Wildlands #2: Manzanar

“Where the water touches this soil of disintegrated granite, it acts like the wand of the Enchanter, and it may with truth be said that these Indians (Owens River Valley Paiute) have made some portions of their Country, which otherwise were Desert, to bloom and blossom as a rose.” –Capt. J.W. Davidson, US Cavalry, 1859

Shame shadows us, popping in and out of consciousness like a Hollywood gumshoe tail who, every time we turn around, ducks into a doorway and hides, his back pressed to the window glass. If victory is everybody’s child and defeat’s an orphan, then a people’s collective crimes float like ghosts, rarely glimpsed but never quite forgotten, impossible to rub out yet easy to sugarcoat. I think it was Mark Twain who wrote that the human conscience is an abominable creation, and proof positive of God’s malfeasance, seeing how conscience lacks the strength to get us to follow it and yet it still won’t shut up. Not so with the guilt that comes with a lynch mob’s crimes. Like with the crazy aunt locked in the attic, or the institutionalized son who’s a child molester, respectable people keep the open secret, their eyes averted and lips zipped.

For at least 1,500 years the Owens Valley Paiute had been diverting the Sierra’s cascading creeks in ways that, by irrigating the lowlands, expanded nature’s gardens and attracted a bounty of animals, fish and birds. So it makes sense that when the pioneer cattlemen, after casting their hungry eyes over the Paiute’s vast waterworks, decided to steal them, simultaneously they’d reduce the rightful owners to the status of sub-human savages. It’s called blaming the victim and it’s not so much an intellectual position as a psychological defense mechanism—self-delusion as alibi. Striped to its bare bones, what has America’s notion of its global manifest destiny ever been but a way to blame God for our crimes?

When in the 1950’s I was a little boy growing up in El Lay, to go and see my grandparents we’d pile into our car and take San Fernando Road out to the town of San Fernando. From there we’d head west on Chatsworth Ave. and, past the old Spanish mission and on the southwest corner of Sepulveda Blvd., we’d come to a truck farm that was worked by a family of Japanese. With just an acre or two, mom, pop and the kids grew about any kind of vegetables you could think of. They sold them, along with other local produce, from their roadside stand framed with peeled tree trunks and roofed with palm fronds, and their sandy blond parking lot was dotted with hand-painted white paper sale price signs thumb-tacked to sandwich boards. We always stopped and shopped, my mom hefting, squeezing and sniffing the offerings, my sister and me keeping our hands to ourselves and my dad searching for a peach to bite into. One day my dad announced how the family didn’t own, but were only renting, the land they were manicuring. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my dad explained, the family’s farm, and maybe hundreds more like it, had been stolen. . .

When I was old enough for driving lessons, my dad took me out to the empty parking lot of Santa Anita Racetrack. Once he mentioned how the parking lot had been used to assemble thousands of ethnic Japanese citizens until they could be shipped to their permanent quarters hidden away somewhere where nobody had to look at them. I could tell the story gave my dad the creeps— in 1945 he’d toured Dachau in Bavaria—and after that Santa Anita’s parking lot always gave me the creeps. How many Jews had gone to their deaths because they’d mistakenly believed they were Germans, Poles or Ukrainians? How many native-born Californians had lost everything because they’d mistakenly believed they were Americans?

My whole life I’ve known about the crewcut ruins of the Manzanar “relocation camp” sprawled out there across 500 acres of scrub just north of Lone Pine in Owens Valley. Yet, like the next-door mass grave holding the bones of the Chinese coolies killed during the great earthquake of 1872, I kept Manzanar in my mental shoebox along with the rest of my tourist curios. Like the crumbling beehive-shaped charcoal kilns at the mouth of Cottonwood Creek, the stone Winnedumah Pillar standing tall in the Inyos, the giant white Owens Lake talc mine with its gaping mouth looking like the house of a trapdoor spider, and the ruins of the stinking Dirty Sock hot springs resort, Manzanar was another roadside attraction, a bronze plaque set in a highway turnout boulder, a California landmark, historical tidbit, the answer to a trivia question. (“Manzanar” means “apple orchard” in Spanish, which is what the land was before El Lay “bought” the water in the 1920s, shipped it south and let the orchards—555 acres of apples, peaches, pears and plums, and the surrounding croplands, die of thirst).

After Japan unconditionally surrendered, the GI guards went home, the inmates got their walking papers and the camp itself was (legally) scavenged and picked clean by the local ranchers, merchants and Indians. Before Manzanar became a National Historic Site in 1992 and the “Interpretive Center” opened in 2004, about all that was left out there was a grid of about 750 concrete barracks and barracks-sized foundations, a graveyard, a stout brown stone guardhouse and a bright white concrete obelisk with black Japanese writing painted on it. Built by the prisoners, the obelisk is set on a wedding cake pedestal with three layers and, every time I’d visited there, the surfaces were covered with some kind of prayer-offerings.

During our first-time visit to the new museum this last trip, I finally found out what the inscription on the obelisk says: “A monument to console the souls of the dead.” It was a wish that disturbed me since I’d been brought up to believe that the best thing about death was how it solved all of your problems for you. But now the vision of the wounded souls of the dead needing consoling, of captive spirits wandering lost beyond memory, by hinting at what had been usurped and the depth of the damage that had been done, was something I wasn’t prepared for. This here’s a war museum, I suddenly realized.

By refusing to offer any sort of compensation until 1988 when 28,000 of the 110,000 former inmates of the gulag had already died, the Feds saved a big pile of tax dollars. By not opening an “Interpretive Center” at Manzanar until 70 years after the fact, they saved, and are saving, a whole bunch of face. Beginning in early 1942, here at this exact spot, was Owens Valley’s one and only real estate boom and population explosion—over 10,000 residents appeared practically overnight—and here, for the one and only time in its senile skinflint history, El Lay’s Department of Water and Power opened its local spigots and made the desert bloom. Yet, because of the shame, to those speeding by on US Hwy 395, Manzanar’s less famous than the Subway sandwich shop up the road a piece in wind-whipped Independence.

A tour through the museum/shrine gives you the straight story of a major atrocity and it’s a bellyful. It’s a barebones reminder and warning about what happens when ignorance and fear reigns over the dominant majority and fear-mongers, money-grubbers and race-baiters rise to rule. Of all of life’s cruel masters, the artifacts and exhibits mournfully whisper, moral cowardice is the most exacting.

Back outside and walking through the ruins in the glowing sunset shadow of pyramidal, snow-flecked Mt. Williamson, I imagined a family of prisoners huddled around a woodstove inside a drafty wooden crate and felt their desolation. How dreary this giant land must have seemed to fishermen from Treasure Island and San Francisco Bay; to farmers from Fresno and Sacramento; how alien, frigid, sweltering, empty, heartless and lonely. Over 100 orphans were kept locked up here in a “children’s village” and I wondered what it’d be like to have to personally explain to those little boys and girls how they came to be dire threats to public safety even though, having fought in Vietnam, I knew the answer full well. I’d recently read that the youngest Afghan “terrorist suspect” we’re “holding” in Cuba was just a rag-hanging snot-nose when he was “arrested” by American liberation forces entering his village some 10 years ago, and I wondered if things have gone downhill or have only remained the same.

I shifted my eyes southward and rested them on the curly bronze contours of my beloved Alabama Hills, birthplace of my wanderlust and home of my spirit allies, and it occurred to me that I’d stumbled upon a part of what ails we-the-people today. When it comes to the truth about ourselves as human beings and where we’ve come from as a nation, we’ve been jacked around so many times that we’ve forgotten how to feel homesick.

I wrote about the Alabama Hills in my story Solitude, which is posted under “Nature and Spirituality.” Like with the rest of the stories , it comes with snapshots.

Wild Lands

For maybe the fourth time since our first child was born back in 1978, my wife and I are on the road alone together. Out to visit my big sister and her family at Lake Arrowhead in the San Berdo Mountains, we figured on our way we’d spin by the Alabama Hills in Owens Valley. Set between the eastern escarpment of the High Sierra and the sheer, naked west face of the Inyo Mountains—home to mile-high box canyons filled with glacier-shaped alluvial fans—the Alabama Hills are near the center of one of the world’s deepest valleys, and the bronze sunrise and sunset shadows stretch for 20 miles. The Alabama Hills are my very favorite wild place, and not just because they’re layered over with a lifetime of memories. Then just the act of saddling up, getting out of Dodge and taking off into the two-lane wide open is three quarters the fun.

Can’t say how many times somebody has complained to me about how ugly and boring I-5 is between Frisco and El Lay. It tells me they haven’t done much traveling, they’re not very discerning about such things and, like the rest of us, they like repeating what they’ve heard. Sometimes I’ll contradict them—even the Grand Canyon looks dull at high noon, I’ll say—but usually I let them slide, having grown used to folks who travel only between points A and B, and then only when they’ve got to and while focused on making time and saving money. In this wondrous Era of Tweets, most folks are too fully-employed, high-speed connected, occupied, preoccupied and absolutely-positively goal-oriented to gaze into the sky overhead or grab a handful of the dirt underfoot.

Because so many people are rightfully afraid of driving unlit hinterland superhighways at night, nearing sundown out on the I-5 under the smoggy red San Joaquin sky, this cultural attitude of busyness equaling accomplishment manifests itself as metallic wolf packs of luxury-muscle cars weaving at 100mph through the big rigs and sissy cars while trying to get the jump on each other. What they after? They want to be very first to have everybody else either shrinking in their rearview mirror or about to be. Yet, since it’s a Wednesday and not a Friday or Sunday sundown, the wolf packs, like flies hitchhiking a stiff breeze, are only a minor annoyance.

After camping overnight inside Motel 6 in the corporate interstate pit stop town of Buttonwillow out there on the western edge of the suddenly-not-so-voracious Bakersfield megalopolis (Pop. 800,000), we awoke with the dawn, packed and drove up into the empty Kern River Canyon. Because of all of this year’s snowfall, we figured the Kern would be at flood stage and, sure enough, it was. Winding up the ribbon of blacktop beside the river in the bottom of the fractured-granite defile, the whole way the water was leaping, foaming white and roaring, its breezes billowing and snowmelt frigid. The Kern is world famous among daredevil kayakers and locally notorious for its habit of drowning people. Come the spring thaw, you wouldn’t want to stick your finger into the Kern. It’ll drown not just children, geezers and puppy dogs; it’d drown Tarzan and Jack LaLanne, cows, horses, bears, orcas—you name it.

While the river isn’t at all particular about whom it drowns, it does seem partial toward the clumsy and the oblivious. Why, the very morning my wife and I were moseying up the lower canyon, up beyond Lake Isabella, under the tall pines in the upper canyon that cleaves northward and splits the southern Sierra into the East Crest and the Great Western Divide, two male college kid campers out of El Lay, after a hearty breakfast of trail mix (?), inflated their Big 5 rubber raft, put into the river with two Day-Glo plastic paddles, quickly capsized and disappeared underwater since neither of them was wearing a life jacket or knew how to swim. The last we heard, their bodies still hadn’t been found.

After stopping in the town of Lake Isabella for a country breakfast served with a side of western hospitality—all proceeds from our stacks of flapjacks went to support the music program in the nearby elementary school—we continued eastward for some miles through the broad mountain bowl. Rimmed with tall peaks and deep canyons, and decorated with a substantial man-made reservoir, deep green runs of finger-shaped riparian woodlands and grassy bottomlands circled with creamy, sage-tinged foothills, the bowl speaks of vast herds of antelope, elk and mule deer, galloping grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, eagles, beavers, flocks of migrating waterbirds and shimmering schools of giant rainbow and cutthroat trout. Before the coming of the Euro-American prospectors and ranchers, the mining combines, lumber barons and then, after WW2 and the birth of car culture, the Army Corps of Engineers and the realtors, the people living here shared a mountain meadow about as bountiful and hospitable as you’d find anywhere. Even today a person could do worse than to live here surrounded by such scarred beauty.

Soon we’re winding up to the summit of mile-high Walker’s Pass. Nowadays a pass is considered by biologists to be one kind of “ecotone:” a place where two or more separate habitats meet and mingle. But back in 1833 when the trapper/horse trader Joseph Walker and his party were led up here by the natives, it was called a “divide” and seen as a place of parting waters. Or, at this particular spot, a place of waters gathering westward and vanishing eastward. Dotted with clump grasses and shrubs, pinyon, juniper and Joshua trees, Walker’s Pass is a notch in the Pacific Crest where it descends southward from the High Sierra into the vast oak forests of the Tehachapis. The pass is also where the Pacific Coastal Zone meets the interior’s Great Basin and, while taking a short hike to a high spot above the pass to gaze back into the bowl we’d just climbed out of, a powerfully cool and wet Pacific wind whipped our faces that had made landfall maybe four hours before.

Back in our car and coasting down the long, gentle and smooth Sierra bajada that sinks into the 4,000-foot-high northwest corner of the Mojave Desert, the air is suddenly hot, still and bone dry, and we break out the Chap Stick. Eastward stretches a vast, silent and shadeless landscape overlaid with a half dozen barren, silt-skirted mountain ranges arrayed like ghost ships becalmed in a sea of scrubby wasteland. Feeling like I’m on the outskirts of home (my wife’s from back east), I announce how hidden somewhere down in there is the fair metropolis of Trona and brag about how it ain’t often a person gets the privilege of riding a state-funded highway (178) that dead-ends at a company town out in the middle of Sizzling, Nowhere, population scalding. Eastward past Trona lies California’s sprawling, tippy-tippy-top-secret Area 51B, Annex C, and were my wife and I adventurous enough to sneak out there to tool around in some trackless, creosote-covered basin, from all sides would converge speeding armored personal carriers and the sky above would fill with Apache gunships, Command and Control vehicles and predator drones.

Not wanting to start a war or proceed to Pahrump, at the bottom of the hill we turn north and head for Inyokern Junction, the Sierra’s east face towering above our left shoulders. Lone Pine with its Best Western Motel swimming pool patio chaise lounge view of craggy Mt. Whitney (14,494 ft.) is just 70 miles ahead, and I wonder how much the town has changed since, for the first time in my life, I’ve been away for nearly a half decade. Yet El Lay’s Department of Water and Power ain’t called that for nothing, and when it steals water it steals it all—creeks, creeklets and groundwater— and it stays stolen. By reputation, the DWP would snatch the tear out of a widow’s eye and ship it to a Southland swimming pool if it could. Anyway, since no community can grow without water, during my lifetime the string of little highway towns dotting Owens Valley haven’t changed much. And that’s saying something seeing how most of the rest of the state, including Anderson Valley, has been radically transformed.

Whether it’s in the erased resort town of Little Lake, or the near ghost towns of Olancha, Keeler and Cartego, or the mini-boomtown oasis called Bishop, or one of the little hangers-on like Lone Pine, Big Pine and Independence, most everything’s the same as it was when I was a kid. It’s the same cafes and saloons and motor lodges; the same Piute and Shoshone trailer park slums, the same grids of vintage, sand-blasted, shabby shoebox cottages with pounded-dirt front yards littered with piles of maybe someday useful stuff shaded under giant decrepit cottonwood trees about ready to drop dead of old age or blow over in a sandstorm. Here and there are the cleaner and more comfortable abodes of government workers of various kinds: the DWP, Cal-Trans, the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, Fish and Game, the US Forest Service (what’s that supposed to mean?), substation CHP officers, resident deputies, school teachers, public health workers and the like. Finally, like the cherry on top, there’s the “in-holdings” that are the 2nd or 5th vacation-speculation-tax-dodge homes of the anonymous rich from God knows where, their stately stone facades masking their cobwebbed interiors and empty gazes.

Were you to take all of the human settlements in Owens Valley and gather them in one spot, they’d be but a grain of sand atop a bucket full. In a land so huge, trackless and unforgiving, it’s easy to put our personal concerns into a proper perspective, since like tumbleweeds we’re just passing through while the land endures. Out there where deep geologic time shows off its face, all but the most swollen of heads shrink at least a little bit and for a little while. Some folks recoil in terror from the vision of themselves as zits on a flea’s ass—what good’s the universe if I ain’t at the center?—while others take heart in it and are the better for it.

Some years ago, up in the High Sierra southwest of Lone Pine near Horseshoe Meadow, my wife and I sat and gabbed with a young local Piute fellah named Thunder. After spending a year going to community college down in El Lay, Thunder told us, he’d dropped out and returned to the Rez. He couldn’t take it down there in the smoggy red yonder, and not just because of the constant noise, crowds, sirens, choppers, gunfire and gridlock. That was bad enough, but it was all the crazy people that really drove him out. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, or thinking, or what they really wanted, it got scary and finally he had to get out of there. Then, when he returned to the valley and like a dawn mist his ancestors seemed to rise up from the ground to welcome him home, he was re-born. While it was near on impossible for somebody like himself to make a good living in these spare parts, poverty weren’t so bad when you had roots.
–Next: Manzanar

The Deeper You Go

Did you hear that the blond oil cartel lady that’s always on TV—“the deeper you go,” says she, “the more good things you learn”—isn’t a real human being? Yup, that’s true. The news is all over the internet and, I don’t mind saying, I’d already suspected as much in my own wicked mind. I mean, here’s this blond oil cartel lady who’s constantly on all of the TV channels and radio stations, inside newspapers and magazines, coming through the mailbox and up on billboards—already she’s clocked more screen time than Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor put together—yet nobody knows her name, or what country she’s from, or how she got her job, or how much money she’s making. While they keep the camera jumping around to try’n keep you from gazing into her eyes, freeze-frame your TV, get up close, take a gander and, I swear, those eyes are so spooky you can’t even tell what color they are. It’s a giant commercial vacuum inside those eyes; its funhouse mirrors filled with ranks and files of empty safe deposit boxes replicating themselves into infinity.

The oil cartel lady isn’t some kind of Stepford Wife robot, either. For one thing, the Stepford Wives were fictional and, for another, they were programmed to be the Ideal Woman from the rich suburbanite’s point of view: hard working, neat, organized, bright, submissive and alluring. Putting aside their sex and status appeal, the Stepford robots were the functional equivalents of a perfect company slave: you get a productive, reliable worker, you have no healthcare costs and, after it’s outlived its usefulness, you don’t have to feed and clothe it and, when it dies, you get no funeral bill. From the point of view of some high-rise Imperialist having African diamonds to mine, supply lines to secure and savages to civilize, the Stepford robots made soldiers so perfectly programmed they’d die before they’d question the wisdom of an order, much less the Divine Order of Things.

But the oil cartel lady isn’t an object to be exploited or a toy to be played with. She’s a whiff of digital wind, a puff of smoke, a clear plastic bottle of gourmet outer space. The product of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on market research and development, she’s a platinum-plated Madison Avenue think tank chimera; a fabulous monster, a wholesome holistic hologram of Ole Ben’s timeless American wit paired with maternal sweetness and presented with the fair sex’s take on Corporate Charity. She’s blond but not too blond, simple and sincere, her creamy Anglo Saxon-Teutonic-Nordic skin blemish-free, youthful and pure, her business suit formal but not black, her aura androgynous, her shoes plain and practical. Tall and willowy one minute and short and muscular the next, she’s your wife, big sister, mother, grandmother, Earth Mother and Holy Mother. Always on the move, always focused, balanced, engaged, engaging, empathetic, emphatic and serene, her neutral voice tones bursting with subtle hints of earnestness and enthusiasm, her Queen’s English-techno apparatchik speak perfectly Global Market, she spreads the Good News while her bold assurances and reassurances land inside your memory as gently as rose petals alighting on perfumed bath water.

With your help, the oil cartel hologram lady is providing fuel for 1.9 million American jobs and more jobs everyday—good, productive, permanent jobs with limitless potential for advancement, enrichment and fulfillment. Along with legions of good Americans everywhere working together for the common good and our common destiny, she’s providing us with a “clean environment” and our children yet unborn with “a clean energy future” and the limitless Promise of Tomorrow as Our Business, Our Only Business. She’s “fueling our comfort” and “our way of life,” “prosperity,” “security” and “the building blocks of future medicine.” She lights our homes and churches and schools, warms our food and bellies, farms, pharmaceuticals and factories. The perfect embodiment of the glorious Miracle of Free Capital and God’s Invisible Hand of Justice, she’s The Economy, stupid, and so the Giver and Taker of All Things. The constant breaking news updates we get alerting us to the very latest minute fluctuations in the world’s stock, bond, currency and commodity markets, plus the very latest up-ticks and downticks in the Leading Economic Indicators are measures of the pulse of God, and the oil cartel hologram is His television face.

It’s her body language that gives her away. If you saw a creature moving like she does in a parking lot, or inside a shopping mall, you’d be struck dumb. Is she some poor suffering psychotic trapped by the opera music relentlessly grating between her ears? Is she dangerous? Should I run? Yet, cocooned within the magically glowing mindscapes of our electronic living room campfires, she’s transformed into a sweet Angel sent from High Heaven. Without our oil, she so graciously informs us, you people starve. God doesn’t want you to starve and, since we keep you alive, we’re with God. Crude oil is the Holy Water we sprinkle on our newborn babies, the exhaust, coal dust and petrochemicals they breathe from cradle to grave the refreshing breath of The Exalted One, the dying oceans the Sinai Desert they must cross.

I know, it’s all subliminal and, sure, what’s a web of lies when they’re serving a Higher Purpose? And, sure, the oil cartel lady is just one Icon in an ever changing menagerie of them —there’s Old Clean Coal, the Energy Czars, the Atom B. Nuclear twins, Inc., The Good Hands People, the Copper (“Need a Penny, take a penny”) Kings, Burger Barons, Taco Titans, Pentagon Princesses, etc., etc.—but still the oil cartel lady is the star and centerpiece of the most extensive and expensive propaganda campaign ever waged against the sound minds of the people in the whole history of the world. I think we should know it and chew on it and, there, now you know. So don’t be fooled. That way lays madness and ruin.

Animal Rescue

About a month before my second book came out, I received a form email from my publisher’s Manager of Marketing and Publicity. At the ripe old age of 29, I was informed, worn down by the workaday grind and determined to follow her heart, she was quitting her job so she could devote herself to doing volunteer work with Animal Rescue. So I emailed her back: “How bout me? Ain’t I an animal?”

Although I never received a response, I like to think she got a chuckle of out my wisecrack, at least until she realized I had a point. I mean, imagine if we people loved each other the way we love our little house doggies and pussy cats. Since we’re taking leaps of imagination here— for this we’d need Divine Intervention—what if we loved each other as much as we love the money in our pockets? Since about 90% of human misery is caused by greedy humans, imagine how sweet and easy our lives would be if ever we got out from under their thumbs.

I’ve been an outdoors person, both as vocation and avocation, my whole life, and I’ve spent more time around house pets, wildlife and livestock than most any busload of the kind of animal rights activists you see on TV. Yet, while my attitude toward animals ain’t nearly as romantic as theirs, we’re on the same page ethically. If “soul” is what makes humans more than the sum total of their parts, then so it goes throughout nature. Humans rightly see the human in animals, and animals rightly see the animal in humans. As for the earth’s global community of wildlife, they do just fine with or without us humans so long as we allow them a half-chance. But I’m a human through and through, my favorite sort of animal is the human kind and, in terms of my loyalties, no other species comes close. I’m for Life and Liberty for all living species not just because it’s right by God, but because, after I’m dead, I want to leave behind the chance for a bright future for my own particular sort of critter.
Anyway, after I quit my horse ranching job of 15 years, my two boys had flown the coop and my dog, and then my cat, had died of old age, I swore on the Altar of God that never again would I allow so much as a pet parakeet—or even a gold fish—into my house. As for taking care of other people’s animals, while I wasn’t above doing a favor if pressing need there be, I was forever done with that, too. So imagine my shock and dismay when my wife came into the house and set a tiny little maybe two-week-old feline fur ball into my palm of my hand. Our landlady had found it hidden behind some bales in the hay barn, obviously it had been abandoned by its mother, and our landlady wondered if we’d like to try’n save it to keep as a mouser.

Taking the measure of the furry Twinkie trembling in my palm, my first thought was to drown it in the sink; put it out of its misery and save myself some money, time and trouble. One of the kitten’s BB eyes was festered half-open, its other was stuck shut, its ears were lying limp like wash rags and its weak, worn-out, rasping S.O.S’s sounded like the last gasps of some broken-up old man dying in the bottom of some dry water well. Yet I wasn’t in the business of drowning kittens, I wasn’t about the farm the chore out and—gee—it was a she (Tomcats suck) and, a Siamese-tiger stripe mix, she sure was purdy. Then, if she was going to die, she’d do it here pretty quick and, taking into account my wife’s moon-eyed expression as she gazed at me in hopeful anticipation, I knew she’d be doing most all the nursing and that got me off the hook. Also, I’ve never given a rat’s ass about easy, and what’s easier than carrying around a cold heart? Finally, what’s an oath sworn on the Altar of God? This is America, ain’t it?

So my wife called Cheryl Schrader of Anderson Valley Animal Rescue, got summoned to Boonville, then came back with a teensy baby bottle fitted with a weensy nipple, a can of infant kitten formula, salve for the eyes, drops for the ears, a short list of do’s and don’ts and—this was a pleasant surprise—gift certificates to get the kitten inspected, inoculated and, once she was big enough, spayed at the vet’s. So we got to work and, once the kitten figured out how to milk that nipple, she didn’t mind lying on her back in the crock of an arm like a human baby does. In fact, it wasn’t long before she was holding on to the sides of the bottle with her front paws, her toes spread like fingers, and happily gurgling. And when I’d make like I wanted to pull the nipple out of her mouth, she’d say “Oh, no you don’t!” by suckling and clinging to the bottle all the harder just like my boys did back when, after some slight amusement and wanting to maybe put a little fight into them, I’d done it to them. Within a couple of days it seemed certain she’d survive and, seeing how she’d won the abandoned feral kitten lottery, we named her Last Chance.

When, a couple of months later, we took Last Chance to the vet’s and she weighted in at 1.9 pounds, my wife and I brimmed with pride. Since she’d bonded with us at such an early age, and because she’d had no raggedy wildcat mother to teach her raggedy wildcat ways, we made Last Chance into a dignified housecat and, as such, she’s now about 90% civilized. As for the 10% that ain’t civilized, that’s probably my fault. Back when she was learning how to run across the living room without having her ass end, which is powered by the stronger legs, turning her sideways like a hook-and-ladder, and I was home from the woods by way of the saloon, I was sitting on the couch and, having learned how to climb up there, Last Chance was sitting atop it at a distance above my shoulder. Something caused me to cautiously turn to sneak a peek at her and, when we caught eyes, she sprung into the air and came at me like Rocky the Flying Squirrel except with outstretched feet with switchblade claws and a crocodile mouth full of needles. Not wanting to get bit or clawed, I grabbed up one of our puffy throw pillows and, using it as a shield to parry her lunge, I knocked her backward to the far side of the couch. After landing on all fours, instantly she was back atop the couch, down it and leaping at me, and again I batted her away with my pillow, this time trying to swish her into the exact far corner of the couch.

Good and mad now, and channeling her ancestral inner mountain lion, she attacked me again and again and—here’s Bambi whipping on Godzilla—she got me laughing so hard that she finally pierced my defenses and, whizzing by, she swiped a pair of inch-long bleeding scratches into my forearm. I let out with a yelp, jumped up and, with her nipping at my heels, I made for our bedroom to fetch our water-filled spray bottle. Once I had my semi-automatic, organic mace gun in my clutches and aimed right, I beat off her assault with a barrage of exploding mist balls administered about the head, neck and shoulders.
She’s never again attacked me like that but sometimes, especially when she thinks I ain’t looking, she’ll stalk me and I can tell she’s mighty tempted. Occasionally, like a Lakota brave counting coup on a bull buffalo, she’ll put a scratch into me or give me a playful/painful bite. But she does the same with my wife and visitors so I don’t take it personal. She’s just expressing her eternal feline soul is all.

Mendocino Stories

A while back in the nearby woods a large gaggle of wild turkeys started raising a ruckus to the high heavens. A veritable convention of agitated gobblers, it was, them being in their tribal mood. By and by a bunch of the turkeys came running out the tree line, hopped the pasture fence and started circling in the grass, not so noisy now that they’d switched over to dancing. One Tom turkey froze, puffed himself up like a balloon, shuddered to make himself a teensy bit bigger by getting his chest feathers to stand on end, then fanned his tail feathers, curled his neck and broke into a skittering little soft-shoe, his movements dainty. “Lookee here,” he was saying, “ain’t I something?”

Self-expression is everywhere in nature, everything from the rocks on up tells a story, and each story is inextricably woven into all. We are the creatures of our earthly surroundings, and Delta Blues rose out of the rhythms of stoop labor and sweltering sun; Jazz mimics the sounds of the city, Bluegrass the songbirds, creeks and breezes. If a writer writes about the desert, his or her prose will be spare; writing about the jungle, florid, the sea, in ebbs and flows reflecting the lack of solid ground underfoot. The creator is made manifest in creation and self-expression, whether animal or human, is meaningful to the extent it is social. Art for art’s sake? How about food for food’s sake, or water for water’s sake? How about that Tom turkey prancing around out there if he was all by his lonesome? How long before he started feeling silly?

“You may as well try’n herd house cats,” the woman advised after I’d told her about Mendocino Stories, the artist’s collective. That seemed a reasonable enough sentiment, given the little I know of the county’s “artist communities.” Yet I do know that, given their affluence, the one centered around the town of Mendocino more resembles the ones you’ll find in Malibu, Laurel or Topanga Canyons than in, say, Willits. Yet even the Villagers celebrate their surroundings; in fact most, especially the visual artists, set down roots out there to do just that. Throughout Mendocino County live artists of one sort or another: musicians, painters, sculptors, photographers, writers, potters, weavers, jewelers and what all. We’ve even got our own homegrown art forms: chainsaw sculpture, to name one. And that grew out of the now belly-up cottage industry that once manufactured redwood burl furniture. Go back a couple of hundred years, and for countless generations before then, and what were the ocean-going boats that plied these waters but works of art put to practical use?

Say you are a painter and you create a magnificent painting that, owing to the tremendous amount of time and intensity and talent you’ve put into it, only the richest of the rich can afford to buy. Why would you feel any different than the field hand who, having just helped bring in the last of a bumper harvest, sees the paymaster pull up in his pickup truck and immediately starts wishing for a bonus; a small cash token of appreciation as he or she’s sent on their way? If there’s a difference between the two, it’s that harvest workers—at least until TV invented Throwaway Culture—knew that virtually all of what they’d helped produce went to good use.

But what if the buyer of your magnificent painting lives in a vast and empty Winchester Mystery House-style mansion with rooms leading to rooms and in all of them hang magnificent paintings? What if your painting winds up decorating a guest room visited only by the maids who periodically enter to keep the suite and its furnishings pristine? Having gotten your price, would you rather that your painting hung in a high school library? Better yet, would you rather it hung in an art museum or, better still, alongside the masters in a famously prestigious one? If you were a painter and you achieved the last possibility, then you’d feel just like the field hand who’s been given a fat wad of crisp twenty dollar bills, the keys to the paymaster’s pickup truck, a full tank of gas and the sight of him in your rearview mirror waving you a misty bon voyage.

As a practical matter, the field hand moves on to the next crop, and the painter to the next painting. Still, without social relevance, there is no art. There is no philosophy, religion or science, either. The innate need to share is why birds and whales sing, why Monarch butterflies and buffalo migrate, and why a backwoods hermit jaws with his surroundings. The need to share is why Thoreau left his cabin on Walden Pond. It’s why John Muir left the High Sierra for San Francisco. It’s why Moses came down from the mountain top, Jesus returned from the wilderness and Buddha resumed talking. Coyotes don’t sing to the moon; they sing to each other. Any human that forgets that loses its way.

When I heard about Mendocino Stories, the artist’s collective that stages live entertainment and also hosts a website given over to local artists, their wares plus a web store for selling them, joining up seemed like a natural to me. The Heyday addition of Walking Tractor had just come out, I had plenty of pretty pictures already digitalized and the cost–$40.00 per year plus a couple of hours of me having to head-scratch and punch keyboard—was nothing at all in the grand scheme of things, or even in the little scheme of things, for that matter. Then why wouldn’t I invest in myself to increase my audience and maybe make some money back? (In my case, joining Mendocino Stories was like buying a bundle of storefront penny stock, walking around the block and then selling it back for nine cents a share).

I also knew that, when it comes to marketing, the more, the merrier. By way of illustration, say you own a corner gas station in the big city. On your left and right are other gas stations and kitty-corner sits a vacant lot. Now, if on that vacant lot a fourth gas station is built, your sales will increase. Why? Because living within a mile radius will be thousands of car owners who will know that, if they need gas and they want it in a hurry, yours is the intersection to head for. The wisdom of joining in cooperative ventures was proven by the first successful hunting party, or harvest party, or agricultural co-op, and it’s why today we have arts fairs, county fairs, shopping malls and, out on the open Interstates traversing the depopulated hinterlands, why corporate motels, gas stations and eateries cluster together. It’s also why, as Saul Alinsky so famously pointed out, the only difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are organized. And that’s another way of saying that dog-eat-dog competition makes perfect sense only so long as you ain’t a part of it. Because you enjoy laying down money on cockfights, that doesn’t mean you wish to be a cock.
So if you are an artist and wish to showcase your wares, or just an art lover (if artists and art lovers don’t love artists, who will?), or are interested in live entertainment bargains, or just out for some free internet entertainment, check out www.mendocinostories.com.

–Originally published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser