FISHING FOR MY SELF

I Was Warned

Inexorably, the aim and direction of your purpose resolve into the blinding light of the rising sun.  The death of your former life has given way to birth.  All is holy; all is aflame with the glory of life.  Nature is but a mirror of the newly born.
Steven Foster (1938-2003)

I had spent four days alone, fasting in the high, wild White Mountains outside Death Valley.  Following Native American tradition, my goal was to remain awake though the last, long night – my symbolic death – to greet the dawn and rebirth. 

I was in my late thirties, marking what I hoped was a passage through a turbulent stage in my marriage.  Prolonged anxiety attacks were plaguing me for the first time since law school.  I nearly abandoned going out alone into the mountains, fearing I would panic.  But the intrepid leaders of our group, Steven and Meredith, lovingly got me back on course.  I gathered my courage during the days we prepared to go into the wild, each of us alone. 

Before we met every morning to prepare for going out, I fished at dawn for rainbow trout in Big Pine Creek as it flowed through willow forests down the east side of the Sierras.  I happily fed our little band with my catches.  The anxiety faded; maybe I could live four days alone in the wilderness.

On departure day, I woke to the sound of Steven playing his cold banjo in the distance, rousing us before dawn.  The sound and scene evoked excitement and apprehension.

But reasonably confident, I set out from our mountain base camp as the sun rose, after a quiet, solemn ceremony of prayers for my safety and success, the scent of burning sage in the air.  When I stepped outside a ring of stones to begin my adventure, I became invisible.  The others ignored me as I began my ascent higher up the mountain. 

I camped nestled among scrubby ancient Piñon pines, just big enough to support a tarp – my only shelter from the sun and afternoon showers.  As the days passed, fasting slowed my pace to a crawl.  But I explored during the bright, warm days, finding quartz with bits of gold that lured gold miners there a century ago and shards of obsidian from ancient Paiute arrowhead makers.  I gazed over precipices plummeting thousands of feet toward Death Valley, watching hawks and vultures soar endlessly.  Immense white sand dunes shimmered below, many miles away. 

The fasting and sheer solitude sharpened my senses, but with a surreal edge.  I spoke to a rabbit squatting at my feet one day.  Unafraid, it feigned interest in my warning about the red-tailed hawks circling overhead.  I silently wished the hawks good hunting as well.  I laughed as male lizards did push-ups on the rocks to impress the ladies.  Some things are universal.  I watched for rattlesnakes with every slow, careful step, probing snake hiding places with my walking stick.  I painted and wrote, including a story for my children.  The anxiety attacks disappeared.

The fourth and final night was the hardest.  At 6,000 feet, the May evenings were breathtakingly clear, cold, and moonless.  For hours I watched the brilliant night sky, marveling at the darting shooting stars and slow moving satellites.  I listened attentively to the owls and other night creatures. 

Four days without food had weakened me.  I wanted to stay up to greet the dawn, following the venerable ritual.  But part of me wanted to sleep so morning would come and I could return to companionship and my first food in days.  Not necessarily in that order.  Waves of fear were followed by waves of deep contentment and connectedness to all things, including myself.

Eventually, restless sleep won out.  In the most vivid dream of my life, I found myself in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, thinking, “Why am I here when I’m supposed to be in the mountains finishing my vision quest?”  I desperately needed to get back to where I was supposed to be. 

Later I found myself in London, in a shop owned by an early member of the Grateful Dead.  He was pleasant, but no help at all in returning me to the White Mountains.  My desperation, and hunger, grew.  Riding in a gondola in Venice, I devoured a crunchy head of lettuce, then realized it was a delicious pair of socks. 

After a globe-spanning struggle to return, I was suddenly back in Golden Gate Park.  But it had changed completely, the gardens and towering eucalyptus trees replaced by strip malls, fast food joints, and other plagues.  I was hopelessly forlorn as the dawn approached and I could not find my car to race back to the mountains. 

Just before I died of despair, a young dark haired boy came to me and took my hand, smiling.  “Don’t worry mister, I know where your car is.”  He led me by the hand to the car.  My vision quest was saved and I awoke.

After I hiked gingerly down to base camp, we hugged and smiled and feasted on hard boiled eggs and fruit.  Back at our original camp, we plunged naked into the icy creek, rushing with fresh Sierra snowmelt.  We lounged in Steven and Meredith’s sweat lodge in the willow forest. 

Then, for three days we sat together in soft grass in a clearing, one by one telling the stories of our experiences. 

Our leaders were my beloved, long-time friends, Steven Foster and Meredith Little.  In the early 70s they rediscovered the ancient vision quest ceremony for recognizing, marking, and honoring life’s passages.  Since then, they had been introducing it to a Western world that had a serious soul deficiency.  Doing this work for so long, their deeply thoughtful insights into our stories were illuminating. 

After I recounted my epic dream, Steven said without hesitation that the little boy who saved me . . . was me.  I shuddered and knew, of course, that he was right.  I had saved myself when all hope seemed lost. 

Steven and Meredith had known me since I was sixteen.  They knew about my marriage, anxiety, and disenchantment with my career as a lawyer.  After sharing his thoughts about my vision quest story, Steven chuckled and made a prediction.

“You’re in for one helluva mid-life crisis!” 

I laughed nervously, fearing his powers of perception.

Losing My Self

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.
Brendan Francis Behan

I married a week after graduating from Berkeley.  My bride was not yet twenty-one.  We met the summer before, studying Spanish in romantic Guadalajara, Mexico.  We fell in love and marriage seemed obvious to our young minds.  As I came of age in Marin County in the mid-seventies, “dating” seemed uncool and smoking pot made me even more self-conscious than the average teenager.  Lacking much experience with girls and being in love – with a girl who would sleep with me – I jumped headlong into marriage.

There were red flags.  My young wife seemed threatened by things that had always been dear to me.  She demanded I throw away letters from my childhood sweetheart.  She created tension with my family that lasted for years.  Even the Grateful Dead, my beloved hometown band, seemed to threaten her. 

So did my love of fishing.  We drove through Wyoming and Montana in our early years, before children.  I wanted to do some fishing, but my wife was not encouraging.  As time was running out, I dragged her to the upper Firehole River in Yellowstone.  But an elk carcass on the trail ended her grudging cooperation and my last fishing opportunity vanished.  I actually cried, and tears didn’t come easily to me.  But instead of fighting for what I wanted, I submitted to living without things that were important to me. 

Despite thinking I would become a writer, I went to law school.  It would be intellectually challenging and seemed responsible.  During our second year of marriage and my first year of law school, she checked out.  Between law school stress and my new marriage veering for the rocks, I started, for the first time ever, having anxiety attacks a month before first year finals.  Somehow I got through my finals.  But the attacks – actually, one long attack that paused only when I slept – continued as I stayed home for an internship that summer while my wife returned to Guadalajara. 

By fall, the anxiety attacks had gradually stopped.  My wife tearfully admitted the affair she’d had with an older man the year before.  To stop the flood of tears, I forgave her on the spot.  I did nothing to express my devastating hurt, burying it instead.  I believed total sacrifice of self for others was the honorable path for a man.

We both wanted children, and our oldest son was born nine months after I started my first job with a San Francisco law firm.  Five years later, we found ourselves outnumbered by three wonderful children: five, three, and newborn.  We adored them and we were good, loving, sleep-deprived parents.

But litigation was a bad fit for me.  Working under extreme stress and constant deadlines to help often ungrateful clients fight over money conflicted with my conciliatory, non-materialistic personality.  I went to work before dawn so I could go home at a reasonable hour and be a real father.  Not working even longer hours intensified the pressure at work.  I tried to escape litigation more than once.  But I let it keep pulling me back, largely to support a family of five in expensive Marin County. 

My fishing dwindled to a salmon fishing trip every year or two with my dad and younger brother, Joe, outside the Golden Gate.  I fell out of touch with my best friends and fishing partners of my youth, including Joe. 

The years passed and my wife was preoccupied with the children.  I felt more and more alone and disconnected.

In 1993, while I was working at 101 California Street in San Francisco, a deranged man bristling with automatic weapons murdered eight people at a law firm just a few floors above ours.  I heard the police rushing up the emergency stairwell, screaming “Halt!” to people fleeing the mayhem.  We were trapped for hours until rescued by a SWAT team.  A friend was among the wounded. 

I reacted by calling a woman I had struck up a friendship with on the bus.  She had only recently left the firm targeted in the massacre.  We met for lunch and continued to meet and talk.  I fell for her.  It went nowhere and we exchanged a single hug, but I admitted it to my wife.  After marriage counseling, things improved for a time, but quickly our old patterns and my loneliness returned. 

So did my anxiety attacks.  I had done a vision quest with Steven and Meredith when I was nineteen and I decided it was time for another, hoping to regain a semblance of balance.  It helped for a time.

The children grew and my wife became consumed by her new teaching career.  I found wonderful refuge with the kids, who were a delight.  We hiked, played with the chickens in the backyard, and sometimes I rousted them out of bed for nighttime fishing expeditions to catch sea monsters – sharks and rays.  They were very willing participants, too young to know they were helping me stay connected to who I was. 

As teenagers, the kids understandably came to have things they’d rather do than go fishing with Dad, who didn’t fish much anyway.  Thankfully, they shared my love for music and we went to concerts.  I was a good sport for some (Blink 182) and they were good sports for others (Ornette Coleman with the Grateful Dead). 

Our home was where the kids and their lovably offbeat friends hung out.  Sometimes the police came too when neighbors complained about the joyous noise.  One afternoon I met a sheepish officer at the door, embarrassed to say he was responding to a report of “loud acting” in the backyard.  Often the boys played music in the garage while the girls did art projects in the dining room.  I was the dinner cook and did not know, or care, if I was feeding five or twelve.

One evening my oldest son enticed me into picking up my trumpet for the first time in years, appearing in my room saying, “Dad, we’re playing Miles Davis from Kind of Blue.  I know you know this stuff.  Your trumpet is set up in the garage for you.”  At sixteen he seemed to know what I didn’t – that returning to my music would soothe my ailing soul. 

Yet even in a house full of raucous, happy teenagers, I could still feel utterly alone.  I had returned to litigation and it was beating me down, but I kept at it, fearing change and needing to support the family.  In the early 2000s, the severe anxiety returned for a time, then receded.

Around this time, I took my firstborn, then sixteen, to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s otherworldly Black Rock Desert.  I had wanted to go for years.  We went with a family friend, a founding member of the fiendishly talented and notorious Extra Action Marching Band.  We loved the marching band and camped in their compound.  In the mornings I paid protection – in the form of bacon – to an ominous pit bull who patrolled the camp. 

As their contribution to the Burning Man theme that year, “The Floating World,” the marching band built a stunning one-third sized replica of a 16th century Spanish galleon, over the frame of an old school bus.  Early mornings I watched it “sail” across the horizon, with towering masts and tattered sails.  My son and I helped paint La Contessa, but I declined to take him on their evening debaucheries at sea.  They were an intense bunch.

I simply thought it was funny at the time, but my artistic contribution to Burning Man that year was revealing.  I had found a life-sized human figure made of cardboard and paper mâché in the garage, likely liberated from the high school art department.  I sat it in a lawn chair holding a fishing rod, removed the head, and hooked the end of the fishing line to the head, which I put on the ground, painting the whole thing silver.  “Fishing For My Head” was a miniscule project by Burning Man standards.  But it spoke to my own search.

Within a few years the kids and their entertaining circus of friends and music moved on.  Little remained at home besides our neglected, empty marriage.  In that void, I found myself being attracted to other women, including my childhood sweetheart (of the discarded letters), who I had located in a distant state after nearly forty years.  My work drove me to the brink of despair.  Finally, after twenty-eight years of marriage, I no longer felt a connection and could no longer live on vague promises of better things to come.  I left while I was still young enough to try to make a better, truer future for myself.

My transition into living alone for the first time in my life was not easy.  As always, I presented a strong face, but I started sinking.  The crisis Steven Foster foretold had come to pass. 

I began fishing as if my life depended on it.

A Fishing Life

  The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.
John Buchan

My earliest, fondest memories are of fishing.  My father and his brother David grew up fishing together in Indiana, where I was born.  As soon as Joe and I were old enough, Uncle Dave’s family and ours went on adventurous fishing trips together.

The first was to Black Sturgeon Lake, in Lake of the Woods, Ontario.  To a six year old it was magical: staying in a foreign land in log cabins heated by Franklin stoves on a lake in primordial deep woods.  No bathrooms, just outhouses.  Uncle Dave and Dad warned us to always knock hard on the outhouse door before going in, to scare away the deadly – non-existent – snakes. 

Poor Joe, only four, was relegated to fishing for bluegills and sunfish from the dock with his even younger cousins.  But I was allowed to join the men on the boats, fishing for walleye and northern pike.  The early morning smell of outboard exhaust on a lake still triggers happy memories. 

We filled stringers of fish every day.  I caught my first notable fish, a northern, and was overjoyed.  I was entranced watching the men clean the fish every evening in the shed on the edge of the lake.  Back home in South Bend, Dad, Joe, and I delivered fish to our extended family.  I was so proud.

I adored my Uncle Dave and Aunt Sally.  Sally, like my mother, was beautiful and a fine actress, with a sparkle in her eye and a hearty laugh.  David was legendary to me, not only as an expert fisherman and my dad’s best friend and accomplice in their youth, but as an actor, director, set designer, architect, builder, and playwright.  He was always good naturedly teasing us and making us laugh.  His love for me, his firstborn nephew, was obvious.  He and Dad were patient and happy teaching us how to fish.

We moved from Indiana to New Jersey.  Uncle Dave and his family also moved east, to New Haven, where he studied architecture at Yale.  Our family fishing trips continued.  When I was in second grade, we met in the north woods of Maine.  Again, I was allowed to join the men, this time in a canoe with a guide manning the outboard.  We fished for smallmouth bass on the St. Croix River, the eastern boundary of Maine and Canada.  The idea that I was on a river between two countries thrilled me, and they let me climb out of the canoe to stand on Canadian soil.  Not so thrilling were the rapids, nor the signs along the river warning the flow could suddenly increase, apparently from releases from dams upstream.  Dad and Uncle Dave gravely reminded me more than once about the torrential flow mercilessly bearing down on us at any moment. 

We fished with jitterbug lures, which the smallmouths attacked violently as the lures gurgled across the surface.  But the hook had to be set precisely, and between the rapids and my fear of the coming devastating floodwaters, I missed every strike.  Still, the men caught dozens of fish and it was unforgettable.

The families met next at a lake in New Hampshire.  Finally, Joe was old enough to join us on board.  The fishing was not great and I dreaded my job of being the lookout for submerged boulders as we motored along.  Uncle Dave was not his normal self.  He was quick to anger, even at me and the other kids, and had no patience with us.  I was distraught and talked with my parents, who told me about his alcoholism for the first time.  They reassured me his tirades had nothing to do with me, but with his drinking.  That was the last of our joint family fishing vacations. 

I missed fishing with my dear uncle, but my fishing life went on.  Living in New Jersey, Dad took me on my first trip in the ocean, fishing for fluke.  To a Midwestern boy, fishing in the ocean was a true adventure. 

Joe and I were lucky to be kids in a time when after school, and on weekend mornings, our parents simply told us to be home for dinner as we headed out the door.  Besides playing sports in our big, unfenced yards, we spent much time exploring an abandoned rock quarry and a remote forest.  But we liked fishing best, riding our bikes to a lake, or catching minnows and eels in the creek near our house.  We marveled at how the eels coiled into a knot, intertwining with low hanging tree branches, when we pulled them from the water. 

My family traveled again to Ontario one summer, to the Rideau Lakes.  We fished with limited success, catching bluegills, crappies, and a few small bass.  Mom made family history when, after she violently set the hook on a fish, something came flying through the air right into the boat, all of us ducking for cover.  The flying largemouth remains a family legend.  I caught a five pound bass; the hook of fishing lodged deeper.

Dad took a job in San Francisco and we moved west, to Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.  Now eleven and thirteen, Joe and I explored the vast hillside open space, full of creeks and wildlife and an old, abandoned mine.  The creek running through the valley was full of crawfish and minnows.  The big fish we saw sometimes were, we later learned, part of the remnant steelhead population. 

Our family fishing trips continued.  Just after moving, we went to the Trinity Alps.  We rode horses through the mountain forests, shot rifles at bottles, and fished for trout for the first time, in a gin-clear stream flowing to the Trinity River.  One day a truck drove up as we fished.  The driver climbed out and casually dumped countless rainbow trout right into the hole we were fishing.  Unfamiliar with fish stocking, we were stunned by our good fortune. 

Joe and I made a core group of fishing buddies.  As soon as we could drive, we fished San Pablo and San Francisco Bays from shore with a vengeance, catching perch, flounder, and sharks.  Night fishing in Raccoon Straights from Elephant Rock in Tiburon, we caught big leopard sharks, to the frequent horror of tipsy tourists leaving the nearby restaurant. 

One night fishing at the foot of the Richmond Bridge, one of our best fishing buddies, Mingo – aptly nicknamed after Daniel Boone’s Indian sidekick on TV – decided to try another spot.  Hours later a kid ran up to us, breathlessly asking if we had a friend with red hair.  “He’s fighting a gigantic fish!”  We rushed with him to a rocky point at San Quentin and, sure enough, there was Mingo fighting a huge fish.  It turned out to be an eighty pound bat ray, flapping menacingly in the dark water.  Joe and I laughed at Mingo’s suggestion we get in the water to help land it.

We hiked to remote spots on the Marin and Sonoma coasts and caught flounder, surfperch, rockfish, cabezon, lingcod, and greenling.  We fished for silver salmon in West Marin and caught crappie, smallmouth, and catfish in Lake Berryessa.  Dad took us on party boat trips for king salmon and rockfish, from San Francisco to Westport, Washington, and to catch trout in British Columbia. 

As a high school junior, I enthusiastically joined a three-week expedition to Baja California with thirty of my fellow alternative school scholars.  We went in a dilapidated, psychedelically painted 1947 school bus with a top speed of thirty-five miles an hour.  We crawled seven hundred miles south of the border, down the newly completed – and first ever – paved highway running the length of Baja.  The bus had no seats so we sat on our backpacks. 

Our rightfully fearful, incredibly brave leaders were Steven and Meredith.  They had just fallen in love and shared a passion for using wilderness experiences to help at-risk youth.  I was not so much at-risk myself, but – to paraphrase Joni Mitchell – I was drawn to those that were. 

During the trip, Mingo, his girlfriend Mary, and I visited Mulege, a village on the Sea of Cortez.  Before dawn we watched a bright comet in the southern sky as we walked to the docks in search of a guide to take us fishing.  We were heroes when we returned with fresh yellowtail and barracuda for our hungry schoolmates back on the windblown beach.  My love of the Sea of Cortez was born.

A few months later, our family travelled through Mexico, stopping to fish out of Mazatlán and La Paz.  We caught iridescent dorado and tried for sailfish and tuna.  A huge yellowfin tuna grinned at us as he jumped high out of the water, spitting out Dad’s lure.  From shore in brutal heat, Joe struggled for half an hour to land what he assured us was a tremendous fish.  To our amusement and his chagrin, it was a two-pound triggerfish, expert at wedging itself between the rocks when necessary.

The next two Christmas breaks we somehow convinced my parents to let us – a vaguely questionable bunch of sixteen to eighteen year olds – take the family car for two week trips to Baja, with a small aluminum boat strapped on top.  We camped on deserted beaches on the Sea of Cortez.  We caught fish that were strange to us and gathered baby clams by the bucket full.  Coyotes came in the night, biting through our water jugs to quench their thirst; scorpions darted from their hiding places in our firewood.  We caught sharks at night as we drank tequila by the beach campfire, only to wake up staring at the tide that had completely covered everything we left on the beach. 

Since it was Mexico and we were teenagers, we narrowly survived disasters by the skin of our teeth: food poisoning from eating past-its-prime sea turtle steaks in a restaurant; a car accident; and Joe and I being stranded overnight on a desert isle on Christmas Eve, after our toy boat nearly capsized in suddenly dangerous waves.  But the fishing was great in this strange, beautiful wilderness, we could buy beer legally, and we were having adventures, so all was right with our world.  Mingo was fond of quoting Helen Keller that, “Life is a daring adventure, or it is nothing.”  That was our credo.

Right after high school Mingo and Mary moved to Deer Lodge, Montana.  He worked first as a janitor, then as a guard, in the state penitentiary to feed his fishing habit.  Joe and I joined him there to fish two summers in a row, before the winters drove him back to California.  We rarely saw another soul or even the tracks of other fisherman in Montana.  The fishing was staggeringly good: big wild rainbow, brown, brook, and cutthroat trout, and even a few rare grayling, from the Clark Fork, the Gallatin, the Madison, the Firehole, the Bitterroot, and the Big Hole rivers.  Montana joined Baja in my fishing mythology.

During college, Dad took me to an island in the Alaskan panhandle.  From the small river running through the temperate rainforest we caught all the salmon we cared to catch and Dolly Varden trout from the streams.  Bald eagles flew so low we sometimes felt the wind from their wings as they fished the same waters.  Black bears were everywhere, fishing nearby in an uneasy truce.  Dad lost his senses one day when a bear took his salmon, running after the beast as it ambled away nonchalantly with its prize.  His plan if he caught the bear remains a mystery.

One summer during college I flew to New York and stayed with my best childhood friend from New Jersey.  I hitchhiked west, stopping in eastern Pennsylvania, where I fished with my younger cousin.  On to Nashville, Indiana, to visit Uncle Dave and Aunt Sally.  Now on the wagon, Uncle Dave was in good health and high spirits and was very happy to see me.  We laughed, reminisced, and told fish stories late into the night. 

My fishing dropped off suddenly in my last year of college when I fell in love with my bride to be.  I started turning down fishing offers from Joe and Mingo.  In less than a year I was married and my fishing gear started gathering dust. 

While I was in law school, Uncle Dave took his life.

Closing A Circle

  Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Henry David Thoreau

My instinctive response to the trauma of leaving my marriage and home was to start fishing.

On weekends I often hiked to the railroad trestle across the Petaluma River, jackrabbits crisscrossing the path in front of me.  I loved the soothing beauty of the place, watching the tides flow in and out through the marshland while countless shore birds and waterfowl plied the waters, ospreys flying overhead firmly gripping juvenile bass in their talons.  I meditated as I patiently watched my rod tip for the slightest movement. 

I reconnected with best friends from my youth.  Erik, a founding member of the old gang, often joined me at the Petaluma River, braving the cold winter downpours in pursuit of striped bass and huge, prehistoric sturgeon.  I lured Mingo out of his deep woods lair to join us on the river.  In turn, I joined him on a three-day trip to fish for rockfish, sheepshead, kelp bass, and white seabass around starkly beautiful Catalina and San Clemente Islands, many miles off the coast from Los Angeles.  The old fishing gang reunited on the Trinity River, catching steelhead from drift boats.  Joe and I caught twenty pound king salmon as they headed up the Sacramento River.  We revisited our old fishing haunts in Montana.

For our dad’s seventy-fifth birthday, Joe and I took him to Cabo San Lucas, where we battled dorado and yellowfin tuna off the tip of the Baja peninsula.  We traveled up the East Cape, catching acrobatic needlefish, along with pompano, bonito, and triggerfish.

Erik and I also returned to Baja.  We stayed in a little house in the desert outside a small town, where skinny cattle and goats still wandered the streets.  We met Tito, a friendly guide who took us out at dawn to catch big powerful roosterfish as they patrolled the beaches for baitfish.  It felt so right to be fishing again and with the friends who meant the most to me.

While the fishing provided much needed relief, my divorce dragged on and brought me down.  My work as a litigator was oppressive.  A profession that leaves little room for personal problems, the law does more than its share to create them.  Lawyers are more than three times more likely than those in other professions to suffer depression.  Their suicide rate is fourth highest in America, trailing only dentists, pharmacists, and doctors in this dark distinction. 

As my loneliness and divorce ate away at me, I found it harder and harder to successfully navigate the litigation minefield.  I narrowly averted disasters and constantly worried what would go wrong next, coming to fear the phone and email, which only seemed to bring bad news.  My partners’ confidence in me dwindled, along with my self-esteem. 

My divorce finally concluded, but at terrible emotional and financial cost.  Just months earlier, my mother had been diagnosed with cancer and had major surgery followed by devastating chemotherapy. 

The threats closing in, I suddenly froze, unable to address them or anything else anymore.  Suicide entered my mind.  I thought about a lawyer at my first firm – a good man I liked very much – who killed himself, without warning to anyone.  I remembered how peaceful and happy he became the week before he took his life. 

I reached my breaking point.  Terrified, I went on leave from my firm and sought counseling and treatment.  Things worsened when I had to leave my firm three months later.  Fifty-three years old, I was divorced, depressed, nearly broke, and facing a major career change.  I sank and again thought of suicide, having failed in my poorly chosen career.  The hardest year of my life was in full, dreadful swing. 

Joe and I returned to my place one evening after a fishing trip to a favorite mountain lake.  As we reached the deck to lay out the trout for some photos, taped to my door was the eviction notice from my estranged landlady. 

I totaled my car.  I had to move in with my parents.  Everything was broken.

For solace I returned again to fishing.  Erik and I went back to Baja, where we caught seventy pound roosterfish with Tito.  Joe and I returned to Montana and caught hundreds of wild trout in magnificent solitude and fished the wild Lost Coast of Northern California.  Mingo and I caught a multitude of beautiful fish off San Clemente and Catalina Islands in Southern California. 

The loss of my car turned out surprisingly well, since I was convinced my luck had run out.  But the insurance money paid for a reliable old truck and a long-coveted fishing kayak.  Erik bought a kayak, too.  They let us go places we never could before: off the Pacific coast fishing in kelp forests among curious otters and sea lions; in San Francisco Bay catching sturgeon, stripers, and leopard and seven-gill sharks; or in pristine Manzanita Lake in Lassen Park, fly fishing for wild rainbows. 

But the hits kept coming.  I had started a long distance relationship with my childhood sweetheart – of the burned letters.  It was wonderful and brought me great joy for years.  But the distance and other serious complications led us to the point where I had to break it off, even if it broke my heart.

Little did I know how broken it was.  Two bleak days later, I awoke with terrible heartburn that only kept getting worse.  When it got to the point it was scaring me, my mother took me to the emergency room.  After a quick EKG, the doctor told me I was having a heart attack, a dangerous type known as a Widow-maker.  Forty-five minutes later a stent was inserted by angioplasty.  Two days later I was back at my parents’ house, wondering how many other shoes remained to be dropped.

Once I felt well enough, Erik drove me up to a beautiful lake in the Sierra foothills, to get me out of the house and back to the water.  Joe took me to his favorite spot on the Bay and I caught my first post-heart attack fish.  After a while, I started kayak fishing again off the coast.  Fishing helped to lift the darkness that had enveloped me.

A year later I moved to New Orleans, to be near two of my kids who were there, in a city I loved.  It was the fresh start I needed.

One day at JazzFest, in a crowd of at least 40,000 people waiting for Steve Winwood to play, I happened to turn my head to the right and recognized an old friend and neighbor of mine from 25 years earlier in Marin County, where she still lived.  Back in the early 90s, Kathleen, her friends, and I had gone to some Grateful Dead shows and the Golden Gate Park memorial for Bill Graham, when we were both married with three very small children each.  Now we are single.  Three days after meeting again at JazzFest, we were social media friends.  Eighteen months later we were married in the old Algiers courthouse, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.

We are a wonderful match and feel so incredibly fortunate to have found each other so late in life.  My good fortune turned out to be even greater when we realized Kathleen loved fishing nearly as much as I did.  Moving back and forth between Marin County and New Orleans we kayak fish in San Francisco and Tomales bays for halibut, sturgeon, and striped bass, and in the stunning marshes of southeastern Louisiana for redfish, speckled trout, sheepshead, flounder, and others.  We both feel the profound connection fishing gives us to nature.  And we – and our friends – eat well.  We now spend most of our time living happily in New Orleans.  The fishing kayak lives on the roof of our truck.

Supremely meditative and peaceful, fishing brings me back into the natural world I love.  It creates adventures that become, and connect me to, my history.  The inherent mystery inspires excitement, hope, and awe.  Fishing reminds me that I am competent and successful.  It gives me solitude and brings me together with life-long friends and my soul mate.

Mingo and Helen Keller were right; life is indeed a daring adventure.  Coming home to my fishing roots kept me tethered in desperately hard times – and maybe even saved my life.  Fishing is an important part of who I am.  It helps me realize that by living true to myself, I can better weather the storms and live an authentic life. 

Far Too Much At Stake: Don’t Elect Trump By Not Voting Or Casting A “Protest Vote”

Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Al Gore got the most votes nationwide for president in the 2000 election, and still lost. Thanks to our un-democratic electoral college system, the outcome of the election came down to who won a single state: Florida.

With the bad faith help of the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida vote recount was halted and George W. Bush declared the winner of the state – and the presidency – by just 537 votes (out of more than 6 million votes cast in Florida).

In that election, consumer advocate Ralph Nader ran as a Green Party candidate. He got 97,488 votes in Florida. It’s difficult to imagine any Green Party voters would have voted for Bush, the oil industry-favored candidate from Texas.

But if just 538 of Nader’s 97,488 voters – fewer than 0.6% of his total – had instead voted for Gore, the Democrat, Gore would have been president. Nader and his voters had to know from the day he announced his candidacy that he had no conceivable chance of winning the presidency. Instead, by siphoning off otherwise Democratic votes, Nader and his voters handed the election to George W. Bush.

Under Bush, we experienced 9/11 and his horrible responses to it: the “War on Terror” and the war in Iraq. Conservative estimates of the civilian death toll from Bush’s war in Iraq – which had nothing to do with 9/11 – are at over half a million dead. The total scope of innocent deaths worldwide from Bush’s “War on Terror” is unknown.

Jill Stein’s candidacy for president in 2016 may have similarly helped Trump win the presidency, after he (like Bush) lost the popular vote but won in the electoral college. (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/11/13576798/jill-stein-third-party-donald-trump-win)

I have closely followed American politics since the late 1960s, then studied American history at Berkeley. When I was 13, I volunteered with my mother on George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. I worked on Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign. I am a long-time Bernie Sanders supporter. So I have a lot of experience favoring candidates I support on the issues, but who lose elections. I fully understand people’s desire to vote their conscience and not simply vote for the lesser of two evils.

But our elections for president have very real consequences: in the case of Bush, mortal consequences for countless people around the world.

In the case of a second Trump presidency, we face the very real threat of fascist destruction of our very democracy.

A third party protest vote against Biden in the coming close election – by people who would never under any circumstances vote for Trump – is effectively a vote for Trump. Until the 2000 election result, I was a life-long admirer of Ralph Nader, but no more. I have a hard time forgiving the Nader voters that gave us George W. Bush. Half a million dead Iraqis would probably agree, if they could.

Sometimes voting for who you perceive is the lesser of two evils is in fact the morally responsible thing to do, especially when the likely consequences of the election are so unprecedented and profound, as they are in the coming November election.

Often, people voting for third party candidates who cannot win justify their decision by saying “there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats.” If you are considering not voting or voting for a third party candidate who cannot possibly win – either of which could help propel Trump back into the White House – ask yourself some questions first:

Will the Palestinians fare better with Netanyahu’s favored candidate, Trump, in power?

Will climate change be better addressed under Trump?

Will women’s reproductive rights be better protected under Trump?

Will racism and misogyny be addressed better addressed under a Trump regime?

Will our democracy and constitutional rights be better protected by Trump?

Will our Supreme Court become less reactionary under Trump (who already saddled us with three extreme right-wing justices with lifetime appointments)?

The answers to these questions are clear. A second Trump victory would be an unmitigated disaster for our country and the world.

Part of me would love to write in Bernie Sanders. I pretty much agree with him on everything. But with the stakes so incredibly high, I will instead cast my vote to best keep Trump as far from the presidency as possible. And I’ll be proud to do my part to protect us from that monster, even if I’m voting for a candidate I disagree with on issues that are important to me.

Bernie Sanders agrees and has strongly endorsed Biden, and not any of the third-party candidates. (https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/08/27/dana-bash-bernie-sanders-cornel-west-sot-sotu-vpx.cnn)

At this perilous crossroads in history, we do not have the luxury of not voting or casting “protest votes” that could bring us the worst imaginable person as our president. We cannot afford to let ideological purity open the door for utter disaster.

Only Biden or Trump will be elected president this year. No third party candidate has any conceivable chance of being elected. Please do not do anything to let Trump have his malevolent way with our country again.

A New Orleans Guide

May 15, 2024

EXPLORE!

Explore the French Quarter and the Faubourg Marigny (the neighborhood downriver next to the Quarter) by foot and/or bike. The Quarter was the original part of New Orleans, founded by the French in 1718.  The Marigny is a subdivided plantation dating to the very early 1800s.  Sign up for a walking tour of the Quarter.

Tour historic homes and places in the Quarter. For example:

Hermann Grima and Gallier Homes (http://www.hgghh.org/)

Beauregard Keyes House (http://www.bkhouse.org/)

1850 House (http://www.neworleansonline.com/directory/location.php?locationID=1347)

Madame John’s Legacy (http://www.neworleansonline.com/directory/location.php?locationID=1268)

The Presbyterie (http://www.neworleansonline.com/directory/location.php?locationID=1280)

The Cabildo (http://louisianastatemuseum.org/museums/the-cabildo/)

Jackson Square: the original “town square” or Vieux Carre “Old Square” in French

St. Louis Cathedral

The Ursuline Convent (http://www.neworleansonline.com/directory/location.php?locationID=1278)

The Historic New Orleans Collection (http://www.thnoc.org/)

Royal Street, towards Canal, is full of antique places worth checking out

Walk along Esplanade Avenue, from the French Quarter, through the Faubourg Treme and the Seventh Ward, to Bayou St. John (which flows to Lake Ponchartrain).

Along Moss Street, on the banks of the Bayou St. John, you can tour the 18th century Pitot House. (http://pitothouse.org/visit-pitot-house)

Go to Sunday morning service at Augustine Church in Treme (an ancient black Catholic church at which slaves were welcomed; and they have a killer band – with horn section).

Go to Congo Square, in Louis Armstrong Park, on Rampart Street on the edge of the Quarter. This is where American music – the roots of blues, jazz, r & b, and rock and roll – was born, when slaves were allowed to congregate there on Sundays in the first half of the 19th century and dance and play the African music of their homeland.  The oaks around the square are so old they witnessed those gatherings.  For any music lover, this is holy land.

Ride bikes out through the Marigny into the Bywater (the next neighborhood downriver from the Marigny) and ride along the Mississippi River in Crescent Park. (http://www.nola.gov/city/crescent-park/) Quiet with great views of the river and downtown New Orleans; maybe eat at Elizabeth’s or The Joint while you’re out there.

Take the Charles streetcar uptown from Canal Street, along the mansions on St. Charles Avenue, the “American Sector” of town. Canal Street (known as the “neutral ground”) separated the American part from the old French creole part of town.  Go all the way to Tulane University on your right and Audubon Park on your left.  Maybe make your way back by way of Magazine Street.

Explore Magazine Street, in Uptown; miles of interesting shopping, dining, and drinking opportunities.

Explore City Park by bike (it was designed by the same person who designed Central Park and Golden Gate Park). Walking the trails in Couturie Forest gives a taste of the Louisiana wilderness, in the middle of an urban setting

Take a swamp tour of the nearby cypress/tupelo swamps. I like Cajun Encounters tour of the Honey Island Swamp.  (http://www.cajunencounters.com/)

If you don’t take a formal swamp tour, go to the Barataria Preserve (about 45 minutes out of town) and walk through the swap on raised boardwalks. During the warm months alligators are often seen.  (http://www.nps.gov/jela/barataria-preserve.htm)

Go north, up the Mississippi River and tour a plantation along River Road, less than an hour away. I like the Laura Plantation, a French Creole Plantation that gave plenty of emphasis to the slavery there, without whitewashing.  (http://www.lauraplantation.com/)  Also, the Whitney Plantation (just before you get to Laura) is devoted exclusively to being a museum of slavery.    (http://www.whitneyplantation.com/)

EAT!

There are countless restaurants in New Orleans.  Many are closed on Sunday or Monday or Tuesday.  This list does not include many of the pricey old classics, which are great for history and ambience.

French Quarter

Café du Monde (at the foot of Jackson Square): serving incredible hot fresh beignets (French donuts) and chicory coffee with steamed milk, 24/7 since before the Civil War.

Killer Po Boys (219 Dauphine St, New Orleans, LA 70112, http://www.killerpoboys.com/) delicious and inventive po boys; the pork belly po boy is great.

Central Grocery (923 Decatur St), birthplace of the delicious muffaletta sandwich; get one and grab a beer next door and eat your awesome sandwich out on the levy along the Mississippi.  STILL CLOSED FROM HURRICANE DAMAGE BUT WILL HOPEFULLY OPEN BY THE END OF 2023.

Bennachin (1212 Royal St, http://www.bennachinrestaurant.com/) tasty, inexpensive West African food.

Bayonna (430 Dauphine St, http://www.bayona.com/) wonderful, upscale place in a 200 year old cottage; make reservations.

Croissant D’Or Patisserie (617 Ursulines Avenue, http://www.croissantdornola.com/) good coffee and French pastries in a pretty setting near the Ursulines Convent.

Coop’s Place (1109 Decatur St) pretty good Cajun/creole food; open late; bit of a dive and the sometimes surly service is part of its charm.

Dian Xin (1218 Decatur St.): Quaint, low-key eatery serving Chinese staples including dumplings, noodles, jianbing & meat dishes.

Buffa’s (1001 Esplanade Ave) a bar and restaurant open 24/7, good burgers and sandwiches; the shrimp and grits are reportedly excellent.  They have live music in the evenings.

Verti Mart (1201 Royal St) 24 hour kitchen/Cajun-creole deli and quickie-mart grocery

Mona Lisa (1212 Royal St.): Simple Italian dishes & pizza in an intimate, laid-back space hung with “Mona Lisa” portraits.

The Marigny

Adolpho’s (611 Frenchmen St.,www.facebook.com/pages/Adolfos-Restaurant/122414214436780) old school seafood and Italian place on Frenchmen Street, above The Apple Barrel; cash only and no reservations; very strict COVID rules

Paladar 511 (511 Marigny St, http://www.paladar511.com/) delicious small plates and pizzas; the Yellow Fin Tuna Conserva small plate is great, and not very small.

The Franklin (2600 Dauphine St, http://www.thefranklinnola.com/#thefranklinnola) somewhat upscale and delicious.

Green Room (1300 St Bernard Ave, New Orleans, LA 70116)  a great Eastern European  restaurant; everything is delicious and cheap; try the Omni Reuben (a killer Reuben with red beets on it).

St. Roch Market (http://www.strochmarket.com/vendors/) (2381 St Claude Ave.) a recently restored historic building housing a collection of great food vendors – kind of like the Ferry Building in SF but smaller.  Delicious food in a lovely setting.

Budsi’s Authentic Thai (1760 N. Rampart St.) ( https://www.budsisthai.com/ /) delicious, authentic Thai food (and drinks at the bar) at reasonable prices.

Horn’s Eatery (2440 Chartres St.) (https://hornsnola.com/) a lovely little neighborhood place for delicious breakfast and lunch.

                    The Bywater (next neighborhood downriver, past the Marigny)

Elizabeth’s (601 Gallier St. http://www.elizabethsrestaurantnola.com/contact_us.html) incredible Cajun/creole breakfasts/Sunday brunch; don’t miss the praline bacon; and the Bloody Marys are awesome.

Bywater Bakery (3624 Dauphine St, New Orleans, LA 70117): Laid-back bakery & cafe specializing in king cakes, plus sandwiches, soups, salads & coffee

Pizza Delicious (617 Piety St, http://pizzadelicious.com/) great pizza and salads in a funky neighborhood joint.

The Joint (701 Mazant St, http://alwayssmokin.com/) one of the best BBQ restaurants in New Orleans; funky and down home.

Bacchanal Fine Wine & Spirits (600 Poland Ave, http://www.bacchanalwine.com/#about-marquee) great small plates, a beautiful outdoor seating area with live music often; buy your bottle of wine in the store in front and drink it with your dinner in the back.

Rosalita’s Backyard Tacos (3304 St Claude Ave) funky eatery offering up tacos, nachos & margaritas, plus outdoor seating in the backyard.

The Treme/Seventh Ward (just above the French Quarter, across Rampart St.)

Lil Dizzy’s (1500 Esplanade Ave, http://www.lildizzyscafe.com/) great creole food by local restaurant family; breakfast, Sunday brunch (great buffet) and early dinners only; the Trout Baquet (speckled sea trout with crab in a delicious sauce is outstanding).  ONLY OPEN FOR LUNCH AT THIS POINT

Manchu Food Store (1413 N Claiborne Ave) it may be a liquor store in the hood, but the chicken wings are straight from heaven; TIP: don’t linger to eat them under the freeway overpass, but move on to a safer locale.

Dooky Chase’s Restaurant (2301 Orleans Ave, http://www.dookychaserestaurant.com/) classic creole home cooking since 1941, only open for lunch Tue-Fri and for early dinner on Friday.  MLK Jr. and other civil rights heroes used to meet and plan upstairs.  Black owned by the Chase family since the 1940s.

Willie Mae’s Scotch House (2401 St Ann St, www.facebook.com/WillieMaesScotchHouse) neighborhood family place for down home cooking, perhaps the best fried chicken in America, won the James Beard Award; only open for lunch and there will be a line to get in; they also have a new location in Uptown at the corner of St. Charles Ave. and Cherokee St. TEMPORARILY CLOSED AFTER A FIRE.

Café Treme (1501 St Philip St) nice little coffee house tucked away behind Louis Armstrong Park.

Old Road Coffee (2024 Bayou Rd.) another nice little coffee house on one of the oldest streets in New Orleans.

The Flagpole (2032 Esplanade Ave.) a tiny coffee, juice, and snowball place right on Esplanade Ave.

The Buttermilk Drop Bakery (1781 N Dorgenois St.) a takeout breakfast and donut shop; the buttermilk drop donuts are to die for; the owner played the father in the great film Beast of the Southern Wild (see it if you haven’t) and they had to adjust the shooting schedule around his early morning donut making

Mid-City (between Treme and City Park)

Parkway Bakery and Tavern (538 Hagan Avenue, just off the Bayou St. John, http://www.parkwaypoorboys.com/) reputed birthplace of the po boy sandwich (which they handed out to the poor boys on strike against the transit system in the early 1900s); the fried shrimp po boy is outstanding, as is the hot corned beef; Mon and Wed get the fried oyster po boy.  My favorite place for po boys!

Liuzza’s by the Track (1518 N. Lopez, between the Esplanade and the race track, http://liuzzasnola.com/) a friendly little neighborhood joint; only open till 7 p.m.; the BBQ shrimp po boy is beyond description, the gumbo and turtle soup are wonderful, and the red beans and rice with an andouille sausage (Mondays only) is very good.

1000 Figs (3141 Ponce De Leon St., http://www.1000figs.com/) owned by two 20-somethings who started not long ago with a food truck selling falafels, their brick and mortar place serves delicious Mediterranean food in a great setting at reasonable prices; consider getting take out and eating in the lovely little park across the Esplanade.

Café Degas (3127 Esplanade Ave., https://www.cafedegas.com/) a good French restaurant in a lovely setting.

Mopho (514 City Park Ave., http://mophonola.com/) in a strip mall near City Park, they offer a creative fusion of Vietnamese meets Louisiana; do not forget to order the chicken wings appetizer.

Norma’s Sweets Bakery (2925 Bienville St.) a great, cheap breakfast and lunch spot in the back of a Central American grocery store.  Get your Cubano sandwich on!

                        Central Business District (downtown)/Warehouse District

Luke (333 St Charles Ave., http://www.lukeneworleans.com/) beautiful 75 cent raw oysters and half-off beers during happy hour – a dozen on the half shell and a good beer for $13!

Domenica (123 Baronne St., http://domenicarestaurant.com/) half-off delicious pizzas during happy hour.

Peche Seafood Grill (800 Magazine St., http://www.pecherestaurant.com/) top-notch Louisiana seafood at its best.

Cochon/Cochon Butcher (930 Tchoupitoulas St.,   http://www.cochonrestaurant.com/ http://www.cochonbutcher.com/) incredible Southern/Cajun fare; Cochon is the main restaurant and around the corner is Cochon Butcher, where you can not only get some of the best sandwiches anywhere – made with house-cured meats – but you can bring home only-in-Louisiana treasures like house made tasso, andouille sausage, venison sausage, boudin, etc., etc., etc.

Herbsaint (701 St Charles Ave., http://www.herbsaint.com/) French and Italian-inspired, yet distinctive Southern fare in a lovely setting.

Uptown

Stein’s Market & Deli (2207 Magazine St., https://steinsdeli.com/) a Jewish deli offering great sandwiches.

Turkey & The Wolf (739 Jackson Ave., https://www.turkeyandthewolf.com/) a great spot for excellent sandwiches

Commander’s Palace (1403 Washington Ave., http://www.commanderspalace.com/) one of the ancient New Orleans classics, Commander’s Palace, in the beautiful Garden District, is not to be missed; make reservations and meet the dress code; save some money by going for lunch or their wonderful Sunday brunch, complete with wandering traditional jazz trio; the turtle soup is wonderful; explore the cemetery across the street (during daylight hours).

Shaya (4213 Magazine St., http://www.shayarestaurant.com/#about) excellent modern Israeli cuisine.

Baru Bistro and Tapas (3700 Magazine St., http://www.barutapas.com/) coastal Colombian and Caribbean small and large plates.

French Truck Coffee (1200 Magazine St. – and various other locations around town, http://www.frenchtruckcoffee.com/) delicious small-batch brewed coffee.

LISTEN, DANCE & DRINK!

The first several touristy blocks of Bourbon Street are lined with bars and clubs.  It’s worth one evening’s (or one hour’s) walk down in my opinion, if only to experience the horror of the Ugly Drunken American up close and way too personal.  It quiets down as you head towards Frenchmen Street and the Marigny.

The best way to know what’s going on musically any night of the week, is to go to the “livewire” section of the great local radio station WWOZ’s website.  Best radio station in the U.S. – 90.7 on your FM dial!  www.google.com/#safe=off&q=wwoz+livewire

                                                           French Quarter

Maison Bourbon (641 Bourbon St., http://www.maisonbourbon.com/) a traditional jazz oasis right in the frenzy that is otherwise Bourbon Street.

Bombay Club (830 Conti St., http://www.bombayclubneworleans.com/) a comfy, retro martini bar with great jazz, tucked away in a quiet spot just a block off Bourbon.

Preservation Hall (726 St Peter St., http://www.preservationhall.com/) the one and only.

Toulouse Theater (615 Toulouse St., http://www.oneeyedjacks.net/) a hipster hangout with interesting acts.

New Orleans Jazz Museum (400 Esplanade Ave., https://nolajazzmuseum.org/) not only a fine museum of New Orleans jazz music located in the old U.S. Mint, but they offer free late afternoon shows many weekdays.

Laffite’s Blacksmith Shop (941 Bourbon Street,   http://www.lafittesblacksmithshop.com/Homepage.html) on the quiet end of Bourbon St.; worth a visit if only because it’s reputed to be the oldest structure used as a bar in the United States, dating back to the 1720s; also reputed to have been used as the New Orleans base of the pirate Jean Laffite (who helped Andrew Jackson beat the British in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812).

House of Blues (225 Decatur St., http://www.houseofblues.com/neworleans/) a chain, but still one of the premier venues in town for all kinds of music.

Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone (214 Royal St., http://hotelmonteleone.com/entertainment/carousel-bar) sit at the elegant revolving bar while you sip your Sazerac cocktail (the official cocktail of New Orleans and reputedly the first mixed drink in the world); Tennessee Williams used to drink here during his many years living in the Quarter.

Bar Tonique (820 N Rampart St., https://www.bartonique.com/) a great little bar right across Rampart St. from Louis Armstong Park; well-made reasonably priced cocktails

Frenchmen Street

All of Frenchmen Street, between Esplanade and Royal, is stuffed full with excellent bars and terrific live music places.  Explore it and you’ll surely find something you like any night of the week, into the wee hours.  My favorites are:

d.b.a. (618 Frenchmen St., http://www.dbaneworleans.com/)

The Maison (508 Frenchmen St., http://www.maisonfrenchmen.com/)

The Apple Barrel (609 Frenchmen St., www.facebook.com/pages/Apple-Barrel-Bar/117468114938296)

The Spotted Cat Music Club (623 Frenchmen St., http://www.spottedcatmusicclub.com/)

Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro (626 Frenchmen St., http://www.snugjazz.com/)  The premier jazz club in town!

The Marigny

Hi-Ho Lounge (2239 St Claude, http://hiholounge.net/) wide range of acts, from burlesque to bluegrass to everything else; Great dance DJ on Saturday nights; different pop up restaurants depending on the night of the week.

R Bar (1431 Royal St., www.facebook.com/rbar.nola) Dim, chandelier-hung neighborhood hangout with pool, a jukebox, Friday crawfish boils & an upstairs inn

The Bywater

Bud Rip’s (900 Piety St., www.facebook.com/pages/Bud-Rips/216014581771908) classic neighborhood dive bar

B J’s Lounge (4301 Burgundy St.) neighborhood dive bar featuring some great live music, sometimes in the back yard (weather permitting)

Mid-City

Chickie Wah Wah (2828 Canal St., http://www.chickiewahwah.com/) one of the best small clubs in town, with excellent live music.

Finn McCool’s Irish Pub (3701 Banks St., http://finnmccools.com/) a nice Irish neighborhood pub.

Twelve Mile Limit (500 S Telemachus St., www.facebook.com/twelve.mile.limit) a friendly neighborhood bar with good food pop ups.

Bayou Beer Garden (326 N Jefferson Davis Pkwy., http://www.bayoubeergarden.com/) a sprawling, yet cozy, place with many draft and bottled beers; huge, inviting outdoor patios out back; a great place to get a big burger and watch some sports.

Second Line Brewing (433 N Bernadotte St, New Orleans, LA 70119): a great microbrewery a short walk from Mopho’s restaurant; good food trucks

Skeeta Hawk Brewery (455 N Dorgenois St., https://skeetahawkbrewing.com/) a great little neighborhood brewery (with a nice bagel shop next door)

The Broadside (600 N Broad St., https://broadsidenola.com/) an excellent outdoor music venue with a bar and good food trucks

Central Business District/Warehouse District

Sazerac Bar at the Roosevelt Hotel (130 Roosevelt Way, http://therooseveltneworleans.com/dining/the-sazerac-bar.html)

Little Gem Saloon (445 S. Rampart St., http://www.littlegemsaloon.com/)  Creole fare in a 1903 tavern with live performances by local jazz artists.

Uptown

Barrel Proof (1201 Magazine St., http://www.barrelproofnola.com/) a hip whiskey bar with a good beer selection too.

Courtyard Brewery (1160 Camp St,  http://www.courtyardbrewing.com/) an excellent nano-brewery (too tiny to qualify as a micro-brewery) that makes excellent beers and has other great ones on tap.

The Rum House (3128 Magazine St., http://www.therumhouse.com/) a raucous college crowd, but tasty rum drinks in a “Caribbean taqueria.”

Freret Street Publiq House (4528 Freret St., http://www.publiqhouse.com/) a hip, brick-walled warehouse with live music.

Ms. Mae’s The Club (4336 Magazine St., http://msmaeswallofshame.blogspot.com/) ancient dive bar with cheap drinks; open 24/7; just a couple of blocks up from Tipitina’s.

Le Bon Temps Roulé (4801 Magazine St., www.facebook.com/pages/Le-Bon-Temps-Roule/177980392260637) popular neighborhood bar with local music by the likes of the Soul Rebels, plus late-night grub; I had free oysters on the half shell one early evening.

Nola Brewing and Tap Room (3001 Tchoupitoulas St., http://www.nolabrewing.com/) excellent craft brewery with a big new tap room; good BBQ pop up.

Tipitina’s (501 Napoleon Ave., http://www.tipitinas.com/) more holy ground for music lovers; one of the premier live music venues in New Orleans; Professor Longhair held court here weekly for many years.

Maple Leaf Bar (8316 Oak St., http://www.mapleleafbar.com/) at the far end of town on cool Oak Street, the Maple Leaf is another of the most venerable music spots.

READ!

If you’d like to read up on New Orleans, I recommend:

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, by Lawrence N. Powell (the first 100 years of New Orleans’ history)

Creole: The History And Legacy Of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, edited by Sybil Kein

A Confederacy of Dunces, by Robert Kennedy Toole. One of the funniest books ever written; full of colorful characters and set entirely in New Orleans

The Road Home

The notion of transplanting myself to New Orleans from the Bay Area – my home for 40 years – came while visiting my daughter and son last year.  Both love New Orleans – the culture, the music, the food.  She went there to teach poor kids how to cook the food they grow in their organic garden at school.  He went after living in a Zen monastery for a year to, as he put it, dance in the streets and sit on the porch and watch other people dance in the streets.  They’re part of the youthful, post-Katrina migration to New Orleans, thriving in their new home.

I’d been fascinated by the city since my first visit years ago.  I brought back stories and voodoo dolls for the kids, and cooked countless family meals out of Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen.  Our family loved music and good food and the offbeat and mysterious.  It wasn’t so surprising we ended up drawn to this most foreign of American cities.

But during a visit last year it dawned on me that major changes in my life – a traumatic divorce and career transition, with bonus heart attack – had actually freed me to change things up even more.  I’d vowed to write the novel that had been living only in my head for decades, a story partially set in New Orleans.  Two thirds of my kids were living there.  No mortgage or regular job or significant other tied me forever to California.  The birthplace of jazz was the perfect place to pick up my trumpet and start playing again.  So I decided I would move to New Orleans, write the novel, dance in the streets, and sit on the porch.

It took a year to get things in order.  But the deadline I set came, I took several deep breaths, and packed my truck for phase one – a road trip to explore other places where the novel takes place, making my way to New Orleans to find my new home.

I said goodbye to friends and family – especially my first-born son I was leaving behind in Oakland – and set out, alone, on a cold January evening.  It felt momentous and frightening and exciting.  Marking the change with a road trip seemed right.  It sparked memories of other parts of my own story that took place on the road.

Truckin’, like the do-dah man

Once told me “You’ve got to play your hand”

Sometimes your cards ain’t worth a dime

If you don’t lay’ em down.

 

I remembered another cold night in early March 1976.

Our psychedelically painted 1946 school bus had pulled into suburban Livermore for the first of many repair stops, just hours after leaving San Rafael, in Marin County across the Golden Gate from San Francisco.  At a top cruising speed of forty, it would take days and days before we reached our final destination, an empty, windswept beach at the foot of the Bahia de La Concepción in the Baja California desert, 600 miles into Mexico.  I was sixteen and on the adventure of my young life, along with twenty-five other kids from our free-form alternative high school.  The 60s did not give up without a fight in Marin County.

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It was bitter cold as we milled about the gas station, shivering while the attendant reached out on his CB radio for truckers who might have the unusual tire we needed.  He eventually found it and we lumbered on.  By dawn we reached the first rest stop after Highway 5 takes a hard right towards LA.  A trip that normally took two hours had taken seven: a sign of coming trials we would face and overcome, or not, until we came home – changed – three weeks later.

But on the road to New Orleans this January night my truck was running like a champion.  Hurtling south, in Fresno County I passed “Pleasant Valley State Prison,” quite a name for a place surely unpleasant in all respects.  I passed four prisons in my first twelve hours – dark monuments to the Age of Incarceration, mostly hidden away in remote rural places.   Prisons have sprouted like poisonous mushrooms across California for the last twenty-five years.

Down the arrow-straight freeway the miles ticked off.  With the 18-wheelers limited to fifty-five, I passed them like they were standing still.

I thought of a driving lesson I once got from a former big rig driver, heading up this highway one night in 1979.  He was one of the adults on a vision quest trip for teenagers that my friends Steven and Meredith – leaders of the Baja expedition – had led for us in Death Valley.  Recreating an ancient Native American rite of passage ritual, we each spent three days and nights alone, fasting amongst the valley’s fragrant creosote bushes, circling vultures, jumping kangaroo rats, and braying donkeys – whose ancestors had escaped from 19th century miners.  We camped at sea level on the valley floor, the towering Funeral Mountains rising up 11,000 feet to the west.

I was the oldest teen and had earned a degree of respect from Steven and Meredith for not being entirely irresponsible on the Baja trip.  So they partnered me with a sweet kid who today would be diagnosed with Asberger’s Syndrome or something like it.  He admirably made it through two of the three planned solo days before he returned, satisfied, to base camp.  I enjoyed helping him and had a fine time myself, writing for hours, nestled in my camp down in an ancient arroyo – not necessarily the best spot if a freak thunderstorm had caused a downpour in the distant mountains.  The sudden appearance of donkeys from time to time, staring down at me blankly, was startling.  But I understood their bewilderment and appreciated the comic relief.

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After returning to base camp, we exchanged gifts and shared the stories of our experience with solitude.  Then we drove back home through the night.  I rode with the truck driver in his great white whale of a car.  He took a liking to me and asked me to take the wheel.  I was honored, and a little intimidated.  But it was the driving lesson of a lifetime.  He explained the etiquette among truckers of flashing your lights to tell a passing driver it was clear to pull back into the right lane, then for the passing trucker to flip his lights off and on to say “thanks.”  He taught me the cardinal rule of highway driving: never, ever, use the left lane except when passing.  I was only a 19-year-old kid, but he treated me with respect.  At dawn, our convoy from otherworldly Death Valley reached the lush green springtime hills of Marin County.

Having started late to New Orleans, after five hours it was one in the morning and I was approaching Bakersfield, in the Kern County oil and cotton fields.  I was stunned to see the population had grown to 363,000 people – just 15,000 fewer than New Orleans.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Bakersfield, visiting relatives.  There was nothing to do when we visited.  To me it was a dreary, sprawling, desolate place.

That night was particularly eerie as I rolled in through the dark countryside.  Dense ground fog enveloped me as I navigated unfamiliar country roads, clearing suddenly then swallowing me up again moments later.  Adding to the sinister ambiance, the thick air reeked of manure and strong chemicals.  As I got closer to town (now a “city” I suppose), the blackness abruptly gave way to large, brightly lit industrial facilities.  The massive parking lots were half full of parked cars, their owners working the graveyard shift.  As I drove into town it was quiet except for the never-ending stream of big rigs flowing up and down the freeway.

I had an early experience with Bakersfield.

At the tail end of the ‘76 Baja trip, a schoolmate and acquaintance from the neighborhood – I’ll call him Mike – and I somehow convinced our gullible parents to permit us to leave the organized trip in Orange County and hitchhike home together, stopping to visit a friend in San Dimas, somewhere in Los Angeles.  (Do not judge my parents harshly; we were adept liars and I generally avoided serious trouble, or at least getting caught, and survived to reach adulthood remarkably unscathed.)

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Mike was a personable guy.  He also had a hot temper and an unfortunate tendency to drink heavily and make threats – say, to a disgruntled neighbor – to “burn your house down with you in it.”  He also had a loose grip on the concept of personal property.  Introducing himself to Steven for the first time, he said – with a big smile, a twinkle in his eye, and a warm handshake – “Hi, I’m Mike.  I’m a thief.”  Not entirely surprisingly, I hear he may now be a guest of the State of California, perhaps in Pleasant Valley.

A winning personality can take you far, and I liked Mike and we were hell-bent on adventure.  Starting at dawn, we hitched without incident from San Clemente – Nixon Country – up to San Dimas (later famous as Bill and Ted’s hometown, starting point of their excellent adventure).  It took seven rides.  We spent three days there, eating ravenously to regain the weight we’d lost in Baja after the food fund ran low.  The “wake and bake” concept being well-entrenched in San Dimas teen culture, we stoked our appetites by smoking weed incessantly – which we’d grudgingly given up for the trip out of fear of Mexican prisons.

We also listened to the White Album over and over – part of the fine soundtrack of our excellent adventure.  The night we first arrived in the Mexican village of Mulege, an old shop owner sang us popular American songs from the 20s and 30s.  We sang “Me & Bobby McGee” and “Mercedes Benz” to an extended family of itinerant Mexican fisherman who befriended us on the shores of the Bahia de la Concepción.  They spoke no English and we spoke little Spanish, but we spent a memorable evening together, hiding in the bus from the relentless wind and happily trading songs into the night.  Crammed together in the bus, one of our fine guitarists serenaded us with “Dead Flowers” as we crept along Mexico 1.  On our last night in Mexico, we danced under a full moon to Santana’s Abraxas in the dunes along Baja’s deserted Pacific coast.

After a few blurry days in San Dimas, we were back to our fighting weights and ready for action, so we resumed our trek, this time on the much longer trip from LA north to Marin County.  Always polite, we followed our host’s recommendation to “take these whites to keep you on your toes.”  His last admonition as we stepped out of the car at the freeway entrance was, “And whatever you do, don’t get stranded in Bakersfield.”

Four hours later – after getting dropped off just past the huge billboard blaring the town’s dubious motto of “Sun Fun Stay Play,” we were stranded in Bakersfield.  For eight long hours we looked as charming and harmless as possible, without the slightest nibble.  When we weren’t utterly ignored, all we got were furtive, fearful glances and hostile glares.  We saw plenty of pickups with gun racks, but not a single VW microbus.  We Marin County boys were not in Kansas anymore.  Or we were.

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After we nearly died of old age on the Highway 99 entrance, a big car suddenly pulled over and jerked to a stop.  We dashed over and leapt in.  The gregarious middle-aged driver was heading to Stockton, a travelling salesman tweaked on speed, making the long haul home from Phoenix.  He talked our ears off but got us closer to home and away from the dismal trap that was Bakersfield.

I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari

Tehachapi to Tonapah

Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made

I’ve driven the back roads

So I wouldn’t get weighed

And if you give me weed, whites, and wine

Then you show me a sign

I’ll be willin’

To be movin’

 

My escape from Bakersfield this time, after six hours sleep at the motel, was far simpler.  Up before dawn, I filled the tank and hit the road for Arizona.  The empty highway snaked up through the Tehachapis, cattle grazing in the vast Tejon Ranch, the largest private landholding in California – a quarter million acre conglomeration of four Spanish land grants.  The first sweet scent of sage welcomed me to the dry side of California.

Descending into the desert, Frank Zappa’s southern California geography lessons made me smile as I passed Mojave.  Do she and Bobby still live there in that Winnebago?  Skirting Edwards Air Force Base, I passed dusty Boron, with its incongruous signs about mule teams and aerospace.  Somewhere around Barstow, I knew that – as a young man – the drugs would have been beginning to take hold.

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Pushing east across the Mojave Desert, the Joshua trees and cactus appeared.  I’ve never found deserts bleak or barren, but beautiful and intriguing.  I have too many fond memories to feel otherwise: a family road trip from Indiana to Phoenix when I was six, along the course of old Route 66, exploring pristine desert full of giant saguaros with my cousins in still wild Apache Junction; vision quests with Steven and Meredith in Death Valley and the White Mountains; and many adventures in the Baja California desert and Sea of Cortez, camping and fishing and carrying on with my best friends.

But the side effects of coffee, the morning’s lackluster drug of choice, had taken hold so I pulled up in front at a rest stop.  After dashing in and out, I opened the tailgate, took out the propane stove, and treated myself to some Peet’s coffee.  Just because you’re on the road doesn’t mean you have to drink swill.

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Time to fill up, my next stop was Needles.  On the Arizona border, it straddles the trickle that remains of the Colorado River after it’s been sucked dry so countless millions can live in a waterless desert.  At the gas station, my wallet was not in my pocket or in the slot on the dashboard where I’d had it earlier.  Getting more and more desperate as I searched, I came to the dreadful realization that maybe I’d left the truck unlocked when I ran into the men’s room at the rest stop.  If my wallet had been sitting there, it would have taken just an instant to open the door, grab it, and make a clean getaway.

After two thorough, cursing searches of the truck, front to back, I  raced back to the rest stop, an hour trip, in the exceedingly off-chance I’d dropped it and a Good Samaritan had found it – with my driver’s license, ATM cards, and $350 in cash.  No such luck.  At least my bank told me I could replace my card at any branch, and they had one up ahead in Flagstaff.  I’d brought more cash in my suitcase, so I wasn’t completely high and dry.  But my last experience in California hadn’t been a good one and I was ready to cross the once mighty Colorado, without looking back.

Interstate 40 starts climbing soon after the border.  Approaching Kingman, the rocky cliffs looked like long rows of giant Easter Island stone heads.  The yucca and prickly pear gave way to sage and cottonwoods in the creek beds, then to ponderosa pine forests as the road rose high up into the Kaibab National Forrest, south of the Grand Canyon.  A sign warned of an elk crossing, punctuated by the carcass of a massive elk on the shoulder, not ten feet past the sign.  Point taken and confirmation that elk cannot read.

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In Flagstaff, at nearly 7,000 feet, the air was frigid as I hurried into the bank.  They refused me a replacement card when I told them no, I did not have a photo ID since it had, of course, been stolen with my wallet.  I stormed out.  Feeling bitter and unlucky, I pushed on towards Winslow, Arizona as the sun set.

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Jackson Browne’s “Take It Easy” got Winslow some notoriety – there’s a statue on the main drag called “Standin’ On A Corner” – but it’s still a small, sleepy high desert town.  Historically a railroad stop, Winslow got sleepier when the interstate replaced Route 66 and bypassed town.  My plan to soothe my soul with some good Mexican food was dashed, as the dining options were even more limited than I’d imagined.

Winslow did have a Motel 6, my cheap motel of choice, but I had to convince the young Navajo woman at the desk to rent me a room even though I had no driver’s license.  The unforeseen consequences of a stolen wallet just kept on coming.  I had a picture of my passport on my phone, which I waved desperately in front of her.  She called her boss at home and, after a little explaining, I was in, drowning my sorrows with a beer in my room before falling into bed, exhausted.

Kit Carson was a hero to some

With his poison and his flame

But somewhere there’s a restless ghost

That used to bear his name

 

Studying history at Berkeley, I did my senior thesis on the treaties between the Navajo Indians and the United States, between 1846 and 1868.  A fascinating, little known tale, I threw myself into the project and wrote it from an ethno-historic perspective, describing how the three clashing cultures – Navajo, Hispanic, and Anglo-American – played a critical role in what went wrong.  I loved the project, but I’d never been to the Navajo reservation.  This trip was the perfect opportunity.

Up long before dawn, I made my tailgate coffee in the freezing cold outside the motel.  Next stop was to refuel the car and myself at the massive truck stop – with classic greasy spoon – on the edge of town.  Starving, I ordered the Billy Big Rigger (known as The Lumberjack in wooded locales), with five kinds of meat, three eggs, hash browns, a stack of huge pancakes, and toast.  I had a big day ahead and figured if I drove into a ravine I could live off the calories for days while waiting to be rescued.  The waitress winked and called me “sweetie” and filled my cup after every other sip of coffee.  I was in the friendly, artery-clogged heart of America.

Minutes later, I was on Navajo land, climbing in elevation through rolling grass prairies.  The sky was getting colorful as I made my way northeast toward the center of the reservation, many miles ahead.

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After yet another treaty failed, the Navajo endured a forced exile and 450-mile death march from their ancient homeland in the mid-1860s – the Long Walk – followed by years of internment in a pestilent concentration camp.  Their suffering was so deplorable that eventually even the U.S. government – not known for compassion toward native people – took note and agreed the Navajos could return to part of their native land.  Over the years the reservation has grown to more than 24,000 square miles, in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah – an area larger than nine states, more than twice the size of Massachusetts.

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I was astounded by the striking beauty of the land as I drove for hours to the heart of the reservation, virtually alone on the roads.  Immense, fantastically colored mesas rose up in all directions.  Long valleys extended for many miles.  Each turn in the road brought unique, kaleidoscopic vistas.  The day was gloriously clear and the sky cobalt blue.

The people were scattered far and wide.  Many seemed to live as they had historically: raising crops, and sheep, cattle, and horses that grazed in open pasture land.  Their homes were small but well-kept, often accompanied by a hogan, a small five or seven-sided building traditionally made of wood and mud, now often built with modern materials.

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I didn’t see the abject, grinding poverty that is so obvious on many reservations.  The Navajo people I saw might be “poor” by Anglo-American standards, but – perhaps naively – I thought they could be living a simple life, like their ancestors, doing what they have learned over thousands of years to make a sufficient living in their homeland.  The people I spoke to were unfailingly friendly, kind, and helpful.  I never got so much as a dark or angry look from anyone I encountered.

As I neared the center of the reservation I arrived in the town of Chinle.  Navajo and local pride was displayed on signs and posters around town.  Like the corporate endeavor to sell a bad diet through the few fast food joints I saw on the reservation, the religious effort to “save” the Navajo people – dating back to the 17th century Spanish friars – also remains in full swing.  Little Chinle alone hosts Mormon, Seventh Day Adventist, and Jehovah’s Witness churches, among others.  I was told many Navajo people are members of the Native American Church, known for its ceremonial use of peyote – a practice surely looked upon with dismay by the rigid American sects still vying for Navajo souls.  Nothing is more threatening to dogma and orthodoxy than hallucinogens.

Chinle is the gateway to the vast Canyon de Chelly, a serpentine labyrinth of 700-foot deep sheer rock canyons fanning out many mile to the east.

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I was unprepared for its magnitude and stunning beauty.  From scattered vantage points perched along the top rim the canyon, I could see the fields and orchards far down below, along a frozen stream.  Horses whinnied as they grazed along the valley floor.  The canyon is still home to many Navajo people, and the floor can only be accessed by outsiders on official tours.

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Here and there, ancient Anasazi ruins of stone settlements were visible, built into the cliff-sides to give further protection from enemies.

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The Navajo have lived in the canyon since the beginning of their time, raising crops, peach trees, and livestock in relative safety from their historic adversaries: the Apaches, the Utes, the Pueblo Indians, the Spaniards, the New Mexicans, and, most recently, the Americans.  It was considered impregnable by early American military forces attempting to subjugate the Navajo, who vanished into its deep recesses when pursued.

The canyon was the last refuge for the Navajos when the Americans came to force them into exile.  The Army enlisted frontiersman Kit Carson to root them out by any means necessary.  While in some regards sympathetic to the Navajo and other tribes, Carson nevertheless followed his orders ruthlessly and efficiently.  His troops systematically destroyed the fields in the canyon, chopped down the ancient peach orchards, and drove off the tribe’s livestock.  Wells were poisoned.  The impact on the Navajos of his relentless slash and burn campaign was compounded by an especially brutal winter.  Starving, all but a few who had fled to remote, distant parts were forced to surrender.  The Navajo aptly call this the Fearing Time.

The horrific history of the canyon stood in stark contrast to its astounding beauty.  I felt sadness, and shame, and awe.  I felt the greatest respect for the Navajo people, who survived a cataclysm and returned to their magnificent homeland, working ever since to rebuild their lives and adapt to the alien culture that overwhelmed them.

It was time to move on.  My next stop, the town of Fort Defiance, on the New Mexico border, could be reached either by backtracking then following another two lane highway, or by dirt road directly from the south rim of the Canyon de Chelly.  Since the weather was dry and the high desert scenery so captivating, I decided to take the scenic route and explore.  I’d been told the road could get muddy, but it was clear and cold enough that the snow along the road was frozen.  Reaching the end of the pavement I was pleased to see a smooth, dry dirt road heading southeast.  I was able to drive at thirty-five miles an hour comfortably as the road gradually descended toward Fort Defiance.

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Five miles later, I came over a crest and the road instantly turned muddy except in narrow tracks.  I tried to stay in them and slow without hitting the brakes suddenly, which would have sent me sliding off the road.  Coming to a white-knuckled stop so I could turn around, the back end – in slow motion – fishtailed slightly to the right and came to rest in a slushy gully on the shoulder.

Taking a deep breath, I gently gave it just enough gas so I could, with luck, move forward the three feet I needed to have all four wheels on solid ground.  (Four wheel drive would have done the trick, if I had it.)  But the rear wheels just spun.  I unsuccessfully tried not to think about how remote the road was and that I had not seen a single car on it, or that there was no cell service and it was probably eight miles back to a place that might have a phone.  I tried not to think I was cursed or, more likely, stupid.  Feigning calmness – for my own benefit, since no one else was around – I gathered sage brush and fallen wood and stuffed it under my rear wheels to give them traction to stop spinning in the mud.  It was the right approach, but for all my efforts I got perhaps two inches of forward progress, and was afraid I might instead get the front end into the ditch too.  At least I’d banked up calories at breakfast for this scenario.  I stood there, forlorn, in the middle of the road, my shoes encased in thick red mud, wondering how they said “you’re fucked” in Navajo.

Five minutes later, a big, new truck suddenly appeared, coming over the crest of the hill.  I waved it down and saw it was a Navajo family with a couple of kids.  The young father got out and kindly agreed to pull me back onto the road.  He politely told me to “Go get your tow chain.”  A tow chain – something else to put on the list for future trips.  Maybe they could at least take me to a phone so I could arrange the $500 tow.  I felt more stupid than cursed.

We scratched our heads for a while, then I remembered I had heavy tire chains.  They were long enough and might be strong enough.  I was able to fasten the end of one to the front of my truck, but we couldn’t figure out how to connect it to the back of his.  After some rummaging he found a piece of metal we used to connect a loop in the chain and get it attached.

One slow, steady pull later and I was back on the road.  Thanking them profusely for saving me, I offered him money for his trouble, which he refused with a smile.  Off they went down the road.  I was struck by how these complete strangers treated me so kindly as I blundered my way across their country.

After making the slowest, most careful three-point turn of my life, I was back on the dry stretch of the road, gladly backtracking to Chinle, then on to the eastern boundary of the reservation.

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I passed through Window Rock, the tribal capital and a bustling small town, in an area the Navajo originally called the Center Of The World.  A few miles to the north was Fort Defiance, a place that figured prominently in my Navajo Treaties.  It was a beautiful place the Navajo considered sacred, where they had grazed livestock for hundreds of years.

In 1851 the Americans established their first fort there, in the heart of Navajo country.  They provocatively named it Fort Defiance.  It became a flash point, where troops killed Navajo cattle after the Army prohibited grazing – except for its own cattle.  The fort was attacked twice by large Navajo war parties.  It was abandoned during the Civil War.  Later, after the Navajo were allowed to return home, the Bureau of Indian Affairs put offices there.

Of the towns I’d seen on the reservation, Fort Defiance had a very different feel.  No sign said “Welcome to Fort Defiance,” or even told you that was the name of this place.  Nothing of the old fort remained and the BIA buildings appeared long-abandoned.  Even on a bright clear day, this seemed like a gloomy place, with none of the vitality I’d felt in Window Rock and Chinle.  I could only think that the specter of the Americans’ defiant fort, thrust upon a Navajo sacred place, still hung over the town like a shroud.

Leaving the main reservation, I crossed into New Mexico and rejoined the interstate at thoroughly tawdry Gallup.  Driving through the beautiful high desert toward Albuquerque – incredibly long freight trains running parallel to the freeway – I crossed the Continental Divide and passed through ancient lava flows and Indian reservations.  I could always tell I’d entered a reservation when the screaming billboards and garish roadside attractions suddenly disappeared.  The kid in me was still tempted by every sign hawking “Last Chance Fireworks!”

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In Walter White’s hometown of Albuquerque, a lawyer’s billboard advertised his specialty – suing drunk drivers – surely the easiest slam-dunk in the law.  I headed north, making the short run up to Santa Fe, my evening’s destination.

Native people began living in what is now Santa Fe a thousand years ago.  Six hundred years later – the same year Jamestown was established and thirteen years before the Pilgrims landed – the Spanish founded modern Santa Fe.  Sitting at a crossroads of native, Hispanic, and American cultures, Santa Fe is rich with history.  It has preserved much of its legacy and historic style and has been an artistic center since the early 20th century, home to the likes of Georgia O’Keefe and D.H. Lawrence.

It’s a romantic city too, as I knew all too well, having once spent a glorious time there with a woman I loved.  Her love died – another story for another day – so Santa Fe is, for me, a sad and beautiful place.  But I didn’t linger over old wounds.  I still had red mud to wash off my shoes and I was tired and hungry.

It may be remote, but Santa Fe is a good place to eat.  Crunching through snow on the sidewalks, I headed to the Cowgirl, a lively place where I feasted on New Mexico yak meatloaf and a Belgian style ale made in a local monastery.  From my spot near the front door, I watched the colorful parade of locals pass by.  Santa Fe reminds me of Marin County, in adobe and cowboy boots.

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Pat Garrett rode up to the window that night

And the desert was still and the moonlight was bright

And he listened awhile as the Kid told his tale

Of shooting the guard at the Las Cruces jail

 

Awaking to another clear, cold morning, my first stop was down the street at The Pantry, a seventy year old coffee shop.  The Navajo Taco, with homemade chili and eggs, was just what the doctor ordered.

Ten miles east of Santa Fe, I pulled off the interstate in Apache Canyon, site of a Civil War battle known – with a bit of exaggeration – as “the Gettysburg of the West.”  Along the side of the road was a ramshackle private monument to the fighting that took place there over three days in March 1862.  Confederate troops from Texas had invaded the New Mexico Territory, including present day New Mexico and Arizona, initially driving out the meager union troops.  Their objective was to take the area and move on to take California and its gold and, even more importantly, its Pacific ports.  But the union forces quickly regrouped and returned.  The Battle of Glorieta Pass – of which the fighting at Apache Canyon was a part – spelled the end of the doomed Confederate adventure.  While the actual fighting was largely a draw with significant casualties on both sides, a group of union troops – led by a New Mexican officer who detested the Texans from their previous attempts to wrest control of New Mexico – made an end run around the Confederates and surprised their supply wagons in the rear, destroying everything and scattering the pack animals to the winds.  In that distant place, without hope of re-supply, the Confederates had to beat a hasty retreat back to west Texas.

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Just after sunrise, I had Apache Canyon all to myself.  Climbing a barbed wire fence, I wandered down through the battlefield area, along frozen Deer Creek.  It was hard to imagine a tumultuous battle in this quiet, empty place.  A railroad track ran through the canyon and I found pieces of hard coal along the tracks, from the long-gone days of coal-fired steam engines.  I also came upon the remains of the Santa Fe Trail, first created by the Spaniards in the late 1700s, then used by the Americans until railroads reached Santa Fe in 1880.  One of the most important east-west arteries, it connected Independence, Missouri with Santa Fe – facilitating commerce and immigration across the continent.  But all that remains now are faint, overgrown traces, crisscrossing the railroad tracks that made it obsolete.

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My next stop, a few miles farther into Glorieta Pass, was the Pecos National Historic Park.  I had the place to myself, except for a few surprised cottontails darting across the trail ahead of me.  I walked through piñon, juniper, and ponderosa pine forest to the ruins of the ancient Pecos Pueblo.

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Set on a hill in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, between the Pecos River and Glorieta Creek, the pueblo began in the 14th century.  By the mid-1400s, it had hundreds of structures, reached five stories tall, and was home to 2000 people.  Strategically located in a pass leading east to the vast plains and west to the Pacific, the pueblo was a major trading center.  With the residents as the middlemen, Apache and Comanche Indians of the plains regularly came to trade with Indians of the far west.  Later the Spaniards joined in.  When trading, the plains Indians camped out in a large clearing below and outside the walls of the pueblo, where rings on the ground from their tepees are still visible.

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Before the Spanish arrived, the pueblo’s residents had led a rich spiritual life, in part centered on underground kivas, some of which have been restored at the park.

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The people initially welcomed Spanish conquistador Coronado in the mid-1500s.  Later, they permitted Spanish friars to build a large church and, to some extent, included Christianity into their spiritual life.  But, weary of the Spaniards’ demands, the people at Pecos Pueblo joined an Indian revolt across New Mexico in 1680 that drove the Spanish back to Mexico for decades.  The pueblo’s Catholic priest was killed and the church destroyed by the Indians who had been forced to build it.

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In 1838, tribal warfare and, more significantly, diseases brought by the Spanish forced the last remaining residents to abandon their ancient home and flee to another pueblo 80 miles away.  Only the haunting ruins of Pecos Pueblo remain.

At the visitor center they invited me to tour the major part of the Glorieta Pass battlefield, a few miles down the road behind a locked gate.  Armed with the combination, I headed over through thick forest and had it completely to myself.  The battlefield site was silent except for the sounds of birds and the crunching of snow beneath my feet.  The snow cleaned the last red Navajo dirt from my shoes.

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Here, Union and Confederate troops met in close combat, intermittently falling back to regroup and tend to their casualties before resuming the fight.  A thick forest now, in 1862 it was a clear battlefield, largely deforested for ranching and fueling Santa Fe.  Below a hilltop command position stood the remains of Pigeon’s Ranch, around which the fighting had raged.  An extensive adobe complex built in the late 1840s, by the 1850s and 60s it was the largest stage stop on the Santa Fe Trail, housing dozens of guests and hundreds of horses and mules at a time.

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Once again, it was hard to imagine this tranquil, beautiful place enveloped in pitched battle, in a war that mostly raged a thousand or more miles to the east.

Crossing the upper Pecos River, I headed east and then south toward my next destination, Fort Sumner, where the Navajos had been imprisoned after the Long Walk.  Leaving the mountains, the landscape suddenly changed to barren plains.  The survivors of Carson’s campaign of destruction had been driven mercilessly over hundreds of miles of inhospitable land like this – attacked while they were defenseless by New Mexicans and enemy tribes along the way.  Already weakened by Carson’s bitter campaign, those who could no longer walk were left behind to die, or suffered a more immediate fate at the hands of the soldiers.  This bleak place was so different from the country of the Navajos, who must have believed they were being forced into another world.

The small town of Fort Sumner was appropriately grim.  Its advertised claim to fame is being the final resting place of Billy the Kid – outlaw folk-legend and, in reality, sociopathic thug.  Turning down Billy the Kid Road, I had no interest in visiting the grave site roadside attraction.

Much more significant historically is Fort Sumner’s role as the internment camp for the Navajos and their mortal enemies, the Mescalero Apaches – who were also rounded up at the point of a bayonet and driven to this God-forsaken place.  Given the infamy of what was inflicted on these tribes, I was surprised to find a sprawling, handsome memorial and museum acknowledging and documenting the terrible crime committed there against them.  Virtually the only visitor, I got a personal tour of the entire museum from the memorial’s historian.

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I wandered the grounds along the banks of the Pecos – a place known as the Bosque Redondo when it was the Navajos’ prison.  At one point, near the banks of the river, I came upon a small, solitary headstone in the grass, marking the precise spot where Sheriff Pat Garrett had rid New Mexico of “Billy the Kid.”

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The effect of four years’ incarceration at the Bosque Redondo was devastating to the Navajo.  The plan had been to force them to become sedentary farmers like the Pueblo Indians.  But the tribe’s agricultural efforts all failed: the crops of 1864 and 1865 were destroyed by worms and those of 1866 and 1867 were destroyed by hail and floods.  Demoralized, they did not even plant a crop in 1868.  The nearest source of abundant firewood was twenty-five miles away.  The water made the Navajos sick and was described as “black and brackish, scarcely bearable to the taste.”  The Bosque Redondo was wracked with disease, including a smallpox epidemic that swept through the tribe.  Navajo women were aborting most of their pregnancies.  On top of the natural disasters, the Navajos – who were shot if they left the camp without a pass – were repeatedly attacked by Comanches, Kiowas, and other hostile tribes while imprisoned there.

Between the Long Walk and the four-year internment, a quarter of the entire Navajo tribe died.  Another quarter were held as slaves of the New Mexicans – part of a dark, centuries-long tradition.  Between enslavement by the New Mexicans and death from exile and internment by the Americans, the Navajo people suffered a relative population loss comparable to, if not greater than, what the world’s Jewish population suffered during the Holocaust.

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With a heavy heart, I moved on, heading west across a perfectly flat plain, a few mountains to be seen in the farthest distance.  The prairie grasses were covered with snow; massive cattle grazed here and there.

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My plan was to stop for the night and eat in Socorro, in the Rio Grande Valley.  Dining at the top-rated place in town, in the bowling alley, the Mountain Man Burger – an elk, bison, antelope, wild boar, and venison mixture – was delicious.  But my mood soured when the flea bag Days Inn turned me away because my cards had been stolen.  Disenchanted with Socorro, I kept moving and eventually slept in my truck outside the entrance to my next destination, the ruins of Fort Craig.

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Out in the West Texas town of El Paso

I fell in love with a Mexican girl

Night-time would find me in Rosa’s cantina

Music would play and Felina would whirl

 

After a fitful night’s sleep in the frigid truck, I walked through the Fort Craig Historic Site at dawn, the bracing cold stinging my hands.  Mountain ranges rose up in the distance in all directions.  The smell of creosote bush brought back memories of Death Valley.  I had the ghostly place all to myself.

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Seven miles down dirt roads and a few miles west of the Rio Grande, the ruins of the fort stand alone in the high desert landscape.  Built in 1852 – after the United States had taken New Mexico as spoils of the Mexican War of 1848 – Fort Craig was used for thirty years.  Before the Navajos were subjugated, it was a base for military operations against them and the Apaches, in whose traditional homeland the fort had been built.  After the Civil War, it was at times manned by the buffalo soldiers – African-American cavalry brigades.

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Just a few miles from the fort, the Civil War Battle of Valverde had been fought in 1862.  After heavy fighting with high casualties, the Confederates opted to leap-frog past the Union forces and head north toward Santa Fe.  A month later, they were defeated at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, and retreated to Texas.

Back on the road, I headed south, following a route the Spanish conquistadors called the Jornada del Muerto: the dead man’s journey.  It was a particularly difficult and parched 100-mile stretch heading up the Rio Grande Valley toward Santa Fe.  It was home to the Apaches and their leaders, Geronimo and Cochise.  Turning west up out of the valley, I climbed through rocky foothills, imagining Apache war parties moving along the ridges.

The road snaked up into the mountains.  The landscape changed from juniper to pine forests as I climbed to 8000 foot Emory Pass.

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Descending, I suddenly came upon the vast gash in the earth that is the Chino Mine – one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world.

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Once again crossing the Continental Divide, I pulled into my next destination, the old mining town of Pinos Altos, above Silver City, New Mexico.  Rambling over pine-forested mountains, Pinos Altos was founded when two California 49ers discovered gold nearby. A year later, Apaches led by Cochise launched a major attack on the town, which was defended by Confederate Arizona territorial militia.  The colorful character Roy Bean – later self-proclaimed “Judge” Roy Bean – operated a store in Pinos Altos that supplied the miners.

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Going east again, I headed for the site of the Cooke’s Canyon Massacre.  During the Civil War a 100 warrior strong Apache war party had ambushed and laid siege there to a wagon train of American immigrants.  Literally circling the wagons, the Americans managed to prevent being overrun, but several were killed on both sides and the Apaches made off with the livestock.  Unfortunately, since now on private ranch land, I could only get to within a mile of the actual site.

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Two days after the attack at Cooke’s Canyon, Confederate Arizona militia forces led by Capt. Thomas Mastin surprised the Apache fighters in the nearby Florida Mountains, along the Mexican border.  Most of the livestock was recovered and several of the Apaches were killed.  The Apaches later killed Mastin in their attack on Pinos Altos.

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As I descended back into the southern Rio Grande Valley, the jagged Organ Mountains loomed beyond Las Cruces.

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Pulling into old Mesilla, I walked through the quiet town square full of adobe buildings and a large church.  One adobe had served as capital of the New Mexico Territory.  Later it served as the courthouse where Billy the Kid had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang.  He escaped and fled to Fort Sumner, for his fateful encounter with Pat Garrett.

La Posta de la Mesilla restaurant – my dinner objective – was in a building from the 1840s.  During the 1850s, Roy Bean and his brother Sam operated a transit line from the building, connecting Mesilla with Pinos Altos.  A sign said Kit Carson, Pancho Villa, Billy the Kid, and Douglas MacArthur had all stayed in the building.  The food was nothing special, but the historic adobe building was stunning – as was the long-legged hostess – so I was happy.

Texas was just minutes away.  El Paso seemed sprawling, but it was hard to tell, driving through at night, where El Paso ended and Juarez, Mexico began.  When I reached the far side of town, the speed limit – for all vehicles – jumped to 80 miles an hour.  It helps for making good time in the vast state, but a highway accident in Texas could well be your last.  I finally understood all the Texas billboards I’d seen for lawyers specializing in big rig accidents.

Entering Jeff Davis County, I knew I was crossing from the West to the South.  In Pecos County scores of gas flares from oil wells spread, flickering, across the dark horizon.  By the time I reached Bakersfield, Texas, the stench of sulfur and oil got intense and lasted a full twenty miles.  The smell took me back to my childhood in New Jersey in the 60s, my little brother and I holding our noses every time we passed polluted, industrial Elizabeth on the turnpike.

I pushed past the stench to find a non-toxic rest area where I could get some sleep, finding it as I entered Crockett County.

Te gusta mucho el baile

Y bailas al compass

Te vas hasta Laredo

Y quieres mas y mas

 

After a decent night’s sleep, I drove through vast West Texas.  Hours later I reached the beautiful Hill Country.  The Llano River was full of water; the Little Devil was dry.  Clear spring-fed creeks gurgled along below brilliant white limestone outcroppings.  The hills rolled off in every direction, forested with oak and cypress and pecan trees, interspersed with grasslands and prickly pear.  Deer were plentiful – as were exotic African species grazing behind tall fences, brought to Texas for hunting but now often surviving in greater numbers there than in their native lands.

Twenty miles west of Fredericksburg, I came upon a plaque marking the site of a Kiowa attack on a homestead in 1865.  With troops off fighting the Civil War, conflict with native tribes increased.  In this case, two homesteaders were killed and a number of the women and children were captured.  The captives were taken all the way to Oklahoma before they were eventually found and ransomed back.

Fredericksburg is a well-preserved old town, with street signs in English and German, evidence of the heavy German settlement in the Hill Country.  German bakeries and restaurants dotted the main street.  Traveling south, I took the Old Kerrville Highway, which ran along the Pedernales River, and crossed the Guadalupe River at Kerrville.  On the road to Bandera I went up meandering Verde Creek Road.  After a mile I reached the marker for old Camp Verde.

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Established by the U.S. government in 1855, a year later Camp Verde became home to the Army’s “Camel Corps” – an experiment in using camels as pack animals to cross the inhospitable Great Basin and western deserts.  Coming to Texas with Lebanese handlers – starting a wave of Lebanese immigration to the state – the camels were well-adapted to the task.  But between the onset of the Civil War, and the fact that the camels frightened the other pack animals and were intensely disliked by their American handlers, the project was scrapped in the 1860s.  The remaining camels were sold off, some to the Ringling Brothers.

I drove through scenic ranch country along the Guadalupe River, through tiny Center Point.  In keeping with the Hill Country’s eclectic animal history, a roadside marker commemorated an armadillo farm that had been there for decades, supplying the previously unknown armadillo basket market.

Picturesque Comfort, Texas was established in 1854.  A welcome sign said it was also the “Home Of The Fighting Bobcats And Deer,” an unusual combination of fighting animals.

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In the center of Comfort, I stopped at the “Treue Der Union” monument.  Within the first decade of immigrating to Texas, the Germans were suddenly faced with Texas’ secession from the Union and the Civil War.  Not owning slaves, and not having come to America simply to break away from it, most of the Hill Country Germans opposed secession and supported the Union.  A detested stance to most of the Anglo population, mass hangings of pro-Union German immigrants took place in central and north Texas.  In 1862, sixty-eight mostly German men and boys headed south to try to reach Union forces by way of Mexico, but were intercepted by Confederate home guard forces.  In the “Battle” of the Nueces that followed, forty of the Germans were slaughtered.  Others drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.  Their remains were left unburied.  At the close of the war, Hill Country Germans went to the site of the massacre, gathered the bones they could find, and buried them in Comfort.  They marked the spot with the “Loyalty to the Union” memorial, surely an unusual monument in a former Confederate state.

Once past the Hill Country, I made good time heading east to Houston, my evening’s destination.  Checked into my motel, I waited to hear whether my former love – now friend – who lived there could meet me for dinner.  She could and we had a fine time, as always.  But her offer to let me stay in her guest room – as opposed to her bed – was too hard to bear, so I headed back to the motel with a familiar heartache.

Along the way, I recalled another heartache, to my much younger heart.

During the high school Baja trip, I quickly paired up with a vivacious, adorable girl one year older than me. Debbie and I had been attracted since we met, but it took being on the road, away from home, to get things going.  My diary was detailed for the first three days of the trip, then abruptly stopped cold after I wrote the words: “Debbie and I conserved our body heat together last night on the bus.”  At the Bahia de la Concepción, we built our own structure a slight distance away from the main group.  We hitchhiked to the closest town, nearly forty miles away, to explore and sleep together on a bed in little guest house.  She was on a faster track than I was – reputedly living with a 30 year old.  But I was touched when she looked deep into my eyes one evening and told me I was the first – “the first guy I’ve ever been unfaithful with.”

But my adolescent dream come true soon came to a crashing halt.  A divide between the haves (who could bring some spending money for the trip) and the have-nots had developed.  Debbie and I fell into the haves category.  People had also started losing things in the great pile of stuff that filled the bus – a bus with no seats, so we sat on our packs.  There may have been some jealously because she and I had taken ourselves out of romantic circulation.  Then someone started a rumor that Debbie was the secret sneak thief of all missing items.  With little else to do in the howling wind, our fellow travelers had plenty of time to play telephone with the rumor, which gained traction among the more conspiracy-theory prone.  Later, one of the supposed victims of the thefts announced his stolen money had miraculously reappeared in his wallet, thanks to the “Great Spirit.”  It was a colorful group.

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Debbie’s attention quickly shifted from me – where it rightfully belonged – to dealing with her former friends’ malevolent whisperings.  One evening, at a meeting called around the campfire to address the rumor, she confronted every person in the group, one-by-one insisting they honestly tell her what they thought about her, while looking her right in the eye.  I could tell I was losing a strong girl.

The next morning, she and her best girlfriend disappeared.  We found them a day or two later, when our fishermen friends reported the angry girls were camped on the beach near their fishing camp.  My good thing was over and I was miserable.  I was ready to go when Mike suggested we get off the bus as soon as we crossed the border.

Tipitina tra la la la

Whoa la la la-ah tra la la la

Tipitina, hoola malla walla dalla

Tra ma ti na na

 

After sleeping in for the first time in a week, my sadness had lifted as I drove away from bittersweet memories in Houston.  Just past Texas mile marker 881, I finally entered Louisiana.

Eating at the bar at the Blue Dog Cafe in Lafayette, young Jackie – a petite dark-haired beauty – was my bartender/server.  The gumbo was delicious and Jackie was charming and funny.  We talked about the books we were planning to write.  She told me her boyfriend had broken up with her that very morning.  I told her he really fucked up.  She laughed and said that made her feel better.  To complicate matters, her mother had married the boyfriend’s father.  It had been all the talk of Lake Charles.  I was sorry to leave, but the end of my journey was in sight.  I could feel New Orleans’ gravity pulling me.

Crossing the immense Atchafalaya Basin – the largest wetland and swamp in America – I could be nowhere else but Louisiana.

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Once I fought my way through the typical Baton Rouge traffic, I was only an hour from New Orleans.

There’s something profound about nearing home – even a new home – after a journey.  Perhaps it resonates with the mythic hero’s journey and return.  My return from Baja California with Mike when I was sixteen was no exception.

The travelling salesman in the great white whale took us as far as gritty Stockton.  There we caught a ride with two partiers in a van who were high as kites.  They got us as far as downtown Sacramento.  Waiting for our next ride, we met a pretty girl about our age – also hitchhiking to Marin County – who was coming home from a coke deal at Lake Tahoe.  We joined forces and eventually, around midnight, got a ride to Vallejo – just two counties shy of home.

It was freezing cold as we walked along deserted Highway 37, hoping to find some traffic.  We parked ourselves along the road outside the Josey Wales Country Western Saloon, a honky-tonk where the music was still blaring.  Our traveling companion gave us more whites.  We waited and shivered and ground our teeth.

After an hour, the music stopped and a big car weaved out of the saloon’s parking lot, lurching to a stop just past us.  Two guys were in front and an attractive woman sat in back, all about ten years older than us, in their late 20s.  Mike got in front with the guys and I slid in next to the woman in back, with our new traveling companion next to me.  Fresh from a night of drinking at the saloon, they were friendly and hammered.  They lived in Vallejo but would happily give us a lift all the way to Marin – 30 miles away.  To some, their drunken state, erratic driving, and irrational offer to go so far out of their way might have set off alarm bells.  But to a couple of teenaged fools, they seemed like a Godsend. We could not believe our good fortune.

We did exchange concerned looks when, rather than head to Marin, they suddenly veered off the highway into Vallejo, a rough town.  But once we understood they just wanted to party before heading to Marin, we relaxed and once again realized how lucky we were.  We drank and smoked with them in an apartment for a while, the stereo blasting away.  Then the police came, responding to a well-founded noise complaint.  Somehow the police overlooked the cloud of weed smoke, and the egregious contributing to the delinquency of several minors, and let us off with a warning.  The 70s may have been the last decade for getting away with murder in America.

The party spoiled, we got back in the car to head to Marin.  The alcohol began having its usual effect on Mike, who started needling the guys about being so loud the cops had shown up.  He was a wise ass and expert button-pusher, but his charm was still compensating for it.  Barely.

Meanwhile, the lovely older woman next to me was getting friendlier and friendlier.  When she stirred her drink with my finger, then put it in her mouth and very slowly pulled it out, the pain of my earlier heartbreak disappeared; the world, once again, was a beautiful place.  Sixteen year old boys have short attention spans.

They surprised us again when they pulled in to a 7-eleven before going to Marin.  “We need more beer.”  A valid point, we waited in the car as the guys went in.  While my attention was primarily focused on the miracle woman who couldn’t keep her hands off me, I did notice out of the corner of my eye that something was amiss inside the store.  While the guys stood at the counter loaded down with beer, the Southeast Asian shopkeeper seemed to be yelling and jumping up and down and shaking his head violently, pointing at the clock, which indeed confirmed it was too late to buy beer in California.  Since he would not sell it to them, the guys simply walked out with the beer, jumped in the car, and we took off.

I did not appreciate this intrusion into the romantic moment I was having there in the back seat.  Mike was not happy either and started a steady flow of not-so-thinly veiled insults about the stupidity of robbing a 7-eleven.  We drove on across the marshes of the North Bay, towards Marin.

At four in the morning, we stopped in San Rafael at another convenience store, this time to lawfully purchase cigarettes.  We chatted with the gregarious garbage men who were there, getting ready to start their morning runs.

Other than sensing some tension had developed between Mike and the guys, things seemed to be going well from my lust-addled perspective.  We arrived in Kentfield and dropped our hitchhiking partner off at her house.  Then we headed back north to take Mike and me to our neighborhood in Lucas Valley.  The eastern sky was just beginning to lighten.  The driver asked if we knew a good place in our neighborhood to stop and smoke a joint.  Of course we did, in a secluded spot along a creek at the end of a cul-de-sac, close to Mike’s house.

We got our bags from the trunk.  She didn’t want to smoke, so I had to say farewell to my new love, getting a long, passionate kiss from her as she slipped a note into my hand.  I dreamily followed the other guys down into the creek.  To my astonishment, one of them suddenly pointed to the other and angrily accused me of “fucking with his old lady.”  I’d assumed they were just friends, or maybe siblings, out for an innocent night on the town.  Caught by surprise, Mike and I got a short but severe beating.  My misunderstanding about the woman was the official reason, but they went after Mike much harder.  People did tire of his sharp tongue.

Having better protected my most vulnerable parts, I was up off the ground as soon as our former friends struggled up the hill to their car and drove away.  But Mike was knocked unconscious and starting to have an asthma attack as he lay in the dark creek bed.  I woke him up after a few panicky minutes and his asthma attack stopped.  He was furious as he came to his senses, saying we would be going to Vallejo to find them and burn their house down with them in it.  I assured him we would do that right away (thinking that at least I could call the phone number she had slipped me).

Back on the street we got to our bags.  Mike bent down and picked up several unfamiliar items, held them over his head triumphantly, and announced, “At least I stole their shit!”

After leaving bleeding Mike at his house, I had a half mile to walk to mine.  The sun was just starting to rise, like the welts on my head.  It had been a twenty hour ordeal to make the seven hour trip from LA.  We’d been stranded in Bakersfield, and beaten within an inch of our lives and a mile of our homes.  The whole trip to Baja had in many ways been a slow-moving disaster of hunger, wind, strife, and heartbreak.  But as I walked home I was profoundly happy.  Not because I was going home, but because I had a true adventure and came back more of a man.  Despite formidable adversity, I had survived, and adapted, and loved, and been a useful member of our group.  I had experiences that would be part of me as long as I lived, experiences that make life rich.

My trip through the Southwest to New Orleans, where I now live, was a simpler affair.  But it also marked a profound transition, from personal and professional upheaval to the promise of creating a new, truer life for myself in a new place.  My journey felt like the opening chapter in a book that is yet to be written.

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Copyright © Daniel W. Hager, 2015.  Quoted song lyrics: “Truckin,” by Bob Weir, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Robert Hunter; “Willin’,” by Lowell George; “Kit Carson,” by Bruce Cockburn; “Billy the Kid,” by Woody Guthrie; “El Paso,” by Marty Robbins; “Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio,” by Santiago “Flaco” Jimenez; “Tipitina,” by Professor Longhair.

Elvis Has Left The Building

Silver bells, silver bells
It’s Christmas time in the city
Ring-a-ling, hear them ring
Soon it will be Christmas day

For many years – since the kids were little – it’s been a family tradition to spend Christmas Eve eating dinner in Chinatown at the House of Nanking, across Kearny Street from Francis Ford Coppola’s patina green flatiron building at the corner of Columbus Avenue. In the early years the place wasn’t too crowded on Christmas Eve, just us and a scattering of Jews, Buddhists, and proto-hipsters. The owner usually took over the ordering process, bringing us a table full of family-style surprises in addition to a few favorites we asked for. We liked the food and took perverse pleasure in the minimal service, mostly intended to turn over the tables with new customers as fast as possible.

In the early days the place was tiny and there was always a line out the door. Eventually they expanded into an adjoining space, but the lines of people waiting to get in never went away. But even waiting in line was part of the fun. We loved the Chinese dive bar two doors down, with the tattered green awning promising that was “Where Good Friends and Girls Meet.” Over many years, we never saw a single female in the establishment.

We met others in line, often from around the world after the place got written up in the tour books. We met colorful local characters, like Tony Baloney, who good-naturedly sang and entertained the kids while we waited our turn inside. This year, a woman came up with two pit bulls on leashes, wearing sweaters. She described the very friendly female as the jiggy one; the dour male seemed decidedly less jiggy. The female was all over everyone, licking and wagging her tale. The lady said for the right contribution either could be ours to keep. We passed, though my eldest son made a small donation to the dog food fund.

The line this year was especially slow and the restaurant was packed. As we arrived, I saw a drunk had latched on to a group of young people right ahead of us in line. We tried to will him away from us by avoiding eye contact, but when the kids ahead of us ignored him sufficiently, he turned to us. He was nursing a can of Foster’s in one hand and a cigarette in the other, which kept flying out of his grasp onto the sidewalk. He was blond and thin, maybe in his early fifties but he could have been younger given the effects of alcoholism. His nose had clearly borne the brunt of past interactions gone wrong. He was talkative and labile, his mood turning on a dime from friendly to vaguely hostile. He wasn’t talking gibberish, but he wouldn’t shut up and his topics veered off suddenly, in unexpected and unwanted directions.

He first focused on Cynthia, who was particularly uninterested in gaining a new friend.  When he touched her shoulder she told him in no uncertain terms that she “would be much happier if he never touched her again.” He backed off and started trying to engage me and our three twenty-something kids. We did our best not to engage, but he was relentless and ignoring him seemed to rile him up and focus on us more intensely. The kids spoke to him kindly and calmly, but tried not to get into a conversation. I tried to get him to leave them alone by focusing on me instead.

Always standing too close, he said his name was Elvis Christ. He bragged about being “the King of the North Beach poets.” He said he put his poetry on masking tape then taped it to the sidewalks of North Beach. I was surprised, because I’d actually seen his poetry on the sidewalks for years. He dropped names of his “friends” in the neighborhood, like legendary hippie criminal defense lawyer Tony Serra, and Paul Kantner, founder of the Jefferson Airplane. It seemed like he’d once been intelligent, before drinking himself into his present sorry state. At times he talked nonsense. Another time he leaned in to me and told me I’d accomplished the best thing a man could accomplish, raising three great kids. I couldn’t disagree with him on that one, but it stayed painfully awkward and unpleasant as the line moved at a snail’s pace.

In a moment of clarity, he finally told me and the kids he was so drunk he was about to start “acting retarded,” and since he was going to do that with us or away from us, he was going to bid us adieu. We gave him sincere goodbyes and he weaved away from us, across Kearny.

Unfortunately, his “retardedness” kicked in the instant he crossed the street. He made a 180 degree turn and barreled right back to us. This time he focused in on my daughter, who studiously ignored him as he babbled at her. His mood turned ugly again and he got so close to her that I pushed him away. My daughter wisely told me not to touch him, but my instincts as the elder male in our little tribe urged me to keep him away. He got very hostile and started shouting that she was an “ugly lesbian.” Cynthia took out her phone and told him she was calling the police if he didn’t get away. That didn’t calm him down and he encouraged – almost dared – her to do it. She did. My youngest son told him very calmly it wasn’t going to end well for him and that he should just walk away. But trying to talk sense to the very drunk is usually a waste of breath, and it was here.

The scene at this point was getting so ugly – and so close to violence – that the manager of the restaurant took notice and moved the line into the restaurant itself, locking the door behind us. Evil Elvis cursed and shouted obscenities at us through the windows.

Moments later we were at a table on the far side of the restaurant from the door, taking some deep breaths. Within a few minutes a police cruiser rolled up across the street and they were talking to him. But since he hadn’t assaulted anyone, and apparently got his act together enough talking to the cops to avoid a drunk and disorderly charge, he walked away and the police drove off.

That bit of ugliness behind us, we tried to calm ourselves down and ordered.  It had been traumatic, but nothing that a beer and a plate of Nanking Chicken couldn’t soothe.

As we waited for the food to arrive, the waiter brought a pile of six plates and forks, stacking them by me at the end of the table. Moments later, my family members sitting across from me – looking into the restaurant – went pale as I heard a commotion behind me, getting louder. In an instant, Christ’s evil twin was standing next to me, picking up the pile of plates in a threatening way and screaming at Cynthia that she’d turned him in to the police. As I rose from my chair – grasping the beer bottle I intended to apply to his head – a young guy in his early twenties at the table right behind us leapt out of his chair and lunged at him, sending our attacker flying end-over-end in the middle of the packed restaurant. Dazed, drunken Elvis sputtered as he tried to untangle himself from a pile of overturned chairs, while we shouted at him to get out of the restaurant. Slightly cowed but still crazy drunk, he gradually made his way back through the restaurant, towards the door, shouting at us all the while.

Throughout all of this, the restaurant staff went about their business feigning complete ignorance of the ungodly scene that had just taken place right before their eyes. At first I was angry they hadn’t intervened to protect their patrons, but I figured they probably felt, not unreasonably, that they weren’t paid enough to put themselves in harm’s way. After the cops returned, Cynthia talked with them and they agreed to at least hold him in the drunk tank so we could eat our dinner in peace and walk to our cars unmolested.

The heroic young guy and his mother finished their meal and headed out past us. We thanked him profusely for coming to our aid and he humbly said we were welcome. When we thanked his mother for raising such a fine young man, she said it made her nervous “every time he did that.”  So this was not his first rescue operation. I’d wondered why he was wearing tights and a cape.

We were all flustered, to say the least, but the Chinese comfort food did its magic and we calmed down, agreeing it had at least been a memorable night. As they say, “any Christmas Eve you can walk away from is a good one.”

Trouble in Mind

If things don’t get better

I’m going down to the river

I’m gonna take my old rocking chair

And if the blues overtake me

I’m gonna rock on away from here

To relieve the daily stress of my work as a lawyer, I early on took to using my lunch break for long walks from my office in San Francisco’s Financial District – down to the Ferry Building to walk along the Embarcadero and the bay, up Russian Hill, or through North Beach up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower, then down the Filbert Street steps by the old cottages reachable only by foot, flocks of wild parrots squabbling in the lush trees around me.

I took in the chaotic scenes in the markets of Chinatown, old women elbowing each other aside in their quest for tonight’s vegetables, while their husbands gambled at games of Go for hours in Portsmouth Square.  Intense chess matches at the Powell Street cable car turnaround, while young drug dealers did their thing nearby at the entrance to the Muni station.  People of all kinds relaxing in the grass on a sunny day in Washington Square Park, the smell of garlic and the sound of voices speaking Italian in the air.  Young ballerinas walking briskly to and from rehearsals around the Civic Center.  It was a colorful feast for all my senses.

As a music lover, I was especially lucky to come across street musicians busking for spare change.  They ran the gamut, from young classical musicians playing violins and cellos in the BART stations, to the middle-aged jazz sax virtuoso playing Coltrane on a dark, empty street corner, to the woman in a silver spacesuit who sang in a high, reedy voice about subjects only she could understand.  Once I passed through Justin Herman Plaza just in time to catch U2’s last note in a surprise appearance, wondering who had vandalized the Vaillancourt Fountain with black spray paint.  It was Bono, who was cited that evening for “malicious mischief.”

Approaching the cable car turnaround at the foot of California Street one day, I heard blues music that instantly caught my attention, and only sounded better and better as I got closer.  I made my way through the large crowd of office workers, bike messengers, and tourists to see who was making such beautiful, soulful music.

They were a couple.  She was a strikingly beautiful black woman, probably in her late-forties, standing tall and smiling broadly while she played the bass, singing in a rich, deep contralto.  You could feel the joy and the pain in her words.  Her partner was a white man maybe a few years older, sitting before a pared down drum kit, kicking the bass drum and high hat pedals while he played electric guitar and a harmonica on a neck rack.  He played and sang with a growling vengeance, from somewhere very deep down.  With slicked back graying hair, he had blue eyes and a gold tooth.  Not the smiling type, he looked like a man who’d done some time.  He reminded me of Neil Young if he’d lived his whole life on the streets.

Their songs told hard, sometimes violent, stories but – as the blues have always done – spoke of survival and overcoming hardship in a way that soothed the soul.  The crowd was entranced and beaming as the pair powered through classics like Sweet Home Chicago.  Their cardboard tip box was overflowing.  They introduced themselves as the Chicago Blues Brother and Sister, recently arrived from that city.  Knowing a bit of the history of Chicago blues, and having loved seeing blues shows there at Kingston Mines, I knew right away these two were the real deal.  I stayed as long as I could then left a few of dollars in the box, enjoying the warm thank you I got from the lovely bass player.  I smiled myself all the way back to the office.

blues brother sister

They disappeared for fairly long periods, but they always returned and I fortunately ran into the Blues Brother and Sister many times over the next seven or eight years.  They blew me away and lifted my spirits every time.  I bought a cassette tape they were selling once and played it back home for my family.  I thought we should have a party and hire them to play, though I wondered about the interesting interaction between them and us and our suburban Marin County friends, so very far removed from scraping by on the streets by playing the blues.

They intrigued me.  She often looked profoundly sad, and maybe a little frightened.  He seemed dark and intense.  As I tend to do, I spun out in my head what I thought their story might be.  It was not a healthy relationship, probably living just a half step off the streets.  I imagined him as controlling and abusive.  I imagined both of them living with alcoholic and other chemical demons.  He didn’t always treat her right, by a long shot, but she stayed with him – or left and came back – and their self-destructive dance went on and on, spiraling ever downward.  I hoped I was wrong, but had a feeling my imagination was, this time, probably not too far off the mark.

I hadn’t seen them in quite a while when I was walking through Fort Mason one afternoon with my oldest son, a blossoming young bass player himself.  I heard their music wafting our way from down below, at Fisherman’s Wharf.  Excitedly, we followed the sound to Ghirardelli Square and there they were, out in front, playing as always to a big crowd.  They looked haggard, but that’s not necessarily a bad state for playing the blues – at least from the listener’s perspective.  I was so glad my son finally got to see these people play the music I’d been talking about for years.

That was the last time I ever saw them.

A year or so later I was reading the paper on my way to the office on the Larkspur ferry.  Buried in the back pages of the Chronicle, a small article caught my eye.

S.F. Man Held In Death of Girlfriend Found In Bay

San Francisco police arrested a man on suspicion of killing his girlfriend, whose body was found floating in San Francisco Bay near Treasure Island last week, police said Wednesday.

Bruce Brooks, 52, faces homicide charges for allegedly killing Juliette Williamson, 50, police said.  Someone phoned police May 17 and reported that a woman had been killed in San Francisco and her corpse had been dumped in the bay, police said.  The body was discovered by the U.S. Coast Guard last week.  Police have no motive for the slaying at this time.

Brooks and Williamson lived in San Francisco and played in a blues band called Chicago Brothers and Sisters.  Williamson, whose stage name was Juliette Valentine, crooned such tunes as “Everyday I have the Blues” and “Trouble in Mind.”

My blood ran cold as a terrible chill ran down my spine.  Taking no comfort in having been so near the truth in my ruminations about their story, I felt unspeakably sad for her and my tears flowed.

They had both seemed haunted, and they were.  He had beaten her to death with a hammer in a drunken rage during a violent argument – one of many between them.  Serving fifteen years to life for her murder, he still professes his love and writes songs about her from prison.  The tragedies recounted in the blues are often true.

I think of them often as I walk through San Francisco, passing the spots where they used to play.

 

Copyright © 2014, Daniel W. Hager. All Rights Reserved.

Striped Bass Between Storms

Erik and I have been great friends and fishing buddies since we were in our early teens. Year before last we bought fishing kayaks.  The last time we fished the mouth of the Petaluma River, where it flows into San Pablo Bay, was about three weeks ago.  Neither of us had anything even resembling the slightest hint of a tiny nibble all day long.  The tides had been huge, sending brown, muddy water rushing up and back from the bay.  The rains up to that point had been negligible.  We hoped last week’s heavy storms might have done the trick to wake up the sturgeon and send them and striped bass up river.

After I stopped to get some live ghost shrimp and a couple of live mudsuckers for bait, we met at 8:30 at the boat launch under the Highway 37 overpass.  It was low tide, so we could fish all of the incoming tide and some of the outgoing.  We had our kayaks in the water in ten minutes.  While a lot of rain had fallen, the water was a deep green.

ghost shrimp    5b-longjaw mudsucker

We headed east three tenths of a mile, to just off the upstream side of the railroad trestle across the river, then dropped anchor.  The anchors held against the strong tide, pointing us upstream.  We cast out, hooks baited with ghost shrimp and held to the bottom with a sliding six ounce weight.  Fortunately, the red and Dungeness crab had not yet appeared this far up the bay, so our bait remained unmolested and alluringly available.  We leaned our rods on the PVC pipe rod-holders Erik had designed, so they would hold still while we waited for the gentle pulls of sturgeon or the quick hits of stripers.

Before long we were both getting hits from small striped bass, as schools moved up river.  I hooked and landed a striper, 16 inches and too small to keep.  But things were already looking much better than our last attempt.

Throughout the morning we heard splashes behind us, around the railroad trestle, but thought they were probably waves slapping against the pilings as the tide rushed through.  When the small striper bites diminished and the tide got close to high, I decided to head to the other side of the railroad trestle.  Bass often like to hide out under the trestle, facing into the current, lying in wait for food to swim by.  My plan was to move slowly along that side of the trestle, drifting a live mudsucker along the bottom on my light action rod, in hopes a striper would dart out and grab it as it passed by.

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But as soon as I rounded the corner of the railroad trestle, I realized the splashing we’d been hearing was actually striped bass violently striking bait right on the surface.  There were swirls and tail slaps large and small all around me.  I quickly removed my weight and started casting the mudsucker to the swirls.  I thought a lure might be better, and while I paused to think which one to use – with my mudsucker swimming around on the surface two feet from my kayak – a striper helped himself to it with a fast, strong tug, managing to avoid the hook.

Quickly, I put on a 4-inch white fluke swimbait attached to a very large hook, with no weight.  Maneuvering my kayak so the current wouldn’t push it under the railroad trestle, I started sight casting to the swirls, letting it sink only slightly, then twitching it back just under the surface.  On the second cast, a nice striper hit it hard and started pulling out line, darting this way and that, and sharply bending my light rod.  Pulling it into my kayak, it was about 22 inches long and later weighed in at 4 ½ pounds.  A keeper, I gave it a quick knock on the head so it wouldn’t spike me with the long, sharp spines on its dorsal fins.  I do, eventually, learn from my mistakes.  No time for putting it on a stringer because the feeding frenzy on the surface was continuing, but could stop any minute; I kept casting to the swirls and maneuvering my kayak against the slowing tide.  I wished I’d brought my fly rod, knowing the stripers would have hammered big bright streamers.

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I had many strikes and lost a couple before I caught another 16 incher, then landed a 20 inch keeper.  I thought I could pin this one against the side of my kayak with my leg, so I didn’t take the time to dispatch it, and kept on casting.  A few minutes later, the fish executed a beautiful leap straight up and out of the kayak and back into the river as I watched helplessly.  I had to admire his survival instinct and laugh.  Already having a fish big enough for dinner made it easier to be magnanimous.

As soon as the tide started running in the opposite direction, the surface feeding came to a screeching halt.  I moved around to the other side of the railroad trestle, hoping the bass had just taken their show on the road so they could again face into the current.  It was quiet at first, but soon the surface feeding resumed.  I lost a couple in the fast moving current of the very large outgoing tide, and had trouble with snags on the trestle and in keeping myself from being pushed into the pilings.

After a while Erik gave the signal it was time to head back.  In twenty minutes we were back ashore, stowing our kayaks and gear, in high spirits after a fine day on the river.  With more rain – expected this week – sturgeon as big as 10 feet long should start moving up and down the river with the tides.  Erik and I will be there to greet them.

On Monterey Bay

It was early November, but the weather was warm and sunny.  The marine forecast for the next day called for calm seas.  For various reasons – none of them good enough – I hadn’t been out fishing in my kayak for quite a while.  So I readied my gear and excitedly set my alarm for 5 a.m.

As dawn broke, the sixty mile drive to Santa Cruz was fast and picturesque – down the Peninsula past the beautiful reservoirs filled with Hetch Hetchy water from Yosemite, following the contour of the San Andreas Fault, then winding up and over the Santa Cruz Mountains.  I sang along with some favorite music as I drove, happily embarked on my day’s adventure.

In the early morning light I passed the now-quiet Santa Cruz Boardwalk as I made my way to the harbor to the south.  After a quick stop for supplies at a decent tackle shop just a block from the harbor, I readied my kayak and fishing gear, pulling on my wetsuit to keep me warm and, perhaps, alive if something went badly wrong.

The launching site at the harbor is about a quarter mile in from the bay.  Passing a huge dredging rig, I quietly made my way to the narrow mouth of the harbor, over some mild swells, and into Monterey Bay.  The forecast was right – the sea was very calm, with gentle two-foot swells spaced far apart.  My plan was to head south about two miles, to fish in and around the kelp forest off Soquel Point.  Once out of the harbor I trolled a blue Rapala minnow as I made my way toward my destination.  I wasn’t sure what might be interested in it, but figured it couldn’t hurt.

Within ten minutes I heard a familiar whooshing sound to my right, turned and saw water spouting into the air.  A moment later the whale breached the surface – no more than thirty yards from me – moving quickly northward.  Always a good sign, at a safe distance.

As I approached the first kelp beds, the sea lions, harbor seals, and sea otters appeared in great numbers.  Sea otters tend to stare.  Sea lions pop their heads up for a look, dive, and then pop back up to take another look from a different vantage point.  I’ve had them pop up so close to my kayak that it gives us both a good scare.  Sea lions can be pesky stealing fish off your line, but I still find them enjoyable fishing companions.  The otters are particularly fun to be around in their home environment, sometimes tying themselves to the kelp while they nap.  They’re curious and playful.

About a quarter mile off Soquel Point, I rigged a large rubber jig below two feather jigs baited with a little squid and dropped it to just off the bottom, about forty feet deep.  I hoped to entice a big lingcod out from the kelp to take the large jig, or to get a rockfish to take one of the smaller jigs.  As I drifted I quickly lifted my rod then let it sink back down, yo-yoing.  The mild swell pushed me very gradually toward the shore.  I had to be careful of snags as I drifted over the kelp.  In short order I lost my entire rig when it got hopelessly snagged.  I rigged a new set up, with a two ounce weight below two dropper loops each with a hook baited with squid.   I dropped it carefully between kelp plants.  When the kelp piled up on the surface I could let the kayak drift over it, then be held in place by the kelp as I fished around the edges.  But nothing was biting.

I moved back offshore, just outside the kelp beds.  Using a metal jig that looked like an anchovy, I jigged up and down, between twenty and forty feet deep.  At Soquel Point, where the bay turned in towards the east, I hoped to encounter a White Sea Bass, turning the corner as it made its way along the coast.  Recent reports said sea bass up to sixty pounds had been caught in the area.

I’ve never caught one, and they’re high on my list.  But they’re elusive and mysterious – sometimes called ghostly – as they seemingly appear out of nowhere, then vanish.  One of my best, oldest fishing buddies and I have gone after them twice on multi-day trips out of San Pedro Harbor in L.A., out to Catalina and San Clemente Islands.  Sea bass were caught on only one of those trips (and not by us), when a school appeared suddenly.  Nine were hooked simultaneously and six – each five to six feet long – were landed after brutal fights.  Then they abruptly disappeared.

San Francisco Bay was full of White Sea Bass – until they were devoured by hungry Forty-Niners during the Gold Rush.  They were gone from the Bay for one hundred years.  Their ecological niche was filled by Striped Bass, brought to San Francisco Bay from the east coast in train tankers.  Fortunately, White Sea Bass have recently begun to re-appear in the Bay in small numbers.

I did nothing to deplete their numbers on this fine November day.  The ghosts left me alone.

But the kelp did not.  In making my way through the kelp beds I apparently caught a long strand in my rudder.  Trying to work it loose by raising and lowering the rudder, I managed to snap the plastic pin that holds the rudder in place.  My kayak is propelled by an ingenious foot pedal system that operates flippers underneath the boat.  When the rudder is working, I control it with a small handle at my left hand, while I pedal along at a good clip, with my hands free to fish.  I only use my paddle if the water is too shallow for the flippers.  But now I’d lost my steering mechanism at the furthest point out.

The weather and sea being so calm, I wasn’t worried.  But I knew it would be slower going on my way back to the harbor, needing to use my paddle alternately on one side then the other to keep me moving more or less straight as I pedaled.  And since I hadn’t had a bite, I figured I might as well start fishing my way back.

Between the Point and the harbor I’d passed some sandy stretches I thought might hold halibut.  When I reached a likely spot about half way to the harbor, I drifted again, first trying to catch some live bait.  I set up a Sabiki rig – a series of six very small hooks spanning about five feet of line up over a weight.  Each hook has a bit of plastic material to make it look like a shrimp or other tiny creature.  On each hook I added a small piece of squid to, hopefully, make them irresistible.

Once again, no bites at first.  But I was joined by a female seagull that flew in and landed not six feet from my kayak – just watching every move I made.  She wasn’t the slightest bit skittish and kept me company for hours.  I shared my squid with her.  Clearly she’d had good experiences with kayak fisherman in the past.

I started getting taps on the Sabiki rig – two very small rockfish and a sand dab.  The next time, two small croakers.  Suddenly, I got strong hits.  As I reeled up, a fish, maybe fifteen inches long, was pulling hard and diving under the kayak.  It was a jacksmelt – long and slender, but very strong for its size – shining silver with a bright yellow spot over each gill.  After releasing the fish, I dropped my rig to the bottom again and within seconds had another on.  As I brought it up, in the last fifteen feet of crystal clear water I could see an entire school attacking the Sabiki rig, lunging in and darting away.

For the next two hours I did nothing but catch and release dozens of jacksmelt.  Sometimes I had more than one on my line at a time.  Often they jumped more than a foot out of the water, after streaking back and forth in the water, fighting with all their might.  I was amazed at how hard they fought for their size, and some of them reached twenty inches long.  The schools were thick and watching them go after my line all the way up to the surface was a joy to behold.

When I finally caught a small one – about the size of a large anchovy – I rigged it live to my other rod and let it bounce along the sandy bottom, in hopes of attracting a halibut.  What it caught was a keeper size olive rockfish, which swallowed the jacksmelt whole.  On a small anchovy I caught a larger rockfish.  My dinner was taken care of.

And so was the seagull’s.  Still close by my side, she seemed perplexed I was just letting so many jacksmelt go free.  I thought the smelt were pretty large for a gull to eat, but I knocked one senseless and tossed it to the gull.  In three quick swallows the entire fish vanished.  Unfazed, the gull stared me down until I fed her another.  And another.  And another.  I stopped after four, not wanting the bird to explode.  Seagulls are apparently an enormous mouth and wide throat atop a huge stomach.

At one point during the smelt fishing frenzy, an immense flock of small sea birds – thousands upon thousands of them – located a school of baitfish fifty yards to my right and descended on them.  Their screaming and the fluttering of their wings as they landed and took flight over and over again was nearly deafening.  One moment the tremendous flock would appear bright white from the late afternoon sun shining on their undersides; then the flock would change direction and instantly turn black as coal.

Chuckling to myself at my good fortune, I kept catching jacksmelt until I could catch no more.  Contentedly, I finally bid adieu to my gull and resumed my trip back to the harbor as the sun started dipping toward the horizon.  No glamorous sea bass or halibut, but it had been a memorable day in a fine, wild place.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2014

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass free music festival (www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com/2014/) is one of my favorite events of the year and it’s happening next weekend – Friday 10/3 through Sunday 10/5 – in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.  There are a multitude of great performers on many stages in a beautiful setting.

I thought I’d share my plan of attack for this year.  When a second band appears in parenthesis that’s my second choice at that time.  Sometimes you have to make hard choices.  Enjoy!

FRIDAY OCT 3

  • 1:15pm Buckwheat Zydeco [Arrow Stage];  (The Waybacks [Banjo Stage])
  • 12:00pm Peter Rowan’s Twang An’ Groove [Banjo Stage]
  • 2:40pm John Prine [Banjo Stage] (2:45pm Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin with The Guilty Ones [Star Stage])
  • 4:00pm Cibo Matto with Nels Cline [Arrow Stage]
  • 4:30pm Lucinda Williams [Star Stage]

SATURDAY OCT 4

  • 1:25pm: The Time Jumpers Featuring Vince Gill, Kenny Sears, Dawn Sears and Ranger Doug Green [Banjo Stage]
  • 2:10pm: Justin Townes Earle [Star Stage]
  • 2:45pm: Holler Down The Hollow: A Hardly Strictly Salute To the Masters (Dickens, Hellman, Reed, Scruggs, Seeger, Watson & Winchester) [Banjo Stage]
  • 3:55pm: Mavis Staples [Star Stage]
  • 5:30pm: Robert Earl Keen [Rooster Stage]
  • 5:45pm Steve Earle & The Dukes [Banjo Stage]; (Chris Isaak [Star Stage])
  • 6:15pm The Flatlanders Featuring Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock [Arrow Stage]

SUNDAY OCT 5

  • 11:00am Malawi Mouse Boys [Banjo Stage]
  • 11:40am Jimmie Dale Gilmore [Bandwagon Stage]
  • 1:25pm Jerry Douglas Presents Earls of Leicester [Banjo Stage]
  • 2:45pm Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys [Banjo Stage]; (Chuck Prophet & the Mission Express [Rooster Stage])
  • 3:40pm Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn [Towers Of Gold Stage]
  • 4:00pm T Bone Burnett [Rooster Stage]
  • 5:20pm Dwight Yoakam [Towers Of Gold Stage]
  • 5:45pm Emmylou Harris [Banjo Stage]
  • 6:10pm Bruce Cockburn [Star Stage]

Wind and Wilderness

Trying to fish this year in and around the San Francisco Bay has been one long, frustrating battle with seemingly incessant wind.  With diabolical regularity it churns the generally shallow water of the bay into a light chocolate mess, making the water rough enough to keep any kayaker without a death wish on shore, cursing.  It’s been so bad I avert my eyes from the gloomy conditions when I’m near the bay.  And the “experts” have shared a depressing prognostication, saying “get used to it” because stronger winds in these parts may be a feature of our climate change.

So far, only a handful of good fishing days on the bay this year stand out.  The year showed promise when, fishing with my brother in early March, I caught my first striper out of an inlet north of Coyote Point in Burlingame leading into a recovering marsh right next to Highway 101.  It hit a large Rapala X-Rap medium diving lure just as I was about to pull it out of the water.  A few casts later, a big striper turned on my lure in exactly the same spot, but didn’t take the lure.

3.4.14

May was a successful month.  Most notable was the day before my birthday, on a party boat out of Berkeley at the invitation of my friends Joel and Val, owners of the former – and deeply missed – bait shop at Port Sonoma.  Despite strong winds, I caught a big ling cod (two weeks before it became legal to keep them) bouncing small live anchovies off the bottom, on the eastern side of Angel Island, a seven pound halibut – my first ever – drifting with the incoming tide just east of Alcatraz, and three eight to ten pound stripers in repeated short drifts in raging currents in Raccoon Straights, between Tiburon and Angel Island.  This was certainly the stand out day so far this year.

5.6.14.striper.3.cropped  5.6.14.striper.1.cropped

When the wind miraculously showed mercy on another day in May, I ventured out with my kayak into San Pablo Bay from McNear’s Beach Park, in San Rafael on the way out to China Camp.  Armed with 18 live ghost shrimp, I anchored and bottom fished in the strong incoming tide about a quarter mile off of tiny Rat Rock island.  In about five hours I landed 200 to 300 pounds of eagle bat rays (several in the 50+ pound range), leopard sharks and assorted varieties of dogfish and smooth hound sharks, and a keeper-sized striper.  The rays are incredibly fun to catch from my kayak, making fast, long, powerful runs, and turning the kayak on the anchor as they get close.  One I never saw was so large it made an incredibly fast run and snapped my heavy tackle.  They can reach 100 pounds or more.  And getting up close and personal enough to get them off the hook – wings slapping water in your face, long tail with barbed stinger switching in your direction, sinister eyes staring you down – is not for the faint of heart.  But I let them all off with a warning – except the striper, which provided a delicious fish taco dinner for three.  It was a very good day and well worth the sore arms the next morning.

BatRay_A

But the wind drove me away from the bay.  Escaping, I made a May weekend run up to beautiful Iron Canyon Reservoir, in the mountain woods of Shasta County, miles up a terrible road above the hamlet of Big Bend on the Pit River.  The water levels at Iron Canyon can change dramatically in the course of a single day depending on hydroelectric needs.  There’s an input from higher lakes (“the pipe”) that, when it’s on, creates an upwelling making incredibly productive rainbow and brown trout fishing in a cyclonic current.  Unfortunately, the water level that day was as high as I’d ever seen and the pipe was turned off.  From my kayak, in the morning I did manage to catch two respectable rainbows on night crawlers under a bobber at the pipe.  Then, trolling a gold Castmaster lure off a point my brother and I have had good luck at in the past, I caught another.  While the fishing was slow by Iron Canyon standards, the scenery was stunning, with bald eagles fishing from the sky and trout jumping all around me.

mcloud kayak

I saw no more than six other fisherman all day and no one else – except two flak jacketed, heavily armed sheriff’s deputies who woke me from an afternoon nap I was taking next to my kayak.  Ostensibly polite, they asked me countless questions, demanded to see my ID and fishing license, and searched my ice chest.  They even ran the good cop/bad cop routine while questioning me.  What they found the slightest bit suspicious about a 55-year-old fisherman napping on a spring afternoon on the banks of a remote mountain lake, I will never know.  But I had the distinct impression they were trying their best to find any reason to bust me.  I miss the days when police seemed more interested in keeping the peace and being a helpful presence, rather than treating everyone they encounter like a criminal and adversary.

One mid-July day the wind on the coast was lighter than the wind on San Francisco Bay.  I headed my kayak into the Pacific out of Half Moon Bay in search of ling cod and rockfish in the kelp forest just south of The Mavericks.  Just a few months earlier there had been 50-foot waves for the annual big wave surfing competition, but the sea was glassy calm now.  About a half mile off the outer Pillar Point harbor jetty, my plan to first catch some live bait worked out, but the lings and rockfish were not interested.  A dolphin swam by at one point and I later found myself in the middle of a school of anchovies jumping wildly all around me.  In hopes they were trying to escape predators from below, I feverishly cast my Yo-Zuri minnow lure into the churning school of bait fish, but got no takers.  Later, I heard that a guy fishing slightly farther out the same day in a larger boat caught a salmon and two white sea bass – of 46 and 53 pounds.  The serenity of my own Pacific outing was not disturbed by such goings on.

dolphin

A few days later, I did a little expedition into the Ventana Wilderness, in the steep, rugged mountains east of Big Sur and southwest of Salinas.  I was searching for rainbow trout in Tassajara Creek, which flows into the Arroyo Seco River.  While spending time with my family at the Tassajara Zen retreat and monastery, I’d seen large rainbow trout – or steelhead that had come up from the Pacific by way of the Salinas River and Arroyo Seco – in the upper reaches of Tassajara Creek, so I figured fishing downstream, in bigger water, might be a good idea.  Since the area is so remote I also thought fishing pressure would be very light.  In my experience, if it takes a one-mile hike to reach a spot on foot, that eliminates 99% of the fisherman.

ventana wilderness

I drove south and, after some delicious chicken enchiladas in downtown Salinas, spent the night at a motel in the small town of Greenfield, just south of Soledad.  Waking at 4 the next morning, I drove east about 40 minutes to the end of the road parking lot at Arroyo Seco Gorge.  After a three mile hike into the Ventana Wilderness, the streams became legally open to fishing.  The scenery was beautiful and I encountered no one else on the winding, ascending trail.  My mind lingered on what would be the right course of action in case of mountain lion attack, since this seemed such perfect habitat.  My plan was to look big and menacing, then put up a fierce fight until the lion finished me off and dragged me into the brush.  There were abundant deer tracks and scat from raccoons and predators, most likely coyotes.  In places I could see where wild boar had been rooting.

ventana mts cropped

After crossing an old WPA suspension bridge over the upper Arroyo Seco, I started fishing my way about a mile and a half up lovely Tassajara Creek, heading west.  The water was very low and I thought I might go absolutely fishless.  While the creek ran through trees that gave much appreciated shade, the temperature was quickly heading into the 90s.  Hiking up the creek – with my spinning and fly rods, fishing vest, and day pack – was fairly difficult, jumping from rock to rock, or wading through the water itself, to avoid the poison oak that was thick in places up from the water’s edge.  The maps showed a trail crisscrossing along the creek, but it was rarely visible.

ventana suspension bridge

Minnows were abundant everywhere, but I needed deeper pools if I hoped to find fish of any size.  While the low water made deep holes rare, whenever I had enough water to fish, I immediately caught very small rainbows (or juvenile steelhead) on Panther Martins, Roostertails, and other small lures.  They jumped and fought hard but – since they were 2 to 4 inches long – I managed to land them without too much struggle.  They all returned to the creek unharmed.  Perhaps one day they will go downstream to live in the Pacific Ocean and grow big and powerful for a few years, before returning to this remote mountain stream to breed.

On my first cast at the largest pool of the day, I had a big strike and saw a very large fish turn, then swim quickly upstream.  I quietly moved up the hole and cast again.  Another big hit and this time it stayed hooked.  About 20 inches long and fat, this one got my attention.  But as I gently pulled him up the bank, I saw he was a five pound squawfish (or “Sacramento pikeminnow”), a native considered “trash” by many fisherman.  But it was a beautiful, big, predatory fish and I was happy to have landed him.  As I tried to rinse him off in the creek so he’d be ready for his close up, he bolted.

Creek above second narrows

The mini-rainbows kept biting but I caught nothing more of note.  The stream was remarkably healthy, full of crawfish and turtles.  One good-sized turtle took interest in me – a rare, large visitor.  He swam up to within four feet of me, putting his front legs up on a rock so he could pause and give me a good, long stare before darting off.

The hike back – in the heat of the afternoon after scrambling up the creek and back – seemed three times longer than the hike in during the coolness of dawn.  Finishing my last sip of water as I reached my truck, I headed back to Salinas for more fluids and another fine Mexican meal.  It was an exhausting trip, but well worth the effort to visit such a wild, little-known place.

Completing my week’s fishing trifecta, a few days later I met up with one of my oldest fishing buddies and a friend of his who fishes regularly at Riverfront Regional Park in Sonoma County.  Set among vineyards in lovely rolling hills northwest of Santa Rosa, the park has three small lakes that were once part of a rock quarry along the Russian River.  We fished the middle lake – Lake Wilson – for largemouth bass, the first time I’ve fished for them in decades.  Our friendly host gave us tips on what to use (soft green plastic brushmaster baits with large hooks set to be weedless, with a small sinker that would slide down to the bait) and where to fish (right on the edge of the plants extending into the water all around the lake).  He fished from a float tube while my buddy and I used our kayaks.

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It was a warm late-afternoon, with a slight breeze (for a change).  After honing in my casting, I was finally able to start dropping the froggy-looking bait right on the edge of the weeds.  Once I was casting into the zone, I had a strike right away and landed a small bass.  Things went quiet for a while after that, as I worked my way along the edge of the lake.  Then I decided to try out a topwater popper lure, still casting as close as possible to the edge of the weeds.  Instantly, there was a huge swirl at my lure as it gurgled out from the weeds, but I missed it.  Our host catches three to five pounders here, so my heart was pounding.  In the next hour I landed four more largemouth on the popper.  Nothing too big, but catching this fish of my Midwestern youth – on topwater lures in a beautiful setting – was a blast.  My buddy and I vowed to put freshwater bass back into our fishing repertoire.

Despite this year’s windy conditions, I’ve managed to have some success and to explore some new places, new techniques, and new species.  The wind’s howling as I write this, but it’s not going to keep me from getting out there and enjoying the outdoors.  Fishing is such a fine excuse for getting out and soaking in the pleasures of the natural world.

Copyright © 2014, Daniel W. Hager. All Rights Reserved.