The Pleasures of Eastern Washington 1: The Mountains

I’m a city kid, ah, but you gotta have some wildness too.  Doncha? Preferably, with plenty of splashing.

I’m cooling off in Lake Leo, named for our trusty correspondent and great friend of Jinx The Cat, Leo Sadorf.  It’s a trout-filled little lake hidden in the Selkirk Mountains of Northeastern Washington, just two hours from our home in Spokane.

If you’re scared of fish nipping your toes, or Grendel maybe, you can go hiking…

That’s my 89 year old mother-in-law beside me. No joke - this lady keeps up with the Pondering Pig on the trail any day and she ignores the doctor’s pleas about osteoporosis.  She can trip over a root, get up, grin and keep going.  Never broke anything yet. What a lady! My Patrushka comes from sturdy stock.

Ah, the August mountains. If you’re a photographer you can wander around and just look through your viewfinder…

We get long winters up here in the North Country, not far from the Canadian border, but the summers are divine and the mountains are near. They’re one of the pleasures of eastern Washington.

On To Santa Barbara, Summer 2008

We touched down at the Oakland, California airport a week ago Wednesday (July 9).  I was curious - has the price of gasoline changed California’s famously maniacal driving habits?  I was here to find out.

Actually, I was here to go to a wedding (see I’m Going To California),  but I was still curious to see how Californians, with their wondrous skewed materialism and idealism all slushed together, were facing peak oil.  The cost of housing has driven folk right out to the outer outer suburbs. Towns that used to be artichoke centers or desert spas are full of new subdivisions and professionals who drive 85 miles to work every morning. That’s the distance between San Francisco and Stockton, once an affordable community for San Francisco wannabes who couldn’t afford to buy there.  Or it was popular until their mortgage balloon payments called the game.

Unemployed writer and ponderer that I am, I can afford to sneer, but I don’t.  We’re all stuck in this shit, one way or the other.

Patrushka and I grabbed BART to downtown San Francisco - where you can rent a car for half the price at the airport, and off we buzzed towards the great Beach Boys California to the south.  Good Vibrations, here we come.

The Eyesore Freeway as far as Gilroy is still crammed with giant SUVs hitting 80 miles an hour on their way to somewhere dead important before it’s too late, leaving the Pondering Pig in his rental Dodge Caliber inhaling their carbon dust.  $4.85 a gallon?  Pigeon feed.  I got lunch with Steve Jobs.  Let’s roll!

There’s next to no clunkers on the road, so maybe the $4.85 a gallon has affected the beatniks, layabouts, and other troublemakers who know how to enjoy the coast, but now that I think about it - there never were many clunkers on the Eyesore - this piece of Highway 101 is in the land of big salaries and young cats with two Mercedes and a Hummer in their three car garages.  OK, there’s still the odd gardener burning oil down the Eyesore on his way to the next job, but that cat’s driving a gas-conscious 60.

Me too.  This rental car has cruise control, we got the time and I want to look around.

Gad, I hate to write this.  But I am sworn to the truth, no matter how much it costs: the California coast in July is just as beautiful, just as near perfect as it ever was, even looking out a Caliber car window.  Oh man, why didn’t I rent that white Mustang convertible instead?  I need the top down to watch the wind tousling my baby’s hair.  As soon as we hit the eucalyptus groves north of Salinas, the years melted away, my hair grew out down over my shoulders, the pounds melted off and I popped a Coca-Cola, the kind with sugar. And Patrushka, my gosh, she looks fab in that bikini next to me, just like she did when I first fell in love with her in the spring of 1969.

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true
Baby, then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do -
We could be married!
And then we’d be happy!
Wouldn’t it be nice?

We stopped for lunch in Pismo Beach.  Is this guy still selling these things?

You know what?  I sat down to write a nice self-righteous diatribe against people still living a sybarite lifestyle with the apocalypse nearly upon us - but damn it, this is California and the myth is just too big to see over. I’m getting those good vibrations!  I can’t raise up the required sourpuss-ness.

Say, isn’t that the curve where James Dean bought it in his Porsche Spyder one  afternoon in 1955?  And isn’t that Dead Man’s Curve, that place you won’t come back from?  And look, isn’t that where that guy in the black denim trousers and motorcycle boots and a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back bought it on the railroad tracks?  And, my gosh, that’s exactly where Brian Wilson’s girl made him come alive, made him want to drive in Don’t Worry, Baby!  Hey Patrushka, stop slathering yourself with Sea ‘N Ski.  Let’s roll!  We got a wedding in Santa Barbara!

Spring Is Here At Last

Ah, spring! Our daffodils are daffy in the door yard. Our crocuses are croaking. The tulips are…what? And there’s not a cloud in the sky, except for that little cloud there.

I feel like wandering lonely as that one today until I spy a field of daffodils, don’t you? We could go together. We could be lonely as two clouds.

We could pack a lunch. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine…but then I’ll be dozing in the daffodils while you frolic in the flowers. Make that sasperilly today, bartender.

In honor of this glorious Spokane day (with delightful April showers forecast for this afternoon) I intend to share a well-known little poem with you. It’s from a bear of a literary figure, but don’t worry. It’s not Wordsworth.

How sweet to be a Cloud
Floating in the Blue!
Every little cloud
Always sings aloud.

“How sweet to be a Cloud
Floating in the Blue!”
It makes him very proud
To be a little cloud.

You’ll be interested to know that lovely set of verses comes from the twenty-ninth best selling children’s book of all time. The biggest-selling children’s book of all time is, of course, The Pokey Little Puppy.

Last Days of Playland-at-the-Beach

Note: This is Part 3 of the Playland Story. It’s full of occult hippies and glamorous pop stars and stuff you’ll want to read about — but if you came in late, you might want to start with What Happened to Playland at the Beach? just below.

By the mid-Sixties, Playland at the Beach had lost it’s magic, even for me, and certainly for the Whitney family who owned the park. After George Whitney Sr., its entrepreneurial genius and founder, died in 1958, the family business slowly disintegrated in law suits and ill will, with the children — able people in their own right — battling their mother who still controlled the park and who finally forced them out of management roles.

If I ever went to Playland, it was late at night, probably with a carload of hippies who had the munchies. The Pie Shop still sold fourteen kinds of pie, and the Hot House next door still sold enchiladas we could eat sitting on the seawall across the highway. Skateland, the roller skating rink across Balboa Street from the Midway held on, and George Whitney’s collection of Victorian fortune telling mechanical gypsies, peep shows, steam pianos, and a working toy carnival made entirely out of toothpicks were still on exhibit, but somehow they weren’t trippy any more.

Yet, in 1969, as the old world of Playland ebbed, across the street the brave new plant of San Francisco pop culture was sending out a hot tendril.

The Family Dog, the rock dance commune centered around original hippie Chet Helms, lost its lease on their Avalon Ballroom headquarters and moved west, out to the beach, out to a rickety wooden building where generations of San Franciscans had come to eat fried chicken, roller skate, play with their slot cars and now…dance to the Grateful Dead.

Soon longhaired freakos, velvet swathed teen heart throbs, spotty faced boys and undercover narcs were converging on the fog-shrouded building across the street from the kiddie sailboats dripping in the foggy night dew. The guys running the ski-ball concession looked at each other incredulously as Pigpen’s blues organ drew the few lingering drunks across the street.

Monday nights acid guru Steven Gaskin was filling the same hall with a kind of revival meeting for hippies called the Monday Night Class. I can’t beat Albert Bates description: “Monday Night Class became a weekly pilgrimage of throngs of hippies from up and down the coast, from high schools and university campuses, from army bases and police academies, from mountain communes and Haight Street crash pads. Thousands of people, in various states of consciousness, came with tamborines and diaphanous gowns, love beads and bangles, Dr. Strange cloaks and top hats with feathers. The open-ended discussions ventured into Hermeneutic geometry, Masonic-Rosicrucian mysticism, Ekenkar and the Rolling Stones, but opened with a long, silent meditation and closed with a sense of purpose.”

Gaskin was teaching the kids the original Huxley-Alpert-Leary hippie vision of LSD as a life-changing sacrament, not a thrill ride or a Friday night high. Challenging them to change their lives, not just trip. And the continued success of The Farm after nearly forty years implies he was to some degree successful at it.

I could never take him seriously though. Not his fault - but to me he was just good old Steve Gaskin, my hip grad student acquaintance at SF State who had a teaching assistantship in creative writing, I think. I remember when he came back from Mexico absolutely charged with psychedelic adrenalin. The guy had had a life-changing experience down there and he was telling everybody who would listen. But I wouldn’t. Like Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor, except to his old pals.” Or something like that. But basically I thought Steven was okay.

But there were all those other guys climbing onstage at the Avalon. OK, I’m not a big swami fan, and my prejudice colors the rest of this picture. I was at the Avalon the night Allen Ginsberg introduced Swami Bhaktivedanta on stage. He was the guy who introduced the Hara Khrisna movement to the West. The two of them chanted Hare Krishna together for a while, and clicked their little bells and Om-ed it. I thought “Hmmmm… is there something in this?”. It was interesting. I’ve still got the poster for that night in a box under my bed along with a lot of other remnants of that life.

Well, it turned out there was something in it. There was macrobiotic food and colon cleansing and kundalini force for the masses and Esalen Human Potential Seminars, Khrisna Consciousness with extra child abuse for no charge, The Children of God, Werner Erhard, transcendental levitation and the whole soggy descent into dopey earnest astrological unreason that has plagued the rest of the twentieth century. Thanks a lot, Allen. Thanks a lot, Chet, for letting that fakir onstage.

Hmm, I seem to be wandering off here. Just to wrap up the obvious, the hard beat Sixties I had entered as a seventeen year old kid were over. Playland would be closed and ripped down in 1972. The Family Dog was going broke. And the soft and goushy, it’s-all-about-me Seventies were on us. Help! Run!

Photo 1: Playland’s End. September 24, 1972. Photo by Patrushka.
Photo 2: Site of Playland today. Photo by Patrushka.

What Patrushka Saw: The Birdseed Capital

Looking at Andreea’s pics just now reminded me of all the images from The Pondering Pig and Patrushka’s travels across America this summer in their little gypsy cart.

Here is the little world of Flagler, lost and forgotten on the plains of eastern Colorado. Except for the local bird seed farmers, of course, to whom it is found and remembered every day.

Bird Seed Central

What America’s Sparrows Need

Technology for the Sparrows

In the Lonely Country

Corn Dog Girl

How’s this for a life style? You go down to the barn, get out your traveling corn dog stand, and your traveling pizza stand, and your supply trailer with batter and cheese and stuff and off you go over the mountains to the Mendocino County Fair, or the California State Fair, or the Fresno County fair, the Rodeo, up and down Northern California, filling hungry giant California bellies with fresh deep fried corn dogs, lemonade (“our lemonade made with real lemons”) and gooey slabs of cheesy pizza.

The County fair wasn’t even open yet. We were just wandering around watching setup, watching the 4-H Ag kids putting the last bean in their all-bean display about the top 10 crops of Mendocino County – (trees are number one, grapes number two, apples number ten, pot number nothing), stopping by the Methodist Ladies Homemade Apple Pie and Ice Cream Stand to see if it was open yet and the corn dog business was already jumping. The workers, the 4-H Dads, the guy from the cowboy hat and saddles concession, and even some of the Methodist apple pie ladies were standing around waiting for their custom fried corn dogs to come out hot and brown.

Corn Dog Girl told me they’ve been deep frying up corn dogs for many a year. Her partner started out in 1970 with icies and they went pretty well, but when he added hamburgers, the business took off. It was hard decision, moving into corn dogs but once he decided his future was corn dogs and lots of them, he never looked back.
He built the sign one rainy winter. Pretty cool too. Yellow. Purple. The letters light up one after the other in a hungry sort of way.

Hey, they’re just a carny couple, right? Hardscrabble life in a trailer behind the ferris wheel, right? Wrong, On corn dog profits, they just bought a twenty acre ranch in the Sierra foothills.

See You In September

If you’ve been wondering why the Pondering Pig is getting a little thin lately, a post here, a post there, but sort of random - Patrushka and I are putting our lives into an entirely new order. We are leaving our temporary summer quarters here on the far coast in 1910, and heading home - to our new home in Washington State up against the edge of the Rocky Mountains where the grizzly bears roam.

We have chosen the year 1925 as our time location, although I will be visiting the present to report on our adventures, discuss the pondering business with other talking pigs, and pick up our supply of Cheerios.

We’ve been sweating the deal and the financing and how to move all our gear over a thousand miles and packing Grandma’s sewing machine (yes, Patrushka’s greyhaired Saxon mother is coming to live with us) and besides that, we left our gypsy cart in a field in Washington State and I have had to hitchike to the library to post.

By the end of September we will be living in our new home, surrounded by boxes but with an internet connection again. And, I promise you, a whole new exactly the same Pondering Pig ready for new adventures. So keep your RSS feed connected.

Pondering Pig’s Tour of San Francisco

Planning your big trip to San Francisco? Don’t forget your coat! I know you want to see Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum real bad, and, oh those cable cars climbing halfway to the stars, they’ve got to be great. How about a trip to the Haight-Ashbury to see where the Grateful Dead lived? Maybe a topless bar (wink wink nod nod), and a nightcap in the bar of the Holiday Inn.

But hold on for a minute. There’s another city hidden beneath the glitter and gloss of “My Enchanted City”. A city with hidden treasures and landmarks that only the talking pigs know about. Let me take you down, cause I’m going to…San Francisco’s Richmond District, Home of the Talking Pigs!

Oh, there’s not many of us left now in the City. We’ve dispersed across the world. I’m an exile myself, sleeping in an abandoned mobile home far down the coast with only an owl and a feral cat for company. (Besides the beautiful Patrushka and her indomitable Mom, of course, both of whom insist they like it)
Oh, perhaps it’s quiet, perhaps it’s a little lonely today. But there was a time when the Richmond resounded to the throng of happy snorts and grunts, when little curly tails disappeared into the bakeries and came out with pies and cakes and sugar cookies to take home for tea. Young pigs such as myself studied in the libraries and parks of the Richmond and learned to ponder deeply into the mystery of things.

Wandering through the muffled streets, we learned to love the fog and moist grey gloom. For us it was a warm cozy blanket. The wind barreling off the Pacific, it filled the lungs with glee. Ah, for the life of a talking pig in the Richmond District in those golden times of yore.

Certain among you are beginning to wonder when the show starts and I wish you’d have a little more patience. I’m just getting warmed up. But ever it shall be. Okay, next picture, please…

The Temple of Learning. Ah, the lines of merry young pigs that stood outside the Balboa waiting for the box office to open and the Saturday matinée to begin. Some Saturdays we heard a lecture on Aristotle. Other Saturdays it was six color cartoons, a Superman serial, and Mickey Rooney in “Penrod Fights The Gangsters”. Even today, the remnants of the Golden Age remain. Where else could you have your choice of Nacho Libre or Army of Shadows, a phenomenal, magnificent 1969 French film about the Resistance during WWII, and don’t miss it if you trust a talking pig’s judgment). But it’s not coming soon to a theater near you. Sorry. Maybe on DVD.

The Secret Treasure Statue. I boldly proclaim its location because I know how to get to the treasure and you don’t. No, it’s not symbolic of the treasure of the imagination – it’s money. Gold beyond your wildest dreams! And it’s mine, mine mine! Hahahahahahahahah.

Adolf Sutro. How we honor Adolf. Not only did he build San Francisco’s Sutro Park, most beautiful park in the known universe, he was the first talking pig to successfully pass as a human for most of his life. We don’t like to do it, but it’s so much more convenient. People are always asking embarrassing questions like “How come you’re not wearing trousers?” But they never guessed the truth about Adolf. What a pig! Too bad about the name though. It was a perfectly nice name in 1890.

The Old Manse. Pigs lived here once but now they’re gone.

Our tour of San Francisco’s Richmond District is about halfway through. We’ll be stopping for lunch today at The Blathering Pig. Please try not to encourage the proprietor or we’ll never get served!

Back In California

Ben Lomond Springtime
Originally uploaded by Patrushka.

“This world…and then the next,” my Kansas-bred grandmother used to say. I was never really sure what she meant but she said it after she had experienced some small sorrow or exasperation. I think Nana believed this world was a vale of tears to be gotten though by grit, determination, and holding on for dear life. And who knew what the next world would be like? But when she used that expression, she didn’t sound too hopeful. In later years, my mother took up the refrain and now I hear it ringing in my own ears.

Where is joy this overcast morning in the backyard of my brother’s house in Ben Lomond, CA? The acorn woodpeckers, a whole gang of them, are knocking and banging overhead somewhere, making their ‘kacka-kacka’ calls to each other. A grey squirrel and a stellar jay are facing off over first rights to the birdbath. Looks like the beginning of another nice California day. So why do I feel grey?

We flew down from Spokane on Saturday. My oldest pal, Way Out Willy, and his wife Kay picked us up at the San Jose Airport. We went out to dinner and laughed about nothing in particular, as we always have. “Joshed” as they used to say. I’ve known Will since we were Baby Beatniks together nearly fifty years ago. He’s become as strange and crotchety as I have but I’m okay with his crotchets — you don’t get that many best friends in a lifetime and God gave me one. Someday I’ll write about him, but I’ll have to disguise his name so he won’t get mad. Maybe I’ll call him Way Out Billy.

Will was out on his adventures for a long time but he made harbor at last. Now he has a sweet wife, and a cool little house in the manzanita thickets and an old dog Miles who remembers Patruska and I when we come to visit and wags his tail and grins.

How I long for a safe harbor. A place I can put my stuff. A place where I can get up in the morning and know where everything is, know that today will be a lot like yesterday, pondering and writing and going down to the coffee house to see what the other talking pigs are doing.

This is just a phase, of course. Too much experience, too much chaos. Too many days just trying to get through to the end - like the homeless guys experience every day of their lives. No wonder so many take drugs! When we do get a home again, and peace, and a fire to sit by on winter evenings, I know I’ll get restless and start planning a new adventure. Perhaps a voyage to Kerguelen Island, the far away land. But for now, this grey California morning, my sciatica hurts and I just want to go home. If I had one.

Sorry. I don’t usually get this personal. Next I’ll be telling you about Sniffy’s birthday party. With luck, I won’t make a habit of it, but you never know. I may be going into a new phase.

The Strange Case of Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone

SCENE I. A fancy cemetery a couple of miles south of the San Francisco county line.

1.Establishing Shot. Big granite sign:”Hills of Eternity Memorial Park”

2. Pull back to reveal workaday suburban traffic cruising by. It’s a normal day on a normal street in normal suburb…but something sinister’s in the air.

Teenager with baggy pants on skateboard misses curb and falls on nose.

Little girls in pink party dresses and holding balloons skip down sidewalk. A blackbird flies angrily into their midst and pops the balloons with his steely beak.

An armored Brinks truck passes cemetery entrance — and its wheels fall off.

Across the street from the cemetery stands…the First National Bank!

3. A ancient black Rolls-Royce enters LEFT, pulls around the corner and

4. CUT to DRIVER’S perspective as the limo rolls uphill into a city of the dead, a city crafted for the city’s wealthiest, most respected and distinguished residents, and one mysterious frontier marshal. A city of granite and marble and enduring peace…until today.

5. Apparently not noticing the caretaker gazing pensively at some pigeon dung on the sidewalk, an older pig steps from the Rolls. He is dressed in black, black silk hat, black cape, and he carries a cane adorned with an enormous, although glass, diamond. It is the Pondering Pig’s fabulously wealthy detective uncle, SWINISH McTAVISH. Intent on his mission, he hobbles down the walkway ahead.

6. POV of McT: (VO) Not this one…not this one…what has Josie done with herself and her rascally husband? Not here, not here. Oh, there’s someone who really missed his mother…”

7. McTAVISH spots a raggedy gardener making notes on which weed to pull next. They engage in conversation. “My good man”, the pig patronizingly begins, could you direct me to the grave of that glorious lady of song and story, the great actress and renowned beauty Miss Josephine Marcus?”

8. GARDENER: You must be myopic, old pig sir, the maiden you speak of resides here, in front of your tremulous snout, beside her husband, the fabled frontier marshal, Wyatt Earp! Yes, their ashes lie side by side, for, as the old poem says, “That nothing’s so sacred as honor, and nothing so loyal as love.”

9. “Strange,” replies McTAVISH - “I’ve never heard of that poem. Do you know who wrote it? Was it the great Robert Service?”.
GARDENER: Actually, it’s not a real poem at all. This isn’t even the orginal gravestone!
McTAVISH: Great Scott! Not the original gravestone! How can that be?
GARDENER: Some say it was the the work of the Clanton Gang, or what was left of them. All I know is one morning in 1957 I came to work with my notebook, planning to make notes on which weed to pull next, and the stone was gone! Evaporated into the night, the whole piece of granite plus 250 pounds of cement foundation! Why, it was the size of Mama and Daddy’s gravestone back behind there. Gone. Flitted away,like the souls of those two adventurous wanderers.
McTAVISH: Hmmm, I’ve heard of graverobbers, but never graveSTONE robbers. I wonder…
GARDENER: They lay there like that for forty years or so, then a year a two ago a mysterious stranger ordered this stone with specific instructions that it must contain the words,”Nothing so sacred as honor, nothing so loyal as love.” Go figure…
McTAVISH: I am. I’m figuring hard right now. I figure that was none other than Jimmy Clanton, last of the mean Clantons, stricken with remorse over his gang’s heinous deed. Or maybe it’s a code of some kind. If I could find old Jimmy, I just might find a clue to the whereabouts of the gravestone and its secret coded message.
The old pig paces the sidewalk excitedly. “I’m going to find that gravestone or my name’s not Swinish McTavish!”

10.WS: Suburban homes on the hillside looking down on the Earp’s’ grave. McTAVISH walks thoughtfully back to his 1948 Rolls. His driver, now revealed to be none other than McTAVISH’S daring and resourceful young protegee EMERALD LAKE, looks at him expectantly.

EMERALD: So what’s up with Earp, Unc?

McTAVISH: Emerald, have you been sitting in the car this whole time working on that line? Look, I’m on the scent of a crime so incredible, so fiendish that for 49 years the entire misbegotten act has been dismissed as a simple college boy prank. There’s something funny about this, Em, and I’m going to need your help!

EMERALD: 49 years? Thast’s the coldest case we’ve ever taken. Shall I head for the morgue? Newspaper morgue that is.

McTAVISH: Yes indeed, Emerald. But first, let’s make a little stop at The Whiff of Cyanide, the worst bar in the Tenderloin!

Big scarey music stab.

(Pondering Pig, pulling sheet from beatup typewriter: Well, that ought to grab ‘em. Big bucks, here we come! Gabbin, get off that feedbag and get this in the mailbag! Straight to Paramount Pictures!)