WTG Devin

You know what I hate? Lots of things. If you asked me to list all the things I hate, I think I would pass out from exhaustion before I stopped. People who study intelligence call a person’s ability to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions ‘divergent thinking.’ I am a genius at hateful divergent thinking.

One of the many things I hate are blogs. What’s the point of a blog? Do they tell a story? No. Do they make people smarter? No. Are they entertaining? Sometimes. But who needs more entertainment? Did you forget to download the entertainment application on your iPhone? Do you want to know why you’re fat and haven’t accomplished anything with your life? It’s because you’d rather read a blog than do something constructive with your time. In fact, you just gained a pound reading this sentence. Stop reading blogs and go do some push-ups.

Who writes blogs? Who thinks their opinions and advice are so important that they need to force them on basically everyone? Narcissistic trash-holes, that’s who. If someone has so much time on their hands they can write a blog, maybe you shouldn’t be listening to them. So instead of reading 100 ways to decorate your foyer, maybe you should read 100 ways to stop sucking:

1-94 – Stop reading blogs.
95 – Do some push-ups.
96 – Run to the nearest body of water, swim across it, then run home.
97 – Every time you do something stupid, slap yourself.
98 – Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it.
99 – Wake up singing, drink water until you vomit, then saddle your horse and raid your neighboring tribe.
100 – Invent a time machine so you can go back and convince your mom this whole pregnancy thing is a bad idea.

And yes, I see the irony.

About a year ago I decided to stop being a worthless, non-contributing zero and actually do something with my life, so I went back to school. The last time I went to college I got a degree in Environmental Studies and Anthropology, which comes in handy every time someone asks me to be a pretentious d-bag, so this time I’m getting a degree in science.

The fun thing about studying science and math is that every teacher is completely batshit insane. And not in the same way as humanities professors, who at their craziest hit on their students and say things like, “Bush is a dick and the Iraq war is a quagmire,” while drinking something complicated from Starbucks. I’m talking about the insanity that comes from being exposed to too much radiation and absorbing toxic chemicals. The kind of insanity you get from studying eight hours a day for ten years to get your PhD, and then pretending for the rest of your life that calculus makes sense and is useful. Here are some awesome things I’ve heard professors say in the last year:

– Oh, that’s a hard problem. Better have a little more rum and root beer before tackling that (drinks from cup).

– The other day my daughter comes up to me and tells me her math teacher made her cry in class, so I said, ‘Good to hear he’s doing his job.’

– So I stuck my hand in the powder and my skin started to crackle. I wasn’t sure if it was basic, though, so I stuck my other hand in, and when that started to crackle, I was like oh yeah, that’s basic.

– Hey, I’m a chemist. What is that, pH 4? I’ll drink that (stomach acid has a pH of 2-3).

– We once got a whole kilogram of sodium from the lab (sodium explodes violently when it touches water). I threw it off a cliff into the ocean at night. There were multiple fireballs. One of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

– Who wants to go to Mars? No one? Why not? Sure, you might die, but I’d rather die in space. What’s your other option? Dying on the streets of Sacramento? No thanks.

– The secret of life are the choices you make every day. Study hard, be ambitious, you might go somewhere. Slack off, end up like me – teaching at a community college and drinking too much.

– I used to go to this summer camp when I was a kid where if it was your birthday you had to crawl between the other kid’s legs while they paddled you. So when it was my birthday, I was like, the heck with that, so I wore all the underwear I had. I was walking around like that all day. It was really uncomfortable. I was like, come on guys, when are you going to smack me in the butt?

– I have five kids – three sons and two daughters. The second son, he’s no good. I mean a real loser. He’ll probably get his first job when he’s 45. I don’t know what happened to that one. And my first daughter – she’s 12 – is a brat. You know what the difference between a brat and a bitch is? A couple of years.

Russians, sodium and water don’t mix.

Also, this isn’t something that a professor said, but it is still awesome:

Professor (doing a lab demonstration) – So if you don’t do it like this, you’ll make lots of mistakes.
Girl student – Isn’t experience the name we give to our mistakes?
Guy student – So experience is the name of your first kid?

ICE BURN.

The subtitle of my blog (wow that sounds presumptuous – who needs a subtitle? I feel like I should be wearing a monocle) used to be “traveling without insurance,” as I did lots of stupid and entertaining things in the year or so I was uninsured – like boxing, hitchhiking, mountain climbing, teaching kids, and playing tag with scorpions in my sleeping bag in the desert. As one can see, that subtitle has changed – I now have coverage. Whoo! This is a good thing, because as soon as I got coverage the world was like, “Fair game!” and started throwing diseases right at my face.

Remember back when swine flu broke out in Mexico? I do, because I was in Yuma, Arizona at the time. For all of you who are uncertain of Yuma’s proximity to Mexico, on the highway out of town there’s a sign that says, “Mexico, next exit.” I wasn’t super worried about swine flu because I was going on a canoe trip down the Colorado river from Walter’s Camp to Martinez Lake Resort (aka sketchy mcsketchville), and probably wouldn’t be running into swine flu cases in the middle of the desert.

You may be thinking, “Cool! A canoe trip through the desert,” and yes, it would have been cool, except I had to make sure a bunch of 16 year-old ADD kids didn’t drown. If you think regular 16 year-olds are a joy to work with, wait until you guide a dozen overpriveleged, severely insecure ADD kids with parent issues down a river. Sooo much fun. A good 50% of them were incapable of things like tying simple knots (like shoelace knots), washing dishes, and not breathing through their mouths. One of my kids was always throwing rocks. In a canoe. On a river. Where do you find rocks in the middle of a river? Another one thought that it was a good idea to yell at a guy fishing on the riverbank: “Hey! Why don’t you go to school and get a real life!” The fisherman’s response: “Why don’t you find a rope and hang yourself!” Fisherman 1, Kid 0.

After a few days of lifting metal canoes full of water over my head we got to Picacho State Park, homeland of my ancient enemies: mosquitoes. Words cannot express my hatred for them. One night while sleeping in the desert I was bitten on the lip by a spider. I woke up and my lip was swollen and my heart was doing fun slow down now go really fast exercises, but I was so tired I was like, meh, then went back to sleep. I will gladly take poisonous spider over mosquitoes any day, because poisonous spiders will LET YOU GO TO SLEEP. Mosquitoes never stop whining in your ear and sucking your blood (in other words, worst girlfriends ever). At Picacho I was overjoyed to experience my first mosquito bite on a zit, which left a scar on my face for four months. Surprisingly, I was not the worst hit by the mosquitoes. This one kid, who refused to put on a) bug spray and b) a shirt, out of some misguided attempt to impress a girl, was reacting so badly to his thirty-plus mosquito bites that his right eye swelled shut. Not so easy to make out now, is it Mr. Depth Perception?

At the end of every canoe trip we do a sunrise paddle, which means we wake the kids up at 4 am, have them pack up their tents and gear into the canoes by headlamp, and then get out on the water before it starts to get light. This is a beautiful and amazing tradition, and if you lay on your back across your canoe, it actually looks like the sun is falling into the sky. But I digress. Four in the morning is too early to motivate kids who haven’t slept at all (I got up to go to the bathroom around one and I could see a good dozen teenagers making out, and the next day one of the kids said they had been paid twenty dollars to keep quiet about something they had seen).

The last day on the river was filled with these two phrases repeated 500 million times: “How much longer until we get there?” and “Why am I such a dumbass?” (okay, maybe just the first one). Also an emergency stop where two of my kids dug holes and pooped in what appeared to be a Native American religious site. After getting to Martinez Lake and sending the kids on their merry way home, one of my co-workers and I carpooled to Joshua Tree, where we split a bottle of tequila while she told me her life story. The next day I thought it might be a good idea for my out of shape self to go for a forty minute run with my friend cute-as-a-button Molly, who was training for a marathon, and then take a cold shower from a hose in a parking lot.

I know all of this may sound unrelated to getting diseases thrown at my face, but the point I am trying to make is that I was not in a good place. Recap: zit/mosquito bite, aggravating week of doom, no sleep, physically exhausted, and not enough alcohol. Anyways, so I’m teaching on Catalina Island, and I’m swimming in the ocean, having a grand old time, and I’m like huh, that’s weird, why is there water and little rocks leaking into my left eye? I go the bathroom and discover that the left side of my face is f’d. I can’t wink with my left eye, and when I blink my left eye is a wee bit slower than the right. My first thought is, did a week of ADD munchkins give me a stroke? But the rest of my left side is fine, so I talk to my co-workers and Miss Sarah (aka Sharkfoot) tells me, “Yeah, that looks like Bell’s palsy. I had it in high school. You should definitely get it checked out, because it could be something really serious.” Bell’s palsy is a paralysis of a facial nerve that results in an inability to control muscles on one side of the face – for example, on the second day of symptoms, I lost the ability to whistle because I couldn’t purse my lips on the left side of my face.

My situation is this – I’m in a cove that’s a twenty minute boat ride from the nearest town, which has laughable medical care, which is an hour ferry ride from Long Beach near Los Angeles, where I have no place to stay or any idea where a hospital is, and I’m supposed to be directing my first program the next day on Catalina. Fortunately my laziness doesn’t extend to taking care of myself. In the next eighteen hours I take a ferry to Long Beach (setting up doctor’s appointments before 6pm in the twenty minute window my cell phone works as the boat gets closer to land), find a parking garage I’ve never been to, find my co-worker’s car, call my friend in New York and see if I can stay at their parent’s place in Long Beach, get to my friend’s house and look online for hospitals, go to an emergency care place that closes in twenty minutes and get diagnosed, get my prescription filled, solve world hunger, and then make it back to the ferry the next morning and then to Catalina accompanied by a forty-dolphin salute. I didn’t even miss a day of work.

It’s a good thing I know lots of amazing people whom I call my friends and who for some reason tolerate my annoying presence, otherwise I’m pretty sure I would be dead by now. Oh, and that “something serious” Sarah mentioned Bell’s palsy might be? Lyme disease, brain tumor, or permanent paralysis of one side of the face. Moral: get health insurance.

So I just finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, and it was pretty funny. I’m a fan of almost any book that uses the word “f***face” in it. The stuff about the Dominican Republic was really interesting, and the constant references to nerd mythos were awesome. Even though I’m the second most nerdy guy that I know, I barely got half of the references. Impressively nerdy. Although combined with the many Spanish sentences that appear in the book, I can see how a reader not proficient in Spanish/nerdese could be frustrated by this (coje that fea y méteselo – classic).

Unfortunately, the book suffers from what I like to call “Yellow Raft on Blue Water Syndrome”, where the main character and conflict get sidelined in favor of exploring other characters that have pretty much no point in driving the plot forwards, so the author can dick around and talk about history and symbolism. Geh. This really annoys me. It would be like if Shakespeare was like,  “Well, you know this Hamlet character and his conflict is pretty interesting, but let me tell you about his dad and uncle, King Hamlet and Claudius. Man did they not like each other. But it all really started with their Aunt Violet, who first introduced ear poison to the family.” NO ONE CARES. It’s like the author is saying, “Man this guy is boring, let’s move on to a character who’s new and exciting!” It’s almost as bad as a Dominican man switching women.

One of the worst examples of this occurs during the section about Oscar’s mom’s three great loves. There was 10 pages for the first guy, 30 pages for the second guy, and oh yeah that guy she’s sitting next to on the plane? That’s the one that she had kids with! Doesn’t she do the darnedest things? Let’s not talk about him at all. And none of it drove the main conflict forward. It was almost as suspenseful as watching dust collect. Look, it’s a bunny!

Don’t read this book if you have no interest in learning about the Dominican Republic and one of the worst dictatorships of the twentieth century. Don’t read this book if you can’t read Spanish and are easily frustrated by this fact. Do read this book if you want to hear one of the greatest burns to a fat guy the world has ever known (or I guess you could just message me and I could send it to you).

Sometimes dropping a letter off at the local post office is a hassle. Sometimes it’s life threatening. Guess which one this story is.

I was visiting my good friend Angel the set-designer one week I didn’t have work. Angel lives at the top of a hill in the wonderful neighborhood of Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley (that’s Los Angeles for all you non-Californians). Pacoima, in addition to being the birthplace of Leonardo DiCaprio, has gangs that many consider to be more terrifying than ANY other area in Los Angeles, as they have a well-documented tendency to shoot pedestrians on sidewalks at random. The residents of Pacoima like the place so much that a sign reading “Hansen Hills” had its letters chipped away to read “Hell”. Cute.

Anyways, everyone was at work so I was home alone, finishing a letter to my friend Mike, who is in the Peace Corps in Malawi. I decide I need to mail it right away, as I was leaving for the desert the next day, I had no stamps, and Angel was getting back from work after the post office closed. Fortunately Angel said I could use his dad’s bike.

Now let’s get something straight. I am not a good biker. I grew up in a city where the pavement looked like a jigsaw puzzle and the leading cause of death was bus accidents, so I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was in college and my friend Mike (same one that’s in the Peace Corps) forced me to bike around Santa Cruz during beach traffic in an effort to kill me. Anyways, so I walk into Angel’s garage, and set my eyes on Angel’s dad’s brand new racing bike. It has wheels that are about as wide as a toothpick, it weighs five pounds, and it was definitely worth more than my life. Thanks for the head’s up Angel. I sigh and get on.I roll down Angel’s 45 degree angled hill at like 80 mph (and yes, I did go “wheeee!”) and turn onto Pacoima’s main street. The post office is a good 3 miles away, it’s 100 degrees, and as soon as I get on the street I start coughing because LA has the air quality of a coal mine. The streets of Pacoima are not designed for bikes, let alone tiny racing bikes that feel like a strong wind could pop the tire. So there I am, trying to avoid glass from broken 40’s, crumbling cement, cars, and yes, syringes, when I roll past some bushes and A PACK OF RABID CHIHUAHAS break cover and start coming after me, yipping like crazy. I nearly fall off the bike in shock. In retrospect this sounds kind of funny – IT WASN’T. Those things could have inflicted some severe ankle damage. I take off, and after about a block they stop following me.A few minutes later I come up behind this one guy dressed in office clothes and carrying a briefcase. I’m about to let him know I want to pass when he hears my bike. He immediately drops his briefcase, plants his feet, and starts to PUNCH ME IN THE FACE. I duck. He apologizes a second later, but I can’t really talk as I’m pedaling away pretty fast.

I get to the post office after crossing like 5 train tracks and 3 freeway overpasses, and on the front door a sign says “Robbing a post office is a federal offense.” No shit. I walk in and am completely unsurprised to see lots of bullet proof glass. I am dripping sweat, coughing, holding a racing bike in one hand, and asking a teller for postage to Malawi. I can understand why the teller looked at me a little strange. I pay, then enjoy another fun 20 minute bike ride back through DTP.

I hope you like your letter Mike.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, has really good intentions, but very little follow through, just like a twelve-year-old’s penis. Zen isn’t really a novel because its plot – a father taking his son on a cross-country motorcycle trip – is mostly just a metaphor for the narrator’s philosophical journey through his past and mind. This might not be so bad if it wasn’t so repetitive – but after the tenth time in as many pages Pirsig compares his philosophic progress with the weather him and his son are biking through I wanted to stab someone’s face with an ice pick. Oh, you’re having trouble thinking about philosophical question # 10? What a coincidence that it’s raining outside at the same time! And you mention that it’s slow going! Holy shit! You just made the physical world reflect the main character’s thoughts! Or is it the other way around? How thought provoking! Please stop.

But if there is one thing that Zen is, besides poorly-edited, arrogant, and plotless, it is thought-provoking. Zen ponders the question of how to reconcile the romantic approach to life with the classical (technological, Western) approach, and while it doesn’t come up with any quality answers (ha!), it does produce tons of good quotes and discussions on technology, college, education, classical philosophy, and makes the reader ask themselves the question, “What is best in life?” It unfortunately also makes the reader ask themselves how much better the book could have been with a plot, and how much of a douchebag Robert Pirsig is.Here’s a guy who was so concerned with philosophy that he goes insane and gets electro-shock therapy. Sucks. Maybe he should have been raising his two kids instead of thinking up airtight critiques of Aristotle. Then he takes his kid across country on a motorcycle, ignoring him for the better part of 4,000 miles, and then at the end of the book comes to the realization (also metaphorical) that all his son could see most of the time was his back. Way to go. Selfish, anyone? At one point his son asks him why they went on the trip, and he shoots back with this little philosophic gem: “Why does anybody do anything?” That’s the kind of answer you give to people you want to develop a severe case of shutting the hell up.

The special edition, with forward and afterward and book club questions and author-editor correspondence and naked pictures, makes it even more abundantly clear what a delta bravo Pirsig is. There’s a lot of talk about how hard it was to get published and how the book is a unique work of genius that defined a generation, which makes Pirsig’s disclaimer at the start of the book that he doesn’t know much about Zen or motorcycles look like a weak attempt at modesty. There’s also an interesting tidbit about how Pirsig persuades his girlfriend to get an abortion then changes his mind at the last second because he realizes the baby is carrying the life force of his murdered son. Well, when you say it like that it just sounds ridiculous!

I would read the first and last 100 pages, and then look up quotes online and call it a day.

WordPress won’t let me post pictures for some nonsensical reason, which is why I haven’t posted in so long, so you know what I say?  F wordpress.  And its little dog.  So without further ado:

A few months ago I decided to forsake all the comforts of modern society and spend my remaining years eking out a harsh existence in the wilderness. Then I decided that wasn’t masochistic enough, so I became a teacher. In the woods. For the past four months (not counting the last two months, which I have spent visiting old friends and reminding them of all the money they owe me) I have been what is known in the industry as an “outdoor educator”. Each week I get a new group of kids, grades 4-12, and take them around a different beautiful location in California, teaching them about botany, ecology, how to completely embarrass themselves in front of their peers, how to lose respect for adults, how to wash dishes in the woods, but not, unfortunately, how to stop asking insipid questions like “Are we there yet?” or “Is it normal for snake bites to bleed this much?”. Kids these days.

Many of the people I work with are insane. The first co-worker I met had worked for AmeriCorps for 2 years, been a spotter on a whale watching boat, a firefighter in Big Sur, a wilderness therapist in Utah, and in college had taken an Arctic Explorer’s class where for the final he mimicked the sleep patterns of a wolf for a week. Other co-workers spin fire, travel obsessively, and blow up mountainsides full of snow for avalanche control. This is because most of my co-workers are seasonally employed, meaning that all of them have had approximately 237 thousand different jobs. And each job is usually in some exotic, far off locale, like Hawaii, Chile, or Neverland. Actually, that’s exactly what my company is – Neverland (the one with Peter Pan, not the one with Michael Jackson). We work in gorgeous, dream-like settings all over California (Neverland), we teach over-privileged, spoiled, mostly white kids (neglected British children of low-level aristocracy – how come James Barrie didn’t include any cockney children with black lung? – oh wait, that’s right, because he was nowhere near as cool as Roald Dahl, who in addition to being from a well-off family and writing about poor kids, was a fighter pilot in WW2, broke a crash landing with his chiseled features, and then became a spy – and when I say spy I mean he had sex with a lot of American women from wealthy families), all our employees are adults who never want to grow up and are completely content with entertaining children for hours on end (the Lost Boys) who dress at every opportunity like pirates (the pirates), Native Americans (the racistly-depicted Native Americans – are there any other kind?), and giant f-off crocodiles with enormous clocks in our bellies (exclusively on river trips).

Anyways, due to the diverse array of jobs my co-workers have had, they end up with a pretty ridiculous skill set and job outlook. Example:

Me – Hey Drew, what are you up to?

Drew – Oh, I’m moving to Oakland, so I’m looking for jobs on craigslist.

Me – Cool, find anything interesting?

Drew – Well, I could be a personal assistant to a producer. In the porn industry.

Me – That’s awesome. You should do that.

Drew – I don’t know. There’s this other job, where I would be a clown at children’s parties. “Must provide own transportation.” Ha! I could totally entertain kids for a few hours! That’s what I do now.

Me- Why not do both?

Drew – I would totally be the best porn personal assistant slash children’s party clown ever.

That has to violate some part of Megan’s Law.

Because seasonal employees are constantly moving around, it’s inconvenient for us to have certain things that most people take for granted – like homes, or personal hygiene. Most of my co-workers live out of their cars. For those of us who care about the environment too much to own a car (read: too cheap), living out of a backpack is the solution. Which means I had to bum rides from all my co-workers, putting my life in the hands of people who are not quite all there. Carpooling also leads to fun escapades like almost getting arrested in the middle of the desert by border patrol, and then learning how to drive stick shift in a K-Mart parking lot in 20 minutes at midnight before embarking on several miles of dirt roads (also in the desert). The conversation with the border patrol really epitomized the ridiculousness:

Border Patrol (BP) – So what do you guys do?

Will – We’re outdoor educators.

BP – What’s that?

Will – We take school groups backpacking and canoeing in the woods, and teach them about ecology and stuff.

BP – So you’re teachers.

Will – Yeah, kind of.

BP – So where are you guys headed so late?

Will – We’re going to Blythe, and then these guys are going to the Colorado River.

BP – Why are you going to Blythe?

Will – I have to get my car there.

BP – Your car? Whose car is this?

Will – It’s Scott’s car.

BP – Scott? Scott who?

Will – I don’t know his last name.

BP – You don’t know the last name of the person whose car you’re driving?

Will – No.

BP – What kind of person lets you borrow their car without knowing them?

Will – I know Scott, I just didn’t know his last name. The company we work for has us carpool a lot.

BP – What do you guys do again?

Will – Outdoor education.

BP – Right . . . whatever. We’re going to have to search the car.

Next up, an in-depth study of what’s at the bottom of a bottle of Jameson’s.

As promised (several months ago), here is the most amazing The Relay video ever put on YouTube, thanks to the video editing genius of Shaun de Beach Hill House.

If you thought that video was cool, check out this work of art, also from Shaun:

People have asked me what kind of people picked us up while we were hitchhiking. The hot kind. And when I say hot, I mean Danny’s mom. But seriously, a great variety of people were kind enough to give us a ride. There was the rich businessman who was convinced that Estonian women were the most beautiful in the world (“Don’t get married before you go to Estonia”), the ex-biker who had been born in a meth lab and was headed to jail until he found Jesus, the ex-biker steel worker slash minister to the inmates of Pelican Bay Prison who had rescued a jumper on top of the Sacramento Bridge Tower while inebriated, the older lady with beautiful crystal blue eyes and the most well-informed nine year old son I’ve ever met (“That store was established in 1928 after a fire, and traded hands five years ago. You guys going to Leggett? The best pizza place in the world is in Leggett.” Points to random surfer on the side of the road, “That’s Geoffrey. He’s out early”), the Mexican with an immense Latin lover’s curl and an amazing truck that was “just for him” who had driven straight from Sonoma to Guadalajara, the pot-head sound technicians coming back from a Hells Angels’ gathering in Norcal where one of their friends had gotten beaten up, the guy who had started a children’s home with his wife before she cheated on him with his best friend, the beautiful Billy with six-shooters strapped to her thighs, the German graduate physics student who couldn’t pronounce “Mendocino” to save his life but was applying for a fellowship at UC Berkeley, and last but assuredly not the least, Crazy McCrazerson.

Crazy McCrazerson picked us up deep in the Coast Range of California the day after out quicksand adventure. When I got in the car the first thing he said was, “You boys got money for gas?” I’m not sure he understood the whole hitchhiking deal. Danny got in the front seat, we informed him that we had $14 between us, which he was more than welcome to, then McC took off speeding in his enormous new truck. From the back seat I noticed that he 1) had no front teeth – upper or lower, and 2) he was wearing ALL DENIM (known in the industry as a Canadian tuxedo). There was a moment of calm. Then:

McC – You boys ever head of Lake Baikal?

-pause-

Me – You mean the lake in Russia?

McC – Yep. Got me some property up there.

Me – Do you speak Russian?

McC – Nope. Don’t need to. It’s a free country there now.

Danny – How’d you manage to get a place up there?

McC – Used to be a spy. Not a bad profession, if you don’t mind gettin’ all your teeth knocked out, gettin’ shot in the back, all the bones in your foot broken with a hammer, gettin’ your scrotum torn off by another man’s teeth. Ha! Heh, heh, not bad.

Danny – Whoa.

McC – Yep. Lake Baikal. Biggest lake in the world. Deepest, too. Call it the uncrossable lake. Know why?

Me – Why?

McC – ‘Cause it can’t be crossed. Can’t swim across it, can’t cross it in a boat, can’t put a bridge over it. Hell, it’s got it’s own micro-climate. Know why boats can’t cross it? Boat will be going across, and giant carbon dioxide bubbles seep up from the bottom, overturn the boat. Never heard from again.

-silence-

McC – Know what’s strange? Feels like we’re going uphill, right (we are clearly driving up an incline)? But we’re not. We’re going downhill. See that river down there (points to the Trinity River, which flows next to the road, and on a side note in the dry summer season is one of the most unique and striking rivers I have ever seen)? Water’s going the wrong way. It’s an optical illusion.

Danny – Whoa. That’s crazy.

McC – Yep. You boys don’t mind listening to some music, do you?

Me and Danny (enthusiastically) – No, not at all! Go ahead.

Cue way strange 80’s synth music set to rolling, golden, dry CA redwood forest and turquoise rapids. I could have felt how uncomfortable Danny was several football fields away.

Me – What band is this?

McC – This is Simon Friedman. 28 years old, from Seattle. He sat down one night and recorded this whole album. Course that was ten years ago.

McC asks me if there is an open water bottle in the back seat. I give it to him, and instead of taking a drink, he proceeds to remove the cap and SPRAY THE GAS PEDAL AND BREAKS with water. Of course, at this point he could have started gnawing his arm off with his remaining teeth and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Terrified, yes. Surprised, no. He also liked to put his cigarettes out underneath his seat.

As we went up the mountains McC would periodically pull over to “decompress” his ears. This led to lots of awkward conversations on the edges of cliffs. “Hey, come look at this view,” McC would say, standing on a ridge above a 400 ft. drop into a valley. Danny and I would look at each other, look at the cliff, and then reluctantly join McC.

McC – You boys scared? Am I scaring you? Heh. Me, I don’t care if I live or die. I’ve got degenerative bone cancer. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to die tomorrow. Hell, I’ve got 23 grandkids.

-silence-

Danny – You’ve got a really nice car.

McC – Yep, brand new. It’s a good thing, too. Get into an accident, won’t explode.

Danny – What do you mean?

McC – New cars, they’re built different. They don’t explode. Not anymore. They implode. More powerful than a nuclear explosion. Bet you didn’t know that you could turn a Pepsi can into a nuclear bomb, did you? Heh.

McC – You boys got Indian blood in you?

Danny – A little, yeah.

Me – A tiny bit.

McC – Yeah, you boys look a little Indian. Hell, how come you’re hitchhiking? How come you don’t get your check from the government?

Me – I don’t think I qualify.

McC – Sure you do.

Danny – How much do you get?

McC – Oh, not much. ‘Bout 100,000 a year. Enough to keep me in cars.

McC – You see this valley? It was made by a tsunami. Swept in and carved it out. The Indians, they won’t cross it. If you try, you’ll die. Die of thirst, or a bear or rock will get you. Hell, a falling pine cone can start an avalanche. Same thing happened back in ’67. Wave came over the hills, lifted up a Spanish galleon, dropped it right here in these mountains. All these mining companies around here? They ain’t mining. They’re looking for gold all right, just not in the ground. They’re looking for those galleons.

McC – You know redwoods are the hardest hardwood in North America? They’re the most radioactive, too. They suck heavy metals from the ground, that’s why they only grow in areas where there’s gold. That’s why I got me a house made of solid redwood. You know what happens when you stick your head in a knot of redwood?

Me – What?

McC – You can breath! There’s air in there. You know what happens when you throw grenades into a redwood house?

Danny (finally getting a little uppity) – What, the grenades break.

McC – Nope. Nothing. Redwood’s that strong.

Even though he said he was going all the way to Seattle (“Yep, I’m gonna be eatin’ salmon in the Space Needle come nightfall”), Danny and I got out at Redding because we needed some time to sweep together our shattered nerves and glue them back together. To see how well that turned out just read my previous post.

Of course, because this trip was 2 ½ hours long, I’m leaving out a lot of amazingly ridiculous monologuing from McC. Like how the water on the top of Mount Shasta is always boiling, always 76 degrees, and how he jumped in to prove he could swim it. Or how Danny and I could bike up Mount Everest because we were hiking in California. Or how his son uprooted a tree with his bare hands because they got into an argument, or how he likes to go boulder dancing. What’s that, I hear you ask? What’s boulder dancing? Why, it’s when you stand on a boulder at the top of a mountain, start a rockslide, and ride the boulder down the whole way because that’s how you live your life – on the edge.

A few weeks ago, my good friend Danny the poet-farmer hitchhiked across the country from Boston to Salt Lake City with his recent acquaintance, Dave the sensitive minstrel. Their original goal was to hitchhike to California, hang out with friends, and then hitchhike south to Ecuador and then Chile, which is one of the most admirably foolhardy plans I’ve ever heard. It’s kind of like watching the charge of the Light Brigade in slow motion, only in Mexico. Fortunately, Danny and Dave were traumatized on their 11 ½ day journey through America’s heartland, and after getting stuck in the blazing desert of Moab, Utah for two days, they said f this noise and took a train to Sacramento. When I picked them up they were both sunburnt, and they kind of smelled like dead armadillos.

Danny wanted to go to Chile because he’s kind of from there (he’s actually from nowhere, which is what you’re supposed to say if a gang member asks you where you’re from), and, as he put it, “Things were too perfect back home, so I left.” Dave had to go to Ecuador to stop the marriage of his girlfriend to her Ecuadorian ex-boyfriend so he could get a green card. Because this situation wasn’t simple enough, the very first night I put the two up at the museum (my house), Dave gets an email from a girl saying that she has chlamydia, and hey, you should get yourself checked out. Cue a super frustrated and regretful Dave and planned parenthood the next morning.

Turns out Dave was fine, so we went camping in Big Sur well before the fires started (1 week), where we saw a bobcat, slept under the stars, got stung by my ancient enemies the mosquitoes, and almost got bitten by a rattlesnake (Danny – “Wow, they actually have rattles on their tales! I thought that was just a myth!). But after a week of tooling around the bay area, Dave flew to Ecuador, and Danny and I were a little restless, so we decided to hitchhike to Seattle. Why Seattle? I had promised some friends there that I would go visit them, and as for Danny, he was trying to catch up with a circus that was traveling back to Boston so he wouldn’t have to hitchhike back across the country. That’s right, a circus.

Circus Folk Unite!

Danny and I set out on Friday the 13^th with peanut butter, water, sleeping bags, and a tarp. We were originally taking I-5 north, but I-5 in the summer is really hot. So we cut west to the coast. Upon the telling of this story, some people stop me and say, “Wow, isn’t hitchhiking dangerous?” Well, yes. I felt like Danny and I were going to die a good 75% of the time, which was compounded by the fact that people kept telling use we were going to die. We were in Petaluma, and we asked this guy how to get to the road to Bodega Bay, to which he replied, “You guys are walking? You guys are going to die.” Then he turned to a young couple who were walking down the street and said, “Hey, these guys are walking to Bodega Bay,” and the young couple looked at us and said, “Oh, you guys are gonna die. You’re dead.” What the hell. Optimistic people in Petaluma. So we started walking to Bodega Bay, and around mile 2 a car drove by and a kid yelled out the window at us, “You’re going to die!” Only the car he was in was going really fast, so it was more like “YOU’RE . . . Going . . . to . . . die!” all echoey and whatnot. We kept walking. The sun was going down, and we began seeing the bodies of dead animals in various stages of decay on the side of the road – rat, crow, cat, and I joke not, sheep. We made it about 10 miles before we pitched tarp in a grass-filled ditch near the Coast Guard Training Academy and passed out until dawn.

We spent the next few days inching up the coast about 10 miles at a time. We slept in state parks, ate a burrito a day, and met lots of “street people”, as Danny calls them. One night we got driven to a state park by a burly police officer. “Yep, I’m about all the law there is between here and Crescent City,” she said. Side note – if you don’t want to be arrested for vagrancy, make sure you’ve got an ID and some cash on you.

We eventually got tired of moving 100 miles a day and the sun coming out at 5pm, so we cut back to I-5. On the way we camped in the coast range near the Trinity River. Because I’m addicted to rivers and waterfalls we went hiking, and as we were walking down the trail we ran into an earthquake fissure. Just imagine many enormous trees torn from the ground with their roots exposed and covered in mud, and a hillside split open into a cliff down to some rapids and you’ll get the picture. So we start down the earthquake fissure to get a better look at the river, which is about 150 ft below us. I jump into the middle of the fissure onto what appears to be solid ground, but no, quicksand. Surprise! My legs have disappeared up to my knees. I look up at Danny and say, “I really . . . shouldn’t . . . struggle.” So I get out of that stuff, and ask Danny if he thinks we should risk climbing down the rest of the way to the river. Danny looks down at the jagged rocks, and says completely straight-faced and bare-chested, “I feel no fear.” So we hike down to the river, which is beautiful and awesome, and even more so because we find a 5 year-old sealed bottle of St. Pauli Girl, which we drink riverside as the sun goes over the hills.

We get to Redding at noon the next day, where we have to hike from DTR (downtown Redding) to the I-5 onramp, which is about 3 miles away, up and down massive, sloping hills. It was the middle of a 100-degree day, and we had a fun time walking in the heat with our 25-pound packs. Danny and I were standing on the side of the onramp, sweating profusely and trying really hard to smile at the oncoming traffic, when Danny turns to me and says, “Hey, what does heat stroke feel like?” So I get Danny some water, he passes out in some gas station shade for a few hours, and we call Valería la más sería for some tech support, aka bus times from Redding to Portland.

While we’re waiting for the bus station to open we’re reading on some grass in DTR, when this bearded messiah-looking homeless guy walks up and proceeds to try and scam me out of my stuff in the most ridiculous way possible. He starts pounding the grass with his hand, talking about how the grass was the only true path, and how I should let Jesus into my heart, and then he says, “I want you to stand up, leave all your stuff here, and walk over to that wall. With each step, imagine the people you love and are thankful for in your heart, and when you turn around you will have the Lord with you.” I was having none of it. Then another homeless guy (he was a pretty big guy – picture a cross between Meat Loaf and the Big Lebowski) sits down on the other side of me and Danny, flanking us. The two homeless guys get into an argument, which results in the bearded guy laying his hands on the big guy’s head and baptizing him in the middle of the grassy area. Danny and I beat it mid-ceremony, and hole up in a Mexican restaurant until the bus station opens and we can play arcade games. Then we take the night bus to Portland for an actual place to stay, and some much needed showers.