Stardate 12062002
In the deliriously erroneous song, “This Land is Your Land (this land is my land)”, the geophysical wonders of the geopolitical United States of America are extolled. This land, contrary to the song, was not made for you and me. The land was already here long before there was a California. There is, however, an actual Redwood Highway and I spent Thanksgiving traveling through it to get, post-haste, to a sit-down dinner party in Eureka comprised entirely of people who had chosen to be there, unlike T-days of yore where I had no choice about who I’d spend the day with.
Eureka was a bustling shipping port and a major logging town at the turn of the century and the streets are lined with Victorian and Edwardian era homes. The Humboldt and Arcata Bay today are completely filled in with silt. The dredging operation to keep the ships afloat was a year-round task. Sometime during the 70s, hippies starting moving in and now the area is known more for its aggressive ecological activists and stank weed than its historical and still controversial logging industry. It is a beautiful little town full of bored out of their minds tweakers (a.k.a. methamphetamine users) and super-mellow stoners. There is also a mall, which seems totally out of place. It wrecks the illusion of the whole “back to the earth, small local economies” ethos of the region.
When I was a kid, I hated spending Thanksgiving with my Dad’s family because dinner would come and go sometime in the early afternoon and the rest of the day, the grown-ups were either in the kitchen cleaning or in front of the television watching football, generally unavailable for any kind of familial warmth or camaraderie. Back in those days, one of the non-network Los Angeles television stations would air a TWILIGHT ZONE marathon which was pretty much the salvation of my Thanksgiving. And when that got monotonous, there was always the Japanese monster movie marathon on another channel.
Back in those days, cable television was just another way to get TV into the homes of people who lived in places with no reception and ON TV was the only cable network. HBO and The Movie Channel would soon follow, broadcasting 2-year-old movies 24 hours a day. The Home Video Market didn’t exist. There wasn’t even Atari, just Pong. It was the seventies. Everything was orange and olive green. My Grandpa Fowler drank. The cranberry sauce was a gelatinous cylinder forcibly ejected from a tin can. Life was hell.
Thanksgiving at the Nana and Papa Madison’s was slightly better because I felt closer to my mom’s side of the family, having spent more time by far with them after my parents’ divorce (which I later learned was a tragedy, thanks to an ABC after-school special). I didn’t feel as compelled to avoid the grown-ups. Unlike the chaotic jumbled affair at the Fowler’s, Thanksgiving at the Madison’s was an neat, tidy and orderly. My Nana started the turkey at the same pre-dawn hour every year. The family was already in-house, as everyone arrived the day before. The kids would help by setting the big table and the kids table and then we’d be banished outdoors until it was time to eat.
Dinner would begin around 3, finish around 4. Everyone would go back to work cleaning up. We always had pumpkin pie long after the time I thought was appropriate. My cousins and siblings and I would begin our assault sometime around 6. “Is it time for pumpkin pie yet?” “Is it time for pumpkin pie yet?” We were all generally afraid of Nana and Papa and when they would say, “We will tell you when its time,” us kids would hide out in the den playing with the box of toys my Nana had in there since time immemorial. Just when we could care less about any stupid pie, it would be time. And since my birthday is always on or around Thanksgiving, my thoughtful grandparents would stick some candles in the pie and magically, Thanksgiving would become my birthday. And the day would end the way it should always end, completely focused on me.
I complained about this one year and the following year, at my Aunt Jan’s house, I was properly presented with a cake after dinner.
Life is as strange as you let it be. When you start out on an adventure, the whole idea is that you don’t know what will happen. Every time I leave my house, I have an inkling of what may occur or what is supposed to occur and then there is the vast, “everything else.”
Driving up to Eureka, California in Humboldt County along the 101 is an awesome, inspiring drive. So unlike the long barren drone of I-5 going into Los Angeles. I-5 is punctuated by traveler’s oases every 40 miles or so. Going North takes you right into the majestic Redwood Forest, or at least what’s left of it. I don’t like to be all depressing about it all the time, but there are hundred year old stumps of thousand year old trees and today a battle rages between clear-cutting logging companies and the people who are trying to protect the last stand of old-growth Redwoods in the world. It’s estimated that only 3% of the original old-growth forests exist.
On the way up, I pulled over in the Redwood National Forest and took a short hike. I get a new appreciated for civilization after spending some time completely surrounded by the natural world. I walked along the back of a 700 year old tree that had fallen and examined the moss that had was growing on the log. There was a colony of ferns beginning to grow out of the moss. An entire ecosystem was settling in where there was just bare wood. Nature finds a way. Nature can reclaim itself. After this oil spill off the coast of Spain, that was a lesson I desperately needed to learn.
It’s no secret that Earth’s biggest fuck-ups are humans and since post-industrialization in the late 1800s, we have been detached from the natural world and thrust into a system where our basis for survival is not the blessings of the land, but the financial blessings of an employer. Not only can we minimize our impact on the natural world, the natural world can heal itself, the way our body heals itself.
After I was done reflecting on the regional character and taking in the Redwoods, I went to the Eureka Inn to see the Christmas Tree. Every year the Eureka Inn drags in a giant tree and turns it into a veritable amusement park. One year, they even had waterfalls cascading around it. This year, someone got Fourth of July and Christmas confused. The tree was stark white, covered in tiny red white and blue lights, festooned with the American Flag and replicas of national monuments were tucked among the branches. The effect was garish and disjarring. I appreciate what they were doing, but Christmas should be kept a little traditional. It is, after all, an international holiday. Whatever holiday spirit I was hoping going to visit “the Tree” would engender was blown right out of me.
My friend Angela and her brother Steve and his kind-of girlfriend Ilsa (a Swedish supermodel in name only) all had the same gut-churning reaction and we fled to the local Moose lodge to get tanked. Or we would have if I drank and Angela wasn’t pregnant and Steve didn’t have to drive. That left Ilsa to do all the drinking for us and she just didn’t think her job was to drink for four. “But I’m eating for two,” said Angela.
Steve had just joined the Moose Lodge, something I didn’t think anyone under the age of 60 did anymore. “The drinks are cheap,” said Steve, the ever-frugal drunk. There was a honky-tonky country-western ensemble playing live music. There were as many people in the bar as there was in the band. And they had a pool table. Only a quarter! Damn, being a Moose hella rules. I began giving lessons on how to play pool Ilsa, my new team-mate in a couples match. “You have to get the table going in your favor,” I said while rubbing the edges of the table. “And then you have to lock eyes on your enemy and stare them down.” So we went over to Angela and Steve and stared them down.
“What are you doing?” Angela said.
“Kicking your ass,” I said.
“Is that a real thing, rubbing the table like that,” Ilsa said.
“No I just made it up.”
“Oh,” Ilsa replied. “It sounds like a real thing.”
We ended up winning when Angela scratched on the 8 ball. A win’s a win as far as I’m concerned. We played a couple more lengthy, inept games. I kept rubbing the table and staring people down. Ilsa made careful, studied shots. Angela hobbled around the table and bent bowlegged over her cue-stick while we tried to make her laugh so she’d pee a little. Pregnancy can do that to you, she told us. Why she told us is between her and her God.
As if playing pool at the Moose lodge wasn’t excitement enough, we headed out to Rock and Bowl and the local bowling alley. The Emcee/DJ/Announcer spun the hi NRG tunes for the amassed crowd of Saturday Night Jail Bait while the disco balls spun and the lights flashed and we danced in our seats in the adjacent coffee shop and ate french fries. I snatched the order pad from the cash register and became the cosmic waitress taking orders for the Universe. Angela asked for a washer and dryer and a healthy baby. I signed it off, “With Compliments, The Management.” If it was any closer to Giftmas, I’d have said, “I’m an elf. I work for Santa Claus. He has deemed you to be good. Stand by for presentage,” in a high squeaky voice while tossing my head from side to side.
You’d think a bunch of stodgy thirty-somethings would be done at that point: Babies, chair-dancing, invading the sacred stomping grounds of high-schoolers with few other late night options and man, it was almost 1 am. Yaaaawn. No, it was now time to search for Karaoke.
The Red Lion Inn is supposed to have a kickin’ karaoke night but the lounge was closed for decorating. Up was going the holly and ivy and out the door was going us. We drove into Old Town Eureka to check out the something Brewery’s Karaoke night. There was only one other table of lousy drunks and lonely karaoke operator. Perfect. I sang Janis Joplin’s BOBBY MCGEE and Ilsa sang Kylie Minogue’s CAN’T GET YOU OUTTA MY HEAD. When Ilsa was halfway through Kylie, the Thanksgiving miracle occurred. A small crowd of twenty-somethings showed up out of nowhere and filled the dance floor while Ilsa sang and one guy jumped up on the other mike to sing back-up. A chorus of “nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah’s” filled the once desolate barestaurant. Ilsa finished and we ran. It was nearly two am.
Angela was getting tired and Steve and Ilsa wanted to get back home while they were awake enough to do the deed and I was the guest beholden to the will of my hostess.
Angela and I got home and popped SPIDER-MAN into the VCR. Anyone else pick up on the whole “hey, I can spew sticky white stuff from my body” innuendo? Or am I just a perv? Tobey Maguire … *drooool*
Some things I learned: Christopher Guest is the half-brother of Lord Anthony Haden-Guest, a notorious drunk in the New York society party circuit. Read all about him in Toby Young’s tell-all HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE.
On the way home, I picked up a young, scrappy hitchhiker who said he was a rainbow tribesman and he taught me all about growing pot and ‘shrooms and then offered me a sample. The Rainbow Tribe is a mythical tribe prophesied to come in a Native American legend that would unite all the people of the earth and every year they hold a gathering out in the woods. He told me the “High Holy Ones” (the old codgers keeping the faith) of the Rainbow Gathering were losing the attention of the younger generation and the younger generation is starting to go in their own direction. “They forgot what the Rainbow gathering was supposed to be about. Just like we forgot what America is supposed to be about.”
I turned down his generous offer of free pot but thought a lot about what he said. He is 24.
An interesting development. Last About Town, I wrote about California’s poet laureate Quincey Troupe. It recently came to light that Troupe lied on his résumé and he gave up his title of poet laureate and resigned from his teaching post in San Diego. I’m pretty sure there is a moral lesson in there somewhere.
Next time: more Hollywood madness that you can read about in a dozen other places, but instead you come here. Awwww…. *hug*
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