July 17, 2015, Oak Grove, CA- “Don’t go telling people this is Aguanga. We’re Oak Grove! The sign even says so.” Thus did a campground host admonish me, when I was describing my location to someone on the phone. This little village is darned proud of its identity, and never mind that the mail is addressed to Aguanga, six miles to the northeast. I stopped here for the night, at what has become my go-to campground, when en route to visiting my son, who is in the Navy, in the San Diego area.
My journey started in a more timely manner than previous SoCal trips, with my getting out the door by 9 A.M. I was in Blythe by noon, affording me a nice lunch at Rebel BBQ, my favourite venue in Riverside County’s eastern gateway. It offers south Texas-style barbecue fare, including brisket prepared with a Mexican-German sauce blend. They offer something called vinegar slaw, which sounds like sauerkraut, but I opted for creamy slaw, with my meal.
It was 102 F, in Blythe, so I headed quickly uphill, getting to Hemet, a higher desert town, by 3. I spent a bit more time here than I have in the past, and for the first time, I checked out Hemet’s downtown, starting with its library, where I spent an hour or so.
The town also has a lovely Children’s Museum, on the southern edge of downtown. Not having a little one along, I didn’t go inside, but a local mother takes her children there, several times a year. This speaks well of Hemet’s regard for its rising generation.
The view towards Mount San Jacinto, 40 miles to the east, is spectacular.
I headed out of town, along Juan Bautista de Anza Historical Trail, which is paved as far as the Conservation Camp, named in de Anza’s honour. The route passes several orange groves, which remain a staple of Hemet’s economy, while having faded in other parts of southern California.
Bautista Conservation Camp, run by the State of California, is used as a staging area for fire suppression efforts. Painfully, not so far away, on the north side of San Bernardino County, a serious fire is wreaking havoc, destroying a small hamlet and threatening other areas. I hope the hurricane remnants, that are forecast for tomorrow, bring soaking rain to the region.
Between Bautista Camp and the Cahuila Indian Reservation, one goes along a narrow, unpaved road, and is treated to exquisite views like this:
I can only imagine these will be even more gorgeous, once the rain comes. Now, to sleep under the stars, before that happens.
July 16,2015, Prescott- I treated a good friend, (one of my besties), and her daughter to dinner this evening, since it was bestie’s birthday. Back in New England, a birthday is ever the occasion for the honouree to be so treated, and to choose the venue, within reason. So, I have continued this tradition, over the years, for Penny and for our son. Aram.
One’s entry point into this life establishes the chance to be of value, to an entity greater than oneself: First the immediate family; then friends and neighbours, followed by ever-wider communities. This, alone, is worthy of respect and nurturing.
In our culture of independence and relative anonymity, it’s easy for a person to feel like no one cares much. Most of the time, this isn’t true. We tend to have more friends, who care more about us than it seems outwardly. There are all manner of distractions, and external pressures, both real and imagined.
My own answer to this has been to be more proactive about expressing my friendship. Sometimes, because of the depth of my feelings, this has been misinterpreted and I’ve had to backpedal a bit, for the sake of the endurance of the friendship. It started to happen with the friend mentioned above, but with clear and gentle communication, things are where they need to be.
So, her birthday matters, as does her daughter’s, a few months down the road. Their dreams and plans are more in focus, with the stock-taking that happens at the beginning of each year. In my own case, this is one of the reasons I am doing this series of posts. Some years seem to be clearer milestones than others, but each one is of value, and is crucial to one’s total life experience.
July 15, 2015, Prescott- Summer is road time, and also, reading time. Heck, any time is reading time, for me. Maybe that’s why so many of my friends tend to be women. We share a love of reading, and thought, and caring.
Alaska Young was a fictional character, yet larger than life. John Green presented her as a blend of every schoolboy’s dream, every teacher’s model student and a nightmare in her own mind. What a mind, though! In a literary-real world mashup, I’d have taken a very quick liking to Ms. Alaska. The wit, the razor-sharp intellect and the take-no-prisoners swagger, blended so deeply with her self-doubt, her vulnerability- which no male classmate saw, made for one of the most searing characters I have ever encountered.
A real life friend remarked this evening that men and women are tasked with trying to understand one another, precisely because we are fundamentally different. Yes, men and women; young and old; wealthy and impoverished; landed and homeless; across “racial” and ethnic lines; differences of sexual orientation; differences of temperament; differences of opinion- all such barriers must be crossed. Spaceship Earth is a Mashup of universal proportions.
Yet, Alaska Young, seen first by her boy peers as a gorgeous creature, was a toweringly complex being. So it is with each of us. A thoughtless man, just a bit more than a year ago, called me a woman-hater, for having used the word “beautiful” too many times, with reference to women. Beauty is far beyond physical, though. Without a shining, searing spirit, bursting from the eyes, the most appealing of symmetric features lose their allure, in a flash. Alaska Young’s deeper appeal was her Force of Nature aura. This was a woman who did not miss a trick, and but for her angst, her guilt, she would have conquered the world.
Each of us is given the goods, and the burden. Shall we not use the former, to cast off the latter?
June 29, 2015, Lone Pine- Today is the last day of my second long road journey of this year. Like all trips, it has been less of a “vacation”, (though to some, any time spent away from one’s home town is a vacation), and more of a time of self-discovery. I learned that I could handle the worst of circumstances, with help from the spirit realm and logistical support from steadfast friends. I learned that there are those who will love me, regardless of what condition I am in and that there are those who will despise and avoid me, no matter how humbly I approach them. I learned, again, that there is no Final Destination, and that, no matter how far one goes, there is that one step beyond.
My last key destination on this road trip is a place of national shame, and of continuous soul-searching. Fear itself drove Franklin D. Roosevelt to order the removal of Japanese-Americans from the immediate Pacific Coast and of smaller numbers of German-, Italian- and Romanian-Americans from the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, from 1942-1945. These American citizens were interned in what the President himself called “Concentration Camps”, though there were no pogroms planned or carried out against any of the interned.
Manzanar was the largest of the camps, with the Sierra Nevada serving as a wall between its Great Basin location and the western 2/3 of California. People were rounded up, without explanation, by the FBI and the military, early in 1942, from places like San Diego, Long Beach, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland and Seattle, and transported in buses and trains to this desert camp, and several others, such as Poston, AZ and Tule Lake, CA. There are two ironies here: The camps were often close to, or on, Native American reservations, though Manzanar was not- as the reservations in this part of California are on the outskirts of small Great Basin towns. Manzanar was a small collection of farms and ranches, such as Wilder Farm and Shepherd Ranch. These had been abandoned, before the U.S. government took over the area. The second irony is that, in 1944-45, internes were recruited into the U.S. military, for service in the European theatre. Many Japanese-Americans distinguished themselves in military service, including the late Daniel Inouye, who later served several decades as a U. S. Senator from Hawaii.
The Visitor Center at Manzanar National Historical Site has elaborate displays of both the Internment Period and of the history of the region. The other big conflict between ordinary citizens and the governments, both state and Federal, involved water rights in this region, the Owens Valley. The City of Los Angeles has bought up the lion’s share of water rights and built a pipeline, to meet much of its water needs. There is ongoing discussion with Owens Valley residents, from Bridgeport and Bishop, in the north, to Lone Pine and Lee Vining, in the south, about how to strike a balance with the City of Angels.
Here is a scale model of the Internment Camp, at its peak.
Some dormitories are maintained, by the National Park Service, to show just what living conditions were for the detainees. Remember, in 1942, there was no air conditioning, such as we know today.
The dining halls were crowded, and there were few safeguards against infestations by vermin and scavenging insects.
Ruins of several areas are accessible. Here is what’s left of the house at Shepherd Ranch.
This was once a koi pond, maintained by the internes.
They kept up a splendid “city park”, on the north side of the camp.
Yes, it was called Pleasure Park.
This part of the park is sealed off, to prevent injuries to the public, and defacing of sacred inscriptions.
These are scenes of the hospital zone. There was a full medical facility, separate doctors’ and nurses’ facilities, and as was the wont of the internes, a garden.
There was also a cemetery, and this cenotaph stands today, in honour of those who died during internment.
At the southeast corner of Manzanar, there is this slab, the remnant of a camouflage tent factory, where many internes worked, “for the war effort.”
This time in an American government internment camp was nearly as jarring, and as thought-provoking, for me, as my visit, about this time last year, to Berga, Germany, where Jewish-American and Hispanic-American POW’s were kept, in slave labour conditions, during the last months of World War II. The difference was that the U.S. was, and is, a representative democracy, and Germany knelt to the whims of a few. The similarity: Bigotry called the shots.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan formally apologized to those interned, and to their families, and signed legislation which authorized $20,000 to be paid to each surviving victim. This was the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
I drove, purposely, with the windows rolled down and no AC, from Manzanar to Prescott. Stopping for lunch and a copious amount of iced tea, at Totem Cafe, Lone Pine, set the stage for this. I came in to the pleasant establishment alone, but was followed by 28 other people, within ten minutes. The couple running the place managed to keep everyone pleased, but I had some concern for the wife, who had to brace herself on the back cabinet and apply a wet towel to her forehead, for several minutes.
My heart goes out to all those who work in the hospitality industry, during these days of triple digit temperatures, in so many places, around the globe. I also stopped at Juicy’s Famous Riverfront Cafe, Needles, for an early supper, before heading on across the Colorado and back to base. Juicy was a stray dog, who attached herself to the fire company in Needles, and to the hearts of the entire town. That, alone, made it worth the stop. The service is excellent and the food fine and dandy.
I got back to Prescott at 9:40 P.M., exulting in the drizzle and cooling temperatures, no worse off, for the heat, having plied myself with lots of iced tea and cool water, along the way. Oh, yes, and plenty of sunscreen was applied.
June 13, 2015, Prescott- I looked at a few, rather superficial, aspects of my life in the last post. Now, it’s time to look again at how things are in the inner circle of my being. Most of us would define integrity as one’s behaviour when no one but God is watching.
I’m doing better in that area. I no longer fuss and fume, internally, when people I thought I could trust, turn on me, as happened yesterday on another social media site. I know there are definitely people I CAN trust, to the direst of straits and back-starting with myself, and everyone to whom I alluded as family, in a recent post. I no longer doubt myself, when it comes to the ability to do what I need to do to survive. The issues with my Nissan took care of that. I no longer make how people treat me as the determining factor in whether I should help them or not. Lastly, I no longer feel that I need to explain myself to my critics, especially when it comes to dealing head-on with unpleasant subjects. No problem has ever been resolved by sticking one’s head in the sand.
There is much to be done, in getting this spirit of mine in condition for the Great Beyond. I sense, though, that I have a lot of time left to get it accomplished. Integrity is our mirror, to be polished each day.
July 12, 2015, Prescott- I went to the high-end downtown shoe store, yesterday, to be properly fitted for a more stylish pair of black shoes, which will stand me in good stead in the workplace, this coming academic year.
I learned that my feet were different sizes, and that the size I had been buying for the past twenty years, no longer fit. I have experienced late-onset foot expansion (my term), with the left foot being larger than the right, to boot (no pun intended). So, I settled on a size 10 1/2 pair, and will replace the smaller pairs, one at a time, until my shoes are in compliance with Foot Reality. This, of course, means that my sneakers will be larger, by week’s end.
It got me to thinking: How do I measure, in other ways.
Health-wise, my teeth, which could be replaced by a full set, are stable, and I won’t worry about the full set unless it becomes a deal-breaker, in an otherwise budding relationship.
That brings me to the notion of relationships. We’ve discussed this here before, and almost ad nauseam I am in a good place, right now, and have several fine friendships with women, based on mutual respect and regard for each other’s well-being, just as my friendships with men, or with children, happen to be. None of us sees any reason for that to change, and several of the several are in good marriages, or other committed relationships. Those who aren’t, are happy being where they are.
I am honest, by nature, and almost to a fault. This sometimes causes problems with people who communicate with circumlocution, or roundabout speech, subtle hints, etc. I never was very good at that, even when an offended party screams at me or slams the door, as has happened a few times. I have to be true to my own soul, though I do make an effort to be gentle about it.
Work-wise, I finish what I start. So, once this academic year gets on, I will be very conscious of doing all that’s needed to ensure the success of any students with whom I happen to work. A commentator on another post suggested “take the money and don’t concern yourself too much with the outcome.” That may be the person’s way of “avoiding burnout”, but to me, it is a recipe for crashing.
I will continue to measure myself, in various ways, knowing that the path should always be, as Jack Kornfield wrote, “with heart”.
June 28, 2015, Big Pine, CA- I got my Nissan back in shape again, with a morning visit to Jiffy Lube. Friends Wendy & Steve hosted a brunch, which was a group effort, and thoroughly enjoyed by all. Then, I bid farewell to my Reno family.
Little did we know that, a scant thirty miles away, above Gardnerville, three vehicles, including an RV, had collided. One of those involved was killed. I was in the southbound five-mile line of cars. Two hours later, I was in Topaz Lake. While in the intermittently-moving line, I took these shots of the area.
The scene at Topaz Lake was rather quiet, away from the border town casino anyway.
Off to the west, the Sierra Nevada showed just a smidgen of snow, where there are normally several feet, even in late June.
The first town I entered in California was Bridgeport, already set for Independence Day.
I had a pleasant break and supper, at the lively Rhino’s Grill. “Rhino” is the owner, not an item on the bill of fare. Seeing so many families and couples enjoying the nation’s back roads does my heart good, as does being served by congenial folks, of all ages.
The last time I visited Mono Lake was in 1980. It is about 1/3 smaller now.
This saline lake is still a gem, but an endangered one.
As I drove towards Big Pine, and my stop for the night, I caught a glimpse of a superb California sunset.
Then, as is its wont, the sky went to bed.
After all that waiting, and switchback-negotiating, the Nissan was just fine. So was I, settled in at Bristlecone Motel, run by one of the town’s two mechanics.
June 11, 2015, Prescott- I went to see the film, “Jurassic World”, this evening. Having seen the first three films in that franchise, it was a matter of curiosity, as to what possibly could be added to them. There are two overriding themes in this episode: Genetic Engineering and the Arms Race.
The artificially created being, in this case, is, of course, a dinosaur- and the biggest, most ferocious ever, at that. With regard to the Arms Race, a mercenary comes to Jurassic World, with an eye towards using velociraptors as the Ultimate Weapon. The rest of what happens is for anyone who hasn’t seen it, to find out.
My take on any effort at bringing animals back from extinction is that they would be hard put to find a niche in a human-centered, progress-oriented world, such as ours. The ever-shrinking animal population of the world is being expected by many, as the President of Zimbabwe once put it, “to pay their rent.” This, of course, means the ivory, internal organs and exotic pet trade are going to be with us for some time to come, though the thing none of the purveyors of those odious practices have considered much is: These are not renewable resources, at least not at the rate they are being depleted.
I have heard of enterprising Chinese, and others, starting game farms, with a view towards replenishing herds and prides. The idea in many of these is strictly breeding and increasing animal populations, much as has been done with American bison in the U.S. and Canada, in the 1960’s and since. There are others, of course, who are mercenary and keep animals around, strictly for hunting. They are no better than poachers, who are the Slash and Burn farmers of animal husbandry, with no thought whatsoever of the future.
The television series, “Zoo”, explores the notion: What if mammals, collectively, began taking the planet back? It’s highly unlikely, to say the least, but it begs asking. Do we really need to cleanse the planet of those closest to us in intelligence and spirit?
June 27, 2015, Reno- I had breakfast at Kopper Kettle, then left Susanville, headed for my mid-journey anchor. In Reno, I would do things like see how my car was holding up, assess the state of my clean clothing supply and share my Alaska, British Columbia and Pacific Northwest stories with people who would actually listen for more than three minutes.
Truth told, I have people I consider family (both spiritual and biological) in many parts of the world: Massachusetts, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Atlanta, northwest Florida, Alabama, various parts of Texas, eastern Kentucky, southern Indiana, northern Illinois, northwest Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, all over Arizona, southern California, western Oregon, southeast Alaska, France, Luxembourg, Luzon, South Korea, somewhere in Canada, and Reno.
That this could keep me in perpetual motion is plausible; that the list will grow, is probable, but I digress. I got in to the parking lot of the apartment complex, where the matriarch of my Reno family lives. I checked the oil dip stick on my Nissan, after giving it a two-hour rest: Nothing. NOTHING?? How long, with no oil light flashing on the dash? The consensus was: The temperature gauge was normal, no smoke was coming out of the tailpipe and no clanging, shaking and banging were being vocalized by the engine, so lucky Nissan, lucky me. Jiffy Lube, in Reno, opens at 9 A.M. on Sunday, so the rest of today could be, and was, spent doing things like sipping artisan iced tea at the Starbucks that lives in the House that Barnes & Noble built, whilst listening to my spiritual nephew speculate as to the possible virtues of a Hillary Presidency, and enjoy a 3:30 PM dinner, at Black Bear Diner. The day was well-capped by three of us going to see “Inside/Out” at a nearby multiplex. Given the heat, anything inside was best for my Reno family. I am almost impervious to heat; but most are not.
“Inside/Out” is, essentially, the depiction of a young child’s emotions, as she struggles with a move that was generated by her father’s quest for the Golden Egg. It is a fascinating take on the topic, and ought to be seen by every parent- and prospective parent. Too often, a child is expected to take one for the team. I know we moved far too often for my long-suffering son. He is a treasure, nonetheless, and handles life’s vicissitudes quite well, I’d say.
After the film, I was gratified to see that it was still light out, yet cooling off enough to briefly enjoy some fresh air. Then, another breath of fresh air showed up: Spiritual grand-niece.
There is no end to the joy this little one brings into a room, and into a heart.
