Prince Rupert . 3 : Director's Cut

Ok this is the third version after I made a couple of adjustments you might not even really notice. Going over and over the material from my trip is making me very very sad in this cold Autumn/Winter as the leaves are beaten down from their lonely trees by the cold rain and wind and lie helpless in gutters all over town. Such a long time ago I had nothing more than a snack and the window on my mind, and somebody else had to drive, and I could go anywhere I wanted and nobody knew where.

I'm no genius with this video stuff sometimes I think it is just the opposite I never know what about the thing I am looking at makes me feel what I feel when I am looking at it, no eye for the visual image, yet a sunset or a branch or a ripple on the water can make me cry. So I took what little I had and put it together in an easiest way and remembered sad music for the moving pictures and now this thing made me cry and I wish I was back on the road. Maybe some day I will be...

Looking For Somebody with Bobby Lindstrom at the Tonic Lounge

This here is shit nobody remembers but the fools, and Bobby Lindstrom is a guitar-playing fool. Looking For Somebody, off the very first Fleetwood Mac album,  by Peter Green. Actually the album is named Fleetwood Mac, but this tune is a guitar masterpiece, and totally Peter Green, with the delicate-to-ripping  progression of techniques. And our dear sweet Bobby Lindstrom does it, in my view, even better. This was the second song of the first set that night at the Tonic Lounge, there wasn't nobody there but me and the drummers dad and his girlfriend and the guy behind the PA from the house staff. 

That's the real shit, right there, when the guitar player digs deep and plays his heart out for nobody, just to play, and play heavy and play light and right when nobody knows. That's why Bobby is the undiscovered genius that he is. Its the heart, man, the heart.

Upload Successful Blue Highway Fragments of Chaos

My Mom

This is my Mom. She is not sad. I am sad.And hopefully you will be sad too. My movie won't upload. I don't know why. Maybe I can get it to go to YouTube and get it from there. But not now. I am going out to the boat now. When I get back. I love you Mom. I didn't tell her about my blog. There's too much cussing.

Cold Tater

 

This tree is way in the back of the Miami Greyhound Bus parking lot. I think its on acid. No idea what it actually is, but I almost missed the bus because I couldn’t tear myself away from staring at it and trying to figure out what I was looking at. Baobab?

I’m going back into my photos for stuff I should have posted at the time but this was on my phone and I didn’t figure out how to download en masse until well after I got back to Portland. To keep us all happy while I figure out the video.

This flower was the thing that made me start thinking seriously about the tropics. Just casually growing on the parking strip behind the fence between the bus depot and 18 th street, a gravel road through the down-at-the-heels industrial neighborhood where the bus station is. What I dug about it is that the tree and the flowers are just in the back yard in kind of a throwaway spot and they are bloody gorgeous and exotic as hell and this is the shit they throw away. Like the old John X song about the man who lost his stash in the trash. He hears a knock on the door and it’s the garbage man, who hems and haws and finally says “Look, man, I found your weed in the trash, man, and I smoked it, man, and if that’s the shit you throw away, man, can I try some of the shit that you keep?”

Coming Attractions

MOVIE

This might be another in a long series of big mistakes resulting from expectations raised and promises made and never fulfilled however I want to build up a little excitement around here. I'm working on a movie of my Trip.. Yes I am, more accurately, splicing together all the lame-ass little snippets of video I made in different random settings and dealing with the incredibly even more lame-ass narrations trying to make  it all fit together.
In the process of finding a photo for this post I found a bunch more from the Cabnabda run so there will even be a sequel...

Head Shot

This guy , sitting in front of me from Bellingham to Seattle, had the fattest head I have ever seen. I kept trying to take a picture of it without him getting wise to what I was doing and so I never did really capture the sheer bulge protrusion of the way it  marshmallowed out from the the little adjustment portal in the back.

And he was with a babe, an attractive and yet somehow goofy looking brunette, and, to make it worse, they were in love. They chattered like magpies on meth all the way every minute, eventually leaving the Seattle bus depot hand in hand out the back door. Go figure

PCBs

This here is the center of my life these days. Well, not these exact days, but this past three years have been all about this sailboat the FelicityJane seen here at anchor in Willamette Cove with the St Johns Bridge in the background. There wasn’t much sun all summer so this cloudy evening was distressingly typical.

This particular evening I had the dinghy in the water and I was rowing around taking pictures of shit and looking for cool stuff washed up on the rocks along the shore. The only beach around there, as beaches go, is the very inner edge of the cove. Everything else is riprap or these weird puzzle blocks. But cool shit still washes up so I can still go beachcoming, which is pretty much my secret mania. Behind me you can’t see the railroad bridge, and beyond that towards town the beach was so contaminated with PCBs and heavy metals from the shipyards that used to line the river here so they paved it.

That’s right, paved it with articulated concrete blocks, interlocking  tessellated three by two blocks interwoven to keep the contaminated sand in place. It works for that, but it plays hell on your dinghy’s bottom paint when you run her up on the edge to salvage something or just to take a leak and look around. All I found that night worth picking up were a couple of foam blocks, rigid foam bread loaf sized and shaped pieces of rigid polyurethane foam, which I kept one to make an external float/fender for the bow of the dinghy. I figure the more built-in flotation you have the better to a point, and I don’t at all follow the blow-up-boat fad the inflatable thing yachtsmen these days have to have to look cool to themselves. Sheep.

But I had a nice night on the hook. Next day I ran into the lady from the Metro agency that deals with Willamette Cove and is trying to get it in shape in its transition from filthy Superfund Site to public park. Its about a 100 million dollar difference. Metro was given the cove for a dollar by the old owners who tore down the buildings that used to house a creosote plant in the cove. Apparently I had anchored in the most contaminated spot in the cove. She urged me to not eat the local fish, and to swim as little as possible, and to please please not careen my boat on the beach to scrape the bottom and wash off the growth with buckets of sand and a push broom like Larry Pardey does in all those Serrafyn books. Actually, I was planning to do just exactly that when she and her pal Ranger Rick cam walking up looking tense. I probably won’t, she made a convincing case, but I don’t think taking pictures of the sunset will be a problem.

Even if there isn't much of a sunset.

Bus Window

It wasn't all such a disaster. Coming into LA I happened to see this and for once I had my camera in my actual hand. I think it is Los Angeles City Hall.

Gangs Of New York

This biker gang came swarming up alongside us at a stop light at 87th and 5th Avenue in New York. We were running down fifth toward the Port Authority bus depot at Times Square. I don't know who they were, I think they had name tags on their jackets and it got me thinking about how I was only notionally in New York and what it means to actually be someplace. Sure, geographically at that moment I was in New York but we didn't stop, not above ground anyway. That afternoon I got on another bus and we went through the tunnel to New Jersey and down the pike to Washington DC. 

I once flew from Medford Oregon to Portland via Seattle, which sounds incredibly stupid but it is the same phenomenon. I wanted to stay in Ashland until the last possible moment that Sunday, and the departure time for the flight I booked was 7:30 pm, which gave me an extra 4 hours, and I didn't notice that the flight was nonstop to Seattle. Then a half hour layover, then to Portland. Stupid, but a lot like my bus trip. It was close to 9 pm when we flew over Portland at about 30,000 feet. From that height you didn't see a big city at all, what you saw were a few scattered  lights as if from a small desert town. It really made me think about the nature of the experience of being in a place is really more about how you interact with it. I was no more "in" New York this day on the bus than I had been "in" Portland that night at 30,000 feet.                                                                                              

Unconscious Impressionism

To start with these pictures make me very angry they are perfectly focused on the mud splashes on the window. I can't get the damn macro to focus on a flower when I want it to, and why it would think I want to take a picture of the mud on the window is beyond me, the level of irony that puts me into kill mode. All that aside here's what it makes me think about.

Unconscious Impressionism.

Mostly on the bus you are watching out the window as the world goes hauling ass by. Safe. Removed from consequences. Nothing can happen to you there. You inhabit that particular space only for the fleeting moment and time pulls you onwards. If something is ugly it can't hurt you. If something is nice it can't help you. You are already gone. I tried to take pictures through the side windows and this is what I got in California near Los Banos after we left I-5 heading for Salinas. These were cotton fields I think. Or cane sugar. There was both and you can't tell from the photo which brings me to my point. This here is pure impressionism.
Mass of soft color shapes. And the filth from road-rain-dirt caked on the plexiglass.

 Farther on into the Salinas Valley the landscape became more intimate, perspective of fields and groves of trees and crops rendered in the soft mass of color shapes yet it gives you the impression of peace and plenty.

I keep thinking I could get this same composition with oils even though I know eff-all about it. I fully intend to get into it at some point., when I can put some time into it. Think about it  and think and look some more. I think I could get some of this.
But from a bus window hauling ass into the California evening this is all I got.

Rocky Mountain Video

Turns out you can put video in here. Who knew? 

Between Salt Lake City and Denver you go over the Rocky Mountains. Is all. How you do that is the question. I had been redirected to a bus that wasn't on my schedule that traveled over state highways, two-lane jobs through the very NorthEast corner of Utah past Park City and many other small towns some of which were desert style and some of which were ski-towns in the mountains. A woman named Bert drove and I still wonder about her, a truly weird chick whose duckface poses and weird body language and self-obsessed manner put me off at the time but she kept the thing on the road and made her stops plus extras to smoke and probably didn't have a destructive bone in her body and you can leave the pun alone thank you.
 I liked not being on the interstate, and as many stops as we made not very many people got on or off, so those of us that began at Salt Lake got to know each other and the thing turned into a community before too long. Really the only time in my 10k plus miles that happened.

Side Trip To The Beats

I have an advantage that is fairly recent. I wrote and published, such as it is, within hours, sometimes within minutes, of the events I wrote about. And it was all event reporting, even if the event in question is an intangible insight. Otherwise what is there to write about? So I captured my events immediately. Jack and Neal waited and percolated and shifted lenses and added lenses before they wrote spending a good deal of energy recapturing the to me distant past during the process of composing. Jack’s contribution to world literature being the rigorous stream of consciousness, and rigorous it was, which recreated the sense of the event actually long after it in time, but somehow traveling back to within the event spiritually and that was a heavy discipline indeed. I don’t have the chops. And I never will, so that cannot be what I am doing here. I understand that.

I do have photos, which is what I have learned to call my pictures, and a tiny bit of video. Now the question is how this stuff captured in the exact moment of its occurring relates to the spiritual stream captured so truly by those guys with their rigorous discipline?

Alcohol killed Jack Kerouac. Bloody and dead. In my view it killed his life long before it killed his body. Then I have to wonder what good are exact spiritual portrayals of a spiritual suicide destruction, exact pictures of a bloody disaster?

Crank  killed Cassady. No doubt about it. Neal’s gift was a trick he had of giving you the exact internal stream, expressing in the moment. I’m no expert, I’m uneducated but I have read these guys and talked to their friends and I, so to speak, read books. I’m sorry but Neal Cassady, as thrilling as he was, was a talking horse.

Crank will kill me. I haven’t touched it in eleven years and I am likely to never touch it again, but in the end it will be the long term effects of methamphetamine abuse that puts me under the ground. Probably liver cancer or liver failure when the cirrhosis turns what’s left of my liver tissue into rotten oak. Hepatitis C. It might be pathetic but it won’t be bloody or sudden when it happens. I will doubtless have plenty of time for regret.

This isn’t what I started out to say , but it might be worth saying anyway. If you go on the road and you write about it you have to deal with these guys somehow.

I give you some near-time reporting and a few pictures and you can work out the spiritual experience for yourself.

Sarvice Berries

Apparently this is a sarvice berry, or more properly, berries. They are everywhere. I finally looked it up. Or as one says now, I googled it. Then I wikipediaed it. My pal Rivers didn't believe Wikipedia could be a reliable authority. Like a lot of guys his age he's afraid of anarchy.
If you have been following this rant/blog you will recall that I made me some pemmican for my travois trip on the Greyhound, and that I said I used golden raisins in the place of these things, Sarvice, or Service, berries, which is what the pioneers always were said to use as  the sweet starch filler in pemmican. Smoked dried buffalo meat, dried sarvice berries, and congealed fat or suet. Yummy. So much for orthodoxy.
And it turns out that is not just an okie mispronunciation of the word service. Sarvice is listed as one alternative name along with Saskatoon. All this variation stems from the fact that these things are all over the place, North America, Europe, in more than twenty different species. The taste is described as ranging from delectable to insipid,  Blueberries to Crabapples are comparisons I read about. Many of the varieties are cultivated by landscapers for their abundant foliage, compact shape and the contrasting color of the blossoms in the spring and then the clusters of berries in the fall.
I took this photo in early November just last week with my phone across the street from my apartment in NW Portland. I tried one of the berries. They had it right, it was, in fact, insipid

Ex-Husband

Ish is my ex-husband I visited in New Orleans. I hasdn’t seen her in thirty years more or less, but that didn’t seem to make too much difference. We got along like a house on fire, we always did.

When Facebook says “its complicated” they don’t even know. Ish and me were actually married for a couple years back in the 70s. It was a political thing and a friendship thing and I would do it again only now it would be illegal in most places. See, me and K Isheim we don’t do that gender bullshit, we got our own system.

Back when I was an angry young man I was extremely alienated from the American culture. I’ve grown to accept it but back then it could take a flying fuck and I would have been happier. Ish was in the US Army, fully functional, but as a practicing Lesbian she operated under severe constraints. That was where I came in. We got married to take the heat off her a little bit and so she could live off post with her girlfriend. Me, I dug the dependant's allowance Ish sent me every month. We never had a harsh word.

Then I got serious about a girl and me and Ish filed the paperwork for divorce and we gradually lost touch over the ensuing years while we both had careers, lived lives, and had our heartaches and triumph separately.

Now I’m a chick which means most states wouldn’t let us remarry, that is, if we wanted, which we don’t, me not being Ish’s particular type, which is kind of the blond surfer look. Ish gets around. She has pulled some major babes in her time. Me, I’m happy to be out of the mix. And the more I adjust to actually being a woman the  more interesting men have become.

The New Is Better Than The Old

Five years after all the shit that hit the fan in New Orleans was over this is what the bus depot looks like. Ish drove me around the city and we found some abandoned properties in the lower 9th ward. Not very many of them to be sure, and I felt like a vulture scouring the place for  fucked up shit. I have to be honest, those poor bastards did a hell of a job fixing shit up. You wouldn't hardly know what happened if you didn't know what happened. Its just not quite as densely populated as I remember it from the one time in early 69 that I drove through there with Rick DuPuis right after he got back from Viet Nam.

This place is unlike the rest of the town, it is neat as a pin, polished, shiny, crispy looking. Ish's house is also like that but very little else is.

Matriarch

This portrait hangs above the davenport sofa in Jane Coffee's delightfully collected apartment in Hartford Connecticut. At first I thought it was from the 70s television show "Dallas" depicting JR and Bobby's mother Ellie. I think that was her name, but no it is not her, but Jane's actual grandmother, Rusty,  whom I was later to meet in Cashiers NC.
In a way my first guess was not so far off. Rusty was, and still is, something of a looker, glamorous to the extreme even still today. She was 'discovered' in Dallas in the late 50s and made an exotic career as a fashion model, becoming as it were the face of the fashionably rich Texans of the sixties of Dallas, and that is very much of a richness indeed. Her portfolio is filled with beautiful photographs and snapshots taken wearing the highest of high fashion posing with the rarest of rare celebrities in the most colorful and exclusive of the world's glamor capitals. I don't remember specifically if there is a shot of her with  Shah Rezha Pahlavi of Iran or with Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco but I will wager real money that there is either if not both.
I was terrified when I got to Cashiers and I learned that I was scheduled to meet Jane's grandmother, this formidable woman whose austere beauty made such an impression. I could not bring myself even mentally to call her Rusty, and I was racking my brain to remember as much as possible of the Emily Post which I actually read as a teenager in preparation for just such moments. Lo and behold she was a warm and engaging and charming woman, and she too collects  things, chinoiserie to be more specific and she was delighted that I knew the term and used it correctly in a sentence. I couldn't have done it again, but I will take a gift horse so to speak, and smiled and made a note to myself to shut the eff up while I was ahead.
Coincidentally a surprise party in Rusty's honor had been in the planning for months before Rosemary's tragic ending and it served a useful purpose in taking Jane's mind off the casual brutality of the cat's demise. That is a very good thing about family ritual, to distract us when it seems nothing will, and also the beauty of the matriarchy, to give us strength through the generations.

Murder

 Jane's wonderful wise curmudgeon of an old fluffy cat Rosemary took an unprecedented liking to me and nobody knows why. She wouldn't give most people besides Jane the time of day. I was sensible of a great honor.

Rosemary slept with me at the foot of this ancient austere bed in Jane's guestroom. The surprisingly comfortable mattress is a ten inch slab o' foam, the head and foot board look like a puritan version of a Spartan version of the Parthenon. 

Three days after I left Rosemary was brutally murdered by the neighbor's pit bull. Jane was devastated. I felt like I had lost a friend. Fortunately Jane was scheduled to go to Cashiers North Carolina the next day

To her mother's place for a family get-together. Jane's Mom Sally is pretty wise herself, and kind and warm and If I had lost a friend like that I wish I could be sure I would have somebody to comfort me as wise and warm as Sally, posing here at the door to the guestroom of her antique-filled home on a hillside in Cashiers.

Key West With a Really Good Guide.

 On Big Pine Key, I think, halfway between Key Largo and Key West the hipper tourists stop to feed the Tarpons. Amazing. For 5 bucks you get a dozen mullets in a little bucket, and when you toss one off the dock all hell breaks loose. They are huge, and there are dozens that hang around waiting for the out-of-towners and free lunch. I tossed and snapped blind and this is the picture, they are gone just as quick. I'm not kidding. Huge. The little ones are 3 feet long, the bigger ones are bigger than me. Don't fall in.

 Nan Kitchens, the Really Good Guide in question at the Fisheries restaurant on Marathon Key where we had lunch. Fish, of course. Not only is Nan gorgeous, she is a brilliant and productive artist working in a fascinating medium of giant clay work installations in public spaces plus she has a beautiful daughter and she is a gracious host. And she drives a convertible.

Guess where? Nan knew all the tourist type spots, took me to swim at the one little public beach in Key West and then drove us to the sunset celebration. Unfortunately there was a bit of overcast so there wasn't really a sunset to celebrate, but that didn't stop the locals. We did the Duvall Crawl down the main drag with the top down and I felt distinctly superior to each and every tourist I saw. Then at ten o'clock amidst a warm tropical downpour with thunder and lightening complete, Nan and Nikki did a tenderloin BBQ for the three of us. The tropical warmth and humidity and foliage everywhere made me think of Thailand.

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Hartford next door to Mark Twain

Jane took us on a tour, first  to Mark Twain's house where we walked all around and took pictures it is a great place and a crazy cool house made of different colored bricks with fancy High Victorian gingerbread everywhere.

 Then we went downtown to look at the old graveyard with headstones from the 1600s...and took pictures of our reflections in a gold colored office building we found nearby. After that we went to the Connecticut River.

In Mark Twain’s time at Hartford Harriet Beecher Stowe was the crazy lady who lived next door. Alzheimer’s. She would wander in and out of her neighbor’s houses not knowing what year it was or where. Despite the anti-slavery rhetoric, her 1845 book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”’s racial sterotypes drove another century’s worth of racism. Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”, more realistically honest in its portrayal of race relations, is practically unreadable now because of the use of  the "N" word. I tried to read it aloud to my kid and I couldn't do it, as brutally cold and habitually out of line as I am. But I still love the book. Jim is an honorable character, so is Huck. Uncle Tom, however is an insult to the reader. IMHO. 
The irony of this sculpture goes on and on.

This statue is displayed on Hartford's RiverWalk, a promenade in the downtown area overlooking the recently flooded Connecticut River, which was still brown and angry looking when Jane and I were there. 

Jane takes pictures that somehow make me look beautiful, I don't know how. Check the dimple on my little chin. I don't really have one, but I do think it makes me very attractive and feminine. Good for my self esteem

There is a way...

If I can remember how I did it I got this photo directly from my pictures stash without going through the Google bullshit. New Orleans of course down in the Kwatuh having Beignets and Cafe Au Lait at Du Monde while these guys blew it was 11 am and starting to sweat.

Photos Are Hard to Post

This is the desolate Skeena River Valley in the bleakness of October taken from the speeding (also rattling, grinding and howling)Greyhound coach on my way to Prince Rupert. What's up with the Prince names for all the towns? It sounds gay.  And I can say being the T in LGBT. I was glad the bus didn't stop here, it was miserable out, cold, and mile after mile of little stunted evergreens and birch trees losing their shit. There was snow on the hills all around and within a few weeks this will be really fucked up and dangerously hostile.

 This is some kind of convention center in Prince Rupert on the bluff overlooking some sound or other where the ships anchor up. This is the longhouse first nations style architecture. That's what they call Indians up here. Cool by me. Actually there was a Prince Rupert. Nephew of the King Charles that got deposed and executed but they didn't blame Rupert, who was the best of the losing Royalist generals, for some reason. Matter of fact when they brought the Kings back in England he showed up again and they made him an Admiral. A successful Admiral, I might add. Practically the only one they had. Quite a character. Rupert.A dweeb name nowadays.

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This is for the photo below I screwed up the layout and I can't get into the little narrow space below the picture, which is the totem pole just casually inserted next to the NAPA store in Cow Bay in Prince Rupert. I don't know what this totem pole signifies, maybe its like a Kyle Petty endorsement type gimmick, the Crow God runs on NAPA parts or something. Anyway its cool to have public art that's not formally sponsored by a government or an institution, this shop owner is probably just a first nations native, there's a million of them around, every other person you see is native, Indian as we say, American culture is ethnocentric to a disturbing degree, the language itself almost precludes inclusivity. The totem pole is old, and starting to rot on the shaded side. I took all these pictures with my cell phone. 

This is the fourth time I've made a caption for this dumb-ass picture. If you do all your shit in Google fine but its a pain in the ass to get a picture in here if you don't. I kind of hate Google but it's like hating God. It looks bad to the neighbors when you talk about it and it doesn't do any good. Anyway this is the dumb-ass Community Center in Prince George BC with all the pipe somebody stole from an oil rig. That's the joke I have belabored to the point where it isn't funny any more. I will try to put more pictures in here but you have to put them in Picasa web first.