Sand and Sage Brush: The Finale: Hanging with "the Beave"

   
     Our outing to Salt "Lick" as the locals called Salt Lake City, referencing their extremely salty lake---one of the salt companies had salt ponds at the edge of the lake and they'd built a huge salt pyramid---had given us a taste for the open road.  We couldn't wait for the next weekend adventure to free us from the small town confines of Montello, home of itinerant railroad workers and not much else.

     Terry's car turned out to be quite a ride.  It was a Triumph TR 4-A convertible sports car.  It really couldn't accommodate much more than two people, a couple of small suitcases in the trunk and a few bags of groceries in the back seat, but it drove like a bat out of hell.  Back in 1967 in Nevada, there weren't really speed limits outside of city limits, of which there were few and far between.  This allowed us to travel rapidly and in style.  Highway 80 was our weekend ticket to fun and adventure.

              Behold the Triumph TR 4-A in all its speedy glory.  

     Some of the geologists mentioned that they liked to unwind from a hard week bouncing through the sage brush and staring at aerial reconnaissance photos, by kicking back at a casino/steakhouse/topless bar in Elko.  Terry and I looked at each other and practically in unison said, "We're going to Elko!"  In addition to a "titty bar" there was a public swimming pool there.  Our parched, desert-wandering bodies---mine in particular---were screaming to get wet.  Enjoying drinks, steaks and bare-breasted women was the cherry on top.  

     Elko was about a hundred miles West of us and most of that road mileage was on good old highway 80.  "Hell!" Terry exclaimed, "We can make it there in about an hour and a half."
So the next weekend we felt like hitting the open road in our speedy little sports car, Elko would be our destination.  Sometimes Terry would let me drive which was generous of him, considering how much pride of ownership he had, but when I volunteered to do the dishes for a week, he gallantly allowed me to share the driving duties.  Elko, here we come!

     Besides, Salt Lake City, we hadn't been anywhere that had more than one stop light and much in the way of amusement.  Elko was actually a pretty substantial little community.  It's best known for hosting a cowboy poetry reading round-up.  In early February for the last thirty years, aficionados of cowboy life on the lone prairie gather from all over to listen to grizzled, yet soulful cow-pokes recite poetry and play music glorifying the life particular to western cattle ranching.  Elko had a long and proud history of being one of the hubs for surrounding cattle ranches.  Many a parched and lonely cowboy, just back from a round-up or riding fences, would get a bed in the local cowboy bunk room for the weekend.  He'd take his friday night bath and put on a clean western style dress shirt with the pearl buttons, a clean pair of Lee Rough Rider jeans, his Stetson 10-gallon hat and his walking boots and head to one of the local watering holes to get drunk, maybe get in a fight with another hombre much like himself, and if he was very lucky maybe, if it didn't cost too much, he just might get laid too.

This video clip gives you an example of Elko style cowboy poetry.

     Terry and I packed our bathing suits and put on our best chick-magnet get-ups.  Topless babes and beer---oh my.  True to his word Terry, with a little help from me, got us to Elko in under two hours.  It was a hot Saturday afternoon in Elko and all the town-folk were out and about.  "Yea!  Civilization"  we thought to ourselves as we cruised on into town.  "Terry, let's cruise around and get oriented.  We need to find that public swimming pool and the casino with the busty bare-breasted babesters!" I exclaimed.  My partner was in total agreement.  After locating both, we were soon relaxing pool side in our surfer dude swim trunks.  

     We had a refreshing swim including some belly flops off the high dive.  Boy did that water feel good.  I tried to not imagine how much urine might be mixed into the pool water.  Next to the pool was a large field-yard of luscious green grass.  We had a football and a frisbee with us and we spent some time frolicking barefoot on the grass.  It felt so good to get our tootsies onto a nice green lawn after all that desert wandering.  "Look Terry, this is a sage brush-free zone!" I cried.  "We gotta come here more often."  We got all cleaned up in the locker room and headed for the casino for some grub and some suds.

      Note the large statue of a polar bear.  More on that shortly.

     This casino had a sort of roadside attraction to draw attention to itself.  When we walked into the lobby we found out what it was.  There in front of us, in a huge lucite case, was the biggest stuffed bear I had ever laid eyes on.  It was a polar bear and it had been stuffed in a standing position with its paws and huge claws raised up over its head.  From its paws to the ground must have been a good twelve feet.  I felt humbled, puny and weak in its presence.  After giving our respects to Mr. ( or Mrs.---I didn't look) Polar Bear, we headed into the casino/restaurant/bar.

     Accompanied by the sound of ringing slot machines, we had ourselves a nice steak dinner.  Afterward, we pulled up seats in the cocktail lounge area in front of the stage.  Our waitress had assured us that now that we had treated our stomachs, we were about to get a treat for our eyes.  Sure enough, when the curtain eventually parted there they were in our their glory;  Buxom   Bouncy   Bare-bosomed Babesters.  Terry and I smiled at each other and clinked beer mugs.  This was kind of a fun Summer, after all.

     We visited Elko several times that Summer for the swimming, the dining, the drinking and the ogling, but there were other places that we wanted to explore.  One, in particular, was of interest to us.  Terry lived in Bel Air Estates a very exclusive neighborhood adjacent to Beverly Hills and Hollywood.  Terry was friends with a couple of brothers whose parents had a ranch outside of a little cow-town in Wyoming called Big Piney.  The dad was in "the biz", as Hollywood people say, and they had a lot of friends in movies and TV.  Terry and the brothers were particularly good friends with Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver, the star of a very popular TV show from that era called "Leave it to Beaver".

The gates to the entrance of luxurious Bel Air Estates.  Home to the rich and famous and formerly, President Reagan.  Nice digs!

     The family had developed a tradition of gathering a few musically inclined friends at their ranch on the weekend of Big Piney High School's junior/senior prom.  They would put together a little ad hoc rock band to play for the dance.  As a special treat to the town-folk each year, the Hollywood band boys would feature some well known movie or TV person as the lead singer.  This year "The Beave" would be bustin' some moves up on stage, accompanied by a thrown-together rock band.  

     Terry called up his Bel Air buddies and wangled us an invitation to the weekend hoe-down.  To get to this ranch/retreat, we had to drive all the way across Utah to get to Wyoming, then it was another hundred and thirty miles or so up a little rural two-land to get to Big Piney.  The town has a population of roughly five hundred people, mostly cattle ranchers scattered all over the area.  Seeing Big Piney, I can't imagine how small Little Piney must be...  The high school---nickname "The Punchers"---was pretty small and the school could only afford to have one prom.

These two images is pretty much how I remember Big Piney, WY

     The big annual event for Big Piney was the high school prom and the bands mystery vocalist.  We got to the ranch and met everybody, including Jerry Mathers.  Beaver turned out to be a real nice guy with a terrible case of acne.  "It's all the damn pancake make-up they put on us" explained Jerry.  The two brothers were both in a rock bands and there at the ranch, they had all the musical gear that was needed.  Between all of us we had a drummer, a bass player, a lead guitarist and a couple of us who could play passable rhythm guitar and sing back-up.  We threw together a set-list of the popular, and easy to play, rock and roll tunes.  Louie, Louie; Beatles tunes; Rolling Stones, Eric Burden and the Animals and such.  The brothers had sheet music with the guitar chords so it wouldn't be too hard to play and sing our hastily arranged harmony parts.

     The truth of the matter was; we sounded pretty shitty but the brothers assured us that the place was going to be so crowded and rowdy, and the acoustics in the school gym/auditorium were so awful, it wouldn't really matter.  The students and the town-folk were there to dance and be serenaded by Beaver Cleaver.  When word got around town that none other then the Beave was this year's mystery vocalist it stirred up all kinds of excitement and everybody couldn't wait for the big Saturday night shin-dig.

     Come Saturday night, we got dressed up in our "rockin-est" duds, loaded up the gear in our cars and headed to the high school.  The school's gym/auditorium was utilized by the whole town for whatever it was needed for.  4-H meetings, town hall meetings, and the like, were all held there.  There was even a marquis out in front and in big bold letters it said:  "SATURDAY NIGHT HIGH SCHOOL PROM STARRING BEAVER CLEAVER".  In addition to pretty much anybody in the high school, townspeople could come too.  All they had to do was sign up as "chaperones", pay a fee and they could come too.  Looking out from the stage, we saw a lot of cattle-ranching folks and some pretty grizzly looking cowboys, lots of them with pints of whiskey stuck in their back pockets.

     "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, LET'S GIVE A BIG PINEY WELCOME TO BEAVER CLEAVER AND HIS ROWDY RANCH HANDS!!!"  With that a great hew and cry rose up from the crowd and, taking advantage of the cacophony, we plowed into "Louie, Louie".  The music went pretty much as we expected it would but as far as the throngs of party-goers were concerned, we could have been the Rolling Stones.

     Sunday morning at the ranch was spent in a state of recovery; aided by steak and eggs and lots of coffee and orange juice.  Out behind the main ranch-house was a deep ravine.  After breakfast, us kids aka "The Rowdy Ranch Hands" along with several girlfriends who had made the trip from LA, convened at the edge of the ravine for a rock throwing contest.  Having been a baseball pitcher from little league all through high school varsity, I had a cocky feeling that I my rocks could out chunk these rock and roll punks rocks.  (I apologize, that's just my damn fingers being mischievous... ).  We spent about an hour heaving stones into the ravine, trying to impress the girls.  I do believe my best throw was the farthest but the rest of the guys felt that way about their best throws too.  

     Much too soon, it was time for Terry and me to saddle up and head on down the lonesome trail.  Later that Summer we got a postcard from Jerry Mathers telling us what a swell time he'd had singing and playing with us and we should keep in touch.  The memory of that weekend and a few other trips we took, sustained us through the Summer.  When it finally came to an end, Terry and I said our goodbyes to our fellow geo survey workers and the little town of Montello and to "Lovely Rita, meter maid, where would we be without you?"  We had a little time before sophomore year at Stanford loomed.  So before heading back down to Bel Air, Terry dropped me off at my girlfriend's house in Sacramento where I would be discovered canoodling in bed with her by the horrified mom.

     That visit culminated in a rather sombre ride back to school in the back seat of the family car.  We managed to get mom to not tell dad what she had witnessed that morning in the guest bedroom.  In exchange we promised to never, ever fool around like that again.  With mom and dad in the front, and us in the back, we presented very sorrowful and contrite faces, to the rear view mirror, while our hands were busy quietly groping each other out of sight.  And that my friendly readers, was my Summer vacation in 1967; wandering endlessly in the sage brush and sand, (with the occasional rattlesnake) dreaming of the warm waves of home in Hawaii.

     Happy trails to you buckaroos, until we meet again.  Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres      

Six A.M. Cinema: Scapegoat

     I saw an absolutely "topping" movie this morning as the English say.  It's called "Scapegoat" and it takes place in 1952 during Queen Elizabeth's coronation.  It's based on a book by Daphne Du Marier, a very popular English writer of suspense novels and short stories.  She wrote the short story that Hitchcock turned into "The Birds".

     A Greek teacher is sacked because the headmaster decides that "conversational French" is what the boys need more than a dead language.  He is drowning his sorrows at the local pub wondering "whither goest I now".  Out of the corner of his eye he sees another chap who looks just like him.  He confronts him in the bathroom and after marveling at their resemblance, they sit down and have a few drinks.  This "other John" (their both named John) is the prodigal son and heir to one of those formerly formidable, now crumbling, family estates.  He is a rogue and the black sheep of the family.  He is supposed to be on his way back to the family castle to settle affairs and do a deal to keep the family's glass foundry from foundering (sorry, couldn't help myself...).

  The Greek teacher (the good John) wakes up the next morning in one of the bedrooms above the pub.  His clothes are gone and they have been replaced by bad John's clothes.  Not having many options, he puts on bad John's clothes and decides to go along with the conceit that bad John has hatched and he allows the chauffeur to take him home to the family castle.  The first shot of his new home is well done.  It looks like an English version of the Taj Mahal with turrets everywhere.  He slowly finds out what a "toff" his roguish doppelganger has been; rogering his younger brother's wife; ignoring and abusing his own, long suffering wife, plundering the family's fortune, ignoring his daughter etc. etc.

He pretends that he has signed the contract that saves the foundry so that all the local village people get to keep their jobs. As he delves into the family finances, he finds that bad John has already sold everything of value to continue to support their opulent lifestyle.  His wife has a trust fund of one million pounds that can only be released if she bears a male child or if she dies. Apparently, the difficult birth of her daughter makes the probability of her birthing a male heir problematical.  While good John is out on the annual pheasant shoot with the village swains beating the brush to roust the local fowl, bad John sneaks back into the house and convinces his wife that only her suicide will save the family by releasing her fortune.  He induces her to write a suicide note then injects her with a lethal dose of morphine.  The daughter, affectionately known as "Piglet" sees what's going on and puts two and two together.

In an earlier scene, as good John was tucking her into bed, she remarks on how he seems different and he even smells different.  "You don't smell the same, Daddy.  You smell more like a doctor" she exclaims.  She gets word to good Johnny, who is gamely trying to lead the shoot that bad Johnny has been up to same major mischief.  He also puts the numbers together and runs back to the house just in time to get the wife to the hospital for a life saving stomach pump.  He surmises that bad Johnny has gone to the foundry.  It's time for a showdown between the two Johnnies. When good Johnny confronts bad Johnny, bad pulls a gun and tells good to take off his clothes.  Now that he thinks he has killed his wife, he will inherit the trust fund loot and good Johnny is expendable.  While they are both dressed down to their identical shirts and slacks, good Johnny says to his evil twin, "What's to become of me now?"  "Ashes to ashes" says bad Johnny.  He marches good Johnny to the foundry's huge coal fired industrial furnace.  Ashes to ashes indeed...  Good John manages to grab the gun and a jolly good row ensues.  One of the Johnnies manages to shoot the other, but by the semi-dark light of the furnace, we don't know which Johnny prevailed.

A quick exterior shot of the foundry with smoke billowing from the chimney informs us that the other Johnny has been reduced to unidentifiable ashes.  Surviving Johnny rushes to the hospital to see how his wife is doing.  By now, the poor viewer doesn't know if he is going to comfort her or put a pillow over face while she sleeps off the effects of the morphine.  With other family members in attendance he can't reveal his true intent.  Eventually, as he deals with each of the family members we realize that "Yea!" good Johnny has prevailed.  In the last scene, everyone is gaily playing ping pong and the wife has not only recovered she is with child.  Once again, this being the movies, good has triumphed over evil.  We are left to assume the bun in the oven will be a boy child; large trust fund monies will be released; the village people's foundry, and their jobs, will be saved and all but bad Johnny shall live happily ever after.  A jolly good show and I propose we have a Pimm's cup all around.

In other nooze, I'm off to get my leg sawed open again to excise any more tissue that may be cancerous.  Wish me luck as I've grown rather fond of that particular leg...  Cheerio and all that rot, Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres  

Valentine's Day for the Romantically Unencumbered

One nice thing about not having a "squeeze" in my life is not having to worry about falling short on Valentine's day.  I remember hustling down to the flower shop at the last possible minute before heading over to Nicole's place for a romantic dinner.  "A dozen red roses, please, if you've got any left", I said to the smiling flower clerk.  "Why yes of course we've still got some.  Most of our business comes on Valentine's day afternoon.  We stock up on red roses just for forgetful guys like you who are kind of over a barrel because of last minute purchases.  That'll be $ 125." she announced cheerily with a glint of smugness.  " $ 125 ?---wow.  That's a hell of a lot for twelve flowers!"  I replied.

       Now I imagine running a small flower shop in downtown Mill Valley must be a challenge.  Because of the desirability of these store fronts in the heart of our quaint and precious little village, the rents must be sky-high.  You can tell by how quickly these little ventures come and go that these poor shopkeepers struggle daily to maintain a positive cash flow and I imagine that profit margins are razor thin.  Having an MBA in finance and accounting, and having once been a partner in a recording studio, I knew something about struggling businesses.  "Okay", I sighed.  "I'll take them.  Just one question; how much will these same flowers cost tomorrow?"  She smiled, "Oh probably about $ 30-35.  The mark-up on Valentine's day gets us through to Easter.  Come a little earlier for Easter, the Cala lilies will probably triple in price come Easter morning.  We'll be open to 1 PM on Easter."

As I mentioned, now that I'm post-sexual, I don't have to deal with being in a romantic relationship and the obligatory flower purchase.  This year, I sent my lady friends talking Valentine e-cards with silly messages.  I imagine they were surprised to hear from me at all.

The cherry-plum trees in the back yard and the plum tree in the garden are all in glorious blossom.  That's a risky strategy for these trees.  But because of our balmy, droughty weather for most of this year, they couldn't help themselves.  The problem is, it's not quite warm enough for our little denizens in the apiary to be out and about pollinating.  They have their sugar water to sustain them till Spring.  With the cherry and plum blossoms unpollinated, there's a risk that a heavy rain at this point will knock all the blossoms off and there won't be any fruit this Summer.  It has happened several times before and it's very disappointing to have no plums in June and July or pears in August.  Keith, my eighty-two year old beekeeper, within whose bosom hope springs eternal, has planted a cherry tree and another peach tree down in the apiary.  After helping him to plant them a few weeks ago, I haven't been down to see how they're doing.  I think I'll do that today as it appears that it's going to be a lovely, sunny day.  I noticed that the peach tree we planted was already budding.

When I decided that my garden needed some fruit trees back in '91, I consulted my almanac, Organic Gardening Magazine.  The editor, a third generation organic gardener and grandson of the original editor, had recommendations for the types of fruit trees to plant.  I trusted his recommendations, as he was "standing on the shoulders of giants".  His grandfather J.I. Rodale had been a huge promoter of all things organic and had been urging people to grow their own since 1940 when he started his own "Experimental Organic Farm and Garden".  At Mr. Rodale's urging, I planted heirloom trees on M-1 dwarf root stock.  Even at maturity the trees will be short enough that you'll never need more than a small wooden step ladder or a long handled fruit picker to harvest (I have both---the fruit picker, though, is tricky; especially when you have a cluster of fruit.  And harvesting before the damn yellow jackets get after them is also a bit of a challenge).  J. I. Rodale, along with people like the Englishman Alan Chadwick, was one of the pioneers of organic gardening.  After he turned the editor's job over to his son, he traveled all over the world, lecturing on the importance of growing organically.  He was killed in a car crash on an icy road outside of Moscow after a lecture in 1971.  R.I.P.  

You plant fruit trees in the middle of Winter when growth is dormant.  So in mid-february, I journeyed to several specialty orchard tree nurseries to buy what they call "bare root whips".  These are fruit trees that are just a year old and their roots are covered in damp wood shavings.  They look just like buggy whips and it takes a leap of faith to plant them.  The orchard owners assured me that if I did the planting, as instructed, they would grow and probably bloom the following Spring.  With their trimmed root balls carefully trussed up in wet burlap bags, I laid them in the bed of my pick-up truck and drove down through the horse pasture to the garden.  I dug six holes for my infant dwarf heirloom fruit trees,  while a heavy rain poured down.  I had to dig the holes fairly large and deep to accommodate wire gopher baskets.  The resident dog, a young and very spirited golden lab, had a serious jones for retrieving thrown objects.  The rain didn't dampen her spirits one iota so the planting "drill" went something like this:  Stevie would drop the tennis ball next to the hole I was digging.  If I didn't respond immediately, she would push the ball with her nose till it fell into the hole.  At this point I would get down on my knees, fish the damn ball, covered in mud and dog slobber, out of the hole, and heave it out of the garden and down the hill as far as I could.  Now I had been a baseball pitcher in my youth and I still had a pretty good arm.  The ball would sail up and over the greenhouse roof and bounce down the slope above Highway One.  With the ball and the dog a good hundred yards away by now, I would hurriedly continue digging.  I usually got about three or four spadefuls dug before dog and ball magically reappeared 'hole-side'---damn that dog was fast---in moments, the ball was back in the hole and Stevie Wonder-Dog would look up at me with a quizzical look as if to say, "C'mon, guy!  What's the hold up?"    

I eventually got the trees planted, aided by several mighty heaves of the tennis ball that had Stevie running down the side of the road to retrieve her prize.  Now we get to enjoy Spitzenberg and Spigold German heirloom apples; Doyenne', a French fancy desert pear; Fuji, a golden russeted Japanese desert pear, (often called an apple pear because of it's crunchiness.  I especially like them poached in pernod + sugar syrup); a Santa Rosa plum and a nectarine tree I bought at a nursery in Bolinas.  The nectarine, alas, never really panned out.  Although the fruits had a wonderful perfumey aroma, they never got much bigger than duck eggs and now, twenty-three years later, the poor tree appears to be have end-stage cancer...  All we can do now is give it palliative care.  It could probably use a morphine drip at this stage of its life.

Valentine roses and heirloom fruit trees; how the hell did they get mashed together?  I blame my fingers.  Once I let them out of the box in the morning and they are hovering over the keyboard, I never know what the hell they're going to type.  And for that, dear reader, I apologize.  

Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres

Here's our new cherry tree in early blossom.  In the background is the rental cottage I built.  God bless Mill Valley rental prices.

 Here's our new peach tree being guarded by one of our bee hives.  I love the red branches shining in the morning light.  If you look closely, you can see the fruit buds.  Looks like peach cobbler this Summer!  If we can harvest before the yellow jackets do...

That's Stevie Wonder Dog in the foreground waiting for me to put away the damn camera and throw her orange fluffy again---and again---ad nauseam.  In the background we have her partner in crime, Jester the Molester (he's uncut...).  Jester's owner, (not me), took him out mountain biking when he was a pup.  That permanently weakened his leg tendons and he eased his distress by sitting down a lot.  He used to follow me around the horse pasture while I shoveled up horse manure for the compost pile.  He would sit patiently while I did my shoveling.  Sometimes the horses would come over to investigate.  They were intrigued by this immobile brown creature sitting next to my garden cart.  Sometimes they would bend over Jester and give him a sniff and a gentle nudge and occasionally a little nip on his lustrous brown coat; at which point The Molester would look up at me with his sad but loving brown eyes as if to say:  "You've got my back on this, right?"  Jester made it to David Letterman's show where he was featured on "Stupid Pet Tricks".  Because of his tendinitis, it was painful for Jester to walk down stairs.  Instead, he would get down on his belly and pull himself down with his forelimbs, softly grunting as he went.  We called it "Downward Dog".  It wasn't till many years later that I learned that the term actually referred to something yoga sufferers did...

Stevie Wonder-Dog and Jester the Molester.  Jester has just asked Stevie to be his valentine.  Evidently she said yes.  No, we did not pose this picture.

A rare moment of repose between bouts of ball retrieval.  Alas, neither Stevie nor her owner are with us anymore.

The Old Mill by Tom Stevens for the Maui News

     In the golden light of late afternoon, the old mill looks like a ruined fortress, or a shipwreck with its prow pointing toward Haiku.

     From a distance, it doesn't look like a structure at all---just a dark green hump of banyan trees surrounded by canefields.

     Closer up , you realize that the " hill" beneath the trees is man-made.  There are foot-thick, vine-covered walls, sagging window casements and the twisted iron girders of a roof.

     Sheets of corrugated roofing iron still cling to the rafters forty feet above what must have been a boiler room, but the rest of the roof has fallen in, forming a kind of jungle courtyard open to the sky.

     Mejiro birds twitter in the banyans, and doves call softly in the stillness of this lost place.  Even the light enters softly, screened by the vast canopy of foliage.  In a few places, sunlight footprints the carpet of dry leaves beneath the wall, but most of the ruined building is in shadow.

     While it lacks the antiquity of Angkor Wat, Nan Matol or other great ruins where a thousand monsoons have softened the works of man, the old mill has the same feeling of spent purpose and eerie repose.

     It's almost as if the huge building, exhausted from turning mountains of cane into vats of molasses, weary of supporting the human community that once surrounded and depended upon it, finally caved in beneath its burden.

     Reclining now in its last days, it has given itself gratefully into the green hands of nature, the planet's foremost masseuse.  Tendrils of lilikoi lightly stroke the blue rock walls that trembled to the thunder of mighty engines, and muscular banyan roots knead and probe the old mill's aching foundations.

     If walls could talk, what tales these could tell---of all the years and storms and engineering triumphs; of the ant lives which passed beneath this vaulted roof.  No chiseled date stone remains above a fractured door, but the silence says enough: the men who built this place have gone.

     In another part of the world, crowds of monkeys would shriek and chatter in these treetops, and green snakes with glittering eyes would slip like liquid through the vines.  Ocelots would wait in the shadowed doorways, and bristled tapirs might root and snuffle in the court.

     But this is a benign ruin, home only to lizards, birds and an occasional foraging mongoose.  Horses were stabled here once, but they are gone.  And Kolohe camp kids once "fought figs" on this forbidden battleground, but those kids have grandkids now.

     So the old mill rests.  The clatter of plantation tractors cultivating nearby fields brings a kind of reassurance---the work goes on---but human events are of little consequence now.

     What is real is the moist caress of the Haiku wind, the toppling of root-lodged stone, the kiss of rain on upturned leaves.

                                                                                                                    September, 1983

   

Cemeteries by Tom Stevens/Maui News '97

     In my brother's wonderful collection of columns he wrote for his hometown paper for several decades, I have many favorites and I'm going to transcribe a few for my blog followers.  In my decidedly prosaic way, I serve up the liver and onions in my blog and it's only fair that you be rewarded occasionally by some of my brother's Cherries Jubilee.
______________________________________________________     Cemeteries

     Passing the small cemetery near Waikapu the other day, I thought how peaceful cemeteries are, and how unlike the image we have of them from literature---dark, dangerous places; "graveyards" full of skulls and ghouls.

     Most island graveyards are pretty nice, and the tended ones can be beautiful----both those that are cared for privately and the big commercial ones than can afford sit-down mowers.

     Even the neglected ones look good compared to what is going on around them.  Traffic whipping past.  Tournahauler trucks dragging tons of cane.  People racing around in a frenzy trying to squeeze another buck or another deal out of this deal-weary island.

     The graveyard is restful.  Nobody's going to get rich in here, and nobody's going to get any poorer.  If there was illness, it's over.   If there were cares, they are clouds now.

     The clouds float over the headstones.  Tall grass bends.  Flowers tap-tap in glass jars---some fresh and real, others plastic for the long haul.  It doesn't matter.  It's the thought that comforts.

     Some graveyards are weathered, wild places on sand dunes overlooking the sea.  During big swells, ghosts of salt spray drift gently among the monuments, beckoning.  It's the ocean calling us back.  The Bible says dust to dust, but I like spray to spray.
    "Full fathom five they father lies;
    "Of his bones are coral made;
    "Those are pearls that were his eyes:
    "Nothing of him that doth fade
    "But doth suffer a sea-change
    "Into something rich and strange."

    Shakespeare wrote that passage for "The Tempest," and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had the last three lines engraved on his headstone.  He can have those.  I like the first three myself, especially "Of his bones are coral made."  That's a concept I can live with---the idea that we just change form.

     The islands change form, too.  They built themselves up out of the ocean floor like weightlifters, adding slow layers of lava.  Finally they bulk themselves into mighty Schwarzeneggers, thrusting skyward until their shoulders are caped with snow.

     But then they wear down.  They recline at last in their blue ocean plots, with just a shoal for a headstone.  It's amazing to think of those islets stretching a thousand miles northwest of Kauai---Nihoa and Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Hermes Reef, Laysan, Pearl, Kure, Midway.  Once towering Hawaiis and Mauis, they're just slivers of reef now.  Of their bones are coral made.

     I'd like to be a deep fish and swim down to the graveyard of the Hawaiian Islands.  I think it might be peaceful there: no traffic, few tourists, nothing stirring but seaweed.  Every century or so a bubble might bloop up out of the mud and wobble toward the surface miles above, but that would be about it for action.

     There's some action in land-based graveyards.  In Wailuku, lei flowers are picked from a plumeria-scented cemetery at the head of Vineyard Street.  Canoe teams and sunbathers park near the kiawe-shaded graveyard at Lahaina's Hanakaoo Park and Kuau neighborhood kids shortcut through a pleasant, grassy cemetery on their way to the store.

     Some resting places are the stages for major annual events.  Flags snap to attention in the Makawao Veterans Cemetery, which each Veterans Day resounds with speeches and military honors.  And up the mountain at Waiakoa, village children costumed as angels and prophets make an annual feast day procession around Holy Ghost Church and its small graveyard.

     My favorite is the Matokuji Mission cemetery just past Paia.  I remember a night in late summer, the tail end of Obon festival season.  Dancers in beautiful kimonos circle the musicians tower, dipping and turning gracefully to the drum beats and the singers' voices.

     A fat silver moon hangs over the ocean like a paper lantern.  Beneath it, other paper lanterns strung through the graveyard cast soft rose, green and amber light onto the monuments.  Family members picnic on woven mats among the inscribed stones, sharing this fine night with their ancestors.

     Soft laughter and murmured conversation float into the warm, moonlit air around the monuments.  Silver waves pulse shoreward, sea-changing the land, stirring coral and pearls.  The whole night breathes life.

     There are no ghosts here but the ghosts of kind regard.

                                                                      October, 1987

Note:  This book was published in 1989.  Since then, brother Tom has written for the Maui News several more times.  He said his final alohas in 2010 when he moved to California permanently.  All fifteen thousand copies of his book, "Shave Ice", instantly sold out (I think).  On the day of the book's release, the family dutifully trooped down to the major book retailer at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, Hawaii's first mall, and marvelled to see my brother's book prominently featured in the front window.  I do believe our parents had never been prouder.

     My father, who was somewhat of an 'eminence grise as one of the leading psychiatrists in the islands, new a lot of VIP's on Oahu, where we lived.  He was having lunch one day at a country club the family belonged to called The Pacific Club---although it's probably not proper to call it a country club since it was situated right across the street from Queen's Hospital, Oahu's main hospital, in downtown Honolulu.  "Hey Doc"  A voice behind him called out.  "I was just going over the list of recent locally published books and I saw one written by a Tom Stevens and published by the Maui News.  Doesn't one of your kids write for the Maui News?"

       It was Thurston Twigg-Smith, the managing editor, publisher and majority owner of Oahu's most popular daily newspaper, "The Honolulu Advertiser".  He was also a fifth generation "Hawaiian", a direct descendent of two of the original missionaries who came to our fair shores in the early 1820's.  "Yeah Thurston, that's my oldest boy." replied our father,  "He's the paper's human interest columnist---has been for years."  "Well he must be a pretty good writer if they published an anthology of his best stuff" remarked Mr. Twigg-Smith.  "I hear the book's selling like hot cakes.  Maybe I'll have a look at his stuff---keep him in mind for the Advertiser.  You must be proud as hell of the kid."  With a broad smile lighting up his face our dad just said.  "Yeah, Thurston, we couldn't be prouder."    

Wandering in the Sand and Sage Brush: Behold the Magnificent Mormon Tabernacle: Part Three

     After putting in our forty hot and dusty hours, come Friday afternoon, we had the freedom of the road for two and half days.  Terry's peppy little sports car was a God-send.  It allowed us to achieve escape velocity from Montello and go walk-about.  Strangely, we never took the road north to Idaho.  When we were venturing out for the weekend, we would drive the thirty-five miles South to highway 80.  To the East lay Wendover and the famous Stateline Cafe.  Wendover was across the highway from the Bonneville salt flats.

  

     The salt flats were a marvelous bit of geology.  As you probably know, back in prehistoric times, much of the country was a shallow inland sea.  After its retreat, it left a large salt pan just west of the Great Salt Lake.  This salt pan was a remarkable place.  It stretched for miles.  It was almost perfectly flat and the salt was so bright in the nearly constant sun of eastern Nevada that you could go "snow blind" if you didn't wear shades, like the young dude in the above picture.  The Stateline Cafe was the unofficial site of the Bonneville Speed Way.  Every couple of years, a contest was held at the salt flats to determine the fastest ground-based vehicle.  It could be a souped up hot rod, it could be a rocket powered car, it could even be a motorcycle.

     During that summer (1967) Craig Breedlove was the holder of the record for "fastest man on the ground".  He used a modified motorcycle style of vehicle.  It was actually more of a rocket ship on the ground.  It's name was "Spirit of America" and it was powered by a turbo jet.  He held the land speed record for years, eventually managing to exceed six hundred miles per hour.  The Bonneville Speedway and Breedlove's crazy turbo-rocket cycle  made the salt flats famous and Terry and I made this part of our first weekend outing.

     As we ate our lunch burgers at the cafe, we marveled at all the pictures on the walls of the land speed contestants over the years.  Craig Breedlove's pictures standing proudly beside each year's new and improved rocket-cycle dominated the walls.

After lunch we darted across the highway, put on our shades and walked onto the salt flats.  It was an amazing experience.  We walked out aways until we were surrounded by nothing but salt; hot, dazzling white, very salty, salt.  (we had to taste it).  Everywhere you looked there was nothing but this amazing monolithic floor of salt, with mountains in the distance.  It was actually kind of disorienting and I was glad we could see the entrance gate by the highway, otherwise instead of wandering in the sage brush and sand, we'd be wandering in the salt flats.

     After we'd gotten our fill of the salt flats we headed East.  Next stop; Salt Lake City!  Driving into the city was a bit of sensory overload after all that solitude in the desert.  We checked into a little flea-bag motel.  The room was pretty decrepit.  It had one light bulb hanging from a cord in the middle of the ceiling.  In the corner was a tiny, very stained, sink.  The communal bathroom was at the end of the hall.  It was the kind of place a junky might stay at while he detoxed.  We found a little greasy spoon and had dinner.  We asked the waitress where the action was on Saturday night.  "Well, hon" she drawled, "This bein' Mormon country and all, they ain't no bars, or nothin' round here.  For kicks, the kids cruise up and down State Street in their hot-rods."

     We followed her directions and headed to State Street.  She wasn't kidding.  It looked a scene out of "American Graffiti".  It seemed like every car, souped up hot-rod or not, was filled with fresh faced Mormon teenagers.  The drill went like this:  You open your car windows, turn the rock-n-roll radio up loud and drive slowly down State Street.  When you got to the end, you did a u-turn and cruised back down the other way.  As other cars passed, you checked out the members of the opposite sex.   If you thought they were cute, you would yell out some inanity and they would do the same.  I must say Terry and I were titillated to see all these young babesters; all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, due to the absence of wicked vices in their lives.  We did here one wag tell us, "Mormon girls don't smoke and they don't drink.  But that's all they don't do!"

     As guests of this fair city and feeling like beings from another planet, we weren't about to find out about that last part.  I could just imagine being interrupted "flagrante delicto" with some young honey by her Mormon patriarch father, armed with a pitch fork or worse.  So we just cruised up and down a few times and flirted a bit at the stop lights, of which there were many.  "Hi!  You're kinda cute!  You're not from around here are you?" one of the gals  said.  "No, we're working for the USGS for the Summer." I replied.  "We're stationed in Montello, Nevada, about a hundred, or so, miles West of here up route 233."  "Montello?  You guys are staying in Montello?  I passed through there once on a family trip to Idaho.  It seemed like a dumpy little place." our flirtatious teen remarked.  Luckily the light changed about then and we didn't have to tell her about our humble living arrangements.

     While cruising state street, we couldn't help noticing a strange apparition to the north of us.  Rising high above the surrounding trees, were these stunning white alabaster towers.  From a distance it looked an albino version of the Emerald City.  Intrigued, Terry drove us up to get a better look at this etherial castle.  Situated in the center of a ten acre park we beheld the magnificent Mormon Tabernacle.  This castle, which none other than Frank Lloyd Wright dubbed one of the most magnificent buildings in the country, is ground zero for all things Mormon.  The temple park is open to the public and there are tours open to us non-believers.  The next day, Sunday, we checked out of our fleabag motel and took the tour.  However we were not allowed into the tabernacle itself because of our heathen status.  Construction of this temple, also known as the Holiest of Holies, took place in the mid 1800's and it has undergone several upgrades and remodels since.  This is also home to the world renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  It would not be presumptuous to call this tabernacle the Mormon  Vatican. 

The acoustics in the main cathedral where the choir sings are reputed to be as good as any modern day opera house or symphony theater.  Most Mormons are known for industriousness and thrift.  The state emblem is a bee hive and Utah is known as "The Bee Hive State" announcing to the other, less industrious states, just how busy and prosperous Utah's Mormons are.

  The church expects members to tithe ten percent of their annual income to the church.  This allows the tabernacle to be as resplendent as it is.  In order to properly accompany the choir in their cavernous cathedral, the church commissioned a magnificent pipe organ to be built; one that could stand side-by-side with the great organs of the European cathedrals.  Below is a picture of this mighty instrument.  To get a sense of perspective of its massive size, those little pink things in the foreground are actually the seats where the choir sits.  You've got to admit, that is one big honking organ...

  

     Sunday afternoon we bid adieu to the bee hive state and returned to our little humpbacked trailer, suitably humbled by the Mormon Tabernacle experience.  We didn't venture out on every weekend.  Sometimes we just stayed in Montello.  That allowed us to get to know some of the local residents.

     We became friends with one family in particular.  Mr. and Mrs. Ludwig and their teenage daughter Rita had spent their whole lives in Montello.  I don't remember what the mom did but she was employed, as she was the main breadwinner in the family.  Mr. Ludwig had been one of the aforementioned railroad maintenance guys till he hurt his back in an industrial accident, thus allowing him to collect a generous disability pension from Union Pacific.  This allowed Mr. L, unencumbered by the nuisance of a regular job, to pursue his real passion; gold and silver mining.  On one visit to their home, he excitedly took Terry and me out to a little shed behind the house.  "This here's my sluice box.  I load this up in my pick-up and head out to the dry washes around here and shovel the loose sand and gravel into this here box.  Then I shake the box and  sift through everything looking for gold and silver.  You know it was right here in Nevada that silver was first discovered in this here country at the Comstock load."

Here's a picture of a gold miner using the sluice box method circa 1860.  Notice the presence of water.  There was no such stream anywhere around eastern Nevada but hat didn't seem to dim Mr. L's hopes...

     I didn't think it was polite to mention to Mr. Ludwig that the Comstock load was discovered in Virginia city, on the other side of the state, about four hundred miles away.   His wife said that her husband had been diagnosed the year before with incipient emphysema and under Dr.'s orders he was only allowed to smoke three cigarettes per day.  With the loss of his job and his smoking habit, the sluice box and the dry stream beds and dreams of hitting it big with gold and silver nuggets was pretty much all the poor guy had to look forward to.  That, along with the love and companionship of his wife and daughter.  

     Rita was about sixteen and had to commute the sixty-five miles into Wells to go to school.  She was a pretty typical teen for this area.  Despite her long blond hair I would have to say she was average looking at best; a little on the plump side, she was ever vigilant for the next pimple to appear.  However she was a good kid and she was a bit awed by having two studly young Stanford boys in town for the Summer.  She was fascinated to know what life was like in California; especially in San Francisco.  The Summer before had been the famous "Summer of Love" in SF and the locals had witnessed the occasional long-haired hippy hitch-hiking on highway 80.

     The owner/manager of our little motel was a friendly sort who welcomed any new strangers to the area.  Terry had brought some records with him, including the Beatle's "Sergeant Pepper's" album.  He often invited us into his home and he graciously allowed us to play records since we didn't have a record player.  We invited Rita and her best friend, Thelma, to join us for a little impromptu record party.  "Rita, you're gonna love the new Beatle's album.  It's got a song on there about you!" I told her.  When we got to "Lovely Rita, meter maid; what would I do without you?" etc., she let out an excited squeal.  "Oh my Gawd!", she gushed, "I ain't never heard a song about a Rita before!"

     Terry and I huddled briefly and decided that the girls seemed  thrilled with the pleasure of our company.  We invited them to come join us in our trailer that evening after dinner and we'd have a little party.  After dinner, as we waited for our "party dates",  I  whipped up a pitcher of Sloe Gin Fizzes.

Pretty soon the girls showed up and we all got jolly.  We had a grand time chatting up the gals with tales of exotic California college life.  After the girlish giggling died down, we indulged in a little make-out session.  A grand time was had by all.  The girls were curious about college life and asked us if we'd ever smoked pot.  We admitted that we had and told them how it made you kind of loopy and light headed and happy.  When told his comment by Rita, Mrs. Ludwig gave us a piece of her mind.  "I've read all about them pot smoking hippies in San Francisco and I've even seen some of them at the coffee shop in Wells waiting for rides out of town.  I read in "The Weekly Reader" where smoking pot can lead to all kinds of trouble.  You boys say that pot makes you feel all light headed and happy.  Huh!  You just think you're happy!"

     We apologized profusely to Mrs. Ludwig and promised we would stop trying to corrupt Rita and Thelma or any of the other kids in the neighborhood.  (I don't remember seeing any others...).  We did have a chuckle about the conundrum of the difference between being happy and just thinking your happy.  That became a catch phrase of ours for the Summer.  "Hah!  You just think your happy!"

     Final episode:  The Elko Cattlemen's Steakhouse and Topless Bar and being on stage in Big Piney, Wyoming with Beaver Cleaver

   
   

Color Me Pink

For those of you who enjoy my brother's writing, here's another piece he wrote for his local paper down in lovely Pacific Grove, where the deer and the antelope play and the skies are not cloudy all day---except at certain sunrises as you'll see below.  Pinking of you, Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres

Otter Views – When Pink Was Big

Tom Stevens for CST

A Serengeti-sized herd of puffy clouds migrating across the dawn sky Tuesday created a “bed of coals” sunrise so colorful it woke me up. As the clouds morphed from pearl gray to fiery pink, they reminded me of a curious sight from childhood.

For a time in the mid-1950s, the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser maintained among his several residences a shoreline estate on the east end of Oahu. Tall fences discouraged gawking from the land side, but the “Kaiser mansion” could be seen from surf breaks just offshore.

Thus, long before psychedelics, neighborhood surfers beheld a wondrous sight: large pink poodles cavorting on a bright green lawn. When we reported this phenomenon to our parents, we learned the poodles had been dyed at the behest of Mrs. Kaiser, who loved pink. 

The poodles weren’t as numerous as Tuesday morning’s clouds, but they were bright enough to be seen from afar. Even from a half-mile away, you’d be riding a wave along the reef and pink poodles would come into view, reclining on the estate’s lawn like a flock of fairy tale sheep. 

These days, such wanton dog-dyeing might prompt recriminations from PETA or the SPCA, but this was 1955. If Mrs. Kaiser wanted pink poodles, she could have pink poodles. In fact, she and Henry J. could pretty much have pink anything, and so they did.

I should point out here that Kaiser was no garden-variety millionaire. He was a magnate. His West Coast cement plants and “victory ships” had helped win World War Two, and one of the nation’s premiere health care systems bears his name. He even manufactured for a few years an odd-looking car modestly named “The Henry J.”

After the war and the car, Kaiser fixed his steely gaze upon Hawaii, a sleepy U.S. territory soon to be electro-shocked awake by the advent of statehood. Like capitalist titans before him and many others to follow, Kaiser looked at Hawaii and saw what wasn’t there yet. Where there were fishponds, he saw suburbs. Where there were reefs, he saw marinas. Where there were beaches, he saw hotels. And everywhere, he saw pink.

On the color wheel, this pink fell somewhere between Porky Pig and Pepto-Bismol; between Pinky Lee’s bow tie and Kim Novak’s cashmere sweater. Distinctive enough to have its own color mix number, “Kaiser Pink” soon proliferated throughout the Oahu of my childhood. 

Before Kaiser arrived, the Territory had two big pink structures: the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Tripler Army Hospital. To see other pinks, one had to look to nature; to tropical plants and flowers; guavas and grapefruits; sunrises and sunsets; feathers on parakeets and stripes on reef fish.

Here's a shot of the lovely and venerable Royal Hawaiian Hotel.  When it first opened the water fountains in the lobby spouted pineapple juice.  Behind the hotel, there used to be a wonderful lawn.  It was almost the size of a football field and sported several majestic Banyan trees.  Around the grounds there were several shops and a dance pavilion.  This is where, as seventh graders, we went to "cotillion" to learn to dance the box step, the cha cha cha and others.  After several weeks, we were considered to be ready for a proper dance party.  They held several of these over the course of the cotillion.  One was a costume party.  I cleverly didn't tell my parents about it and I got to skip it.  Alas, my brother, in those days, wasn't as devious as I and he got roped in to going.  

      As his costume he chose the description from a goofy song that was popular that year.  The chorus went something like this:  "He wore, tan shoes and pink shoelaces a polka dot vest and man-oh-man.  Tan shoes with pink shoe laces, a big Panama with a purple hat band.
When the big day of the dance finally arrived my brother, who had assembled the above outfit with a little help from our mother, came strutting out in this get-up.  I must admit he looked damn sporty.  I'm sure he got to box step with some babes that night.  I hope so anyway.

Post-Kaiser, pink spread to an unlikely array of vehicles, objects and artifacts. All over Honolulu, pink construction cranes, pink dump trucks, pink bulldozers and pink pile drivers built pink hotels. A fleet of pink catamarans plied the limpid waters off Waikiki. Tourists visiting Kaiser’s Hawaiian Village hotel rode to their rooms in pink jitneys, wore pink bathrobes, rented pink surfboards from the beach boys. 

Elsewhere, Kaiser’s pink dredges were busily chewing up reefs, marshes and fish ponds to create a whole new city of 50,000 on the island’s east end. As planned, canals feeding into a grand marina would give boat owners of this tropical Venice speedy access to water skiing, ocean sailing, snorkeling and reef fishing. 

As it happened, the industrialist’s dream city got built, but the construction silt turned the surrounding ocean into an undersea graveyard. It was one of the few instances where Kaiser’s tenure caused the color pink to diminish. Pink fish, pink shrimp, pink corals and pink anemones all vanished from the area. 

As Kaiser’s new city was rising from the marshland, he dispatched one pink dredge to carve a marina into the reef off his mansion. Over the course of several months, the dredge methodically tore up the reef, pulverized the coral and spat it out as a slurry. Pumped ashore through a floating pipeline, the crushed coral became the pad for the magnate’s personal boat house.

The floating pipeline, meanwhile, became a shortcut to the surf for neighborhood kids. Clutching our flippers and foam “kick boards” (this was pre-Boogie), we’d clamber atop the pipes at the boat house end, extend our arms for balance, then walk seaward toward the distant dredge. 

As incoming waves lifted, dropped and twisted them, the seaweed-slick pipes clanked and swayed beneath us, occasionally bucking us off. If we managed to stay on, our bare feet registered the hum and buzz of the coral slurry racketing toward shore. And if we made it all the way out to the dredge, we might see the crew smoking and playing cards in their little deck house. 

Then we’d dive off the pipeline, don our flippers, point our kick boards shoreward and catch a wave. Looking up, we’d see poodles as pink as a flock of clouds at sunrise.