Go west, young arantxa!

Highway 46, heading west on the Antelope Plain.

I just got back last week from a very quick (very truncated, I had to rush back a day early to beat the storm) visit down to Los Angeles. Back in December, I learned that my wonderful friend Paula would be in LA from NYC for the President's Day weekend, and that my parents were planning a trip to visit my sister in Seattle for that weekend as well and were looking for someone to take care of their dog, Rusty. What an excellent coincidence! I signed on to drive down to dogsit and see Paula,* too.

In the end, my parents never booked that trip, and I waited to leave Santa Cruz until late Saturday morning. I always take the 101 all the way down (I know every California Highway Patrol hiding spot from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles. 101 all the way!), but traffic was so bad that, in a moment of desperation, I slipped onto the 46 in Paso Robles and jogged over to the 5 in order to catch Paula's party later that evening.

What a weird and wonderful decision that was.

Oil pumps and tumbleweeds along the 46. 

There are certain towns and strips of highway -- even entire counties -- in California that, since we were little kids, my mom would make us lock the car doors in while passing through while on road trips. It makes us laugh now, but my mom was reacting directly to an entire catalogue of highly publicized cases of child molestation (Kern County), kidnappings and serial murders (Merced, Modesto, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties), endemic drug addiction and its correlating violences (Antelope Valley, Inland Empire et al), and general "sordidness" and infamy that has stereotyped so many rural and desert communities in the state.

I like to think of myself as a self-assured and independent person,* and I have plenty of experience travelling internationally on my own, but there are still certain carefully stipulated rules that I follow when it comes to lone, long driving trips: fully charged cell phone, large bottle of water, gas stops in large towns, no highway rest stops, no gratuitous side trips, no scenic drives. And, lastly, no Interstate 5. On the road, I am Little Red Riding Hood and I stay the course -- until this past trip, that is.

Driving the 5 itself, once I got to it, was tedious, boring, long, and filled with insane people tearing down the highway at 90+ miles per hour, but it was the jog along Highway 46 that put me on red alert. As my Yiya would say: METE MIEDO. Specifically, Lost Hills mete miedo.

The small drilling town of Lost Hills is, of course, scary in that same way that the wolf is scary in the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale: sinisterly attractive in the way the Uncanny always is, dangerous and seductive and ugly. The landscape is monstrous in its very nature: arid, barren, corrosive and corroded in its hyper-industrialized mechanizations. Driving through its oil fields, I thought to myself: this is like a weird and horrible Steinbeck novel that I've never read. Then I realized: No, it's Upton Sinclair's Oil! personified, 90 years evolved. Post-industrial and post-apocalyptic. Have you seen the great and horrible There Will Be Blood? It is brutal and beautiful and it is this place. Amazing.

I couldn't drive fast enough through the high winds and dust and miles of oil pumps, passing the tumbleweed and the gas station and the strange little school district building. I am the perfect abductee victim! A young woman driving a Prius! Mindlessly meandering alone along the high desert plain! I am tasty and delectable serial killer bait! 

But I went back! Over my short weekend stay in Los Angeles, I read a great article by Richard Manning on North Dakota's fracking boom in this month's Harper's Magazine. I kept thinking about the Lost Hills oil field, not one of the largest in California but one of the most productive, and its natural gas reserves; the weird little isolated community struggling along beside it; its scary alone-ness and desert desolation. I decided to retrace my route back up to Santa Cruz and stop in Lost Hills and take some photographs.

Here they are. Aren't they something?

I originally intended to pull over along the highway a couple of times while driving through town and the oil fields. But, frankly, I'm still my mother's daughter, and I lost my nerve. The winds were gusting and I felt too exposed. I snapped photos blindly with my iPod as I drove along, eventually putting the camera away when I had to quickly swerve out of the way of the third tumbleweed to bulldoze out onto the highway.

While driving, I started listening to an audio book I had downloaded at my parents' house before leaving: Hampton Sides' 2007 text Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. It's right in line with another history of the American West I had downloaded a couple of years ago -- Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe of American History (MOUTHFUL) by S.C. Gwynne (2011) -- only, frankly, better. Because I'm a snob, I attribute it to the fact that, though both authors have History BAs from prestigious Ivy Leagues, Sides considers himself a historian whereas Gwynne identifies, professionally, as a journalist. When the rhetoric got problematic and weird in Gwynne's history of the Comanche,*** I first let it pass because he wasn't an academic and then eventually stopped reading/listening altogether. Nearing the end of Book I of Sides' text, I have yet to run into this problem of what I feel to be an unbalanced critical approach.

But I digress: listening to this history of the American Mountain Man, the Mexican-American War, the invasion and conquest of the American West, and the highly polemical and problematic imagining of race and ethnicity in the Southwest in particular, I drove from Lost Hills all the way into Paso Robles. And as I listened (with great interest, might I add) I reflected on all the other kaleidoscope images that make up my imaginary of the American West: the old Autry westerns of the 40s and 50s, and the spaghetti westerns of the 60s and 70s; novels and short stories by those beloved authors who I tie directly to California and the West like Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion; those long and yearly road trips from my childhood, during which we explored every continental state west of the Rockies; forays to roadside tourist traps in the Colorado Desert with my grandfather; Pee-Wee's Big Adventure; the Manson Family; the Donner Party; Neil Young and Tom Russel songs; Cabeza de Vaca wandering the Sonoran Desert.

I love the West in all of its kitsch, its horror, its Good, its Bad, and its Ugly.

I decided to stop for dinner before turning north onto the 101 in Paso Robles, and went off in search of Good Ol' Burger, a nutty looking tourist trap in downtown Paso Robles that my dad and I had stopped in for lunch on a drive up to Santa Cruz nearly twelve years ago. The weird shack was gone, as you can see, but the burgers are still good. They built the new place over ten years ago, apparently.

* Paula is nearly 6 months pregnant -- surprise! I wanted to see her before the little one (who I'll have the pleasure of meeting in July) arrives in June. 

** Okay, let's get real: I meant "woman." Travelling alone is definitely a sexed issue. 

*** Judge-y qualifiers like "primitive," "savage," "uncivilized" -- as well as a bold contention that the Comanche (pre-horse) had, literally, no culture whatsoever -- eventually turned me off completely.

Wintertime is for Postcards, Too

Just the front of the postcard this time. 

I'm happy that we're receiving some much-needed rain after an incredibly dry year, but it's been non-stop mist, fog, rain, storm up here the past couple of weeks. Looking at this photo of the postcard I received from Sarah T last week -- and then comparing it to other photos of postcards received over the summer -- I note the paleness of my fingers, the (perpetual) sogginess of the lawn,* the morose grey sunlight. Winter is here in all of its central coast, Wuthering Heights, doom & gloom glory --and I love it!-- but boy do we have a long winter ahead of us.

Wintertime is wonderful for its storms and winds and cold and spookiness, the move to insularity, introspection, quiet, and aloneness. But, sometimes, it becomes lonely. In a Stephen King-protagonist-isolated-in-a-snowed-in-cabin/closed-mountain-resort** kind of way.

The academic quarter has come to an end. The past couple of weeks have been long, sleep-deprived, manic and exhausting. I found this postcard in the mailbox late Thursday evening of last week, and it's been brightening up the large pile of unattended mail ever since. Thanks, Sarah T.

* The lawn has become a perpetual mushroom pit of fungal despair. I'm pulling out handfuls of mushrooms on a daily basis.

** MADNESS.

Noche de San Juan

I've been looking at photographs from last night's celebrations in Spain on "El Huffington Post" (crazy that The Huffington Post is taking over the world... do check out the photos, though) and it sure looked like fun. I celebrated quietly here at home, lit a couple of candles and washed my face after midnight with ritualistic deliberation. Small stuff. 

     

Apart from the fire and water rituals, I did some "gathering of midsummer herbs". And rather than go tromping around in the surrounding hills and hollows up here in the mountains in the middle of the night, risking poison oak, mountain lion attack*, and wolf spider terrors**, just so I could come home with a handful of California sagebrush that, now that I think of it, grows in my own yard, I decided to plant my own batch of cooking herbs. I didn't get a chance to start up the veggie patch this spring, so this little herb collection will have to do for now. The symbolism isn't quite right, but we tend to have long Indian summers and annuals generally thrive with occasional bud pinching through the New Year, no need to start drying herbs now. 

Damn, I forgot to buy the sage!!!

I'm a lazy person, so I haven't transplanted them to the pots next to the kitchen door yet. Tomorrow. I've never grown/eaten/cooked with Cuban basil before; it's supposed to be similar to any sweet basil, but with a spicy flavor. Intriguing! Even better, it's a perennial.

And just in case you thought that I didn't end up having any St. John's magic come my way (or just a stroke of ordinary good luck), I stopped by my next door neighbors' yard sale on the way back from the farm & feed, and ended up leaving with a little treasure:

FANCYYY

Howard gave me a ridiculously good deal. As I gave him the cash for the typewriter, I blurted out, "Up in the Mission District in San Francisco, you wouldn't be able to find one of these for under $100!" SUCH A DUMB THING TO SAY. It needs a new ribbon, but all the keys and doodads seem to work, and it's really just beautiful. I'll post some proper photos once I'm finally able to test it out.

Addendum: I mixed up the two thymes in the photo identifying the midsummer herbs. The Orange Thyme is top center, and the French Thyme is bottom left. OOPSIES.

* There have been sightings of a lone adolescent mountain lion roaming around the neighborhood in the past week -- at dusk and at night, but sometimes during the day. We're hoping s/he's just passing through on the way to discovering new territories.
** Don't even dare do a Google image search -- DON'T YOU DO IT IT'S TOO TERRIBLE. 

Midsummer Love Letter

The summer solstice came and went yesterday without me even stopping to acknowledge it. The day was filled with meetings on campus and long Skype dates with far-flung friends under the oak tree, and after having dinner later on in the evening, I immediately went to bed to snooze it all off.

I've been living here in Ben Lomond for over two years -- how is it that I'm only now taking advantage of the
electrical output under the oak tree? All I need out there now is a small table and I'm all set with a new summer office.

Though last night was officially Midsummer's Eve -- and today the first day of summer -- I'm holding off until Saturday night to celebrate the solstice. I'm celebrating the Spanish way, the witchy way, on St. John's Eve, what I've always known as la noche de San Juan. 

The Spanish version of the original Old Christian/Pagan tradition would call for a bonfire on a beach -- either on the ocean or river bank or lake -- and midnight bathing and bonfire jumping, as well as late night herb collecting, but I think I'll try a more quiet and cozy adaptation of the fire and water rituals from here at home. All my friends are away, and though my trusty Spaghetti Western side-kick Mr. Coe would love nothing more than a midnight adventure for two, lighting bonfires on the dog beach, I think we'll be better off at the house. BECAUSE IT'S GOING TO BE SPOOKY OUT THERE. This noche de San Juan is supposed to be extra special due to the fact that we're currently in a new moon -- the magic is said to be extra strong,  ooh la la! So, those of you looking to avoid witchy influences in your life, stay out of the dark and light a candle or three! And for those of you wanting to embrace the witchiness, take advantage of this most important Witches' Sabbath, your spells and incantations should be exponentially more powerful. I'll report back on my own shenanigans Saturday night.

Speaking of witchy, spooky things, check out my afternoon reading:  

Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria (2006) is of special interest these days.

More on those later. 

Heaven is a hammock and stack of spooky reading on a summer afternoon, indeed. And gazpacho. I still have so, so, so much gazpacho. 

Sun Moon Waning

Quiet evening at home. I'm finishing my final Enriqueta Martí post and it's exhausting. I'll be happy to let this one go, the sign of a successful exorcism. Roscoe's extra spooky tonight and doesn't want to go outside. Strong winds and a big moon, witching weather. I lit a candle for a friend's grandmother, it's burning strong. 

Found: Golden State Speller

A couple of weeks ago, while unpacking one of the last boxes of books and miscellany left in my parents' garage, I came across this old grade school spelling primer I bought when I was still a college student living in Santa Cruz. I remember buying this on a whim, for super cheap, at a weird old used and antique books store in Moss Landing. In the back, there were boxes full of old text books that had been used by area public schools. I only bought the one; I probably picked it because I liked the cover. I regret not picking up a couple others, especially now that the bookstore's gone. 

This one little artifact is pretty neat, though. I love the Viola Swamp/Big Brother tone of the notice stamped on the inside front cover. Also, note that this particular book was only in use for four years. WHAT.  Those were the good old days, I guess, when the state was somehow flush with cash devoted to education funding. In the middle of the Great Depression. It actually makes me really sad to think about how priorities have changed in this state and the country as a whole. 

How super neat is this? I'm assuming that the "Laurel School" is now the Louden Nelson Community Center in downtown Santa Cruz.

Here's a nice peek at what fourth graders in California public schools were given in order to learn how to spell: 

Trying to come to terms with the fact that people once used the plural of beef -- beeves -- in any way, shape, or form is kind of breaking my brain. 

Similarly, thinking of teaching children vocabulary useful for serving, specifically, good foods really tickles me.

My favorite part about the book, by far, is that it came with a couple pages of notes that a school teacher had written up hidden in the very back. He or she (she? ladies handwriting, or did everybody have lovely penmanship in the '30s?) must have been preparing their lesson plan at the last minute. I WOULD KNOW. 

They look like notes for an American history or regional studies lesson. I'm especially curious about the "demographic" groups listed on the sheet on the left -- antebellum society of the rural South? How many large plantations survived the American civil war? I WILL NOT LET THIS BECOME A NEW PROCRASTINATION INVESTIGATION.

Rooms (and a beach chair) With A View

I really do love my little office on campus. It has crazy blue retro carpeting, a matching blue filing cabinet (locked, and missing the keys, unfortunately... it's purely decorative now), and has, what seems like, all the original furniture and shelving from when the building was first built in the late 1960s.

The best part, though, is the big plate glass window running along the outer wall, just below the ceiling.  I took the photo above last Friday, looking up while seated in front of my laptop at my desk. What a view, right? Redwoods and a bright patch of sky right outside the window. This is Santa Cruz (and the university campus) at its best.

Last Friday was, of course, every campus educator and employee's least favorite holiday: 

4/20. 

This year, it formed part of a trifecta of awesome (or awful, depending on how you see it, of course): 

1. 4/20

2. Friday

3. The first day of absolutely gorgeous, high 70s, clear skies of the spring

This is a recipe for lots and lots and lots of tourists from out of town, both on campus at the university,  and downtown and at the boardwalk and beaches. Which brings a lot of traffic, people driving poorly, and young people wandering in and out of the street, super high and super stupid. I see it as awful. I also sound like an old person. 

I'm not that old. I'm just over it.

I wasn't going to let the stoned tourists ruin it for me completely, though, so a friend and I went out for a post-work drink at the only place we could think of that wouldn't be over-run by out-of-towners and students. The bar of the super fancy hotel at the foot of the wharf. Nice view, as you can see. 

The following day was brighter and shinier and warmer, and Santa Cruz was just clogged to capacity with people from over the hill. I drove into town with Roscoe to go to the dog beach, but ended up driving north out of town on highway 1. I drove until I saw the first beach with space for a dog to run and play, over the county line, past Año Nuevo State Park. I drove all the way to Bean Hollow. 

We spent a lovely afternoon on the beach. I took this photo right before we left, just as the fog was rolling in from the sea. Perfect Brontë beach weather at the end of a visit to my favorite California Gothic beach. I got to drive the extra 5 minutes north to Pescadero and pick up a loaf of Arcangeli Grocery's famous artichoke bread, too. A successful Saturday drive to the dog beach.  

Septic Woes

Oh, so sad. The house's septic system is troubled. There's a blockage between the septic tank and the leach fields, and we need to find it. Here's Jason digging a trench to nowhere. This picture was taken pretty early on. He dug another five feet after this was taken, which took another day and a half due to the insane network of ancient oak tree roots that he had to cut up and take out. All for nought, we subsequently learned that the pipe we were trying to expose had been abandoned nearly 20 years ago. We had to find the new pipe. So we started digging in the opposite direction. 

See that terrible cave underneath the concrete that we dug out? I had to crawl in there to search for the elusive new pipe. Just me, a trowel, and a tiny flashlight. And dirt and roots and dirt. But I found it. Guess which direction it was going in? 

That's right, it's going directly for the center of the cement patio, right where I've marked with blue chalk. A construction crew's coming tomorrow to cut a hole into the patio and search for the mythical distribution box that we think has been taken over by oak tree roots. Hopefully, everything will be fixed by tomorrow afternoon and we can get back to normal water/toilet/shower usage.

If you ever want to really come face-to-face with your finite resource consumption (specifically that of water for household use), try living in a mountain home with an out-of-commission septic system. We generally try to conserve water -- and gas, and electricity -- at home on a day-to-day basis, but this is ridiculous. Because we need for the pipe between the tank and the leach field to be empty in order to fix the system, we emptied the tank a week ago, and we need to keep it from filling up all the way to the pipe-line in the mean time. We're using as little water as possible when we do dishes, flushing infrequently (GROSS), and not using the shower at all. I've been showering at the gym, Jason's even resorted to "showering" in the yard with the garden house (don't laugh it wasn't funny yes it was okay I laughed). It's a good thing our washing machine is hooked up to a grey water system, if not I'd be washing laundry in a bucket in the yard. MOUNTAIN LIVING. 


If we're to look on the bright side, it's so far been an incredible learning experience. I know all kinds of things about double-chamber septic tanks and distribution boxes and leach fields and aerobic vs. anaerobic systems and etc. etc. etc. One evening, as I was gazing down on the sinister cement hatch covering the septic tank's output from the kitchen, I had a single, perfect Murder She Wrote realization:

The best place to rid oneself of a dead body? A septic tank. A terrible, stinky, watery grave, with loads of anaerobic bacteria to speedily reduce the corpse to sludge. You're welcome. And, of course, the best time to dump a body in a septic tank is when the outlet's already been dug up for maintenance reasons. It's the only way to not arouse suspicions. Jason is not amused.

Wish us luck. 

Sand Dogs

Yesterday, I drove Roscoe and his BFF Leila to the dog beach in Santa Cruz for an hour of extended horse (doggie) play. 

These two get along ridiculously well. All they want to do when they're together is rough-house and chase each other and bite each other's tails and wrestle and bark and snarl and bare their teeth and chew on each other's necks and ears and basically act like rabid, wild beasts. I used to kind of poop myself every time they'd mess around like this on the beach back in the day, but I now understand that it's all fun and games. It's a little embarrassing when there's a crowd on the beach and they look on, mortified. I just roll my eyes and shrug and walk away. These two are just crazy sand dogs. 

Oh, hey, what's up?

Checking out the beach.

It was a beautiful, stormy day out on the beach. Prime Brontë weather. We got caught in a light sprinkle just as a new storm system rolled in.

Sand dogs in action.

Roscoe, especially, gets pretty crazy looking. It's the feral canine within, I guess.

Phew. Time to take a break and oggle the other dogs on the beach, clearly. 

I love all the sand art etched in to the cliffs along this beach. There's all kinds of bizarro goodness left behind by winter birds, junkies, kids, and weirdos. Here's a nice example on the northern-most cliffs. 

I decided to take a portrait of the dogs in front of it. I don't have very good voice-command with Leila, but I was able to put Roscoe into a sit-stay as I backed up to take the shot. 

That lasted just about as long as it took Leila to wander off... 

Sand dogs will be sand dogs, after all.

Brontë weather.

Misty San Lorenzo Valley, taken from my side yard during a lull in the storm.

After an extended Indian Summer - that even made a reappearance halfway through January, it seriously just didn’t want to go - we’re finally experiencing some winter in Santa Cruz. It’s been raining and storming on and off for weeks now, making everything soupy and misty, sometimes snowy and hail-y, windy and sleet-y, but generally damp and chilly, for a couple of months now. The snow in the mountains rarely sticks (though it did hang out on top of Loma Prieta for a couple of days at the beginning of the month), but the wind gusts and driving rain on their own can be pretty impressive.

Some people hate it, it gives others the S.A.D.s, but I find it thrilling in a beautiful, kind of crazy way. I call it Brontë Weather: beautiful but dangerous, sublime (as characterized by both Burke and Kant), and generally louder and more awesome than you. I think it’s the perfect weather for enjoying the local geography. Picture it: redwoods swaying in the fog, churning seas, craggy, foam-topped shorelines. Brontë weather makes the best beach outings (the beaches are awesomely scary! and devoid of sunbathers! just you and a bunch of other people with dogs!), and, when you’re home, baking and soup making, and candle-lit (you never know when the power’s going to go out and stay out) fire building. Though it sometimes feels spooky and sinister, it’s arrival is my favorite time of year here in the Monterey Bay. Who am I kidding, I love spooky and sinister. When I think of California Gothic, I think of the Monterey Bay under these kinds of weather conditions. I wonder if Steinbeck did so as well. Denis Johnson certainly did (well, not true, his Already Dead was set in Mendocino. whatever, close enough, I digress). 

I originally called it Wuthering Heights Weather, but I’m trying to make an effort to be a bit more inclusive, especially now that Jane Eyre is getting the Hollywood treatment. Wuthering Heights is still my favorite Brontë novel (and Emily my favorite Brontë) but I’m warming up more and more to Charlotte and certain aspects of her Jane Eyre and I’m curious as to how this new film will interpret the original text (I also love director Cary Fukunaga’s other film Sin nombre [2009], so I admit to having high hopes). More on all that to come. 

Anyways. I’m off to nurse this cold with some tea and netflix.