Humboldt County Reflections

A visit to Humboldt County always grounds me.  I can’t shake the feeling that the entire county exists in a parallel universe.  A better world nourished with the rich fog of light and mist and the rich hummus of a more ancient world. 

Plus, the whole damn county flourishes off-the-grid.  Oh, I’m not saying you can’t find internet connection or that young girls don’t snap photos with cell phones or text under the table.  But, at least half the people I met didn’t own a computer or a smart phone.  Mostly by choice, though economics plays a part in the decision too. 

And, those of you who live in Cutten or Lombard Hills, before you stone me, remember I hung out mostly in Old Town and come from a family of beautiful rebels and free thinkers, drunks and healers, loggers and tree-huggers.  None of whom are noted for riding future’s cresting wave.

The effects of technology and being constantly, oh-my-god every second, connected to the world did, however, jump up and slap me in the face twice during my trip home. 

My mom attended a wedding and returned with tales of the lovely bride and her dress and the lip-smacking food and something called a butt-dance that I seriously do NOT need to know about.  Mom also told how during the ceremony the guests snapped pictures with their smart phones.  Leaned into the aisles and stood up for better shots.  Moved around so as to get that perfect photo to share with the world on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest. 

Really?  People can’t sit quietly and drink in the joining of two people in the biggest fool’s errand ever devised by man without snapping pictures to share on social media?  If a couple pledge their love and nobody snaps a picture and posts it on Facebook, is the marriage even valid?

The second time technology reared its beady-eyed, micro-chipped head, was after a day spend with my sister and her two grandsons.  My nephews.  Jake and Justin.  The oldest boy, Jake, has always been a favorite of mine.  Yes, I know.  Playing favorites is frowned upon.  Too bad.  I love and adore Justin, but Jake and I click.  We GET each other. 

So, after a day at Sequoia Park Zoo, my sister and I brought the boys back to their house where Jake immediately disappeared into the computer room.  When I ducked into the room to say goodbye, Jake shared with me a piece of music he wrote on the computer.

 Did you know a gifted artist like my nephew could compose gorgeous, wonderful music with a computer program?  Well, maybe you did.  But I sure as heck didn’t know it.  And when Jake tried to explain to me how he did it, the world became more and more dark and strange and filled with the breath of young folks who might someday set me afloat on an iceberg.

I arrived back in computer-savy NW Arkansas a few days ago.  My husband had bought me a smart phone.  Oh good Lord.  Propelled into the twenty-first century. 

Well, maybe it’s for the best. Perhaps, when the time comes, I can rally the wrinkled forces and stage a coup from the shrinking surface of my blue island.

Books by Pamela Foster

Zipper

 

In April of 1971, I lived in Munchweiller, Germany with my newly drafted husband.

My sympathies were with the love-children and hippies of that zeitgeist (another ‘Z’ word).  But my husband received his draft notice on our wedding day in ’68.  I worked a double-shift at the phone company in Red Bank, New Jersey during Woodstock while my groom received Army training at Fort Mammoth. Life got in the way of my political leanings.  I was all late-night talk and impassioned arguments and hoping to make it to the end of the month without going hungry.  Again.

So, after narrowly escaping orders for Vietnam, when my husband carried the newest Rolling Stones’ album home from the PX in Parmesan, Germany, it was an event of some magnitude. 

And the album’s cover!

A man’s crotch, penis bulging against the pants and a real, honest to God, zipper.  A zipper that opened and closed.  After you paid for the record, carried it carefully home and removed the plastic wrapper.  Like so many things in life that work too hard to titillate and tease, the zipper was a disappointment when I actually got my hands on the thing.

I’m willing to bet most everyone out there over sixty remembers slowly lowering the zipper on that album cover.  Under all that promise and sexual innuendo there was nothing but white briefs.  Tightey whiteys as they became known.

It was a different time.  Now we have nipples and pole dancing at super bowl half-time.  The internet has made erotica the most profitable book genre and the producers of Tiaras and Toddlers are rich instead of imprisoned.  Different times, indeed.

This morning, at dawn, watching the sun return color to the world, I couldn’t help but smile thinking about that innocent zipper that promised so much.  It’s been a long road since that April day in ’71.  I have three sons.  Two grandsons.  Two published books and another two coming out this year. It’s been a nice glide down the teeth of time to reveal a plain, ordinary, absolutely wonderful life.  A tightey whitey of a life.  I wouldn’t take a million dollars for any of it and, parts of it, you couldn’t pay me a million to live through again.

‘Z’ is for zipper and zeal and zany and zipitty do da.

Yaks, Yetis, and Party Clothes

A few years ago, Jack and I backpacked Nepal for a month.  We flew over Everest, that beautiful lady of a mountain, in a small plane.  But mostly we hung out in Kathmandu, and Chitwan, and Lumpini, and tried to get rid of the guide who’d attached himself to us our first day in country.  We fired him five times.  He always found us.   

Pokhara was our last stop.  We had finally escaped the guide and we were tired of travel with nothing but one change of clothes.  Besides, from our room at The Stupa, we had a brilliant view of the holy Fishtail Mountain.  We kicked back and relaxed for a week.  Climbed a small mountain.  Ate breakfast each morning beside the lake and watched little children row themselves across the calm waters in their school uniforms.  Strolled dirt streets with water buffalo.  Talked to the Tibetan women from the nearby refugee villages.

From the Tibetans we bought yak wool sweaters.  The women braided my hair like theirs with brightly colored lengths of red yarn and tied the ends off with silver.  I still see the gold light of late afternoon in that thin air, feel the warmth in the pit of my stomach as these woman giggled and played beauty parlor while I sat on a three legged stool in the dirt street, their fingers in my hair, the smell the yak wool tickling my nose.

That night, as Jack and I strolled the narrow streets in our new sweaters and my newly coiffed hair, the Nepalese smiled at us, told us we wore our ‘party clothes’ when there was no festival.  Very politely, they explained that the designs on our Tibetan sweaters were for a special Yeti festival held each year, high in the mountains behind Pokhara.  Our hotel manager asked if we knew of the sacred Yeti.

I laughed. 

We call him Bigfoot and his hair is darker where I come from.

             That was years ago.  We gave away the sweaters when we moved to the tropics, but the heavy, mountain-cold scent of yak still permeates my leather backpack, makes me think of festivals and the creatures that prowl our wild places.

Xenophobia and Xcaret

Xcaret used to be a gem at the butt-end of a sand path off a dirt road in the Yucatan Peninsula.  White sand beach.  Wild Manatees in clear cenote waters. Now it’s a tourist trap in Mundo Maya.  But still paradise, worth a day’s vacation and the bag full of pesos it’ll cost to enjoy the pee-poluted waters.  Visitors have brought money to a patch of Mexico that had nothing but natural beauty and poverty when Jack and I towed a 35 foot trailer onto the beach just north of Xcaret back in ‘91.

Back then we’d often drive the sixty miles to Cancun to pick up friends from the airport and haul them down the coast to Paamul, the funky trailer park on the Caribbean where we lived in our aluminum house under a grass-roofed palapa.

It was paradise.  For a while.

We heard a lot of xenophobic questions on that shuttle from the airport in the big city, where just a few years earlier you bought meat from a butcher who lopped the heads of chickens on a blood-stained stump and, for a few extra coins, would pluck the fowl for you too.

Questions like:

“Why do these Mexicans pretend they can’t understand English?”

The same reason you pretend you don’t speak Spanish.

“So, living down here, what do you do, just eat canned food?”

We eat everything, just make sure to wash it down with tequila to kill all those nasty Mexican bugs.

My favorite query though was from a couple who had been coming to stay at an all-inclusive in Cancan for years. Jack talked them into staying in a cabana near us instead, promised to show them the real Yucatan.

The woman crossed her high-heeled sandals, peered through the window of our van at the dirt-floored, grass-roofed, stick-huts where the locals lived who worked at the luxury hotels that lined the crescent beach of Cancun and scraped out a living pandering to tourists.

“What kind of animals do they raise in all these sheds?”

The maids and gardeners and waiters who work at the hotels live in those little houses.

“Oh no!  That’s not true.  The local people who wait on us at our hotel are so clean and super-dooper friendly.  They love Americans.  No way they live in those ugly little huts.”

Uh huh.  Well, see their living, whether or not their kids eat, depends on you feeling comfortable and happy and unafraid when you fly down here for your yearly visit to the all-inclusive, so they kind of have to be real friendly and happy, happy to see you.  Smiling brown faces all around.

Our guests were hungry and Jack, true to his word to show them the real Yucatan, bypassed Senor Frogs and took them to one of the very grass-roofed huts they’d asked about.  We dined at the home of our boat captain’s mother.  From 5 to 9 each night, Gabriela swept the hammocks up and tied them to the pole ceiling and, with the addition of four wobbly tables and a few mismatched chairs, she had a restaurant.  Jack and I ate carnitas and tacos until our bellies were full as ticks.  Our guests were wrung out after their two hour flight from Atlanta.  They didn’t eat a single bite.

The next day we took them to Xcaret where Jack and I swam in the blue cenote and they sweated at the edge of the jungle and begged for air conditioning.

I understand they still go to Cancun.  They’ve found a new all-inclusive on the turquoise sea between Hooters and Ruth Chris.  Last year they even took a hotel shuttle to the new, improved, paved-over Xcaret where they sipped margaritas, listened to a mariachi band and dipped their toes in waters where just a few years ago, manatees sometimes frolicked and this very couple yearned for smiling brown faces and air conditioning.

Wild Thing

Reblogged from Pamela Foster, Author and Speaker:

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“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”

― Aldo Leopold

I cannot. 

Last night friends and I celebrated the birthday of a wild and witchy woman.  Many of you know about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pen, a group of five women authors in which I am delighted to be a part.

Well, yesterday was…

Read more… 390 more words

Wild Thing

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”

― Aldo Leopold

I cannot. 

Last night friends and I celebrated the birthday of a wild and witchy woman.  Many of you know about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pen, a group of five women authors in which I am delighted to be a part.

Well, yesterday was Ruth Burkett Week’s birthday.  Ruth is our passionate, wild, knock-you-on-your-ass sister.  Okay, all of The Sisters have those characteristics to some degree, but Ruth is the instigator of those qualities in us.  Ruth is the one I call upon for righteous anger when I haven’t yet gotten beyond desolate depression over some slight.  Ruth stirs me up, kicks my butt, and sends me own my way into the world.

Last night was a lunar eclipse.  Ruth planned to watch it while sipping Captain Morgan and Dr Pepper.  Honest to God, that’s what the woman drinks. 

The last time I watched a lunar eclipse, I was on a night dive in the Mexican Yucatan.  The dive was blessed with sea turtles and nurse sharks and the beautiful, dancing translucence of squid.  But the real magic of that night came when I surfaced through a shimmering world of phosphorescent algae. 

People are nervous on a night dive, images of hungry shark flit in their brains.   Which, on that night, was good for me.  While a dozen tourists were plucked from the ocean one by one, happy to have survived the dive, I floated in the glimmer while the earth’s shadow swallowed the full moon.  When the boat was full and it was my turn to come aboard, I conned the captain into taking the tourists back to the dive shop and coming back out for me.

So, for almost an hour, I lay on my back, stirred my hands to make angel wings of the shimmering algae and fell under the spell of the ocean at night.  Did it occur to me that large, sharp toothed, night-feeding predators lurked in the waters below me?

It did. 

Was I worried?  Not at all.  You see Leopold was right.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.  Some of us feast on wild things, become one with them, and grow in their possibilities.

Somehow, last night, all these years later, standing on my deck after the party and looking up at the darkening moon, picturing my friend with her horrible rum and Dr Pepper, I felt that Ruth had been there with me all those years ago on that shimmering ocean. 

Wild things recognize one another after all.  And they’re connected.  We’re all connected.

‘V’ is for Vulture

I’ve always liked vultures.

These giant birds get a bad rap.  For some reason that’s never been clear to me, we admire hawks and raptors which swoop down from above and sink talons into unfortunate mice and bunnies, but abhor buzzards which do nothing but act as efficient waste disposal units.

It has to do with our fear of death, I think.

In Nepal bodies are wrapped in green bamboo leaves, placed on a bier and lit on fire so the ashes sink into the river.  In Tibet my friends, the vultures, dispose of the bodies, carrying the bones high overhead and then dropping them onto the rocks below to release the tasty marrow.  In my culture, the body is encased in steel guaranteed to keep the embalmed flesh sparkling fresh for eternity.

There are exceptions of course, many people today in the U.S. are cremated.  Ed Abbey had friends secret his body in the red rock country he loved and leave it for rodents and vultures.  This appeals to me, though I doubt my friends would be keen on the request.  My husband, Jack, wants me to build him a bier with a sail and set it aflame on the ocean.  Of course he also thinks I’m going to throw myself onto this funeral fire.  Why, as he asks, would I want to live without him?

I meditate on the vulture occasionally.  The naked, leathery head we find so ugly which is perfect for the job the bird has evolved to do.  The way the big black birds spread their wings to the sun and perch like statues for hours after a rain.  The hopping dance they do when interrupted in a meal. They call to mind old women lifting their dull-black skirts, turning their wrinkled faces on long saggy necks.  What? They seem to be thinking, we’re busy here!

So today, ‘V’ is for vulture.  A reminder that this life I’m living will end.  A reminder to spread my wings to the sun while I have the chance.  A reminder to lift my metaphorical skirt and hop around a bit while doing my life’s work.  A suggestion that I not worry about my saggy neck or wrinkled face.  I am, after all, like the vulture, perfectly suited to the task God gave me in this life.