Author: folktraveler405aa618e7

I’m a retired history teacher.

My Mother Showed Her True Colors

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ 1 Comment

In the Time of COVID. Day 54

May 11, 2020

My Mother Showed Her True Colors

This weekend was Mother’s Day . The sky was gray and our energy was zapped. We do so much better when the sun is out. This Self Isolation directive weighed heavily on us all weekend.

Our kids called their Mom and that was thoughtful. We spent time thinking of our Mom’s as well. This year is an election year and that brought to mind the first presidential election I can remember. I can also remember how my mother made her political choice abundantly clear, one night. That night, my mother showed her true colors.

Mom and Dad came of age during the Great Depression. They were both raised in West Seattle and both sets of their parents struggled mightily to make ends meet. The policies that President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted helped lift the most destitute Americans out of crippling, gnawing poverty and my folks appreciated that very much but by the mid 1950’s politics in America were shifting away from The New Deal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower (Ike) ran on the Republican ticket and won the White House. That ended a 22 year run of democratic control. Ike had been Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe and had overseen the defeat of the Nazi’s.

In 1956 “Ike” ran for re-election. Again the Democrats put up Adlai Stevenson as the party standard bearer. Stevenson was a stalwart New Deal Democrat.

It was late October 1956. We were living on East 11th Avenue in Spokane, Washington. There were six of us kids. We ranged in age from 17 to a newborn infant. Mom was sitting on the couch , cradling the baby. Dad was in his cups. He’d had a quart or two of beer and was feeling frisky. He took a dime out of his pocket and flipped it onto the rug. This was how I, at 8, got allowance. I dove down onto the rug and reached for the coin. Just as my fingers grazed the edge, my father grabbed one of my ankles and pulled me back. There was no polite handover of money from my Dad. You had to fight for it.

I always loved how physical Dad got with me. He put me in a half Nelson. He applied other wrestling holds, head locks, Dutch rubs , and he made me squeal, he made me moan, he made me scream for mercy. He grabbed the dime and then I had to try to press it out of his grip. This went back and forth for at least a half an hour.

We had recently gotten a Silvertone Black and White TV. It was always on. Our cat lay on top the TV and it’s tale swished back and forth across the image. That night, the impending election was discussed on air. My dad started to ruminate about how he was going to vote. He announced “ I’m going to vote for Ike. He beat the Nazi’s and he’s doing a hell of a good job”. My Mom was aghast. She confronted him about how he was just “spouting bar-room blather”. They got into it, but my Mother didn’t suffer fools. That was a time when most men thought women didn’t have the intellectual acuity to make wise voting decisions , that they should vote as their husbands advised. My Dad still had me in a squirming headlock and we were still on the floor.

The more my Mom pressed him to wake up and make sense, the more irritated he became. She was a firm FDR Democrat, had never voted for a Republican and wasn’t going to start now and be dammed if she’d tolerate my Dad voting for Ike. My drunk father made a very bad mistake, then.

My Mother had terrible bunions and ingrown toe nails. She suffered throughout her life. She worked in a hospital kitchen and stood on cement all day. Her feet killed her all the time. My drunk Dad was frustrated at Mom for being so resolute. Dad hated to loose an argument. In a heated moment, he reacted toward Mom as if he was wrestling with me. He pressed a dirty thumbnail against one of Mom’s swollen toes. She screamed “You Son Of A Bitch” and then hauled back with the ball of her heel and kicked in one of my dad’s ribs. He sprang up, holding his side, and dashed out the door.

My Mom didn’t cuss. We’d never heard her cuss. All us kids got real quiet. We got scared. Were they going to get a divorce. Oh no, oh no. Dad didn’t come back in the house, the minutes ticked by. Finally, Mom said to my brother Ray “Go down to the tavern and bring him home”. Ray said. “They don’t let kids in there”. “Go!” She demanded.

Sometime later Dad and Ray came on the front porch. Ray came in but Dad stayed outside. Mom handed the baby to my sister and went out. 15 minutes later they came in together laughing and hugging. They slipped into the bedroom and closed the door.

I believe a broken rib taught my Dad how he was going to vote on Tuesday. My Mom could be very convincing when she showed her true colors.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

The Wall of Immigrant Leavings

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ 2 Comments

In the Time of COVID. Day 51

May 8, 2020

The Wall of Immigrant Leavings

Sometimes what seems like social isolation is actually a door opening to our memories. It gives the mind an opportunity to traverse the landscape of the past. We remember through image and sound, through taste and texture, through aroma and emotional encounters. There is an image that has stuck with me for 65 years. It was a wall of immigrant leavings.

When I was a kid, my mom worked in a hospital kitchen. We were on the edge of poverty and my father’s job was spotty at times. They had six children and I was in the middle. Five years separated me from my older sister and older brothers and five years from my younger brothers. I was in a weird position. There was no one my age to play with. My imagination had to carry me through that social isolation.

My dad was a drinker. He loved beer. He made beer. I worked the siphon hose from an early age. The taste of green beer was natural to me. The walls of amber quarters with congealed yeast balls, lining the basement shelves was just part of my childhood.

Dad had pals who loved too drink, gamble and bowl. They met on Saturdays at Bolero Bowling Alley. They played “pot bowl”. Each guy ante’ed a few bucks and the high score winner racked in the mullah. Mom made Dad take me along sometimes, but it could get lonely.

I’d get a bottle of soda, a hamburger and chips from the lunch counter and sit in a window booth looking out at the world. Inside the building, the sound of bowling balls crashing against the 10 pins was constant, and the juke box pulsed between those crashes. The smell of frying burgers and the salt-sour delight of sliced dill pickle were delicious sensations.

Outside, a muffled swish of traffic drove by on East Sprague Avenue. There were no trees along the road but there was a brake and tire shop. There was a print shop and between the two was Spokane Junk. It was a visual feast for the imagination. It’s old brick exterior had a riot of objects fastened to it’s east wall and below, caged in by a tall wire fence was a junk yard. The main line of the East-West Great Northern Railroad ran just behind the building.

The last of the three great US transcontinental railroads, the Great Northern, was completed in the late 1887 and linked Chicago to Minneapolis and Seattle and ultimately Portland. The long haul over the Rocky Mountains made Spokane a natural sight for Round House Train Repair and freight hauling. The population surged from 1,000 European settlers in 1881 to 100,000 thirty years later. Immigrants from Western Europe flowed in and brought their dreams with them.

These were not wealthy folk. They were laborers and domestic workers, subsistence farmers, stockyard and slaughter house workers and hard rock miners drawn to the silver and gold mines in the Coeur d’ Alene mining district. They were brickyard workers, and roving work gangs of Wobblies following the wheat harvest. These were also Japanese truck farmers in the Peaceful Valley and Hangman Creek areas. Hard workers everyone.

By the 1950’s the residue of this human migration could be seen on the wall of immigrant leavings at Spokane Junk. High above the rooftop, on a steel pole was a taxidermied Bald Eagle in frozen, stoic perch. In all weather it sat sentinel, with snow dusted wings or in blazing summer sun. Below it, at angle, on the pole, a trombone was wired in place. The wall was adorned with bear traps, trumpets, iron bed-frames and headboards, tin lanterns, peeve poles from forgotten logging camps, a run of welded-together bread pans from a labor-camp kitchen ,and milk cans with their bottoms gone. There was a whimsy to the wall. Along with survival tools were tennis rackets with their weaving sprung, bed pans with nicked white enamel, several two-man rip saws with rusted teeth and weathered gray wood handles. Hanging down were massive block and tackles with rotting hemp rope, ox-bows, shovels, picks and baby perambulators. There were hay rakes and scythes, each object elicited a narrative. I wanted to know who had owned these things. Who those people were.

In the yard below the wall were anvils and massive links of chain, stone grinding wheels with treadles. There were mangles. There were buck boards, wagon wheels and harness traps. There were old steam powered tractors and blacksmith tools and a few old decayed truck chassis.

As I got older, I crossed the street and peered in the windows and went inside. There were kegs of nails and railroad spikes and used work clothes handing on a wire, high up. There was a bin of used loggers corks and carpenter aprons and hand tools still good enough to use. It smelled of grease and a mothball muskiness common to army surplus and Hank, a near toothless man of indeterminate age and with no inclination to bathe or shave. He lived in back, a true bachelors life.

I Dream of that place even now. Those inanimate objects had been touched by human hand and were part of a great desperate narrative of survival. Those immigrants were not all good people, they helped displace the native people, they were crude and rambunctious , they were exploited and used up. They inhabited the flop houses along Trent in the great Spokane skid row. They lived in small workers quarters away from the gleaming mansions on the South Hill. When I think of my home town, my first thought is of the wall of immigrant leavings.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

La Princesa and The Handsome Stranger

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ Leave a comment

In the Time of COVID. Day 50

May 7, 2020

La Princesa and The Handsome Stranger

It’s been 50 nights that we have all been tucked into our nidos, our nests. It’s about time for a bedtime story.

San Gabriel was the center of a remote tract of rancheritos. The farmers and ranchers were descended from Mexican campesinos. Their ancestors had farmed and run sheep and goats on their land for 300 years. The tract clung to the northern frontier of the US / Mexico border in the desert southwest. The tract had once been in Mexico.

The Pueblo of San Gabriel was a poor little place. At that time there was no pavement and the people used horses and wagons or their own feet to go about. Occasionally a delivery truck would bounce over the rutted roads to bring supplies to the Tienda Ramos. It was the only store for hardware or seed or fabric or sewing needles or the other things people could not make themselves. The Ramos family were the richest people around. The old señor acted as the unelected mayor and the judge in community disputes. His wife Lupita was the lay leader of the local Catholic Chapel and ran things when the visiting padre wasn’t available. Their daughter, La Princesa, was the prettiest girl in that village or the others that dotted the landscape from east to west. Her beauty was legendary.

The Pueblo had a community center. It was used for fiestas and once a month a big dance. A traveling group of troubadours played the music. The young folk scrubbed up and put on their Sunday best. But, they were a humble lot. The young men hadn’t a shined boot among them and all the young women were wholesome and plain. All, that is, except La Princesa.

On the night in question the moon was full as the dancers trailed in from out of the dark landscape. As was the custom, except for those who were promised in marriage, the men stood on one side of the room and the women on the other. Parents and grandparents sat on benches with watchful eyes. La Princesa stood aloof, as always, near her parents. Nose so high her neck must have ached. Her dress was new each month. It was sewn from the finest fabrics available in that sorry little place.

The single men looked on with lust, the women with envy. La Princesa made sure she was the center of attention. A regal in her court.

The band struck up a fandango and the men walked forward to choose their partners. Around they swirled to the lilt of guitars and violins and the crooning of the singers. When a young man screwed up the courage to walk the long walk across the room, toward La Princesa, to ask for her hand in dance, she would give an assessing cold eye roll from toe to head and utter “not in this lifetime!” It was a walk of shame back to the men’s wall. So it went dance after dance. La Princesa was too good, too condescending to dance with the local single men. No, not in this lifetime.

Suddenly the door opened, and standing in the frame was a tall, beautiful man. He wore an elegant black cowboy hat. His hair was black and oiled and wavy. This stranger had a black cowboy shirt made of silk with small red roses and mother of pearl buttons. His jeans were ironed to a crisp and his belt buckle was a big as a rodeo trophy. His boots were perfect and fine, all black with silver toe tips.

Like a moth to a flame, La Princess’s eyes turned in his direction.

Ever so slowly, he strolled across the floor in her direction, keeping constant eye contact with her. He asked for her hand in dance, and for once, she agreed. All the people looked on in astonishment as he escorted her to the center of the floor. He nodded to the band and they struck up a hypnotic tune. Everyone fell into the dance floor and around they all swirled. The stranger pulled La Princesa close and she was overtaken by his cologne. She swooned and looked into his eyes with longing as his breath heated her cheeks and her other areas. The stranger picked up the pace and that made the band play faster and faster and dancers spun faster and the old people to, were dancing and the mayor was fat and out of breath and his wife Lupita was overtaken with longing. All the women were looking toward the stranger as around and round they danced ever faster.

The stranger stopped suddenly and the band collapsed, the old people fell down and held their hearts. The dancers to, fell and the women crawled slowly with hands out stretched toward the stranger whispering “take me, take me” .

He threw La Princesa to the floor and floated over the prostrate crowd. As he threw open the door, the full moon could be seen just behind his head. Then, a great burst of smoke and fire erupted around him. His eyes turned red , He pitched back his head a gave a demonic scream of laughter. There, at his feet , where beautiful boots had once been, was one chicken foot and one cloven hoof.

As mysteriously as he had appeared he was gone.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

A Kaleidoscope of Misperception

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ 1 Comment

In the Time of COVID. Day 49

May 6, 2020

A Kaleidoscope of Misperception

I sometimes think it started with the Jerry Springer Show. He struck on an attention catching notion of bringing conflict into the public eye. It was a talk show TV format patterned after The World Wrestling Federation. Prepared guests lost patience with one another and started slugging, hitting each other, pulling hair, screaming back and forth, slamming each other with chairs and drawing blood. The show first aired in 1991 and ran for 28 seasons. All unsavory topics were advanced, race, sexual proclivities, religious differences, infidelity, criminality and social taboos. It was a wild success. It polarized America.

Springer loved to play on the stereotypes of white southern, “mullet wearing hillbillies” and black “baby-mammas”and “ghetto queens” and “Pimps”. He stirred the pot of division and the viewing public ate it up. 28 seasons is an eternity in television programming. He spawned a kaleidoscope of misperception.

Once while walking a country lane in Southwest England we happened on a couple of truant teenagers out smoking and feeling free. When they discovered we were Americans, they had only one question. “Do you own guns?”

Today, a neighbor whose restaurant is shuttered, told me that all the COVID news are lies. He didn’t know anyone in California or Mexico who was ever infected. The News is lying, he said. The Deep state plans to imbed micro-chips in all of us, he said. This brought to mind a discussion with Amos, our Kenyan Tour guide on our cross Africa Safari in 2006.

Amos was a delightful guy, he was full of local stories that helped us interpret what we were experiencing. It was Amos who explained to us the spiritual dilemma of going against the wishes of dead people. How their spirits reside in the bush and surround us at night. That they communicated through our dreams and that they could manipulate physical objects from beyond the grave. He explained how a dead woman could destroy a van motor and why the owners of the van feared her wrath and arranged to take her back to where she didn’t want to leave. Well, tall tale and all, that is a commonly held belief in interior Africa.

Amos and I were talking around a camp fire one night and the topic of East African Hindus come up. I had read that during the British colonization of Africa, the British imported East Indian Hindus to operate stores in the towns and cities that emerged. The resident Africans resented the relative prosperity of this new group. Once Independence was realized a great reckoning took place. Hindu land was ceased, stores raided, Hindus were deported, riots and mayhem ensued. Hindus were often murdered. I asked why.

Amos had a simple answer that he believed in the core of his being. “Because The Hindus abduct black babies and eat them”. A fine example of the kaleidoscope of misperception.

Before traveling to Africa I read “Dark Star Safari” by Paul Theroux. In the very early 60’s Theroux was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and had loved it’s vibrancy. 35 years later he traversed Africa from Cairo to Cape Town and as he traveled through Malawi he was astonished by the destruction of the Hindu stores. The fronts were torn off, the interiors gutted and the Malawians lived in those abandoned buildings like caves. That’s why I had broached the subject. When we went through Malawi, Theroux’s descriptions were spot on.

Regardless of reason, Amos, an otherwise lovely man, was a rabid hater of Hindus. Amos was a Christian but also had traditional African spiritual underpinnings. He walked in two worlds, that way.

It has always bothered me how people are so easily led toward misunderstanding. Take for instance the sense that all Muslims are terrorists that permeated the American psyche post 9-11. As we approached coastal Tanzania the demographics swung away from the Christian interior to Muslim communities skirting the coastal Indian Ocean. When we had interactions with Muslims there, we heard many times “Please tell your people that we are peace loving”. They were kind to us. I must admit that I saw one Tuk Tuk in Dar es Salaam that had an image of Osama bin Laden painted on the back. It disturbed me.

How do Tanzanian’s form their opinions and perceptions of Americans? Besides, the missionary handouts that cause people to stick their hands out for the “gift” every time they see one of us, or the ubiquitous White SUV’s that every NGO and Religious Mission drive everywhere. There is the matter of film. Bootleg DVD’s imported from China.

We were aboard a large Hydrofoil that was racing above the water from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Stone Town on the Island Zanzibar, 92 kilometers out into the Indian Ocean. The young pups in our tour were hanging on the railings outside the passenger cabin. Feeling the speed , the pounding of waves and the ocean spray, being extreme. We older folk, joined the locals in the cabin. There were 150 seats. We found ours, and sat among Muslim women with cloth bundles of market goods. They were dressed in colorful wax print wraps and the sight was pleasant and their kids well behaved.

The Televisions first aired tourist information in English and French and Italian and then a feature film came on. It was dubbed in Swahili. It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger . It was called Commando. It just happened to be filmed in 1985 at San Simeon Cove, just north of our village of Cambria, by Hearst Castle. Within minutes the film devolved into exploding buildings, shirtless American soldiers with hyper-exaggerated muscle mass, with shaved chests all greased up with olive oil, packing huge monster machine guns. The bad guys looked middle-eastern, the good guys all fair-haired lads. The bad guys were ripped apart by endless volleys of automatic rifle fire. We have lived in Cambria for 35 years. I have not once heard a gun shot.

How do people in the rest of the world form their opinions of us? You tell me! It’s just a kaleidoscope of misperception

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

A Lesson In Willfulness

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ 2 Comments

In the Time of COVID. Day 48

May 5, 2020

A Lesson in Willfulness

I picked up to-go mole chicken enchiladas this afternoon for our private little Cinco de Mayo celebration. I joined the queue of 6 or 8 and we observed physical distance protocols waiting to pick up our orders. Most everyone was wearing masks and I had a latex glove on the hand that I use at times like this. Years ago, when I broke an elbow, I learned how to function with one hand. I knew most of the people in line and we had a friendly chat about our kids. Then, a man in his 70’s walked past. No mask, no gloves, no respect for physical distance. He just brushed by us with no regard for our safety. It was an act of willfulness. That brought to mind a willful woman we came across in the Serengeti.

In 2006, April and I signed on to a three week overland safari from Nairobi, Kenya to Victoria Falls in Zambia. It was by assisted camping and was a rough go in a big truck through some of the most breathtaking sites in the world. We entered the eastern gate of the Serengeti National Park and our tents and gear were loaded atop safari jeeps for the trek into the heart of the savanna. We rough camped in the Serengeti and had two game safari trips. One at night and the other in the early morning. We saw elephants and zebras and giraffes, hippos, warthogs, hyenas, lions, baboons, buffalo, cheetahs and gazelles. It was a wonderful time.

We were told to stay in our tents at night because our camping site was not fenced. The guides slept atop their jeeps with loaded rifles to protect us. In the middle of the night, April thought she might just slip outside the tent and have a quick pee. She unzipped the flap and was confronted by two eyes catching the light of the moon. She zipped back up and nudged me “Stan, there’s is a lion out there, go look!” Is said “No way, I believe you, go to sleep”. We still laugh about that night.

In the morning we were roused for an early game safari. As I exited the tent I was confronted with perhaps the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Out past the cinderblock out-house was a herd of a hundred grazing zebras and a sprinkle of wildebeests standing in Tall grass. The black and white stripes against tall tan grasses with a massive blue morning sky was breathtaking.

We grabbed our cameras and drove out to see more wildlife. The safari guides had two-way radios and they communicated over distances to tell each other where big five game were congregated. One had found a pride of lions, females and cubs who had taken down a Hartebeest and had eaten themselves into a blood drunk stupor. The carcass had been ripped open and the the hind quarters and organs were in those lions bellies. Their faces and jaws were blood red. They lay in the shade and raised their heads, passively, toward us when we drove up. This was their land and we were just observers.

The road through the Serengeti is impassable several months of the year. In the rainy season it becomes a quagmire. When we were there, the road was dry and dusty we wore bandana masks over our faces to breath. The jeeps spread out so the dust didn’t blind the drivers. This was serious 4 wheel terrain. It was a hundred miles from tarmac or gravel road bed. The edges of the track rose two to three feet up onto the savanna. Only in certain places could we turn off onto the grassy plains.

Later that morning we loaded our gear and headed east toward the lip of the Ngorongoro Crater where we were to camp that night. Suddenly we came upon a white window van. It was broken down in the track far from any assistance. It too was headed east.

Our guides offered to hook a chain on the van and pull it up to the eastern gate. It was about 40 miles east of us at that moment. The van people adamantly refused.

The oil drain plug had come undone and all the oil leaked from the engine. The engine ceased up. The engine was shot. Why refuse the tow?

The men in the van were transporting the casket of a woman who had died in Musoma, on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. She had a good life there with her second husband and children.

It is the custom in Tanzania that when a woman dies she is to be buried near her first husband. That guy was from Arusha at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The men in the van were certain that she didn’t want to go to Arusha, that her spirit had loosened the oil drain plug to stop the van. These men had sent word back to a shaman in Musoma. The shaman would arrive in a few days and sort out the woman’s wishes. Her willfulness, at that moment, was respected.

April and I turned to each other and said “This is why we travel”

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

“I’m an American! I Know My Rights!”

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ Leave a comment

In the Time of COVID. Day 47

May 4, 2020

“I’m an American! I know My Rights!”

The ongoing divisiveness between individualism and the common good continues to roil the American population. People on both sides of the debate are suffering. One side demands a haircut now! The other is either letting house mates have a go at barbering or they are letting their freak flags fly. This brings to mind an incident and it’s ramifications that I experienced many years ago. The Oaxaca State police encircled the Zocalo in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca. They threw a dragnet.

I once had a fascinating history professor named Dan Krieger. He proclaimed that history could be taught through an examination of hair styles. He showed a slide of Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. Moe had a bowl cut. But then he showed slides of English “Round Heads”. We in the US, know them as Pilgrims. Those guys all had haircuts like Moe. They could tell each other by their haircuts. Strolling the lanes of London, they could identify each other.

In 19th Century America, women of “class” had long hair that they did up in elaborate piles on their heads. Women of the “night” had bangs cut short. Both social stations were obvious.

In 1849 California got it’s first street gang, in San Francisco. They robbed stagecoaches, did strong arm hold-ups, and they were excellent arsonists and extortionists. The people of San Francisco paid them not to burn down their homes and businesses. They took the money and burned San Francisco anyway. Those guys had distinctive hair-do’s, long greased-back hair that formed a ducks’ tale. The gang was called the Sydney Ducks. They were escaped convicts from Australia’s penal colonies. They came to California to extort or rob gold from the 49ers. Eventually the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance organized to rein them in. Many were hanged. Some made their way into the California prison system. Their hairdo became a symbol of being a badass. Zoot-Suiters went for it in the 30’s and 40’s. By the 1950’s the DA was common and those who wore them were considered “greasers” . Rock and Rollers went for it.

For young guys in the late 60’s and 70’s there were two styles. “High and tight” with a variation of “flat-top with fenders” or long hair. Both groups were easily identifiable. Guys with short hair were considered “narcs or conformists” and guys with long hair “stoners or hippies”. Ok, so what does this have to do with the Mexican police?

My pal Bill and I rolled into Oaxaca in March of 1973. The town was crawling with hippies. They came from all over the world. Oaxaca was an epicenter of psilocybin mushrooms. Carlos Castaneda had published “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”. Oaxaca had no Yaqui’s or peyote but they did have magic mushrooms. There were some very stoned young people in Oaxaca and many were trying to buy mushrooms in quantity to smuggle home.

Bill and I skirted that scene. We rented a cheap room in a Mercado hotel and we tried to find out what lay to the south, in the mountains. Our hair was long but we weren’t hanging in the Zocalo.

Around the Zocalo were several outdoor cafe’s where people could watch the show, the strolling lovers, the street vendors, the families with their kids. There were always musicians, especially in the evening on the bandstand.

One evening we were having a cheap dinner of eggs, beans and tortillas in a cafe when a rumor circulated through the tables. A large convoy of Airstream Trailers would be arriving in a couple of days. We really didn’t think much about it other than, no way , they couldn’t pull those things clear down here.

The next afternoon Bill and I were on the roof of a Zocalo Hotel. We were drinking and gambling with a group of willing sports. It was a dice game called “Ship-Captain-Crew” which was quite popular in the dive bars on Seattle’s skid row.

Suddenly we heard sirens and screaming coming from the Zocalo. We peered over the edge. A dozen blue state police vans swung in around the square blocking all exists. Several dozen cops poured out the backs. They had night sticks and hand cuffs. They herded all the hippies into a circle. One by one they pulled a gal or guy out of the herd and roughly patted them down. They made sport of this with the women. They checked their passports and visas. Those not carrying them were hustled into a van and the door slammed on them. Anyone holding dope was hustled into a different van. I remember a young woman screaming “I’m an American! I know my Rights!” The cops laughed and slammed her up against the van door before opening it. She wailed from the inside.

ALL the hippies were rousted out of that park. Those with drugs were sent off to the state penitentiary. Those without proper papers on them were loaded into a locked passenger train-car and taken north to the US Border were parents and lawyers could pay the transportation cost and buy their kids freedom.

Bill and I scurried down the back steps and ran away from the Zocalo. We ducked into the first barber shop we found and asked for local hairdo’s. Kids stood around the open door of that peluqueria and laughed as they saw two hippies transformed into locals.

We started making plans to move on, to head south. The next night we went back to the cafe scene. Now, there were middle aged Americans taking up the tables. They weren’t ordering cheap stuff. It was steak and fish and brandy. There wasn’t a hippie in sight. We left in the morning.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

The Very Last Drop of Water

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ 4 Comments

In the Time of COVID. Day 46

May 3, 2020

The Very Last Drop of Water

Small crowds of protestors are marching in the streets demanding the freedom to do what they want. They ignore physical distancing directives and go in public without masks. It remains to be seen if their disregard for the health of others will cause an exponential uptick in COVID cases. The math of the spread points toward uptick. What is at stake is a battle between individual freedoms and the common good. This brings to mind an event that happened when I helped fight the Sundance / Trapper Peak forest fire in the North Idaho/ British Columbia border mountains many years ago.

It was one of those all hands on deck events. On September first, 1967, lightening ignited a thick stand of timber on Sundance Mountain in Bonner County Idaho. Fast moving winds spread the fire at 60 miles an hour. The dense northern forest of fir, pine and spruce erupted in one of the most horrible fires in American History.

A call went out for volunteers, the pay was decent and we young guys came from hundreds of miles around. I found myself in a camp with 2000 other people. There were cook tents and hastily constructed tables and benches. Back hoes dug long latrine pits and log frames were placed over them so a guy could do his business hanging is rear over a log. There was no privacy. We were issued paper sleeping bags and assigned to crews. The crew chiefs were experienced loggers, a hard nosed lot of guys. They directed us where to drop our gear. We were issued hard hats, gloves, canteens, bandanas, shovels or Pulaski’s . A Pulaski is a combined axe/hoe named after a crew of firefighters in Montana that had lost their lives many years before.

We were directed to eat up and we queued for food. While we waited, several Huey helicopters landed in the clearing of the camp. Dozens of semi trailers pulling D9 bulldozers arrived. Deuce and a half army trucks pulled in. That was the beginning of staging a war against the fire.

There was a hierarchy amongst firefighters and hushed awe when Navajo, Zuni and Hopi Hotshot crews, piled out of the helicopters. These guys were the best of the best. The food line moved back and let them go first. When ever they came into camp, they went first. There camp was the best, their transportation the most excellent available.

We ate and turned in. Up at four am another line for huge breakfasts, issued c-ration lunches, grabbed our tools and off we went.

Our first day on the fire line was learning to work together cutting fire breaks. we were a team of 25 and were hauled up to the fire in back of those army trucks. Sawyer teams with chainsaws had gone before us , dropping timber to make fire breaks. Each sawyer had a guy lugging fuel cans and extra chains and tools.

Our job was to be a line of human ants. We were spaced Pulaski, shovel, Pulaski, shovel and as a team we chewed the earth and pitched it back, this was every bit as hard labor as a chain gang road crew, but without the shot gun. But, Joe Houston The Crew chief would knock your ass flat if you didn’t keep up. We went on like that for 14 hours before we were loaded back in a truck and dropped at base camp.

We soft kids turned hard in the next few days. It didn’t matter how much we ate, we were always hungry. We gorged ourselves and lost any semblance of baby fat. Blisters became callouses. Airplanes dropping red fire retardant roared low over head and dumped their loads in erupting crimson clouds. We babied the water in our canteens. It had to last.

One night we were on an dusk until dawn assignment. We were high up in the mountains and in a wide fire track. Bulldozers had ripped a 50 yard wide fire trail that went on in the distance. That earth was powdery dirt. We walked in it half way up to our knees. It got cold up there at night and we had a small slag fire in the middle of the track to warm by. Our job was to be vigilant. If any sparks ignited the wood piles along the track we were to put it out. I remember the sky being a brilliant show of the Milky Way.

About 3 AM it was like a bomb went off. An unbelievable roar rose up and fire came crowning in the timber tops toward us at 40 miles an hour. If it crowned over us it would burn up all the oxygen beneath it. We could all be killed. Joe had told us what to do if this happened. I doused my banana with water and covered by face and dove into the dirt. Fire sped over us about 50 feet high and leaped the fire break. I breathed what oxygen was between the dirt particles through my wet bandana. Joe yelled an all clear. I stood up and my pant legs were on fire. The back of my head was singed, but I lived to tell the tale.

During the Sundance / Trapper Peak forest fire, 2 bulldozer operators were killed by crowning fires.

Some days later we were loaded in a helicopter and dropped at the top of a ridge. Sawyers had made a clearing and retardant had turned the mountain top red as a tomato. Our job that day was to cut a five mile fire trail to the bottom of the ridge where an army truck would load us up for base camp. Off in the distance a cloud of smoke and fire and ash rose thousands of feet into the air forming a mushroom cloud that flashed with light. Retardant planes circled its base trying to damp it down.

That day was a rough go. We were exhausted but we pressed on. We were doing mop up along the way. Digging burning roots and earth and stamping the fire out. About 3 pm we were all out of water. Every canteen was bone dry.

We were about an hour from our ride back when up came a Navajo Hotshot crew. They were fresh or seemed like to us. They saw how whipped out we were and offered over their canteens. We each of us took a swallow and handed it back. All that is except a guy named Scooter. He was was a Neanderthal kind of a backwoods Montana guy who was already half toothless in his early 20’s. He took the offered canteen and drained it to the very last drop.

We all saw what happened and were ashamed. Joe Houston saw it too. He walked up to Scooter and slugged him straight in the face. He knocked that punk out cold. The Navajos said nothing. We said thank you to them. When Scooter came too, he was whining like a weasel and blood was everywhere. Even the friend he’s paled with wouldn’t say a word to him. When we got back to camp, Joe bumped him out of the food line and loaded him on the first truck out of there.

That lesson has stayed with me for 53 years. Especially in difficult times we must act in the common good.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Coming Changes to My Blog

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ 11 Comments

In the Time of COVID. Day 45

May 2, 2020

Coming Changes to My Blog

Friends, in the next day or so I am going to limit sending my postings to the my blog itself, plus facebook. I don’t want to bomb everyone with email chains about my writing and the blog site has a feature for subscribing so if you choose to subscribe you will be notified when I post another piece.

I’ve been writing for 45 straight nights. So far Ive only posted 25 of the most recent. In coming days I will edit the first twenty and post them along with new yarns. They won’t be in chronological order but that doesn’t really matter.

This whole process has been wonderful because I’ve been able to wander back into my past and remember remarkable and unusual people I have met along the way. Unique encounters help shape who we are and they give perspective to what we are currently experiencing. If I have bugged you with to much email I am truly sorry. (Btw) No one complained. I just sense I’ve been compulsive.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

A Very Peculiar Greeting

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ Leave a comment

In the Time of COVID. Day 44

May 1, 2020

A Very Peculiar Greeting

Recently we’ve lost the ease of polite greeting. There is so much that goes into a good hello. Face muscles slightly turn a cheek into a dimple and one side of the mouth turns upward in a polite smile. Eyes contract slightly with a twinkle of recognition. We stand upward and lean toward the other person and extend our hand with friendly intent.

Now, our masks shroud those muscles, and caution causes us to step back, making the 6 foot distance obvious. Latex gloves preclude a good hand shake. This breaks the tradition of greeting and we haven’t found a replacement for what humans have been doing since the dawn of time.

Men in this country don’t get too touchy-feely in the best of circumstances save a punch in the arm or a chest bump now and then. Now, it’s just awkward , maybe bump elbows but it’s like ‘oh ya, that’s what we do now, huh huh huh”

I have a friend from the Lebanon. In the before time, it was a big hug and a kiss on both cheeks every time. That took me some getting used to. I lived in Mexico for a time and believe me, the abrazo, the big sustained bear hug is as common as breathing among men. But now the physical distancing is more awkward than the hugs were to me at first.

In my twenties I traveled a lot in remote Mexico and on Saturday nights, in the town squares back then, the single girls walked, with arms around each other, clockwise around the square. The unattached boys held hands as they walked counter-clockwise, checking out the girls. All of this under the watchful eyes of parents, and grandparents who sat on the park benches. This was a tradition hundreds of years old at least. Now, boys holding hands was another thing that took me some getting used to but it was just a cultural difference. Of course now, LGBTQ realities and outness have caused us all to re-examine our conditioned reactions. Times change.

But, I want to tell you about a very peculiar greeting that occurred by happenstance. The year was 1999. The place was the Philippines. Our daughter Christy was in the Peace Corps for a couple of years and we flew with our son Myles, into Manila to spend 6 weeks seeing what was what. The four of us did a bunch of traveling around to some southern islands and stayed around metro Manila for a week or so but then we flew north. The Batanes Islands are the furthest northern island group in the Philippine archipelago. That’s were Christy’s Peace Corps project was located. First stop was overnight in Tuguegarao, in north eastern Luzon Island.

I’ve got to tell you by Philippine standards I am a BIG guy, both by height and weight. I was like King Kong to them or something. Well, anyway we were transported by Tuk-Tuk to a hotel not far from the airport. When I say airport, don’t get you hopes up. It was a roof and some partitions and a ticket kiosk. Next day was a flight to Basco Batanes. We bought tickets and had a good wait. I mean a good wait.

They didn’t figure they had enough passengers to fly up north the next day so they said maybe tomorrow. Folks, out there in the real world, that’s common. Maybe tomorrow, there’s a lot of that.

So we said, “What if we pay more for petrol? How much more do you need?” See, the shake down is just as common as “maybe tomorrow”. They settled on a price, not so much as we couldn’t swing it. Well, they decided to have a little fun with me.

On the loading floor there was one of those freight scales with a big old Big Ben face. They put me on that scale and that arm starts to swinging and those guys go to acting like they never seen anything that huge and heavy before. We all had a big laugh.

That airplane was maybe a 12 passenger a best. It had duel engines under the wings, and storage at the tail that was netted into the cabin. Those guys rolled out a big old fuel tank on four wheels and they started fueling the plane. I have never seen anything like what they did that day. One guy climbed up on the wing and got the plane to rocking so the fuel went into both wings. Then he took out a chamois skin and placed it in a funnel. The guys down below handed up buckets of fuel that got poured into the funnel. That went on for 45 minutes.

There was a big discussion about weight placement and they put me in the front seat right behind the co-pilot. The flight deck was just a slightly raised platform. We were all in this together. Well, up we went and it seemed like 15 minutes we made a coiled climb too altitude and the plane banked to the north west and off we were across the Babuyan Channel over an endless dotting of volcanic islands.

We were having a great time looking out the windows in that remote area when suddenly the copilot grabbed my big toe. He had reached around his bucket seat grabbing for a map packet and got my toe instead. I don’t know who was more startled , him or me, but we had a big laugh about it, everyone on the plane got to giggling.

When were landing at the Batanes airport the plane dipped low over the ocean and nosed up on the landing strip which was uphill on the side of Mt. Iraya, a volcano. We are always relieved when we land safely.

We rented rooms at Mama Nina’s Guest House in Basco and a few evenings later, we were sitting on our veranda looking out toward the town square. Along came the co-pilot with another flier. Well, he recognized me and we said hello. He leaned into his buddy and told him about the toe incident. I lifted my foot and the buddy came over and shook my toe. Big laughs again. The Filipinos are happy people.

Weeks later we were down in Loag catching a connecting flight to Manila. That plane was maybe a 40 seater, like a DC 3. The windows were all scratched and foggy and the seats had seen better days. The barf bags said “U-Land Flight Services” I thought “ Oh hell no, you guys land, I’m along for the ride.” I still have that barf bag in a drawer.

Up we went and we were flying along and suddenly over the intercom came “Will Mr. Cooper please come forward to the flight deck?” That got me all right, but, up I went. I opened the door and there in the pilot seat was my friend the toe shaker. He’s gets to laughing and telling his co-pilot about meeting me and so, in polite greeting I lifted my foot and the co-pilot shook my toe. Now, isn’t that a very peculiar greeting?

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Ode to Idaho Red

~ folktraveler405aa618e7 ~ 2 Comments

In the Time of COVID. Day 43

April 30, 2020

Ode to “Idaho Red”

Staying home like this just naturally gets me to thinking. I’m an adventure man, myself, and when I can’t have one of those, why I just run off into my memories because I’ve have plenty. I was just thinking of old stuff from when I was a kid. There was lots of leavings. Old wood, old cars, old fruit trees from old houses and yards. Old falling down sheds full of fascinating what not. My neighborhood was built in the 1907 building boom. There were some strange old timey plants along the alleys and I loved those alleys.

Unlike today, kids use to just wander off. Folks thought nothing of it. I loved to wander off of a summer day. Wouldn’t need a lunch, lots of fruit hanging from the trees. Old timey apples and apricots and peaches and berries, volunteer tomatoes, wild asparagus tastes good, and the bite of rhubarb and pucker of choke cherries. Stuff was just growing, ripe for the picking. I’d fill my pockets and find me a perch. I’d look off at the world and set to wondering.

There was a high bank I especially favored. It was atop an underground reservoir and had a big play field on it. Kids used to fly kites from it and play fly up baseball on it. I’d dangle my legs over the edge and look down on a grocery store and an abandoned gas station and at Edith Lauer’s amazing building project.

My dad had a goofy name for everybody. He called Edith “Red” on account of her red hair, and he called her “Idaho” on account of she was way out their somewheres. Well, the state of Idaho was only 36 miles away but folks would say “Why go way over there, when we got all this, right here?”.

Idaho Red was a man woman. She did stuff men do. She built a house that must a took 7 years. She and her boyfriend Leroy would come a driven up in her old Hudson. She’d must a welded a lumber rack on that old boat, come to think of it. They’d pitch down a bunch of found wood, like they’ed tore down some old shed cause it was free stuff. Just pile it in the yard. Lots of piles in that yard. Now, I don’t know if Red started from scratch. To think of it, that wasn’t her way. Mighta just started building on a stout shed and up sprouted a two story house. Nothing fancy, heck, she didn’t even cut the weeds. That place was ah-naturale.

I can still see her up on the roof beams. Stripped to the waist , but for an industrial, ready for World War III, bra. Big old butt pointed skyward and driving nails like a man. She’d yell down to Leroy for a cut. She’d give the dimensions and he’d wander off into the piles. Best not wasting half boards, find the right length. Leroy was good at cutting but he was no show up high. I remember he favored red stripped pants and big suspenders. In summer he wore that wife-beater undershirt, but he was a pink guy. Had blond hair like that Boris Johnson over there in England. I never saw him work a hammer. He was more of a “got get that Leroy” sort of a sandwich and Kool-Aid man. Ya Idaho Red was a man woman and she had things to her liking.

I remember my sis, Janette , saying at the dinner table how that Idaho Red aught not to be going around in her bra, wasn’t decent. My mom said, “You going to go down there and tell her that?” We all had a big laugh. No one in that neighborhood gave Red any sass.

That’s how I learned women can do anything they want, especially if folks are afraid of them, Now it was always a big time watching those two love birds build their dream house.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.