s first road system, and designate the Richardson to a pitiable four hundred mile stretch. Glenallen was no longer the northern hub for trade.  The bustling frontier town began to fade as trucks chose the routes of the shorter and far less perilous Parks Highway on their way with deliveries to Anchorage.  Tourists, eager to view Denali (McKinley for those who don’t speak Alaskani) up close and with ease, chose the Parks for its circumference to the Denali recreational area.  The charms of the Richardson Highway were forgotten.

Glenallen and other small outposts along the Richarson now turned Old Glenn, have struggled hard over the years to sustain an income from what had once been thriving road traffic.  Although there is some evidence of a reviving economy; brand new structures stand gleaming in the sun, an occasional, fashionable house spreads its triumphant foundations, many of the homes are in disrepair, with numerous old vehicles and rusting machinery in the yards.  The rotting timbers of early settler houses crumble in the middle, and stare blankly in amazement at their abandonment.

Mat-Su Valley Farm @ Rocky Brown

It’s true you won’t see the Big Boy from the Richardson, old stone faced Denali with his severe winter breath.  It’s also true you’ll be driving on one of the most hair-raising roads designed by man.  However, the Richardson breathes of wild, untamed country.  Leaving behind Palmer, heaving with gentle farms nestled into a valley carved by the Matanuska Glacier and its thundering water head, you begin immediately climbing the Chugach Range.  Within minutes, you are snaking around cliffs with seven hundred foot drop-offs revealing the churning, restless Matanuska River.  The Matanuska has no boundaries.  Each spring, it changes its voracious path, pulling up trees by their roots, swallowing embankments, carving new paths through the canyons.  Within minutes, you are entering the tiny town of Sutton, and suddenly feel you are in “the real Alaska”.

The real Alaska isn’t easy to find anymore.  Like a botanist following the trail of a specific species to its flourishing fields, it’s identified first in the stragglers left behind in the energetic high-cost, post pipeline, housing push   Not everyone who lived in Alaska before the advent of the pipeline signed up to work with the oil companies, nor joined the rambunctious tourist trade that followed.  Those who didn’t were shoved aside and forgotten.  You see them in their once stately cabin homes, the painted totems and blue trimmed rafters now blistered and fading.  You see them in the yards filled with indigenous shrubs and fruit baring bearing bushes, thick and flourishing with fifty years of cultivation.  The yards are deeper, greener.  The scrape and seed lawns of imported grass can neither compare or compete with the wild disorder of nature’s carpet.  These yards slumber while around them, hills are leveled, the spongy glacier soil graveled, and suburban homes and businesses spring up like popcorn.

Petrified Trees and Drunken Forests

Sutton is famous for its anti-corporate stand.  It has repeatedly shut down efforts to expand mining in its giant coal fields.  It has ignored attempts to establish chain businesses, preferring their local gas stations and restaurants to the slick, polished new hopefuls.  It ran its assembly representative out of town and burned an effigy in his yard when it was discovered a proposal being considered for natural gas development would remove all the home owners’ sub-surface rights to deeded property.

Sutton is the first benchmark into a geologist’s paradise.  High in the coal ridges between Sutton and the Matanuska Glacier, are the fossilized trunks of giant trees.  Written in the frozen resin; now turned amber; in the piles of leaves and shrubs forever captured in slate, is the marvelous proof that Alaska had once been tropical.  Deep in the canyons carved by the receding glaciers, are thunder eggs, amethyst, jade and gold.  Arriving at these deposits is a challenging task.  Following the bed line carries you into strange, twisted canyons, with sharp rocks rising and falling from upended cliffs.  Here, not only has the earth had to contend with the brutal force of water, but the Talkeetna’s, located on a converging line between the Chugach and Alaska, gnashes and grinds its way to the top as its own mountains.  The Talkeetna’s grow an average of one inch a year.  During the 1964 Anchorage earthquake, it grew an estimated four inches.  When you are in the jaws of the Talkeetna’s, yawning patiently open, undecided whether to devour you or not, you become acutely aware that you are in an earthquake zone.

leaf fossils and amethyst @ Karla Fetrow

By remaining on the Richardson, now with proper propriety  called the Old Glenn, you soon enter a wildlife enthusiast’s paradise.  Dotting the mountains like specks of moving snow are Dahl sheep and mountain goats.  The viewing is best, surprisingly, at a place called Sheep Mountain.  For those who drive slowly enough to catch a glimpse into the rustling bushes, the rewards are pleasant; foxes with round, startled eyes, waddling porcupine, a baby moose, with the mother watchfully guarding it from a thicket.  If you are lucky, you’ll see herds of caribou migrating across the tundra.  In the past, caribou sightings were frequent.  On any given day, you could see them  in the valleys or grazing casually near the highway.  However, development and snow machines have caused them to change their migrational routes and favor more deeply interior passage.

One of the bizarre aspects of Alaska’s evolving environment are what we call, “the drunken forests”.  Permafrost once covered most of Alask’s sub-soil surface.  Depending on demographic location, you could dig two feet into warm soil before hitting permafrost, or find it just inches under the moss covered blanket that characterizes the tundra.  The tundra has been thawing and the permafrost receding.  The fir and spruce, accustomed to attaching their roots to firm, nearly frozen soil, look for stabilizing factors in the  marsh as the frost melts, saturating the ground with water.  The young trees quickly adjust to their new environment, but the older ones twist and turn in their growth, their roots too short and shallow to remain a strong foundation.  They shift drunkenly to one side, and when the sunlight brings their attention to the fact that they are staring at the ground, not the sky, bend precariously in the opposite direction to remedy the situation.  All through the sunbathed summit of the Chugach are regions of melting permafrost and their drunken forests.

Drunken Forest @ Karla Fetrow

It’s difficult to turn a drive up the Old Glenn to the Richardson Highway into an afternoon pleasure trip when the heart is reluctant to turn back.  With each curve in the road, there is a new landscape, a breathtaking adventure to explore.  The Old Glenn sidles by three glaciers; the Eklutna, the Knik and The Matanuska.   Someday soon, the industry of corporate life will tidy up the rustic aspects of the Old Glenn, the quaint little towns with its humble churches and equally bawdy taverns, the rusting signs of homesteaders who made their livelihood from farming, trapping or prospecting, the first, colorful prints of history to overlay their bland imitation of culture, but until then, the journey remains a gateway into another time, another era in history, another people living out a dream that is being quietly moved into the background.  For them, the Richardson is anywhere along the road that leads up over the settlement of Sutton and heads north toward Glenallen, then southeast to Valdez.

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Surfer at Lover's Point Monterey-By Grainne Rhuad

By: Grainne Rhuad

My driving companion glares at me and makes the remark, “You are the worst map reader in the world.”

“Careful,” I reply, “you’re coming dangerously close to giving me the highest of compliments and I don’t think that is your intention at all.”

In fact, I am not a poor map reader.   I learned how to read maps in school in the days when it was mandatory information; back before we had George Jetson-like computers to tell us where they think we should go.  I am a good map reader; I just don’t like them, especially when I am on holiday.  I see them as a hindrance to me experiencing what the universe would have me experience on my adventure.

We are currently somewhere between Santa Cruz and Watsonville and not to my mind off course at all.  After all, I can still see the ocean, which I tell my companion to follow.  “Follow the Ocean and everything will be fine, we are headed to the beach after all. “  It is a refrain that two generations of my family will learn well this trip, and I hope it sticks.  If where you are going is within sight, you are not lost.

Later on in the trip my driving companion asks me the question. “What do you think Steinbeck liked about living in this area?”

We are currently in Salinas, surrounded by farm country.  Artichokes, strawberries and lettuce stretch out as far as the eye can see going east and to the west where the fog banks whisped in from the ocean.  I think a while about my response.  There is much here to like but I try to envision it as Steinbeck may have seen it.  It’s a little easier in the countryside, farming has not changed much.  As you get closer to the center of any given settlement however, there is much that has changed.  The obligatory strip malls have moved in.  Car lots abound, both for new and used vehicles.  But there is much here that is the same.

I think about the fact that this has always been a literary place; it boasts the first library and college in California, both founded when Monterey was still a part of Mexico.  Also it had the first newspaper in California, The Californian which was established in 1846 by a Kentucky Frontiersman, but I don’t think that’s really the answer.

“I think he liked that he was around people with stories.  Solid working people who he knew and related to.  People with something to impart when they shared it.  People who lived full lives, working hard and playing with abandon.

“But I also think he liked the terrain itself.  You have mountains and forests within walking distance.  For contrast you can walk in the other direction and find sand dunes and rolling hills, and always the ocean at your back with its internal push and pull.  As a writer, or an artist, it’s easy to see what the attraction is.  One could easily be amongst people and yet one could easily go away, isolate, dream. “

Dreaming is so essential to the artist. And there are plenty of places to do it here in the Monterey Bay.

Cannery Row

Sardine Cannery Exhibit-by-Grainne Rhuad

Monterey is a town that was built up around a single industry.  Fishing.  Mainly Sardines.  In this town where Cannery Row is legend, the thing that was canned was sardines.   The last cannery closed in the 1950’s due to overfishing of the small and cheap fish; but before that it was a bustling industry mostly due to the fact that sardines were cheap food for the poor, as well as a Portuguese staple, many of whom had made their homes in the area.

The Real Cannery Row was a tough place to eke out a living, a place where cannery barons made millions on the backs of laborers making 35 cents an hour. No minimum wage, no hours, no retirement, no safety net, no nothing.  And yet due to the romanticism that millions of readers placed on it, it has become a place of legend.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”- John Steinbeck; opening lines of Cannery Row

It was in the 70’s that I first remember visiting Monterey.  The place was rundown.  The canneries still stood with their paint peeling and the smell of sardines still in the air.  The Aquarium had not yet opened and the area itself still held historic places almost in stasis.  Doc Rickett’s lab was still there. The Wing Chong market, The Mackerel Jack’s Trading company which used to be a Bordello written about by Steinbeck.  You may recognize it as “The Bear Flag” and La Ida’s Café, which only recently closed for good.  Kalisa Moore finally succumbed, as we all do to age, taking with her the legacy of belly dancing on the bar for servicemen and workers alike.

Thankfully, this trip around I was surprised to find an exhibit included in the Monterey Bay Aquarium of what a working cannery would look like.  There were guided tours and videos of workers as they did the hard monotonous job of canning sardines.  When asked why it was a working class food then and so incredibly expensive now, the answer was not surprising.  Overfishing killed off even sardines to the point where they are now specialty items.  A strange world we live in where a food that nobody but the poor would eat in 1950 has turned into something you will find in specialty shops and for $16 a plate and up in restaurants.

Another new exhibit that warms the heart is one of Doc Rickett’s Lab.  Among his actual collection,were  sea creatures he used to take to schools for introducing the strange and somewhat new world of marine biology to school children.  We all owe a lot to this man and his obsession, and not surprisingly, it was one of the only exhibits I had a hard time seeing due to the fact that 3-7 year olds were crowded around still ooohing and ahhing over the weird animals of the deep, suspended forever in jars.

Doc Rickett's Lab Exhibit-By-Grainne Rhuad

As for Cannery Row itself, it’s hardly worth the walk. Gone are the unusual, strange and weird, and it its place are chain stores and overpriced restaurants with gimmicks like Bubba Gumps , Louie Linguinis’ and the Steinbeck memorial mall which bears the overpowering smell of fried things on a stick and cotton candy.

People tend to forget that those who work in these places can no longer afford to live anywhere near Monterey.  A prime example of this was our waiter.  We asked him what was being served in the kitchen. My companion having been a waiter in Monterey, knows that the kitchen staff cooks up a hearty meal around lunch for staff every day.  Where he worked it was largely Portuguese fair, think hearty, spicy fish stews.  These things never make it to the menu.  Our waiter replied he missed that and rarely gets a chance to eat at the restaurant as he has to travel inland to his second job right after his shift.  Salinas is where most people have their second jobs and can afford to live. Things change and at the same time they stay the same.  We were also more than a little entertained to watch the staff watching Rachel Ray’s cooking show on their down time in between orders….Just weird.

Another thing that’s easy to forget about Monterey with all its press about being a town that celebrities like Clint Eastwood like to make home and the beauty of the beaches, is it was at one time one of the biggest Military Bases in California.

The now Closed Fort Ord provided a background of a different sort for this area.  During WWII our Californian coastline was of great concern, naturally.  We were at war in the Pacific Islands.  It was during this time that Fort Ord was opened.  It provided a good deal of natural land for war games and housing for military families.  There are miles of barracks, both for single soldiers and families.  In fact, it is the size of an entire city.  One of my traveling companions spent almost a year of his high school life living with his family on base and remembers that there wasn’t much that you needed to leave for.   One of the siren songs that induced men (and boys) off base however was prostitutes.  Situated not far off base with their home base an old run-down McDonalds, the prostitutes used to roam practically unmolested by law enforcement.  This is not surprising; where soldiers are prostitutes will also be; this is a law so ancient that it is honored by practically everyone from wives to clergy.  Men who are getting ready to possibly die for their country need some physical contact after all, and women need to make money for so many reasons, they are uncountable.

We were surprised when we drove through this part of town on this trip.  It was on the way to our lodgings and not only the look of it; Strip malls, Targets, Chain Restaurants, etc; but also the feel of it had changed.  The prostitutes had left.  This left me wondering.  Where did they go?  We knew Fort Ord had closed down.  It had been converted to a city college and unsurprisingly, the PX had been sold to a box store – think Sam’s club or Costco.  Houses that had housed families were now dormitories and various used book stores.  But for some reason I couldn’t get out of my mind, what had happened to the hookers?  There’s no union for hookers, no retirement and no special Old Folks home.  Did they fade away when no longer needed, becoming bag ladies?  Or did they more likely follow the money to the interstate where one can still turn a trick for a trucker at any truck stop along I-5?  It was a little bit sad to me to think of a whole sector of society that will not get a museum, plaque or even a second thought but had made up such a big part of the economy of this area.

Visiting Carmel

Six miles south of Monterey lay the township of Carmel-by-the Sea, a pretty little town of homes built on a steep hill overlooking a long sandy beach.  It is notoriously Bourgeois and expensive to boot.  However it also houses the first Spanish Mission in California; Mission Carmel; which is also one of the few Missions whose parish is still active.  So off we went without a map to visit the final resting place of Father Junipero Serra.

This was an educational stop.  All school children in California do a unit on missions and mission life.  Usually, The Sainted Father Junipero Serra is outlined as a good and kindly aesthetic whose only concern was to bring souls to his God.  This may very well be the case, however, the way in which he brought souls to his God was anything but kindly.  Natives were set up in a peasant caste role and did all of the hard labor.  In addition, missions would typically destroy natural habitat surrounding them, and plant herbs, vegetables and plants within mission walls making it sometimes necessary to comply in order to eat.

Beyond all of the ugliness however, Missions today are very beautiful places to visit.  They have a haunting quality to them, probably because they ate so many spirits in their making, but you definitely feel not quite alone.  The gardens are beautiful and there is much to be learned about the history of trade and architecture in early California.  For example, this trip we tagged along behind a school group on a field trip and learned that the windows in the chapel of the dead were made of thinly sliced shell and sent to Father Serra as a gift by the then King of Siam.  One has only to kneel down and touch the well worn adobe floor bricks to feel the smooth prints made by generations of subjugates kneeling in prayer.  There are distinct dips where knees go.  There is more wear at the altar of Mary the Mother of God than any other alters in the Church, which says a lot about who was praying.

Native American Cemetary at Mission Carmel by-Grainne Rhuad

It was after leaving the mission was when those in my car began to get nervous about the lack of a map, which was again pointed out to me.  “Look” I said. “The Ocean is right there, we are heading to the beach anyway, we will be fine, and we will discover something new.”  Which we did.  We discovered that Carmel-by-the-Sea may be worth the high property prices.  Around every corner and up every hill was a magical cottage clinging to the hillside and gazing into the sea.  Tall trees surrounded all and it became a game to find the cutest house.  It became a game for the driver to stay out of the way of construction crews.  The single lane roads were littered with them, new houses being tucked into amazingly small spaces that looked like someone’s garden.  Another thing we learned is Carmel-by-the-Sea has the worst road markers ever.  Painted on 2×4’s stuck at corners, I have seen more legible road markers in the back hills of the Sierra Nevada’s.  It seemed that as magical as the town was, you really were not welcome to stay.

We did find our way to the ocean sans map, Oceans after all don’t move…much and all one has to do is point their vehicle in the direction of one and you will get there eventually.  If one wishes to spend the afternoon daydreaming in warm sand, Carmel-by-the-Sea is one of the best beaches to do it.  A little bit windy for some, if you lay down low you miss the wind and the rest is lost in afternoon daydreams.

An Afternoon in Big Sur

A half an hour further south you enter the area called Big Sur.  Big Sur is famous for its mad artists, well photographed coastlines and yearly forest fires.  There are two sides to Big Sur, the tourist presentation which includes the beautiful beaches and redwood hiking trails, the overpriced boutiques and lodges and the Art that artists chose to share.  These are all so well documented by magazines, calendars and travel shows that almost everyone knows Nepenthe is “The Place to Eat!” the views being spectacular.  I highly recommend not eating there as the food is not fabulous and overpriced and the view is free, there are benches and pillows set up everywhere so one can take in the spectacular sights of eagles nesting and the ocean mating with the craggy coastline.  For those of you just sure that the staff is giving you the evil eye for not ordering, position yourself on the brunch house deck and give a tip to the servers, they will appreciate this more than making you a $12.00 plate of scrambled eggs and will leave you alone to draw, snap pictures or meditate.

The underside of Big Sur includes the more interesting things.  For example high in the hills there is a man who has made a home out of a pickle jar.  A huge old wood cask the size of a winery barrel, this comfortable home was free when it was made; it was also placed on squatted on land.  Who knows how property like that would even change hands nowadays?

Of late everyone is aware of the artist who balances rocks and makes his home in Big Sur.  You can see his gallery from the roadside, but my favorite artist is a photographer who can see faeries.  I came across this artist by accident several years back when one night from the porch of my rented cabin; drum beats called me into the forest.  What I found there was the most fun and taking pictures was Brock Bradford, of Heart Beat, a studio and shop at the Big Sur River Inn.

Big Sur River Inn itself is a jewel that a traveler may easily pass up.  Nestled up against the highway it looks like nothing more than a gas station and a strip of 1940’s style motel rooms.  Inside the inn you find the surprise of a restaurant that opens up to the most magical lawn leading down to a creek through the woods.  It is the perfect respite from the world and once you cross the doorway you forget the highway.  It is also an excellent restaurant with more reasonable fare.  Its humble beginnings were with Pie and who doesn’t like a story that begins with Pie?

All good trips come to an end

The trip ended with another accidental discovery.  Hungry travelers on a mission to eat vegetarian, we stumbled upon the best neighborhood for food not too far from Lover’s Beach.  Lover’s beach itself is a lovely throw back with its restored bath house and single swan boat saved from death.  It was an attraction in the 40’s and now is a small picnicking area ideal for families as the shallow beach has less of a break and swimming is good there for kids.

Bathhouse at Lover's Point by-Grainne Rhuad

In any case not more than a few blocks away was a neighborhood that seemed to have a restaurant for every culture, from Thailand to Afghanistan.  If you had a taste for it you could find it.  I highly recommend this little strip of restaraunt, used book stores and thrift shops, located on Lighthouse and Central Aves.

We were on our way out of town when again a reminder of just what was so special about this area made itself known.  Huge metal flowers in juicy colors looking like they belonged on the set of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland called to me from what looked like a fenced in yard.  Pulling over my driving partner told me I had to see this place.  “This old guy has always been here as long as I can remember and you will not believe the stuff he has.”

Indeed I couldn’t,  Jorge & Stella Rodriguez’ Crystal Rose was stuffed with fountains made from recycled tin festooned with neon lights, a huge array of Don Quixote statues in different attitudes made from driftwood and metal and limestone and what looked like whatsoever came to hand.  Peeking in the work area I found unfinished projects which were mostly more interesting than the stuff in the main house which served as the show-room.  Tucked in a corner was a limestone mantle that could hold an entire tree.  Coming up behind me our host told me it was recovered from someone who owed him money in Mexico.  “He wouldn’t pay me so I took the mantle.” Fascinating stories poured forth of trips to estates in Mexico, to salvage tin and stone to make the art before us.  Who knows if all of it was true, I really didn’t care.   The stories were worth the price of the 3 fantastic flowers we ended up buying.

You see it is this; the people who have stories, who live lives and the easy availability of escape from reality.   The thin sidestep between hard labor and daydream that I think kept someone like John Steinbeck anchored here and which calls to others.

http://www.mchsmuseum.com/historypages.html

http://www.bigsurriverinn.com/history.html

http://www.sardineking.com/sardinespecs.html

http://www.canneryrow.org/

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