The Beach

For today, a short story...

The man walked up to a beach shrouded in fog.  It looked familiar but it had been a long time since he'd seen it, so he wasn't completely sure.  The last time he'd seen it, the sun was shining and the sky was pale blue with just a wisp of mist hanging at the intersection of sea and land.  He looked at it for some time, studying it's features.  Finally, he decided to speak.

"Aren't you that beach from 1997?  Remember?  I was driving by and you were lying naked there in the afternoon sun." 

The beach said nothing.  However, the longer he stood there, the more convinced the man became.

"Come on, you remember...  Children were collecting shells and driftwood.  There was a Labrador splashing in the surf.  And there were blackberries as big as my thumb growing in the dunes right over there..." 

Still the beach was silent.  The man grew frustrated that the beautiful beach refused to acknowledge his return.   He decided to try again.

"Remember how I stood here and ran my fingers through your sand?  And how I took my shoes off and walked a mile out to the water to meet you?" 

The beach made no sound.  A wave rolled across the face of the beach, washing the sand away in rivulets that resembled tears.  The man thought for awhile.  Maybe he had imagined it?  It didn't matter, he thought, there are lots of beaches.  Maybe there is another that is sunny?  He sat down to wait.  He would have to see it in the sunshine to be sure.

*  *  * 

A man walked up to the beach.  The beach lay comfortably shrouded in a blanket of fog.  The beach thought the man looked familiar, but then again, people were always stopping to stare at her.  After a while, they all looked the same.  He stood there for awhile searching her and it made her uncomfortable.  Finally he spoke.

 "Aren't you that beach from 1997?  Remember?  I was driving by and you were lying naked there in the afternoon sun."

 "That describes approximately 100 days of the year," thought the beach, "and that means there have been 1,900 days just like it since that I haven't seen you.  You just remember me because you saw me naked that day."

The man spoke again.   "Come on, you remember... Children were collecting shells and driftwood.  There was a Labrador splashing in the surf.  And there were blackberries as big as my thumb growing in the dunes right over there..."

This was an improvement.  He saw the gift that the beach had given that day.  The beach gave the gift every day though, even on days when she wasn't beautiful.  The man seemed to understand the gift but she wondered if he understood that she had no choice but to give it.  If she didn't, it would be taken.

The man seemed frustrated, his voice had risen before, but this time the man spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. "Remember how I stood here and ran my fingers through your sand?  And how I took my shoes off and walked a mile out to the water to meet you?"

Tears washed over the face of the beach.  She remembered that day now, how the man had touched her sand and imagined the children collecting shells and driftwood were their own.  She remembered how the sun felt warm and instead of feeling naked, it made her feel like she glowed with the sparkles of a thousand little suns.  She tried to speak to him but all she could do was summon a memory for the man.  She rued that he had chosen such a foggy day to come to visit her but she hoped the man would stay.

The man sat down to wait. 

Clearing fog along the beach at the Oregon coast.  iPhone 6s

Crater Lake

When we woke up on Saturday morning, we packed up our sleeping bags and tent and backtracked into Eureka for the wheel bearings that had been ordered the afternoon before.  The guy at the counter looked for my parts for a few minutes and just as I was resigning myself to the fact that they may not have arrived, he produced two small boxes from a plastic tote near the register.  I thanked him for getting them in time and returned to the far end of the parking lot.  I jacked up the front wheel, broke the lug nuts and removed the wheel hub from the right front wheel.  As I suspected, the bearing races were spalled, cracked and filled with small metal shavings.  I cleaned them with paper towels and returned to the store to buy a mallet to beat the damaged races from the hub.  It took me about an hour to repack the new bearings and install them, making sure this time to torque the hub back on the spindle and back it off one notch for the cotter pin to seat in the castle nut.  After another ten minutes of wiping the grease off, we were back on four wheels.

The noise that screeched at me for the past two hundred miles was completely gone, and the sweet rumble of the exhaust played solo once again as we rolled north towards Crescent City.  Around 11am, I spied a gaggle of wild blackberry bushes on an abandoned road and we pulled off.  For half an hour, we stuffed our faces, fingers and lips the color of dark bruises.  We turned east at Crescent City and as we climbed through the Rogue River Valley, the crisp temperatures of the coast climbed into the triple digits.  We stopped early in Grants Pass, Oregon and I let the kids swim for an hour before dinner.

On Sunday morning we resumed our eastward trek, climbing to 6,000 feet to Mazama Campground just inside Crater Lake National Park.  Crater Lake is a spectacular remnant of a mountain the size of Mount Hood that blew its top around 7,700 years ago—in geologic time, practically yesterday.  The mountain collapsed into the deep magma chamber below, and over the intervening period, the caldera filled with snow melt.  Five trillion gallons of the purest fresh water on Earth now occupy the bowl, creating an awesome sapphire-blue lake nearly 2,000 feet deep.  It’s gorgeous and awe-inspiring, and one can’t help but look at the massive hole and wonder what it must have been like when the mountain disintegrated into a plume of ash and rock.

On Tuesday we'll clear out and head back to the Oregon coast for a low and slow cruise through what I consider to be some of the best coastal scenery in the United States.  If I can get the kids to turn off their iPads, maybe they'll get to see some of it too!

Crater Lake is impossibly blue.  This is a view through the trees to Phantom Shiprock.  Nikon D800, Nikkor 24-120mm @ 38mm, ISO 100, f8, 1/100 sec.  

Picking wild blackberries.  Nikon D800, Nikkor 24-120mm lens @ 58mm, ISO 250, 1/160 sec, f5.6.

Parker and Samantha among the wildflowers at Crater Lake.  Nikon D800, Nikkor 24-120mm lens @ 66mm, ISO 320, f5.6, 1/250 sec.

Man vs Machine IV "The Long Way Home"

Man vs Machine IV pulled out of the driveway yesterday morning around 8:30am.  As you may recall, last year's trip was something of a manifest destiny, a trip I always knew I would take.  I traveled some of the same roads I traveled as a kid and visited some of the places I visited on my post-bar trip almost twenty years ago.  It was conceived in my mind long before I had kids and long before I imagined doing it in a vintage car.  I also imagined a longer trip that would capture almost the entire Western United States.  When our trip to Paris and Hawaii were over last summer, I realized that the voyage I had imagined was too big, too long and way, way too much for me to handle alone with two kids.  So I chopped it in half.  We saw the crown jewels of national parks in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota and skipped the Pacific Northwest.  With my sabbatical year nearly complete, I decided to close it the way I opened it, with an epic road trip.  I dug out my original itinerary from last year and made some edits and what emerged was Man vs. Machine IV.  A trip up the West Coast to Oregon, Crater Lake, Mt Hood, east to Glacier and Montana and then south through Yellowstone and the Tetons, doubling back on the northbound portion of last year's trip.  I rebuilt the car over the winter, so as I pulled out of the driveway, I confess that I felt a knot of anxiety about the reliability of the machine that had served us so well last summer.  Any time you rip anything apart and put it back together, mistakes will be made.  They just will.  

As I loaded our gear into the back of the old Pontiac I looked more than once at the Honda CR-V sitting in the driveway.  Modern cars are so much better than the antiques that were made when our parents were young.  They have fuel injection and power outlets and navigation and yes, air conditioning.  They are built to run 200,000 miles with little more than regular oil changes.  But they don't have soul.  They don't have chrome.  And they don't have a piece of you inside them.  They don't have traces of your blood on the inside of the cylinder walls.  So I kept packing the trunk of the Pontiac.  

As we barreled up the I-5, fate smiled.  The temperature in the Central Valley was about 95.  Hot, but not unbearable.  We ran almost 80 mph the whole way and the rebuilt engine performed flawlessly.  But somewhere around San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg's ghost swept alongside us and I began to hear a howl, softly at first and then louder.  It wasn't my kids, no, this time it was coming from somewhere up front.  After we crossed the Golden Gate, traffic slowed and we drove the rest of the way to Sonoma at little more than 25mph.  The noise abated and it didn't overheat, which was a problem that plagued us last summer.  We stopped for dinner and got a motel.

This morning though as we resumed our journey over to Highway 1 and up to Mendocino, the howl began to roar.  As I do when I begin to troubleshoot, I imagined the car as being made of glass, so I can visualize nearly every moving component.  As I drove, I dropped the shifter to neutral and noted any changes, I swerved to the right and left, I braked and accelerated.  The noise vanished when I turned right, but otherwise it was constant.

We stopped in Mendocino for lunch and when I got out of the car, I walked around to the right front wheel and on a hunch, pushed the fender back and forth.  The right front wheel flopped about an inch in both directions.  The wheel bearing had failed.  After lunch, I found a quiet spot and tightened the spindle nut.  The noise disappeared on the afternoon leg of the drive but reappeared as we approached Eureka, California.  The damage had already been done.

As luck would have it, I was only a few miles from an O'Reilly Auto Parts store and when I walked in at 5:15pm they announced that their cutoff for having the parts delivered from an outlying warehouse was 5:30, so they would have them by 9am.  We limped the rest of the way to our campsite and set up for the night.  It's not the best start to our reprise of last year's epic road trip but mistakes are inevitable and all we can do is fix them and drive on.  So tomorrow, I'll perform the requisite surgery in the parking lot of an O'Reilly Auto Parts Store in Eureka.  And then, on to Oregon.

Tightening the spindle nut in Mendocino, CA.  It was too little, too late.  iPhone 6S.

Christmas Morning

After three days of heavy snow, I woke up Christmas morning to a pale blue sky.  I had been hoping to get some photographs of the Tetons while we were skiing in Jackson Hole, but the weather had not been cooperating.  So when I saw that tantalizing suggestion of blue, I jumped out of bed, pulled on my long underwear and three layers of shirts, including a heavy wool sweater and grabbed my ski parka and my Nikon.

The kids were already plugged into the iPad watching Frosty the Snowman, and Quimby was propped up in bed with the remote watching HGTV.  "I'll be back in a couple hours," I said as I closed the door.  They know the drill, so there was barely a nod.  The car was parked out in front of the hotel and when I started it up, the dash read five degrees.  The snow creaked in hollow protest under the wheels as I got underway and headed north out of Jackson toward the mountains, ice smoke billowing behind the car as I picked up speed.

Two miles out of town, the Tetons were in full view for the first time, the craggy peaks jutting out of the tundra like broken bones wrapped in gauze.  It's no secret that the best photographs come with a price.  They tend not to happen in perfect weather and they almost never happen after you've had breakfast.  It takes patience, practice and a not insignificant amount of disappointment but the reward, when it finally comes, is more than worth it.  On this particular Christmas morning, I nearly froze my fingers solid and only came away with a few shots, but the ones I got were epic.  And what could be better than spending Christmas morning in front of a silent altar of ice and stone, admiring creation.  Merry Christmas!

The Tetons are the most beautiful mountains any time of year, but wrap them in snow and it's game over.  Nikon D800, Nikon 28-200mm lens @ 50mm, ISO 125, f9, 1/640 sec.

Guy Fawkes Day

The 14 bus crawled forward and then took an unexpected left on Edith Grove.  The beads of water were gathering on the window now and beginning to streak down in angular dotted lines, the raindrops tapping out a message in morse code.  I didn't want to go left, I wanted to go straight, on to Fulham Broadway.  I could see the blue jerseys out the window now, emblazoned with the word "Samsung" in white, and then it clicked.  There was a Chelsea match and Fulham Road was closed.  My bus was on diversion.

I jumped up as soon as the bus turned and rang the bell.  I immediately made the calculation that a twenty minute walk in the rain beat a forty minute diversion so I leaped out of my seat along with a handful of other impatient types, and seeing the angry crowd forming behind him, the bus driver hit the brakes and flung open the doors even though we weren't technically at a bus stop.  They can be practical that way--anything to avoid a mutiny.  We spilled out onto the sidewalk and scattered away in the early winter gloom.  It was dark now and at the halfway point, I opted for the shortcut through Eel Brook Common, preferring a quiet walk through the park to dodging drunken footballers on the road.  The broad sidewalk gave way to a narrow path along a blackened wall and then emptied into the inky expanse of the common.  As the sounds of the crowd faded, there was only the sound of my footsteps on the wet leaves and something else, something I hadn't noticed before.  In the distance, seemingly from all directions, there were fireworks.  Mostly just the bangs of the M-80 style firecrackers, but also the occasional screech and pop of bottle rockets. 

It turned out to be Guy Fawkes Day, a peculiarly English holiday that marks the anniversary of a failed plot to blow up Parliament by packing the storerooms below the then-wooden floor with gunpowder.  The ill-conceived plan was to blow it up while King James I and the entire parliament were gathered, paving the way for Elizabeth, then third in line to the throne, to ascend as a Catholic and save the island kingdom from the bloody Anglicans.  It didn't work.  The night before the big bang, the King received word of the plot and when they arrived at the store room, the hapless Guy Fawkes was caught guarding the stash.  Poor Guy was tortured on the rack and shortly gave up his co-conspirators, whereupon the rest were rounded up and summarily drawn and quartered.  It's a charming tale, and I admire the fact that 400 years on, the British still commemorate the failure of an otherwise ignoble man.  It's a sarcastic little holiday and I love it.  So today, we kept it alive here in America with some sparklers and a little bonfire in our backyard.

Huntington "Lake"

You know that feeling you get sometimes when you need a vacation from your "vacation"?  Well, after the blitzkrieg of Paris, Hawaii, Man vs. Machine III and the party planning, I was wiped.  After I returned the party rentals at the end of September and took down the lights, the forward momentum stalled out and what took its place was a combination of homework, school drop-offs/pick-ups and housework.  It's not exciting stuff, certainly not compared to the whirlwind that was the summer.  Not exactly blog-worthy either, so I took a break and turned my attention to some of the domestic tasks that I had been neglecting.

Never one to be without a project, I noticed that the pergola that sits behind our guest room had rotted to the point that I could stick a screwdriver through the 2x6's that held it up, and in an ill-considered moment while cleaning up from the party, I decided to give it a shove to see if it was still structurally sound.  What followed was a sound not unlike breaking styrofoam and then the entire structure twisted its way to the ground in a heap of rotten, mouldering wood.  I wasn't totally surprised that it came down, but I confess that I wasn't really looking forward to tackling this particular project first.  Nevertheless, you do what's in front of you and so I took some measurements and then retrieved my circular saw from the garage and began cutting firewood.

I have a bad reputation at 570 E. Glenarm for underestimating the time these little home improvement projects will take.  It's a combination of hubris and a failure to account for the sinkhole of time involved in just running the inevitable errands that these little projects require.  You need wood screws?  One trip to the hardware store has a way of eating half your day.  You know what I'm talking about.  When combined with the relatively small window of time (it seems) that lives between the school drop-off and pick-up, days have a way of turning into weeks.  And so a project that I estimated would take a week turned into almost three, but I'm pleased to report that it's nearly done, and tomorrow I'll drive the last screws and sweep the sawdust out of my driveway.  I'll do some work on the kitchen next, but I'm vowing to try being more realistic this time.

During all the sawing and painting, Samantha turned 10.  She usually has a party, but this time when I asked her what she wanted for her birthday she didn't skip a beat.  "I want to go camping," she said.  Notwithstanding the fact that she SAID she was having a good time on our road trip this summer, I had to wonder whether she was really enjoying it or was simply "managing upwards."  Let's face it--4300 miles in a vintage car, sleeping on the ground and eating road food that can test even the most ferrous of intestinal constitutions is not everyone's cup of tea.  And yet, when offered an open ended wish list of gifts or activities, the fact that she chose more of the same brought a smile to my face.  I made a reservation at a campground in the high Sierras near Huntington Lake and asked one final question: "Should we take the Pontiac?"  She considered it for a moment and then raised her eyebrows, "Well, we could... but air conditioning would be pretty nice."  She's 10 and already has more common sense than her dad.

So last weekend, we hit the road again.  You've no doubt heard about the drought we've been having in California.  For those of you living elsewhere, I can assure you it's serious.  It's been several years now with precipitation far below the average.  Farmers in the Central Valley, where much of this country's fresh produce is grown, have been drilling deeper and deeper wells to access water.  This spring I drove by Folsom lake south of San Francisco and was amazed to see the level far below the usual water mark.  I knew it was bad, but upon arriving at Huntington Lake, a man-made reservoir covering 1,441 acres, I was shocked to see a barren moonscape containing nothing but hundred-year old tree stumps normally covered by fifty feet of water.  It was a sobering reminder that if it doesn't rain this winter, or more specifically, if it doesn't snow enough in the Sierras to provide snow melt to feed California's water needs next summer, 2016 is going to be pretty interesting.

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Huntington "Lake".  Somewhere out there, I suspect still covered in the deepest part of what remains of this "lake", is said to be a B-24 that crashed shortly after World War II.  If there was ever a good time to recover it, I suspect it's now.  About a quarter of the way in from the righthand side, where the sand meets the treeline, you can see what used to be the marina, the boat slips now lying deflated.  iPhone 6.

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Late afternoon sun streams through the pine trees at Rancheria Campground, on the shores of Huntington Lake, Sierra Nevada, California.  iPhone 6.

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My pergola project is nearly complete.  Lifting a 20' 2x6 over my head was worth a month at the gym.  iPhone 6.