The relative place of it

One broadcasts oneself as well as one can, though there can be too much of it. They’ve been predicting the demise of letters since a few days after they started. Waves cross the planet putting faces on every screen and voices in every speaker, while the slow reduction to language plods on, a marvel of inefficiency. These days speak for themselves, I’ll not compare them to others I found more comfortable. I speak only on behalf of friends; there weren’t any so close as those who appeared on paper. What remains now for these flags of truce, sent forth uncertainly into the world, but to see who wants peace, and how many?

How far you get

You can ride a bike all year, of course, but snow is no fun. We decided go to in October, early November, a not advisable time but not completely inadvisable.

The day came at last, late October. Little Mighty, 25, arrived in Philadelphia, with her shiny red 1965 Schwinn 10-speed girls’ bike, all smooth and sprightly, with its upright shifters and brake extenders on the handlebars and pants protection wheel on the chainring. To this assemblage she had added some prim zip-up saddlebags that carried everything she needed, which at this point was about everything she owned. I had the Trek I had saved from the dumpster and which had now carried me through a large chunk of the west.

Ultimately Little Mighty was bound for Mexico, Ecuador and Columbia, but that was later, after the bike ride. She was a svelte little dynamo who gave an excellent impression of indifference when her clothing began to fall off as she walked, and, as I found out, as steady under duress as she was breezy, unwilling to notice inconvenience, unwilling to notice even the most jarring discomforts.

For fun she volunteers as a farmhand in South America and for work she cooks aboard tall ships. She had just spent two months sailing the Pacific in a wooden ship and whipping up crew-jubilating meals out of tumbleweeds. That is of course an exaggeration but not much. We are both sailors, I am sorry to report.

I cast a doubtful look at her bike. Early in life it had probably never taken its young owner farther from home than the corner store. It looked clean and capable enough. But God save me from rookies. God save me from riders who set out cross-country on a tank from Walmart wearing sneakers and a 50-pound backpack. How much time would I spend finding the shortest walkable distance to our destination after she got too tired to pedal? Where would I find the numbers of local cab companies? Who should I call when the emotional crisis occurred?

We got everything ready. Which direction should we go? South, of course. Ever south. South toward the waning sun, to a destination still vague but probably North Carolina.We set our caps south. We set everything we had south. Everything but our sails. We needed a break from those.

And so began the great No Pressure Tour, a vagueish sort of bike tour starting in Philadelphia, featuring Little Mighty and myself. You will not credit, reader, how two giant northeastern cities, connected by highways, connected by bus schedules, and train schedules, and flight plans, and gas prices, and weather patterns—you will not credit how two giant northeastern cities might also be connected by streets, ordinary streets that you might walk upon.

But they are. On streets, so it had been said, one may in fact travel from place to place, indeed from city to city, without ever resorting to that methamphetamine-with-rest stops that is the modern interstate highway. It’s like walking around your block 90 or 100 times and finding yourself in Chicago.

We set off from 30^th Street Station and wound southwest through streets that had once been the main gates into town, Grays Ferry, Paschall, Lindburgh, Elmwood. This was the route George Washington took when traveling from Mount Vernon to New York, on the way to his inauguration. Brick town homes gave way to wooden Victorian ones, and then to plain wooden ones. The level of repair went from City Historical to Urban Neglect to Suburban Tidy. And so the miles passed until we reached The John Heinz Wildlife Refuge, that exuberant patch of wilderness beneath the main landing approaches at Philadelphia International Airport.

And then twisky-twee like a corskscrew we rode along the graveled paths, with a wrong turn here and wrong turn there, marveling the luxuriance of green just a javelin throw from Interstate 95, and the marshy lowland that was the original landscape through much of the northeast. We saw exotic birds in the swamps.

And then back to the street, and so on down along the western side of the Delaware River. We followed long streets of respectable residences, giving way to light industrial roads. And then to Chester, where a tunnel might be the best route through. Then we found a path along the waterfront that took us through the old Chester Waterside Station coal burning electric plant. It’s an office park these days, unless the utility workers must all wear business suits now, because that’s what we saw as we rode past: a complement of office workers in office casual dress, relaxing and smoking on the great fortress causeways of the power plant.

We missed our intended host and spent the night in chain hotel, a neo-Greek sort of place that had everything of a classical nature about it that could be rendered in cinder block. The night was peaceful, though we were still somehow astonished by the knowledge--the proof, now--that you can arrive at place without getting into an automobile. It didn’t seem right. We felt like cheaters. The staff were chirpy, happy and friendly.

Little Mighty had brought her own computer, and we planned our next day’s route, consulting everything the Internet could bring us. A good breakfast next morning and then: South.

We rode past Newcastle and through Newark, then into Maryland, past Elkton, past Northeast, much of this on a federal highway that by some accident has wide shoulders. We finally got to some country roads near the Susquehanna River and wandered northish to Perryville and more chirpy happy friendly.

Here we settled in satisfied, and comfortable in knowing that for the first time we had actually hit a target we aimed for. Once again the free Internet brought us more possibilities than we knew how to use, and for the next hours we planned exotic jaunts through Virginia by way of Sacramento and Disney World. Later we walked the non-exotic 100 yards to Denny’s for dinner, then went to bed happy and woke up to a driving rain.

Here it was. Rain. The make or break. The wheat from the chaff. The men from the boys. The women from the girls. The parking lot splashed and spattered with it. We knew what we had to do. There is only one thing to do in a case like this. We went back to bed. And all day the rain came down, heavy and thick. The rivulets ran in the gutters and into the storm drains. For a while we paced. We checked Facebook 70 or 80 times. We texted friends. The day wore on.

And then, next day, the rain had ended but puddles remained. Sunshine struggled, struggled. In place of rain there was now a constant 20 knots of wind from our intended direction. Already the dead leaves were flying off the maples and sycamores. Grasses bent horizontal. Ah, well. Wind will not soak you or give you flu. Wind’s discomfort lasts but a moment, unlike rain’s. (By this time our choices were dwelling among the least hurtful terribles.)

We suited up, executed the departure checklist I had written out the previous evening after becoming exceeding wroth about losing my phone charger, loaded the bikes and pedaled out. Our first job was crossing the Susquehanna River, the only unrideable part of the trip.

On maps and biking guides you will often find the assurance that, despite Maryland’s tenacious resistance to letting cyclists pedal across the river, several local bike shops will transport you, free or cheap, with 48 hours’ notice.

But faced with the prodigious fact of a long no-bikes-allowed bridge whizzing with motor traffic, or a 40-mile additional upriver pedal to an equally terrifying crossing of the Conowingo Dam, all that bike-friendly help disappears. The bike shops have moved on. The help lines to the Maryland Transportation Authority are dead. The MTA agent at the bridge itself answers your question with a flat No, then sends you for more help to a phone that rings forever. (It is ringing even now.) The trains don’t accept bicycles; the buses don’t run on weekends. All of this, plus rain, plus being too long indoors, plus your dying phone, plus your lost phone charger and your new bandana made of (you just realized) uncomfortable polyester, makes a challenging day.

At the Route 40 toll plaza we found no one to make big eyes at and get sympathy from, as had been our primary plan. (Little Mighty is a master at this.) A cop just then arriving told us we couldn’t cross, as of course we knew. And so, the cab. The cab came directly, a stationwagon, into which we squeezed our bikes—one longitudinal in the bed, another sideways in the backseat—and ourselves—one atop the other in the passenger seat—and prepared for the impossible passage.

The driver vouchsafed to us the many great places we might go for a bite or a sip, if we were inclined to abandon these ridiculous riding plans, my god look at that wind. Where did we want to go, anyways?

The Bridge Diner, I said.

Doesn’t exist anymore, he said. Gone.

Whatever is left of the Bridge Diner, I said. The ruins of the Bridge Diner.

I need an address, he said. There’s a Waffle House there.

We want to go to the Waffle House.

They’re building a Royal Farms where the diner was.

Let’s go to the Royal Farms.

Eight minutes later we were across. Before we had unloaded our stuff a cyclist dressed in foul-weather clothing screeched up and declared he was glad to see someone as crazy as himself out in this wind. Where did we intend to go?

When we told him he insisted we’d have no trouble. Insisted. Then he screeched off. We found the streets our map wanted us to. The turning cues seemed to correspond with our presumed direction. We got rolling. Not 10 minutes later as we lay into the breeze whistling through a housing tract a woman opened a window of her SUV and asked if she could take us wherever we were going. Anywhere, she said. She couldn’t stand the thought of riders out in this wind. By this time we were making a solid 3 miles per hour, which meant only 12 more hours of riding today. We thanked her and declined.

At the end of that street we turned left, somewhat off the main thrust of the wind and gained speed, though every 200 feet another gust smothered us to a stop. We could feel the bikes swerving and shying with every puff. The traffic in its endless flight came up behind and disappeared before. The shouldered highways gave way to unshouldered ones. On.

Over the hills, through the dips, the steady rush of traffic belittling our plebeian little two-wheeled-pumping-of-the-feet transport. If we amounted to anything in this world we would be in one of those big cars. We would be whushing past those poor suckers on bikes, those idiots too weak and poor to own an automobile. What is a pansy tin machine like that, with less than one horse of power, compared to the astronomical great power of an august and magnificent internal combustion engine, with its spinning fans and its harness of electric pulses and its thresh-work of pounding pistons tuned to maximum force? What it a simple pedal machine compared to tech-now-low-gee?

We made it finally to Monkton near sundown, the trees filtering the late afternoon autumn light as we made the last turn into a road marked with the sign of the farm Little Mighty had persuaded to let us stay.

Well, that was the beginning. We split after Monkton. She got as far south as North Carolina, where her boyfriend picked her up and took her to Florida. I got to Baltimore, where I stayed with my brother and his wife, and enjoyed the autumn colors, the landscape daubed with reds and golds, and the presentiment of wood fires and apple cider.

The importance of finding Ernest

Ernest Hemingway came to Idaho first in the late 1930s, a guest of the developers of nearby Sun Valley Resort, then sporadically for the next 10 years, hunting along Silver Creek and the Sawtooth foothills. In the late 1950s he bought a house in Ketchum, and in 1961 died there, after two years reaping the rewards of a lifelong will to self destruction. The funeral was brisk, the burial local, the trout still ran and the geese still flew. But thus another place name went onto the map of literary reverence.

I found his grave as easily as one finds the neat Ketchum Cemetery, near downtown, a gravely slab bearing his name and often littered with pennies and pens—which are in fact an error in the liturgy, for Papa used only no. 2 pencils. By such commonplaces is communion with greatness achieved.

But the city nowhere advertises his last house's location, perhaps fearing a swarm of Papa wannabes, an invasion of acolytes, an asphyxia of aspirants. It is left to the cunning, the clever, the calculating, to find his house on their own. It is left to those with access to Google maps and a disinclination to ask the owners for a tour. Thus:

It sits alone on a small hill, this house, as it did when Hemingway lived there, despite the dazzling wealth that has thrown up its idols nearby. It's sat empty for many years, the gossiping river running ceaselessly along its front, and is now maintained by the Nature Conservancy, who can't figure out what to do with it.

I got to its driveway, with all the No Trespassing signs glinting nearby in the sun, yet with obviously no one near who could threaten me with jail—and decided not to go the whole way after all. Hemingway was in deep trouble when he lived here: depression, paranoia, attempted suicide, great physical pain, shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic, alcoholism of course. He took the final step with both barrels of his shotgun in the foyer. I didn't need to see the place to know the story. And I think: Which is more worthy of reverence, the life or the work? And how much may they be separated?

To my friend Sterling I recommended an old Esquire piece by a guy who found himself on this same pilgrimage I was. Sterling came back at me angry that, in the piece, Norman Mailer gets to call Hemingway a coward. If I want to know Hemingway, Sterling says, I should read his short stories, The Sun Also Rises, the hunting scenes in Green Hills of Africa and any of his journalism.

“That writing is all that you need to know about Ernest Hemingway,” Sterling says.

Yeah, maybe. I wish I it was all I did know. And I wish that my reverence might someday learn to be careful.

The Sawtooth Tour

Sawtooth NRA, not actual size

Sawtooth National Recreation Area. It contains mountains, it contains forests, it contains broad sweeping pine-blanketed plains rising curvingly up to white blasted crags blazing in the sun and rocky overhangs with snow on the upper ranges. And then miles after miles of sloping pine forest, lonely forests of trees, until you come to a lake, several miles off the highway and circled by a pavement, with clear opaline water and reflecting yet another stark asteroid of a mountain on the other side.

Every 50 or so miles, there is a little grocery and service station built of rustic boards, until you get to Stanley, pop. 258, where there is also a restaurant. In Idaho City, pop. 63, there are also genuine frontier storefronts with long wooden sidewalks before them, and a picturesque gold rush cemetery.

Kurt, Mark and Kate, in a rare stationary moment

We started from Boise and rode 42 miles south, to Melba, toast capital of the west, then an additional 10 miles to a place called Celebration Park. My three teammates put distance between themselves and me, but we all flew along, with Idaho state flags flying above our machines.

The park, a state park, contained petroglyphs and other items of archaeological interest which you could view from a trail that wound among them.

The second day we followed an ancient still-elevated rail bed out of camp, across an old train bridge and on through the country until we reached the barbed wire barricade.

Advance notice of this obstacle, stretched defiantly across the right-of-way, had come to us before the ride in an email message from the route planner, to whom we swore left and right it would not hinder us a fig.

I had occasion to wonder at this certainty, as we handed our entire royal caravan—three recumbent trikes, a bicycle and trailer, 10 stuffed panniers, coats, helmets, cameras, water bottles, pumps, sunglass cases, all held aloft--over the dangerous wires and to a resting place further along the railbed as we shimmied and jiggy-footed trying not to stumble down the slope.

What we hadn't seen coming—what we had reason to believe would not come—was the screaming man issuing from his trailer down the way to command our immediate return from whence we came. He seemed to be quite agitated. He directed us to just turn around and go back, just turn around or we would go to jail. Clearly this was the biggest thing that had happened to him all week. From his trailer he began to make his way over the scrub toward us. 

The railroad bridge, just before The Encounter

Now, this was not the time to debate the ascendancy of property rights over the needs of poor touring pilgrims like ourselves; nor did we think it quite politic to ask how any private person could own a railroad right-of-way. Or how we were supposed to effect a rapid escape with that barbed wire behind us. Or, for that matter, who he was and how was he able to throw us out. (Private property it may have been, I thought, but my attention is private also and he was trespassing on it.)

The thing to do, as Katie said later, is de-escalate. Kurt began this by assuring the man we were leaving, yes we were leaving, yes, leaving right now, just this minute. Meanwhile, the last of the party were joining us from the rear. Just turn around and go back, the man said, or you go to jail.

Yes, thank you, we are leaving.

We kept going. In the direction we had been going.

The man disappeared into his trailer, probably to get his gun. We were making steady progress down the road, which had become a driveway, a private driveway, upon which we were making highly illicit and probably immoral passage, toward the county highway just beyond. Four minutes later a frantic woman in a white Lexus came screaming up. She was slender and white and burning with the kind of rage that can only result from the secret belief that the world intends to destroy your flowerbeds.

Katie, the designated de-escalator, leaned into the woman's window and began emitting soothing tones. Her husband Mark stood by as diplomatic backup. Kurt and I watched. A minute later a 60-ish western-looking man went whizzing by on an ATV, trying to head us off at the pass.

More soothing sounds. In the car, the woman's voice had come down half an octave. She had grandchildren on those grounds she was saying, and they couldn't have just anyone going through. Sixty feet away Kurt rolled his eyes.

We got past that obstacle and down the road, down the long road. Night Two brought us, after a day of intermittent rain, to a state park called Bruneau Dunes which, despite this being Labor Day, was about half occupied. The park featured giant sand mountains that brooded over the little camp ground like a sky full of stars.

That evening we attended a lecture and slide show by a “UFO-ologist” in the park's observatory, and learned among much else that:

• The US government has for many years suppressed information about our frequent visits from space beings; this information has included the unbelievable sightings, witnessed by our astronauts when traveling in space, of space vehicles and alien structures built on the moon.

• 
  

  

  The government is itself in possession of a planet-hopping spacecraft, built usingtechnology reverse-engineered from UFOs, along with several secret places on earth that serve as bases for this vehicle.

• There have been a number of UFO crashes, all well and carefully documented, on US soil. The government won't tell you about them, though.

• We have also, it goes without saying, many bodies of aliens now preserved, and have given medical attention to alien survivors of UFO crashes. 
   
• A UFO researcher has initiated a program allowing all this information—including suppressed astronaut testimony--to be freely disclosed by those who until now have been sworn to keep mum. The researcher got the green light for this project when he wrote to Bill Clinton saying he would do it and got no response from the president saying he couldn't.

There was much more UFO information on offer, but Kurt and I fell asleep in our chairs during the last half hour. During this time it was obvious that Kurt's brother Mark was not in attendance, as we heard no one's head exploding, as Mark's would have.

Night Three, after another 60 miles: an empty RV park in Gooding, ID, where we slept amid the great empty cement pads designed to support large recreational vehicles.

Night Four, after yet another 60 miles, we got back to civilization again, to Hailey, where Mark's daughter and son in law fed us, slept us, and got us warm again. At dinner I announced complete satisfaction with my riding so far, and therefore my intention to quit here and remain satisfied with myself, rather than to become angry or frustrated or, perhaps, dead. Hailey had been planned as one of the possible quitting spots, so this was no problem. And Kate was also quitting here to go visit a new grandchild. I would ride one more day with Kurt and Mark and then return alone to Hailey the following day.

And so it happened. Three of us rode next morning to a campsite called Easley Hot Springs, and there spent a pleasant evening fretting about bears and hoisting our food into the trees; and next morning it was 27 degrees and my toes were frozen together.

Idaho City

This and a swelling achilles tendon brought home the wisdom of leaving early. Kurt and Mark continued on for another hundred miles, most of it uphill—I met them later near Idaho City. Meantime I rode downhill back to Hailey, stopping along the way to take pictures of trout streams and mountains.

So there it was: 311 miles in six days. Nothing for some folks but at least respectable for a cripple and invalid.

Shiloh

I got to Shiloh after a long drive south from the interstate and deep into the swamps of southwestern Tennessee. Miles and miles of trees, a clean, no-shoulder highway, no evidence of traffic in the form of litter, here and there a sign advertising Bubba’s Catfish Shack, and then, suddenly, a national park, a huge swampy, piney, national “military” park with probably more alligators than people in it, filled with ravines, bayous, creeks, humpy ridges and a damp forest  floor raising a fog of steam. Very few people there, the Visitor Center parking lot was almost empty, perhaps because the heat is stifling. It’s only slightly less deserted there now than in 1862, except the roads that the Union army hoped to travel further south are now the paved route of the driving tour.

The driving tour: a single car travels on that narrow National Park Service pavement with the clean forest sweeping away, and what looks like a widely spaced cemetery full of monuments distributed throughout. Big ones, little ones, ornate ones, simple ones. Granite monuments marking this or that headquarters, the end of this or that line, the place where 2100 federals surrendered, the location of this or that hurriedly placed battery. The memorials of many different eras all share the space; hence you see markers made of cannonballs and old cannons marking some spots(the oldest), then rusting metal plaques marking others(the not-so-old), than fancy modern NPS signs (the newest). Monuments mark the spots where important things happened or resided-- for example, where William Wallace was mortally wounded, and where Haith had his headquarters, and where the blue and gray lines first made contact.

Most interesting to me, you have a sign--within a stone’s throw of little ramshackle Shiloh church itself-- that marks the end of Buckland’s line. I saw this from the car. Buckland was the brigade commander in which Amos Laymon’s regiment was included. Amos was the brother of my great great grandfather, and Buckland was his brigade commander, part of Sherman's division. The sign sits at the corner of a parking lot and it’s hard not to notice the wet path leading away from it into the woods. Which has to be followed. Because if Buckland’s line ended there, and the confederates were coming up from the south, than Amos’s regiment must have camped somewhere along that path.

Sure enough, I tramped into the woods and found markers/memorials marking where the three Ohio regiments camped that made up Buckland’s Brigade, including Amos’s. Getting better oriented I was able to see why those outfits often turn up in histories of the battle. They were the closest to the enemy and the furthest from safety.

The leader of the regiment just to the left of Amos’s, a man named Cockerill, tried repeatedly to make Sherman understand there was a crowd of rebels before him, without success.  All three regiments got assaulted at 7 a.m., their breakfast uneaten, and continued fighting until 10, almost surrounded, when one of the Sherman’s staff ordered them back. Buckland himself was commended in Sherman’s report.

And Amos was seriously injured, according to the roster of the 48^th Ohio. I don’t know how or where. He was 39 years old and soon went back to Lynchburg, Ohio, where he had been recruited the previous October. He had boarded the steamboat Empress in Paducah, Kentucky for the trip down, and made it his home for 12 days until finally unloading at Pittsburgh Landing near Shiloh, then spread out into the woods with his regiment to loaf and invite his soul, more than two miles from the landing. It was all spring and songbirds until the morning of April 6. The Battle of Shiloh was his first and only day of war.

I traveled further south to the town of Corinth, MS, whose vital railroad junction had attracted so much union interest in the first place. There’s a great interpretive center there, with cannons on display from the battle, a research library, an allegorical fountain, a movie auditorium and a bookstore. There too, I was one of about three patrons.

The town of Corinth itself, grand as it sounds, must be one of the saddest little towns I’ve ever seen, even now. Never very big, it swelled to more than 40,000 after the battle and during the subsequent siege, most of these people wounded or dying. Every building became a hospital, the water was foul, and disease was rampant. During all this it was also the scene of two bloody battles, and upon giving it up both armies burned it. I figured it had good reason to be sad.

But the railroad junction is still there. And a lot of ghosts, I guess. You withdraw credulity when I mention ghosts, of course. But standing in the middle of the woods by the 48^th Ohio encampment, miles from the nearest soul, I swore I smelled gunpowder.

Intelligent life in California

Deserts are not just for recluses anymore. Nowadays, entirely respectable people go there and rent houses and stay, and burn stuff, and watch caloric waves shimmer off the desert floor, and feel rugged and hardy and American, and drink a lot. You might have thought the desert was just for coyotes and creepy lizards, but I’m here to tell you. Much of Los Angeles is there, goes there every year, at least in the winter.

I’m talking about the constellation of towns near Joshua Tree National Park: Desert Hot Springs, Cathedral City, Twenty Nine Palms, Yucca Valley City, Palm Springs, all of them partners-in-baking when the calendar progresses past May. Bob Hope made Palm Springs famous, mostly for the golf, I think. Dinah Shore, Gene Autry, the Rat Pack—the place has celebrity credentials. I found it mostly walled golf courses interspersed with walled condos and walled strip malls.

One day I got taken out to a mystery location in the Mojave Desert. Out we went to where the roads became rougher and thinner, and the desert began to dominate again over the futile etchy-sketchy byways of humankind. We went toward a destination my friend wouldn’t reveal, for an event she wouldn’t describe, and an experience she couldn’t calculate. Eventually, I realized why, as after I had it I couldn’t say much either.

We entered a gate like one of the many along those roads, opening to a property filled with superseded furniture, the bodies of ancient automobiles, many of them bullet ridden, antique refrigerators, antique freezers, skeletal old easy chairs, middens of colored bottles, roadside signs that formerly stood before hotels, drive-in restaurants and summer camps, forgotten children’s trampolines, the occasional jumble of go-kart and minibike parts, and other sequelae of hobby enthusiasm gone amuck, all long abandoned, all radiating slowly outward from the house in an ever-expanding pool like an oil slick.

Except this property was clean and neat and kind of enchanting. The parking lot was swept, small structures of neat carpentry stood nearby. Even the ancient automobile bodies look scrubbed.

This was the surrounding ground of The Integratron, which the signs there began to instruct us.

There were neatly carpentered benches, a wall of clean chalkboard with large cylinders of chalk waiting below, and a full length mirror displaying the picture of you over the words You Are Here. There was a cluster of hammocks beneath a gauzy shade, and free standing outbuildings in warm colors.

At the far end of the property was The Integratron itself. It looks like an observatory, about 60 feet high, a big white dome colored a metallic-looking white but in fact built of plywood and other non-magnetic materials. This you learn when you see the pictures of it under construction in the check-in office beside it. 

What you also learn, reader--something I’ll wager you didn’t know but not many people do in this age of distraction and ignorance of our heritage. What you also learn is that the Integratron was one of the first places on earth we made contact with the wisdom of other planets. Since then, owing to its highly unique resonance and geological anomalies, it has served as a place of cellular rejuvenation and the first stop in anyone’s education wishing to prolong life indefinitely.

Again, reader, please don’t reproach yourself for not knowing this; it’s rather poorly known, for whatever reason.

This contact, I might as well tell you, was made between an aerospace engineer from California in 1953, and a Venusian man who was dressed in a very dapper one-piece gray body suit. The Venusian, whose name was Solganda, told the engineer, whose name was George Van Tassle, how to construct a building that would extend human life and enable time travel. It would do a lot of other things, but unfortunately Van Tassle died before getting it finished. Three sisters bought it 14 years ago and now it’s a tourist attraction and—if you can believe this—recording venue for musicians.

We entered, on the ground floor, removed our shoes, underwent ritual purification, endured a body search—actually I made the last two up. But it did have the feeling of a preparation to enter holy space, with its formal ablutions and suppression of hilarity. We went upstairs. There were sleeping mats laid on the floor, and a series of bowl-looking things at one end of the room. Signs asked us to not touch them, though we never thought of doing so until we weren’t allowed. We lay down. A man began speaking.

I have no doubt he spoke English. But what he actually said I have no idea. He talked about this location being at the intersection of three rivers beneath the earth’s surface; and about how the height of the building is a number the reverse of which is the exact coefficient of pi at sea level. He spoke of the 17 rafters in the ceiling and their cosmic meaning. He spoke of cosmic meaning of every last joint, and why it was titanically significant. The room was a superb place for the “sound bath” he was about to perpetrate upon us, and we should be prepared to experience, in sound, the exact vibrational level that was known to rejuvenate human cells. It was all very mystical and numerological and, if you ask me, more than a little psychotic. Yet it stands to reason that earthlings like myself won’t understand these things.

After he had professed this incoherent scripture for 15 minutes, he began—I think he got a signal from someone in the audience—to bow his bowls, and the meat of the experience was arrived at last. These were quartz bowls, and when rubbed with a bow, made a rich and interesting sound. We lay back and closed our eyes, and the capsule-like room that had been built with the help of Venusians resonated with warm tones. The notes were full, disarming, relaxing, sustained as long as the gusts of wind and steady as the rock that produced them. I think I dozed off for a while.

The thing wore on for about twenty minutes and I cannot say that it—the sound bath/cellular rejuvenation/electrostatic irradiation—was unpleasant. I didn’t snore and I didn’t laugh, and when the whole thing was finished we wandered out further into the desert among the scattered properties and scattered lives, and looked for somewhere to eat.

Fragment From a Voyage

We set out from San Pedro with a boatload of Boy Scouts, and things went according to plan: Up to Smugglers Cove on Santa Cruz during the day, around to Painted Cave next morning, back down the other side in the afternoon. Nearing evening, we heard a distress call coming from our intended anchorage. A boat had gone up on the beach and the skipper was frantically calling for help. His words were poorly differentiated but his tone sang through. Panic. No one, he would have acknowledged in a calmer moment, could have appeared suddenly by his side, on an island 30 miles at sea, at least an hour from the nearest tow boat, to stop his sailboat from grounding higher on the beach with every breaker. After 10 minutes of shouting to the Coast Guard, he had established that he and a crewmate were safe on the beach, but their sailboat was grinding away in the surf, hard aground.

By this time we were opening the cove in question, a 100 foot line of sand bookended by tumbled falls of boulders, with the suggestion of a widening of the beach behind this landing. It was in fact an attractive place for cruising sailboaters, who liked to anchor there close enough inshore to relish the secret, empty beach. The first mate peered through the binoculars and at last saw the boat, a big cruiser whose distant mast swayed lazily in the swell. He didn’t see the former occupants, but they saw us. The frantic voice haled us soon after we radioed the Coast Guard of our proximity and readiness to help.

“Are you the big white sailboat a couple hundred yards out?” he said. The relief was already coming into his voice. “Thank god.”

Our inflatable boat was speeding shoreward.

“Are you able to bring the others aboard from the beach?” the Coast Guard asked.

We were.

“Are you able to carry out these operations without risk to yourself or your vessel?”

We believed so.

We came to anchor.  The next half hour we spent relaying information from the beached boat to the Coast Guard as the beached captain had only a handheld radio. We gave the vital information the Coast Guard always gets in cases like this, and then stood by for further need. Though our inflatable boat had stayed near the two men on the beach, eventually we recalled him when it was clear that rescue boats were on the way.

Meantime the scouts had gone swimming off the boat. And while they swam, and leapt, and swung from the tacks, we observed while the rescue boat from Santa Barbara arrived, and discussed with the stranded owner the cost of the salvage—as it was by now a salvage operation and not a simple tow—and then labored mightily with his 400 horses to drag a 10 ton boat off the sand. It was a tricky job as the tide was now falling and the next chance would be more than 24 hours away. But at last he succeeded, a cheer went up from the deck of the Exy Johnson, and tower and towed set off for home. For a moment before they left, a group of adults met at our bow to watch the goodbye, and to bid farewell to the little train. But also to possibly fend it off as it floated close.

Exy Johnson at Santa Cruz Island

The scouts, who had encircled the boat with all manner of aquatic capers, and mounted upon unsteady kayaks to search for distant caves, now slowly returned aboard. The tacks were brought in and restored to their rightful duties, likewise the rescue rings and floating lines. The galley, already warm, heated up to business strength, and dinner loomed ever closer. The first mate took the deck, and afterwards reported that we had received a thank you from the Coast Guard.

Next morning we weighed at eight and were out of soundings before breakfast was clear, turning 2000 and steering for Isthmus Cove on Catalina. At 1330, the breeze finally stirring the ensign, the squares all came up and the main went down. Our speed dropped from six to under four, though it rose again as the day waned. We had never dropped the main while running downwind and it came off well, the agile deckhand tip-toeing forward on the boom guiding down the sail and the scouts folding it there as neatly as they rolled their neckerchiefs. 

But I fear that with so much sailing talk the sensory parts of the thing, the memorable parts--the smell of jasmine, the barking of sea lions, the white crash of breakers on rocks, the peachy creamy morning of a deserted island cove—might be left unnoticed. To show a fair picture of our lives, this will not do. So then, be it known:

On the approach to these islands, they never simply appear. Rather, at some perfunctory point, oh, they are there. They are a less vivid brightness against the horizon, a pale outline between the sea and sky, a looming, a species of cloud. Many hours pass between first awareness of them and the first meaningful assessment. After a long time in the back of consciousness, thoughts turn at last away from the stowage of deck stuff and overhauling the ground tackle, and, once again, to them, to those sudden great presences-out-of-nothingness. Now regions of color are discernible, tan fields of sun-baked island grass, brown ledges of igneous rock, and lighter brown cliffs reaching straight upward from the ocean. Withal there is now a heaviness to the view in that direction, a heavy stolidity to what before was empty as ether.

Moving closer you begin to feel the mass of the land, like an object of gravity in blank space. Now the froth and cream of surf appears as a changeable white line at the bottom. Boulders of blue-gray jut up from the surf. Seabirds wheel above the worried shores, darting in and out among the wet boulders. Browner tufts of scrub bushes and trees populate the hillsides, with here and there a scar of ripped earth where a crag or promontory fell anciently into the sea. The outline of the land describes a sudden, thrusting aspiration skyward from the ocean, and among the sea caves at water level you hear the roar of crashing currents against the rocks and the voices of seals.

The Drumming Life

I've really suffered no lingering effects from being a drummer.

Eh?

WHAT?

You'll have to talk louder if you expect me to hear you. I was saying I've suffered no lingering effects from being a drummer most of my natural life - though it's pretty weird seeing "drummer" and "natural life" there in the same sentence like that.

The truth is, I was a drummer for many years and I'm here to tell you that all that stuff you've heard about drummers being users of major hallucinogenic drugs is pure baloney. In fact it's a GIANT CHARTREUSE BALONEY, and it's humming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"!

Drummers are just a little offbeat, that's all. This is because the constant subdividing of time actually severs the brain fibers by which one thought is linked to another, with the result that drummers are very good at misunderstanding everything in great detail.

You folks who have some connection to drummers, such as a parent-child or other professional relationship, know what I mean.

And you know the next thing I'll say about drummers - the most salient and important thing that you could all just scream out in unison: Drummers must tap on everything! (All heads nod rapidly.)

There is no object in the world, anywhere, any time, that will not be drummed upon by a drummer, if it can be reached. There is no object, however rough, ugly, moldy or covered with insect carcasses, that will not be given at least and experimental roll in passing, if not a full-blown Carl Palmer solo

with two-minute bass drum roll and gong hammering.

And you know how this can lead to trouble, such as when your drummer goes to church, and all heads are bowed, and a persistent noise begins to fill the silence, emanating from your bench.

"What is that?"

"What is what?"

"That tapping."

"Tapping? That just happens to be 'Channel One Suite' by Buddy Rich!

"Well stop it!"

"But I'm not even to the cymbal work."

Yes, it gets annoying. But, looked at another way, it's at least excusable: Drumming is a drummer's basic mode of interaction with the world. Newton saw a world of mass and velocity, Einstein of light and energy. But drummers know the world only as rhythm and tone. Freud showed us the personality consisting of Id, Ego and Superego. In drummers there is a fourth component: walking bass.

In the long run I suppose that drummers are more than offbeat. Maybe through their constant tapping they're trying to syncopate with the Rhythm that holds us all together. Maybe, deep down, they hope we'll all get in touch with the same beat. There are worse hopes, it seems to me.

(Tappitta tap tap tap...)

The Fighting Shy Rules of Stuff

1. The acquisition of stuff must be monitored with vigilance, and whenever possible avoided.
2. It is perfectly acceptable, and better than acceptable, to diminish your load of stuff periodically. 
3. You usually don’t need to buy something to solve a problem. This statement is necessary as thoughts of buying are almost a reflexive reaction to any new problem faced in daily life, whether a rusty chain (buy some oil) or a fresh new anxiety (pay a therapist).
4. The urge to buy can usually be satisfied through circumvention, through making the thing wanted, for example, or renovating an old one, or borrowing one, or finding a lay alternative, rather than by buying new. The desire for a particular experience is often construed in the imagination as a desire to buy, probably because buying a thing, for so long associated with enjoyment of the thing by preceding it, has come to be imagined as the enjoyment itself.
5. Yet, with very few exceptions, the enjoyment of new acquisition soon wears off, and the soul returns to the humdrum quotidian.
6. The price of an object seldom includes—as it should when making the purchase decision--the cost of storing the item for years, the commensurate loss of living space, the psychological toll of schlepping it around, the embarrassment of seeing it sit idle, the worry of finding a big enough place to hold it, and others that should be obvious to the reader.
7. The accumulation of many possessions diminishes the appreciation of few. One faces a choice: Many and worse or fewer and better.
   
8. Love of less can be cultivated, is nobler in spirit, and cheaper.
9. In modern life, very few tools—very few tools—are truly necessary to perform the tasks of daily living. What tools are not possessed can often be improvised.
10. A borrowed item is a more efficient item, as because it is used by more users it is more often used.
11. A truly needed and not-to-be-borrowed item can be purchased with others and shared in a group.
12. The concept of private property is not considerably diminished by the loss of exclusivity. That is to say, you don’t lose possession of something because others get to use it. It is no less your possession simply because you have lost the exclusive use of it.

 Conclusion: The theory of private property is a powerful, a civilized, and a not-to-mention necessary idea. But it can be taken too far.

More Tips for Happy Living

The Way of the Superior Man, A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire 

By David Deida 

Debates will never end about what’s right behavior in love. Answers will always be contested, proposals always countered, disagreements always rise. But it always helps if when you fight you sound like a new-age troubadour. 

Here we have The Way of the Superior Man, A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire, talking about What Women Want in a way that would lead to violence at cocktail parties. You know the talk: When women say this they really mean that. You want to respond to her this way but you should really respond that. Dangerously general statements, you see. But because they sound so Jungian and mytho-poetic here, they seem to work. They seem to get away with it. Thus: 

“A man shouldn't tolerate bitchy and complaining moodiness in his woman, but he should serve her and love her with every ounce of his skill and perseverance. Then, if she cannot or will not open in love, he might decide to end his relationship with her, harboring no anger or resentment.” 

Or: 

“The feminine is the force of life. The more masculine a man is, the more  his woman's feminine energy (as opposed to other qualities) will be important to him.” 

Because I am long out of school and far past concern for logical rigor I will skip the griping, and only say what I often say in cases like this: These ideas are interesting whether or not they are true. Meanwhile they might be fun to try. 

Know your facts, then distort 'em as you please

Random notes on Bill Bryson.

Bryson manages to be suspenseful and desultory at the same time, something not many thoughtful people would ever strive for. He relates the history of a certain common home feature—quite rivetting in the telling, actually--by first emphasizing the strange niche in his hallway wall, a niche clearly not part of the original house, because the object it was designed to hold did not exist in 1765. We don’t learn he’s talking about the telephone until many pages later, after the suspense has gotten heavy.

Then we turn to Alexander Graham Bell and his odd story, and then to his assistant Thomas Watson, and his even odder story, and then to the reason why Bell didn’t have his invention stolen from him by his competitors, as happened so often, and then how the telephone was designed, and then why there are letters on the dial, and so on. There is apparently no guiding principle at work, but a smoothness in segueing between nuggets of interest. In some cases there is not the faintest causal connection between his contiguities. There is danger in this, of course. One is led almost to infer a chain of causality from the the chain of events, as if the events actually unfolded in the order Bryson relates, and not the order he has chosen to enliven his story.

I have caught Bryson in some stretchers. In The Lost Continent, an account of his driving tour of America, in the section where he visited Philadelphia, he threw down scorn about the place that stood out in a book already wretched with it. He was describing the block in town that had been consecrated to the memory of Franklin—a section of Market Street, where Franklin’s old print shop still stands, and where the outline of his house, long since demolished, has been rendered in tubular steel. Almost every tourist in Philadelphia visits the place. There’s a museum devoted to Franklin there, and a Post Office that still handles mail, where Franklin’s signature forms the cancellation mark. That’s where he said he was, anyway. The problem was, he was describing Franklin Square, a rundown and derelict old square several blocks away, where the west end of the massive Benjamin Franklin Bridge comes to earth, and where weeds grow, and debris drifts, and a general air of abandonment and decay makes this the least congenial spot in Old City. Whether he knew he was in the wrong place or not is a good question. It makes the difference whether we should call him a fibber or just plain dense. In any event he did not concern himself to learn why, in a place where it was advertised he would find a museum, a print shop and a post office, he found only trash and desolation. Only very accomplished writers have this kind of privilege.

And Those Who Study History Are Doomed to Misconstrue It

  
How Should We Live?: Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life
 

by Roman Krznaric

It’s tempting to say—so I’ll go ahead and say it—that this is one of the first bold thrusts of a no-doubt-soon-to-be-popular kind of thinking, and we shouldn’t carp that it grows straight out of self-help literature. I’m talking about “lifestyle philosophy,” the attempt to find a way of living, though it be unconventional, that maximizes personal fulfillment and remains friendly to the planet.

Lifestyle philosophers—god forgive my language—lifestyle philosophers go beyond your typical self-help fare—remain positive, work and play well with others, exercise frequently—to question why we might wish to follow this advice—to ask, indeed, if it be the best advice after all.

A lifestyle philosopher is willing to question certain always-unquestioned premises—more is better, easier is better, faster is better, a rewarding job is naturally the best way to spend one’s life, entertainment is the best recreation—and, after a gentle tap with a hammer, knock them to the ground. Lifestyle philosophy promises the twilight for some very popular idols--if anyone takes it seriously. And it is not stamped out by the police.

So you will find nowhere a list of bullet points saying smell this or eat that. Or reach your target weight by June. Or smile as you claw your way to the top. Instead you will find discussion, always interesting though sometimes off track, that serves as prelude to the hints he offers for living a richer life. The suggestions he offers, I have no doubt, will provide a rich trove of new possibilities to those unsatisfied with their current lot, and will no doubt go down in the annals of lifestyle philosophy when such annals come to be written. (I suggest writing them in pencil.)

To name a few:

•    Try to lessen the “tyranny of the eye,” and develop the other senses. This will bring a fuller love of that ambrosia of life we so often quaff without tasting.

•    Carefully evaluate the place of market activities in your life, including paid employment. We all believe that time is money, that time is wasted if not exchanged for some improving medium, such as cash. At least we act as if we do. But this concept has captured us only very recently. Before the Industrial Revolution self improvement had nothing to do with labor, or money accrued. Perhaps a better quality of life is available to those who search this question.

•    Give your traveling a deliberate meaning. Don’t be in thrall to your guidebook. Travel in the guise of a nomad, a pilgrim, an explorer. Krznaric offers suggestions how to do this,  but the baseline intention is to add a spiritual component to your journeys.

“We ought to spend time travelling, giving ourselves enough headspace for contemplation and going at a sufficiently slow pace to appreciate the beauties and sorrows of the landscape, whether it is a mountain range or an inner-city slum. Forget the car: put on some straw sandals and start walking under an open sky.”

•    Be brave enough to challenge your beliefs. As Nietzsche said, it’s nothing to have the courage of your convictions; what takes courage is to attack your convictions—an edict this book clearly takes to heart.

•    Reject the social norms and develop your own perspective on the art of living.

•    Find satisfaction in doing more things for yourself. In other words, be creative where you can. Cooking, for example, is a great channel of creativity and a means of self expression. And it hasn’t been taken out of the individual’s hands by an industry.

“Creativity does not require the bestowal or inheritance of genius. Above all it requires the self-confidence to believe that we are capable of finding ways to express our uniqueness.”

•    Bring the shrouded aspects of life—in other words, death—into the light of day. Why can’t funerals be as creative as marriages? Why can’t we develop our own rituals of death to substitute for the festival approach to death that is now in steep decline?

It’s not difficult to range Krznaric’s book among others Instructions For a Happier Life. The difference is, he claims history as his justification. And I’m not sure it works.

I am all in favor of sleuthing out how civilization has stolen a person’s means, and eventually his desire, for expression. Commerce has co-opted the creative. Singing in public is now rarely done except before a karaoke machine. The creativity once exhibited at Halloween within living memory been replaced by a shopping opportunity. But how history can justify personal behavioral changes--how vast chronicles of the political and military movements of a people can suggest one small twitch for modification—goes beyond me. One might as well say history justifies dumping sewage in streams

Nevertheless, Krznaric is onto something big. He has opened some big questions it behooves all of us to ask. How many of our social conventions disrupt the quality of our lives? How much of what we’re taught isn’t true? Can we reject these unquestioned conventions and live better? Most important, he has rescued history from inclusion in that squash-all-debate refrain about how, no matter how awful it is now, in the past it was worse.

As Krznaric shows, it often wasn’t. For that we owe him a lot.