Death and (Fire) Axes

by Jim Washburn

It’s 9 am and there are tomatoes all over the freeway. Caltrans is doing construction on the I-5 in the Central Valley, so every so often there’s a “bump” sign. And because the freeway’s pulsing with twin-trailer, open-topped trucks packed with tomatoes, immediately past each “bump” sign, there are hundreds of tomatoes lining the lanes in varying degrees of squishedness.

It’s like the tomato trucks are red blood cells running through our great arterial. The white cells are similar trucks toting garlic bulbs. You almost expect to see spaghetti trucks, followed by giant forks. This is one delicious freeway! Not too sensible, though, seeing that there are tomato trucks going north passing ones going south. You’d think that, our energy woes being what they are, it might not be putting too great a constraint on the free market to maybe get one hand to talk to the other once in a while.

As my sister and I drive further north, the sky takes on more of a brown ocher hue, though that’s too kind a description. Picture a crayon labeled “Baby Diarrhea on Light Blue Pampers,” that might do it. 2000 fires burning 1500 square miles over a month’s time certainly did it. Though most are now contained, the sky is still full of smoke, and you feel it with every breath.

It’s the worst fire damage in the state since we started keeping records. According to the Sacramento Bee, the National Forest Service has already burned through 75% of its fire suppression budget for the year—$900 million—and the fire season isn’t even in full swing yet. Sixteen years ago, the agency only had to spend 13% of its total budget fighting fire; now it’s 50% and all its other programs are being starved because of it. An effort in Congress to provide emergency funds is being held hostage by Republicans who first want Democrats to agree to offshore oil drilling. No fucking kidding: they are willing to let the West burn unless we hand our shorelines over to their oily masters.

Bush was out here the week previous, reminding us all how much he cares, neglecting to mention his administration’s seven years of suppressing the science on global warming and blocking any action on it, or his recent attempt to cut $22 million from the Forest Service’s brush-clearing budget, which might have mitigated some of these fires. (For comparison’s sake, consider the $142 million of wasted US tax money—for uncompleted or unusable construction projects in Iraq—discovered in a recent audit, and that was for only one of a dozen such sweet contracts issued.)

Bush has been sticking it to California since he came to power in 2001, when the feds took a hands-off stance to his friends at Enron while they gamed the state’s electricity market into blackouts, and when FEMA ignored the state’s desperate plea for federal help to clear trees killed by drought and bark beetles, which instead provided kindling for the horrific fires that year, costing lives and billions of dollars.

I’m driving up the I-5 with my sister in a Volkswagen Golf she inherited from our dad, who passed away under auspices I’m not at all sanguine about. He’d fallen in his apartment complex and hit his head. It took me a day to learn he was in the hospital, and when I called he sounded fine, expecting to be released at any time. Instead, he took a second fall in the hospital and the next day was shunted over to a care facility, because the hospital deemed he needed a week of physical therapy to be steady on his feet. Instead, some 40 hours later he was rushed to another emergency room, bleeding in his brain, with a temperature of 104, kidney failure, and a heart attack.

He was nearly unrecognizable when we got there, like some inflatable doll with the air let out, except the air was the consciousness that had shaped him for 81 years. Gone. He had just enough consciousness to respond to pain when the doctor probed him, and soon that slipped away too, followed by his pulse a few days later. There’s no knowing if he heard our goodbyes.

I’m thinking the first hospital might have been hasty in releasing him, perhaps not as attentive to details like BLEEDING IN THE BRAIN! as they should have been. I may pursue this with a lawyer, but am of two minds, regarding it like I do the question of whether Bush and Cheney should be impeached: part of me just wants to get past the horror and loss as quickly as possible and move on; another part feels there should be some accountability in this world.

Meanwhile, we’re driving my dead dad’s car toward an apocalyptic baby-shit sky, wondering what happened to the future.

Chico and the Tan

My sister’s driving to her home in Sequim, Washington, and I thought I’d accompany her partway. This brother thing only goes so far.

She’d been in So Cal visiting her daughter’s family when things went south with Dad. I can’t imagine slaloming through the past few weeks—vacating his action-packed apartment, dealing with medical, financial and legal matters—without her being there to share it.

The activity helps. My wife’s folks are always on the go—Laughlin, Vegas, cruise ships, bingo—so that, her mom maintains, “the Reaper will never know where to find us.” Maybe it’s the same with grief. Keep busy, keep moving, and it will still catch up with you, but it’s winded when it does and you can better wrestle with it.

My friend Jonathan is encamped in Chico, building a brick patio for a relative. Schlepping bricks for a day counts as keeping busy, so that’s where I parted company with my sister.

Chico’s a great town, with beautiful, tree-lined neighborhoods of old Victorian homes, many on the comfortably funky and lived-in side. It’s about 90 miles north of Sacramento in the Sacramento Valley, nestled between Harpo and Zeppo. The town’s founding industries were almonds and wooden matches, so it’s no great surprise that lots of streets are named after trees, and five of them—Chestnut, Hazel, Ivy, Cherry and Orange—were placed in order to spell “CHICO.”

Leslie, my wife, is unimpressed by this, noting that the streets of Bakersfield line up to spell “FUCK YOU.”

(The Chico story was confirmed on Wikipedia. Bakersfield you’ll have to confirm for yourself, though if you drive its streets for any length of time, I suspect you’ll agree with Leslie.)

In the time it takes other acts in the studio to decide on a bass drum sound, Jonathan will record a whole album. He’s slower with bricks. He’ll ponder one so long that he must see right to the core of its inner brickness. Then he’ll ponder another brick. If the Greeks worked at this speed they’d be finishing the Parthenon any day now.

He’s got a guy helping him named Arturo. He’s from Guadalajara and speaks about as much English as I do Spanish. He pantomimed shivering when telling me about working in Alaska and Montana. He pantomimed the work he usually does. Ah, an apricot picker! “No, he’s a house painter,” Jonathan corrected. Whatever his other occupation, he’s a gentleman and no slouch of a workmate.

As Jonathan got busy mortaring in the soldiers—upright bricks—that would ring the patio to be, Arturo and I loaded wheelbarrows with sand and shoveled it about, brunted bricks from a pile that had been serving as a black widow apartment complex, and did various other tasks that put the “me” in menial.

Jonathan’s not big on sunblock and he’d advised that instead I do as the Bedouins and cowboys do and wear a heavy flannel long-sleeved shirt. When cowboys and Bedouins—the mullets and mullahs—agree on something, you know it must be good. Sure enough, I don’t burn, or even tan, and in the 94-degree heat the shirt’s soon drenched in sweat, which keeps you cool. And sweaty. I hardly even notice the smoke in the air after a while, though officials on the news are urging folks to stay indoors.

Jonathan wonders how I’m feeling, about my dad’s death and other things. He thinks I don’t slow down enough to really feel things, and he’s big on feelings. That’s one reason why he took up stonemasonry in his 50s: he’d made a promise to himself that he’d quit music if he ever stopped feeling it, and felt that promise would have more weight if he had a skill to fall back on.

Me? I’m not so big on feelings. I’ve had friends and lovers whose lives were fantastically screwed up because they obsessed over how unhappy, unfulfilled, etc., they felt. I’ve told some of them, “Take a tip from the universe: it doesn’t care how you feel; neither should you.”

In high school, I customized a Penney’s t-shirt with a Marks-A-Lot quote from Goethe: “Life is the disease of matter.” I was depressed for years and think it can be a great learning experience. If you dig your own hole right down to the bedrock and live there long enough, you either take up permanent residence or learn one very important word: So.

Life has no meaning?

So?

The love you poured years into was an illusion?

So?

You’re a worthless piece of overlooked shit in a world rife with corruption and venality?

So?

Infinity, nothingness and all points in between are an affront to your consciousness?

So?

“So” has dozens of uses, and it’s so small you can carry it with you wherever you go. I’m not talking nihilism here, quite the opposite. I used to read the existentialists, and didn’t see why they kept on writing once they’d established the point that life had no meaning. In my teens and 20s, I thought it was bad faith to participate in the wheel of life once you’d decided it was without purpose.

Now I get the rest of what Sartre and Camus were going on about. Whether there is a god, or turtles all the way down, or nothing, you’re here anyway; there’s a whole universe here for better or worse, and you get to decide what matters to you.

So how do I feel? Generally all right, with occasional spikes of despair or elation. I’m just not that concerned with my emotions. Though I’ve never been fond of “your body’s like an automobile” comparisons, I have tried this one on depressive friends: life is what’s going on outside your windshield, under your wheels, etc. Your emotions are the dashboard. It’s good to check in with them to see how you’re doing—“Hey, I’m a little low on the self-esteem” or “I’d better get that sadness checked soon”—but the more you’re fixated on the dashboard, the less you’re living.

For example, I get a lot of my greatest happiness playing music. When it’s really connecting and flying in the moment, that’s a state of joy for me. But if I’m checking in to see whether I’m joyous or not, it pulls me right out of the moment. The only moment you’re alive in, the only moment you can change, is this one right now—whoops, there it goes!—so I don’t want to waste too many moments worrying how I feel about that moment. Maybe Socrates had it backwards and it’s the unlived life that’s not worth examining.

Any troubles you’ve got, someone’s always got worse. As we were working on the patio—evolving into a nice herringbone pattern of black widow-evicted bricks—a cheerful woman kept coming and going carrying loads of stuff.

The couple whose house is getting patioed threw a big dinner that evening. (Oops, I’ve lost my present tense. Will I ever get it back?) Life’s full of wonders and lessons if you pay attention. This, for instance, was the first time I’ve seen a cat eat corn on the cob. It’s also when I learned that the cheerful woman and her husband had just lost everything they owned in one of the fires. They’d been evacuated from their home once, had been given the all-clear and returned with their most precious possessions, then the wind suddenly shifted on a back burn and they had to flee for their lives sans precious possessions. Among a great many other things, her husband is a disc jockey and lost a huge music library.

Another guy at dinner was a former anthropologist and PG&E meter reader. Along with meeting a lot of interesting people on his route, he noticed that one day he might read 1500 meters in town, then spend the next day in the forested hills reading only 80 meters. Though it cost tremendously more to provide service to those 80 homes, they paid the same utility rates as the city folk.

Offhand, I’d say good, that sounds democratic. But he stressed another side of it, that, like the rich in Malibu, these well-off hill-dwellers are being subsidized by everyone else, and since they don’t have to pay the true cost of living where they do, it encourages more development in areas best left undeveloped. Forest Service authorities, for example, have said their firefighting efforts are hampered by having to factor in the hard-to-reach housing and the evacuation routes and that new home construction in forests has been the biggest “cost driver” in the ballooning price tag.

Some of the best people I know live in wooded areas, so I don’t know the answer there. I do know that a cat eating corn on the cob is a wonderful sight. He doesn’t go at it in vertical rows, nor horizontal. He just goes at it.

Leave the Driving to Amtrak, and Your Driver’s License

I’d planned to return home by continuing my adventures in mass transit and taking a train. Curiously, there is almost no direct passenger rail service between Northern and Southern California. There’s the Coast Starlight, which runs daily between Seattle and San Diego, but it only leaves Chico at 3:50 am (and Amtrak’s site warns it can run three to nine hours behind schedule) and somehow would take 19 hours to get me home. The only alternative involved a bus and a train, and another bus and train, taking 12 hours. That’s what I opted for.

In Chico I was told that they have a serviceable airport, and that I could catch a flight home to SNA for $160. Thanks anyway, I said, but it’s good knowing that, so I could regret not making that choice at mid-point on my ground journey, which I did indeed.

I’d made my reservation before leaving home, first attempting it on Amtrak’s semi-unnavigable website, which ultimately told me that because my bus travel was only three days away, it couldn’t process my ticket, and I had to call their 800 number, where after some while on hold I got an automated assistant that no matter what I said or did—sobbing wasn’t in its voice recognition software—led me through question after moot question until determining I needed the help of a live representative. After another eight minutes on hold, said live representative was very helpful in confirming the plan I’d made online and gave me a reservation number.

She also told me that, because some ungracious people take the Amtrak bus and then disappear without paying, the bus driver would be walking me to the ticket window in Stockton, where I’d transfer to the first train. “Will he also pin a note to my shirt” I asked. They evidently haven’t heard of e-tickets yet in the locomotive world.

At the Chico bus stop, I found the drivers take one other precaution: confiscating your driver’s license, to be returned when you pay for your ticket at the station. The bus left at 7:55 am, an actual Amtrak bus, used exclusively to fill gaps in its rail service. It was newer, more pleasant and smooth-riding than an Amtrak train, and was a nice platform from which to watch the morning blossom into its smoky haze. The bus stopped to take on more passengers in quaint, choking towns, then made a longer stop in Sacramento, where were allowed off to stretch our legs for a bit.

I’ve read that buses and trains are getting crowded since the gas crunch, and the bus filled to the brim in Sacramento. Being crammed in your seat does take a lot of the elegance out of bus travel. And something I’ve noticed is that fat people do not like to sit next to other fat people. They like to sit next to me.

So I was glad to see Stockton, less glad when, upon dismounting, I asked the driver about getting my driver’s license back.

“Unless you picked it up at the ticket window back in Sacramento, its still there,” he said, dismissively, turning away to unload baggage. Like he or anyone had said one single word about him having deposited it at the ticket window there. The nice Amtrak phone lady had said I’d get ticketed at Stockton, where my train was, and you would think when Amtrak takes possession of something as vital as your primary form of ID, they wouldn’t be so cavalier about it.

Another passenger had been similarly sundered from her ID. Fortunately, the train was running late, and we were barely able to make it to the ticket window, explain the situation and get ticketed. The clerk called Sacramento, and my license is supposed to be mailed to me. Three days later it has yet to arrive, not that I have any plans to drive, use a credit card, pick up concert tickets or anything.

In the Central Valley the only growth industry seems to be prisons, hulking facilities where you can just bet they hear that train a-coming ’round the bend, and dream of being on it, sitting next to me, farting and talking up such a storm on their cell phones that my eyes cook from the second-hand microwave radiation.

It’s just bleak out there, with hobo trash lining the tracks, and occasional clusters of corrugated sheds, crippled RVs, and squalid shacks that would look at home on the outskirts of Kinshasa. Even the graffiti seems exhausted. Near Merced, some soul had sprayed “Whopper, no onion” on a wall.

When planes are late, they can usually make up time in the air. The train just got later. There are sections where there’s only a single set of tracks, and, since our train was off schedule, it had to wait again and again for northbound trains to clear the tracks. So after a five-hour ride, we hit Bakersfield half an hour late. The bus to LA’s Union Station had waited for us. Its brief tour of downtown Bakersfield—past Florence Street, Union Avenue, Chester, Kern, Yuba, Orange, Upaqua—showed one motel after another that had been converted to halfway houses.

The driver laid on the gas, and we made it to downtown L.A. with just enough time for me to dash to my last train on down to Santa Ana and home. My dad’s still dead, Yosemite’s in the fire’s path, and it will be a blacker day yet before I board an Amtrak vehicle again.

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