Sewell’s sticks

It’s summer in Southern California, and nothing says “summer” quite like a gray-haired man in buttless chaps skinning a catfish by the side of a river.

I witnessed such an individual in Victorville yesterday. Mind you, Victorville is not the type of place where you generally find eccentrics wandering the streets — that would be Barstow’s province — but this was a special occasion, being the Huck Finn’s Jubilee bluegrass festival. I can’t imagine a less fitting place to hold such a festival than Victorville, which is not in any way, shape or form rustic, quaint, quirky or literary — in fact, it should probably be the poster child for the phrase “suburban wasteland,” with its thrown-together expanses of strip malls and abysmal traffic. But it happens to have a large park with a river with actual water in it, which I suppose is reason enough to have a festival there.

Anyway, the gentleman in the buttless chaps was at the park enjoying the festivities and catching catfish with his daughter, a surly-looking teenager with facial piercings wearing baggy polka-dotted pants and a large belt buckle that said “U SUCK.” They were matter-of-factly gutting the fish in front of a crowd of gawkers including myself, a coworker from Barstow, a disaffected pubescent boy who was sitting on the bank of the river smoking a cigarette as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and an obnoxious 12-year-old kid who kept attempting to give them advice on their skinning technique until his dad told him to shut up.

Honestly, if I didn’t find humans so entertaining, I don’t know how I would survive.

When I read that Snowball the famous deer is bound for a petting zoo today, I cocked my head and smiled nostalgically at the computer screen. Weirdly enough, the custody battle over that deer turned out to be the highest-profile story I got to cover in my Molalla days, and I’ll always look back on her fondly.

I’m not really sorry that I’m not covering the story now, because it did get a little old. But I’m happy to see that Snowball & Co. will continue creating circus-quality entertainment and diversion for the masses (albeit at the taxpayers’ expense) for some time yet.

There were reports that less people would be traveling this Memorial Day, but I bucked the trend. Even with gas having shot past $4 a gallon and climbing steadily, I was not about to waste a three-day weekend hanging out in Barstow. Instead, I met up with some friends in Lake Havasu City, prompting my Los Angeles-born dad to make fun of me for going native. Apparently going to Lake Havasu on Memorial Day weekend is a stereotypically Southern California thing to do.

“Next thing you know, you’ll be getting a dune buggy,” he said. (more…)

I officially rejoined the land of the living this weekend — which is to say, my Internet service finally got hooked up. As soon as the installation guy was gone, I ran to my computer as if to a beloved friend recently emerged from a coma.

Suddenly, my lifeline to the greater world was restored. Now I once again have access to instant curiousity satisfaction via Google, online news sites and other useful items, and the hours of pleasant time-wasting afforded by blogs and social networking sites.

Not that the two months without home Internet access were a total waste. I read books, watched movies, talked to other human beings, got out of town, went hiking, went to Vegas, went to Coachella, went to L.A., saw jive dancing and burlesque shows, saw Prince and Dwight Yoakham, saw a new independent movie called “Leaving Barstow,” and took promo pictures of a local band on a roof.

That last one gave me a strange flash of deja vu to being in Tucson at the age of 17, when I was newly introduced to journalism through a community college class that I had stumbled into by accident. The journalism department allowed me to use its digital camera, which was very fancy in those days although dinky by today’s standards, and I decided to profile a band whose lead singer I was terribly enamored of. He was flighty and ambivalent, but thanks to him, I knew that Modest Mouse was cool before almost anyone else did, and I got to mope around pitying myself and feeling self-important when he jilted me, which is all that any teenage girl really wants. In the meantime, I took pictures of his band on a roof.

There are a lot of things about Barstow that bring me back to my Tucson days, in fact — the dry air, the elements of Latino culture and frustrated youth. It no longer feels like an entirely alien land. Still, I’m glad to have the Internet to keep me connected to the outside world. Let no one speak badly of modern technology. It is a beautiful thing.

The desert attracts interesting people — in that hunkered-down-in-a-bunker-waiting-for-the-collapse-of-Western-civilization kind of way. People tend to live in the desert because they don’t want to be part of normal society. Some of them live in places like Sandy Valley, out on the California/Nevada line, where they killed a man by shooting him in the leg and then setting him on fire in his own mobile home.

Some of them spend their time cooking meth and stealing copper wire.

Others are harmless codgers with mechanical leanings and a distrust of Uncle Sam, like Harvey the worm poop guy.

Harvey’s a retired Marine Corps mechanic who lives on a one and a half acre plot outside of Barstow, where he harvests worm turds (or, as they’re more politely known, “castings”) for use as topsoil. He feeds his worms on pig manure, thus keeping his pig sty smelling fresh. He raises chickens and grows vegetables and makes fuel out of used restaurant fryer oil. You can run any diesel-engine vehicle on straight vegetable oil, and in the desert, the oil’s tendency to gel at low temperatures becomes less of a problem than in chillier climates.

Harvey has two tractors and a truck running on the SVO now. A broken-down Volkswagen Rabbit that he bought from a tweeker for $25 sits waiting to have its engine rebuilt so that it, too, can tool around smelling like french fries. Eventually, Harvey said he hopes to buy a generator that will run on SVO, thus taking himself off the power grid completely.

I went to Harvey’s place on Saturday in hopes of getting a story for Earth Day, but he’s afraid the government will come to get him and wouldn’t give me his last name. Whether that fear is founded or not, I don’t know or particularly want to.

But at least now I know where to find a good diesel mechanic who knows how to build a yacht motor, should I ever need one. And I know where to look for organic vegetables, fresh eggs and worm poop at a reasonable price.

For my loyal readers who may be wondering if I fell off a mountain, wandered across the path of a passing UFO or got “taken care of” by Mafiosos from Las Vegas, none of those things have happened. The reason for my recent silence is much simpler — I have been living in a vacuum with no Internet access outside of the office where, believe it or not, I actually have to spend my time doing work every day rather than posting on my personal blog.

Barstow has karaoke, decent Mexican food, mountains to hike, a ghost town and a delightfully cheesy 1950s diner just up the road in Yermo. It even has sushi. What it does not have is any coffee shop outside of Starbucks, a bookstore outside of the one run by the Mormons, or wireless internet access outside of a hotel. Apparently it is important that the travelers passing through en route to L.A. or Vegas have a chance to check their e-mail, but as for the locals — well, if they want the Internet, they’d better shell out $45 a month, something that I didn’t feel financially solvent enough to do immediately upon arriving.

“We need to introduce Barstow to the wonders of wireless Internet,” I complained to one of my coworkers the other day. “I feel like I’m in a cultural vacuum.”

“You are in a cultural vacuum,” explained the coworker, who is fond of Barstow but maintains a realistic view.

A quick trip back to Portland for a friend’s wedding where I was the designated photographer this weekend brought on a strong fit of homesickness that hadn’t struck me before.

Despite the insistence of the groom’s father, who also happened to be the Lutheran minister performing the service, on using the word “obey” in the vows; going off on an unfortunate tangent involving woman being “Adam’s rib;” and giving the groom a lecture about what women mean when they say “Whatever,” as if he hadn’t had seven years of dating and cohabitation to figure out his wife-to-be’s communication style; the wedding was a pleasant interlude. I wasn’t the kind of little girl who has her Very Special Day planned out in elaborate detail at the age of 10, and in fact, for a long time, I regarded weddings as a stupid affair conducted more for the benefit of social norms and people’s parents than for the couple pledging to spend their life together. But over the past couple of years, I have come to see that there are reasons for binding commitment between two life partners, beyond the tax benefits. And I’ve come to appreciate weddings as the only event outside of funerals that has the ability to pull friends and family from all over the country into one room at one time.

Of course, what that meant was that I saw people I hadn’t seen in months or years, as well as people that I saw every week until a month ago. I remembered how much I like my friends, and then got on an airplane and left, knowing it will be months or years before I see them again. Until now, the relocation to California felt more like a strange working vacation. After the visit to Portland, it feels like my life. As I sit at an Internet terminal in the Las Vegas airport, this thought is slightly depressing.

But tomorrow is a new day, there are stories to be uncovered and told in Barstow, desert to be explored, and once I give in and shell out the $45 to get hooked back up to the lifeline of society (that is, the Internet), I’ll probably feel better about everything.

I didn’t have high expectations for Barstow. I expected flat, dusty expanses of strip mall. I expected ugly. So upon arriving, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was nestled in the middle of rolling hills. More than that, it immediately felt familiar.

Even before I arrived, when I was on dusty Highway 18 heading toward Victorville on Saturday, I passed first a series of palm-reading shops and then a store advertising its date shakes, and I realized that the landscape no longer felt like Southern California but like the American Southwest where I grew up. The desert here is sparser than the Arizona desert where I spent a good chunk of my early life, the Sonoran desert with stately saguaro cacti poking their postcard-ready silhouettes into the sky, and the bright yellow blooms of the prickly pears in spring. This desert is brown. But there are rolling hills; there is the freeway, stretching on across a bleak expanse, leading the masses to Vegas or beyond.

Unlike Molalla, Barstow feels to me not like a small town but like a very small city. It is isolated from the rest of the San Bernardino county High Desert sprawl to the south, where Victorville, Hesperia and Apple Valley blend into an indistinguishable palette of strip mall and new development homes. Barstow is still more sprawling than an Oregon town of the same population would be - a function of urban planning laws or the lack thereof. But Barstow is still a self-contained unit, a dot of civilization in the desert.

It’s a transient place. Waiting in line at the DMV, I found that the two men standing behind me were truck drivers, the man several places ahead of me was an Army officer, recently returned from Iraq. When I reached the front of the line, the girl behind the counter saw that I was from Oregon and asked in a slightly incredulous tone, “Why did you move here?”

The apartment complex where I live now feels oddly transient, too, like a motel that has seen better days — not the type where you pay by the hour but perhaps a motel along a stretch of highway not frequently trafficked. There is a pool laid out in the center of the complex, with four tall palm trees in the courtyard behind it. The buildings are light peach colored stucco and the roof is grayish blue and purple tile. Inside my apartment, there is much more space than I need for the amount of furniture I have, which is none - aside from a mattress and box spring that I picked up for free on craigslist. My neighbors arrive en masse at about 5 p.m., blaring hip hop in their cars, but then they herd their kids inside and all is quiet. Apartment living is odd. I have gone from living in a house with no neighbors, with two roommates, seven dogs, two horses and a one-eyed cat, to living by myself surrounded by perhaps a hundred strangers.

I spent my first day on the job chasing a story about scrap metal thieves stealing plumbing devices known as backflow preventers, to be followed up later in the week by the tale of a pair of enterprising if not intelligent metal thieves who apparently stole 1,900 rounds of small arms ammunition from nearby Fort Irwin and then set it on fire in an attempt to extract the copper for scrap metal. Needless to say, since I ended up writing about it, that did not go as planned. The other stories of the week included human bones found in the desert, elder abuse, and the narrowly averted closing of a local juvenile court facility.

Whatever else I may find myself to be, I don’t think I’ll be bored in Barstow.

I have crammed everything I could into the back of a Ford Escort wagon, with a painting and two bikes strapped to the outside. Everything else, I have given away, thrown out and, in the case of a few boxes of books and CDs, mailed to myself at the general delivery address in Barstow.

I went for one last rendezvous in Sisters and learned to snowboard. I went to Astoria to cover one last court hearing. I sang my last karaoke at the Horse Shoe, the bar full of old bikers just north of Molalla, and followed it up with one last uproarious night of karaoke in Portland at the Alibi tiki bar. I went for my last horseback ride down through the cow pasture behind my place in Molalla. I had my last cozy dinner in Portland, said my goodbyes to the close friends who mattered and to the people I encountered randomly along the way, including the baristas, gas station attendants and post office clerks of Molalla. They knew I was leaving because they read it in the paper.

Then I loaded up the last of my belongings, picked up a craigslist rider in Eugene and drove my weighted down station wagon over the mountains and out of Oregon. After weeks of stress and sentimental goodbyes, it feels good to be gone. The homesickness will kick in soon enough, I know, but for now I’m happy to have the open road before me, with no expectations other than that I will start my new life next week.

There are times when I feel like life is just a long process of acquiring and getting rid of things. Yesterday, with an extreme sense of relief, I got rid of Sport, the Subaru Justy that has been an embarassingly prominent part of my life for the last year. Sport not only got me stuck in the snow, but ever since I dented him on that pole last spring, he could bring down the class of any neighborhood just by showing up. I would arrive at the scene of a car crash to report on it, for instance, and cops would assume that I was part of the incident. (Okay, that never happened, but I did get some funny looks).

Sport has gone off to spend the remainder of his doddering old age with a genuine Oregon tweeker who gave me $250 in cash. I don’t have positive proof that he was a tweeker, but he had that gaunt, nervous energy typical of the species, and when I went to meet him with the car, the first thing he said was, “It doesn’t have any leaks or anything, does it?”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “It leaks oil. I put that in the craigslist ad. It needs a new oil pump.”

“Oh,” he said. “I don’t care if it does, I was just asking. I guess I didn’t read the ad that good.”

He handed me the cash, then looked at the engine, then drove off, probably into a ditch. When I got home, I found that a friend had left me a message with the phone number of a guy who buys Justys to convert them into electric cars. I felt briefly sorry that I had not held out to give Sport this nobler new lease on life, but cash in hand is cash in hand.

My new car is electric blue, a good California color, and I’ve named it Lucky because I’m hoping that it will be.

I have always been a list maker. It could be a sign of an orderly or disorderly mind, depending on how you look at things. Partly it has to do with the fact that if I don’t have something written down and in front of me, I inevitably forget it (I was a compulsive note-taker long before I was a reporter). And partly it just gives me a sense of enormous relief to have a sheet full of to-dos in front of me with all the boxes checked. In my internal battlefield, lists are the way in which the Type A personality bludgeons the free spirit inside of me with a blunt object.

I have two weeks and a short list of remaining things to do before I leave Oregon. This is it, the last of the essentials:

Sell my old car

Get trip permit for new car

Get rid of everything that won’t fit in or on new car

Go to Bend and hang out in a cabin

Go to Astoria and see (hopefully) the end of a story

Have coffee and/or drinks with everyone I care about seeing before I leave

Don’t have coffee and/or drinks with anyone I don’t care about seeing before I leave

Sing karaoke in Molalla

Sing karaoke in Portland

Pack

Clean

Don’t panic

I wasn’t lying when I said I would move forward in 2008. So quickly did I move forward, in fact, that I am now faced with the prospect of leaving Oregon in exactly three weeks. I’m going back to the desert, although not the desert I grew up in. I’m going to a daily paper in Barstow, CA, the halfway point between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, about as far removed from the lush beauty of the Willamette Valley as you can get. I found the job posting on New Year’s Eve, in fact, right about the time that I was formulating my New Year’s resolutions. You might say that was a sign, but nevermind about signs. I’ll get to that later.

(more…)

The advantages of country living do not include living at the top of a monstrous hill where the county doesn’t bother to plow the roads. That’s how I got to waste three hours of my life last night when my dinky little Subaru Justy got itself lodged in the snow on a hill in the middle of nowhere.

(more…)

Forgive me, for my thoughts are disjointed, but it’s been too long since I’ve written here.

Thought #1 — I do not like January. I’m also not a fan of February. The holidays are over, the new year is underway, but it doesn’t feel very “new” any more. It feels like the beginning of another three months of winter. If I’m lucky, it doesn’t rain through the whole weekend and I get some exercise. Otherwise, I don’t. In the summer, it was possible to go for a bike ride after work at 7 p.m., or, if I had wanted to, before work at 6 a.m. Now, it’s dark not long after 5 p.m., and it’s still dark out at 7 a.m., and it’s all I can do to get myself out of bed then. The one time I actually managed to get up before dawn in recent memory was at 3:30 a.m., and it was because my fire department pager kept going off with the code for a house fire. After it woke me up for the third time, I finally got up, got dressed and went to take pictures.

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This week has caused me to label myself “the most famous person who no one’s ever heard of.” First there was the movie soundtrack (see my last posting), and then my photos showed up (with credit) on the TV news in two different states. You can see one of the photos and the story here.

It had been a slow week in Molalla until about 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, when a pair of young Ukrainian cousins decided to drive a Jeep Cherokee into the Molalla River. Were they suicidal? No. Drunk? Possibly, although I have no proof of that. There’s a popular four-wheeling spot down by the river, and apparently driving around in the mud wasn’t exciting enough for these two. No, these fellows decided to ford the river.

(more…)

They don’t call me “Hollywood” for nothing, folks. I just discovered that thousands of movie-goers in theaters around the nation are, perhaps at this very moment, listening to my voice in a movie I haven’t even seen.

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