The Little Cabin in the Woods

“My God, this place is at the end of the world,” worried the wife.  It did seem like a long ride up the mountain from the main highway.  It was unpaved and pocked with ruts and holes but it wasn’t horrible.  Hell, highway 880 in Oakland has worse stretches and deeper holes with the added hazards of drivers texting, putting on makeup and fussing about the morning coffee that just sloshed onto the console.  The rain was a bit worrisome.  How bad would this thing be if this light shower turned into a gully washer? 

Dropping Benjamins in Jackson

It was a 14 hour pull from Nevada to Jackson, Wyoming.  We limped into Jackson at about 9 on a Saturday night.  The grand plan had been to leave Fernley early and drive as far as we could and get a room for the night.  As far as we could drive turned out to be Jackson and Jackson apparently had no room to spare.  We drove past hotel after motel after inn and every one displayed that increasingly depressing NO VACANCY sign.  Uh, this was a problem.  My Jackson reservation was for the next day; at 3 PM to be exact.  I frankly had expected that we would end up spending the night in Pocatello or American Falls in Idaho but the allure of Wyoming and the Grand Tetons provided the adrenaline to keep me going.  Well, that and a river of Dr. Pepper. 

Getting Away: Fernley Nevada

On the road from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Yellowstone area.  The adventure begins. 

Fernley Nevada; established 1905.  We’re on the road trip, headed for the mountain states.  Fernley wasn’t exactly where I’d expected to land on the first day out.  I’d hoped to reach Winnemucca on the first night but “civilization” (and I use that term loosely) wouldn’t let go of its nasty, relentless grip. 

Evacuating Suburbia

Throw out them LA papers

And that moldy box of vanilla wafers.

Adios to all this concrete.

Gonna get me some dirt road back street

~  From L.A. Freeway, Lyrics by Guy Clark

“Concrete and cars are their own prison bars”

~ From Toes, Written by Zac Brown, John Driskell Hopkins, Shawn Mullins and Wyatt Durette

Retirement talk has been revolving around the domestic circle a lot lately.  Mine, not the wife’s.  You see she’s been retired and according to her it’s the shit (that’s urban slang for she likes it).  I know this because she tells me it’s the shit all the time, quite often after I've dragged my worn out bones into the house after a day at the office and an hour on the freeway with a few thousand of my fellow Americans feeling like shit; about 10 pounds of it in a 5 pound sack (which is old school for suburbia blows).  

Have Yourself a White Bread Little Holiday (and other Chris..err Holiday Stories)

Christmas is done for 2014.  Like a Dickensian Christmas ghost it snuck up on us, stayed for an instant and then dissolved into winter’s fog.  Every year around Halloween we bellyache that “those capitalist bastard retailers are foisting Christmas on us earlier and earlier every year.”  And then a couple days before Christmas we’re in a panic because we managed to procrastinate away the 2 months long shopping season that the capitalist bastards graced us with.   “What the hell do I get for the wife?  She already has everything.”  So we head for Ross and grab a sweater, any sweater.  On Christmas morning she opens the box, holds it up and asks, “Did you save the receipt?”

On The Civil War Trail

“The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”

~ Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative

Unharmed he reached the nearest sufferer. He knelt beside him, tenderly raised the drooping head, rested it gently upon his own noble breast, and poured the precious life-giving fluid down the fever scorched throat.

This done, he laid him tenderly down, placed his knapsack under his head, straightened out his broken limb, spread his overcoat over him, replaced his empty canteen with a full one, and turned to another sufferer. 

~ Excerpt of Confederate Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw’s account of the Angel of Marye’s Heights.

“And let the perpetual light shine upon them.”

~ My wife Cora.

We left Washington DC for a driving tour of Virginia.  Our drive crisscrossed Virginia's Civil War trails.  You can't hardly drive for a few hours in Virginia without coming across a site related to the Civil War.  If it isn't a building or a battlefield it might simply be a sign describing a particular spot as being some general's headquarters or a place where a skirmish took place.  The white signs are along highways, on country roads, near schools and on the fringes of shopping malls. 

Confederate cannons on the hills above Fredericksburg

Reno Rambling - Too.

Reno's Peppermill; a mile or so from what’s left of The Strip's glory years.  In the sixties the strip was a glittering string of casinos and hotels; Fitzgerald’s, The Sahara (which would become the Flamingo Hilton), Mapes, The Nevada Club, Cal Neva, Harold’s Club and a full deck of smaller players. The strip has since been stripped. 

Reno: Rambling

Alright so it was less rambling and more gambling but I felt as if before we even got to Reno; before I’d finished booking a room, that I’d gambled and been snookered by our hotel/casino – The Peppermill.  The Tuesday and Wednesday before the 4^th of July were advertised at $59 and $69 respectively.  A good deal I announced to the wife and she said, “Book it,” and so I clicked BOOK IT.  The next page showed me that my grand total was over $180.  What the hell?  And there was the $15 dollar per day compulsory resort fee telling me that if I wanted to use wi-fi, the fitness center and pool, have a bed and get toilet paper in my room I would have to pony up.  Okay the last was an exaggeration but if the fee is compulsory why not put it up front in the cost of the room?  Oh but I know the answer to that question.  Because at first blush $59 looks a lot more inviting than $74 and so you rush to click the BOOK IT icon before anyone else gets YOUR room.  And now you’re at the page where it’s time to pay up and excitement has taken charge and you say “screw it” and you tap in your credit card number.  Oh I had second thoughts but in the end I reasoned that, hell its only 30 bucks.  Of course that’s how things get expensive.  You keep tacking on the “its onlys” until you've racked up the national debt – it’s the American way.  And so before even leaving the house it was Peppermill -1, American Boomer – 0.  

On Rainy Days and Childhood

The wife and I are babysitting the grandchildren, “tending kids” as my Uncle Al used to say, on a rainy Saturday morning.  Rain has been a rarity in California this drought year but in the last couple days it’s been nonstop torrential.  The pool which was on the verge of disturbingly low is getting scarily close to the brim.  I've been expecting this rain.  I know to expect a soaker every year about this time.  You can keep your cloud seeding and your rain prayers and novenas and rosaries.  Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have a much more reliable rain maker – the annual Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  You don’t got to show me no stinking rain dances here in San Francisco.  Just trot out a dragon, some lion dancers and light up a string of firecrackers and an old bearded boat builder carrying a staff and gathering pairs of animals can't be far behind.  The parade is next weekend and I have a feeling that, as per tradition, this Saturday’s storm is just a prequel to the gully washer that’s going to flood the parade route next Saturday night. 

Tall Tales of Trimming Trees

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.”

~ Larry Wilde

“I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects.”   ~ Charles Dickens

“You know,” I said to Cora, “I've been thinking more and more about getting an artificial tree.” 

“Yeah, we aren't getting any younger and a real tree is a lot of work.”

“Wanna stop by Home Depot and just look?” 

This was our conversation as we pulled out of our street headed for the local Christmas tree lot. 

When I was a kid my parents held artificial trees in contempt.  Easy enough to do back then, when artificial trees were strange looking aluminum structures in ghastly, garish colors; pink, silver and blue.  Christmas tree shopping is one of the few things that's not seen much change since I was a kid.  We took the half hour or so drive to one of the lots on El Camino Real near downtown San Mateo.  A fellow with a 10 foot ruler followed a few steps behind us as we tiptoed through the mud created by the rain that we always got then and never seem to get now.  We followed the ritual that every family has followed since the 1840s when the tannebaum became a saleable commodity.  Dad would grab a likely candidate by the trunk and tilt it and turn it as we inspected it for any flaws that might disqualify it from adorning our living room.  The tree had to be full and without any conspicuous gaps in the branches and it had to stand straight.  Size didn't really matter.  Six foot was just fine because in the 60s cathedral ceilings were something that only the folks in nearby, ritzy Hillsborough had.  Our plebian ceiling topped out at 8 feet.  Once we found a likely candidate the fellow with the ruler stepped up and measured the tree, my mom watching carefully to make sure he didn't add phantom inches.  He wrote the tree's height and price on a slip of paper for my parents to take to the cashier.  Once the tree was ours dad stuffed it in the back of our big, clunky Mercury station wagon. 

Thanksgiving; A Breaking of Tradition

Ah! On Thanksgiving day....

When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,

And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.

What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye?

What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?

~John Greenleaf Whittier

With a few days to go until the big feast I stepped into the dining room and noticed that Cora had set the big table with the Thanksgiving tablecloth.  Pausing for a moment I realized sadly, that it wouldn’t be used this year.  This year the table would sit empty and idle on Thanksgiving. 

TV; Episode One. Buying a Set.

 “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.”  ~ John Lennon.

“People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”  ~ Jess C. Scott

With Black Friday looming and all the pre and post-holiday sales yet to come, the wife and I have resurrected the, “should we get a new TV” discussion.  It happens about this time every year.  We don’t really exchange gifts so the idea is to get the big gift for the household (which is just the two of us now).  This year the idea got a little more impetus by a short stay at the Atlantis in Reno.  The room’s 55” flat panel made us realize that our circa 2000 tube television could be improved on. 

A Dog Day at the Park

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”  ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti, Commissioner of Major League Baseball, April 1^st 1989 – September 1^st 1989. 

It’s been a season nobody saw coming. Like that line shot foul ball into the stands that finds your skull when you turn away for just an instant, we glanced away for a moment in June and looked up just in time to be struck by 2013.  After a 2012 World Series Championship the Giants have found themselves in last place in their division, playing baseball that is often sloppy, passionless and sometimes downright unwatchable.

11 strikeouts in the better days of 2012

Roughing It (With apologies to Mark Twain)

The Family Camping Chronicles: Part III

"On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peak that we had yet seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless."  From Roughing It  by Mark Twain

“It would be distressing to a feeling person to See our Situation at this time all wet and cold and with our bedding &c also wet, in a cove scarcely large enough to contain us…canoes at the mercy of the waves and driftwood…robes and leather clothes are rotten.”   William Clark describing being stranded at Point Ellice, Washington (1808).  (For those who slept through the day they taught about the Lewis and Clark expedition in history class, Clark was Meriwether Lewis’ expedition partner)

“We’re really roughing it,” Dad would say as he loaded our camping gear into the station wagon.  The words were served with sides of arched eyebrow, a wry smile and a large helping of sarcasm.  Dad was alluding to Roughing It, Mark Twain’s chronicle of his adventures in the Wild West of the 1860’s.  Looking back it seems like a magic trick that dad was able to get a big canvas tent, two bulky cots, lantern, fishing gear, stove, clothes, some pre-cooked meals that mom packed for us and an assorted pile of “possibles” into that wagon.

Bags and Baggage

The Family Camping Chronicles: Part II

I relegated myself to sleeping in a sleeping bag the other night.  No, it’s not like that.  I wasn’t in the wife’s doghouse.  There’s a perfectly good queen sized bed in one of the extra rooms that comes in very handy for when the kids visit or when the domestic seas get choppy.  My purpose this night was to test the bedding for the upcoming family camping trip. 

On Dirt, Beans and Wild West Whimsy

“Camping is nature’s way of promoting the motel business.”  ~ Dave Barry.

There’s a family camping trip looming on the horizon and I’ve spent the last few weekends gearing up.  I’ve made lists, rummaged through the big plastic bin in the backyard and a couple of garage cabinets; pulled plastic tubs from an attic storage area and crawled around some closets in the house.

The American Adventure - The Open Road

It's July, 2013 and my wife Cora and I are taking a driving trip through Northern California and into Oregon. 

The wife and I have embarked on that great American summer adventure; that annual migration of the dog days; that paean to the interstate, the motorcar and fuel consumption; the modern day version of the pioneers’ tale – the road trip.  We've headed north from the San Francisco Bay to a distant, uncharted and exotic land – Oregon.  Okay, it’s not distant; it’s only 300 miles or so.  And it’s hardly uncharted.  After all I went out recently and bought a GPS so Oregon, the rest of this land and all of hell’s half acre are all pretty well charted.

A Recollection of Fishing

I got up that Sunday morning a little after 5 o'clock.  During these long summer days it’s more or less my usual time.  Has to be early.  It’s the only time I can take my dog Rainey for a run.  Rainey is day blind; can’t see the paw in front of her nose once the sun starts to peek out so we have to hit it while it’s still dark.  And so when I staggered out of bed Rainey jumped out of her's, did her happy laps around the bedroom while I shushed her lest she wake the little woman and then she rumbled down the stairs. 

“Sorry Rainey, I’ll let you out to do your business but then it’s back to bed."  She wasn't getting it yet.  While she was outside I crawled into my clothes and threw the camp chairs into the truck.  Rainey came back inside, wagging her hind quarters expecting me to grab the leash until I sent her up the stairs.  “Back to bed girl,” as she sulked up the stairs

Glove Story

Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, we are players again, forever young.~ John Thorn; baseball historian.

Its baseball season again.  Time to dig into the closet and pull out the glove.  I did that last year about this time and went through some moments of panic when I couldn’t find it, tearing the closet apart, shouting at my wife, "Cora, Where in hell is my glove?" 

"I don't know. I don't play baseball." she yelled back. 

Then I remembered that I’d loaned it to my son.  I asked him to give it back which gave me an idea for a present for his upcoming birthday. 

A Sunday Stew

For many here in the States, the best part of Sunday is football.  Not so for me.  I’m partial to Sunday supper.  Sunday supper has its origins in Britain and Ireland where a hearty meal of roasted meat was served with a bounty of sides after the Sunday church service.  It’s remained popular to some degree in the former colonies, including The United States.