Another Old Column

It must have been about 20 years ago, so I don't remember many of the details, ya know, like the guy's name and such. The gangs in Antioch were kind of a novelty then, and their members hadn't gotten around to killing near as many of each other as they do now. So this incident got a lot of interest.

I suppose we have grown accustomed to the murders, and so we hardly notice anymore. Murder on the streets is just a routine part of day to day life now. Progress, I guess. I call it that cause it sometimes seems the “progressives” like it this way.

Anyway, this guy was wanted by the police in the murder of a gang member. The cops had been looking for him for a while, like several months, and they went about this by watching for him in the places he hung out and by talking with people who knew him, like his friends. Antioch was a small town then, so that's what the police did, cause everybody knew everybody back then. Turns out this guy's friends knew where he was most of the time, because he was hanging with them, living with them, partying with them, and that sort of thing. They forgot to mention that to the cops

After about 6 months of looking for him, the cops gathered around the house where this guy was hiding, and they invited him to come out. As I recall, it was night, and there was some considerable discussion between the cops outside and the guy inside before much happened, and then the guy came out and pointed his gun (he had this gun cause even though all his friends thought he was a cool guy, he also happened to be a criminal and so he had this gun that he pointed at folks he didn't like, like the dude he allegedly murdered) at the cops. And they shot him! Right there on the front lawn, next to the pink flamingos.

No, you're right....I don't know if they had pink flamingos on the lawn. Who remembers these things? I do remember that the cops killed this guy cause he pointed a gun at them, and I remember the outrage over this. The paper didn't think the cops handled that very well. And I specially remember the girl the paper interviewed, one of the criminal's friends, (one of those friends who could have helped the cops arrest the guy peacefully, but of course did not) because she didn't think they needed to shoot this guy just because he pointed his gun at them, cause they coulda just shot the gun out of his hand, like they do on TV, and then everything would have been OK, ya know?

Those of you who followed my column for a while have heard this story before. I keep bringing it up cause it is such a perfect illustration of how, uh, mistaken some people can be. I'm one of those weirdos who shoots guns for fun. I used to spend hours on the range with my target pistol, which was far more accurate than the service pistols the cops carried, and as good as I got at that sport, I could not have shot the gun out of the hand of a criminal, in the dark, thirty yards away. That's movie cowboy nonsense, and it doesn't happen in real time.

But the cops suffered for that one, so when the next time rolled around, which it always seems to do, the cops surrounded the house in Antioch where the next murder suspect was holed up, with his baby daughter held hostage, and this time the cops didn't shoot him. Instead, they waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally the criminal killed the baby girl. Not surprisingly, the cops caught all the criticism that time, too. And each year after, as the paper showed the baby's mother, the misguided child who chose to reproduce with this murderer, placing flowers on the baby's grave, the cops caught it anew. Progress, again. 

I wrote for that paper, and we all know how that worked out. Now, I have no evidence that anyone from that paper was down there in Oakland rioting and breaking windows, and assaulting police officers the other night after the judge handed out the sentence in the BART station shooting case. Or as some of the locals, collectively named the “community” in the paper, call it: the “execution” of a pure innocent “father and peacemaker” by a police officer. So don't jump to the conclusion that the paper actively supported those riots. And I don't know what the paper wrote about those riots, cause I don't read that paper. I only know how I feel about the people that did that rioting, and those who support them.

Subtle hint:   If I'm paying attention to the rules of proper writin' of the language, when I want to say that a person, WHO did something, I won't say that a person, THAT did something, cause that would be incorrect. THAT did something, should be reserved for animals and things and such, and it's only humans, ah, WHO do something. So if I write about the people, THAT did that rioting, well you figure it out.

I don't much like the folks that riot about situations like this. Rioting does not help their argument, whatever that argument might be. I don't think the cops are perfect. I do think I like what they do more than what the murdering gang members do. I like what cops do more than the anarchists that fed that riot, and that use any excuse to burn down our civilization. I trust cops more than I trust the average criminal.

I cannot escape the fact that most of the yelling over the BART shooting is about race. The criminal killed was Black and the cop was White, and apparently that is all that counts with the anarchists, the progressives, and the “community” that supports the rioters.

And I'm completely hung up on the words of a flawed man who once said some really fine words. Perhaps the most important thing Martin Luther King ever said was that someday we would have a world where people would be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. I cannot argue with this wish.

By any definition, Oscar Grant was a criminal. Twelve times he was charged with crimes, and he was only 22 years old. He did prison time for drug dealing. He once tossed a gun out of his car when he was being chased for a traffic violation. He was high on prescription drugs, illegally obtained and consumed, when he found himself drunk and rowdy and fighting and terrorizing the innocent riders on a BART train at two in the morning. He resisted arrest. And he got shot and killed in the total chaos that followed. Should he have been surprised by this? Was he killed because of the color of his skin? Or was he there, misbehaving, because of the content of his character?

Johannes Mehserle was an unprepared, under trained man thrust into a situation he was completely unable to handle simply because the officers with seniority got the holiday off. He tried to arrest a criminal that was acting like a criminal, resisting arrest, struggling and behaving badly, and a threatening crowd surrounded him. Perhaps he had memories of four police officers murdered only months earlier by a misanthrope not much different from Oscar Grant rattling around in his young head. He panicked. He lost all control of this thinking and actions, and he killed that man. Because he was White? Or just because he was woefully unable to do what he was supposed to do?

In an environment where the “community” hardly raises any comment over a hundred gang related murders each and every year, suddenly the “community” is outraged over the killing of one man by one man. I wonder how this becomes only about race, when it really is about content of character?

And for the progressives who state that we should simply accept a few riots, because in this country's history the police sometimes did discriminate against minorities, I suggest we stop living in the past and instead consider what we can do to survive today. That is how we progress.

And those despicable mobs that use this tragedy as an excuse to riot, loot, burn, and assault...if that is not indicative of a corruption of content of character, we are losing any semblance of our civilization, and if the “progressives”, and the media don't get that, they are as much to blame as those cretins in the streets.

Meanwhile, the anarchists are already planning the next riot, and while smiling, they announced this to a panting media that cannot get enough. The following item in the news program I was watching this morning was about two more gang members murdered by gang members. I must have missed the part where the “community” was organizing to put a halt to this ongoing tragedy. Because that item just seemed to fade into the routine of day to day.

Another Old Column From Last Spring

On Sept 11 2001 some of the world's evil people tried to take down this great nation. Don't quite understand what their beef was, but we were a big target, and big targets are always easy to blame, and easy to hit. And they hit us pretty hard. Like most reasonable folks, we hit back. We have the ability to hurt the people who try to hurt us, and we elected to express that ability. We've put a dent in their leadership, and are working on the rest. And although some among us think that self defense is silly and impolite, more rational folks are still in charge, and thus we still have a country. It is a country worth defending, and I thank those who have and are defending it.

Sentient people know that we are still a big target, and that we will always be vulnerable to terrorist attack, because cowards and terrorists like to go after the gentle and un-defended, and that's how lucky we are, cause most of us are gentle and un-defended. Our life is so wonderful that most of us can be this way. If evil people want to hurt us, we present oh so many easy targets. 

Sure, we work to inconvenience the terrorists. We have finally started to keep track of the worst of them, and we make an effort to keep them out of our country. We endure those security lines at the airports, and we gladly get groped so we can board an airplane, because as soon as we stop doing that those evil ones will strike us again, as they once did. We are a soft people, spoiled by our success, but we have enough among us with the right stuff that we have held the storm at the gates. And we are finding the ways to live our lives and still not make too easy a target for the evil in the world.

I don't know about you, but after 911 I looked around my neighborhood to see where the best targets might be, just in case. The professionals did the same, and they keep an eye on some places we really don't want to loose. I suppose the Golden Gate Bridge is no longer well guarded, cause it is too close to the softest among us, and to those who root for our enemies. But I had to open the lid on the bed of my pickup truck last year before the guards let me drive over the Hoover Dam, and I didn't mind. I hadn't hidden a bomb in there. The Hoover Dam is not only very important, but it is also kinda neat. Would be a shame if the bastards tried to destroy that one.

This year we will drive over the new bridge at Black Canyon. Now commercial traffic won't be stopped from driving over Hoover Dam, but instead they can use the new bridge to bypass the dam. And if the scum want to get that dam to hurt us, they will have to find another way.

A thousand feet long and 900 feet above the broiling river, the cement arch bridge is a wonder of engineering achievement. I cannot wait to see it. The bridge has been needed since before 911, but we erected it as a consequence of that threat, and the builders did a wonderful job. Evil set us down, but we got up fighting, and now our genius is showing us the way to our future. I plan on celebrating when I cross that bridge.

Mike O' Gallaghan was once Arizona's governor and a Korean War veteran. Pat Tillman stared in the NFL and then died fighting for us against the evil that brought 911. They named the bridge after these two. I'll tip a glass to them, too.

8/28/11

I watch the faces, I think. The ‘I think’ part is because I’m not really sure what I do all the time, or even some of the time. I watch the faces in the exam room because so much of what happens in the exam room has nothing to do with what the people think they know, or what they want me to know.

 I’m looking for the truth, and for those bits of useful stuff that I learn from folks when they don’t know they are telling me these things.  This is all a part of that thing somebody once said about veterinarians, that thing about how the animals can’t talk, so the vet just has to know. Well, we don’t just know, but we can often find out.

To do my job I need to know what my patient has been doing. I’m hoping the people have seen what the animals are doing. I ask questions of the people, and they generally answer. Sometimes they tell me what the animal is doing, and sometimes they tell me why they think the animal is doing it. The difference between these two answers is that sometimes they tell me what the animal is doing and I get a useful answer, and sometimes they tell me what they think is the why the animal is doing what it is doing, and that is often wrong. If they fool me, and I accept as fact their why instead of their what, I may make serious mistakes in my diagnosis and treatment. And these mistakes can have grave consequences.

The best example of this dilemma would be an old friend of mine, a retired physician. He has brought his pets to me for the best part of 40 years. I believe he was once a skilled physician. He certainly thought he was a pretty special doctor, but he was only trained on that one species of animal, and not all of his knowledge transfers over to the species I work with.

When I watch his face in the exam room, he puts on his “I’m the real doctor here, so shut up and listen to me and I’ll tell you how to take care of things” face, and I guess I’m supposed to be impressed, and compliant. As a client bringing his pets to me, he was, and is, a trial. Mostly, he is a trial because he will not, or cannot, tell me what his animals are doing, without injecting the why that his doctor brain has already concluded. Now, all this would be fine, except that he generally is wrong. And that makes my job much harder.

I walked out of surgery the other day after amputating this physician’s dog’s tail. All because of that cancer on the tail that he had been treating on his own with the antibiotics because he thought for a while it was just an infection. We had talked about the thing and how it could be a cancer, and he was convinced that the old dog could not survive a surgery to remove said tail, so he simply discarded that notion and did what he thought best, which was wrong. And finally he decided to do what I told him to do, which was to amputate the tail, and I let it be his idea and I did the surgery. And the dog is fine now.

And then later that day I went into the exam room with another man and his young, innocent child and their puppy. He was a nice man, and the boy was bright and asked good questions, and the puppy was a doll. And when I did my examination, and I listened to the puppy’s heart with the stethoscope, and it was OK, and I handed the stethoscope to the boy and he listened to a puppy’s heart for the very first time, I watched his face.  His face was quizzical at first, and his eyes moved back and forth, and then he heard the lub-dub…lub-dub of a living heart, and his eyes froze for a second, and the astonishment came, and then the smile, and I saw it in his face, and my heart sang with his. And in that instant I knew that he had learned a precious thing that I could not have taught him any other way. 

I will never know what becomes of this child, but I will always know that he knows that a heart beats inside a puppy, and that may change him just a little as he moves on into this harsh world.

The day before, I bent over a friend’s kitty that had had the misfortune of beating up a car, and there was a hole in this kitty’s diaphragm that let his guts slide into his chest, where they certainly didn’t belong, and they made sure he couldn’t breathe right. And I was needed to close that hole. On paper such a surgery is a simple thing. You anesthetize the kitty, and open the abdomen, and pull those things out of the chest and put them back where they belong, and then you find the torn parts of the diaphragm and suture them together, and all will be well with the world.

In reality, such a task is a bit more exciting, and when you contemplate such a task, it feels a bit like Bullwinkle the moose, and “Hey Rocky…watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.” 

You don’t want to know how often, “That trick never works.”

I have this machine that sits in surgery, and its job is to beep every time my patient’s heart beats, and show me numbers that mean the lungs are taking in oxygen and putting it into the blood. It is a useful machine…

But when you are doing the surgery, and you can actually look into the kitty’s chest through that hole in the diaphragm, and you can see the heart beating, and it bumps into your finger as you putz around in there, and the lungs are blowing up and emptying out, it just means so much more to you than a machine can convey. If at that point you could look into my face, you might see the quizzical look, and then my eyes might freeze for a second, and the astonishment might come, even after all those decades of playing this game. You might not be able to see into my future, but you would know that I know that a heart beats inside this kitty… and that is a precious thing.

From last June

My best photographs have long or interesting stories behind them. The big photo that hangs in my exam room is one of these. I took it in September 1979 while visiting the Tetons on my motorcycle. The photo shows the length of the Teton Range from the view point you can drive to on the top of Signal Mountain, a view you can’t photograph anymore because the trees grew up too much, and now you can’t even see the forest for them. Sure, you can walk over there and look around the trees and get some of that view, but it’s not the same. In the photo, lots of fresh snow colors the peaks, for it was well into September and the first snowstorm had already come through. 

The storm that brought this snow had also visited the Uinta Mountains in Utah, where I camped high in an aspen grove off a gravel road, and awoke to a winter wonderland that was something less than conducive to motorcycle travel. Later I crossed into Wyoming on I-80 along the only lane that was plowed, and spent the night in Kemmerer, the home of the original JC Penney store, and then rode on the next morning with the thermometer hovering around the 14 degree mark in order to get to the Tetons that day. The things I did for fun….

The motorcycle was a divorce present to myself, one of those self-indulgent things you do to help rebuild your self-esteem in the wake of certain un-pleasantries. I camped alone beside Jenny Lake, in the campground that was closed and nearly deserted for the season, and I squatted to take clear cold water from the lake for meals and drinking, with the mountains looming overhead. I didn’t think about climbing the Grand on this trip, because the last journey to this place had kinda soured me on that plan. And I knew the climbing school and guide service was closed for the season. Did I mention that this was a long story?

Dad and I had talked of climbing the Grand from the very beginning, when we first saw it in the mid 60’s. Mom gave us the look, you know the look, the one that silently suggested we take up some other nonsense and forget this one. So the notion sat on the shelf, to be talked about only in the abstract. And when his doctor told him that no way was Dad getting his permission to climb a mountain at his age, his dream seemed dead.

I still thought about doing the climb. Two years before the motorcycle trip I had driven to the Tetons in September, alone. That marriage was terminally ill already, but the truth hadn’t been revealed to me yet, although she would have known. I drove the new car, the one that I took off the dealer’s lot on 7/7/77, which I had figured was a sign of good luck, and it wasn’t. Approaching from the Idaho side, I had a brief look at the Grand from near Victor, and it felt just a bit weird. And after transiting Teton Pass, where you can turn left just past Wilson and take the back road to Moose, and the Grand fills the sky in front of you, I got this terrible feeling in my gut looking up at the peak, and since I harbored the notion that I would seek out the climbing school and actually try to climb the Grand on this trip, I asked the mountain if it was going to kill me. And the mountain laughed. At me.

That was an annoyance. I was trying to create something positive in my life, cause things were clearly spiraling out of control about then. The Grand Tetons had always grounded me and given me meaning in my life, and here they were taunting me, and I didn’t get it.

That trip was cut short, just like the one before we got married, when she called me, and I drove home at her request. She only did it to see if she could tug the string and I would snap back, and then of course when I got home, I got the who-are-you-and-what-do-you-want look upon arrival and that was a disappointment. Both times. And I knew why the mountain laughed at me. I wasn’t ready for the mountain.

The motorcycle trip felt better cause I felt better, and I think the mountain knew it. I was still looking up at the Grand and thinking about climbing it. So I mentioned it to Dad and he still wanted to climb it, too. He found another doctor, the one who told him he should go, and he somehow got the idea past Mom, and then at age 59 he began beating himself into shape. And that’s how the other photograph came to be.

Our climbing guide used my camera to take the other photo, because Dad’s had kinda got ruint during that little dunking we took when we paddled our kayak into deep trouble in the spring runoff on the Snake River. But that’s another story. In this photo, the coil of rope lay in the foreground, and the line led to its tie off on Dad’s waist. He wore one glove cause the other had floated away, and I stood at his shoulder. Behind us stretched snow covered mountains and then the haze over the distance of Idaho. Everything else was rock, the top rock on that big piece of rock, the Grand Teton (el 13770 feet). We were on the summit. And we be smilin’.

So I was talking with some clients in the exam room, and we looked up at the photo on the wall, and I showed them the Grand, and then I mentioned that we had climbed it on June 25, 1980, and it just happened to be June 25 as we talked. Thirty one years later. And they asked, “Why?”

“Because it was there.”

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. My sister had a shirt made up with that photo on the front and gave it to Dad when he turned 90. I’m thinking he just might have been wearing that shirt while I talked to that client last Saturday. And that would be OK.

Old Studebakers, from a while ago

The clinic exit door is glass, so I can see out to a slice of the parking lot from the hallway in front of the exam rooms. A variety of cars and trucks, and the occasional motorcycle take their turns in the two slots closest to the door. I check them out, like I always do. Some are more interesting than others, just like the folks who arrive and depart in them. Such is life. Much of life is routine, and perhaps will become a blur in memory, and then there are those unforgettable moments, and the people with whom you share those moments.

I don’t know if cars remember much from their past. Like us, they probably pass through their time in a colorless rush to the next place, and they pass by without seeing the bulk of things. But I’m sure they remember some. And when you see an old car parked in a driveway or garage, and you realize that it doesn’t get out on the road as much as it used to, or perhaps it doesn’t get out at all, don’t ya wonder if it doesn’t reminisce about the special times and places it has seen, while it quietly sits there? Surely it now has the time to do this. And like us, as we mature, old cars spend more time with, and savor, the memories. 

A while ago I looked out the glass door, and sitting there was a 1963 Chevy. I did the math quickly in my head. Forty –eight years old. That is older than Norm’s Studebaker. 

Norm was my best friend through high school. I’ve lost touch with him over the years. He wanted to be a concert pianist playing for the assembled masses, and he tried really hard for that. He ended up running his dad’s lumberyard in our little town instead, and he did well enough at that to buy a concert piano, a twenty-foot long or so Bosendorfer I think it was, and it sat in his living room and he played it every day, for himself.  Alone.

Anyway, back in the late 60’s Norm bought a ’27 Studebaker. In the 60’s you could go to the Sears catalog and find any part for an old Model T Ford you wanted, and if you were trying to rebuild an old one you just wrote a check and the parts came and you rebuilt the car. Studebakers were just a bit less ubiquitous than Model T’s, and in the 60’s, if you wanted to fix one old Studebaker you needed another old Studebaker from which to cannibalize parts. So even with a few friends helping, that old Studebaker never regained its former glory. I think Norm finally ended up giving up and selling the car to someone else. Poof…gone.

I recall that driving that old car around was really neat for us. Cars had changed a lot from ’27 to our time. I loved the old pinstripes we found when we took off the old paint covering the older paint, cause that told of the proud past of this car. And I remember how forlorn the car felt. 

That old Studebaker had an aura of sadness about it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that is what I now remember most of it.

And I got a completely different feeling from that ’63 Chevy in the parking lot.

Now, this Chevy was not one of those absolutely perfectly frame off restorations you see at the custom and classic car auctions on TV, the ones that sell for a king’s ransom. Far from it. In fact, it died in the parking lot, and if the car parts store wasn’t walking distance away, and a new battery was thus forthcoming, it wouldn’t have made it home that night. And the folks who owned this old car were as far removed as you can imagine from those people who write six figure checks to buy restored vehicles with the same ease as the rest of us buy a sandwich down at Togo’s . Heck, this guy could have spent his few discretionary dollars on teeth, and no one would have minded.

But with the new battery, the engine fired right up, and settled into a contented idle. I told the guy that it sounded happy. He agreed.

Turns out this car had been in his family since day one. Through forty-eight years of the evolution of the nation, and the progression of a family, this car had stuck around, and the folks in this family have kept it alive and part of things. And the car felt happy.

Somewhere in this there may lay a lesson. I started writing about something way different than this, when I began this thing rather late last night. And I ended up here. Don’t know why. The fun columns always seem to end up way different from where they start. Maybe next week I’ll write the column I started this week. Meanwhile, I’ll just think some more about where this one went.

This old column is from early June this year

I prefer a window seat. All those rumors regarding my alleged agoraphobic and antisocial tendencies notwithstanding, I prefer a window seat for the view from the airplane. So if you note that I sometimes open said window and stick my head out and scream, well that has nothing to do with how much I enjoy being TRAPPED in an aluminum tube for any length of time. No, it’s just about grabbing a bit of fresh air, and taking a peek around.

We did a touch and go to Germany last week. A United 747 carried us from San Francisco to Frankfurt, and the 777 brought us home, and I had window seats both ways. We stayed long enough to watch the kids get married, and for me to eat all of the German food in that fair city. The local citizens were likely happy to see me leave, as they now face famine until the next crop of sour kraut and snitzel comes in. I can only imagine the horror our pilot must have felt as the end of the Frankfurt runway rapidly approached, and his aircraft was struggling to lift my newly acquired weight off the ground.

I enjoy the view of our earth from high above. I pull out the road atlas prior to any flight and imprint into my brain the landmarks that I will watch for as we fly over. I like to look for places I’ve seen from the ground, and for the big landmarks, like Half Dome and the Grand Canyon. Once I spotted a dirt road in the Nevada desert that I had bounced over in the truck years earlier. So I was looking forward to this aspect of the long flights to and back from Germany.

We took off headed north, veered to the left of San Francisco and quickly banked directly over the Golden Gate Bridge, heading northeast. Gorgeous as usual. And then we ran into the clouds. I already knew what clouds looked like from the inside, so this was no thrill for me. But the bigger disappointment arrived when the flight attendants asked all us window sitters to pull down the shades to darken the cabin, just in case anyone aboard wanted to sleep all the way to Germany, to somehow help cope with those nine time zones in between. So except for those few moments when I cheated and peeked under a barely opened window shade, I couldn’t watch much of where we were going.

During those peeks, I saw some Idaho mountains, and what I figured was North Dakota. Not too many large landmarks in North Dakota except the Missouri River. And then the water soaked center of Canada rolled by below us. In between movies, the big screen at the front of the plane showed a gps map of our flight, and some pertinent facts relating to our progress. Over Ontario we enjoyed a 120 mile per hour tailwind, which nudged our ground speed up to 720 MPH. I snuck a peek out the window just as we left the sun behind, and somebody’s contrail glowed pale pink just below us on the starboard side. And then it got real dark outside.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, between Iceland and Ireland, we found the sun again. I was sitting on the shady side of the aircraft, so I missed out on the actual sunrise, but the colors cast upon the clouds below did not disappoint. Remember the last time the washing machine overflowed, and those billowing puddles of suds spread across your new hardwood floor? Well, that’s what these clouds looked like from above. Only ours were spread over an already wet ocean so they didn’t wreck anything, and they were turning pink to red just for me, and the pilots, cause they didn’t have screens over their windows.

The movie screen said we were at 43,000 feet altitude, and the outside temperature was minus 60 degrees F, so I left the window closed.

Scattered cirrus clouds well above the cumulous puddles turned color first, and then the billowing ones below got the treatment. Another airliner, following a parallel path a few miles to the south, glinted silver when painted by the sun. Those poor folks who actually got some sleep on our plane missed the show. For their sake, I pulled down the shade again.

Another Observation From Last Winter

Notes from I-5, and beyond…

I could learn a lesson or two from the truck.

I was worried over nothing. It was one of my classic worries. Would we get to the campground early enough to get a site or would it be full already? My mind… it was too busy conjuring up what-ifs. You know, with my luck there would be only one campsite left on this three day holiday weekend, and it would be too small for the trailer and truck, or just too difficult to back the rig in to because of one tree or a rock in the wrong place. And then I'd have to conjure up someplace else to camp and keep on driving when I wanted to stop, when I'd already be tired and cranky. I had my heart set on this place. Grumble, grumble...worry, worry, worry. You know how I get.

We pulled the trailer along with us to the clinic on Friday morning so we could leave right at closing time. Driving over Kirker Pass first thing that morning, I realized just how happy the truck was to be working again. With the truck it's all about the journey. The destination is not important. Destination is just another place to park while everybody else gets to have fun. Trucks have to be patient when parked. Nothin’ else to do.

Now pulling a trailer...that's a worthwhile endeavor for a truck. You can tell he likes it. Driving daily, empty, back and forth to work and home is no trick. Heck, he can idle along in sixth gear to get us there and not break a sweat. Packing a load makes him happy. The trailer makes him happy. You can hear it in the suddenly joyful rumble from the exhaust. He was made for this. That gear selector is meaningless without a load, but when ya pack him up, all those gear ratios start to make sense. And set him to work on a long uphill grade and he leans into the harness and the grin spreads across his grill.

Heck, when loaded the truck even likes long, boring I-5.

In the dark, in the rain, in the Central Valley, there's not much to see, but I can still notice things. Cruise control set on a few over legal, we plod along in the number two lane while the crazies wail past on the left, cut us off to pass two mini-vans on the right, and then zip back into the hammer lane in time to slam on the brakes again behind the next idiot who is only going fifteen over the limit. Maybe two seconds shaved off a six hour trip. The truck is a slow and steady kinda dude. Down the long, seemingly endless ribbon of asphalt he rumbles. Content just to pull.

That collection of fast food outlets, closed fruit stands that lean a bit in the wind, cheap motels, and peddlers of fossil fuel at each freeway exit is like one frame, where the miles of interstate highway filled with vehicles is the movie. It gives you a slice of the whole, frozen for the time it takes to fill a tank, a stomach, and a toilet. In such places you get to meet the people who infest all those cars you saw lined up, lights stretching to the horizon in the dark. And if you are not careful, or just a bit bored, you might draw conclusions from these brief encounters.

Like:

Whoever coined the term, “the dumbing down of America” was like, totally right. Apparently, even though the process of taking an order, nuking a burger, stacking the right stuff on a bun, and getting the correct collection of un-healthy food into the correct bag has been simplified beyond all reason, as a society we can no longer produce anyone clever enough to do even this rudimentary task in a timely manner.

Nobody speaks English in this country anymore, and that includes the folks born and edjumacated here.

Milling around in a colorful crowd in the confined space in front of the hamburger store counter, waiting ever so patiently for two hamburgers, fries and diet sodas, I looked around at my fellow travellers. Taking up two tables, a family of Southern California type cast stamped from the mold just like everybody else people talked among themselves, oblivious to the poor lady calling out their number, two bags of burgers dangling from her hands. Back under the heat lamps the bags went.

Save for the plastic people and me, everyone in the building was Hispanic, and most stood quietly, looking around furtively, waiting to get caught and sent back to whatever hopelessness they had fled, hoping to do better as slaves here. One guy was duded out in black cowboy had, pearl button shirt, serving plate belt buckle and TIGHT jeans, with his Saturday night boots on. He was skinny as a rail. Everybody else was fat, especially the too many kids and the moms with the blank looks. They waited patiently for their food. They looked like they have survived on patience for an eternity. They tolerated the retched inefficiency of the place much better than I.

The lady behind the counter called out #31 again, and this time Barb and Ken and The Kids heard, and he quickly fetched their dinner. By that point the pictures of the burgers on the sign likely would taste better, but they hardly noticed as they crammed rubbery burgers into their orthodonitically perfect mouths.

Remember the time long ago when the guy selling you gas could also fix your car? Well, don't try that now. That product of California schools behind the counter in the gas station mini mall sold me well aged coffee, but when I mentioned the condition of the bathrooms to her, her blank face lost even more detail, cause that wasn’t her job, YOU KNOW.

California collects taxes on all that fuel you buy, specifically intended to keep the roads in some semblance of repair, but for years, in case you haven’t noticed, they haven’t spent much on road repair. All that tax money has gone into the general toilet, er fund, and the roads have been left to rot. And boy can you tell. I-5 is just a bit smoother than a slightly used minefield.

Back on the road it doesn’t get much better. Really strange people call talk radio in the dark when you are trapped on that endless black ribbon in the rain. At first you shake your head in disbelief, but to change the station is the only true coping mechanism. Problem is, in the valley in the dark the only choices seem to be whether you get to listen to idiots in our language, or in Spanish.

Satellite radio helps. It offers some choice in the listening. We dialed up the Road Dog, the professional truckers channel on Sirius. Plodding along in the two lane pulling the trailer eventually lends itself to listening to the truckers as they complain about us. An item on their news broadcast: A professional clown was elected to the Brazilian senate. His campaign slogan? “What the heck, it can't get any worse.” Along with the lady porn star who was once elected to national office in Italy, it would seem that we all get the governments we deserve, or at least that our choices in characters running the place are somewhat limited. The rest of the news simply follows from this.

We turned left at Bakersfield. Bakersfield is best done in the dark. It smells the same, but ya can’t see as much. Consider that a blessing.

Surrounded by generica, the Wal-Mart parking lot was dotted with parked RV's. Nice new rigs used by retired people who have nosed the grindstone, done well in their lives, and can now reap some of the reward, at least until the price of diesel destroys their lifelong plans, sat next to some less inspiring vehicles no doubt occupied by artists, writers, or similar bums. With our well-seasoned trailer, we are almost ready to blend in with that second group for our golden years. We joined them all for a few hours of sleep. Then in the early hours of a fresh day we gave the diesel its head as we trotted over Tehachapi Pass. Mike's Cafe waited for us in Mojave.

Breakfast at Mike's can happen all day long, and it's worth the price. Don’t tell em, but they could hit you up for a cover charge, just for the entertainment. The old pedal cars still line the shelf rimming the place high on the wall. We’d love to learn the stories of each of these treasures. They each made some kid happy on a birthday or Christmas, and those kids are now old or gone, and ya wonder if they remember those times.

Our harried waitress was a short chubby perky young Hispanic lady in a low cut blouse, with a red white and blue American flag tattooed on the, uh, left one. The café was crowded, and the patrons kept her flag waving as she hurried about the room.

They have thin paperback books on the tables, humor writing revolving around coping with life’s little trials. The book I was sampling was titled, “Things To Say To Idiots.”  Ben Goode, the author has much to tell and ya’all could benefit from his observations. The one sentence I read while waiting on my pile of home fries, eggs, salsa, and spicy sliced beefsteak had something to do with folks who think like they have had their brains pierced, too. I figured I could use that description sometime, and I would be sure to give credit where due for this brilliance. (I wonder if Mr. Goode now lives in a tilting, rusting, seen better days RV?)

The loud crude guy at the booth in the corner was complaining to his friends about how he had just been diagnosed with diabetes, and no he wasn't gonna do all that silly stuff they wanted to force him to do to take care of himself. His friends were trying to talk some sense into his head, but it would have been pretty lonely in there. Sometimes, I have learned, the less some people know about something, the louder they proclaim their ignorance. This guy did a splendid job with that.

The quiet older fellow in the next booth got up to leave, and he turned to wish the mouth well as he passed. He hobbled in serious pain, thanks to his diabetic neuropathy, he said, and he now viewed a murky world through bottle thick glasses. He mentioned this to the loud mouthed lout, along with a statement that the narcotic pain meds he was compelled to take had just about wrecked his life. This fate, or worse, would be the stubborn man’s own if he didn’t listen to his (ours? Since we likely paid for them) doctors. The lout's only retort was that he had once been a junkie, so he knew all about that, and he didn’t much care. Shaking his head, the gentleman left the mullet behind.

Mr. Tard was annoyed and annoying, but he soon got up with his friends to leave. Watching him, I believe he did have a brain piercing to go with his tats and backwards ball cap. I shook my head, too. He had been offered good advice, and it was nothing to get pithed about. He left the place clouded in uncomfortable silence, having wasted all that oxygen while he was there.

I-15 was like I-5, except the traffic ran much faster. It looked like all of Southern California was needed in Vegas, and they were all in a hurry to get there. We let em go on without us at a lonely exit, and traded crowded asphalt for a far more primitive path.

Three miles, plus or minus, of washboard gravel road. All the way up to third gear on the straight-a-ways. Enough inconvenience to keep most of the rabble out. Most everybody on the interstate was headed toward a city. We weren’t. Nobody else was on this road, even though for a while you could see the cars on the freeway in the mirror, so we hadn’t gone far. Fifteen miles an hour and still the fillings rattled in our teeth. Lovely desert desolation on all sides. Round the last corner and we could see the silver cantilever bridge where the railroad crosses the river, and the bushes where the Phainopeplas perch and chirp, and the campground. Nearly empty. All that worry for nothing. I felt better, but we disappointed our truck. Parked for a day of nothing but reading, writing, napping and looking. He will get over it.

Rain drummed on the trailer that night as we slept. The wind pummeled. A few trains rumbled past in the dark. Dreams came and went, odd dreams fueled by the crud dump happening in my brain as it realized it was free to do what was necessary to fix that which was bent in my head, out in the desert and the empty. You will need to reboot when the delete process is complete. And make a cup of strong coffee in the morning.

Morning quiet. Pink clouds. Wet ground. Slaked vegetation. A desert cottontail runs through the campsite. Someday, if he doesn’t learn to stay under cover, he will make that hawk over there very happy.

It always rains when we go to the desert. This time it snowed on Mountain Pass, and the Joshua trees and yucca wore a mantle of white, which is kinda weird. Southern Californians stopped on the freeway shoulder to take pictures of each other in front of the strange white stuff. Brief stops, because they don’t do cold.

Everybody on earth was in Vegas that weekend. I’m happy for the merchants. Even those uh, affiliated folks who profit, win or lose, through the decades in this God forsaken place. Those prognosticators on the news who tell us the economy is getting better, or simply doomed, should see this place. It’s either the mercury rising or the end of the world is at hand, take you pick, but the decadence is thriving. Crowds of wide-eyed tourists mobbed the Strip, a mass orgy of imitation fun, which will all stay in Vegas when they leave, along with piles of their dollars.

We left Vegas, and that was clearly the best part of our time there. I should learn from this. When leaving Vegas becomes the highlight of the trip, it’s time to find another place to go to put in my time listening to those lectures I need. The oppression of the city spilled off our shoulders as we ran screaming away from that place. And right outside of there was the glory of the colored hills surrounding Lake Mead and the wonder of the new bridge at Hoover Dam, and short hours later we were camped in the desert again, listening to a babbling stream. In a land of improbably colored rocks, Saguaro cactus, ocotillo, cholla, and blue herons we found a flat spot, turned on the songs, and watched the sun course toward the southwest, and I found some words again instead of just the frustration of a blank computer screen. It takes so little with me. I should learn from this, too.