Blue Moon

Sunday, June 30, 1996

The kitchen has been garbaged.  The trash can is on its side.  Paper towels, melon rinds, coffee grounds are scattered over the floor.  A cardboard barrel of pretzels has been opened, nibbled, and excreted upon.  In a basket, every single apple and peach has been sampled, gnawed.

I was gone just a few hours, a drive to the Burlington airport to meet a midnight flight.  I've done a week of rehab work at a house called the Blue Heron.  Now my family has come to join me for a few days.  At 1:30 a.m. this kitchen full of garbage and pellets of poop is their welcome to the Adirondacks.

As I sweep the floor, two chipmunks brazenly enter the kitchen through a gap beneath the door.  Seeing me, they stop, rear on their hind legs for a moment as if to get a better look, then flick their tails and run back out.

I feel like I'm the chump in some Chip 'n' Dale cartoon.

In the bedrooms, tiny bugs are swarming.  I light citronella candles.  In my daughter's room a giant pale green moth thumps its wings against the window glass, smitten by the candlelight or perhaps by my daughter, who at age 17 is lovely to the eyes of moth or man.  We are a family of four on this trip: myself, my wife, my 17-year-old daughter and my 14-year-old son.  Our oldest son is spending the summer at college.

In the days that follow, we climb mountains.

Chip 'n' Dale continue their relentless siege of the kitchen.  They break open the cookie can and gorge on peanut butter cups.

A hundred years of scuffling feet have worn a deep groove in the wooden threshold under the kitchen door, allowing entry to any manner of vermin including cute little chipmunks.  There are no power tools here, but with a hand saw I cut a piece of 1x4 pine for an extension to the door bottom.  To match the irregular trough of the threshold, I'll have to shape it somehow.  I have a pocket knife.  I have time.

Every morning, I clean up the mess that the chipmunks have made overnight.  Occasionally in an Adirondack chair on the porch or at the dock, I'm whittling, watching little brown toads hopping in the dirt or a pileated woodpecker grooming the trees.  I'm easily entertained.   

 

The lake is becoming populated with motorboats as the summerfolk arrive.  Canoes pass.  Everybody waves.  We don't know them; we just wave.  Frisky lads and comely lasses are sunning on docks all along the shore.

Now it's Sunday, June 30.  All day it threatens to rain but never does.  The air is warm and muggy.  My wife starts her day with a cup of real coffee which then energizes her to sweep and mop floors and do laundry - all because we’re out of decaf.     

My whittling is complete.  I install an elegant chipmunk barrier at the base of the kitchen door.

After dinner we walk down the paved road to Union Falls accompanied by a cloud of mosquitoes and swooping swallows who appreciate the bugs.  Coming back, the fireflies are rising, frogs chirping, bats dipping.  My daughter tries to recall the song “I Swallowed a Fly;” then, to her disgust - she swallows a fly.  We hear what sounds like human voices from the bog.  Swamp ghosts?  Or frogs?

Back at the Blue Heron, in the kitchen I hear a scuffling.  When I switch on the light, two chipmunks dive through a small hole in the floor.  I plug the opening with the neck of a beer bottle, upside down.  The natural world that surrounds this lodge is the ultimate owner and will take it back over time.  Relentlessly it probes.  Chipmunks and giant pale green moths are only the most visible of scouts.

Late in the evening we go to the dock and watch the full moon rising over Silver Lake Mountain.  After a choppy day, the lake is calm.  Two big hairy spiders - wolf spiders - cling to the concrete just above water line at the boathouse.  

It's the sort of night when babies are conceived.  There's a magic by the lake in the warm air, voices floating over still water, children playing, teens flirting, grownups drinking and laughing.



We launch two canoes and silently glide.  Trout jump for flies.  Nobody is fishing.  A meteor crosses without a sound.  A yellow streak of shimmer from the moon seems to follow us like a spotlight over the water.  The woods are black.  Lights of cabins go out one by one.  Each stroke of the paddle makes a gurgle, a swirl of lunar glitter. 

A loon calls.  Another loon answers from the opposite shore.  The song is wild and wonderful, a duet of call-and-response that echoes and amplifies.  The water is cool as it splashes our hands.  The scent is wet and evergreen.  The lake is dark, mysterious, alive.  It's the second full moon in the month of June.  By some definitions, that's a Blue Moon.  I want to tie it to the song of the loons, but rhyming seems facile in the presence of such a magnificent cathedral of night.  We are rich with life in all its messy glory.  Warm love, cool water, dark woods, glowing sky. 

Pairs

Friday, June 29, 1990
 
There's a popular bicycle loop where skinny people in tight outfits pedal slowly up Old La Honda Road and then speed screaming downhill on Highway 84. 

Today I'm driving to work down Highway 84 following a woman who is bent to the handlebars going 30 to 40 miles per hour in the middle of my lane.  On this curvy road I can't pass her and couldn't go any faster than her, anyway.

On one curve she leans - the wheels slip sideways - and she hits the asphalt sliding and flailing.  I slam on the brakes.  Swerving left to avoid her I go into a skid on the painted center line.  Helplessly she looks up at the oncoming tires.

I skid into the opposite lane.  Good luck: I miss her.  Double good luck: no oncoming traffic.  I could easily have skidded right into her head.  A car behind me has stopped, blocking the lane to protect the fallen woman with hazard lights flashing.  A man is already running to her.  I move the truck to a shoulder, run back. 

The other man has already taken charge of the situation.  The woman tries to get herself up, then lays back down.  She appears to have injured her neck.  She wore a helmet.  The man says he's an off-duty paramedic - more good luck.  Nobody has a cell phone - this is 1990.  A woman shouts from a nearby house that she's called for help.  We're all instantly members of a rescue team, strangers.

When the situation is under control, I drive on - warily.

I repair a leaky bathtub faucet and perform a few other fix-it chores at a rental unit occupied by a fragile man who I've never met.  His father, Elgin, is always the one to call me and to meet me at the son's rental to let me in.  I like Elgin - he's the one who told me he has "champagne taste on a beer budget" as he slowly improves a raggedy house in a bad neighborhood.  The invisible son seems extremely tidy and has a fondness for Shaker furniture.  Elgin seems to clear the way for his son to live a quiet life avoiding encounters with the rough-and-tumble commercial world of which, apparently, I am part.

Driving home, I come upon a second bicycle accident.  This time it's a woman on Portola Road.  It's bad.  Cops, paramedics, flashing lights.  She's being covered by a blanket.

Must be a full moon.

Back home my boys Jesse and Will, age 13 and 8, tell me that big Dave Stewart of the Oakland A's is working on a no-hitter, so I join them watching the last 3 innings.  And he does it!  Couldn't happen to a better guy.  As the team mobs him, I'm moved to tears.  Maybe I'm in a vulnerable state, loosened up by the bicycle accidents.

I have some dinner, putter around, and learn that Fernando Valenzuela is working on a no hitter, so we watch the end of that one, too.  He succeeds!  Wow!  I’m glad, but no tears.  I mean I like Valenzuela but it's the Dodgers, for Pete's sake.

I try to find meaning in these events, something about teamwork, about caring for others, about good and bad things coming in pairs. 

No.  No meaning.

The planet is swarming with sparks of random tragedy, random triumph, every day since life began. 

All we have is love.

In the sky, it's only a half moon.  Half light, half dark.  

The Rat Face Lure

June, 1996

You don't get to choose the places you love.  Sometimes you're just passing through, and it hits you.  Or you might spend 18 years in your home town and still hate it as much as I hated mine.  It's the people as much as the location.  The first time I drove into La Honda I knew within 30 seconds that it was home.  And it still is.

I first came to the Adirondack Mountains of upper New York State when at the age of 14 I spent a summer at Hawkeye Trail Camp on Silver Lake.  I returned for the next three summers.  My final summer in 1965 I was a camp counselor, my first paying job, where at the age of 17 I spent as much time as possible in the company of an amazing girl (who would eventually become my wife) while taking breaks twice a day to teach kids how to shoot a gun.  As Riflery Instructor it was my job to put a .22 Winchester in the hands of little children and take them to the rifle range.  In the process I became a great shot.  It didn't seem weird at the time.

1963.  Me standing left.  JK front center.  Duncan 3rd row center.

Thirty years later I return to the Adirondacks.  Hawkeye Trails closed in the 1970's.  Ex-campers JK and Duncan bought part of the run-down camp and refurbished it as a summer retreat for their families.  Every year in late June they have to repair and re-open after the hard Adirondack winter.  This year, 1996, they invite me to come and help.  They call it Workfest.

I remember the Adirondacks from the 1960's as a poverty-stricken area of terrible roads and survival housing.  Now the roads are smooth; the houses freshly painted.  Compared to California, the land is lush and green.

Arriving after noon, I find JK and Duncan down at the lakeshore.  Duncan is little changed.  He seems to feel the same about me.  There's the instant ease of old friendship after a 30 year gap.  Meanwhile JK and I have always stayed in touch - he's my brother-in-law.

 
We install the dock.  The job requires standing waist-deep in cool water as waves splash against you.  We pound pipes into the mud, mount a frame to the pipes, tighten bolts, add decking in the form of pallets.  Nothing about the process has changed since I first helped out as a camper 34 years ago, though the design is begging for an update.  Already I perceive a sense of tradition with JK and Duncan, a desire to keep things as they were. 

"People are always dropping by," JK explains.  "Old campers who remember Hawkeye from the Sixties or even the Thirties.  They're so happy it's still the same."

JK and Duncan have borne the expense, done the hard work, and run the risk of owning this property, but unlike lords of the realm they feel an obligation to everybody who has loved the place - and there are hundreds.  Never an architectural showpiece, it was a funky summer camp - but a very special place built of memories, of youthful rites of passage from first canoe outing to first kiss.  They want it to remain so.  The main building is a big old lodge known as the Blue Heron.

 
A couple hundred feet down the lake from us, Ken Laundry, age 85, is installing his own dock without help from anybody.  He joins us for a beer and a bit of talk.  Ken says his property assessment tripled this year.  Ken has lived by Silver Lake all his life, scratching out a living with strong hands and a strong head.  In winter he used to take horses out on the ice to haul in fresh water.  “And if the horse did his business on the ice, you had to clean it up.  Now nobody seems to care about the lake.”
   
With the dock installed, we make a trip to Aubuchon Hardware in Ausable Forks.  At Aubuchon I see the adult Duncan at work.  He was playful when I knew him in high school, and now he is playfully engaging as he jokes with the hardware clerk, asking questions about wood-preserving techniques, explaining our concerns, acknowledging the clerk's expertise and experience.  The clerk becomes a part of our project and feels he has a stake in the outcome.  Then when Duncan jokingly suggests that for the size of our order, we each deserve a free Aubuchon Hardware painter's cap, the clerk laughingly agrees.  Duncan scores free hats - disposable, emblazoned with the Aubuchon label, but they had prices on them.  I think it all happened by accident.  There's nothing calculating or manipulating about Duncan; with soft self-deprecation he simply charms you.

Since I haven't seen Duncan for 30 years, I can't say how he behaves back home in Minnesota, but I know he runs a serious business, supports his family and is a responsible man.  Here he's simply playful.  JK is equally lighthearted.  In Los Angeles JK is a partner in a law firm handling heavy-duty corporate law.  Here, he's a different person.  He's merry.  The spirit is infectious.

The next day while wearing our free Aubuchon caps we stain the new paneling in the living room with just a blush of red added.  It looks great.  Over the winter Duncan and JK hired a local carpenter to rip out the old dark interior walls, add insulation, and then panel them with knotty pine.  Apparently this was a new step for them, as they'd done most of the fix-up so far by themselves.  They're pleased with the results, and I agree - the carpenter gave them solid work, lovely details, for a low price.  During winter, carpenters around here don't have a lot to do.

Duncan mows the lawn.



I paint a new door.  Swimming in the lake, I come upon a big fish who doesn’t scare easily.  He's twelve inches long, sitting on the bottom chewing his cud.  There are fresh-water mussels down there and masses of tiny fish hiding among bright green weeds.  I feel I've re-entered a lovely secret world.

We drive out along the Ausable River, which is world-famous for fly-fishing.  Next to the river we dine at a restaurant called Rat Face McDougall’s.  Duncan finds the name amusing, since his last name is McDougall.  Down the road from the restaurant we stop at a fly fisher’s shop where they sell a fly called a Rat Face McDougall, recommended for catching trout.  Duncan buys two.

After dinner we visit a neighbor on the lake by the name of Fred who is remodeling an old cabin.  Fred's in a bad mood about his contractor because while Fred was away the man built a massive stone fireplace rising 30 feet from foundation to chimney top - and he built it in the wrong place.

The next day we return to Aubuchon Hardware where another salesman says, "Oh yeah, I heard about you guys," and he allows us to return some unused stain.  What did he hear?  Was Duncan's charm somehow offensive?  Should we offer to pay for the caps which seemed so freely given?  Or did he simply hear about a bunch of nuts from California and Minnesota who don't know beans about preserving wood in the Adirondacks?  We're the summerfolk in a very small town.  They depend on us for a livelihood; we depend on them for service.  Sometimes it's an uneasy relationship.

Across the street I buy groceries and have to wait five minutes to purchase beer, which to my surprise can’t be sold before noon on Sunday.  While I wait, the checkout lady tells me she's local but she left town for a while.   

"Where'd you go?" I ask.

"Oh I lived eleven years in Florida but then it started snowing down there."

"Really?  Snowing in Florida?"

"You bet your butt it snowed.  So I came back here and now you know what?  The winters are so much milder than they used to be.  All that snow must've gone down to Florida."

"Yeah, maybe the planet really is warming up."

"You bet your butt it is.  The snow here isn't nearly as deep as when I was little.  It used to come up to my chin.  Now it doesn't come up so high."

Then she laughs.  She had me.

"Noon," she says, and she rings up my Saranac Ale.

Duncan and JK

As a last act of opening the camp, Duncan and I install the mailbox at the end of the driveway.  Pre-internet, that mailbox is the portal connecting this camp to the rest of the world.  And so it's been for most of a century.

Workfest turns out to be a reunion, a chance to be boys again, a time when work is worked and play is played, a summer camp for grownups.  Or at least for me.  Like a trout, I'm hooked.






(The photo of Duncan mowing, and the photo of Duncan and JK, were taken by David Minard who reserves all rights.)

Calico Salvage

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

In late 2005 I remodeled some office space for a therapy practice.  May I show some pride?  I moved walls and doorways and created a well-functioning floor plan out of a hodgepodge.   

Stuff happens.  Now just eighteen months later in June of 2007 I'm tearing out my own short-lived construction.  Of course I won't be tearing out any walls or doors.  I've improved the landlord's property - at no expense to him - so he can rent it to the next business at a higher rate, quite a windfall for a man who frankly doesn't deserve such good fortune.

There's slim sentiment embedded in most offices, but this was a place where children found joy.  They acquired skills they never thought they could learn. 

From the ceiling I remove heavy-duty eye bolts to which the therapists had hung swings, trapezes, special gym equipment.  The bolts and their mounting braces can be re-used.  I patch the holes they leave behind.  What took three days to install, crawling in the attic over ratshit and dust, takes three hours to remove.

From the wall I remove a special wooden ladder built for kids to learn how to climb without fear.  I remove cabinets filled with art projects, shelves stacked with board games, custom-sized tables that I built with such painstaking care.  Parts of them can be recycled somewhere, somehow.  I hope.

I remove a truckload of planter boxes that I'd installed to spruce up the entry.  The landlord offers to buy them - on the cheap - but I haul them home to install outside our home-office window, where they look fantastic.  That's one piece of salvage that creates an actual improvement.

Finally in one hot shirtless afternoon I touch up the walls and pack an overloaded Okie-truckload of boxes and games, a mop and broom, two toilet plungers and a file cabinet - and I bring them home. 

It's taken one week to dismantle two months of work.

The next day, equally hot, equally shirtless, I perform an overdue cleaning of my garage, rousting a cat who has long dwelled there.  Unloading the truck, I pile cabinets and boxes of therapy equipment, little kid-sized tables and chairs painted bright blue and red where games were played, drawings drawn, skills acquired.  Now they are spattered with a few drops of my sweat.

It's a melancholy job dismantling your own work, especially from a place of such happiness.  

The cat returned.  A feral calico, catching rats.  I don't feed her; I didn't ask for her.  She first appeared about ten years ago.  I find paw prints on the truck windshield.  Sometimes when I enter the garage the cat leaps past me in a flash of flying calico.  Sometimes she sits outside the back door to my house and peers through the glass seeking me out, wanting some vague companionship but fleeing my approach, never to be touched.  She's like the ghost of a relationship that never was.

Four years have passed since I dismantled that office.  Junk accumulates.  Sometimes, fetching tools or some old box from the garage, I'm surprised to see spots of bright paint poking out through the debris.  In her search for comfort the cat rearranges the insulation, the old carpet, the coils of corrugated pipe exposing little glimpses of the past, of blue table and red chairs, of careful work and thoughtful play.


(Note: my garage cat is camera-shy.  I've included a generic photo from Wikipedia of an elderly calico.  My feline - if she is indeed mine - has more orange, less black and is gaunt with a raggedy coat.  Life is tough out there but it's a life she chooses, and many times at night I've heard her defend that territory with a screaming passion.)

Septic Dog Karma

Monday, June 26, 1995

So a lawyer calls me asking about a house that I repaired, a house just two doors down the street from my own.  The house has been sold.  The buyer is suing the seller for fraud and nondisclosure.  The lawyer's voice is precise.  Immediately I sense the chill, the threat of large sums of money changing hands.  Hopefully not my money.

"I understand you did plumbing in that house."

"Yes."

"Did you install a graywater line?"

"Yes." 

A graywater line is a way to dispose of wash water - never toilet water - by a system less elaborate, and much less expensive, than a septic tank.  They're not allowed in San Mateo County, but lots of rural folk install them because they combine two good things: they dispose of soapy waste, and they water the plants.  Generally, the county inspectors pretend not to see them.

"When you installed it, were the owners aware that it was illegal?"

"Yes.  I told them.  I installed it at their request.  And then later I noticed that they tore it out.  They said it was smelly.  And then even later I noticed they'd restored it themselves.  So whatever is there now is something they did themselves.  They never talked to me about it.  I'd stopped working for them by that time."

"Why did you stop?"

"They stopped hiring me." 

"Do you know why?"

"I raised my rates.  They were ... uh ... frugal."  Jake was a schoolteacher who tended to stray from the curriculum; Mindy was a seamstress who sold her handmade tie-dye dresses at flea markets.  Both of them tended to engage in wishful thinking.  Mindy liked poetry and birds.  Jake liked poetry and college football.  I'm sure they had no money saved up beyond the equity that had accumulated in their house.  They hired me when I was first starting out, paying me as I was learning on the job, and to them I'm grateful for that.

Like most of La Honda, their cabin had been built in the 1930's when the town was a summer home community.  During the hippie invasion of the 1960's, Mindy and Jake had bought a place and converted it - whimsically - into a year-round dwelling.  Unfortunately for the plumbing, the cabin was at the bottom on a sloping piece of land.  As a summer home, lightly used, maybe the location wasn't a problem, but as a full-time residence, it was a drainage disaster.

One more thing: they had a dog named Gandalf who was the bad boy of the neighborhood.  One time when he had my dog in a death grip, I broke a two by four over Gandalf's back.  Another time after Gandalf had broken into his house and impregnated his dog, my next-door neighbor wanted to borrow my rifle and shoot him.  Another time Gandalf attacked a seeing-eye dog  in Golden Gate Park - and Jake not only didn't intervene but also pretended he didn't know whose dog it was.

The people who had bought the house were a nice hardworking couple with a young boy.

"Do you remember the layout of their house?"

"Yes."

"Did you install a downstairs bathroom?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure.  They asked me once, but I told them their downstairs was below the level of the septic tank, so the only way they could drain the bathroom would be with a septic pump which the county wouldn't allow.  And it would cost more than they would want to pay anyway.  And even if they could somehow get the waste to the septic tank there was no place for an additional leach line which they would need.  In fact, there's no place for any leach line for that cabin and I have no idea what happens to their septic water and I bet they have no idea either."

"So you have nothing to do with the downstairs bathroom?"

"There's a downstairs bathroom?"

"We'll be in touch."

I would never hear from that lawyer again.  Forces of karma - and civil law - would grind Mindy and Jake to bits.

They were irresponsible.  But I'd always sort of liked them.

Thomas (Hosed)

Monday, June 25, 1984

Thomas is a salesman for IBM.  He's an affable man, fortyish.  Apparently he earns very good money. 

At his house in Saratoga, I spend an entire day - nine hours - rehanging dozens of cabinet doors.  Somebody had painted the kitchen, then re-hung the doors in an adequate but not-quite-perfect manner.  "I got hosed," Thomas says.  "But then he's just a painter."

After nine hours of fussing and fitting, microscopic adjustments, more care than any cabinet door should ever receive, I get them darn near perfect.  The task is not unpleasant but feels insanely unproductive.

Thomas comes home from IBM sales-land and inspects.

"Hosed?" I ask.

"Pretty good," Thomas says.  He's a pleasant perfectionist, which must be a winning formula for his career.  At least he can afford an eight-room house in an expensive town. 

I feel like this day was somehow stolen from me, like I'm selling my time - the hours of my life - until they're used up.  But then I'm just a carpenter.

Before I leave, Thomas asks me to check out a Casablanca fan somebody installed dead center over his king-size bed.  "It spins kinda fast," Thomas says.  "Is this thing gonna fly off?" 

Smiling, I say, "Maybe you should sleep with a pillow over your crotch.  Or a garbage can lid."

"Or a lady."  He guffaws.

Euw. 

"Just kidding," he says.

I check out the fan.  The mounting is firm, connections solid.

"You won't get de-hosed," I tell him.

I drive home by way of Highway 9 up into the mountains, then north along the ridge of Skyline Drive.  I have my arm out the window as the sun sinks toward the ocean turning golden hills aglow.  At Alpine Road I drop into the shadows of the canyons, the ranches, the forest, home to my kids and my wife.  I have a check for nine hours' pay.

Thomas is a salesman, living alone.

Just Shut Up

Friday, June 24, 1983

A realtor in La Honda buys a bargain of a house, has some work done on it, rents it to tenants, and then calls me to snake a drain.

Something is wrong.  The more I snake, the more the water seems to back up.

On the hillside behind the house I dig out the lid of the septic tank.  After peering inside, I trace the drain field up the hill.  Now I understand.  The drain field, incredibly, is above the septic tank.  When it rains, water from the drain field flows backward into the septic tank and then into the house drain. 

I tell the realtor that the guy who built that septic system should be in jail.

The realtor is not happy with my report, to say the least.  The septic builder is her son-in-law.

I'm tired.  I smell.  After a shower I join the neighbors for a dinner of barbecued chicken which looks just like what I was pulling out of the drainpipe.  Unfortunately, meaning no insult but simply trying to make an interesting and somewhat ironic observation, I say so. 

Maybe sometimes, judging from the reaction, I shouldn't say what's on my mind.

But the chicken is delicious.