7-14-01 Baby Valkyrie

 

7-14-01 Sa 1:59 PM

I think I’m done writing about the Lassen Trip. I finished it yesterday on the laptop at Wilshire Hill where I’m teaching summer school. I got home in time to take Rochelle and Ada to the Hollywood Bowl for the Bugs Bunny show. It was cool. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra plays cartoon music while the cartoons are shown on the big screen. They started out playing “Flight of the Valkyries,” and I held Ada over my head so that she was flying to the music. A hundred people were cracking up. It was so much fun to watch all those old cartoons with twenty thousand other people. Some of the old gags you’ve seen over and over again are riotously funny when contagious laughter spreads through a mob like that. [color photograph of an abandoned old church in the Idaho wilderness]

 Sunday, we went to see Rawler and Andi and Hunter and three-week-old Margeaux. She had an amazing head of hair, and even her arms and shoulders were coated with newborn fuzz. I made a tape Saturday morning of Ada and Lassen to send to Idaho. I tried to take it to the post office, but the post office was closed. I puttered about the house stowing my gear. Caroline came over. Thing and Leslie were having a party at their new place in the old bank district at Skid Row. Their windows open out onto the roof. {black and white photo of steam rising from boiling tarn, Bumpass Hell, Mt. Lassen]

 

7-12-01 I Asked the Drunk Woman How She Was Doing

 7-12-01 Th 6:38 PM

I turned down a side street and parked on a road behind the main street of Virginia City. I as perched on a hill looking down on a valley of abandoned mine detritus, church spires aspiring to the colors of the Western sunset, but the ghosts of whores flashed and mooned and leered at me from the balcony of a building of which its construction blatantly bespoke of the brothel that it once was. A staircase made a Z up the back. Sure enough, a plaque set in stone commemorated the area as the red-light district. A steam engine whistled in the distance. I sat in car and finished my wine, heady with anticipation of place so romantic with history. I tried to type a line for Jim, but the laptop wouldn't fire up. I scanned the area with my video camera and waited on the bottom of the steps of the back entrance to the Silver Dollar Pub until the train whistle reverberating across town spurred me to action. The pub was closed. I ascended the steps of the establishment next door, the Bonanza where two young men sipped beer nervously. I nodded to them and entered a room full of slot machines. I found a wood bar with a window overlooking the northern Nevada desert and ordered a beer from the barmaid who was otherwise entrenched in cigarettes and conversation with the only other patron of the place. So, no one was around but still I was enthralled. I wrote in a notebook and reloaded my camera. The place was closed, but the barmaid brought me another beer. I gulped it down and exited to the sheltered wooden sidewalk. Painted signs hung down announcing the Bucket of Blood Saloon. I continued on into the Union Bar where a scraggly-bearded biker minded the bar, an old drunk woman smoked. I walked back out the back where glittering red, white, and blue stars festooned a pile of junk below the balcony. I was high, I remember now and when I had downed my beer, I asked the drunk woman how she was doing.

7-10-01 Bumpass Hell

 

7-10-01 Tu 9:03 PM

After I had broken camp and packed the car, I typed fifteen minutes. I took the road south to the Lassen Peak Trailhead. I deliberated and thought I just didn’t have the time. I retreated to the car and continued down the road, past Emerald Lake to the Bumpass Hell Trailhead. I took the way along a rim of rock below Brokeoff Mountain, which had once been part of a super-mountain called Tehama, before the top few thousand feet of the peak got “broke off.” The trail made its way through beds of silver lupine, pussy toes and manzanita. I met with a number of crickets. My pace was brisk as the trail went gently uphill, and the footing was solid so my heart did not pound in my chest as it had on my ascent of Cinder Cone. After a few miles, the trail offered a vantage point from a cliff down into a barren bowl of a multi-hued little valley, tinged with rust, yellow, and alkali white, in which ponds of green water boiled and bubbled, and pools of blue steamed. The trail dropped steeply into the place. Signs were posted warning of the danger in straying from the trail. Von Bumpass himself had lost a leg to this place when his step broke through the crust into a boiling mud pot. A little creek hissed through the bowl and the stench of sulfur reeked in the air. Wooden boardwalks had been constructed for closer views. Clouds of  steam poured from one strange vent that might have had an opening the size of a three-car garage, judging from the volume of vapor bursting forth, except the vent itself could not be seen; it called to mind an entrance to Dante’s Inferno or something from one of Brueghel’s nightmares.

I took photographs and video—had the place to myself for a while before I hiked out. I drove from there out of the park through Chester, past lake Almanor, passing logging trucks, down into Susanville. I considered stopping here and there to fish, but I also considered moving onto Reno or further. I drank wine from the bottle with the wood-handled knife. “We live in a beautiful world…” sang Cold Play. Barns, horses, field of hay. As I grew closer to Reno, I became ever more agitated.

 7-9-01 M 9:42 PM

I typed about the steep bank of unstable boulders I was fishing from at Butte Lake. I had already taken a header off a slippery log. At least the water wasn't cold. That's probably why the trout weren't biting. I was relieved once I had stepped onto flat land again. I worked out to a point along the south end of the lake where the ranger recommended trying; the other side of the lava beds from where I had been fishing in the morning. It was a lot of work with no results. I should be used to that by now. I kept a wary on the sun's progress toward the horizon, having come over the rocks, I didn't want to take the trail back above the cliff for the first time in the dark.  The trail was a steep puffer of switchbacks. My Achilles tendons screamed, and the last beer banged against me knee from my shorts pocket with every step. I was glad to sit in the car. It was still light enough when I got back to camp at Summit Lake to try my luck there. I got my fire going and took my gear and beer down to the water. Some kind of hatch was underway, caddis flies or mayflies, maybe, but in an hour, I heard only three splashes that might have been small trout. I worked my lines in the vicinity of the ripples, but I grilled pork for dinner, glazed with apple jelly and Lawry's, wrapped in foil over my fire. I tried to pen my bottle of red wine, but the corkscrew in my pocketknife ended up ripping through the cork. Eventually, I pushed it through with a wooden-handled steak knife, but when I tipped the bottle to my lips, the cork blocked the neck. I figured out if I left the knife blade in the neck and clenched the handle in my teeth, the wine would flow. My pork was delicious. I had also corn and a can of soup and a couple tortillas. I packed all the grub-fixings in the trunk so as not to attract bears and retired to my tent. I put a flashlight in the pocket that hangs from the roof and read and wrote. I had stopped at the ranger station and showered and charged my computer in the general store whiel I read about the "September Water Conditions in July" that I figure were the reason the fish weren't biting.

A boy was attacked by a bull shark at Pensacola Beach. The shark bit off the boy's arm. The boy's uncle wrestled the seven-foot-long shark from the water, and doctors were able to reattach the boy's arm!

 7-7?-01 Sa 11 or 12 or 1 or 2???? PM

You look down 4th at Los Angeles, and it's funny because there's another guy pissing, too. Where have you left off, you wonder. You always wonder--a lot, anyway. The top of the cinder cone was nearly deserted. The wind huffed deeply, impatiently. A few things grew. A panorama of peaks surrounded. Bees buzzed up there. A human figure. A woman's shape. Yellow shorts. A kerchief in her hair. Don't want to split the solitude. Walk around the rim of the cone. She approaches. You must speak. "Djou you come up that way?" She says something. You say something else. "You must be in better shape than I am," you say. You part. You look down upon the "fantastic" lava beds, the painted dunes, Snag Lake, Butte Lake, Lassen Peak. You fear the wind could blow you over the edge. You and the girl walk down together. She's German. Works in San Jose. You talk about bears. She welcomes your talk. It's all downhill. On a log, you both sit, and she eats carrots. You retrieve your poles and pack from behind the log, fish out a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, offer to share. She refuses, offers carrots. You refuse. Walk the miles back to the trailhead. She is pretty, young. You ask her name. Uta. Shake her hand good-bye. She goes on. You sit in your car, immobile, paralyzed, EXHAUSTED, craving SLEEP. Jeans for a pillow. Turns into an hour or two. What then? A debate between mind and flesh.

 He awoke later than he would have preferred. Jerked beef. Pissed in a wood. Got the laptop working for the last time. Ate an apple and some sunflower seeds. A family--husband, wife, two boys--of pilgrims garbed in long white gowns came down to the lake's edge and lifted their hems as they stepped into the lake, to commune spiritually with God, j supposed. One of the boys was talking. 

"Shut up," snapped the father. "Shut your mouth."

j found the white-gowned pilgrim's viciously unchristian tone darkly amusing. 

He began to break camp around eleven: took down the tent, rolled the sleeping bag, deflated the mattress, and packed his goods into the car. He would have liked to have stayed longer but had promised his wife he would be home early enough to see Bugs Bunny at the Hollywood Bowl, and there were things he wanted to do along the way. Maybe stop in Reno or Mammoth. Cut the drive in half.

He listened to Miles Davis as he rode through the park. He stopped at the trailhead to Lassen Peak. It was only five miles, round-trip, but had a twenty-five-hundred-foot elevation game and an estimated return time of four hours.