Prevent the madness!

We have a fantastic thing in San Francisco that I previously taken for granted: breathable air.  Thank you, coastal winds. Next time you catch me without a sweater and mess up my hair, I will try to remember that I owe you one.

On Wednesday night, I went to see Head Over Heels, a big, brassy Elizabethan-ish musical by Jeff Whitty (whom I met one time, so I am pretty much famous) featuring songs by the Go-Gos.  You're not wrong. That is a lot going on.  And you haven't even seen the costumes.  The good news is that we did get to hear "Vacation"; the bad news is that as soon as the last note was sung, the stage manager called called an "unscheduled break" and cleared the actors from the stage to keep them from dying of smoke inhalation. The audience waited around just in case a friendly breeze happened by, but, ultimately, after 45 minutes they canceled the show. I suppose it's possible the audience could have died of smoke inhalation during the break, but we didn't.  I retreated to my hotel with hair smelling like I had been sitting way too close to a campfire.  Smokey the Bear was right.  Forest fires are no joke. 

I guess I never thought about them as weakening the nation exactly, but when hundreds of people can't see a Go-Gos musical through to the final curtain, what is American coming to?

The next morning was, if anything, even smokier. I wasn't sorry to leave it behind, which I thought I would do swiftly, but I'd gone hundreds of miles before I saw a hint of blue sky. During those long, smoky hours, I learned anew that the radio stations of America take a very limited view of of the musical landscape. Aside from the aforementioned hundreds of songs about Jesus, it would seem that are only three songs in the world. One of them has to do with a woman who's sweet as sugar; one of them has to do with shutting up and dancing; and one of them has to do with leaving the bar before you're too wasted not to cheat on your girlfriend. Over and over and over again. Except!  Once more there was a brief public radio respite (a show called Rhythm and News).  My favorite was "Rivers in Your Mouth" by Ben Howard.

Not surprisingly, I had never heard of Ben Howard. Apparently, I am alone in this. Oops. Sorry, Ben Howard. It seems that you are famous. In my internet poking around, I discovered that he's playing a show in Berkeley in a few months and in the full flush of new fandom, I thought I'd buy a ticket.  Ha.  Ha ha ha.  Here's what I won't be spending to hear that one song I heard on the radio that time: ninety bucks.  And those are the cheap seats.  I'm sure my shock and horror on this front is further evidence of my geezer status  (à la: "When I was a girl, concerts cost a NICKLE."), but hell's bells. The truth is, I just don't enjoy huge concerts enough to spend that kind of cash.* Please don't tell any men this. for fear I will never be coupled again.  If online dating profiles are to be believed (related query: are they?), men are only alive in order to go to concerts.  Are there thirty bands playing?  Do you have to stand in a field for hours with thousands of drunken strangers?  Is the ticket $425?  SWEET!

What were we talking about?  Oh. Right. I'm home and I hereby like the music of Ben Howard. He even did a Ben Howardly plaintive cover of "Call Me Maybe," which clearly amused the heck out of him. Carry on, Ben.

*Please note, exceptions will be made for Tom Waits.

Airstream

When I woke in Redding on Sunday morning, I lay in the motel bed panicking about my life until I remembered that that was a terrible way to spend a vacation, so I got up, ate a Clif bar, and got back on the freeway pointed North toward Ashland, my true destination.

Though I have driven to Oregon many, many times over the last 25 years, I can only say I'm even more of a chicken driving over the mountain now than I ever have been previously. If the road is anything but entirely straight, I drive like a grandma. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.

Cruelly, the radio provided little solace in the treacherous driving conditions (read: curves in the road). Unlike the first leg of the journey, which was all NPR until the bitter end when it faded into a brilliant show called Shasta Serenade, aka the best American road trip music I could have hoped for. Plenty of banjos, but then, just when you think you've got it all figured out, some 30's swing. I could have driven hundreds of miles with Shasta Serenade for company.

My favorite was "Lampshade On" by Dustbowl Revival, perhaps best described as a rollicking ode to alcoholism. By the end of the song, I realized I was doing about 90mph and was in need of a heartrending ballad to get me back to the neighborhood of the speed limit.

The Dustbowl Revival perform their song "Lampshade On" in this music video recorded at the SecondStoryGarage.com studio inside the Daily Camera newsroom in Boulder, Colorado. They're called The Dustbowl Revival, but "dustbowl" should be read as style, not politics. It's more Mardi Gras than "Grapes of Wrath."

North of town, no such luck. I made tour after tour of the radio dial finding that at least 85% of songs were stealthily about Jesus. I didn't mind exactly, since sneaky Jesus songs are a staple of any road trip, but it did get tedious. Worse though, was the smoke. The news had been full of reports of massive forest fires in California and my shaky understanding of geography led me to believe that smoke had arrived in Oregon, somehow skipping over a large section of Northern California.  Not so.  It turns out that the Pacific Northwest has forest fires of its own, thank you very much. The smoke in Ashland was so bad that they considered canceling the evening performance in the outdoor theatre as, indeed, they had done the night before when the smoke was said to have been even worse.

Undeterred, I drove straight to breakfast. I was seated at the counter next to a slim young man.  The waitress brought him a large plate of what might have been pancakes on steroids. Or possibly they were pancakes that had something sandwiched between them?  I can't be sure, but the whole pile was sprinkled with sugar and topped with butter and would have given a lesser man a heart attack on the spot.  "That is impressive,"I said. "I'm excited just to be near it.  However, your level of fitness far exceeds mine so I'll just enjoy it vicariously."  "It's amazing." he told me.  "I had it yesterday.  But it's really not that filling, so i get something else too."  It's really not that filling?  I'm not sure anyone has ever said something that astonished me more.  But then, just a he had forewarned me, the waitress brought him an omelet on a second platter. I laughed. That was when he told me that he had recently walked 700 miles of the Pacific Coast Trail and, during his few days in town, was eating everything in sight.  Ohhhhhhh.  He didn't make it quite through the whole omelet (not for lack of trying) and then he bid me farewell and went to take a nap.

Wildlife Update:  I wouldn't want you to miss out on anything, so I must report that right now a coyote is making a hell of a racket close at hand, and the neighborhood dogs are objecting.  At this rate of wildlife escalation, perhaps tomorrow a cougar will come by for breakfast.

Though I wouldn't have minded taking a post-breakfast nap myself, I instead went to matinee of Long Day's Journey Into Night, an aptly named play that did not end until nearly 5pm.  And then, at last, it was time to meet the Airstream. I believe I made this reservation in January, so I've had plenty of time to build my expectations to unreasonable heights. I have not been disappointed.  It is entirely charming.  I can only imagine how thrilled my child-self would have been to stay here. It is like living in a dollhouse.

I send you this dispatch from the living room:

My only regret is that the smoke has been too thick for me to see stars from my bed, a thing I had been strangely excited to do. However, the joy of sleeping in a place where I hear nothing but crickets instead of my accursed neighbors far outweighs any need for a view overhead.

I'll be sorry to go.

I had planned an excursion to another lake today. My Whiskeytown air mattress is still all blown up and ready to go, but it is still very smoky and today's high is forecast to be in the mid-nineties, so it's possible I'll just go to a movie.  Shhhh.  Please don't tell the lake.  Or summer. They will be mightily disappointed in me.

The birds of summer

photo by Brent Moore

I am on vacation. "Yeah." I hear you saying. "Apparently since FEBRUARY." 

Here's the thing. It's not exactly that i've written nothing since February, it's just that I narrowed my audience down to one person. I have a friend who was stricken by an illness of the big and scary kind. The kind where the treatment goes on and on, all the while making you feel worse than the illness itself. As I floundered around trying to think of something I could do to help her, beyond adding my name to her considerable list of volunteer chauffeurs and casserole providers, I decided that I could write to her. And so I did.  And so I have been doing, I should say..  As a result, she has gotten envelopes full of my free-associative blather and you have gotten nothing. Is that fair?  Possibly not. But then, neither is cancer.

However, I have just had a birthday that defines me, numerically at any rate, as indisputably an adult. It is sobering.  I have many friends who seem to be accomplishing impressive things at a great rate, whereas I woke up in a motel in Redding yesterday morning in the throes of an unscheduled existential crisis. I had planned to spend my vacation eating ice cream that I would later regret and staving off sunburn, not panicking about my lack of creative output. While I would typically choose to worry about this for several weeks while doing nothing, I am rapidly running out of summer vacation ad need to get back on the regrettable ice cream schedule as soon as possible. And so, here I am.  Creatively putting out.  As it were. Also sweating profusely, not in the manner of a fevered artist, but more in the manner of someone sitting in an Airstream trailer on a hot August day. That is because, dear reader, I am sitting in an Airstrem trailer on a hot August day.

Vacation! See?

It is somewhat cooler outside than it is in here, and the trailer is accompanied by a very picturesque deck, but the fly situation is suboptimal out there. I tried.  I was so busy flailing my arms around in a fly-deterring manner that I nearly flung my breakfast yogurt over my shoulder, so I have admitted defeat.  I will happily take flies over mosquitoes, sure, but I will also happily take sweating over flies. That is not the most fortuitous literary construction, but you get my point. 

Additionally, there is a very large wild turkey (perhaps there is no such thing as a small turkey?) stalking the perimeter and, if you must know, I am afraid of him. I have spent very little time in close proximity to live turkeys and this morning's encounter has not made me regret it.  Turkeys look like they have been made from spare parts--as though nature set out to make a perfectly respectable bird, but found it had tun out of proper heads and had to make due with a bunch of creepy prehistoric left overs. "Friendly" is not a word that leaps to mind when looking at a turkey. Not this one, at least.

I did not expect "being quietly menaced by large fowl" would be a thematic through-line of this trip, but I can't deny that Saturday's giddy excursion to Whiskeytown Lake involved a hell of a lot more geese than I had bargained for.

I arrived in Redding in the mid afternoon when the temperature was hovering around 105 degrees. I didn't pause, but headed straight to Whiskeytown and its lake, that, until the day before, I had never heard of.  It promised a swimming beach complete with a concessions stand and a changing room. Summer! The bad news was that the concessions stand, where I thought I might get some kind of delicious processed lunch, had very limited fare. The ice cream sandwich I had was inadequate as a meal, but, on the bright side, was quickly dispatched and did not attract much attention from the geese.

The geese were a surprise. I don't know what geese typically eat, but I do know that when their lake is in a state park, whatever they would typically call lunch is protected and probably abundant. The Whiskeytown Lake geese don't care. They want your snacks. They walk around the beach in groups of four or five and silently surround picnicking families at close proximity. They're like school bullies whose reputation is so fearsome that they can back a kid against his locker and relieve him of his lunch money using nothing more than a hard stare.  If ducks tried to pull this, it would probably be cute, but when you're sitting on the ground and a bird as big as two-year-old wants something from you, it definitely feels like it could go either way.

Happily, I was not called upon to rumble with a gang of water fowl, but later that night, a mosquito did fly all the way up my dress, content to bite me only when it reached the very edge of my underwear--not the place the sun don't shine, perhaps, but certainly a place the sun don't shine.  The wildlife of Redding is not joking around, man. Do not mess with them.

Tomorrow: the Airstream revealed.

Something nice to say

I felt I had left everything so sweet and pleasant way back in November that, when things started to go awry, I just didn't have the heart to mention it.  If you don't have anything nice to say....

In brief, the neighbors frequently drive me to distraction with the noise required of them to just live their lives.  Their noisy, door-slamming, stereo-pounding, stair-clattering, hearty-guffawing, motorcycle-riding lives.  They are still nice boys, of course. I just sort of wish they were nice somewhere else.  See?  Not very nice.  Also, I am single once more. Best not to dwell on THAT.

What with one thing and another, I've just kept my lip zipped, but today I had an unexpected delightful experience and thought: if ever there was a moment to get back on the ol' blogging horse, that time is now.  Because I have something nice to say.  Mind you, they have changed everything about how this site works since last I was here, so it will be a miracle if I can actually post it, but I will try. I will try.

This afternoon, I read an article that mentioned Ampersand. I had never heard of it, but apparently, according to the article, it is a little flower shop in a converted garage on a very unlikely block in the Mission. A block I associate more with shady drug dealing and people pooping between parked cars than with fairy lights and lilies. Could it be true?  I was all excited.  I went there the very minute I left work.

Not only is it real, a bright and fragrant refuge on an otherwise dingy street, the owner was very charming and, best of all, they sell flowers by the stem. This has become curiously uncommon, which I find to be a great pity, because putting together modest little arrangements is one of life's great pleasures.  I prattled on to Emerson (the convivial young owner)--in fact, I was so overcome with excitement that I might have accidentally told him my life story--while I picked through the flowers.

I finished with roses and kumquats and freesia, which is a combination you want to bury your face in and breathe deeply through your nose.

And do you know how much all that joy cost me?  Twelve bucks. 

12

I don't know how familiar you are with florists, but that is a miracle.  I may move in. It's very pretty there and they have a little sofa, so I think it will work out.

I practically skipped back to my car, clutching my bouquet, sweating through my extraneous woolen items (as it was, according to the car thermometer, 65 degrees out). Dozens of pink-hued clouds were scattered liberally across the sky behind Mission Dolores like a 1950s technicolor backdrop. And there was nothing wrong at all.

I can't think of anything nicer to say that that.