“This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency, not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
—Walt Whitman, Preface, “Leaves of Grass” (1855)
The Gaff
The late singer/songwriter/labor saint Utah Phillips was both a practitioner and connoisseur of life on the bum — a phrase with no pejorative overtones for him or for me. Not that I imagine myself embracing it. Yes, every once in a while I think about what life might be like on the streets and how I’d make out hustling spare change. Necessity can make lots of things happen, but I’m not sure it would make me a good panhandler.
What I lack is the ability to craft what Phillips called a gaff. He used to talk about how disappointed he was in most modern spare-change come-ons, which mostly amount to literally that: “Spare change?” (A popular local variation: the Berkeley guys who say as you enter a store, “Maybe on your way out. Whatever you can spare … (pregnant pause) … without hurting yourself.”)
Phillips gave an example of a gaff that went something like this: “Mister, I’ve got a chicken in this sack and I’m going to go back to my camp and cook it and all I need now is a little salt and pepper to do it right. Can you help me out with that?” We’re not talking high art. We’re talking about storytelling that’s plausible and serves the suppliant’s need to ease his potential benefactor toward generosity, past qualms about giving something for nothing.
On Sunday, a day so warm and clear and so out of character for November it shone like a gift, I went over to a hardware and gardening store to buy some dirt. When I got out of our minivan (current mileage 198,000), I stopped to tie my shoes. A guy approached me from behind and asked, “Do you have a lug wrench?” Without turning to see who was asking, I said, “No.” The guy walked away muttering. I thought to myself, “Yeah, OK, I have a lug wrench.” So I opened the back of the van and pulled it out and followed the Lug Wrench Man across the parking lot. “Here you go,” I said. I was even ready to help him use it.
He turned and walked toward me. A black guy. Maybe in his 40s. Wiry. Intense. Working on a cigarette that he’d smoked nearly down to the filter. He was holding a Bank of America ATM card.
“That won’t work,” he said. And then he explained how his car had gotten a flat but that the special wheels on his ride had a special locking nut that he didn’t have the tool for.
“Where’s your car?” I asked, thinking I’d go and take a look.
Oh — it was nearby. He’d been trying for hours to get someone to help him. “Look at my hands,” he said, holding them out. “I’ve been trying to get those damn things off with my bare hands.”
I apologized for not talking to him when he first walked up. “I’ve lived here for a long time, and I think I spent my first ten years saying ‘yes,’ and I’ve been saying ‘no’ ever since.”
“I’m sorry for my attitude,” he said. “I’ve just been out here for hours and nobody will help. ‘The black guy,’ right? The police just told me I have 20 minutes to move my car or they’ll have it towed.”
I asked his name. “Anthony,” he said. We shook hands. He volunteered he worked for the Berkeley school district. As a janitor. Which schools? He rattled off the names of a few and added, “All of them.” He was still smoking the cigarette. Now it was down to the filter.
I pointed out we were standing outside a hardware store — maybe they had the tool he needed. “They won’t let me borrow a wrench — they don’t loan tools.”
Where was he headed? How close were we to someone who could help? “South San Francisco,” he said. Clear across the bay.
I returned to the possible fixes that might be waiting inside the hardware store. He repeated that they didn’t loan tools. But of course, I was thinking about what he, or perhaps I, might buy that could get him out of his jam. I’m thick, but not thick enough that I hadn’t seen where this was headed. “Anthony” was working a gaff and working it hard.
And at this key moment, he said, “Maybe I can get a couple of cans of Fix-a-Flat, that’ll get me seventy-five miles. If I can get that up there at Walgreen’s, it’s seven ninety-nine a can. …” He held up the ATM card. “But I don’t have any cash. But give me your address and I can get it back to you.”
Let’s stop and do an inventory here. Motorist in trouble. His car’s someplace else, suffering from a problem that’s simple enough but somehow unfixable. Of the seven million people abroad in the Bay Area on this lovely afternoon, he’s lit on you as his salvation — in fact, as the only person decent enough to even consider reaching out to help. Everything that’s implausible about his situation has been plausibly framed (though still easy to puncture with a little insistence: “Let’s see the car. I want to see that flat tire.”) Your keen instinct, the one that prompted you to say “no” without so much as a glance over your shoulder — well, you’ve left that behind. What do you do now?
I take out my wallet. As it turns out, I have eight bucks in cash. Enough for one can of Fix-a-Flat, or for a decent six-pack, which would be a nice addition to the afternoon as it winds down.
“OK–here’s what I’ve got,” I say. I hand him the bills. He says, “Can I get it back to you?” I think: Do I want this guy having my home address?
“No, no,” I say. “That’s OK. This is just a … a gesture. I just want to give it to you. So you can do what you have to do. Good luck with that tire.”
I went in to buy my dirt. Anthony walked away, and I think I heard him muttering.
Knowing and Not Knowing
“Whenever the ratio of what is known to what needs to be known approaches zero, we tend to invent ‘knowledge’ and assume that we understand more than we actually do. We seem unable to acknowledge that we simply don’t know.”
–David L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973)
Fall Color
It's our old friend Toxicodendron diversilobum (aka Rhus diversiloba, or Pacific poison oak, or poison oak, or just "goddamn it"), as viewed on a nice hike last Friday afternoon in Redwood Regional Park in the Oakland Hills. I like the seasonal coloration.
You'd think that the ability to easily spot this plant, and its extra visibility as it takes on fall coloration, might arm you against getting a nice dose of this stuff and the attendant nasty, itching, weeping rash. So you'd think. But you must consider in your calculations the fact you're wearing shorts and the presence of a dog who doesn't know from poison oak and what might happen when you pet the dog and let him rub up against you because you're such an affectionate animal person. Add in the possibility that you neglect to wash your hands or shower off after the hike.
Then you get another kind of fall color, in my case running from my ankles up the inside of my legs all the way to where they aren't legs anymore. I had a bad case of poison oak about 30 years ago, contracted while I was digging on a hillside full of unidentifiable poison oak roots. I have been operating under the comforting illusion that I had somehow inoculated myself against a serious recurrence, and have walked for decades in the hills without much concern about Toxicodendron or its effects (not that I'm careless of it–I watch out for it and try to wash if possible if I think I've come in contact with the plant).
As of this week, illusion gone, for now. The onset of the rash was slow, but by yesterday my lower limbs had blown up to a condition that I call "elephant leg." That's an exaggeration. It's really only "ugly leg." I broke down and called Kaiser, readily got an appointment with my doctor (his schedule had been cleared by patients canceling appointments to go over to the Giants parade in downtown San Francisco), and dragged my unsightly extremities to Oakland. Prescription: a 10-day course of prednisone and what is described as a high-potency steroid ointment. This morning, the ugly is still apparent, but the swelling is going down. I don't lightly resort to such aggressive medical measures, but I'm glad they're there when I want them.
Fall Classic: ‘Pitcher’
By Robert Francis, and pointed out to me by Kate (more than once) in the anthology “Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves,” edited by Don Johnson.
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.
Of Francis, I find not a lot online. Poets.org doesn’t even include a listing for him, though he was once remarked to be a protege of Robert Frost (he got an obit in The New York Times headlined “Robert Francis, a Poet Hailed by Frost, Dies”). Three years ago, NPR ran a posthumous piece that featured Francis reading some of his work.
As to the poem, well, it gets to the part of pitching that’s hardest to see, even when it’s there in plain sight. You’d think it was the work of what W.P. Kinsella describes as “a true fan of the game.” Here’s what Francis has to say about his boyhood interest in sports in his autobiography:
No need to say that I was not good at any sport. A boy who shrank from the rough-and-tumble of recess would not be one to take to football. Baseball was a little better, but only if the pitcher was not too speedy. I lacked courage, toughness, surplus energy, but I also lacked interest, interest that could have made me a fan if not a player. I never learned a single big-league player’s batting average. Once Father took me to a big-league game in Boston, but my chief impression was the grossness of the free-for-all urinating under the stands between innings.
Two Mugs, One Shot
We were watching KTVU’s “10 O’clock News” tonight–the Bay Area’s erstwhile decent local news broadcast (all right, KTVU: go ahead and look up “erstwhile”; the rest of us will wait here)–when a story came on about Berkeley police announcing they’d solved several recent street robberies. In one case, involving a group who was holding up pedestrians with a shotgun, the cops said they’d picked up four locals. KTVU showed pictures of four young guys. Next, the anchor said the police had announced an arrest in another stickup, and then they put the above two pictures–or one picture–up on the screen. You just hope that this is a picture of a real suspect–for extra points, one of the two in this case–because based on the stupidity of using the same picture twice, you don’t really have any reason to trust they got any of the pictures or names right.
Bail Bond Alley
On Boardman Place, an alley that opens onto Bryant Street and the Hall of Justice, where bail bondsmen (and women) can find plenty of customers. I especially like Sheila’s/Shelia’s flexibility about her first name. (Taken during my walk from Public Radio HQ to the Ferry Building.
The REM Chronicles
Sometimes you get a signal that maybe you’re a little preoccupied or anxious about work. Yesterday, I had the following dream:
I was at the radio station editing the afternoon newscasts as usual. We had a stand-in anchor doing the casts, and our regular anchor was in the office but on some sort of special assignment. We had our lineup ready for the 5 o’clock newscast, but about half an hour before air time, I couldn’t find our sub anchor. She had gone out somewhere and not returned. I couldn’t get her on her cellphone. Newscast time approached, and I asked the regular anchor to do the cast. He was busy and didn’t want to. Still no sign of the stand-in newscaster. I thought I’d better call master control to tell them we were going to have to blow off the cast and they should stay with the network, but I couldn’t remember the master control phone number. No worries—I’d walk down there. Except I couldn’t find it—the layout of the office seemed to have changed. Now it was getting very, very close to air time, and I was hoping that maybe our regular afternoon guy would relent and go and do the cast, but my first priority was to get to master control and let them know we had no cast. I happened upon some other employees and asked them to steer me to master control, as nothing I was seeing looked familiar. Oh, they said, they moved that to the fourth floor (fourth floor? I thought our building only had three floors) and they pointed the way to an elevator. I wound up in one of our TV studios instead, with no elevator in sight. I did see a stairway, though, and started bounding up two steps at a time. But the stairs got narrower and steeper as I went up. I remember thinking, “Whoa—this is a dangerous flight of stairs” as I looked down. I kept going, but soon the stairs were nothing more than strips of carpet hanging from the wall. I thought about whether I could use them as handholds to pull myself up and decided that was a bad idea. I turned and very gingerly climbed back down. I set out again to find master control, but before I did, I ran into the stand-in anchor. “Oh, man—we’re about to miss the newscast,” I said. “Where have you been?” I noticed she was kind of wobbly, like maybe she’d just come from a bar. She said she had been really exhausted and simply had to take a nap and had just awakened. She set off in search of the regular newscaster, while I continued to look for master control, though by this time I knew it was probably too late to warn them. I then started thinking about how I would explain all the above in an email to my bosses.
And then–I was taught in high school never to end a story this way–I woke up. I have to say that this was very vivid, but didn’t feel like a nightmare. Just one of those familiar (to me) stress-type dreams where a relatively simple,straightforward goal continually shrinks from your grasp.
Filling in the Map
Sunday was spent noodling with HTML in the morning, then in the afternoon getting in the Tiny Car (the Chicago-bred Toyota Echo) and driving from Berkeley out to Antioch, up the Sacramento River to the Delta Cross Channel, then east to where our local utility district stores our water as it flows out of the Sierra Nevada. The destination was chosen because the East Bay Municipal Utility District runs a fish hatchery on the Mokelumne River, and I wanted to see that. The route was dictated because the Delta Cross Channel is the route by which much of the water exported from Northern California down to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California is diverted from the Sacramento. I’ve driven past and ridden my bike by the Cross Channel gates dozens of times, but, not knowing what the heck they were, I never took note of them. Anyway, the drive was part of a long-term project I think of as filling in my map–touring what is largely terra incognita and figuring out how the pieces relate to each other.
It was a beautiful day, anyway, even with no end in mind. I saw water. I saw levees. I met a lonely bridgetender and photographed him and his antique bridge. I encountered a dead skunk and a curious ostrich. And then when I got out to the hatchery, I was hours too late — it had closed at 3 p.m.
Today’s Top Exotic, Invasive Aquatic Menace
In case you need a break from worrying abut what Al Qaida is going to do you or the horrors you’ll suffer at the hands of Obama-care,or the devastation in store if the Tea Party takes over, here’s another terror to contemplate: the New Zealand mudsnail. Somehow, this critter has not been on my radar. But my ignorance was altered yesterday during a visit to a fish hatchery on the Mokelumne River (that’s pronounced mo-KULL-uh-me, if you’re wondering). It was a short visit as I arrived a good two and a half hours after the place was closed for the day. But this sign was on one of the gates.
The numbers are eye-catching: the snail could occur in densities of 1 million per square yard (that’s 110,000 per square foot), and the snail propagates so rapidly that a single snail could give rise to 40 million within a year. The damage it does: It can outcompete native species and rip apart the food web that even large fish species depend on. In fact, the Mokelumne below this point is a place that has been invaded and studied as part of conferences on the mudsnail. And in recent mudsnail news, the city of Boulder, Colorado, recently closed a park because of the discovery of New Zealand mudsnails in a local creek. A short history from the state of Colorado says that the snail first invaded streams in the northern Rockies and that Yellowstone was one of the first places infested. And here’s everything else you need to know about the critter, thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: New Zealand mud snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum).
 |