The Shadow of the Valley

Lake Skinner
California


I'm sitting here stuffed completely full of turkey and pie, looking at a map of California. There are several ways back to Texas from here. And that's where I'm going, by December 16th. A friend of mine is having surgery.

I could go south, pass by the Salton Sea, and on to Phoenix. Or I could go north, through Las Vegas, and on to the Canyonlands, and a corner of Colorado beyond. A little out of the way, but an easy road with things to see along it. Just get on Interstate 15 and set the cruise control. Nothing to it.

So I did. And it was easy, through San Bernardino, then up the cliff and on to Victorville, the land drying out, turning to caliche before my eyes. Then Barstow... Barstow? That sounds familiar....

Good Lord. Death Valley. I'm right outside Death Valley.

That brings back ill-met memories. I was there. In early March, around my birthday. 1978.

And I had ample reason to reflect upon the name before I left.

I drove out from Texas in a rattling old teal green Chevy pickup, drinking beer and throwing the cans in the passenger footwell. Those were the days. I had a Honda motorcycle strapped down back in the bed. A small bore twin cylinder road bike. Maybe 450cc. And maybe carrying just the tiniest chip on my shoulder.

Rollin, rollin, rollin. Though my head is swollen.

It was the first vacation I'd had since recovering from a slipped disc in my neck. Amazingly, the accident and my recovery made me cocky rather than cautious. Like I was one tough hombre, dude. The weather was alternately springlike and iffy all the way out, some sun but mostly windy and cold across West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

I stopped in Las Vegas for the first time. Yes, Mr. Giddings. Of course, Mr. Giddings. We'll be happy to cash your check. In fact we'll cash your whole checking account.

Won a pile of chips at blackjack and pissed it all away. Stayed up all night. While I was still flush, one of the prettier dealers told me about a hot spring out in the desert nearby. Mostly broke by morning, I couldn't remember her name, even if she used her real one, but I drove out into the desert and somehow found it. A little windblown and grubby place, attached to a cheap motel. But I soaked in there for 2 or 3 hours.

What was the name of that place? Somewhere north, I think. Probably not there anymore. It was barely there then.

That part is a blur. But I remember driving on to Barstow and getting a room. Then early the next morning I left the truck in the parking lot of a grocery store and rode back to Baker on the bike, then up through Shoshone to Furnace Creek. All the way there the sun was shining.

I was feeling pretty smug about -finally- doing something irrepressibly cool. I blew down the back roads all afternoon, trailing alkali dust like clouds of glory.

Then it started to rain. Hard. In Death Valley.

Thoroughly surprised and sodden, I set up the tent and spent a rather frosty and self-critical night in one of the campgrounds. I woke up numb to an overcast sky, and decided I'd had enough adventure for a while. But I didn't want to go back the easy way I came and just see the same old stuff.

How boring.

Consulting a map, I saw that it was possible to make a big circle west and back to Barstow. Great idea. All I had to do was glide up over some low passes beyond Stovepipe Wells. One of them was called Emigrant Pass. I remember the name because the sound of it brought back a little of that romantic devil-may-care sense of adventure I had started with.

And I was doing pretty good until it started sleeting.

The windshield on the bike quickly covered over with an opaque slushy built-up rime of ice. Colder and colder. The wind blasted past the windshield. I drove with my head weaving back and forth around the sides, putting together a kind of strobing, uncertain, intermittent notion of the road ahead.

Meanwhile I was hugging the motor with my legs for the least vanishing hint of warmth. When my boots began burning at the ankle I'd go a little bowlegged for a bit, then cozy up again. I had to stop at the tops of hills to clean off the glacier goggles I was using for eye protection, and maybe try to get some feeling back in my fingers. My gloves eventually froze into a talon-like immobile curve, clinging to the handlebars by themselves.

Then, between two passes, the throttle cable broke. I coasted gently to a stop and looked around. Not a soul for miles, either way, and the sky looked lumpy and troubled, black as hell. Come to think of it, I would have paid dearly for a roaring fire right about then, supernatural or not.

It was a situation little improved by cursing. The wind came on in battering gusts down the mountain, flinging small stinging shards before it, sharp as regret.

Tears went solid in the crinkles of my eyes.

After a little uncomfortable investigation I found I could just keep going by running up the idle adjustment on the carburetor as far as it would go, then popping the clutch and piddling along at maybe 10 miles an hour, nursing the middle gears. I'd slow down to almost nothing going up a hill, then scream down the other side at 30, even 35 mph.

Wahoo.

Obstinately clinging to the unnecessary pain of life, I rode and rode, on and on, for what seemed like hours.

What else could I do? Something came to mind. But even at the best of times, which this was not, I don't bend in the right places to kick my own ass.

I lived. Just in case you were wondering. This is not a posthumous note, found on my dessicated, coyote-gnawed body the following spring. But I had some blue, blue, blue fingers by the time I checked into the motel in Trona.

What I remember well is that it took both hands to turn the knob on the front door. The little bit of remaining articulation I could summon up was at the elbows. I stumbled through the door and leaned back against it, trying to straighten up. My coat crackled and shed thin plates of melting ice on the welcome mat.

The lady seemed taken aback, as though not sure she wanted to deal with me. Then, with infinite gratitude, I saw the pity in her eyes. It probably also helped that I had cash.

Jesus. Maybe I should go up there, check it out. I weighed the proposition. On the one hand, ahead of me was Las Vegas, City of Lights and Sin. On the other, Death Valley. The name says it all.

Las Vegas it is.

I blew through Baker like it wasn't there.


Bob

Cities

Malibu Creek State Park
California


I don't have much good to say about cities.

But hang on, I may get onto something else. If you've been hanging around here very long, you already know that what's at the top of the page may not be what's at the bottom.

Cities are a problem for RVers. No place to park. Traffic lights programmed by quick change artists. Curved streets with cars parked on both sides, gradually narrowing into a nice little trap. Unmarked dead ends. O yeah. O yeah.

I remember wanting to take a left turn in Portland once. They made me drive a couple of miles and cross a bridge before it was legal.

My advice is to find a nearby park and ditch the trailer. That's what I did, both in San Francisco and here in LA. In the City by the Bay, I stayed in Samuel P. Taylor State Park, a lingering southern patch of redwoods near Lagunitas. From there it's a straight shot down Francis Drake Blvd. to 101 in Greenbrae, where I hoped to catch the ferry. Unfortunately it was a Sunday, and the ferry was on half rations.

I also noticed a big sign in the parking lot that said NO RVS, which made me feel put out.

In the end I just drove across the Golden Gate, pulled off on Marina Blvd, and parked on the street in front of a Safeway. There was quite a lot of street parking, though not for RVs. I was told you could park a Motorhome at the Palace of Fine Arts for free, but I can't vouch for that. Anyway, it was a short walk across Old Fort Mason to the Maritime Museum and Fisherman's Wharf.

I did all the usual tourist stuff. Ate seafood, rode the cable cars, gawked at all them taaall buildings. Gee whiz. Visited various museums up and down Market, including the Asian museum in the old Library.

They have an impressive City Hall building here. It looks like something you wouldn't want to fight.

I was surprised at the mild weather, and pissed that I was carrying a coat around. Then it started pouring rain, and the coat got soaked. So much for providence. I finally took a cab back to the truck.

San Francisco is a wonderful place. And I was glad to get out of there.

In LA I had the same plan, and found a pretty good site at Malibu Creek State Park. It's a bit of the old coastal hills preserved in the midst of all the concrete, about halfway between 101 and Malibu on Las Virgines Road. You could do worse. You can get around to Downtown and Pasadena and Venice Beach about as well from here as anywhere. It's quiet, and no more expensive than any other state park.

I did the Getty and the Simon and the County Museum of Art, just because I might not be back this way soon. Seen from the aerie of the Getty, Los Angeles is either an inspiring or a godawful hellish sight. On an inversion day, it looks like a preliminary drawing for Blade Runner.

But from the street level, LA is just like any other city. There's just a lot more of it. The brown cloud isn't so noticeable. Neighborhoods blend into strip malls into warehouse districts into neighborhoods again. On and on, people living out their lives. It ain't all bad.

And Venice beach is a passle of entertainment. Don't miss it.

For all people cuss the freeways, in the middle of the day you can get around pretty easily here, even pulling a trailer. Just stay out of the left lane if you don't want to get run over. Of course, in the morning, and again in the evening, it doesn't matter what lane you're in.

But my real business here was to pick up some mail and visit with my stepson and his wife. They're thinking about having kids, and I tried to make a case for the affirmative. Then I shut my mouth before anything I had to say became the kiss of death for the project.

What's the old acronym? Dinks. Double Income, No Kids. That's them.

When I was his age, my life was pretty full, too, and I didn't see any need for kids. But then, as my thirties wore on, everyone I knew was towing little versions of themselves to soccer games and school plays, and suddenly it seemed like just the thing to do.

Funny how it's built into you. Phases and stages. Unfortunately not everyone is synchronized perfectly.

So much for cities. Time to get back to the beach.

I wonder if San Diego is still burning?


Bob

Mirkwood

Malibu Creek State Park
California


"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway."

--- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.


Time got strange on me as I drove down through the Land of Nod - er, California. Part of it was just adopting a slower pace. I didn't want to go rushing headlong into the embrace of those massive fires down south. Part was less rational, as I entered into a sort of introspective gloom made manifest in flora - the fabled Redwood Groves, still lingering under a legislative spell here in the north, protected by a mumble of words from the inevitable axe.

It's hard to believe their overwhelming eternal presence is mere illusion, the product of whimsy and luck. Somehow a few patches have never run into a man with a chainsaw. These giant living creatures, hundreds of years old, may yet find themselves abruptly sold by the square foot and turned into someone's suburban summer deck. People are like that. If I was a tree, I wouldn't trust'em.

Run away. Run away! Oh.

I tried to take a picture of one that was 28 feet through, and 260 feet high. It was like trying to get a good likeness of a man by taking a picture of his shins. Useless. Mostly you can't get far enough away, and when you can, it just looks like a tree. Redwoods have to be experienced, not photographed.

They are romantic places, of course, these dark dim dripping groves, like living green caverns raised above the earth, but for me they are not comfortable to camp in. No direct sunlight in the day, and an absolute abyss of blackness at night, filled with bumps and shudders and creaks when the wind blows. And there's no clear line between growth and decay, here in the damp hush, in the thick noise-deadening wet mush of mould and mushrooms underfoot.

These glens remind me of Tolkien's Mirkwood, where great trees moved slowly about on deep business of their own, at best ignoring and at worst inimical to the nattering apes that passed below.

It gets depressing, being ignored like that.

I spent a couple of weeks in these woods altogether, three or four days at a time, in Jedediah Smith Park, Humboldt Park, Redwoods Park, Samuel Taylor Park, moving slowly south from the Oregon border to the outskirts of San Francisco. I began to feel like a Redwoods zombie, with a dark slow wit crumbly with toadstools, more rough bark than bite, plucked from the dark loam untimely.

Like an Ent.

The sunshine and long sightlines of the coast were the proper cure for that. I couldn't get enough of the beach, and resorted to narrow county roads to stay where I could eyeball it. One particularly deserted and problematic patch was along Hwy 211 from Ferndale to Redway. Lots of switchbacks and bumps. I'm not sure a Motorhome would have made it, but the 5th wheel had no real trouble, or so I believed.

The land along 211 is cattle country. Where the road is away from the beach you can't get to the ocean without crossing a fence, but a good deal of the time the road is right along the bluff, and the water a short unencumbered walk away. I stayed in a couple of turnouts. Maybe 3 cars came by in the early evening. The ocean rocked and whispered at my open window all night long.

The Behemoth is starting to shake herself to pieces. Coming into Fort Bragg, right after passing a wreck, I heard something metallic dragging on the road behind me. It was one of the cross members that support the floor joists. I pulled over into a turnout, broke the final bit of weld holding it on, and limped into town.

Next morning I found Wally's Weld-All. For $107 he replaced the thin angle iron with something twice as thick and strong, and also reinforced another piece that was coming loose. The hidden price of buying a cheap trailer is eternal vigilance.

This is just my kind of luck. Happens all the time. Things fall apart, but the cure is not far away.

A week later, near Santa Cruz, I had another one of those fateful moments. I'd been holed up in Butano State Park reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. After two days and 800 pages or so, I decided to move on. It was crisp in the morning, so I had my catalytic heater going. Those things are so quiet, it's easy to forget about them.

Easy for me, anyhow.

I stopped on the side of the road across from a cafe called Whale City to check in with the NG and get off some emails. I'd forgotten my AC power brick for the laptop, so I went back to get it out of the trailer. When I opened the door, there was a bottle of wine rolling around on the floor. I'd forgotten to hook up the bungee cord on the door to the wine rack that sits underneath the dinette. So that's 3 things I forgot, merely because what passes for my mind these days was still back in Middle Earth.

If you are going to forget things, be sure to make it an odd number.

For, as luck would have it, here's the interesting thing I was not aware of: When that cabinet door is wide open, it contacts the front of the catalytic heater. The front of it was charred black, and the handle was hot, hot, hot. Another hour down the road, and I might have been towing a nascent conflagration. Maybe right about the time I was pulling into a gas station. Or parked next to a grassy hill.

BTID Luck again. Better Than I Deserve. The last thing I need is to be the cause of ANOTHER billion dollars worth of firestorm in California. Wonder if absent-mindedness is a legal defense against arson? Not if I was on the jury. I'd have to put myself away.

I wasn't stopped that far from Lompoc Prison. Hell of a place to spend my golden years.

I had been wanting to yank that dinette anyway, planning to put in a couple of chairs. Just moved the date up.

Dumb luck is better than wisdom. Just in case you are ever offered the choice.


Bob

Guess Who and the Ghost Road

Malibu Creek State Park
California

I'm not sure where Big Sur begins and ends. My guess would be from Monterey to Morrow Bay. It may be one of those places not subject to ordinary measurement, like the road to Katmandu. But while you are there it is a delightful drive you will not want to end.

Don't get me wrong. Hwy 1 is a real road. It's narrow and twisty and potholed in places, a whiteknuckle nightmare if you happen to meet an elderly RVer with his eyes on the ocean. And you will.

But that's just it. The ocean is RIGHT THERE, over a hundred miles of sand and rocks and sunsets, thundering waves and flying spray. This is not a languid lake grown large. This is the old man himself, and you better behave.

My God. It's just gorgeous.

I spent the nights in turnouts. There a number of state parks along the way, but they don't seem to have been built for trailers. You will see innumerable signs that say "Do not enter if the combined length of trailer and tow vehicle is more than 5 feet". I may be a little off, but its something like that. Whatever it is, they mean it.

Doesn't matter. Wide and airy turnouts are plentiful. Traffic dies down at night. Just lower the roadside blinds and turn your soul to the ocean. Let the breeze blow right through you.

This is what you did all that driving for.

Cell phone service is spotty when you're not in Kansas anymore. But somewhere along the road the thing started working, and I got through to Guess Who, one of the regulars on the newsgroup. We agreed to meet for a late lunch at a taco stand in Atascadero. Of course I didn't know exactly where I was, or where Atascadero was, and as it turned out I was many hours away.

Hwy 1 is not a road for making time, and it's probably a crime to try. But there's another appointment I have made, for the 16th, in LA, to pick up a check being sent from a retirement account, and try to sweet talk my stepson and his bride into having kids. Can't be late for that.

Gotta go, gotta go.

I passed by a pile of bodies Okay. For this I had to at least slow down. They turned out to be sea lions, or else some sort of large seals. I'm a creature of the middle continent, what do I know? Well, I do know they were plumb tuckered out. Perhaps a hundred of them lay in hills and drifts along a sandy cove, entirely alive but oblivious to people who stopped and took their pictures.

I would have liked to find out more, but hey, I'm late for an appointment in Atascadero.

Gotta go, gotta go.

I passed by many a likely turnout, but pressed on. Then there was San Simeon, off to the left. Nope, no time for that.

Why do I make appointments? Do you have to wear a leisure suit to finally accept your leisure?

San Simeon. I had an eerie experience there, the only time I took the tour. I think it was around 1976. Early spring.

I was driving up the coast road from LA for the first time, and literally blundered onto the Castle around 2 in the afternoon. I knew nothing about it. Hadn't even heard of it.

I paid for one of the tours, and wandered around a good bit on my own, getting thoroughly marinated in the ambiance and history, the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the gardens, the guest residences, studying the old photographs, etc. In general I just acted like I owned the place. I didn't get away until they chased me out for outstaying my welcome, just before dark.

Fingers of fog were creeping up the valley from the sea as I descended. A huge orange sun was squatting down there, dimly, at the edge of the world.

I headed north through the thickening soup, and the first station I found on the AM radio in my geriatric Chevy was some kind of an oldies station that specialized in big band music. Mood music. Perfect.

I rolled down the window and sang along. It may have gone something like this:

"It's funny, how you loved me,
Then forgot so suddenly...
It's funny, to everyone but me.


How can I do, what my head tells me to,
When my heart tells me how much I care?
It's funny, to everyone but me."


Sometimes I actually sing pretty good. But only when no one is listening.

Maybe 5, 10 miles up the coast, an old car poured smoothly toward me out of the fog. An apparition. It was right out of the '20s. It had those big round bleary yellow headlamps, like goggles floating above the fenders. And a tall narrow grill. It was in amazing condition.

Swooooosh. Right on by. Rickety tick. Moving along. "Alllll Riiiiight," I thought, "This is really cool."

Artie Shaw followed Benny Goodman followed Harry James on the radio. It was great, just rolling down that smoothly winding road at 30 miles an hour, elbow out the window, listening to old songs in the gathering dark. You could hear the ocean even when you couldn't see it. And off on the right, the pale light of a witchy three-quarter moon began to glow through the fog along the cliffs.

Another old car came into view. I couldn't see it well enough to get the make. Some old thing, but running pretty darn good, just floating up and down the humps on that narrow road.

It didn't slow down when I did, but I still got a good look in passing. A Chevy, I think. From the '30s. Some guy in a hat. I waved, but he went on like I wasn't there.

"Man. This is getting better and better."

Then there was another. And another. And another. A whole string of them spread out along the road, one after the other, all of a certain age, gliding by on my left like a long dream in the fog.

And all, I swear, in showroom shape.

Right about then I felt a strong impulse to change the station on the radio. You know, just to check. But half way there my hand got kind of heavy, and fell back. I couldn't quite make myself do it.

It was too perfect. The bubble would burst. I really didn't want to know. Not just yet.

But then, a few minutes later, here came three more of those creepy cars. Okay. That's enough. Feeling a little silly on the one hand, and not a little nervous on the other, I reached out and spun quickly up the dial until I reached a rock station.

There. A little more static than I'd like, but definitely not big band. Whew. I never was so glad to hear Buddy Holly.

Wait a minute. Buddy Holly?

I never did figure out what was going on that night along that lonely stretch of California coast, but I didn't see any more of those old cars. It was a long way, but when I finally made it to the next town, I stopped and got out and had a cup of coffee and talked to the waitress for a while.

It was 1976 again.


And now it's 2003, and there's the cutoff for Atascadero.

Don Lampson, aka Guess Who?, probably had been waiting a couple of hours. But we quickly got past that and into a pile of tacos. He's a retired prison guard, and in his youth something of an apprentice lumberjack. We swapped lies, damn lies, exaggerations and maybe even a couple of potential legends.

We didn't go all the way, though. We never got into statistics.

He offered me his driveway for a camping spot, for a few days. I was severely tempted. I'd like to hear him play the guitar. But nooooo, gotta go, gotta go, gotta go. Gotta get down to LA. Gotta get that check, meet the family, tote that barge, lift that bale.

Gotta go, gotta go.

What the hell am I doing?


Bob, who is supposed to be retired.

Mendocino and the Mountain Spotted Beaver

Manchester State Park
California


Did I mention that I just really enjoy driving along the beach? Both California and Oregon deserve credit for preserving these old cliffside routes after IH5 took most of the traffic. In Oregon a whole tourist industry has grown up along 101. In California, Hwy 1 has benefitted from what appears to be benign neglect.

When I drove down into Mendocino, I really didn't know what I was getting into. I remembered the name from the label on a wine bottle. I expected a vineyard or two, maybe an old cannery.

It's a pretty little town with way too many cars parked in it, perched on a small peninsula jutting out into the sea. Hold that. It's not a real town. It's kind of an outdoor theme park and shopping mall. Every old building has been turned into some sort of chi-chi shop, with overpriced merchandise that no one living within a hundred miles of here could have any use for. Certainly not a wandering hobo of an Rver like myself.

I saw a nice coffee table for $7500, some so-so art for even more. Cocktail dresses hung in a window. Restaurants had hand-written menus in the window, the sort where price is not mentioned. There may be a grocery store in town. I didn't see it. But there's plenty pricy coffee and croissants in every block.

Who knows if anyone actually lives there? Maybe at 10 pm a chain link fence pops out of the ground around the manicured perimeter, and the whole place is abandoned to rent-a-cops carrying thermos jugs and flashlights in their holsters, doggedly making the rounds, rattling doors.

What you've got to remember is that this place is pretty isolated up here on the rural north coast. But it seems to be dedicated to vacationing urban types who live to shop.

I put the question to a clerk in the bookstore.

"What do people do for a living around here?"

"Living?"

"Well, you know. Real people. I don't know the area. I just blew into town, but I can't help but notice there's tons more cars than houses here."

"Oh, this is nothing. You should see it in summer. You couldn't park within miles of here. You can't walk down the sidewalk without turning sideways."

"But why do people come? Just to see each other?"

She looked at me blankly. "Why, to shop, of course. Is that all you want? A paper?"

"That's it." I smiled. "You want paper or plastic?"

"Whatever."

Perversely, I made her wait while I fished around in my pockets for coins. Nickels and pennies. She could barely contain her disgust. It was great.

And there you have it. Mendocino, the little Mall by the Sea. It is a pretty place. And you can buy most anything you don't need. Good luck with anything else.

Whoever thought of this was a frigging genius. In the middle of nowhere, and packed with shoppers. All it lacks is a casino.


It was not far south of the Mall that I ran into the perfect coastal state park. Nearly empty. Behind the KOA. Manchester State Park. "No checks." No host. Okay, I'll wait till someone comes round with change. I settled in among the Cypress trees, and walked to the beach. Two days later someone knocked on my door. They took a check after all.

When I say Manchester Park was perfect, I mean perfect for me. Quiet, lonesome, a long view across meadows of coastal grass bending in the wind. A great place to rest up and recover from the rigors of the Mall. When I arrived, there were perhaps 7 or 8 RVs in some 40 sites. Everyone had a circle to himself. After a couple of days all but one besides myself disappeared, and a fellow in a parks hat came out and started setting up signs in each site: "Closed for Environmental Protection. Do not Cross." I asked him what it meant.

"There's an endangered species moving in here. The park is closing. You're going to be the last one to occupy that site."

"Which one is it this time?"

"The Mountain Spotted Beaver."

"I thought beavers stayed in streams and lakes."

"Well, it's really not a beaver. They just call it that. It's a kind of rodent."

"They're scarce, are they?"

"Well. They're all up and down the coast. But in every area they're a little different, and considered a separate species."

"So they're gonna close down an entire State Park to make way for a rat?" I was amazed.

"A rodent. The plan is to move the campsites away from the beach, maybe half a mile."

"The KOA's going to love that. Won't it be horribly expensive? I though California was running out of money?"

He shrugged his shoulders, and moved on round the circle with his signs.

This was interesting. I sat up late by the fire, thinking about it. Listening for movement in the grass. For anything.

I'm only a visitor here. But I thought it my duty to hunker down a while, giving up my wandering ways to stand in as California's last lonely outpost in the Kingdom of the Spotted Mountain Rat. It seemed the least I could do. In all that time I saw crowds of deer and quail and gulls and park rangers and even what looked like a lone coyote in the distance. But nary a beaver. They must be sly boogers.

On my last day I got to talking to the camp host, who had been gone days moonlighting as a roofer. Let's call him Howard. He and his 5 boys were living in and out of a 23 foot trailer. The youngest was 4. I asked him if he was going to lose his position when they closed the park. He just laughed.

"The bird lady has been trying to close this place for 9 years. It's still here. They'll move those signs out come summer."

"Bird lady?"

"Yeah. She even wanted to uproot all these nice cypress trees. Been here forever, but she said they weren't "native". Then the rangers got together and got them declared historical monuments. That put a cork in her."

It turns out he was shooting the bull one day with an old ranger, and found out how the spotted beaver and gophers and other rodents had been exterminated decades ago in the park.

"They'd let propane down the holes and set it off. Sometimes the earth lifted up an inch or two over a considerable area."

Then one day a while back he saw someone four-wheeling out in the open field, headed for the beach. He called the rangers. Definitely a no-no. Several of them showed up quickly, hoping to get the 4wheelers out of the park before the bird lady showed up and smothered them all in paperwork. When they followed it down to the beach, they saw a bunch of guys roaming around down there with metal detectors, talking into lapel mikes.

It was the FBI. Turns out the beach and park were right under the flight path of the Space Shuttle as it was breaking up. They were looking for fallen parts throughout a hundred mile swath cutting clear across California.

The FBI guy said there was two ways this could go. The rangers could help, or he could shut them down. He didn't want a bunch of looky-looky civilians running around the area, so he'd rather have cooperation. That was okay with the rangers.

But right in the middle of all this, Bird Lady showed up hot and bothered, worried about the rats. She poked her bony finger right in the middle of the FBI guy's tie and proceeded to tell him what he could and couldn't do on 'her' stretch of coastline. The FBI guy took about a minute of this, then put her nose down in the sand and handcuffed her. Then he raised her up by her hair and told her to shut up and listen. In a minute he was going to take the cuffs off. She was going to leave, quietly, and he didn't want to see her anywhere around there for 60 days. If he did she was going to jail for interfering with an investigation.

She left.

"And sure enough we didn't see her for 60 days." Howard tried unsuccessfully to remain sober and stone-faced.

This whole thing got me to thinking about environmental laws, and how I felt about them. As usual, I'm caught in the middle. I don't want to ever, ever contribute to the extinction of any species of animal. Especially not just so I can camp on a particular stretch of beach. I'm willing to put up with considerable inconvenience and some curtailment of my freedom to try and prevent anything like that from happening.

I don't much hold with blowing up gophers, for that matter.

But any environmental plan that attempts to exclude man from nature posits a world as artificial as a cracking tower or a microwave oven. Man as a species is part of nature, and has been living and dead for as long as any of the species these laws seek to protect.

If man is not there, it is not natural.

So here I am in my accustomed place, caught between extremes, trying to camp on the border between. We moderates always try to have our cake and eat it too.

Why not? What else you gonna do with cake, anyway?

Feed it to the spotted mountain rats?


Bob