i hope it doesn’t rain the whole time

break on through to the other side

dragonflies, rodeo, new mexico, 2022

snakes

banded argiope, cedar creek, texas, 2021

(re)incarnation #55

Well, we’re off again, not to greener pastures, or even slightly brown and needing water pastures, but pastures just the same. We’re moving on to pastures where a job awaits, much to our disappointment.

            It’s time to leave this place anyway. A year and a half of right wing, conspiracy theorist, hate the immigrants they’re not even human, horseshit has tampered with my sanity (where many other things are doing likewise). These are the people who would reelect Trump.

            Meanwhile, the nature has been magnificent.

            While our sanity is paramount (I think), we’re moving on not for that reason, but for a paycheck. Social Security lasts till the middle of the month, and there was no retirement plan for wandering innkeepers, so back to work it is. This time we’ll be managing an eighty unit/space, fifty-five and over, mobile home park.

            It’s in the desert.

            It’s in California.

            Reaction from our neighbors has been a nearly unanimous sour expression, “yuck,” and a litany of reasons why California is so evil. I can almost smell “MAGA” in the air. These are militia, waiting for an excuse. Any excuse. And they’re nice folks.

            It’s unfortunate.

            So, there’s that.

It’s not a new adventure so much as, “oh, shit” …

corralling the white

jupiter/saturn conjunction, arizona, 2020

It happens every twenty years …

when worlds collide, and just where exactly

amanita species, lake george, new york, 2018

a restless aura

harris’s hawk, ajo, arizona, 2019

near or far, who cares?

parallel dimensions and the great cosmic rift

costa rica, 2017

gravity waves as caused by a distant black hole

when red thinks no one is watching

wildflowers, orgeon, 2016

alien spacecraft

colors doing stuff

spring, joshua tree national park, california, 2015

need I say more?

There have been a handful of occasions during the course of my life when some small thing was a pebble in my pond, the ripples enough to send me off in a new direction, or something diverted my attention so profoundly, I went chasing after it. It would have an equally profound effect on my life.

Flying saucers, for example, sent my life careening off in another, and unexpected, direction. I eventually majored in astronomy in college.

Moving from Cincinnati to Columbus, a mere 100 miles away, changed my life so thoroughly, it became someone else’s life. No. Wait. That’s my life!

Moving to California certainly reincarnated me.

My life was shaken from its foundation twice in 1964. In September my family moved from an older neighborhood to a newer one, with identical brick boxes lined up along the streets, each with kids living inside: I had never seen so many children at one time in the entirety of my life. It was a suburban Disneyland.

Seven months earlier my young life got its first jolt of life changing electricity. On February 9, Ed Sullivan introduced “four young men form Liverpool …”

Need I say more?

double helix on parade

escorting red

yucca, bob’s gap, mojave desert, 2014

clouds at dusk

From National Geographic:

“Clouds are visible accumulations of tiny water droplets or ice crystals in the Earth’s atmosphere. Clouds differ greatly in size, shape, and color. They can appear thin and wispy, or bulky and lumpy.

Clouds usually appear white because the tiny water droplets inside them are tightly packed, reflecting most of the sunlight that hits them. White is how our eyes perceive all wavelengths of sunlight mixed together. When it’s about to rain, clouds darken because the water vapor is clumping together into raindrops, leaving larger spaces between drops of water. Less light is reflected. The rain cloud appears black or gray.

Clouds form when air becomes saturated, or filled, with water vapor. Warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air, so lowering the temperature of an air mass is like squeezing a sponge. Clouds are the visible result of that squeeze of cooler, moist air. Moist air becomes cloudy with only slight cooling. With further cooling, the water or ice particles that make up the cloud can grow into bigger particles that fall to Earth as precipitation.”

inhospitable, part 14, halloween witches and a meteor shower extravaganza

That first subtle shift in the seasons, when a hint of autumn gets sieved through the pine needles, its faint aroma wafting about like the scent of another woman on an adulterous husband, is noticeable if only for its persistence. Once it is in the air, it does not dissipate, not even if it comes as early as mid-August, which is when we had our first whiff of it at 7,000’. It’s like an in-law who comes to visit for the weekend and is still there a month later; it lingers well into October, when it becomes autumn with consequences. Just ask the Donner Party.

            We didn’t experience anything wintry until November, and even then, the snow didn’t begin to fall in any unusual or preternatural amounts until after Thanksgiving. By then you can’t even recall that first subtle shift of the seasons; by that time snow flurries are measured in feet.

            The inn began to show signs of life as we drifted deeper into September. A handful of guests came and went, including Don and Mary from Ohio, and Mick and Rowan from Sacramento, a mismatched young couple of newlyweds who, in my opinion, had already beaten the odds by staying together these first few months of their marriage.

In October, Dan and Rosy stepped in through the back door with that green-around-the-gills look of trepidation I was, by now, familiar with. I’m sure I did little to soothe their apprehension by nervously babbling at them, “Hi,I’mGregg,yourhost.I’msorry,butmywifeis outoftownforafewdaysit’sjustmetakingcareofyou.I’llbefixingyourbreakfastsanddinnerChrist,I’manervouswreckabouthis.Howareyoudin’?Howwasyerdriveup?Whereareyafromanyway? Lemmeshowyatoyerroom…” Christ, I sounded like that damn sociopath back at the Hellhole.

            A day earlier, Sheri flew off to Ohio to visit her mother, leaving me with these two guests, who had added dinners to their “package.” Fucking dinners. Fucking packages.

            They seemed undeterred, checking in despite me, and the parking lot. It all gave me diarrhea. But my stool hardened as the first couple days passed, and I got to know Dan and Rosy.

            They were an older couple, in their 60s; this was his second marriage, her first. She had waited a long time for the right man to come along, and clearly his first marriage was just a practice run. They were blatantly happy together and in such a good mood with life in general, me and my nervousness and the inn’s uninviting appearance and perhaps even that a longhaired, earring-ed, middle-aged hippy was their innkeeper were all small potatoes in the thick stew filling their bowls. Too much water had passed under their bridges for such silly stuff to matter, and they were determined to have a good time. And they did.

            The first couple days were a little rocky, if only because this whole innkeeping gig was a two-person show and I was trying to drink water and be a ventriloquist simultaneously and not doing a very good job of it. Water went everywhere, and my dummy stuttered. But Dan and Rosy were unfazed, making themselves at home.

            Each morning, while I was setting up to prepare breakfast, Dan turned up in his bathrobe and slippers, looking for a cup of coffee. With Rosy having her turn at the bathroom, he stood in the doorway and chatted with me. We had some laughs, told some stories, and talked about family, bonding like a couple of guys at a sports bar waiting for the game to start. Rosy was even easier to talk to, and she loved to laugh, whether it was at me, or at herself, or because no one had laughed in a while.

            They were two jewels in the rough, and when Sheri got back from Ohio during the third day of their visit, I wasn’t sure I wanted to share them.

            Nothing changed of course. Sheri’s presence just made it a party of four. Dan continued to show up for coffee, Rosy continued to find humor in everything … we all laughed a lot … we made them breakfast and dinner, and we all became friends.

            It was another of those experiences in innkeeping that were once a part of our warmly lit and softly focused notions, but just didn’t happen often enough to justify those notions, and the rarity of guests like Dan and Rosy made them more special.

            I think they went home with a few memories and some stories to tell.

Autumn started to pick up momentum as the gravity of winter began to tug at the mountains. Our quiet little hamlet at 7,000’ was suddenly a thriving community of a thousand temporary residents, everyone an employee of one of the half-dozen ski lodges in the area, every last one gearing up for another winter on Donner Summit.

            Shit-eating grins came around frequently to check on us, the “tenderonis,” about to experience their first winter in the mountains. They offered us advice and tips and suggestions, and they all left their phone numbers should we need to be dug out and rescued at some point during the winter. “An’ fer crissakes, don’t eat each other!” more than one neighbor proclaimed in parting, chuckling at their joke as they did so.

            The inn continued to stir from its summer slumber, with a variety of folks passing through. Andrea and Arnie, a couple young musicians from Nashville, spent the night with us, charming us with their youth, her flaming red hair, and his bushy mane. They regaled us with a couple of songs and tales from the music industry before they moved on. Jack and Diane were having an affair; Rhett and Butler were celebrating their first anniversary; Todd and Lisa came just to get away for a few days, but still needed to watch Barry Bonds hit his record-breaking home run. It was a real bag of mixed nuts. Most of them with salt.

            We would have a couple here, a couple there, and then several days would go by with no guests at all. And just as it seemed business was slipping back into a coma a bus would pull in and empty its passengers on our doorstep for the weekend.

            One such weekend filled us up with guests who all wanted the dinner package. It meant a lot more work for us, but we put on a good candle-lit show, with jazz playing quietly in the background. Everyone was happy. It was a good night.

            We began to really hone our chops as innkeepers during those weeks, poised on the verge of taking everything we had been through and learned in Indiana to a whole new level. We began to really feel like bed and breakfast innkeepers. And we were only getting started.

            Mick and Rowan returned for Halloween. They were an attractive young couple; he sported a fashionable goatee, his appearance was creased and spotless, and he looked to be very fit. She was long and lovely, with legs that went all the way up to her armpits. But that was all they had in common, their photogenic, fashion magazine cover, good looks.

            Mick was a conservative, Pope-loving Catholic raised on an army base and instilled with a Republican’s 1950s litany of morals. Rowan wasn’t.

            He believed God had a hand in all things, including those Right Wing 1950s morals, which included a stay-at-home mother of three. He was to be the breadwinner, braving the cold, harsh world day after day, climbing the corporate ladder, providing his family a comfortable home in a good school district. There would be college funds and PTA meetings and cocktail parties.

            Rowan was all for it; if her husband was willing to work his ass off so that she could live in a nice home in a nice neighborhood, well Goddess bless him. The three kids part, that was another matter. So was the Pope.

            Rowan didn’t subscribe to any misogynistic, God-fearing, toe-the-line religion. Her mother was a Pagan, a White Witch who performed rituals that required the smoking of herbs and co-mingling of juices. Rowan claimed she was a Pagan as well. A practicing Pagan.

            Mick seemed unmoved by her declaration, and the succinct exchange that followed her Pagan musings made it clear, this was a sore spot in their marriage. I got the impression that they had been through this so much, they had distilled a once lengthy and heated argument down to a few words and a couple of facial expressions.

            Mick, I suspected, believed he could tame this wild animal. After all, he had the Pope in his corner. But Rowan had a glint in her eye, a primordial sparkle that oozed hormones, and insatiable hormones at that. Mick, I feared, was completely out of his league.

            They were a nice couple of kids, and I got the feeling they felt lost in the big picture. They took a real liking to us, perhaps because we were available, perhaps because we feigned a sympathetic and interested ear so well. In any case they latched on, spending more time with us than actually going out and having a good time during their weekend at the inn.

            The Pagan talk was entertaining, and before they checked out, Sheri and I invited them back to perform some appropriate seasonal rituals, either at a solstice or an equinox. They both liked the idea of coming back, but more than that, they liked being invited back.

            We never expected to see them again, and they quickly faded into the roiling mists of inn guests past.

            Two days before Halloween, Rowan called. She wanted to come back and perform some All Hallow’s-Eve ceremonies with us. She was very excited about it. Nobody had ever shown the least interest in her Pagan proclivities unless it was just an excuse to be near those long legs.

            She booked two rooms, one for her and Mick, the other for Samantha and Darren. Samantha was also a Mother Goddess enthusiast, and two witches are always better than one. It promised to be an entertaining Halloween.

            Mick and Rowan were happy to be back at the inn; they were happy to see us again. Samantha and Darren were polite, and I think happy to be away from Sacramento for a night. She had an untamed curve to her smile, and a wild gleam in her eyes; where Rowan was a long-legged, musky insinuation, Samantha was a screaming banshee ready for a second helping.

            We did our part to make it a bit of an occasion for them as they were paying guests. We prepared another of our quiet, intimate, candlelit dinners for them, and rather than the usual jazz, I stuck a few Celtic, marginally appropriate, CDs in the player for their ambient dining music. Preparations for the ceremony began after dinner.

            Rowan and Samantha, with Sheri in tow, disappeared downstairs, into Rowan’s room. Evidently witches have a kind of pre-game lay-up drill they go through which gets them limber for the game. They claimed Sheri’s additional feminine energy and maturity would serve to strengthen their powers for the evening.

            I got chills.

            We three guys left behind weren’t sure what was going on, or what to do with it. Though they had been together nearly eight months by this time, this was the first Pagan outing Rowan had dragged Mick to. I think he feared an appearance by Satan. As for Darren, he was merely Samantha’s latest boyfriend; he was along for the ride; he knew it would be a wild one. I busied myself with cleaning up after dinner, washing the dishes, and getting the room ready for the ceremony. Darren and Mick went out on the front porch to puff on cigars.

            As we neared the Witching Hour, when that threadbare fabric, which separates the world of the living from the world of the dead, is pulled aside, the girls finally emerged from Rowan’s room, an other-worldly haze of herbal jazz cigarettes wafting about in their wake.

            Each of them was somewhat disheveled, and Rowan and Samantha wore serious expressions. Sheri seemed amused. She rolled her eyes at me.

            They sat at the dinner table slash ceremonial Pagan altar while Mick, Darren and I were banished to the sofa and chairs on the periphery.

            There was candlelight and bundles of smoldering herbs and chanting and wine sipping going on around the table.

            Samantha, breaking from the somber flow of the ceremony, mischievously suggested, “Let’s do this topless!” Yes, I thought, topless. “Or nude,” she added enthusiastically. Do it nude! Do it nude! I urged silently. But Rowan shot her a stern, Queen of the Coven look of admonishment; it had the feel of scolding a pupil.

            Samantha let it drop, resuming her role in the chanting and the wine sipping and the inhaling of the sacred herbs and oh great spirits of the dead, bless us with your presence on this holiest of nights.

            The ceremony droned on, the smoldering herbs filled the room with their earthy aroma, and not a single wayward spirit emerged from the aether. I grew increasingly restless in the absence of anything supernatural, and in the overpowering presence of Samantha’s juju. There were no spirits, no ghosts, no boogie men; but I knew there were a half-dozen libidos in that room anxious to Draw Down the Moon.

            I don’t know what the hell happened that night.

Our first full weekend happened in mid-November. It culminated in the Leonid meteor shower.

            The occasional snowfalls that had begun Halloween night, coming and going during the first two weeks of November, amounted to little more than flurries that all melted quickly. Folks eager for a weekend away, but not the least bit interested in snow and skiing and pulling over to put chains on their tires knew there wasn’t much time left before Old Man Winter sat his big backside down on the mountains. By the middle of November, it’s now or never … or now or next May.

            It was that now-or-never frame of mind that accounted for two of our reservations; Kenny and June had the added impetus of it being her birthday.

            A third room was occupied by Jason, a plumber from Indiana who Sitara flew in to install two new hot water heaters in the basement, and maybe tackle a couple of those more mechanically detailed problems that were well beyond my limited abilities or enthusiasm.

            The fourth room was still available on Friday afternoon, when I drove down to South Lake Tahoe to buy some high-speed film. While I was out, another couple stopped by hoping we had a vacancy. We did; they took it. They were up on the mountain not because of a now-or-never frame of mind, or because they were tourists in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for the first time, but for the same reason I was out trying to some score some 1600ASA color print film: They were there for the Leonid meteor shower.

            In my many years of losing sleep over meteor showers, the Leonids were not one of the showers that kept me up late. In most years it was a small, uninspiring handful of meteors per hour, but it has long sleeves with tricks stuck up them: every thirty-three years or so it overflows its banks, filling the night sky with hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of bright, swift meteors. This is because, as a relatively “young” meteor shower, the greatest concentration of all those little bits of comet, which are the meteor-producing particles, still travel in an orbit close to the parent comet, which, in this case, is comet Tempel-Tuttle. Since it takes the comet thirty-three and a third years to orbit the sun, it logically follows that there would be enhanced activity in the meteor shower about every thirty-three years. The last such increase in Leonids occurred in 1966, when observers in the southwestern U.S. saw a storm of forty meteors per second.

            During the 1990s, the Leonids began to show signs of their thirty-three-year resurgence, with hourly rates climbing from the usual fifteen or so meteors per hour to twenty, thirty, or forty per hour. Scientists with a knack for equations that include the Greek alphabet and spatial relationships and so on had high hopes for late in the decade and beyond. They were able to predict peak rates in the meteor shower based upon the comet’s previous trips around the sun, and thus, near the Earth.

            The 1998 Leonids produced a glut of fireballs: in Ohio clouds swallowed up the sky, drifting in from the west on the night of the peak. Around 11:00 o’clock I got to see one of those fireballs, a bloody-red ball of molten fire, streaking out of Leo low in the eastern sky just before the clouds gulped it all down.

            In 1999 Sheri and I drove down to Adams Country, in southern Ohio, where we had been having so many satisfying nature adventures, including seeing more than 100 Geminids an hour a year earlier. We had clear skies, but the peak of the meteor shower fell on the other side of the Earth. Still, I counted about forty Leonids each hour.

            The peak of the 2001 Leonids was predicted for about two in the morning over the western U.S. For one of the very few times in my life, I was in the right place at the right time. Scientists weren’t predicting forty meteors per second, nor did they expect a glut of fireballs, but they had high hopes for perhaps several hundred meteors per hour.

            Several hundred meteors per hour. I had never seen several hundred meteors per hour. Several hundred meteors are typical of a single night under perfect conditions during the peak of a major meteor shower.

Several hundred meteors per hour? I was skeptical.

            It was, of course, cloudy on the evening of the peak. I wasn’t surprised.

            As the evening wore on and the guests mingled, meteor shower anticipation reached critical mass. Everyone was in bed by 9:00, everyone promising to respond to a midnight rap at their door. I tossed and turned most of the next three hours, due not only to anticipation, but also the festive mood filling the inn.

Sheri and I grudgingly forced ourselves out of bed and into several layers of clothing around midnight. Lifting a slat on the blinds, I saw two of our guests, the couple who had come solely for the meteors, in the parking lot, gazing up into a murky sky. The sight of them beneath that unfriendly cloud cover filled me with an all too familiar feeling of dread. But they were steadfast in their optimism and enthusiasm, and when they came in, resolved to ride out the clouds, we discussed possible observing sights, and began loading the Jeep with blankets.

Soon the clouds began to thin, and our excitement sprouted wings. Another of our guests appeared, dancing around the parking lot like she had to pee.  She had gotten up, peeked through one of her slats, and saw a Leonid streak through the clearing sky.  She woke her husband, dressed quickly, and made for the parking lot. There was a palpable sense of impending out-of-this-world delight enveloping us all.  We were children on Christmas morning.

This second couple decided they were going to watch from the inn. Jason gave us his cell phone and told us to call when the sky began to fall. The last two guests failed to materialize. The first couple drove off to an overlook on Donner Pass Road, high above Donner Lake and distant Truckee.

Unbelievably, every available space along the three-mile drive to the overlook had a car parked in it, folks milling about, generally staring up toward the stars. The Donner Lake overlook, intended to accommodate perhaps ten automobiles, was a congested traffic jam begging for a traffic cop. Star gazers climbed among the rocks like spiders, huddled together on the ground, lay in the back of pick-up trucks, and leaned against cars. It was Woodstock for the Leonid meteor shower.

Jockeying the Jeep about like a bumper car, I got us turned around and out of the congestion. A quarter mile or so up the mountain I pulled off beside a rocky outcropping. Soon another, and yet another car pulled in behind us.  There was no room left even for a Moped. It was a carnival sideshow. A playground at recess. It was bumper-to-bumper traffic, and we were all rubber-necking a multi-car pileup in the sky.

I began my “official” observations at 1:55 local time (9:55 Universal Time). Expecting busier than normal rates, (I still doubted the predictions, and with good reason. There were folks in central Ohio who still blamed me for the Perseid drizzle of 1993.) I decided to keep quarter-hour counts, rather than hourly. That lasted for exactly one half of an hour. After the first few seconds of the thirty-first minute, it was obvious, five-minute counts were necessary.

This wasn’t one hundred Geminids per hour. This wasn’t a bunch of Perseids tumbling across a dance floor of Northern Lights. This was twelve Leonids streaking across the stars every minute. This was the frequent strobe of flash bulbs behind us as Leonids burst like paparazzi photographing a celebrity. This was the distant “oo”s and “ah”s of stargazers as a half dozen or more bright meteors fell simultaneously. This was the cheer of the crowd a quarter mile down the road as one Leonid exploded in a blinding flash, leaving a train in the sky that lasted for more than seven minutes.

This was the Big One, and I was invited to the party.

I observed for a total of three hours and five minutes. Rates ranged from sixty-four Leonids per five minutes down to fifteen. They rarely fell one at a time, but usually in rapid succession or simultaneously.  They streaked across the sky in bunches, sometimes a dozen or more suddenly appearing within just a few seconds. Many were bright, exhibiting aquamarine trains that lingered for two or three minutes.

We had a distinct peak during the five-minute period that began at 10:25 UT when we counted sixty-four Leonids, with two more, smaller, peaks at 11:10 and 11:40 UT, when we counted fifty-four and forty-three Leonids respectively. After that second spike, rates gradually slipped from the upper to the lower twenties per five-minute period. By 5:20, tired and cold, I decided not to be gluttonous. Leaving the remains of the night and the marvelous Leonid meteors for whoever else was left among the rocky slopes of Donner Summit, I drifted off to bed like a ghost satisfied with the life it had just departed.

The next morning at breakfast was a celebration of kindred spirits sharing in the last few moments of an experience that was ours and ours alone. We and the guests, we came together as strangers, and we may forget each other by tomorrow, but for one glorious night we rejoiced in the splendor of a starry sky filled up with hundreds upon hundreds of Leonid meteors. My wife and I were thrilled with having hosted such a night, and our guests were thrilled with having been a part of it. That was a lot of thrills in one place. What did that do the fabric of space and time?

canyon towhee

Wikipedia says:

“The towhee is native to lower-lying areas from Arizona, southern Colorado, New Mexico and western Texas south to northwestern Oaxaca, Mexico, mostly avoiding the coasts. Its natural habitat is brush or chaparral.”

curve-billed thrasher

From Wikipedia:

“The curve-billed thrasher (Toxostoma curvirostre) is a medium-sized mimid native to most of Mexico and to the deserts of southwestern United States. It is a non-migratory species, and throughout most of its range it is the most common desert thrasher.^[2] Several subspecies have been classified since 1827, though there is no consensus on the number. Allopatric speciation is believed to have played a major role in the variations of the curve-billed. It is grey-brown overall with a slightly curved bill, and is similar in appearance to the related Bendire’s thrasher. It generally resides in desert regions of the United States and Mexico, but can inhabit areas predominately populated by humans.

The demeanor of the curve-billed has been described as “shy and rather wild”, but it allows humans to view it closely.^[3] It is very aggressive in driving out potential threats, whether competitors for food or predators of its chicks. The curve-billed thrasher sometimes mimics several other species, though not to the extent of other mimids. It has a variety of distinctive songs, and this extensive repertoire of melodies has led it to be known as cuicacoche (songbird) in Mexico.^[4]“

inhospitable, part 13, then we went to san francisco

Soda Springs was a small town just off I-80, about a mile west of Donner Summit. Homes were scattered here and there along Donner Pass Road between the interchange and Donner Ski Ranch, as well along a few small roads someone had, at one time or another, managed to bulldoze through the conifers and the rocks. There was a gas station and a lodge at the highway, while “downtown” was about a half mile further along the road.

            “Downtown” was a post office, a small rustic restaurant, and a store, all in the same building. At the time, a new restaurant was being built across the street, but progress seemed non-existent. A little further along, at the intersection of Donner Pass and Soda Springs Roads, hung the lone traffic signal, a flashing yellow caution light for Donner Pass, a flashing red stop light for Soda Springs. There were winter sports stores on two corners (Soda Springs Road dead-ended at Donner Pass Road), as well as a small coffee shop and next to that, condos which had once been a lodge. The Come On Inn West was just down Soda Springs Road, across the railroad tracks.

            Soda Springs Road continued into a more recent enclave of homes, which became newer, larger and obviously more expensive as you continued driving. The road eventually turned into gravel and then dirt, as so many roads do in the Sierra Nevada Mountains; it eventually wound its way down out of the mountains, to Auburn, California.

            This was ski country, with our little town sitting at an elevation just shy of 7,000’. During the summer, when the nights were clear and cool and dusty with stars, and the days sunny, hot, and dry, there were very few people around at any given time. The air smelled of conifers … a variety of conifers … and sagebrush; it was a sweet, primeval, aroma, wafting over the rugged landscape since time immemorial.

            Though we were living in the mountains, we were by no means at the top. The mountains rose and fell all around us, some nearby, some off in the distance. Osprey fished Van Norden Lake, which was across the road from the inn; Audubon’s warblers flitted about the pine trees just outside the windows; Calliope hummingbirds, the smallest hummingbird to call North America home, came to our feeders regularly, getting in our faces and chatting loudly when we dared sit on the porch while they fed; Western Tanagers played hide and seek with us, and Lazuli Buntings foraged in the tall grass along the banks of the mostly dry, what I was told was the South Yuba River.

            At night, the sky was a carnival.

            California tortoiseshells, butterflies reminiscent of their eastern cousins, Milbert’s tortoiseshells, were going through one of their occasional irruptions. Their population waxes and wanes according to the amount of available larval food; some years there are no tortoiseshells at all, other years their numbers fall under what I like to call “Biblical Proportions.” This happened to be just such a year.

            The day we arrived, driving up the mountain out of Truckee, toward Donner Summit, California Tortoiseshells were pouring across the highway, a wind-borne stampede on wings. Even though the truck was barely doing twenty-five MPH by this time, I knew I was killing them by the dozens, committing “lepidopteracide” with the front of the pickup truck. The carnage was nauseating. But the butterflies kept coming … for the next two weeks.

            Every day, beginning each morning at about 10:00, and continuing until about noon, California tortoiseshells poured over and around the inn, heading in a westerly direction. Sheri and I often stood outside in the driveway, among the butterflies as they tumbled lazily by us, like autumn leaves on a breeze. And we applauded.

            It was another one of those little things in life which would be so easy to interpret as having meaning, as being a sign. That aside, it was a wonderful baptismal in Soda Springs, a pinnacle along the path of our journey. We had found paradise.

* * *

 “Do you know how much snow yer gonna get over the winter?” We nodded dismissively; we had heard. Many, many times, and always through that grin. We were sick of hearing it. We were sick of that grin. That shit-eating grin. We’ll deal with that when the time comes.

             In the meantime, we were outside a lot, simply standing, admiring the view, admiring the weather, admiring the sweet conifer and sagebrush aroma, admiring our adventure.

            The hot, sunny days gave way, evening after evening, to chilly, clear nights. We could see the Milky Way from our porch, trickling across the sky, no doubt gathering in a puddle of starlight somewhere on the other side of the ski slope across the dry riverbed behind the inn.

We drove down to Tahoe City one day to see Lake Tahoe. We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant across the street from the lake. Sitting there, in the open-air patio, a plate of enchiladas in front of me, I looked out over the water with disbelief. “We’re eating lunch across the street from Lake Tahoe,” I said to Sheri. She knew what I meant.

            Sometime in the middle of all the California newness, our daughter passed through. She was moving to San Francisco to attend law school. It was a surprising proximity of family for all of us.

The first guests turned up during the middle of August, a young couple with a baby, not your typical bed and breakfast clientele. A week later another young couple checked in, they with two youngsters, again not the sort of folks you expect to stay at a bed and breakfast. It wasn’t a trend, but families laden with kids would not be strangers to us at the Come On Inn West. Evidently families like to ski.

And then there was Kurt and Annie. They were one of those wonderful flukes of innkeeping, which didn’t occur enough.

            They were from England, on holiday in the U.S.; it was their first visit to our country. They had flown into San Francisco, rented a car, and had been driving around northern California for a few days, eventually turning up in nearby Truckee. They had spent a night at the Richardson House; for reasons they never mentioned, they had not enjoyed it at all. Maybe they would have enjoyed it more had we been the innkeepers. They found us, in any case, in the phone book, and they gave us a call. “Sure, we have a room available … Great … Fine … We’ll see ya in about an hour.” It all had the reek of one of those things, which, had it been a decade ago, before all this grown-up life stuff had turned me into a pragmatic callus, I might have found cosmically serendipitous. Now it was all just a large coincidence.

            Kurt and Annie were apprehensive when they arrived, like many of the guests when they got their first gander at the Come On Inn West. We were apprehensive when we first pulled in, and that was at night, in the dark.

            From the back, the Come On Inn West was nothing to look at, just the back of a house, a few windows, and the bottom of a profoundly sloping roof. There was nothing inviting or come hither about it at all.

Off to one side there was a not altogether inviting “tunnel,” which was an enclosed walkway in which visitors went up the steps to the front porch. It was enclosed to keep out the winter snowfall. (That seemed a little overindulgent of the weather, we thought.)

            The front of the inn was much nicer; it had a porch running the entire length of the front of the house, it had a view of the small stream, which might be nothing but big rocks and damp mud, and an inviting ski slope on the other side of that. The trouble is, when guests pulled into our parking lot, they were pulling in behind the inn, where the view was, frankly, disheartening. All the good stuff was on the other side, but you don’t know this unless you suffered the back of the inn and braved the “tunnel.” It wasn’t unusual, the apprehension, the barefaced disappointment even.

            Kurt and Annie didn’t seem disappointed, but they did look as if they were wondering what the hell they had gotten themselves into. Not only was the inn, at first, a disappointing sight, but there was no one around. It was eerily quiet and still, and they were our only guests.

            We welcomed them warmly, showed them around and gave them their choice of room. They nodded politely, said very little, and picked the room with a view of the rocky riverbed. That was that. We went about our business; they went about theirs.

            They had planned to stay only a couple of nights, but when they got in that second evening, after a day of adventuring in California, they asked if they could stay another night. “Sure,” we said, “we’d love to have ya.”

            When they got in on that third evening, they again asked, “Can we stay another night?” “Sure.” And on the fourth evening, they asked for a fifth.

            By this time, we were getting on famously. They were enjoying the Sierra Nevadas, and they were enjoying our hospitality. We spent mornings on the porch, peering through binoculars at birds, and again, at night, gazing up at the stars, waxing poetically about how beautiful infinity was. And we joined them at breakfast each day, having a jolly time.

            They ended up staying with us for a week; they even joined me outside for the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. “Look!” Annie would yell, “there goes another streaker!”

            On their last evening with us, they insisted upon driving us down to Squaw Valley

to ride the gondola up the side of the mountain where we would enjoy the view and watch the sun set. It was a lovely and memorable evening.

            By the time they pulled out the next morning, we all felt like old friends, and Sheri and I couldn’t help but feel a little bit good about ourselves. Charmed by their quiet reticence in the beginning, we had not only been good hosts, but we also made ourselves available to them as friends, we had given them room to feel comfortable, and we had drawn them out. A potential lasting friendship resulted.

            It was a lovely week with them. It made us feel good about innkeeping again. It made us feel good about people again.

            We were getting pretty good at this innkeeping stuff.

            Then we went to San Francisco.

a scene from dune

solar eclipse, christmas day 2000

some clouds, some birds, a candle

inhospitable, part 12, it seemed that the universe was up to something

Reno sits where rocky Nevada gives way to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The highway takes you up into them, and into California, and that is a whole ‘nother world.

            These mountains were different from everything else we had experienced on our trip. Nevada was nothing like this. Utah was absolutely different. Wyoming and the Rockies, well they hardly seemed to matter by this time. The Sierra Nevadas were towering, tumbling slopes, a garden of conifers and chaparral and scrub. They were wild and primitive and hostile and lush. They seemed full of magic. Had Tolkien lived in California, The Hobbit would have taken place in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

            We had barely gotten past Reno and into California, the truck slowly climbing the steep highway, when I knew, without a doubt, we had made the right decision. This place was beautiful. This place spoke to me. It caressed me places. It felt like the place to be. It felt like home.

            A year and half into our midlife adventure, well beyond Ohio and evening strolls along Lake Michigan and bottoming out among the mountains of western North Carolina and more pain and misery than any one person should have to suffer in ten lifetimes, and I was as happy as I could be.

            About forty-five minutes later we pulled into the Come On Inn West. We parked among the towering pines, leapt from our vehicles, and held out our arms to embrace our surroundings and each other.

            We were home.

            We were but the latest dream-seekers to move to the west coast. People were immigrating to California long before gold was discovered in “them thar hills.” People crossed into North America from Asia thousands and thousands of years ago. At that time, a land bridge connected the continents. All they had to do was walk.

            Some came by boat.

            In Springfield, Illinois brothers George and Jacob Donner, restless for adventure, a new beginning, and possibly facing midlife crises, found the lure of California irresistible. They loaded up their families and their possessions into wagons and on horseback and, in 1846, set out for the west coast. Along the way, they met up with like-minded adventurers, dreamers, kindred spirits, and at least three other midlife crises. It was eerie.

   Their wagon train grew longer.

            The more conservative among them wanted to keep to the old familiar, proven, trail to their dreamland. Jacob and George had other ideas. They liked to push things to the edge of the envelope. When a self-proclaimed scout road into camp one evening with news of a shortcut – the Hastings Cutoff – that would have them felling trees and displacing the heathen natives in no time, the Donner brothers went all starry-eyed.

            “Fellin’ trees?” George repeated, awe-struck.

            “Heathen natives?” Jacob added breathlessly.

            The scout nodded vigorously as he gulped corn squeezin’s from a jug. “Take ya uh week,” he managed to gargle. “It’ll getcha over ‘em moun’ins an’ intuh th’ valley in no time ‘t all.

            Jacob and George didn’t need to hear it twice.

            The shortcut, which meandered past the Great Salt Lake and into those now-familiar salt flats, took a month, not a week. By the time they came out of the mountains into Reno, the Donners were at each other’s throat, which proved to be significant foreshadowing.

            Once they stocked up with much-needed supplies, they rested for several days rather than push on. It proved to be a fatal decision. While they rested in Reno, took in a few shows, and did a little gambling, the usual storm clouds gathered, metaphoric and otherwise.

            No literary device this storm system, winter typical of late November was blowing in a month early. Unable to get over the mountains during this premature blast of winter, the Donner party set up camp at what is now known as Donner Lake. Nearly half of the eighty-nine members of the group died. The last survivors, with a belly full of friends and family, were rescued in early April.

            The Donner tragedy was not in vain. Charlie Chaplin, inspired by the severe conditions, bad decisions, and ultimate menu choices, gave us his greatest work, The Gold Rush. He even filmed the exterior shots in and around Truckee, a place we had crossed paths with by way of our phone interview with the Dickinson House; Truckee, not far from Donner Lake, not far from where the Donner Party dined on one another, not far from where Sheri and I found ourselves unexpectedly living.

            It seemed that the Universe was up to something.

i may have wandered into wonderland

a tree and some stars

electrical discharge

clouds in the moonlight

inhospitable, part 11, on the road

There wasn’t much point to the first day of the trip, just to get us the hell and gone from North Carolina and on our way to California. We drove across Tennessee, turned right at Nashville, and continued to Paducah, Kentucky, where we stopped for the night. It amounted to a rather uneventful day; the now familiar mountainous terrain of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee eventually leveled out; I watched for wildflowers; we put about 500 miles behind us; I wanted to be in California day-before yesterday.

            The second day of the trip had more going for it: Our objective was Manhattan, Kansas, where we planned to spend a couple nights so that I could visit an actual prairie stretching from one horizon to the other, and not one of those little remnants I was so familiar with in Ohio and Indiana. We got to Manhattan late in the afternoon. We stayed at Chuck’s Motel Manhattan, in a small square room with its own first floor entrance.

            There were two prairies near Manhattan, Konza Prairie and the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. They each went on in all directions.

            Had there not been a drought holding sway, the prairies would have been a windswept grassland of bird song and a patchwork of color. But a drought was holding sway, birds coughed more than they sang, the tall grass was brown and crinkly, and the bright colors of prairie wildflowers were sparse. And it was 100+ degrees out there, in the open. Shade was a fairy tale without a happy ending. “Crispy” began to figure more prominently in the narrative.

            Our hike about Konza Prairie was brutal and disappointing and Sheri, unable to continue in the furnace-like conditions, went back to the motel to ice herself down and stand in front of the open windows bare-assed naked in case someone walked by and kicked up a breeze. I went on to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve alone.

            There, it was more of the same, but with a few more wildflowers to see, including a bright orange Butterfly Weed plant covered with shiny, green, hairstreak butterflies. It wasn’t the prairie spectacle I was hoping for, and I was definitely disappointed but, damn it, I was in Kansas. I was driving across country. I was heading for California. It wasn’t that bad.

            I was beginning to regard life in an uncharacteristic fashion. I was beginning to experience optimism.

            And then we continued across Kansas, which lasts forever.

            It wasn’t so obvious to us that first day. The landscape of eastern Kansas is not much different from Ohio or Indiana, or any other Midwestern state. It’s not until you get past Topeka that you begin to notice things are changing with a real sense of commitment. Suddenly, it seems to be an awfully flat and tediously featureless landscape.

Fifty miles of mind-numbingly horizontal Kansas isn’t so bad. Multiply it by a factor of six and we’re talking hallucinations and sensory deprivation. Kansas is the flattest, most horizontal thing I have ever seen in such quantity, and we had more than 300 miles of it to get across just to get to Colorado.

            It was also another one-hundred-degree day on the Kansas prairie. Think of it: sensory deprivation and heatstroke. Hunter Thompson would have been in seventh heaven. And that was only the half of it. At the rest stop a few miles past Colby, the truck broke down.

            We had stopped just to get the hell off the highway and out of the heat and into some shade. While we rested beneath a tree, the battery in the truck breathed its last.

            We panhandled jumper cables from a couple of women and tried jumping the damn thing, but the truck would have none of it. Rigor mortis had already begun to settle in. Their jumper cables weren’t up to the task; they were no heavier than a clothes’ line. You couldn’t have gotten a Moped started with those things. The only thing they might have been good for was making a noose, which crossed my mind.

            We drove back to Colby in the Jeep, stopping at the first automotive place we could find. For reasons that were not adequately explained, they couldn’t help us, but they called up a guy who could: One-armed Dan Oilpan. He promised to meet us at the rest stop as soon as he could get away from whatever it was he was working on.

            We drove back to the rest stop, found a comfy place beneath a tree, and waited on One-armed Dan.

            “One-armed Dan? That’s really his name?” Sheri asked me.

            I nodded petulantly.

            In the meantime, people came, and people went. A couple of young guys, who had pulled up in a rusted out old Volvo, worked the crowd, begging for change. They looked like the kind of guys who only asked for change in the daylight; after dark they hit you on the head for it.

            There was a young college-age girl lurking about as well. She had pulled in just ahead of the two young thugs.

            Her car was stuffed full of her belongings, just as our Jeep and truck were stuffed with ours, automotive Thanksgiving turkeys with all the trimmings. Eventually we struck up a conversation.

            She was heading home, to Boulder, Colorado, from somewhere on the East Coast. After dropping her load there, she was moving on to Washington. We explained the nature of our journey, moving from North Carolina to California to run a bed and breakfast, and how it was all a consequence of a midlife crisis. She listened politely, occasionally glancing over at the boys and their Volvo, who seemed to be in no hurry to move along. Occasionally one or the other glanced over at her, not like a young man admiring a pretty girl, but like a shark admiring a surfer.

            Eventually One-armed Dan and a son – a pimply-faced, greasy-haired teenager whose apparent potential as a womanizer suggested he had a lot of years of masturbation ahead of him – pulled in. And indeed, One-armed Dan was just that, one-armed.

            He barked instructions at his son, who scurried about enthusiastically without actually accomplishing much. One-armed Dan, meanwhile, was wrestling with tools like a juggler, holding things in his teeth, balanced on his shoulder, or tucked between his knees or under his arm. His other arm, the one that wasn’t there, had been cut off at the shoulder; there wasn’t even a hint of an arm under which he might have held something, a pencil even. Just a shoulder and air.

            His arm, the one he did have, had the look of something that could easily carry an engine, or knock down a house. It was as big and as thick as a tree trunk. One-armed Dan was an imposing and impressive figure of a man, regardless of his lack of symmetry.

            “I thank yer batt’ry’s dade as a doorknob,” he said, his rugged, strangely classical physique suddenly diminished, if only slightly, by his good ol’ boy twang. “What I’s gonna do is give y’all a jump, and y’all kin foller me back to muh shop. I wanna make shure ain’t nothin’ got itself fried in yer ‘lectrical system.”

            “Okay…”

            The young thugs watching all this, us befriending the young college girl and the arrival of mountainous One-armed Dan Oilpan and his pubescent progeny, seemed to reconsider things. They climbed into their old Volvo, turned it over on the third try, and pulled out of the rest stop. Our young friend’s body language changed subtly, suggesting relief.

            When One-armed Dan jumped the truck, and we prepared to climb into our vehicles and follow him, the young girl thanked us for spending our time with her, wished us well, and pulled out behind us. Though she never said anything, we suspected the two ne’er-do-wells had been dogging the girl on I-70. Our bad luck had been better luck for her.

            As she continued toward Colorado, we backtracked, following One-armed Dan back to Colby, where we pulled off the highway, drove past the motels, the gas stations, the Wal-Mart, and the McDonald’s. We continued into downtown Colby, which was an intersection surrounded by several abandoned storefronts and a dozen or so homes. There were “For Sale” signs in many of the front yards. And we kept driving, following One-armed Dan into and out of Colby, into the swaying grass and horizontal terrain of Kansas. I began to get nervous.

            “Christ, where is this place?” I wondered aloud. Fence posts raced by.

            “Shit…” I opined.

            Roadkill became more frequent.

            “Great. Just great. He’s taking us to the middle of nowhere.”

            On-coming traffic was … well, there was no on-coming traffic.

            It was beginning to feel like an Alfred Hitchcock moment.

            I began to look for some place to turn around.

            His left turn signal flashed on. He slowed and turned into a gravel driveway. A large, hand-painted sign in the front yard read; “Dan’s Auto-Doctor.” The artwork suggested he was right-handed; that was the arm that ended in air.

            Mumbling to myself, I pulled in behind him, into the garage, a sheep led to slaughter.

            He jumped from his truck and went right to work.

            “Yep, okay den. Yer ‘lectrical system’s fine, yer batt’ry I’s gonna take out back and shoot.” He smiled. It was a joke. I chuckled nervously. Sheri was still in the Jeep, possibly waiting to see if there was trouble. She already had the Jeep in reverse.

            One-armed Dan extracted the battery from its nest in the engine and handed it over to me. “Take ‘is sombitch to th’ Wal-Marts. They’ll give ya ten bucks toward yer new batt’ry fer it.”

            “Gotcha.”

            Sheri and I drove back over the roadkill, through all the tall grass, past all the fence posts, into and out of Colby, and back out to the interchange, where the Wal-Mart was. We turned in the dead battery for ten dollars’ credit on a new one, grabbed a new one from the shelf, and drove it back to One-Armed Dan. He stuck it back in the engine like a researcher replacing an eagle’s egg in its nest, tightened a few nuts and bolts, gave it a jolt of juice that would’ve done Benjamin Franklin’s kite proud, and got us back on the road.

            “Y’all send me a pos’ card from Cal’fornya,” he called to us as we backed down the gravel driveway.

            Back out over the roadkill, through all the tall grass, past all the fence posts, into and out of Colby, and back out to the interchange we went … again. But by this time, it was too late in the day to get back on the road.

            We got a room at Indira’s Motor Lodge, ordered a pizza, and put a very long day behind us.

            We were up and on our way to Colorado bright and early the next morning.

            A few days later a note fell from the pages of our road atlas. It was from One-arm Dan’s son. It read, simply: “Help!”

            It was written in crayon.

Eastern Colorado, it turns out, is just as flat as most of Kansas, the only difference being there is a subtle yet definite incline toward the Rocky Mountains. And eventually they appear, a foggy disfigured mirage wafting across the distant horizon like heat waves on a summer day. Slowly they become obvious, the distant hazy mirage solidifying, growing, expanding, becoming imposing, looming before you like a bully daring you to knock the chip off his shoulder. They certainly must have intimidated many a 19^th-Century traveler into turning around and going back home.

            “Ma! Pa! Zachariah! Zachariah’s come back!!!”

            The family quickly gathers on the front porch of the dilapidated old farmhouse, where dirt is the only crop with which they’ve had success. Pa steps down off the porch to confront his restless eldest son.

            “Well look who it is. Mister Big Deal I’s a gonna see me the world Zach – uh – rye…” And he spits an impressive wad of chewing tobacco in his son’s general direction.

            “Ma,” the obviously downtrodden son says quietly, greeting his mother and ignoring his father’s aggression, “Pa …”

            “So, Mister Big Deal I’s a gonna see me the world, what happened? Seen it all a’ready?” Pa barks facetiously.

             The family titters. “I bet ‘e chickened out, Pa,” Jim Bob, the second son observes bitterly: With his brother gone, he stood to inherit the farm. Now, with Zachariah back, he stood to inherit nothing, which, considering the condition of the farm, was actually an improvement.

            “Well, boy?” Pa continues to prod, spitting an even larger, gooier wad at his eldest son’s feet. “Well?”

            “Mountains, Pa.”

            “Mountains?”

            “Yep. Mountains.”

            “What about ‘em?”

            “’ey wuz too gotdam big t’ git over.”

            “Too big?” Pa yells back incredulously, which is something of a feat given Pa’s dismal vocabulary, which didn’t include enough of the alphabet to get anywhere near a word like ‘incredulously.’ A belly laugh begins to form deep in his abdomen. “Of course, ‘ey’s too big. ‘ey’s mountains, fer crissakes.”

            Zachariah forces his way through his family, all of whom are now laughing at him and making light of his failed adventure. He marches up onto the porch, in through the front door, down the hall, through the kitchen, and out through the back door, making a beeline for the big oak tree. At the tree he removes his rope belt, tosses it up and over a branch, knots one end securely to the branch and the other end securely around his neck, and does the only thing he knows to do; he hangs himself at his family, ‘I’ll-show-them’ the last thought to rattle around his uneducated yet adventuresome noggin. And it was all because of the alarmingly imposing Rocky Mountains.

            But I wasn’t intimidated by this grand spectacle of geology; I was excited. The Rocky Mountains were too marvelous to be frightening. In fact, they were just the opposite. They were an enormous hint of dirty, nasty, sinful pleasures to come.

            We pondered this with some impatience over breakfast at a Flying J truck stop in eastern Colorado. It might have been no more than the usual ham and cheese omelet and a cup of coffee, but the waitress had other ideas. What I initially took for a bit of Flo, the harlot waitress flirtation, was nothing of the sort, but more of a phone-call from the dead curiosity.

            Apparently, I was a dead ringer for the waitress’s late father, who had passed away a year earlier. She quizzed me about my birthday and my hobbies and my likes and dislikes and asked me questions only her late father would know the answers to and wondered how the hell her dead father ended up as me, a guy from Ohio, who was lately on a great adventure with his wife, the latest leg of which had us on the road to California and it certainly was no coincidence the fates had dropped me at her counter. This was usually her day off; she took an extra shift for the money. She was saving up for breast implants. Somewhere there was “oo-EE-oo” music playing.

            Clearly, I wasn’t her father; her father was dead, but here I was, the spitting image of him. I knew she was hoping I had a message from him. I didn’t.

            I’ve never been mistaken for a dead guy before, and with such profound conviction no less. Regardless of who I was, or more importantly who I wasn’t, our waitress was convinced I was a message from the Other Side, even if I was just passing through. In fact, my just passing through probably made it all the more believable. A message from the Other Side doesn’t move in next door, it blows through on a sudden breeze; it’s an unlikely coincidence; it’s there and it’s gone. My passing through was the message; her father was telling her everything was fine, and that he was on his way to California.

            “He always wanted to be a surfer,” she sniffled at me as she topped off my coffee.

            “Really?” I answered politely.

            She nodded.

            “An’ now he will be…” she managed to say before rushing off to blow her nose.

            “But … we’re not going … to the … ocean,” I muttered meekly at the space she had just vacated.

            If I hadn’t offered our waitress a hug before we left, she would have demanded it. So, hug we did, and she hugged me with Herculean strength of a daughter who loves her daddy with all her might.

            And on we drove.

            With all our stuff packed into the pickup like a fat backside stuffed into size four jeans, the Ford Ranger was riding low and slow. Rather than try to get up and over the Continental Divide in Colorado, I thought we might have an easier go of it in Wyoming, where the road up was (hopefully) less steep. We turned right at Denver.

            The drive up along I-25, parallel to the Rockies, was a disappointment. Sure, the mountains on my left were a groove; I was finally seeing these mythic peaks, but on my right were malls and gas stations and shops and fast-food joints and trash swirling around in gusts of wind kicked up by highway traffic; it was a wasteland of highway interchange commerce, something I could see anywhere. It was my first hint of the normalcy that inhabits the land east of the Rockies, right up into the foothills of Boulder.

            As we neared Wyoming, the commerce diminished, and we were back out in the open prairie. The mountains had drifted further westward and weren’t quite the awesome spectacle they had been, but that would eventually change. At Cheyenne, we turned left.

            The wide-open landscape of Wyoming began to “gyre and gimble,” rolling a bit more, tumbling slowly up toward the Rockies. And it seemed to take on a wild-west persona.

             We spent the night in Laramie, at another motel that didn’t take pets. This time, rather than be sneaky, we just told the owners we had a couple of cats and we had been driving for days and days and really needed to stop for the night and what the hell, you have a dog anyway. The empty parking lot didn’t give them a lot of leverage in the negotiations.

We stopped early enough in the day to allow us a shower, a lie-down, and a walk around town. Laramie was my first cowboy town. My imagination, fed by a childhood that included cowboy movies and Marshall Dillon and the Ponderosa and tales of the “savage Redman” and gunslingers, did nothing to diminish the Wild West Gestalt.

            And I felt like I was doing something worthwhile; I felt like I was on a great (midlife?) adventure; I felt alive. I was in my mid-forties; why did I wait so long to do this?

            We were up early the next day of our trip, the sixth, and back on the road, taking I-80 across Wyoming into Utah. We drove up and into the Rocky Mountains … slowly, mind you … into a rugged new landscape, yet again unlike anything we had ever experienced before. And it took our breath away … as usual.

            Fences divided up the land in a way that suggested mind-bogglingly huge properties. New and exotic wildflowers bloomed here and there along the highway, streaking by at seventy mph. Wild animals of one sort or another grazed on distant hillsides.

            Utah was green where we crossed the border, the consequence of suburbs. It eventually gave way to more of that rugged, dry, dusty cowboy terrain I was becoming deeply enamored with. By the afternoon Salt Lake City appeared in the distance, much as the Rockies had done a day earlier, a distant mirage, out of focus and perhaps a trick of the light.

            We decided to spend the night on the other side of Salt Lake City. But we could find no place on the other side of Salt Lake City. That left us with the Bonneville Salt Flats. When you are driving across it in the middle of summer you expect to spontaneously combust at any moment or melt like a candle. When you drive across it in the middle of summer after already being on the road for about eight hours, well, you have nobody to blame but yourself. All I wanted to do was get on the other side of Salt Lake City before stopping for the night. How was I to know there was no place to stop, just that damn Salt Lake and the white pool tabletop salt flats that stretched out in all directions? I think I suffered permanent brain damage that day in the heat, and I still see after-image psychedelic bursts of colorful light on my retinas, a consequence of the blinding white light.

            Christ, it just went on and on and on. Messages were spelled out in rocks and empty bottles along the roadside, declarations of undying loved, accusations of infidelity, outbursts of patriotism, Bible passages, pleas for rescue from the relentless white-hot salty desert… It was the worst day of our trip, and quite possibly one of the worst days of my life.

            We began to see signs of life … signs as in billboards … as we neared Nevada. Eventually, after finally emerging from the vast wasteland of the salt flats, we came upon an exit for Wendover. We couldn’t see a town, just an exit ramp and a lot of rocks. We got off the highway anyway.

            The exit ramp curved around a big monolith of a stone where, perhaps, ancient people once worshipped at the altar of the Great Robust God of Geology, and there, revealed to us as if by magic, was the main street of Wendover, Utah. We pulled into the first motel we came to, got a room, cranked up the air conditioning as high and as cold as it would blow, doused ourselves and each other in cold water, and then drank our body weight in it.

            It was a long, miserable day, capped off by miles and miles of a near-death experience in the emptiness of Utah.

We slept like asteroids that night, tumbling heavily across the unfathomable depths of deep, dark, distant space, lifelessly inert as we fell through the empty vacuum of slumber. We hit the atmosphere in the morning, plunging with reluctance into another day, consumed not by fire, but by the desire to roll over and go back to sleep.

            Somehow, we dragged ourselves out of bed, not eager to hit the road so much as wondering when and where we would be stopping for the night. Across the street seemed like a manageable distance.

Soda Springs was a long day’s drive away, but after yesterday’s death-defying Donner Party transit of the snow-white salt flats, I saw no reason to overdo it. Before we had even zipped up our trousers or a toothbrush got stuck in a mouth, we decided to cut the day in half. That meant spending the night in Winnemucca, Nevada.

Nevada.

We were a few hundred feet from Nevada.

            As I drove from Wendover, Utah into West Wendover, Nevada, I was as giddy as a teenager at a peep show. There was a restless stirring in my being.

            We stopped for breakfast in West Wendover and were immediately confronted with the strangeness of this new environment. The restaurant was nestled in among slot machines and Black-Jack tables and people betting on what the people at the next table were going to order for their breakfast. We had had a small taste of this at the airport in Reno a few weeks earlier, but it was nothing like this. This was bright flashing lights and bells ringing and alarms going off and the sound of change … lots and lots of change … getting fed into slots.

            I ordered a ham and cheese omelet with wheat toast, coffee, and orange juice. Brenda, a weathered old gal with big hair sitting at the table across the aisle from us won $10.00; she would have won $15.00, but she figured me for a white bread kind of a guy. Not anymore, Brenda. Not anymore.

Maybe driving across Nevada was a bit like sightseeing on the moon, but it was all so new and exotic to me. It was really the wild, wild west, not nearly as tame and sedate as the wild, wild west of Wyoming.

            By the time we pulled off the highway for gas in Battle Mountain – or was it Elko? It was one of those towns nearly by-passed by the interstate – Nevada was beginning to suggest its God-forsaken-ness to me, but I was ignoring it. Battle Mountain (or Elko), for its part, did nothing to deter the God-forsaken-ness of Nevada; the dusty town seemed on the verge of achieving ghost town status, with pockets of resistance here and there. A woman, pushing a baby in a stroller, walked by. Her attire and her makeup suggested it had been a long night, and she couldn’t get a babysitter. Her smile, I decided, wasn’t the consequence of a good time; she was squinting into the relentless, hot glare of the Sun.

            One-armed Dan lived in a paradise compared to Elko. I feared Winnemucca would be more of the same.

            It wasn’t.

            Just as we had done in Laramie, we got to Winnemucca in the late afternoon, early enough that we could have some kind of an evening, obviously a far cry from the day before. We needed the healing.

We picked out a nice motel in the middle of town; the owners, who had been running the place for only a couple of years, were from Soda Springs. When we told them that was where we were going, to run a bed and breakfast, they smiled in a fashion which could only be described as “shit eating,” and said to us, “Do you know how much snow they get there?” It would not be the last time we would see that same smile or hear those words. Not by a long shot.

            Pleasantries exchanged and precipitation amounts discussed, we settled our bill, checked in, and had a shower and a nap.

            That evening we walked the main street of Winnemucca, getting a real sense of the local cowboy flavor. We had dinner at a Mexican place, (the food was so-so,) and we went to the local theater the see the third Jurassic Park movie. It was a nice, relaxing evening, the perfect way to spend our last night on the road.

            By this time tomorrow, we would be living in California.

clouds holding hands

children at play

inhospitable, part 10, soda springs, california

Her name was Margaret Blight, she owned the Mt. Soparis Bed and Breakfast in western Colorado, and she was looking for innkeepers. She and Sheri corresponded, first by e-mail, then over the phone. Negotiations seemed to be going well, and the job itself, well, it was in Colorado, wasn’t it?  How could we possibly turn down something in Colorado? I mean, Colorado; that was just the sort of place we were dreaming this big adventure would take us.

            It sounded pretty much like just another inn job; more of the same with perhaps a wealthier clientele, but it was out there in all those damn Rocky Mountains. When Margaret told Sheri she lived in Arizona, and would only be around occasionally, well, an off-site owner is nearly too good to be true. Granted, we were basing these feelings on a grand total of two innkeeping positions, but Tom living an hour away from the Duneland Beach Inn was paradise compared to the owners of the Hellhole lurking around the next corner, or hiding in the shadows, or hanging from the ceiling like bats.

            There was no question in our minds; if she offered us the job, we would take it. The only real test we had to pass was my appearance; after all, not everyone looked generously upon a middle-aged man with a beard and ponytail, never mind the earrings. When Sheri sent off our photos, I asked, “Say, have ya mentioned the cats?” “It won’t matter,” she told me.

            Our two cats, Rufus and Charlie, had embarked on our adventure with us. It never occurred to us to not take them along, or that not everyone liked cats. In fact, many people look even more harshly on pets, particularly cats, than they do my appearance; we had been turned away from several potential jobs because of the cats. “You got cats? Well, that changes everything, doesn’t it? I mean, we can’t have cats about now, can we? Cats. Why would someone own cats anyway?” We got looked down upon because cat haters thought they were superior.

            A few days later Sheri received an e-mail from Margaret; while she never understood any man who wore a ponytail and earrings, she saw no problems with it. The job was ours!

            “Did ya write back about the cats?”

            “Stop it. It’ll be okay.”

            All we had to do now was finalize a few things and make plans to get the hell out of North Carolina. We expected to leave town by mid-June.

            “I sure wish you’d told her about the cats,” I said more than once over the next couple days.

            As we got nearer the day of our departure, Sheri e-mailed Margaret about our plans, telling her when we expected to pull into Carbondale. And, at my request, she told her that we had a couple of cats.

            Margaret e-mailed back the next day: “I never let my kids have pets. What makes you think I’m going to let my innkeepers have pets?”

            It was the MacArthur House all over again. We had gotten excited about moving on to a new place, we had quit our jobs, we were ready to move on, and just like that, the new inn job was yanked out from beneath us.

            The folks at Sheri’s place of employment expressed their disappointment on our behalf but were thrilled she wasn’t quitting after all. One co-worker even admitted, “I prayed, and I prayed, you would stay with us. Isn’t God wonderful in His boundless wisdom?”

            Sheri wanted to punch her on the end of her self-righteous nose.

            I wasn’t quite so lucky. I had quit; my job had been taken. The owner told me there was nothing she could do; she wasn’t about to pay two groundskeepers. She was pinching her pennies flat. But, as usual, after she behaves in a fashion which isn’t entirely giving and generous and is very non-Zen, she recanted, if only slightly. I could help out with some extra projects, pitch in where needed, but I wouldn’t be getting my forty hours anymore. Well, it was better than nothing.

We had a brief flirtation with a startup inn in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, with much the same result as Colorado for much the same reason, or so we supposed when cats got mentioned and e-mails stopped.

            Then came an e-mail from an innkeeper in Indiana.

            He was innkeeping at the Come On Inn, in southern Indiana. He had applied for the job at the Duneland Beach Inn around the same time we had; we were hired over him because Vonda didn’t want a single person trying to run the place. Some months later, when we were up to our necks in innkeeping on the northern Indiana shore, Eddie had called, just to see how things were going. He was still hoping to get the job. He was hoping we were failing miserably. We quite nearly were, or at least we felt like we were. And now, about a year later, he had seen Sheri’s ‘job wanted’ ad on the Internet; he called us with an insider’s tip on a job.

            Sitara Booshes, who owned the Come On Inn, was looking for someone to run her other inn, the Come On Inn West, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. If we were interested, the guy in Indiana said he would let Sitara know.

            If we were interested? In moving to California? “Call her now. Call her now. Call her yesterday! Call her yesterday!!”

            Within a couple days Sitara e-mailed us; she was interested in meeting us and offered to fly us out to California. Sheri didn’t even bother checking with me, writing back, “We’d love to come out to California and meet you and see the inn.”

            We didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves; we had been shat on too much already (did we look like toilets?). But let’s face it, we were talking about California here. It was difficult to not get excited.

Word spread among disembodied “voices” in the nether-regions of primitive cyberspace that we, a couple of barely broken-in innkeepers, were about to fly out to California to meet Sitara Booshes, and evidently her photo hung in the nether-regions of a cyberspace Post Office, with Karen Anne Vapid and Antoine Schicklebgruber and all the other criminals of innkeeping. A few of them we would meet anon.

            The day before our flight out to meet Sitara, we received an e-mail from an innkeeper who had worked for her. It read:

I understand you are considering the innkeeping position at the Come On Inn West. As a former innkeeper who’s worked for the owner, I must warn you, Sitara Booshes is a big, fat liar. And I’m not the only one who knows it.

                I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but someone should. Sitara cannot be trusted.

                Enjoy your trip.

We regarded the message with humor and curiosity but didn’t give it a second thought. After all, Sitara was paying for a round-trip to California. Maybe she was a big, fat liar. Hell, she could have been a drooling lunatic, but if she was willing to fly us out there, well, who were we to cast aspersions? Besides, the anonymous e-mailer might, in fact, be the “big, fat liar,” with some kind of a grudge. Grudges come easy in innkeeping. They’re common.

            They can hang around, too.

            We spent three days with Sitara and her three kids. By dinnertime of the second day, we decided maybe the e-mailer was onto something.

Sitara talked a lot about the two inns she owned, and how the innkeepers were relentlessly trying to “fuck” her. She had an exhaustive litany of transgressions, and every single innkeeper she had ever hired had contributed to the list.

According to Sitara, everyone was out to get her. Innkeepers had stolen from her, they withheld income for themselves, they threw lavish parties on her credit card, they let people stay gratis. Each one of them was guilty of something, and she was always the victim.

Even the guy who had recommended us to her was slowly working his way up the list.

            “I think he is stealing from me, and is a child pornographer,” Sitara said to us over lunch in Truckee.

            “No. Really?”

            She nodded enthusiastically. And then she pulled a spreadsheet from her purse. “See this?” she began, “a list of credit card expenditures.” Before we could really study it, she folded it up and stuck it back in her purse. “He is purchasing items for personal use. And many, many pornographic magazines. All with children in them.”

            Though we had only just met Sitara, and didn’t know the guy in Indiana at all, we suspected she was a pathological liar or, if such a thing exists, a pathological victim. Let’s face it, everybody couldn’t be out to get her; everybody couldn’t be so dishonest.

            We debated whether to let him know what she was saying about him but thought better of it. We had only just met Sitara. We didn’t know the innkeeper in Indiana. We chose not to get involved. After all, there was a job in California at stake here. That guy in Indiana could take care of himself.

            We were about a mile from Donner Summit, in what was an utterly foreign land compared to the lush green deciduous landscape of North Carolina or Ohio or Indiana. It was an arid, coniferous and sagebrush bottle of perfume, filled with these wild sweet fragrances, uncorked at about 7,000’, surrounded by the rocky terrain of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Across the street from the inn, a variety of unfamiliar butterflies flitted about a variety of unfamiliar wildflowers. I made up my mind then and there; I really, really wanted this job.

            We spent two days talking packages; marketing; “heads in beds”; all the usual shit, all the while stepping over, around, and between the kids. We feigned interest in her anecdotes, clinging breathlessly to every word.  We feigned concern over her tales of innkeeper treachery, assuring her of our profound desire to please her. I would have French-kissed Sheri’s mother if it meant moving to the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

After three days with Sitara and her kids, we certainly felt as though we had earned the job; it’s bad enough, having to make an impression on an inn owner, but dealing with the owner’s kids is more than anyone should have to go through. But go through it we did. We needed this job. We wanted this job. We lusted after this job.

            Any misgivings we might have had about Sitara and where we might one day fit in among the lore of her lies were insignificant compared to the chance to live in Soda Springs, California, innkeeping at the Come On Inn West. All she had to do was offer us the job and we’d jump on it like dogs in heat. But she didn’t offer us the job. Instead, she handed over the keys. The job was ours.

apparently, i’m looking at clouds from this side now

sedona, arizona, 2013

mt. shasta, 2012

inhospitable, part 9, the way eastern acupuncture clinic

Our first year in the traveling hospitality milieu had come and gone. We had been innkeepers for a mere seven months, and at least half of those had been a day in the life of Job; the first year of our great adventure was hardly a success. Despite that, moving back to Ohio was never considered. We simply continued to suffer, knowing full well the Universe would blink sooner or later, and we’d get a brief window of opportunity to turn things around. The actual window of opportunity came in the form of a job at the Way Eastern Acupuncture Clinic.

            Swallowing a fistful of antacids, I drove over one afternoon, looking for the address. I found it. It wasn’t a B and B, as I expected. The ad was for a groundskeeper; Sheri and I both assumed it was a B and B.

            I turned around, drove by slowly, mulling over how much I didn’t want to do this. I turned around again, and drove by a third time, the antacids proving no match for the stomach acid churning in my belly. “Shit,” I muttered, pulling over, gulping down air against the upwelling of stomach acid in my throat. “Shit.” And I got out of the Jeep.

            The clinic was in a big house, just the sort of property that would make a great bed and breakfast. “Shit,” I tried again, but not feeling any better for it. I went in. The creaky hardwood floors let everybody know I was there.

            “Hello,” the receptionist said up at me from her desk. She was not a particularly warm person.

            “Howdy,” I said back, trying to sound as friendly as my upset stomach would permit. “I’m here about the ad in the paper.”

            “The ad?”

            “In this morning’s paper?”

            “Mm hmm,” she said. She was going to make me work for it.

            “For a groundskeeper?” I just wanted to turn and run out of there.

            “Oh. That ad. Here. Fill this out.” She handed me an application.

            I nearly vomited all over her.

            A couple days later I was back for an interview.

            The clinic was a constant hum of white noise and, I guess, a constant flow of white motion. Phones rang; the staff – mostly young, college-aged girls – went from room to room like Abbot and Costello being chased by Frankenstein’s monster, in one door, out another, up the stairs and back down the stairs. There was laughter and hushed commiseration and exchanged pleasantries and indifferent muttering. And a susurration.

I sat and waited for my interview, watching, and listening. Clearly, I had crossed over into one of Rod Serling’s Other-Places.

            A couple days later I was hired. It was all very stressful. I bade God’s World Publishing a sincerely fond farewell.

san francisco, october 2011

inhospitable, part 8, b and b interviews

We did have a handful of B and B interviews during those wretched winter months in North Carolina, which were little gossamer wisps of hope. Two were at inns in Georgia, one was in Virginia, and we had telephone interviews with inns in New Hampshire, California, and Washington. It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that every one of these possibilities was in a different state. Our career in innkeeping wasn’t going to last long if we stayed in Asheville.  

            Too bad, too. Asheville was a groove.

A couple of the interviews, the phone interview with New Hampshire and the interview in Virginia, were arduous and painful, and didn’t go well at all, or at least they didn’t result in anything positive. Neither did any of the others for that matter, but they didn’t result in anything positive in a more positive fashion.

            Telephone interviews have always been a little more than I can handle, and to kiss someone’s backside over the phone is unspeakably unbearable. Sheri and I each had a turn at the owners of the New Hampshire inn, talking ourselves up, asking any questions we might have, and then answering their questions, which were what I assumed to be their foolproof method of culling the herd. It was silly.

            We never heard back from them. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I was relieved.

            Our phone interviews with inns in California and Washington went much better.

            The inn in California, the Richardson House, was an eight-room bed and breakfast in a place called Truckee. The town sat in a depression in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just below Donner Summit, about forty-five miles west of Reno, Nevada. The current innkeepers had had their fill of innkeeping and the Sierra Nevadas and California; they wanted to move to Asheville, North Carolina of all places. Sheri and I took that to be one of those things that could really be interpreted as a sign if you believed in such things and, if nothing else, was an impressive display of coincidence.

            Try as we did to be pragmatic and sensible about it all, we couldn’t help but feel it boded well for our future.

            The job offer was on the tip of the owner’s tongue when the assistant/relief innkeeper decided she wanted to do it full time, snatching it from our grasp before we could close our hands around it.

            The inn job in Washington was another near miss. This one was a collection of cabins on an island in Lake Chelan; the owners were looking for winter caretakers and hosts, the ‘hosts’ part a consequence of the occasional hearty soul who was willing to brave the harsh weather of the Cascade Mountains to stay on the island. That job also seemed to be on the tip of the owner’s tongue when, at the very last minute, they decided to simply close the place down for the winter.

            An unsettling trend was beginning to develop.

            Our interview in Virginia wasn’t much better than the phone interview with New Hampshire. We met with an elderly gentleman, Cyrus Bankroll, whose family had owned land in the Shenandoah Valley since somewhere around the dawn of time. Most of that land was now occupied by a dairy farm, and he was turning the family’s old 19^th – Century home into a bed and breakfast. He was clearly under the influence of that old, familiar warmly lit and softly focused notion.

            We sat in his office and talked about the usual shit. He then gave us a tour of the inn.

            After that, we went home with him to meet his wife, have a cup of tea, and get the feel of one another. I’m not sure how they felt about it all, but I wanted to stick my hand down my throat and pull out my spleen. It just went on and on and on. When we got back to our motel room, Sheri had to take two muscle relaxants just to loosen the faux smile stuck on her face. It was dreadful.

            We knew, despite our current situation, this was not the place for us. Cyrus had done a nice job, a lovely job in fact, of turning that old house into a bed and breakfast. Let someone else manage the damn place.

            We never heard from Cyrus after our visit, which obviously didn’t matter, but we felt we deserved something from him, even if it was a rejection. After all, we drove all the way up there to listen to his prattle and to hold our breath against the stink of manure.

            The two jobs we interviewed for in Georgia were at opposite ends of the state, and as different as night and day. The first was just off the coast, on Little St. Simon’s Island; a rustic nature lodge in a land of Spanish Moss, shorebirds, newly minted sand dollars littering the beach, heavy, hot, humidity, alligators, nesting egrets, Eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes. Lots and lots of mosquitoes. With all that nature, it reeked of potential. Nature always reeks of potential.

            The second was in northern Georgia, near the Tennessee/North Carolina border. It was another nature-oriented retreat, which included campgrounds, a big, rustic lodge for dining and meetings and just sitting around in and relaxing, and lots of hiking trails. It seemed to have a bit of potential as well but being just more of what we had in Asheville in terms of environment, we were leaning toward the Inn on Little St. Simon’s Island.

The island was a kind of sub-tropical jungle, the kind of place where voodoo runs rampant; the kind of place you expect to find King Kong. The Spanish Moss draped itself over most things that stood around long enough to let it happen; the heavy, hot, humidity draped itself over everything. In the morning, after the tide went out, the beach was littered with a king’s ransom of perfect sand dollars. Migrating warblers taunted us with brief glimpses. Great egrets mated and nested on the island; in fact, Sheri and I hopped feebly on to bicycles and pedaled clumsily down a gravel path to their rookery.

            Pulling off the gravel path and slowing down in the soft, wet grass of the path to the egrets, I came to an abrupt halt when my front tire ran into something. I looked down to see what the obstruction was. Christ! It was a rattlesnake!

As I began to frantically backpedal, Sheri came zooming in on her bike. I reached out, grabbing at her, stopping her momentum. “Rattlesnake!” I yelled, resuming my hasty retreat, my bike beginning to tangle itself up with hers.

            As we pushed and pulled at each other, trying to get out of striking distance of a very large rattlesnake, which was now not only rattling its tail, but was also rising up and hissing at us, our bikes were wrapping themselves about each other like wire clothes hangers in the dark corner of a closet. I had no idea how far the snake was capable of lunging, and I had no intention of letting it show me.

            Once we were what we figured to be a safe distance from the evil viper, we watched it with awe and fear. I think there may have been some soiled underwear involved as well.

            The rest of the nature we enjoyed on the island was much less toxic, and we began to ponder living and working there. After meeting with staff members and innkeepers and the chef and the decision-makers, we knew it wasn’t for us. There were too many staff members, too many co-workers, to interact with, ‘co-workers’ being an important distinction.

            We were not being offered the position of innkeepers or managers; those jobs weren’t available, though they might eventually be offered to us. We were being offered staff jobs, Sheri in the kitchen, me as a housekeeper.             Two weeks later we were interviewing at the Big Bear Retreat, at the other end of Georgia. And again, we were not being offered the jobs we wanted. We were oh-for-six on inn interviews, with no further prospects in sight. It felt like we had pissed the universe off.

a good day for yard birds

canyon towhee

black-throated sparrow

verdin (photo bombed by house sparrow)

ruby-crowned kinglet

great-horned owl

the adventures of sky king