Rain

We have rain in Novato, my yes.

Perhaps you’ll remember, however, that Novato is only one of the micro-climates of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a desert micro-climate and features the polite rain Arthur sings about in Camelot:
…The rain may never fall ‘til after sundown,
By eight, the morning fog must disappear …

Our rain appears in November, after announcing itself with some mildly gray clouds for a few days. It departs in April, and if we get rain after Mayday there is much anxiety and talk of sacrifice to the gods.

Folks characterize San Francisco as the land of fruits and nuts. Not really. In it’s own way San Francisco is more button-down than Yale in the 50’s.

First, we don’t say “fruits.” Humor regarding our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender brothers and sisters and whatevah is socially forbidden. Unless, of course, they’re Republicans.

We all love animals and rejoice when our friends show up at our homes with their dogs or wallabies or Komodo dragons. “Isn’t that long tongue just darling?” This is predictable behavior and any inkling that you don’t want any domestic creatures is close to an admission of sociopathy.

It’s predictable that San Franciscans accept any new idea that comes careening down the pike – Tibetan chanting medicine, American Native herbal sweat lodges, yoga coaches in the state assembly chamber. Being unkind to a new idea, no matter how illogical, will not be entertained. One idea is just as good as another; they all come from the heart, right?

The Bay Area is comfortingly predictable. Everyone loves children – so honest, so creative – and everyone consistently votes down property taxes that supports local education. Everyone advocates solar, wind and tidal power. True, the per-capita use of energy is enormous. The mighty and pious Prius electric is the People’s Choice for San Franciscan transportation. Even though the People dismiss energy audits that suggest the global manufacturing process and the shipping of Priuses (“Priae”?) to our shores via auto carriers that burn bunker oil all the way across the Pacific Ocean is not sound energy conservation.

Logic be hanged, it’s the heart that counts, and San Francisco social attitudes, seasons, politicians, traffic patterns, mating habits, and – yes – weather, are reliably fixed. The Wild West was tamed not by the Colt Peacemaker but by whorehouse madams and cheap railfares. San Francisco was tamed by the immigration of eastern yuppies with enough money to drive prices up. They sprayed the upscale, post-hippie, better-hygiene, young-professional ‘Frisco Culture with firm-hold hairspray and it’s holding firm.

I’m discovering that Florida is a more spontaneous and unpredictable place than San Francisco. Every Floridian is encouraged by the hothouse sub-tropical climate to go rogue at intervals and Shake Things Up, rant in the street in the front of the house. There’s no special disapprobation if you Bullit-drive after the floozy who, during the post-game party, looked moon-eyed at your man, screeching after her through the suburban streets and throwing high-heeled shoes at the hussy’s car from your own convertible. You tell her, girl!

Small churches are tucked into little country or city nooks, with their particular versions of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses that would not merely irritate the Vatican, but confuse billy-hell out of the cardinals. Snake-handling, gay-bashing, Koran-burning, abortionist assassinating and full-gospel massed bagpipes are unusual but not, here in  what’s-next extemporaneous Florida, surprising.

I’m discovering that Floridians expect to be surprised, and it doesn’t bother them that much. Last month, here is Gainesville, a large black bear was seen walking across  4th Avenue SE, about half a mile from the Gator Swamp stadium (it’s expected of me to add “Go Gators!” when it’s mentioned) at the heart of the city. Was there a hue and cry? Villagers with torches and double express rifles? Nope. “A bear? Humph. How ‘bout that?”

Weather is a tipoff. Yes, Novato has rain, but there is rain and then there is Rain.

Rain arrives here like a meteorite ploughing into your toolshed, whammo. Big rain. The kind of rain I’d forgotten about, coming down seriously so that the far side of 12th Avenue, NW, might have been washed away because we can’t see it. Rain crashing down in solid masses, raindrops as big as quail eggs. Rain that makes side streets tributaries to the sudden river of 12th Avenue, swelling a hefty current so that the big splashes appear to be hurrying west, down to the Gulf of Mexico, sweeping leaves and twigs rapidly past our porch. It roars, a soft monotone. It insists, then relaxes, reasserts. It can taper off across a day. It can stop now, a sun of enormous heat sliding out from behind the retreating clouds as if to say, “There! Good job of it!”

This is the sub-tropics (or as near as damnit), with heat and moisture pushing blooms, developing fungi and giant bugs, proliferating a riot of plant and animal life. Micro-climate? Hell, no. Florida is a big-assed macro-cooker for weather and unusual biota, including genuinely surprising characters. Hell, I’m becoming more unpredictable, myself.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is savoring new territory. He hyperbolizes, but he always does. I'm not about to attempt behavior modification at this late date, and it's what he does best. He generalizes about San Francisco, which I know he loves, and he misses some of the adventurous factors in California life. But he's quite right about it being a more rigid social atmosphere than many other venues. Liberal, yes, but not malleable.  

G'ville

Yes, I will doubtlessly whine and moan about Florida's humidity, heat, hurricanes and lack of topography. But this is my home, now, so I can more readily share some of the qualities anyone would appreciate here.

It's a small town. True, it's home to a great university with world-class departments in archaeology, geography, history, and medicine, but it's still a tidy village. The streets are laid out sensibly; you wouldn't get lost easily, and you'd appreciate the amenities. One minor example: this is a great ice cream town, several local artisan ice creams. As another, the barbecue is splendid (Florida has a cabinet level position, Secretary of Barbecue). Satchel's Pizza (we'll be there tomorrow evening, a regular Friday night event) is as good as it gets.

The produce, from local truck farms and a long growing season, is bountiful. There are greens and field peas and fresh okra and cuts of meat that don't appear in middle-American supermarkets. The local honey – orangeblossom, saw palmetto, sourwood, and others – is exquisite. If I can persuade some local bakery to produce sourdough bread anywhere near Boudin or Acme quality, this could be a culinary hotspot.

Though it's only an hour and a bit from the coast, the seafood is not inexpensive. Why? A good mystery to pursue. Perhaps a good situation to remedy with rod and reel.

On my last leg of the migration to Gainesville, from Tallahassee, one of the quiet beauties of this new landscape presented itself: the highways cut across low country through unbuildable swamp and wetland in slight, hardly perceptible curves, so the broad concrete dual-lanes run between leafy walls of deep green, quite high and even. The median is intensely green. Palmetto and Spanish moss, invariably dramatic, feature the walls. This place is irrepressibly bursting with chlorophyll generators, green machines everywhere. Herbs and beans grow with little more than a nudge. Some say homegrown Florida tomatoes aren't as good as, perhaps, Vermont beefsteak reds, because they grow too fast, too easily. This would be bad country for winemaking: the lesson of Napa is that heat and lack of water "stress" the vines to produce a keener, smaller, sweeter and more complex grape. Grapes here would be fat and lazy, unstressed, flabby despite their best intentions.

Will I grow flabby here? I doubt it. My alarm clock is a pair of devilish boys who leap on me. They also bring my first Diet Pepsi of the day and demand stories. They'll return to the house from nursery and pre-school around 3:00 and I'll have dinner in the oven for an early meal. We have plenty of stories to make up, plenty of projects (they're helping me on "our" Dovekie), and a clutch of Arxea 703 secrets. Like our Crow-Planes – technologically advanced ornithopters, silent and disguised as mere crows patrolling the skies. Crow-Plane Alpha is piloted by Max, Crow-Plane Bravo by Luc. The black craft wait in a hangar under the lawn for immediate take-off and carry truly disgusting bad eggs from hens that occasionally lay under the house. These missiles of smelly disrespect are dropped on improper, stuffy, or overdressed people. The egg-bombed victims look up to find the source of their misfortune and notice only a pair of crows (heh heh heh) who couldn't possibly deliver such a blow to their composure. No, flab is not in the cards, mental or physical.

Even though I've arrived in G'ville, the Journey continues.

Braxinoso Speaks

The reception we received was unexpectedly enthusiastic, merry, relieved, welcoming in every way. We arrived as partners come to make life easier, not as visitors come to take our ease and advantage. They boys will be a handful of squirm and chaos. Like all the best cow-ponies, rally cars, sailboats and children, they are not "easy." They have personality and will. They won't be governed submissively. Pushing limits is their job description. Himself will get scraped and pounded but what joy to help raise them! Both of us feel younger.

Texas BBQ

"Roadfood" rates City Market in Luling, Texas, as one of the shrines of BBQ. Are they correct?

Yes and no. Here we encounter one of those "Wise Men of Hindustan" problems: seven wise blind men approach an elephant, each grasping one part of the beast, each defining the big fellow as his particular sampling – a snake, a wall, a tree trunk, a leaf, &c. Each is right for the trunk, the body, the leg, the ear – and each misses the nature of the elephant.

City Market BBQ meat is perfect.

Texas BBQ concentrates on quality of meat, spice rubs and slow process, not sauce. The ribs are fall-off-the-bone tender. The brisket is firmer but wonderfully succulent. The City Market signature sausage rings are among the best sausage I've ever encountered. Meaty, moist, natural casing, a hint of consolidating filler (which retains the tasty meat juices, a plus), and mildly spiced, not at all hot-spicy. The rings are in casings about 1.25" in diameter, looped into a 6" round.

Let your GPS find Luling and City Market. You could miss both. They do not stand out or shout superlatives of any kind. This is a neighborhood joint and you'll share your lunch (they don't serve dinner) with locals. As a courtesy to locals and as self-preservation, do not associate yourself with Abraham Lincoln, General Grant, or Harvard.

Ordering lunch is a two-phase operation. First, go to the meat room in the back where chunky men in white butchers gear and pale green sanitary gloves are carving and serving. The meat room has Lexan window-walls to keep the smoke in. It's thick. The menu is on the wall, a plastic "Coke" sign with small plastic snap-in-letters. But it's cohabited with the smoke for too long, the selections are hard to read. No matter, the choices are severely limited: beef brisket, pork ribs, sausage, Wonder bread or crackers, sweet or dill pickles, Saran-wrapped sweet onion thirds.

The fat butcher boys want to process you in and out briskly, "What you want? What can I getcha?"

I order half a pound of brisket and a sausage ring. The beef is cut, weighed, and slammed onto butcher paper with the sausage.

"Bread? Crackers? One or two? What can I getcha?"

I get two slices of bread and a dill pickle, pay about $8, and scoot out into the booths and tables.

Phase two, the counter at the front of the City Market space, where you can get a beer or soda and a stated amount of beans. I get a root beer and a pint of beans.

City Market doesn't take its reputation seriously. It's local joint, formica table tops and aluminum tubing chairs with vinyl cushions. Two utensils are available: plastic spoons for beans, plastic knives. No music, no funny business. Serious eating, some talk. Some men retain their cowboy hats, more retain their John Deere hats. The women are dedicated eaters, hefty redneck women, some black, some Hispanic, some with hospital scrubs or hair salon tunics. The light is dim, unenthusiastic light, which probably suits a place sitting in southern Texas heat.

There are two sauces, in bottles. One is standard hot sauce, the cheap Mexican red. The other is the City Market's barbecue sauce, a discouraging mustard-based yellowy-orange mix flecked with something.

Texans take their BBQ seriously, granted. What they don't take seriously is a meal. It's not enough to provide perfectly smoked, slow-cooked meat if you don't care about the meal around it. If you throw Wonder Bread and very bad big-jar dills into the butcher paper with exquisite meat, the meal goes downhill. The pinto beans are genuinely awful, without character, a pasty dried legume taste.

The City Market makes exquisite BBQ but they don't put any effort into the meal it makes. I like minimalist food, foh joints, holes-in-the-wall, even plastic utensils. But there is no respect for a meal, here, or for eating well, or for the magic balance of a meal. There's something smug and rural and wrong-headed about hunks of great meat served with disdain for anyone who wants more, like lunch.

I wish I could take half a dozen of those incredible sausages and eat them with a tasty salad and sourdough bread. At Bo's in Lafayette, Bo serves equally good BBQ supported by a real meal and careful tastes. The City Market is an experience in redneck stubbornness: you got your meat, you want fancy, too?

Yes. Why not? Food is one of the best things in our lives and it takes only a little care to elevate it to real cuisine. If that's fancy, yes; I want fancy, too.

Braxinoso Speaks

This is our second successful search for road food. We found it, we et it. I agree with Himself in this instance: it would have taken a tiny nudge of effort to make this world-class but some Texan sullenness keeps it "country," which may be a virtue to rednecks (and I consider Himself a prime redneck) but is a pejorative in cuisine.

We found the 50/50 burger – half ground bacon, half ground beef – and loved it. After City Market we finally found the much-touted Texas kolaches, a Czech pastry. Purely awful, cheap, nasty. It made us long for a nice cherry hamentaschen.

Two and a Half Texas Towns

El Paso, the U.S. side of an international, continuous city, is elevated, so that Ciudad Juarez spreads out  below, to the south. At night the Mexican half of the bitty is an even matrix of white and yellow lights. In the morning it is even more regular, an uninterrupted texture of single-story block structures, gray and undistinguished by any architectural feature.

These Mexican border towns are well-documented sites of drug gang violence unchecked by the Mexican authorities. From most reports, the violence is – like the view of Ciudad Juarez – an even pattern of criminal brutality that doesn't distinguish between commercial cartel mayhem and official police mayhem. The profits made by these two antagonists as motive and product of the violence is evenly divided, as well. Perhaps it was my prejudice but the low, gray, crowded grid of Ciudad Juarez had a sinister look.

Leaving El Paso (with Marty Robbins' song clearly in mind) the Subaru and Dovekie and I traversed more striking desert. Toward the end of the afternoon we moved into hill country and dense, dark-green scrub trees.

I wondered how anyone could navigate among those trees and hills, and what a pain in the saddle it must have been to winkle longhorns out of that brush. The hill country seemed impenetrably complex.

Until I reached San Antonio. I-10 ported me into a web of interlocking, wandering highways headed in every direction and confused even more by massive signs hoisted a hundred feet up, above the second and third tiers of crossing superhighways. I have never been so assaulted by commercial come-ons – every possible service and product and blandishment, every business logo and catch-phrase. A defensive panic developed in my throat as a coppery taste and a headache accompanied it. I had been sweeping across landscape for too long, I suppose, to confront sudden advertising overload.

Overload. Like TV ads, one after the other but not from a screen. Every direction, every scrap of sky lit by hype and hyperbole. I had the skin-crawling feeling that a thousand hungry commercial claws were reaching for my bank account, blatantly, loudly, squalling at a volume like a dog pound when a fire engine passes.

The hardware store was once my friend. They wanted me to get along well, suggested tools and fittings, how-to suggestions. Maybe it still is, though it's all in Chinese, now.

The elevated signs above San Antonio's warren of oversized highways are not concerned for my well-being or health or consumer approval. Ask yourself: do we still believe businesses care about consumer approval? More likely, they go for the percentages and forget the dissatisfied. The masses will eat/buy/use/consume anything. Tell 'em what they want.

But it was late. I'd once again gone to the wrong Red Roof Inn and was using my iPhone GPS direction lady to guide me to the room I'd already booked from the iPhone while I was at the edge of the desert. I was disheartened, disoriented, unbelieving.  Too much greed, too much advertising, too much of everything.

The GPS iPhone lady – an infuriatingly smug bitch I'll never meet, thank God – directed me through the briar patch levels and concrete thruways of San Antonio. She employed a doubtless logical but abstruse embroidery of turns and route numbers, once vectoring my car-and-trailer rig through a tiny neighborhood street where multiple pickup trucks sat before each bungalow. I was grateful she showed me the way, and I hated her all the same.

Tomorrow I will scoot out of San Antonio ASAP. Perhaps there are six or seven blocks of distinguished downtown beauty in this burg. I'm not encouraged to find them. The GPS iPhone lady will get me out of the briar patch and on the road. I'm too tired to eat, too discouraged to rejoice at geographic progress. El Paso and San Antonio are ugly blots on wonderful land.

How did we get this way?

Braxinoso Speaks

Himself is plentifully naive. And thin-skinned. He's seen the commercial grip tightening around life for, lo, these many years and he's contributed to it. We can't return to Walden Pond or the Little House On the Prairie, dammit. This is the time and society we've got. Cowboy up and do what you can with it. He needs to stop feeling "special" and admit that he's as much a part of this mess as the rest of us.

The Great Divide

I've crossed a great divide. I feel it.

Moving across the country is what we all must do from time to time, I'm certain, to get a feel of the American scope, the enormity of this nation, and to remind ourselves that nice little lawns and suburban shopping centers make up a tiny part of the United States.

We don't own this place. We belong to it. It isn't crowded but huge and remarkably lonely in its spaciousness. It's anthropomorphic narcissism to assume our nation is what we see in our own gerbil cages. Getting out onto the American ground is humbling and sobering.

Long, long desert stretches. Wide prairies, horizon to horizon. A few clusters of folks here and there. This is a major chunk of the world, and shortly we may wake from our doze and discover that rats and mice and cockroaches have been plundering our wealth for their own aggrandizement. When that happens, when we compare the real physical breadth of our nation and its weight of resources, we'll be obliged to squash the rodentine corporations that are squirreling away our wealth.

Who are these piss-ant speculators, juggling numbers and derivatives and robbing pension funds? Well-dressed, self-congratulatory, puffed-up thieves. At some point it's going to be critical that we remember our grampas. They worked willingly within codes of self-restraint and ethical boundaries that were essential to their identity. They couldn't respect themselves without the codes. They would not look kindly on legislating ethics, morality and logic out of existence, a process that's ongoing in Washington.

Seeing the big-ness of this nation puts the money pests in perspective as embarrassingly trivial frauds. Isn't it time to get angry?

This is a wonderful land. It's easy to hear Woody Guthrie out here on the road. Get out in the big spaces and listen.

One expects a mighty ridgeback for the Continental Divide but I crossed it this afternoon on a flatland Interstate, I-10. Without the sign, announcing the geographic fact and the height, around 4500' above sea level, I wouldn't have noticed. But that sign struck a harmonic. It occurred to me that my life has crossed over into another watershed phase, and that I'm following the downslope gladly, looking forward to a natural return to family and closeness. Big medicine.

The land speaks to us. No doubt about. It can sound like Woody, or it can sound like a brief thundering rainstorm whacking the windshield as you drive the desert floor, or like wind over gravel at a rest stop. I don't know for certain what it's saying to me, yet, but the message is crucial, stirring, important. I must listen louder.

Braxinoso Speaks

Himself has been in the car too long. He's gone a bit woo-woo on us. He's wringing significance out of desert rocks and finding messages in rainstorms. But this is what he does. It's my job to keep him on-task and out of bogs. Perhaps it's his job to hear language in running water. From each, according to his ability . . . 

Elegance Without Lushness

It's easy to be trivial about the desert, ripping across it at a skimming rate in air-conditioned pods. But even from such a patrician perch, the size and scope and hammering heat of it intimidates.

Beside I-10 East, as the Subaru and the Dovekie and I ascended a pass in one of the mountain ranges that lie athwart the Great Southwestern Desert, an old gravel road appeared again and again. I realized that the Interstate engineers had followed one of the old stage and freight passes. On reflection, it was the natural thing to do. The Old Guys tried every pass and settled on the best crossing. I began to feature mule-drawn wagons on that scrolling, wayward track whenever it reappeared, and to notice that it took every possible advantage of topography and natural shape. The Old Guys had shovels and blasting powder and an eye for advantage. Damn, the trip across these mountains was epic, unthinkable in our cushioned lives. The West wasn't "won," it was endured.

But the mountain passes may have been the easy part. How to cross sixty miles of desert between ranges in Sonoran heat? 110°F at the rest stop. so hot that I almost fell back into the car when I opened the door and stepped out.

Wagons moved at the pace of a slow jogger – though I don't know a jogger who could manage a 10 K in heat like this – making twenty or thirty miles on a good day, camping in the cold, starry nights among the inquisitive sidewinders and scorpions. How could you carry enough water for yourself and the mules? Jolting over rocks, avoiding big creosote bushes, finding eroded edges into and out of the waddies, constant focus in brutal sunlight that had to erode focus.

I crossed one waddie named Palen Ditch out on the vast, flat, gravel platter of the Sonoran Desert. Suddenly I was treated to a rainstorm in the bright sunlight. It lasted exactly thirty seconds and didn't darken the road a whit.

I crossed a larger watercourse, the Hassayampa River, but it was not being used at the time for carrying water. Perfectly good river,  broad and deep, but no water. It was flanked by warnings against sudden dust storms that kick up quickly and reduce visibility to zero. I didn't experience one this crossing (yet) but this particular bit of local meteorology must have been plenty interesting from the seat of a freight wagon.

I enjoyed passing Sore Finger Road, plenty of Ditches (I'm not sure that having a ditch named for you is an honor or an official insult), and watching those giant Quixotic desert inhabitants, the high-tension electric towers, march across the planar land.

Desert colors are muted, though there are occasional gray-green bushes and stunted trees and saguaros. Like the old B&W cinema, however, the beauty is often in lighting rather than chroma. From the desert floor, the distant foothills have a horizontal hachure, a delicate texture seen at a low angle that resolves into parallel lines. At a distance, the creosote bushes resolve into a dot-stippling that shade the rugged hills. A joshua tree standing out among chollas and low bushes seems always like an event, and the saguaros, which top forty feet, are remarkable desert statements.

I remember reading a copy of an old letter at Death Valley National Park, commenting that some birds flew across the desert on their way to some bird rendezvous and simply dropped dead out of the sky from the heat. Understandable.

It would be terribly hard, but it would also be a thrilling challenge to ride with a few friends and some friendly mules across one of these desert stretches, to savor just how it felt, to camp out with a fire and a lot of snake repellant (I'm sure I can Google that), and to lie under the stars talking to the Old Guys.

I want to explore the desert at length if I can. It's spare and harsh and mysterious and elegant. Like Marlene Dietrich, but more gravel.

Braxinoso Speaks

Listen to him, as if. The desert requires lean young men who don't sweat much. Himself is an old fat man who sweats buckets at the least exertion. When we arrive in Florida, I'll nip at his heels a bit about losing weight. He needs to move fast with those boyos about.

BON VOYAGE!

An alien place without hearth-gods, the lares fled – or were they imprisoned in the moving pod sitting under my computer studio window? Bare, dusty, tatty, the former den of an untidy bear.

No, I decided where my particular lares reside: in my Weems & Plath Admiral's ships clock, which chimes the half-hour watch bells. Clever lad, I boxed the clock and it rides behind my seat in the car. I can hear it faintly keeping faith with the time and my household gods, which will inhabit the Taj Garage with me and my boyos soon.

Tears, of course, hugging Laura who has been a strong, warm, loving friend. My advocate and spur. A daughter or a sister, but I often sat in the role of child. Of course, tears.

I 580 through Oakland could be Anyplace, USA. That ugly. No concept of architectural dignity, merely commercial ballyhoo wherever possible.

Once on I 5, however, my little cavalcade – Adkins, Subaru and boat trailing behind – rode south through an inimitable place: the vast, fertile plain of the San Joaquin Valley. Dry, dusty, with wind devils and tumbleweeds, but lavishly irrigated to grow marvels – garlic, artichokes, almonds, plums, pistachios, and wine grapes. Distant mountain ranges watercolored in light, cool shades that emphasize the mighty size of the Valley.

The boat trailers well. I'm happy for the money I spent getting new tires and lights and a bearing lube-job for the trailer. Cruise control is ducky on that long, long road, 60 to 64 mph all the way.

A surprisingly political journey through the Valley. An Adkins rule: ken the quality of the signage to judge the message. These were frequent, expensively painted, well-mounted, all-weather signs that blamed the Democrats for curtailing water, jobs, progress and human rights in the Valley.

"No Water = No Jobs"
"Democrats Kill Jobs and Plants"
"Dust Bowl Courtesy of Democratic Administration"
"Get Rid of Barbara Boxer and Get People Back to Work"
"Water Crisis! We All Need Water!"

Apparently some rich planters didn't get their water allotment and they're using their famously discretionary income to shout about it – without a word of argument or logic – to the passing motorist.

Impressive money. More impressive: a simple prestressed concrete overpass bridge patterned with hundreds and hundreds of perfect, tiny swallows' nests, natural architecture gracing industrial architecture.

And at dusk, passing from I-5 on CA 138 in a smaller valley, the purple somber shape of the hills against darkening indigo skies, with tiny red blinking lights of a high tension line defining the desert floor plane.

Even though I started crying, and continued by driving off with my local gas station's pump handle still stuck in my gas tank (a $173 tank of gas, all told), it was a lucky day full of sighs and long looks across.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself did well on the trip. Very little narcolepsy, a short nap in the shade of a building, walking around at rest stops. His right leg is cramping and the knee is bothering him but he's remarkably sane for a prime neurotic going through a massive change. He bears watching.