Garth's Words

Wed. 8-25-10:

Full car for the ride to town early this morning, as Amy’s guest Joanna also joins us. Carrying along the goods required for all of our many daily errands, things such as empty water jugs, space is limited. We arrive to the Mateel Center expecting to begin preparations for the free lunch, but find that the building is still in severe disarray due to the reflooring project that has been ongoing for at least a week. While the kitchen floor is not included in the project, the kitchen space is packed tight with temporarily stored objects. As was done last week, cold sandwiches will have to be served outside rather than a hot meal inside.

With more than enough time to make a few sandwiches, we kill an hour by sipping coffee at a Garberville cafe. Wisely, Joanna stays there using her computer rather than returning to the Mateel. Our crew of 3 is using the corner of a kitchen table, the only space readily available, to make a few tuna sandwiches when the Mateel’s manager and caretaker storm in yelling. “THIS IS OUR KITCHEN, NOT YOURS! NEXT TIME ASK BEFORE JUST COMING ON IN! WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO TAKE THE KEYS AWAY FROM EVERY MEAL COORDINATOR!”

For months I have put up with such absurdity on the grounds that homeless people get to eat the food I make for free, but enough is enough, “You don’t have to worry about me invading your space anymore because I’m never coming back here again!” Excuses concerning the cleanliness of the kitchen are retorted by the manager and caretaker, but they are just that, excuses. The kitchen was sealed tightly during the floor work and all utensils used for food preparation were sealed behind 3 sets of doors. What this really was about, what this really always has been about, is the plain and simple human nature of territorialism. And I’ve had enough. I meant what I said. Sorry homeless, but good ridence Mateel.

Already having begun the sandwiches, we move the project outside to a portable table, with the manager slamming the door behind us before all the necessary supplies can be brought out. Flies now buzz the tuna. Knowing of the flooring project, barely enough people show up for the meal even to consume these couple dozen sandwiches.

Seek relief from hundred-something degree afternoon heat at Garberville Library. So hot by 3PM that even the air rushing through car windows feels as if it will burn skin. Engine rattles nervously. Seek more relief at the home of Amy’s friends in Redway, watching the independent news channel on satellite TV in a deeply chilled living room.

Thur. 8-26-10:

Much of this mild windy day in the Northern California mountains spent writing and editing a letter that will be sent tomorrow to the editor of every local newspaper. Sarah helped. They’ve had it coming for a long time. Here it is:

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Mateel Community Meal: An Outsider’s Inside Perspective

While volunteering hundreds of hours at Mateel Community Center events this summer, my girlfriend and I witnessed an organization in crisis, finally deciding this letter to be an absolute necessity.

Arriving to Redway in late May, we assisted regularly with the Mateel Community Meal, a deliciously free hot lunch served on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. While the Meal exists under the legal umbrella of the Mateel and operates in the same building, the two organizations are actually separate. No portion of the Mateel’s funding is transferred to the Meal.

On the contrary, Meal coordinators struggle to keep food on plates 3 days per week while seeking food donations and paying a “utility fee” of $30 to the Mateel each day the meal is served. The Meal owes thousands of dollars in fees to the Mateel, including vendor fees for running its lemonade fundraising stand at the Mateel’s summer festivals.

The Meal is run by 3 volunteer coordinators, each of whom is responsible for one meal per week. They are assisted only by other volunteers whose appearance is sporadic at best. Whether or not other volunteers show, coordinators are expected to stay until cleanup of the entire hall is complete. In worst case scenarios, this has resulted in 9-hour shifts. The Meal Program has no overall leader or manager, but one of the three coordinators has recently attempted to fill that role. While this charitable person has spent great amounts of their own time and money, they lack resources and management skills, often exacerbating chaotic situations that fuel friction with Mateel staff.

Mateel staff offer no assistance with preparation or cleanup of the meal, only present to micro-manage volunteers and police guests. Friction between the two groups also arises due to territorialism on the part of the Mateel’s manager and caretaker. These paid employees regularly treat Meal volunteers and guests as invaders of the Mateel’s space. Countless volunteers have quit under this ever-present stress. And the Mateel’s anti-Meal sentiment appears to run much deeper than its low-level employees; the Meal’s garden was recently bulldozed to make room for parking lot expansion.

The majority of meals are served to homeless individuals, some of whom now refuse to set foot on the property despite the guarantee of a rare hot meal. Under excessive Mateel staff policing, one meal guest recently commented, “Isn’t this a Community Center?” to which the staff member angrily replied, “Do you know how %*$&%*$ tired I am of hearing that!”

Perhaps the most troubling aspect here is that despite its lack of support for the Meal, the Mateel  still takes credit for the program, boldly advertising it on the front gate as the “Mateel” Meal.

The purpose of this letter is to incite change, not conflict. The combined experience of the individuals singled out here would prove invaluable to a properly led organization. The homeless and the poor are in great need of the Meal, and the current environment at the Mateel is not conducive to such an effort.

The Program’s future is dependent on a new leader stepping forward who has the skills and/or local connections to save it. Unless this new leader has the fundraising abilities necessary to free the Meal from the Mateel, they will face the great task of convincing the Mateel’s Board of Directors to change its stance towards the Meal. A grand undertaking in either case, but one which would have a successful leader sleeping very well at night knowing they helped the homeless sleep without growling stomachs.

Let’s all play a part in this success by attending a board meeting or sending a message encouraging the Mateel to create a new paid leadership position to manage the Meal Program. A part-time position, if empowered with authority, may save this wonderful program from extinction.

To share your thoughts and suggestions about the Meal, visit its new online discussion forum at: www.mateel.proboards.com
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Fri. 8-27-10:

I was Amy’s only passenger to town this morning, as her friend Joanna did not join us and Sarah stayed home feeling ill.

Garberville. Laundry. Return two blankets borrowed from the bookstore in May. Sit two hours using wifi at Treats ice cream shop. Email letter about the Mateel to all local newspapers.

Garberville Library. Noticing that I’m using my laptop in a far corner of the building where there is no place to plug it in, a librarian asks, “Did you find a wifi connection?”
I confirm, “Yeah, a new signal has recently shown up here, but I don’t know where it’s coming from.”
The librarian’s response, “A person who was here using that connection the other day said that he thought it was suspicious.”

When I first arrived to Garberville in May and asked this librarian and his female counterpart if the library had wifi, they had responded, “Oh no”, in a very anti-wifi tone. Considering that incident and today’s odd comment, it really does seem that these librarians may be anti-wifi. If so, why? My only guess is that it could be a control issue, that they have no control over who uses that connection or what is accessed from it. The library has just two desktop computers running browsers too old to access Gmail. As sign has sat next to each computer for months informing users that technicians will come to fix the problem as soon as possible. I’ve never noticed any obvious signs that the librarians are totally anti-computer, as they always administer use of the two aging desktop machines very patiently.

I vacuum and wash Amy’s car in Redway while she visits with her friends. The car is pounds lighter now. Back home at the cabin, I find Sarah face down in bed, still ill. Chicken stir fry and whiskey with coke whisks her back into shape. Night air quickly falls into the 40′s, driving us into bed early, but that’s OK since we have now a light hanging over our bed connected to the solar system.

Sat. 8-28-10:

Rain? It’s not supposed to rain again here for months but that didn’t stop it from sprinkling much of the night. Everything is so dry, though, that barely a trace of moisture was leftover by daylight.

Sausage and egg breakfast. Read National Geographics picked up from a free box in town yesterday.  Clear limbs from garden area next to cabin. The lumberjack who recently downed two trees there had left all the limbs behind. No garden was planted this year, the garden is just a clearing, but it is the only clearing near the cabin. On these unseasonably cool days that seem to be the norm this year, sitting in the sun is a nice pasttime, but it was hard to sit in the sun when our only sunny spot was full of limbs.

The distant sounds of sirens and helicopters interrupt the lazy afternoon, the official response to a two-acre grass fire one mountain ridge to the west.

Sun. 8-29-10:

Lazy days should be the norm for the next 30 days or so, as Sarah and I plan on living in this rural cabin till then while not doing much else but breathing, eating and reading, in no particular order. Those things were accomplished quite successfully today. I finished the book Gun’s, Germs and Steel, which answers questions that I had wondered most of my life. As it would turn out, none of us are any any smarter than those humans who used only stone tools until modern times(or the humans that still do). While the book goes quite dry at times, it is highly recommended to anyone who cares to know. Even if you can only last through half of it, you’ll be glad you did. The argument contained within is profound, and hard to discredit.

Sarah and I did get out and about for an hour, hiking down the steeply declined trail I made to the creek some time ago. “Every time you say you’ve made a trail I end up falling down a mountain”, Sarah says. It’s not my fault she has the grace of a giraffe running an obstacle course.

Evening so chilly that we build fire in woodstove.

Mon. 8-30-10:

Prepared new photos for PursuingNothing. Red old copies of National Geographic and Rolling Stone. An article about Wall Street raping Main Streets around the world was particularly disturbing, with thousands of towns and cities having become the victims of predatory lending practices. The article focuses on the incredible story of Birmingham, which apparently is not an isolated incident by any means. After a series of “credit default swaps”, Birmingham reportedly owed hundreds of millions of dollars on a debt that had been a fraction of that amount.

Mon. 8-16-10:
 
Up at dawn for a day out on the town. Not since May have we passed through any civilization larger than Garberville(pop 2000), but that will change today.

Hitchhike to unmarked bus stop in Redway, boarding bus at 9AM for $4.50 each. The journey north to Eureka is over one-and-half hours, up Highway 101 and The Avenue of the Giants(redwoods). The short bus is filled nearly to capacity.

Fog hangs over most of the mountainous passageway towards the virtual metropolis of Eureka, which even has a real shopping mall. The sky spits 55-degree drizzle as we exit the bus downtown, stopping in a Wendy’s for our first fast food meal since May. Not since that previous fast food stop have I seen young women cover their faces in such thick makeup.

Walk to the Humboldt County Department of Social Services office on Washington Street. Sarah had applied for food stamps last week in Redway, where the staff had instructed her to appear within 10 days for fingerprinting and photos to be taken at the Eureka office. 

Walk one-point-something miles to Bay Shore Mall. Enter Radio Shack with long list of maybes. A girl of probably teenage age mans the counter, broad shoulders and stout voice, intent on helping somebody whether they want it or not…….

“No thanks. I just need to look at my list and think about some things.”
“Well I could probably save you some time looking……”
“Thanks, I’ll probably have some questions in a bit.”
“Um……OK.”

One of the maybes on my list is a 12-volt adapter with variable voltage outputs and multiple plug-size options. Although Radio Shack has such an adapter in stock at $25, I deem it too expensive. A potential option is a 12-volt adapter with multiple plugs that only outputs 12-volts, which costs half the price and is the right voltage for my computer. Noticing one of those packages to be ripped open, I ask the cashier if I may check inside to see if any of the plug options fit my computer. She of course obliges and follows to assist.

“But you can’t use this plug with a computer. It doesn’t put out enough power.”
“I have a very small computer, it’s a netbook.”
“It doesn’t matter. It still takes too much power for this plug.”
“My netbook draws 3 amps or less.”
“Well just let me check.”
“I already know for a fact, though, my computer draws 3 amps or less, but this plug doesn’t fit it anyway.”
“Well, I wouldn’t sell you this plug for that computer anyway…..because…..I don’t want to be liable.”

Having general goodwill towards almost all nerdy humans, especially females, I find it impossible to be more than slightly annoyed, continuing to browse the store for other items on the list. The girl goes off to rearrange a computer supply display, looking slightly hurt. I later ask a question about an external DVD drive, which seems to cheer her attitude a bit.

Having just a couple hundred dollars left to our names, the only items we leave the mall with are a 4GB flash drive and a 4GB mini-SD card /SD card adapter from Sears, $10 each. The electronics department cashier rips the sale signs for these items off the rack prior to checking us out, then calls the manager to assist. “So, what are we giving away today?”, the manager probes sarcastically.This sale is technically off but the law is on our side!

Take 3PM bus back to Redway. A 20-something man seated nearby watches fantastic cartoons on a laptop, not even bothering to look away from the screen as he boards or departs the bus. Hitch ride home from downtown Redway with Graham, his dog Chili and his visiting father. Graham and Chili are familiar faces, having offered us another ride just a few days ago.

Having finally purchased that mini-SD card adapter, we get the chance to investigate a 2GB mini-SD card found in a runover cell phone at a Missouri intersection in April. I’d saved the sub-centimeter-sized chip hoping for a good show, but alas, when plugged into the laptop the chip only asks, “Card not formatted. Do you wish to format now?”. I’m assuming that the phone it had been in stores data in some way that the computer does not know how to read. So, no top secret government documents or explicit home movies to gawk at tonight.  

Tue. 8-17-10:

Day spent in the cabin catching up on blogs and photo organizing. I feel that the experiment of running a website with a netbook and nowhere to call home has mostly failed, as two months of pictures and 4 months of videos are still waiting to be processed and uploaded. This perceived failure is also due to the fact I’ve been unable to maintain a proper backup of the site.

Knowing I have no intention of ever working regularly enough to maintain the proper electronics, I am currently pondering whether or not a better option would be for Sarah and me to tell our stories using prepaid phones instead of the netbook. In that case, a free website such as Facebook would be utilized to directly upload blogs, pictures and videos. Roll-up external keyboards would be needed for typing at length. The phones could easily be charged with inexpensive portable solar chargers. 

My main reservation concerning this proposed plan is that much control would be lost. Facebook could potentially delete our accounts in a moments notice if pressured to do so. Considering the fact that stirring up the system is among our favorite hobbies, loosing control over our content seems a bad idea.

Wed. 8-18-10:

Ride to town with Amy this morning but she does not need our help at the Mateel. As the Mateel’s floors are being redone, the meal is prepared elsewhere, at a spot where the kitchen is too small for a full crew of volunteers.

I travel to Meadows Business Park with Sarah, where we purchase three 12-volt lamps for the cabin. Cost of two incandescent is only $2 each, but a single florescent costs $14! Keep in mind that this fluorescent appears no different than its 120-volt counterpart, just a regular screw-in light bulb. This could actually be considered a good deal compared to some other screw-in-style 12-volt fluorescent lamps that are selling for nearly $40!

Sitting for hours at Meadows Cafe, I FINALLY upload the last two months of pictures to PursuingNothing. Leaving Sarah to use the Internet alone the rest of the afternoon, I return to Redway, stopping first outside the Mateel where Amy and her small crew are just finishing distribution of the free meal. Among those present, many display dismay towards one of Sarah’s two articles that appeared in the Independent this week. Without Sarah’s knowledge the Independent’s editor had altered her story about the friction between the homeless and the Garberville town square board of directors. The alteration was an apparently deliberate attempt to skew the homeless side of the story, with the lead paragraph beginning, “while one local homeless man has complained of discrimination…….”.

Phophet Mark is one of those in attendance for the free meal, with whom I ride to the Garberville food bank. located inside a Presbyterian Church that’s having its steeple repainted. Mark had been asked to load a food shipment into his van for transport elsewhere, but finds that there is not adequate room available inside the van. Returning to his trailer in Redway, we remove the van’s contents, including all of Mark’s prophetic signs that he sometimes holds up at intersections, roadsides and anywhere else he sees fit. Two of the signs echo the messages printed on the side of his van, while the third reads, “Prophet in Need, Please Help”. I ask how his response has been with that sign. He replies, “This generation doesn’t respond well to that sign.” I ask how they respond. He replies, “They ask ‘Why is your need greater than mine?”

Some time ago, Mark sent hundreds of letters to US senators and congressman concerning his prophecies and ministry work. I ask if any have replied. Mark says, “The head of security at the US Capitol building called me and asked if he should be worried. Not exactly the kind of response I was looking for.”

Returning to load up the food in Garberville, we find that the food is instead being loaded into the back of a pickup truck. At first it appears there is no need at all for the van, but six boxes of shredded cheese are baking in the sun. We transport the cheese to the supermarket in Redway, which is known for sharing its cooler and freezer space with charities. The cheese is ultimately bound for the Mateel Center, but no space is currently available there due to the flooring work.

Sarah and I travel home with Amy at 6:30, at which time I inform Sarah of the homeless dismay towards her article. Already unhappy with the editor’s alterations, she decides to quit the job. Don’t mess with Sarah’s writing.

Thur. 8-19-10:

Attempt to spend the day producing news at KMUD, but fail. Riding my bike to the end of the gravel road, I wait for news director Terri at the intersection. As she passes by this point everyday on her day to work, we’d agreed to car pool, but 9AM comes and goes with no Terri. Still determined, I stick a thumb out for 45 minutes, watching a dozen cars pass on by. As there are few connecting roads in these mountains, most of those drivers were surely going at least as far as I was. So much for the old hippie culture that defined Northern California in the past generation. It is almost dead for good, morphing into a community of diesel-doping paranoids who can’t even risk a hitchhiker. To the few real ones left, I salute you.

 Defeated, I return home on the bicycle. A friend of Amy’s arrives in a small do-it-herself motor home, spending the day tweaking her engine under the cover of tarps hung from surrounding trees. She leaves a young rose plant on our doorstep and shares freshly picked fruits and berries. She has an interest to install a solar system on her van so I show her my amateur work in the yard. Hearing that I need a multimeter to test the system, she provides two, only one of which will will power on. Applying the multimeter to my charge controller, it shows to be outputting no voltage although full sunlight is hitting the solar panels! Just when I thought all was finally well with both my solar system and Amy’s…….

I am even further confounded until realizing that the borrowed multimeter is reading double the actual voltages. The question now is…..was it also reading double amperage. The two solar panels combined output tested at 7 amps, more than expected but possible. As the charge controller is only rated at 4.5 amps, this would explain why it doesn’t work.

I test the charge controller again by hooking it directly to the battery, finding that it to be outputting 12-volts, meaning it’s working fine! Arghh. Why? Could it have not been outputting any voltage because the battery is almost brand new and doesn’t need charging? But, we have surely used that battery enough by now to warrant some charging. Arghhh. Why? And I don’t want to reconnect the 4.5 amp charge controller to the solar panels if they are actually outputting 7 amps. Arghhh. Why?

There is another alternative. I’d wanted to test Amy’s old charge controller anyway, still not knowing for sure if its apparent malfunctioning was its own fault or the fault of her faulty batteries. I retrieve the device in question, wire it to my solar panels. A solid 12 volts streams through, perfect, so I connect the battery. Nothing…….not a single volt……..arghhh…..

The red light on the charge controller now flashes, no longer a steady glow as before. Hmmmm…….maybe the battery is fully charged…..maybe that’s what flashing red means. “HEY SARAH TURN ON ONE OF THE LIGHTS”, I yell into the cabin. “OK IT’S ON”, the red light now glows steady! “OK, TURN IT OFF”, the red light flashes! Power flows through the charge controller as needed in the house……so…….the battery IS fully charged! But, not that I know the battery is fully charged, is it fully charged because the charge controller I removed from the system had been charging it or because the battery hasn’t yet needed to be charged? Alas, I do not know the answer to that question. What I do know is that if the 4.5 amp original charge controller was actually pumping 7 amps into the battery, it would not have worked for much longer.

Testing the amperage again, I backfeed from the battery, briefly welding the tester prongs to the wires. Yanking the prongs off, the tester lead cords feel hot to the touch, but the tester still seems to be working properly.

I use Amy’s Internet connection to download a full-length movie, 1.5GB, in barely over 30 minutes. Quite impressive for a middle-of-nowhere mountaintop. At sunset I play the movie, an oil documentary called Crude, to an audience that also includes Amy’s visiting friend and her land partner that lives in a house just up the driveway. Considering the small screen size and limited seating, I opt out, leaving the movie running as I read in the cabin.

Fri. 8-20-10:

Travel into town with Amy. Plan on spending the day producing news with Terri at KMUD, but no Terri. Although I’d expected this to be one Terri’s scheduled workdays, her colleague Cynthia is the only employee present in the news room, who says that Terri has the day off.

As Sarah had already gone on to Garberville with Amy, I follow that track, hitchhiking with a man named Boug. Seemingly much too big for his Volkswagon Bug, Boug insists the car is the perfect size. “I owned one of the original Bugs in the 70‘s and it could get 40 miles per gallon on the highway, but this new one can’t get over 25 miles per gallon. What’s wrong with that picture?”

Garberville. I find Sarah crossing the street, at which time we sit for an hour in Treats ice cream shop using the wifi and sharing a breakfast sandwich. Signs read, “$3 per hour purchase required to use tables”. I attempt to telephone the man for whom I was planning on selling potentially valuable Ebay items. “By court order he is no longer allowed to answer this phone or be on this side of the river”, answers a female voice on the other end of the line. So much for that job.

12PM. Library opening time. Retreat there to wait the afternoon away while Amy goes about her regular Friday town routines. She appears at the library for an hour to check email, a predicted part of that Friday plan. Sarah and I take turns typing on the laptop, trading back and fourth a humor travel book by Bill Bryson, seated in the same corner as always. Sarah emails her letter of resignation to editor of the Independent, a well-written document just over a page long expressing her frustrations about the unauthorized editing of her recent article. Smartly, she had already stopped by the Independent office to pick up her second and last paycheck, which totaled just under $150.

4PM. Purchase $100 of groceries at Garberville supermarket. Finally finished with her trusty Friday routine, Amy meets us in the parking lot for the return trip home. Relaxing in the cabin later I browse through a document titled “Your Green Dot Visa Prepaid Card Guide to Benefit Purchase Security”. Initially just glancing at the document to determine what it is, a few strange phrases demand closer attention.

With no other cards currently available, I’d recently purchased this prepaid Visa in order to pay off my Ebay bill so I could sell items for the guy who now can’t answer his phone by court order. As it would apparently seem from this strangely worded document, many items purchased with the Green Dot card are automatically insured through the “Purchase Security” plan. 

“Your eligible purchases are protected against damage due to the following…………Spacecraft or other vehicles”.

Does this include damage caused by UFO’s? If I buy a TV and it a tiny UFO flies into my house and shoots it will it be covered?

“Losses resulting from…….but not limited to…….hostilities of any kind including war, rebellion, invasion, insurrection or terrorist activities.”

Does this include Osama bin Laden collaborating with UFO’s? I think this document could be a little more specific.

Sat. 8-21-10:

Yet another unseasonable morning, under 50 degrees, grey skies and fog banks. Squirrels drop nuts from high atop a tan oak tree that hangs over the cabin, sending the big seeds crashing into the roof repeatedly. Attend Whitethorn Lumberyard farmer’s market for 2 hours with Amy and her friend Joanna. Considering our next stop, Sarah had not joined us.

Travel to Redway, where Amy had agreed to assist the Mateel Community Meal program with a fundraising effort. The organizers of an all-night Grateful Dead tribute concert just down the road at the Dean Creek Resort had agreed to allow the meal program to be the sole food sellers at the event, with all the profits benefitting the program.

Arriving to the Mateel Center in Amy’s car, we find a meal coordinator under verbal attack from a Mateel employee, “THINK OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS! THIS IS WHY YOURE PROBABLY GOING TO LOOSE YOUR KEY(Mateel Center key)!” Foreseeing such chaos, I had so far purposely ignored this fundraiser, thinking that other volunteers would be magically generated if I stayed out of the picture. At the last minute, though, I’d been directly asked to join the effort, as most of the expected volunteers had suddenly bailed. And so began nearly 20 hours of completely exhausting chaos……….

Knowing the event would be an all nighter, I’d stuffed a backpack with a coat, sleeping bag and foam pad, but never got the chance to use anything but the coat. Greeting me upon arrival to the concert site, “DON”T BLOCK THE DRIVE!”, a haggard young male organizer screams at the top of his lungs as I unload my backpack from the back of Amy’s car, although not a single vehicle is waiting or approaching. It’s obvious right away that the concert is in many ways just as unorganized as the Mateel crew. Oh no.

Just inside the parking lot gate are two picnic tables stacked with unprepared bulk foods, a pile of coolers on the ground containing perishables, some $800 of raw consumables. Close by, positioned next to the concert gate, is a small crooked tent and a commercial BBQ grill. Under the tent is a single portable table overflowing with pans, dry goods and cooking utensils. Half of the food preparation space is taken up by a three-foot-high pile of loose potting soil, which someone had thoughtfully covered with a colorful blanket. Only one of the two Mateel Meal organizers is present at first, as is one regular meal volunteer. The concert, which is estimated to see 500 attendees, starts in two hours. Oh no.

“I’m going to commandeer some of these picnic tables to start setting up condiments on.”
“No, these tables are going to be for dining. Portable tables are coming.”
One hour later.
“Where are the tables?”
“They’re not coming.”
“I’m going to commander this picnic table.”

“Where is a water source?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are there any lights for later?”
“I don’t know.”

Oh no.

A couple dozen street kids lounge on and around the dining tables, a few of whom answer the call for recruitment in the hopes of free food or admission to the concert. Thankfully, they had also shucked a couple hundred ears of corn earlier, one of the most time consuming prep tasks. Requiring only minimal instruction, they now went to work cutting vegetables and making hamburger patties. At least six cutting boards were available under the crooked little tent, but only three knives. With many people now working, dirty dishes began to pile up on the ground under the tent. Still no water or even a surface upon which to clean the dishes, someone commandeers a wooden pallet and carries in tubs of water. 

Two hours later………concert about to start, the first hungry customers come searching for a meal. With all the food prep and setup completed to the best of our ability, the crew is now down to 4 Mateel Meal volunteer regulars. We all know each other well and are glad to finally feel at least partially prepared for the long night ahead. Despite many lagging uncertainties, we can relax somewhat and attempt to enjoy ourselves. I work the cash drawer while the others man the grill, an arrangement that everyone seems pleased with.

The first $7.50 cheeseburger sold comes back with an entirely raw center, as do several more, although only one person demands a refund. Many of the concertgoers arrive hungry, spending an average of $10 each on mostly burgers and grilled corn on the cob. Chicken quesadillas are the second best seller, with Mediteranian wraps coming in third. As for three hotel pans full of sliced watermelon, only one single slice is sold, with a couple dozen turning up missing.

The rush of initial concert arrivals comes to an early lull, with a grand total of less than 200 individuals, leaving the vast lawn facing the main stage appear as a ghost land all night. Nowhere near the 500 expected for the event, but that initial dinner rush brings $400 of cash to the drawer, half way to breaking even. By midnight the stream of food customers is down to a trickle, but that trickle keeps coming till nearly 4AM, eventually netting a grand total of just over $900. PROFIT!!!!! Something I never thought possible upon witnessing the initial disorganization of the food stand. Thanks mostly in part to the core group that lasted the whole night through, this fundraising event was not a sad loss.

Sun. 8-22-10:

Cleanup from dawn till 7AM, everything neatly stacked onto a single picnic table. A few random performers and concertgoers still wander the grounds, coming down from their long acid trips, passing around eye drop bottles to start a new day of fun. With the Mateel Meal coordinators off napping, most of the work done, I take my opportunity to depart. Through a highway grove of huge riverside redwoods I follow some distance behind a volunteer who had left a few moments before. Part of his regular morning routine, he screams to the trees, “I FEEL EXCITED ABOUT TODAY!”.

Arriving on foot to Redway an hour later, I hitch a ride in a open-topped Jeep, offering quite a dizzying view through the next redwood grove. With such little traffic on this Sunday morning, the return trip had seemed daunting, but I luck out. The next ride comes minutes after the Jeep, a young man in a huge brand new pickup who speeds me through the mountains in record time. Dropped off on my home-stretch gravel road before 9AM, I arrive back to the cabin an hour later as Sarah is just getting up. We simply trade places in the bed.

Sarah briefly lures me out of bed at lunchtime with a sandwich, then I finally rise for good in the late afternoon. Amy and her friend Joanna, wanting to hear about what happened at the food booth yesterday, invite us across the driveway to watch a comedy documentary about rainforest deforestation. Joanna appears to be planning on staying for an extended period, as she has unloaded many things from her motorhome, including chair and tarps. Sarah and I now have a neighbor much closer than Amy, as Joanna’s parking spot is just 100 feet from our cabin. An active soul who has sailed and traveled the world, she should be an interesting addition to the property.

Mon. 8-23-10:

Getting hot again, 90 degrees in the cabin tonight, still lots of mosquitos. Continued reading the book Guns, Germs and Steel. Took extended nap. Sarah hitched to Garberville and back for her final food stamp interview, expecting to receive the funds in a few days.

Tue. 8-24-10:

One-hundred degrees. Find digital clock/thermometer in box underneath cabin counter, which climbs to 93.7 degrees when placed on the porch table. Attempt to begin editing the two hours of interviews recorded on August 13th with soil supplement company owners. However, the only audio editing program I have available, Audacity, is insufficient for such a large task. I pirate a more powerful program called Magix, which turns out to be too powerful to run on my meager netbook. After an hour of installation, the program simply gets stuck on the startup screen.

So this marks the end of that project, my 30-minute special on soil supplements will not be produced for KMUD after all, at least not by me. I’ll attempt to give the idea and interviews to another KMUD journalist, but none of them may be interested.

Sun. 8-8-10:

Sarah continues working on her second article for the Independent, about a yoga studio in Garberville called Stretchy Pants, which is where she traveled to again today. I stayed behind at the cabin, first helping Amy move a wood pile this morning, then working on improvements to my own shower and outhouse. Late afternoon, I spend hours making a trail from the cabin down the steep mountainside through thick brush to the creek below. Amy says that at the base of her mountain is where hundreds upon hundreds of Native Americans were rounded up and shot by white settlers one dark day back in the mid-1800′s.

No indian ghosts showed themselves down there but I did battle the aftermath of many landslides, which have made parts of the hillside virtually impassible. It appears that these slides may have been caused by the logging done in the 50‘s. Those old logging trails are entirely impassible now, and along that route is where the slides have taken place. For whatever reason, a few of the giant redwoods were left behind, but not many. For the most part, all that remains are huge stumps and monstrous segments of rotting trunks. Finally arriving to the creek, I find running water except in a few sections.

Return to cabin for wonderfully hot shower, so hot in fact that I can barely stand it, thanks to certain segments of the hose lying in the sun. Dinner is on Amy tonight, as she shares grilled chicken breasts, potatoes and corn on the cob about the time Sarah returns home from her long day of reporting.

Mon. 8-9-10:

Amy’s burly lumberjack returns very early this morning to split more logs, saying “hello” to Sarah and I through our screened window. We ride our bikes together for the first time, two miles down the gravel road to the intersection with the paved county route. This will be a new regular thrill ride for us, as nearly one mile of that winding bicycle trip through the dense forest is in the downhill direction, offering awesome mountain views at a couple different points. The lowest point of the road is halfway between Amy’s property and the county road, with the rise from the low point to the county road being so steep in many parts that the bikes must be walked up it.

Arrive country road. Wait….no cars….wait……no cars. Just when I’m about to give up, Rhonda stops is a tiny newer model black car meant for the city. “I’ve have to replace the tires on this car twice already this year”, she says, “its low-profile design just can’t take these roads”. Rhonda tells of her job at a one-room public schoolhouse, the Ettersburg School, that’s located just a mile up the road from where she picked us up. I had no idea the government still funded one room school houses. “We had six students last year and were worried we wouldn’t have any this year”, Rhonda says, “but we had 12 sign up.”

Rhonda drops us at KMUD. Sarah goes off to work at the Independent office in Garberville, while I spend the day doing the radio news with Terri. Her volunteer firefighter boyfriend Doug is present much of the day, who shows me national smoke forecast animations online. Even some of the relatively small fires burning in the northwest right now are projected to produce smoke clouds hundreds of miles across.

Two big local news stories today, the less tragic of which was the resignation of Dr. Mark Phelps, who had been captivating the media with his threats to quit for months. What I had always wondered was, ‘Why is that such a big deal? Aren’t there other docters?’. A member of the public called the newsroom and told me that Dr. Phelps was a “pill doctor”, which would definitely explain the situation. The truth can only be that he was either really good at treating people or really good at prescribing pills, or maybe both.

The other big news was two Humboldt County police officers gunning down a young man on the side of a highway. The man had apparently come out of his house to confront a hitchhiker for whatever reason. The two men got into a fight right then and there, with the local man using a rake as a weapon. The hitchhiker called the cops from his cell phone, and the local man is said to have run at the cops with the rake as they arrived. The two first-responder cops say that the man continued to approach with the rake after being shot by both of them one time, so they opened fire again, killing him. Those rakes can be dangerous. Maybe the police should have bigger guns in case somebody has a shovel next time.

Completing the police shooting story, I turn to editing a phone interview recorded by Terri some days ago. About a Habitat for Humanity(HFH) fundraiser called Bike and Build, she had talked with a Garberville man who had just joined the organization after graduated college on the East Coast. Bike and Build consists of young people who ride cross country working on HFH houses, raising money along the way. Considering that one of this young interviewee’s female classmates, also a Bike and Build rider, had just been killed by a semi truck while checking her phone messages on the roadside, I attempted a followup interview but could only get ahold of the interviewee’s father.

A classical DJ with a throat problem asks that I read his announcements and weather over the air. I leave the station at 5:45 to chase a story in Garberville, almost giving up on it because no drivers respond to my thumb for 15 minutes. Finally a young man in a pickup whose dad just kicked him out, I arrive shortly to where I’d heard a veteran’s meeting was supposed to take place at six o’clock. Sarah, whom I’d tipped off, is also there, but the building is locked tightly, no meeting. The homeless activist Duke had said some days ago that he would attend a vets’ meeting here tonight, then cut up the fence around Veteran’s Park if he didn’t like the meeting’s outcome. However, no Duke and no vets.

Sarah and I walk to the best source of information in town, Paul and Kathy’s bookstore, learning that no meeting is scheduled. A cool Coast Guarder on leave drives us back to Redway, then a former restaurant owner named Gram and his little brown cat-like dog Chili drive us the rest of the way to Amy’s gravel road. Not thinking, I’d bought a 24-pack of Coke in Garberville, which could absolutely not be carried on a bike down mountainsides. I hide the coke in bushes behind a pile of cutup tree stumps.

Arriving to the cabin, we find that the two big trees nearest the structure have been cut down. Counting the stump rings in the twilight, the trees were at least 50.  I recently heard a radio interview with a local woman who said her life was changed when she returned to her rental home late one evening and found one of big trees in the yard to be glowing from top to bottom. She ran inside then slowly creeped back out till she was comfortable enough to stand underneath the tree. She stood there for a long time, then went to bed, awaking with the memory of the glowing tree faded like a dream. That evening she came home from work to find that the tree had been cut down. Her explanation, “the tree had been showing itself”.

Well, I know for a fact, I peed on that tree late last night and it was definitely NOT glowing at me. In memory of the tree Sarah and I share a delicious chicken stir fry.

Tue. 8-10-10:

Sarah and I ride into town with Amy, who was asked to attend a board meeting at the Mateel Center. I spend hours at KMUD doing the news with Terri, working mostly on a story about the postponement of California Proposition 18. If voted in favor of by the public on the November ballot, Proposition 18 would have provided $11 billion to overhaul the state’s massive water collection and storage systems. Seeing that public support had dwindled for the project, supporters introduced a bill to the legislature that postponed the November ballot vote till 2012. What will it matter then anyway, starting all that work just one month before a huge Mayan temple rises out of the earth and destroys it. Did the legislature consider that?

With no lawmakers or opponents returning my calls about Prop 18, I’m forced to produce the entire story with no help from outside interviews, requiring hours of research. In the end, I record the segment in just under 4 minutes.

The news room receives 6 CLIMP reports about a suspected large-scale drug enforcement operation between my home and the ocean. The calls come in over several hours about helicopters and government truck convoys all over Wilder Ridge. With each report, I deliver a printed statement for the DJ to read on-air.

At home later, Sarah and I sit with Amy in her house to hear my Prop 18 segment. Other than a few points of speech hesitation, I’m mostly satisfied.

Wed. 8-11-10:

As promised, I continue helping our new landlord-friend Amy cook the Mateel meal on Wednesdays. Until she migrates to Baja Mexico in November I have agreed to keep Wednesdays free for this purpose. As the oldest of Mateel meal coordinators, Amy agreed to continue the job only as long as she has at least one capable volunteer. Today she has two from the start, as Sarah is also available. The kitchen is full by 10:30, with Ior and Tonya also present. The full meal routine completes in nearly record time, with the last inch of the floor mopped clean and all volunteers out of the building before 2PM.

This allows plenty of time for Musical Wednesday at Steveaux’s house, conveniently located just a couple blocks from the Mateel Center. Sarah also joins in the music after traveling to Garberville to pick up a power inverter she’d ordered from True Value. Steveaux provides her with his unique Chinese-made guitar, and he has thoughtfully borrowed a trumpet for me to play, although he knows full well that I haven’t played a trumpet with any skill since high school. Using a fingering and scale chart printed from his brand new Macintosh computer, I attempt to play along with the band, which also includes the same small female soprano who’d been present two weeks ago the first time I’d come to Musical Wednesday.

As was to be expected, Musical Wednesday doesn’t go off too smoothly with the trumpet, and Sarah quickly looses interest on the guitar. The disinterest is not necessarily about the trumpet, the guitar or the other musicians, but because playing songs written by others is just not our preference. We like improv! As unique as playing along with Steveaux’s ragtime piano is, we just can’t get into following along as he reads from sheet music.

….

5PM. Sarah and I meet Amy at her friend Jackie’s house, conveniently located just around the corner from Steveaux’s. Although both homes are especially popular as social meeting places, located barely a block apart, the residents seem to have no interest in one another. Nothing particularly negative has been said by those of either home, but I get the distinct impression some bad history lies buried.

Around here, the plot is always thickening. At this rate, all of Humboldt County will in a few years be so thick that it is virtually frozen stiff. Something needs to break the ice, and I think that just might happen starting in November. But a long thaw it will surely be. Icebergs don’t break up easily.

Thur. 8-12-10:

No end in clear sight to Amy’s solar problems. Despite my having installed a new charge controller last week, the system’s four 6-volt golf cart batteries have failed to fully charge. New theory- after a month of no charging, the batteries are so dead that the solar panels are taking very long to recharge them.

10AM. Utilizing a gasoline-powered generator and a 110-volt automotive battery charger in a wheelbarrow, I attempt to recharge Amy’s batteries, thinking that the solar panels will be able to maintain them once they’re fully charged. Disconnecting the battery grid, I experiment with each battery individually, watching how the meter on the automotive charger reacts. Two of the batteries barely take an amp of charge, while the other two both pull 12 amps?????????.

Amy’s solar system has just about run my ideas dry. For sure I still believe that the charge controller did need to be replaced, as the old one had been outputting improper voltages even when no load was applied. Did bad batteries damage the old charge controller?

I leave the automotive charger on one of the batteries that’s taking a 12-amp charge, returning frequently to monitor the non-progress. Two hours later and the charger meter still reads exactly 12 amps, not a bit of charging progress. Switching off the gasoline generator, I hear a sound that resembles a pot of boiling water. It’s the battery! Reading the label, “Explosive gasses. May cause blindness”, I flip the sunglasses down from the top of my hat. An occasional gurgling from this type of battery is not entirely uncommon, but the pot of boiling water sound is absolutely not right.

New theory- the two batteries that accepted 12 amps of charge will never actually charge. The power generated by the solar panels is just being wasted on these two batteries, sucked away from the other two batteries that might actually take some charge. However, those other two batteries will only take a small charge even though they are not fully charged. With a good battery, it will accept a charge until it is charged, accepting progressively less charge until fully charged. A low battery that will only accept a low charge is an old battery, which Amy’s batteries surely are. An old battery left to charge for a long time can sometimes hold a bit of charge, though, so I connect these two batteries back into the system. Maybe now that the two bad batteries are not sucking up all the energy, the other two will eventually charge sufficiently for Amy to use her household power inverters.

……

A day full of electrical work. I also spend some hours working on my own system in the cabin, using a series of extension cords to run power from the battery/charge controller into the porch. Thanks to that and the new power inverter purchased yesterday, it’s now possible to sit on the couch and use the laptop while it’s plugged in!

Sarah spends the afternoon hours conducting interviews at the one-room Ettersburg public school, planning on writing a story about it for the Independent.

Fri. 8-13-10:

Rise at 6:30. Behind the cabin, an enraged squirrel squeals from above, descending a tree trunk closer and closer towards my head. Thinking the angry little beast is about to pounce, I turn. A squealing face-off ensues, with the squirrel eventually retreating to the other side of the tree trunk, disappearing.

Two-mile bike ride down gravel road, walking the steepest uphill section near the end. Lock bikes to trees at the intersection with Telegraph Ridge Road. Thumbs at the ready but surprisingly little traffic for a business day morning, not a single passing vehicle for ten minutes. Coincidence strikes, it’s KMUD radio news director Terri and her volunteer firefighter boyfriend Doug in a pickup truck, headed to the same place we are, the radio station! They move piles of firefighting equipment out of the cab’s rear section and flip the seats down to make room.

A day-long pledge drive is just getting started at the station, a flurry of activity involving at least a dozen volunteers. As the building is just a relatively small house converted for commercial purposes, the situation is hectic. With a series of interviews to conduct today, I find no suitable indoor space available. The best alternative is a front yard picnic table positioned under low-hanging apple and pear trees. Big fruits fall as Sarah and I position the table under the best patch of shade. “I hope none of these fruits fall on our guests”, I ponder, noticing several having fallen in just the past few minutes.

The first to arrive is David Lemm, owner of a company called GroNatural that’s selling buffalo manure in local garden supply stores for $130 per bag. An older well-groomed Caucasian gentleman, David wears a tidy buttoned down shirt tucked into a pair of well-fitting jeans. “This is my science guy”, he says, introducing a somewhat less tidy man of approximately equal age, “He doesn’t want to use his full name on the air so lets just call him Larry the Old Guy.”

The two men sit down across from Sarah and me at the picnic table as I test the levels on a Marantz 660 recorder. Sarah takes notes as I conduct the interview, jotting down the exact time different subjects are discussed and potential new questions that arise in the course of conversation. I press the Marantz “stop” button after 55 minutes of talk, allowing for time to wrap up the meeting before 10AM, time of the next scheduled interview.

Sarah departs, having her own interviews scheduled in Garberville today. I wait…..10:15……no Scott Crandall……..10:30……..no Scott Crandall. Exactly the same thing had happened with the same man at the same place one week ago, exactly. And that wasn’t the first time! Meeting up with David Lemm had been almost as difficult, with the only difference being that David never agreed to a meeting and no-showed. However, I did have to chase him on the phone for two weeks. When I decided to do this story on local organic soil supplements nearly a month ago, I’d just assumed that the company owners would come running for interviews, considering it is in fact free advertising to a wide audience. The truth has been quite to the contrary, though, with frequent delays and apparent skepticism of my intentions.

Knowing that the subject of my 10AM interview is scheduled to appear just around the corner later for a presentation of his product at Daisy Garden Supply, I seek him out there. “He told me yesterday at the county fair that he’d be here at 1 o’clock”, an employee says. Not willing to let this man escape interview again, I retreat to KMUD and wait him out. Over the course of the morning, the building has progressed from crowded to near-insanity. I find one quiet corner in the stacks of the music library room, plugging in the laptop and researching my story for two hours. A volunteer works a phone nearby, taking pledges towards the station’s $10,000 one-day goal.

1PM. Return to Daisy Supply. “Scott called”, an employee informs me, “He said he’s running late. He will be here at 1:30.” To Scott’s final credit, he does appear at that time, upon which we settle in to an outdoor table at Bella Cafe, a small eatery connected to the garden store. Scott is a large man wearing old jeans and a stretched t-shirt, a sock hat covering his head despite the afternoon heat. As promised, a crowd of his supporters is also present, gathering closely around as I begin the 40-minute question-and-answer session. Entertaining and informative, I’m just as pleased with this interview as I had been the last. Despite the struggle of getting these recordings, it was well worth the wait.

“Does anybody want to talk about Scott’s product or organic farming in general”, I ask those crowded around after the interview’s completion. All mouths fall silent, eyes turn away. Scott points out a lanky man in a blue t-shirt lurking in a corner, “Hey Dave, you’ll talk to him won’t you?”. Dave laughs shyly but moves in my direction, slowly seating himself in front of me and the microphone. “So, could you tell the listeners, what’s the size of your garden and how much Geoblast Wormcast do you use on it.” All those crowded around laugh simultaneously, Dave scoots his chair further away, turning from the mic. “OK, OK, let me rephrase that……..so, you use Geoblast in your garden, could you talk about the results?” Dave finally lightens up, “Now THAT’s a good question……….”

Also in attendance is the owner of another organic company who’s willing to do an interview, but the Marantz recorder seems to have exhausted itself for the day, perpetually reading the word “loading” on its small LCD screen. I remove one of the four “AA” batteries, the machine however still reads “loading”. The interviewee follows me to the station where a drum band and costumed dancers perform in the front yard, their sounds broadcast live over the air. A familiar face named Cocoa stops me as I lead my interviewee through the crowds, “Don’t write about my family on the Internet anymore, and Jenny doesn’t have a glass eye.”  I continue into the building without a word, where Terri fixes the ailing Marantz simply by removing all the batteries instead of just one. I conduct the interview, 7-minutes long, in the same corner of the music library where I’d worked earlier. The organic company owner says that he sold “thousands of yards” of fruit and nut compost last year at $85 per yard.

Done! Finished! Over two hours of interviews, more than enough to produce my 30-minute special on local organic soil supplements. Meeting back up with Sarah, we catch a ride back home with Amy at 4:30.

Sat. 8-14-10:

Morning alone. Sarah goes off for hours with Amy to the farmers market at Whitethorn lumber, using the wifi there to complete and send in a new story to the Independent. I wire lamp sockets in the cabin, utilizing used spare parts from two boxes of electrical leftovers Amy stores in her shed. The wiring and parts are all designed for 110-volt AC household circuits but will also work with the 12-volts DC that will soon be running through them. I came up with this wiring strategy after recently realizing that some local stores sell 12-volt fluorescent screw-in bulbs that fit into 110-volt sockets.

The only potential problem with using these 110-volt parts, including plugs and outlets, is the ability to accidentally plug things in with the polarities reversed. My strategy is this- most AC plugs have one prong that is slightly larger than the other, which I have designated as the “positive” polarity. In the event that a plug does get plugged in backwards, though, the system is fused properly.

……

Amy later invites us to a local music gathering but we stay behind, not knowing for sure if our friend Justin, the person who drove us to California in May, is going to come by. His summer job counting spotted owls has ended and he had decided to make one last trip to the coast, confirming his potential arrival a few days ago. However, with a new romantic interest, we weren’t quite sure whether or not he’d decide to make the weekend private. Since he did not appear tonight, we can only say, “Good luck on the beach Justin, and careful of the sand.”

Now that there is power running into the cabin, I took the opportunity a couple days ago to borrow a little portable 12-volt TV from Amy’s shed. Not that the old TV does us any good, of course, but the radio built into does. Listening to that radio, a couple recent segments deserve a mention….an event is advertised as “commercial tobacco free”……the host of a local animal rights show talks in length about her experience of running over a racoon. After injuring the animal, she’d somehow lifted into her car without getting bit, then “watched it die”. She ends her story, “I will continue fighting to hold Caltrans responsible for this”, blaming only the California Department of Transportation for the death of the racoon.

Sun. 8-15-10:

Bacon and egg breakfast. So chilly this morning, and foggy, that I build a fire in the woodstove. Majority of day spent catching up on blogs, and, I’m finally caught up for the first time in many weeks!

The sound of typing have been coming from our ceiling, where the building’s insulation is only covered by sheets of plastic. Climbing up onto the counter this afternoon, I witnessed what looks and sounds like bees walking on the other side of the plastic. From the frequency of strange noises up there, I estimate that the ceiling is FILLED WITH BEES!

The bees hive on the outside of the building is abiding by the terms of its lease, but I will not tolerate these new tenants. Cutting a small slit into the plastic sheets on the ceiling, I spray in aerosol Febreeze, the only thing in my arsenal I thought might drive the bees out. But it would seem that they just find their fiberglass insulation home to be smelling better. No change in bee activity.

Sun. 8-1-10:

Whole day spent cleaning up outside around our newly-rented cabin. Too much to comfortably do in one day but I just can’t rest until done.

Crudely finish the unfinished porch floor using bricks and old plywood. Build a porch table from an old window pane, propped up on stacked milk crates and a broken segment from an unknown piece of wooden furniture. Find old stainless sink in back yard, move to front yard, mount atop stacked milk crates. A plethora of old irrigation hose segments is available for running water to the sink, with the water coming from a several-hundred-gallon rainwater collection tank up the hill.

Build shower. Wooden pallet serves as shower floor. Hammer hollow metal stakes into ground around pallet, wrap tarp around stakes to enclose shower. Run segment of irrigation hose to top of shower, suspended above head level.

Screen in open end of front porch with old screen found under cabin. Mount solar panels on top of massive rotting tree stump by driveway, the sunniest place available.

Sarah spends hours cleaning dozens of useful kitchenwares scattered all over front yard.

Home sweet home!

Mon. 8-2-10:

Amy doesn’t normally drive to town on Mondays but needs to do laundry today. Sarah and I ride with. Amy tells of how the mountainous winding gravel road leading to her house, called Goodman Ranch Road, is maintained. Running entirely through private property, the road exists by easement rights, with each property owner legally bound not to obstruct the passage to those who live along it. The property owners are legally allowed to put a gate at the end of the road to keep out non-residents, but have chosen not to for reasons of convenience.

The road’s users split its maintenance costs, having no interest in asking the Humboldt County Department of Transportation to take over. “Since the road dead-ends, the county can’t forcefully take control, and even with roads that do connect, they don’t usually take over unless there is some resource they want to exploit. And the people living on private roads often don’t have permits for their buildings, so they don’t want the county maintaining the road anyway, because then county agents will come snooping around.”

The cost of keeping Goodman Ranch Road up to par is split among some 17 households, with Amy’s part of the last big renovation costing $1200. All the funds go to one of the property owners who has the necessary earth-moving equipment available. Some of the upkeep costs have been paid for through grants from a local non-profit agency that oversees the ecology of the Mattole River. Sediment from improperly maintained roads is said to be a major cause of the river’s many problems, including near-extinction of the once-healthy salmon population.

……

Ride to Garberville laundromat with Amy. Sarah and I both need to use the Internet but find none available for free. Walk to Meadow’s Business Park, a very healthy little economy hidden in a highland meadow between Garberville and Redway. Located here is Meadow’s Cafe, the owner of which had picked us up hitchhiking one day, sharing the fact that her business has free wifi. In all of Redway or Garberville, this is the only place a truly free wifi cafe is to be found.

We sit for hours in a back room of the clean and modern building, near a loud window-mounted air conditioner. I order a $6 egg and meat wrap but am only charged $3. “These are breakfast wraps. They are half price after noon”, an employee explains. Using the laptop, Sarah edits her story for the Independent all afternoon, which she has entitled, “New Community Garden Aims to Teach About Water Conservation”. I ponder interview questions for a planned upcoming radio news segment about locally-sold soil supplements, some of which have names such as “Wet Betty’s Plant Penetrator”. From a solar power supply store across the street, I purchase a 4.5amp charge controller for $30, which will be used with the 2 solar panels that Amy gave us.

Walking through the late afternoon heat to Redway, we reconnect with Amy at her friends’ house, the regular meeting point. The home’s occupants speak of the house next door that burned down last week, taking part of their wooden fence with it.

Tue. 8-3-10:

Spend much time catching up on blog writing. Run wire from solar panels to front yard, finding that the charge controller purchased yesterday does not work, outputs no voltage whatsoever. Sort through piles of junk in the yard, neatly stacking all that’s potentially useful beside a tree behind the cabin. Swarms of mosquitoes.

Wed. 8-4-10:

Volunteer at the Mateel with Amy. Cisco helps, acting strangely peaceful, making no mention of our phone conversation last week in which I informed him that Sarah and I would not be spending the winter working with him in Mexico. Tonya also volunteers, refusing to cut up sprouting potatoes on the grounds, “they are alive”.

Walk to Prophet Mark’s trailer, helping him to continue learning new functions on his computer. He drives me to Meadows Business Park so I can buy a new charge controller for Amy’s solar system at a cost of $102. After much troubleshooting of her equipment over the past days, I had determined that her existing charge controller was outputting unstable voltage.

Return to the Prophet’s trailer to assist him in the garden propping up fallen plants. Meet Amy for ride home. She has live fish in bags, must get home fast. The fishes are for use in her water storage tanks, where they are intended to eat mosquito larvae. As mosquitoes are still present so late in the season, she theorized that her existing fish had died.

Install Amy’s new charge controller. Sarah returns home with a proud accomplishment, her first Independent article printed on the front page!

Thur. 8-5-10:

A burly log splitter and his kitten-totting daughter show up to the property and begin working before 7AM. Sarah and I walk two miles down the gravel road. Only one vehicle drives by, the driver not bothering to stop for our thumbs. “Lets make sure and not be nice to those people”, I tell Sarah.

An older white-bearded man named Herp stops shortly after we reach the intersection with the paved county road. An ex-CIA satellite engineer with a German accent, he walked away from the high-paying work after becoming disgusted with the Vietnam war. He drops us at the KMUD studios. Sarah hitches on to Garberville while I remain to do the news with Terri.

I spend the morning editing an interview recorded earlier by Terri. “This guy owes me dinner”, I say after tediously removing all his stutters and “uhhhhhmmmms”. Terri responds, “Yeah, I think I got some people elected by making them sound too good.”.

A caller reports 50 bicycles on a local highway. Another caller says a small jet has landed at the Garberville airport. Terri assigns me to go chase a story at the hospital in Garberville, where an Obama-appointed USDA rep is set to award a 60-some-thousand dollar grant. I catch a ride there with Simon, a member of the KMUD staff. “So, Pursuing Nothing, it would seem that you’re pursuing something…..”, Simon says as I climb into his vehicle. “So”, I respond, “It seems my website has gone around.” But no, he had actually found it quite by accident, monitoring the mention of KMUD on Twitter feeds.

Arriving to the hospital, I sit in the waiting room awaiting arrival of the suits. The impeccably dressed and manicured administrator Harry Jasper, daily hero/villain in the local media, greets me some minutes later. Following him into a small conference room, he directs me to a seat at the table. A larger man wearing a hospital badge sits across the table, who makes a snidely-toned remark about my casual dress. “So……Redrum Fifth Avenue”, he snorts, referring to the text printed on my black t-shirt. Harry rescues the conversation, quickly asking where I’m from.

The little conference rooms fill more than expected so I voluntarily move to a corner seat. The female USDA rep arrives with her all-female staff of 3, one of which roams the room while constantly flashing a large camera hung around her neck. Embolded by this photographer, I roam also, flashing a camera borrowed  from the radio station. “Looks like we have a reporter in the room”, the USDA rep says, noticing my presence for the first time.

Plaques and words are exchanged. Hospital administrator Jasper expresses his desire for robots to someday roam the halls. Such equipment is apparently in use elsewhere, with robots going bedside to bedside, controlled remotely by far-away medical specialists. Considering the hospital’s current feud, I find the idea of the robots to be particularly amusing. Administrator Jasper and the hospital’s top physician are embattled in a bitter fight, the source of near daily media attention, with the physician threatening to quit if Jasper does not succumb to his demands. I envision airing a story about the robots the day the physician quits…….

The UDSA group and hospital administrators move outdoors for a photo-op at the front of the building, then they ask me what I want from them. People notice reporters! Especially when you’re the only one around. I request an interview from the USDA rep and she obliges, “Anytime a high-level government official comes to Northern California, residents want to know….what are you doing here?”……..”At the station we had callers today reporting a jet landing at the Garberville airport. Was that you?” Amused, the USDA rep denies having arrived in the jet, “Oh no, we travel in cars.”

Hitch back to the radio station with a man who owns a western clothing store. I finish production of the hospital story by 5:30, which runs to 3-minutes in length, then upload the story text and one photograph to the news section of the station’s website.

Hitching home with Sarah, a truck stops that just so happens to be the very first truck that ever stopped for us when we first arrived to the area in May. On that terribly cold and rainy day that seems so long ago, this same truck had stopped in Shelter Cove. The driver, husband of today’s driver Sheila, had taken us back to their house for hot showers.

Sheila drops us at the intersection with the county road, then the very next passing truck, an old pickup with ice-cold air conditioning, takes us two more miles to the intersection with the gravel road. Just beginning the two mile walk down the gravel road, the pickup that had passed us by this morning creeps up from behind, and stops. It’s a young couple that live on Amy’s land, far down the hill from where Sarah and I stay. Their truck is terribly full but they let us climb into the back.

Fri. 8-6-10:

Going in to town on Fridays is regular routine for Amy, as she likes to use the Internet at the library on that day. So, it will become my routine and Sarah’s to ride with her.

Arrive to KMUD radio before 10AM to conduct a scheduled interview with the owner of a soil supplement company. This owner is a no-show, however. Answering a phone call at 10:15, he reschedules for next Friday at the same time and place, with no explanation or apology. I spend the rest of the day helping Terri produce the news. She assigns me to chase a story in Garberville concerning a potential confrontation between vendors and war protesters. An informant had apparently told the news department that vendor(s) planned on selling products on the same section of sidewalk where war protesters regularly protest every Friday afternoon. The same confrontation took place some months ago, with the informant saying today would be a repeat.

I ride to Garberville with the DJ of a local music show who happens to be leaving the station at the same time. He drops me near the town square, where the Friday farmers’ market is in full swing. Amy is seated in a lawn chair under a potted tree at one corner of the square, just observing the scene, which is how she typically enjoys social activities. I ask various individuals around the square if they have heard anything about today’s possible confrontation. Duke, an iconic homeless man who has become a friend over the past month, knows of no potential problems, but may be about to be involved in a different news story shortly. The town square is technically private property but has legal standing as a public area, with the board of directors that runs it receiving government grants for its continued development into a park.

With the recent closing of the last decent homeless hangout in town, Veterans’ Park, all the homeless have now moved over to the town square. Last week, the president of the board of directors had instructed the police to remove Duke and several other homeless from the square, handpicking who was to go and who could stay. Duke staged a protest on that day and was considering another for today because the board president had no-showed for a scheduled private meeting with him.

I make a short walk over to the bookstore, the best source of insider information in town. Operated by community activists Paul and Kathy, the cluttered little store is the creator of things such as an activist publication called Greenfuse. These people know things, so I take their lack of knowledge about the war protester/vendor confrontation as confirmation that it’s not going to happen. Duke enters the store, which is where he stores his protest posters for the town square controversy………one news story a flop but another just brewing up.

Returning to the town square I find the first of the war protesters has arrived, a familiar face named Steveaux, playing an accordion while wearing oversized shorts with colorful suspenders. Sarah also arrives, having been nearby in the Independent’s office finishing up another story when I tipped her off to Duke’s protest. She tips me off to a bicycle for sale at a yard sale just a few blocks away.

With the protest barely getting started, I take a break to search out the cycle, which is being sold at the home of Ella. I met Ella some weeks ago when the police came to inform the homeless that they would no longer be welcome in Veteran’s Park. She had raged through the park screaming about all the “shit and piss” left there by the homeless. As I’m toting a KMUD microphone and recorder today, she recognizes me immediately, remembering that I’d requested an interview during the Veteran’s Park incident. A bike is indeed for sale, two of them actually, and one spare wheel- price for all, $10. I choose the bike that actually works, riding it away with the spare wheel in hand, which just might fit on Sarah’s bike that has a bent front wheel.

Returning to the town square, a handful of other war protesters are present, demonstrating alongside Duke’s “Homeless Hating Park Board” sign. A community member is in a heated teary-eyed discussion with Duke over his use of the word “Hate”, which Sarah and I both record for over 10 minutes.

With no large scale protests or confrontations appearing to gear up, I ride the newly purchased bicycle back to KMUD in Redway. With not enough gathered for a story about any of the day’s Garberville incidents, Terri assigns me to research other topics. A wildfire had reportedly been started yesterday at a marijuana growing operation, but no agencies will talk about it. I do find a talker about another story, though. A police seargent returns a call to talk with me about a string of local unsolved business robberies. He hesitates at the end of the conversation, deciding whether or not to give me a description of the vehicle. He is concerned because KMUD listeners recently doled out vigilante investigations after hearing the description of a vehicle involved in another incident.

Multiple callers report smoke in various locations around Humboldt County. I respond to each of the calls with my own call to CalFire. With all these reports, the agency has no knowledge of a fire. In one case they have a plane in the area, instructing the pilots to fly over then calling back to confirm no fire was spotted. After each call I write up a short report for the DJ to read on-air.

Meet Amy at her friends’ house at 6PM. Duke is also there, saying he and others might be planning on cutting up the orange snow fence that surrounds Veteran’s Park on Tuesday morning before dawn. If they go ahead with this plan, they will stuff the fence cuttings into garbage bags and wait for the police to arrest them. All the members of Amy’s friends’ household are gathered in the front yard bailing water from a large children’s pool. Sarah doesn’t show up to meet us so I call her. She has lost track of time, still sitting in the Independent’s office in Garberville. Amy and I return home, leaving Sarah to hitchhike.

Driving down the gravel road near home, we find Sarah walking there. She had beat us, although our only stop was for a few minutes to buy groceries! Blondes hitchhiking alone get places. Climbing into the car, she proudly pulls out a check for $43 from the Independent, her first payment ever for writing in her whole life.

Sat. 8-7-10:

Amy and Sarah spend the morning and afternoon at Whitethorn Lumber Yard farmers market, where Sarah uses the wifi to work on her latest story for the Independent. I stay behind to focus on other tasks.

As Amy’s solar power system still does not appear to be charging correctly, I investigate further, experimenting with an alternative wiring option on the charge controller.  Next, I get both of our bicycles into semi-working order, then go to work on my own solar power system. I wire a new $70 automotive battery purchased yesterday to a charge controller and the solar panels. Sarah had exchanged the originally-purchased charge controller some days ago after I’d found it to be outputting no voltage. Directly to the battery posts I attach a 12-volt outlet. I don’t have anything to plug into the 12-volt outlet yet, but we have power now! The charge controller should, if it works right this time, allow power from the panels to charge the battery as needed.

Strangely windy all day. Not for weeks has there been any more than the slightest of breezes. With the wind comes cool air from the ocean, which is just separated from this location by one mountain ridge. Sarah talks in the nighttime hours of how much she enjoys her new job writing. She enjoys it so much, in fact, that we may not leave in the winter after all.

Sat. 7-31-10:

Attend farmer’s market at Whitethorn Lumber with Amy, her regular Saturday routine. Sarah, under orders to present her first story to the Independent by Sunday night, had planned on hitching to town for Internet access. However, in an amazing stroke of luck, this extremely rural lumber yard has an open wifi connection. Sarah sits for hours by a chain link fence, our computer plugged in to an outdoor outlet.

The story idea suggested by the Independent’s editor doesn’t pan out, though, as none of the people needed for interviews are available to take telephone calls. Sarah’s cell phone doesn’t get service here but the friendly lumber yard staff allow her to use their phone, even offering to come out and get her if somebody calls back.

Knowing she won’t make the deadline for the editor’s suggested story, she decides to present a different story. After all, the editor had said he was low on print for this week, so in theory he should be happy with any well written story. Sarah chooses the obvious alternative…….the farmers market. Just a few minutes of questioning vendors yields bad news, though. The market does not have the necessary county permits, so nobody wants to have anything to do with media attention. These lawbreakers will continue to tear out structured society apart every Saturday.

Sarah returns to work searching for story ideas, the day now half over. She’s rescued just in time, a vendor suggests a story about his pet project, Friends of Thorne Community Garden, a new venture located right here in the lumber yard. Sarah goes to work immediately.

Her interviews and photographs done by 2PM, she begins the long task of transcribing the audio recorded onto her digital camera. The farmers’ market bluegrass musicians grow in number nearby as she types by the chain link fence late into the afternoon.

I spend time browsing and skimming the free book boxes, which are replenished regularly by farmers’ marketers. A selection on famous lesbians includes an article on Amelia Erhart, but does not claim directly that she was a lesbo. I eventually choose a Pulitzer Prize book called, “The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond, an author also known for writing “The Third Chimpanzee”.

Reading not at all in a concentrated fashion, I sit in a plastic chair near Amy and her old wheelchair-bound lady friend. A young woman faces us, breastfeeding her baby. A middle-aged woman slices huge imported cheese blocks behind us with a wire, wearing ponytails and a frilly apron of the kind popular a century ago. Of all the scenes at this weekly market, cheese woman is the most curious. Another vendor spends an hour loading plants back into her van. I collect a bag of sawdust with Amy, which she suggests Sarah and I sprinkle into our outhouse pit.

3PM. Amy ready to leave but Sarah not.yet close to finishing her story. The market space now empty except for the still-growing impromptu bluegrass band, Sarah stays behind to continue typing by the fence while Amy and I drive home. I leave Sarah’s bike, which had been stored in the car all day, locked to a tree at the intersection with the gravel road 2 miles from from home. Sarah would be able to hitchhike to this point then ride the bike.

I spend the day’s remainder working on Amy’s solar power system, which has been malfunctioning for two weeks. With only a wall-mount style voltmeter to investigate with, I isolate and test various parts of the system. Each of the 4 solar panels tests to be producing proper voltages when disconnected from the system, but no voltage at all is present when the panels are connected to the system. Isolating each of the 4 golf cart batteries that store the system’s power, each tests to be producing the proper voltage. The mystery deepens……..something must be wrong INSIDE the house.

“Do you have anything turned on or plugged in?”, I ask Amy. We find only a power inverter, which is switched off. But at a loss otherwise, I test the system again with the inverter unplugged…….SUCCESS! Voltage now runs through the entire system, but why? Why should this power inverter, which was turned off, interrupt the whole system? My only theory is that the inverter was somehow interfering with the charge controller, a device that is the “heart” of most solar systems.

As a payment for my services, Amy gives me the older two her her four solar panels, which she had wanted to remove from the system anyway. A solar technician had previously advised her to do so because those panels are primitive compared to two new ones in the system. This means that the newly-rented cabin shall soon have electricity!

Sarah returns just before dark, having finished and emailed off her first story to the Independent. I spend the evening organizing the severely disorganized front porch, where half the floor is unfinished and most of the space is filled with the prior tenants abandoned property.

Tue. 7-27-10:

Volunteer at Mateel Center with Chef Bob.

Go to Prophet Mark’s trailer to assist him with computer. He wants to compose poetry offline instead of always using the text editor in his email account. We download Abiword, with the 20-something megabyte package taking over an hour on the dial-up connection.

Prophet Mark also wants a Facebook account but Facebook rejects his name…..“If this is your real name then contact the Facebook team for assistance.” His request receives an automatic response from the Facebook team, “Please reply to this message with a scanned copy or a digital photograph of a government-issued identification displaying the name you wish to use.”

Wed. 7-28-10:

The mysterious young blonde enters the post office for yet another $500 money order, again carrying only her small purse and a brown paper grocery bag. I volunteer at the Mateel with Chef Amy. Among today’s volunteers is Tonya. Holding an empty cottage cheese container she walks up to another volunteer who is serving food, “Fill my plastic vessel with your earthen goodness.”

Having nothing better to do in the afternoon, I stop by Steveaux’s house, who lives near the center of Redway. Being the volunteer piano player at the Mateel meals on Wednesday’s, he’s become a familiar face over the past weeks who had invited me to stop by his place on multiple occasions. His home, situated right next to the Little League ballfield, is the source of the wifi signal that Sarah and I have been relying on for the past two months. Never before though had she nor I actually entered the house.

“Come in!”, Steveaux yells from behind a piano, a small woman singing by his side. “Sing!”, they both demand, barely looking up from sheet music. One song turns to two, and three, four, five, six songs, I loose count. Short break, “Can you play any instruments?”, Steveaux asks, running to grab a bugle from the wall upon hearing my answer, “Trumpet”. He goes immediately into the next song, “Play along!”. He and his small female friend are strangely excited at my rough toots, “We’ve got to get this guy a trumpet, and he can sing too! What will it take to get you back here every Wednesday? How about money?”

What kind of a strange land have I stepped into?

A hispanic women opens a door, “It’s time for your spanish lesson”, she tells the singing woman. Music time over, I sit with Steveaux around a coffee table. Although we’d seen each other frequently over the past weeks, there had never been much time for conversation. Just a half-hour talking and I know, though, musical Wednesdays will have to become a routine. Interesting things could happen in this house, like Ancient Forest’s International.

Thur. 7-29-10:

Patty Plunk our skunk rummages through the camp just before dawn. Small running footsteps pounce on her in the blackness. Screaming, running, more screaming, no more running……no more screaming. Is Patty Plunk our skunk dead? If so, who and what is the murderer?

Nobody shows up at the Mateel to begin the meal, but the back door is open so I get started. New volunteer faces arrive before 10 o’clock, whom I provide with the necessary foods and equipment to make salads and cut breads. The coordinators who were supposed to be here two hours ago arrive and immediately begin micro managing the new volunteers. More volunteers arrive.

The kitchen now too full for comfort,  I quietly sneak out with my backpack. Being quite behind on this blog, I need a comfortable place to sit and type…….Steveaux’s house. He’s outside in his yard, working on a cabin with a power drill. “Sure, you can sit inside or out.”

Steveaux and the rest of the household soon depart, allowing me to remain on the couch with my computer for hours of productive silence. The only interruption is brief, two young boys set plastic dinosaurs on me then run away to play elsewhere.

Returning to camp later, Sarah describes how she lost one job and possibly gained another all in the same day. Having made $1500 over the past two weeks, she was unexpectedly laid off at this afternoon. However, a lunchtime phone call from the editor of the Independent, a Garberville-based weekly newspaper, offered the chance for new work. Paid meagerly by the word instead of generously by weight, but vastly more exciting.

For the first night in weeks, Patty Plunk our skunk does not arrive at dark looking for a meal. RIP Patty Plunk our skunk.

Fri. 7-30-10:

Move out day! Over two months in the woods has finally come to an end. Before packing we celebrate with breakfast at Deb’s Cafe. Sarah purchases a used bicycle for $50. I purchase two bike locks for half the price of the bike.

Pack. Laundry. I wait with our bags on a boulder outside a garden supply store while Sarah stocks up on groceries. Jason, a familiar young homeless man, stops by the boulder to chat. “I just want to raise a cute little bunny rabbit, to pet it and play with it, then just fucking strangle it and eat it. I want to know what that feels like!”.

New landlord Amy arrives in her dirty station wagon. I throw the bags inside and tie the bike on top We pick up Sarah and her grocery stock at the supermarket. She’s standing in the parking lot with Cisco, who responds with a short tempered comment upon my greeting. “He is exhausting me”, Sarah says upon climbing into the station wagon with a long face. It would appear that my suspicions may have been confirmed…….

For weeks we had been planning on accompanying Cisco to Southeastern Mexico in the fall, to live and work on the property of his friend who owns a bar/restaurant there. Considering that Cisco insisted we pay at least $1200 of our rent up front, though, I’d become concerned and told him some days ago that we would not be renting the apartment. I was clear, though, that were still planning on working for his friend. The apartment had been a problem for two reasons; (1) Sarah nor I wanted to commit to live in the same apartment for our entire stay in Mexico; (2) I suspected that Cisco had arranged to receive a commission cut of the rent, raising the price.

Now, after Cisco’s long tirade to Sarah in the supermarket parking lot, we make a decision. I call his phone minutes after he drives away, informing him that we will certainly not be accompanying him to Mexico after all.

Ride with Amy through the mountains for 30 minutes in the dusty station wagon, listening to the sounds of Miles Davis. Amy, a great grandmother, saw Miles twice in concert during the 50‘s.

Arrive to new home, the tiny cabin first visited two weeks ago. Spend afternoon cleaning. Former tenant extremely dirty, pounds of trash removed. Single-sized bed is made of milk crates, plywood and folding mattresses. We dismantle and reassemble, converting the bed to full-size. Share our burritoes with Amy for dinner. Rum and coke in lantern light.

Fri. 7-23-10:

Sarah took the day off work to volunteer with me in the KMUD news studio, something she has recently been very disappointed to have been left out of. And no, her disappointment is not because I’ve been spending days with the pretty blonde news director Terri, but because journalism is one of the few professions she’s truly interested in.

For her first story, Sarah takes a suggestion from Terri; Kombucha drinks pulled from local store shelves. As this suggestion had been made some days ago, I’d already set up Sarah’s first interview while she was at work yesterday, scheduled for 10AM this morning with the manager of the Shop Smart supermarket just down the street.

A few minutes of Marantz recorder training with Terri then Sarah heads off to the interview alone, the black recorder case slung over her shoulder. I set to work at an aging Macintosh on an unused desk in the newsroom. “I should just get rid of that thing to make more room on the desk”, Terri ponders.of the electronic beast, its white plastic case showing the first signs of yellowing. “No, I’m actually glad to have it available”, I counter, finding that its Internet and audio editing abilities are surprisingly reasonable.

At Terri’s suggestion I rescue a story abandoned by a fellow community journalist. On the desktop of the old Mac is an hour of field interviews from a local training facility for convict fire crews. Officially called the Eel River Conservation Camp, the facility is nicknamed “Con Camp” by witty locals. A majority of the field interviews are ruined with excessive background noise from loud equipment, but an indoor interview with an office secretary is of high quality. I write up the story, record it in the news studio and edit the audio to accompany.

Sarah returns long before my fire story is finished, silently working for hours beside me with our laptop at the same desk  I take breaks from my editing to write up and print out Civil Liberties Independent Monitoring Project(CLIMP) reports, running each of them to the on-air DJ. The subject of a recent National Public Radio story, KMUD Radio is a real-time source of CLIMP reports. This is how CLIMP reports work; the public calls CLIMP reporting the locations and movements of government vehicles, personnel and aircraft, primarily those believed to be involved in marijuana eradication operations. CLIMP then relays the information to media outlets including KMUD.

…….

Someone calls the news line to report a high speed police chase on Briceland Road. The suspect flees into the woods and remains at large. A CLIMP report mentions a low flying helicopter near Standish Hickey State Park. “Before you take the report to the DJ”, Terri says, “call the park to make sure it’s not a rescue operation.” Negative- the park office staff knows of no rescues taking place. A man calls the news line reporting his large-breed dogs missing. Another man reports a gang of large dogs attacking his horse. Upon further investigation, however, the large lost dogs do not match the exact description of the attackers. Sarah, finally having written, edited and recorder her Kombucha story, also writes up and records a story about the dogs attacking the horse.

I spend the final two hours before news time tediously editing down an 11-minute interview with a fast-speaking staff member of the Redwoods Rural Health Center, a community clinic located nearby. Terri’s only request, “Can you try to make it shorter?”, is no easy task considering the fast, and at times, highly technical speaking. The speaker is an asset to her profession, knowledgeable, precise and well spoken, but she’s a nightmare to edit down. Expanding the audio to its highest zoom setting, I make micro-cuts between breaths in the speech, using fades to make the half-breaths sound normal. The result is seven minutes and 30 seconds of work that I’m quite proud of. Hearing the report later, a fellow community journalist even calls in to praise the story.

……

As is typical with Terri, she finishes recording the end of the news while the beginning is already playing on-air. She then shows me how to update the news section of KMUD’s website, knowledge I utilize to add two of today’s stories, including Sarah’s about Kombucha. The workday done, Sarah and I accompany Terri for pizza at the Mateel Cafe. Not to be confused with the Mateel Community Center, the cafe is just one of several local businesses using the word “Mateel”, which is just a nickname for this area near the Matole and Eel Rivers.

The bills for the single large pizza comes to $31! “But it’s all organic”, someone later argues.

Sat. 7-24-10:

Planning on moving into a cabin owned by our new friend Amy at the end of the month, we decided some days ago to offer our camp to a young homeless man, whom we will call “D”. Hearing of the offer, D had been immediately interested, as his current camp is located far away and contains none of the amenities that Sarah and I have spent dozens of hours building for ourselves. Clean, soft spoken and thoughtful, D is the perfect choice to take ownership. His quiet loner ways will ensure that the camp is not exposed to the homeless masses, that it lives on for others like us to enjoy.

As was previously arranged, I meet Derrick this morning and lead him into the camp for the first time. “It’s the nicest camp I’ve ever seen this close to town”, he exclaims as I give the grand tour. The introduction is short, as Sarah and I have plans to spend the day at the home of Mateel Center Tuesday chef Bob. Planning on spending the night there, we purchase food and beer, then hitchhike the 5 miles to Briceland. A joint in his wrinkled hand, our friendly old driver winds through the hills in his dirty pickup

………

Briceland. Walking up the gravel road toward the top of the big grassy hill where Bob lives, a curious woman stops in a compact car, offering a ride the rest of the way. Our white-bearded host is located in the maze of debris that is his yard, watering his garden to ward off the extreme afternoon heat. Retiring into the equally cluttered little house, Bob prepares dinner while Sarah and I browse his books. A regular attendee of the Burning Man Festival, Bob has much knowledge and literature on the subject. A book of full-page color photographs features festival oddities such as Dr. Megawatt, a man who stands between two massive Tesla Coil-like devices as electricity streams through his body. “Dr. Megawatt got fried a little bit the last time I saw his show. He didn’t put on another performance.”

Hearing of our interest in Burning Man, Bob suggests that we run a free classified ad on KMUD, “Great volunteer couple looking to work at theme camp.” He explains that many of the festival booths and displays are so elaborate as to require volunteer crews. The owners of such booths regularly pay the $300-something ticket price of their volunteers.

……..

Late afternoon begins the purpose of today’s gathering, to record experimental music with Bob’s impressive arsenal of professional sound equipment. A familiar young man named Derrick joins us for just an hour, and none of the other invites show up, so Sarah and I have the sound playpen almost entirely to ourselves into the nighttime hours.

I primarily utilize a glowing red microphone hanging from the ceiling over the kitchen counter, calling spirits from the hills in a heavy reverberation while Sarah hums and strums a guitar into another mic.  We write impromptu song after song for hours, do spoken word about a man swallowed by a whale after following a glowing strawberry under the water. I chatter on the subject of corporate personhood, envisioning an economic “virus” in which a corporation is controlled by a board of directors consisting entirely of corporate “persons”. The virus is created by an economic mad scientist that organizes the company in a manner that eliminates all real persons from control, including themself.

……..

Completing a final hour of drum beating with Bob, Sarah and I retreat  in the moonlight to a white school bus parked in his yard. Purchased for $4000 some years ago, the old bus has been wonderfully converted into a recreational vehicle complete with full size kitchen appliances and a bathtub. As for the bed, wonderful.

Sun. 7-25-10:

Brilliant early sunlight filters through curtained school bus windows, gently warming night-cooled air. Bob passes by as I brush teeth outside by the bus’s front door, returning from morning errands up on the brown grassy hill where his barn sits. We share coffee in his home while listening to a recording from last night, “Phlym driver drive that phlym all over town, drive that dried phlym all over town…….”

Sarah and I walk down to the highway, thumbs out, eating plentiful roadside blackberries while we wait. A young volunteer firefighter stops, his blonde daughter in a child car seat. Turns out he knows some of the same people we do, having competed in an annual weekend competition between firefighters known as the Roll on the Matole.

………

Attend technical meeting for community journalists at KMUD radio. Studio B filled to capacity, about 10 people, all facing a projection screen as different individuals take turns demonstrating various audio editing software. One of the attendees is a professional freelancer who sells stories via the Internet to news outlets all over the country. He is the first to admit, though, that to date he’s only sold a handful of stories, each for a couple hundred dollars or less.

The other attendees demonstrating software all seem to have skills limited to the particular programs they use, often becoming confused with basic operating system procedures. I give such people great credit, as learning new software without rounded computer knowledge can be extremely daunting, especially with programs of a technical nature such as audio editing. These volunteer reporters have a true passion for what they do, matching that of most professionals..

Moving out of stifling Studio B, the group retreats to a slightly cooler front yard picnic table for Marantz audio recorder training. To hot for a full dinner, Sarah and I take only a salad back to camp, consumed with whiskey and coke.

Mon. 7-26-10:

Track down a smell we awaken to on many morning, that of roasting coffee beans. It’s the Signature Coffee Company, where a sociable older man stands in front of a large stainless steel machine that takes up an entire corner of the building. A slowly rotating arm on the front of the machine grinds piles of beans down into the bottom of a large grated tub. The cost for a small cup of this amazing service, less than $1.50. Although I must say that the smell of the roasting coffee beans from a distance smells more like chemicals than coffee

…….

Sarah goes off to her paid job. I spend the day volunteering for the KMUD news department with Terri, who is involved in a day-long tele-domestic dispute over her ailing little black car. She sends me with a Marantz recorder down the street to Daisy Supply, where a team of repair workers has dug a hole in the parking lot where water had been flowing out across the pavement all weekend.

There is no supervisor present to give an interview, but conveniently, there is a second news opportunity. When walking through Daisy Supply, a garden store, on Saturday I’d noticed bags of buffalo manure selling under the counter for $129 each! An employee directs me to a manager named Linda. Suffering from a temporary voice problem, she refuses to be interviewed but spends 30 minutes sharing a treasure of useful information and contacts. Expensive buffalo manure is the first of many interesting product stories here. Linda has devoted an entire high-profile corner of her upscale store to these locally produced soil supplements, seeing them as a potential next economic opportunity for the region once the liveliness of its current industry fades. And at $130 per cubic foot, she may be on to something.

Having noticed the curious advertisements and logos of these products over the past weeks, I decide to devote an entire series of stories to them, taking the same direction that Linda has; a new potential niche market to help get the region through the hard times predicted to hit if marijuana is legalized in November.

………

As my planned new series is not a time-sensitive issue, I spend the rest of the day assisting Terri with the weekend’s many law enforcement stories, including the apparent murder of a 4-year-old by his caretaker. Not knowing exactly how to write and record this sensitive child murder story, I attempt to return it Terri, but she insists and I oblige. My first recording sounds too upbeat so I delete it and start over, finally satisfied with the dark tones achieved.

The other big story of the weekend is a meeting of the Humboldt County Planning Commission, but Terri is unable to retrieve the archived meeting audio from the county website. She does eventually obtain video footage from another source but does not have the software available to separate the audio. This gives me the opportunity to turn the tables and teach her some things for a change, as we download and experiment with various programs in an attempt to separate the audio from the video. I must say, my Mac skills have come quite a way over the past two weeks. I find that Macs work quite well but would still never buy one since the majority of software is written for the more popular(and cheaper) PC.

………

Returning to camp I find Sarah solemnly sipping whiskey and coke in bed, claiming that she’s terribly bored with her extremely well-paid job.

Sun. 7-18-10:

Haven taken an instant liking yesterday to my new friend Keith, I’d agreed to offer him an entire day of assistance with his volunteer job of feeding the volunteer and performer masses at the Mateel’s Reggae on the River festival.

The only clock available, Sarah’s cell phone, has a dead battery, making the 5:30AM wake-up time very inconvenient. In such situations I tend to wake up every few minutes, making for extremely poor sleep. Dawn is the “alarm”, although I have no exact idea what time the sun is rising, only that it sometime around 5:30.

Entering Redway, the town is vacant of a single moving vehicle or pedestrian, the Mateel Center still dark and tightly locked. A familiar homeless man, Hawiaan surfer Coloni, combs the pavement near the laundromat, seeking out smokable discarded cigarettes(called “snipes”). The owner of Deb’s Cafe opens his business door. “Want to go get coffee”, I offer Coloni, “No, that guy’s ex-CHP”, he replies.

I buy two coffee’s to go, sharing one with Coloni in front of Redway Liquors. I smoke a cigarette that was tucked behind my ear while he puffs snipes. “What time is it anyway?”, he asks, waiting for the liquor store’s 9AM opening time. Coloni is a regular at this time and place. On one recent morning I’d witnessed him trip over the store’s front patio stair then walk right into the locked glass door. He’d then turned around, asking, “What time is it anyway?”

……

6:30AM. Return to Mateel Center. Keith and Dish Nazi are awake and working. A garden hose is wrapped around the lumber rack of Keith’s truck, which he explains served as a shower last night. I ride with him to the festival site, Benbow State Park. Dish Nazi stays behind, engaged in his own private holocaust of the food remains sticking to a pile of pans.

7:00AM. Arrive to the tent that is a kitchen, complete with a sink and hot water heater set up atop wooden pallets, complete with a full commercial stove with ovens. I break 360 eggs, experimenting with a double-handed cracking method that’s not entirely successful, breaking two eggs at the same time, one in each hand. Fearing shells in the scrambled eggs, I return to the trusted one-at-a-time method.

Cut one dozen various types of melons, displaying mountains of slices in large bowls and pans. Serving time. Keith works at the stove, struggling to keep up with the demand for pancakes and eggs. The line is held up every few minutes due to the size limitations of the stovetop. This line, however, is nothing close to the 500+ served last night for dinner, with the majority of breakfast serving done within an hour.

……

“We need somebody from the kitchen to come and organize their stuff in the reefer!”. I’m designated for the task, finding a temporary disaster in the refrigeration semi-trailer. Storage area for all the Mateel’s various food and beveridge stands throughout the event, the trailer is stuffed from front to back with everything from kegs to asparagus to ice. Whoever delivered the last pallet of ice made room for it by haphazardly throwing the kitchen’s products everywhere, creating a nightmare of potential health department violations spanning half the semi-truck.

Seeing me at work in the trailer, a volunteer from another booth with products stored here yells, “The kitchen crew is really fucking up!”. I ignore the ignorant comment, not even giving the offender the respect of an angry glance.  Knowing the health department is expected at any time, I spend an hour reorganizing the stacks, searching out all potential problems and bringing in sanitizing solutions to finish off.

……

I recruit a young student from Chico State named Paige who had helped last night and this morning. She agrees to return with me and Keith to the Mateel to begin dinner preparations. Having secured her assistance, I don’t feel as bad about leaving Keith for a few hours to attend the event with Sarah as planned.

Sarah arrives to the Mateel an hour earlier than expected so I first request her assistance breaking apart 200 pounds of partially frozen chicken thighs. She agrees only very reluctantly, having done her fill of Mateel-related volunteer work over the past weeks. 1PM. We board the free shuttle school bus, onboard which two young men openly sell bottled beers for $3 each. Our friend Prophet Mark also happens to be riding, who finds upon arrival to the event that he’s not on the volunteer list, unable to get in. Upon gaining our own entry, Sarah and I successfully seek out somebody who can get Mark in. The work of a volunteer never ceases.

Sarah and I wander the 100-degree sold-out show for an hour, gawking at booths, particularly the ones selling potting soils and fertilizers with psychedelic packaging. Potting soil at a reggae concert! This place never ceases to amaze me.

Hot in short order, we make great effort to seek out grassy shade. Despite many trees throughout the park, only one small available patch of land meets these qualifications, with every other square inch of shade filled beyond capacity. While the spot is not in view of the main stage, it is within close earshot. We lounge for an hour observing the crowds, especially a young shirtless man wallowing in the mud with a big grin. He sits underneath one of the cooling stations, a misting hose strung over a pathway, just smiling and staring at people. The man finally disappears, then reappears sometime later, again wallowing in the same mud hole with the same goofy grin.

……

Sarah begins a shift in the Mateel lunch program’s lemonade stand at 4PM. I line up to take the shuttle back to the Mateel. “What would it take for you to part with that arm band?”, someone sitting on a boulder asks. With the event sold-out, many would-be attendees wander around attempting to buy arm bands from those leaving. Knowing I will be inside Keith’s truck upon returning, not needing the arm band, I give it to the man on the boulder for free. His friend quickly produces a razor sharp pocket knife, slicing the band off before I can protest the close proximity of the blade.

Return Mateel. All is in order and on schedule. Keith has done this job for years and gotten good at it despite a frequent lack of volunteers. 6PM, we repeat yesterday’s scene, loading the pickup truck with hundreds of pounds of food in pots and pans, serving the food on-site to hundreds of hungry volunteers and performers until well after dark.

Sarah appears sometime before midnight. We ride back to Redway together in Keith’s truck. With the show ending tonight, Keith’s job is now over. We help him unload dirty pans at the Mateel then he begins the hour-long drive home. Dish Nazi goes to work on the pans as Sarah and I make our way back to camp. What a weekend.

Mon. 7-19-10:

Despite having volunteered with the festival kitchen crew all weekend, that wasn’t what I’d signed up for. Before knowing I’d be in the kitchen all weekend I’d agreed to be on Mateel Center manager April’s Monday/Tuesday cleanup crew, having signed on the dotted line assuring my presence.

I arrive to the Mateel at 11AM, finding my niche as the kitchen organizer, putting away all the many truckloads of pots, pans and food as they return from the event site. Having spent so much time in this kitchen over past weeks, this is the perfect job for me, as none of the other volunteers present know the regular locations of stored items. Despite having worked so much over the past days, I don’t mind considering my time is spent usefully. The kitchen has been an infamous disaster in previous years after Reggae on the River, but throughout the day I’m able to keep it under control and free of excessive clutter, finding suitable locations for everything. By the end of the day I’m entirely pleased with the progress, ending up with a kitchen that looks no different from any other ordinary day.

There were a couple surprises, though, in the form of lunch and dinner. “Sure would be nice to feed all these volunteers lunch”, April suggests around noon, to which another volunteer and I respond with two ovens full of quesedillas. “Sure would be nice to feed all these volunteers dinner”, April suggests around 5PM, to which I respond with leftover chicken thighs and a salad. Considering the heat, neither meal sees more than a dozen takers, just enough to consume the amounts prepared.

My volunteer day ends just as the sun sets. Back at camp, Patty Plunk our skunk eats nearly a pound of cooked chicken breasts that I’d thrown out.

Tue. 7-20-10:

Volunteered with Chef Bob to cook his weekly organic meal at the Mateel. Having been a volunteer for over 15 years he is used to finding the kitchen in a terrible mess after the Reggae on the River festival He did indeed come in looking for trouble, but found no more than a single hotel pan with some plastic wrap left sticking underneath its edges. “This is the best the kitchen has ever looked after Reggae”, he finally admits, seeming almost disappointed.

Having signed up for the Monday/Tuesday cleanup crew, I stay on after the meal, cooking two oven-fulls of leftover chicken thighs. The building’s water is out for two hours due to a water main break. I again prepare dinner for the volunteers assisting with festival cleanup. On the menu is chicken, of course. Chef Babette shows me how to make ranch dressing from mayonnaise and sour cream, a combination I never could have imagined was the case. One thing is for certain, all this time spent at the Mateel will have a lifelong effect on my cooking skills, which are still meager but at least much improved.

….

6PM. I meet up with Sarah to attend a community journalist meeting at KMUD radio, with the small congregation of volunteer reporters gathering around the picnic table in the station’s front yard. Today’s agenda is to further develop tactical plans for the new Emergency Response Team, a part of the community journalism project which Sarah and I had previously agreed to be members of. Although a couple good new ideas are brainstormed, the main result of the meeting is primarily a review of things already discussed. A sheet is passed around for all to sign, with the information to become part of a phone chain that can be activated in emergencies. One of the group members writes only her first name. “I don’t usually use my last name”, she says upon being questioned about this.

Patty Plunk our skunk receives chicken thigh bones, carries them down her hole by the fallen redwood trunk.

Wed. 7-21-10:

“I hate that bird!”, Sarah declares with such disgust before dawn after having the prior 30 minutes of her sleeping time ruined by some unseen, presumably winged, creature.

I volunteer at the Mateel with Chef Amy, who cooks up the leftover chicken thighs so deliciously that many of the 50 served return requesting seconds. “Thank god for Wednesdays!”, somebody explains, referring to the popular dissatisfaction with Chef Bob’s organic Tuesdays.

Frequent volunteer Elk Woman refuses to enter the kitchen. “It’s just too hectic in there lately”, she explains, only coming to eat the food this time. It’s presumable that her frequent arguments with volunteer Cisco are to blame, although she shares equal responsibility for those incidents, often being just as much of an antagonizer as he is.

……

Sarah, still working her paid job every weekday, takes off early to volunteer with me at the KMUD news department. News coordinator Terri asks that we research why kombucha drinks have been pulled from local store shelves. To serve as an office she gives us unoccupied Studio B, a larger room used primarily for talk shows.

With insufficient time to prepare the kombucha story for tonight’s news, we focus primarily on another task assigned by Terri, to request new copies of old emergency informational pamphlets. She presents us with two armloads of the aging documents, some dating back to the late 1980′s. Considering that relatively long time span, each pamphlet presents a challenge, with nearly all of the phone numbers and email addresses invalid. After much Internet research we work our way through the pile, leaving it in the news room to wait and see who does and does not respond to our requests for updated copies.

Thur. 7-22-10:

Mateel manager April had agreed to arrive early to open the building for me but oversleeps. Luckily, a Mateel office worker arrives early after taking her dog to the vet.

Knowing Thursday Mateel chef Babette would not be present today, I’d watched chef Amy’s cooking closely yesterday so that I could copy her recipes exactly. Also being well aware of the constant threat that no volunteers will show up to assist, I’d done much prep work yesterday, including cutting up fruits and vegetables, the most time-consuming task.

And a good thing these preparations were- not a single volunteer till 11 o’clock, one hour before the meal was scheduled to be served. At that time, trusted dishwasher Ior finally arrived. And then there were two five-minute volunteers who just did enough to feel that they deserved a cup of coffee prior to serving time, a common volunteer phenomenon.

The main course: white gravy made with chicken fat, flour and a gallon of milk, cooked to thicken then baked in a hotel pan full of chicken thighs.  The side item, various vegetables lightly salted, cooked on the grill atop a thin layer of vegetable oil. These dishes served with the regular sides proves almost as delicious as Amy’s meal had been yesterday, although it seemed that my gravy lacks her flavor somewhat. The meal is served on time and all leftovers are given away. Success! And as for cleanup, some thoughtful people even stick around to help.

…….

Ior and I remain for the remainder of the afternoon to bake off the rest of the leftover chicken thighs from Reggae on the River, about 75 pounds of them. I’d begun this task first thing at 9AM, conducting it in the background all day. Three rounds were required, 4 large baking sheets each time, both ovens always full. A young woman with alot to say named Raven also stuck around to assist, making for quite an easy afternoon of chicken cooking.  Our efforts may have earned the respect of chickens everywhere, as the meat would have likely gone to waste otherwise. As was now the case, Mateel office workers and random passersby gladly took bags of it home, with the rest set to be frozen for future kitchen use.

Tues. July 13, 2010:

Sarah and I leave camp together this morning but do not spend the day together. She heads off to her first day at a new paid job, obtained randomly some days ago when a laundromat customer had been impressed with the way she folded clothing.

I volunteer at the Mateel Center. Chef Babette has me do most of the cooking, barely allowing ample time to for me to arrive to the radio station by 3PM, the time time in which I had prearranged to arrive at my new volunteer job with the KMUD news department. News coordinator Terri is there recording in the news studio. She emerges upon my presence, requesting that I convert three press releases from local government agencies into news stories.

Two of the releases are from municipal police departments, concerning the implementation of DUI checkpoints in the near future. At Terri’s suggestion, I combine the two releases into one story, converting the text into a newsworthy format. She slightly alters my finished product, “We don’t usually quote people”, “We can’t just say what they said. We first have to include ‘The Fortuna Police say’”.

The second story describes how the city of Eureka is demolishing two homes they “deemed to be a blight on the community”. For the first time the city has utilized a legal process known as a receivership, which allows such properties to be temporarily placed into the control of a court-appointed official. The official can then order structures on the property to be demolished. In this case, houses on both properties had been destroyed by fires. To ensure that all details are correct, I phone the city of Eureka, which transfers me to the very congenial assistant city manager. Unbeknownst to me, Terri had already prerecorded a phone interview with the assistant city manager, which I edit on her Macintosh computer to be included with the story.

My stories finished, Terri surprises me, “These can be your first stories”. Inviting me into the tiny news studio, she swings over the microphone. I record the stories, reading from the computer screen there. About two minutes in total length, I slip up twice, in exactly the same spot in the same sentence. “You said ‘coint-appointed’, not ‘court-appointed’”, Terri informs. The recording done in short order, I’m fairly confident it sounds at least descent.

I remain in the studio to observe the rest of the recording process. Five-fifty comes and goes, less than ten minutes till news time but still only half the news recorded. Working hastily but only appearing slightly concerned, Terri uploads the first half of the news to the engineering booth. Six-o-clock, she hits a button on the studio phone. The live radio broadcast plays over the speaker. The news has started. “How many minutes did we already record?”, Terri asks  herself, “OK, 15 minutes, we should be fine”.

Turning off the speaker phone, she completes the remaining 15 minutes of the news broadcast and uploads it before the first fifteen minutes has completed playing. “That’s the closest I’ve cut it in a long time. IT’S DONE!”

A meeting of community journalists is scheduled minutes later, which Terri chooses to conduct at a picnic table in the station’s yard under cover of shade. This is the first meeting of the Community Journalist Emergency Response Team, consisting of mainly the same people that attended the Community Journalist introductory meeting last week. The Emergency Response Team will be a phone chain of volunteer journalists that can be activated at any hour of any day when disaster strikes. In the past, local fires and earthquakes have overwhelmed the station staff. Telling the news in such situations is just half the battle, as a torrent of public phone calls must also be fielded. The station attempts to act as a headquarters to orchestrate public offerings of goodwill. For example, people have called in the past offering livestock trailers when large fires are burning. This information was broadcast over the air in the hopes that those with livestock in the path of the fire would have a way to get their animals out of harm’s way.

After the meeting I asked the attendees for feedback about my first news broadcast. The response was surprisingly positive
.
“When I first heard your voice I thought you might be from some other news service like Democracy Now or something”, a woman said

“It was remarkably good”, a man said. Another man responded, “He’s the biggest critic around. You should be impressed.”

It would seem that I’m either off to a good start or people are just being very polite.
…….

I chased the skunk out of camp at sundown. It did not return.

Wed. July 14, 2010:

Sarah works for money while I work for none. It’s Chef Amy’s day at the Mateel, with a volunteer crew consisting of Tonya, Cisco and Elk Woman. Tonya, a new face, is a pretty 24-year old with dreads, big round eyes and a tiny feminine goatee. She stares intently at all who speak with her, never the first to break a gaze. Tasked with blending melon smoothies,  she chooses to begin with a potato masher, politely turning down my offer of a blender.

Tonya’s mashing motion ceases any time someone speaks to her. Cisco grows impatient, offering to help with the smoothie multiple times. “I only like teamwork when teamwork makes sense”, Tonya calmly replies with a big smile, greatly annoying Cisco. Bickering between him and the elderly Elk Woman increases to the point of near-constant argument, erupting in heated comments on several occasions. Had it not been for Amy’s calming presence then a more serious escalation would have been eminent.

Noticing the irrationality of the potato masher, Tonya finally gives in to the dreaded blender. The feuding couple relax and all is well by 11:30, meal completed and ready for serving. The dining venue will not be the Mateel Center today, though, as someone of authority had passed down word to serve at Veteran’s Park in Garberville instead. This weekend is the Mateel’s biggest annual fundraising event, its Reggae on the River festival at Benbow State Park. With the Mateel Center always utilized as the event’s off-site coordination headquarters, it has apparently been regular practice in the past to cancel the free meal on the days before and after the event. However, the meal coordinators always find great contempt in this cancellation, so this year a compromise was made; the kitchen could be used to prepare the meal if it was served elsewhere.

We load the completed meal and our group of 5 volunteers into two vehicles. I ride with Amy and the food the three miles to Veteran’s Park in Garberville. At least 30 people mill around a little strip of grass, the entire park consisting of no more than the area beside the freeway on-ramp where a few trees grow. Setting up a folding table under those trees, Cisco and I begin serving. Tonya sits on a blanket nearby dispensing the desserts. Mostly homeless, the line stretches to the edge of the park and curves along its roadside border.

And then the incident happened…….the following was included in an email I sent to the Independent, a Garberville-based newspaper.

…..

Approximately 35 people dine in the park, lounging in the shade on the sloped dusty grass with plates of hot food and cups of cool liquids in their hands. Thanks to food donations from local businesses and a group of volunteers known at the Mateel Lunch crew, nobody would have to go hungry in Garberville today.

The temperature is still bearable at this relatively early afternoon hour. Despite the fact that almost all those present in the park are homeless, the current mood is happy and cheerful; humanity shows itself in rare fine form.

Arrive Humboldt County Sheriff’s truck, “YOU CANNOT BE IN THIS PARK ANY MORE! THE VETERANS HAVE ASKED US TO CLEAR YOU PEOPLE FROM THE PARK.”. A tall seargent shouts the orders, a shorter deputy close by his side. Hands stop shoveling forks, mouths cease chewing. Silent seconds that seem like eternity pass by before the first shot is fired back, “WHO DO YOU MEAN ‘YOU PEOPLE’?!!! WHO ARE ’YOU PEOPLE’?!!!”

The war of words is on, the beans spilled from both sides no holes barred.

Officer: “This town can’t support this many homeless people. Go to a community that can.”

Homeless Man: “Why don’t you kick the bad people out and leave the rest of us alone?”

Officer: “Who are the bad people? Do you want to point them out to me?”

Homeless Man: “That’s your job. Go do some detective work. Go where you’re really needed. Do your job.”

Officer: “No, I asked you, who are the bad people? Point them out to me. Call 911 on them.”

Such tirades fly for 20 minutes between the officers and homeless. No attempt is made to clear the area by force today, but in repeating his initial order, the seargent infers that future incidents will be different, “YOU ALL CANNOT BE HERE ANY MORE!”.

The sheriff’s truck pulls away,  leaving the dusty tranquility of Veteran’s Park shattered for those to whom a few moments of comfortable togetherness meant so much. There are mere seconds to peacefully contemplate the loss, though, as an enraged neighbor walks through the park screaming, her young daughter in tow, “WE DON”T WANT YOU HERE. MY DAUGHTER CAN’T EVEN COME HERE ANY MORE BECAUSE OF ALL YOUR GLASS, SHIT AND PISS!”

……

Realizing my new role as a community journalist while remembering how negatively the local populace thinks of the police harassing homeless food lines, I swing into action with my ailing little digital camera, recording video of the bickering between police and homeless. Realizing that the next step will be to get a portable microphone from KMUD and conduct interviews, I begin asking for contact info from certain individuals.

“Hello, I’m Garth Kiser, a community journalist for the KMUD news department. Can I get a statement?”, I ask the deputy. He pulls me aside and describes the situation. Wow, this journalist thing is great, even the police take the news seriously! “I have my camera recording audio. Can I keep your statement on the record?”, I ask the deputy.
“No I would rather you talk with the seargent”. The deputy calls over the seargent, who also patiently discusses the situation as I hold the camera sideways near his mouth.
Having the police side of the story, I seek out the homeless view.  “Hey, you should talk to this guy, somebody says, directing me to a familiar young face named Jason. Both extremely irate and very well spoken, Jason makes for a great representative. There is another alternative I know cannot be passed up though, old Duke, one of the very first people I met in Garberville 2 months ago. He’s no less pissed than Jason but far more controlled and level-headed. His voice would have to be the first choice, especially considering he is a local and Jason is not.

A new scene breaks my concentration, the enraged neighbor named Ella with her young daughter, “…CAN’T EVEN COME HERE ANY MORE BECAUSE OF ALL YOUR GLASS, SHIT AND PISS!” I run up behind Ella as she stomps through the park repeatedly screaming, “……SHIT AND PISS…..”. She violently snaps her body around 180-degrees as I come near,  sharply yanking her daughter’s arm in the process, “DON”T COME UP BEHIND ME!!!!”.

My hands raised, palms facing Ella, “I’m Garth Kiser, a community journalist with the KMUD news department.”. Ella actually cracks a smile, just for a split second, then goes deeper into the same elicit tirade concerning shit and piss. “Can I get an interview from you this afternoon?”
“Yeah, and I got neighbors that would like to talk to you to.”

….

Sources gathered, meal finished, the volunteer lunch crew loads the vehicles, returning to the Mateel. Fully supporting my plans for a story, Cisco and Tonya agree to do the cleanup alone while Amy and I take her car to KMUD.

Inside the station I see no familiar faces, with most of the desks and offices empty. One of the few people present in the building, a middle-aged woman with short curly hair seated at a central location, is helpful but shy to seek the help of others. She seems to realize the local news value of the story,  peeking her head in the one occupied office to repeat what I’d just told her. The unknown listener in that office is not moved, though. The friendly woman turns with a shrug.

“Cynthia is here in the news department today.”, she continues, leading me into the news office. Cynthia, whom I’ve never met, is sealed into her little recording studio, barely bothering to glance up at the eyes staring at her through the window. Defeated, the friendly middle-aged woman apologizes, returning to her desk.

I sit in front of the news office for five minutes. With Cynthia showing no sign of emerging from her recording booth, I write “POLICE RAID VETERAN”S PARK” on a yellow note pad. Holding the note up to the recording booth window, Cynthia only glances away from her microphone long enough to scan the note with her high speed eyeballs, showing no sign of interest.

I decide to wait outside the news office five more minutes, upon which Cynthia appears with a curious expression. She smiles upon introduction, remembering my name from the recent news story I aired. Sitting in the news room together she listens intently. Knowing the potential local interest in today’s events, Cynthia agrees to my request to produce the story, handing over a high quality Marantz recording device in a soft black case.

Outside in the station’s shady yard, I sit at a picnic table with Amy, connecting a microphone to the Marantz and interviewing her. As we back towards her car a few minutes later, Cynthia emerges from the building, calling me back inside to speak with her. She has a concern, a serious one I’d never considered. It would be inappropriate for me to produce this story considering the fact that I was involved with it, a basic rule of journalism taught at the 101 level.

Cynthia agrees to do the story herself. Returning to her office, I give her all the contacts collected at the scene. “Can I turn the table on you?”, she asks with a grin, directing me into the news studio for a short interview.

Amy drops me back off at the Mateel Center. The mood of the Mateel employees(not the volunteers) is very negative.

“Did you just go to KMUD and mention the Mateel’s name? We don’t need any bad publicity, especially not right now when we are getting ready for Reggae on the River.”

Surprised at how the employees of this community center seemingly have such short-sighted and selfish attitudes regarding a community affair, I retort matter-of-factly, “It’s news, of course somebody would have notified the station eventually.”

……

I walk to Prophet Mark’s trailer, who had earlier requested assistance with a project. The phone rings as we’re out baking in the sun, another pissed off voice of the Mateel Center, “I’m trying really hard not to be pissed off at you right now. Why would you inform the radio station.”

I retort, “For the record, and you can keep this on the record, tell anybody you like, I have been volunteering my time at the Mateel because I’ve enjoyed working with you and everyone there. As for the Mateel itself, considering some of the things I’ve witnessed over the past month, I don’t have much respect for it.”

“……well…..I’m sorry you feel that way about the Mateel.”

Another phone call, an equally pissed voice, but one representing another angle. It’s an acquaintance named Paul who runs the used book store in Garberville. Enraged at the police and the veteran’s association, he thanks me for setting up the story and requests that I also contact the Independent, a Garberville-based newspaper. As for how Paul knew of my involvement or my phone number, I do not know.

……..

Mark and I travel in his van to Garberville, the sides of the vehicle plastered with the ever-present magnetic messages of prophecy, “More Pacific Tsunami’s to Come”, “Test of Faith Message for USA Nation”, “ProphetMark.com”.

Mark parks the van in front of a relatively small courthouse building, inside which the veterans’ association that manages Veterans’ Park, location of today’s incident, is about to meet. With the meeting set to start an hour late, Mark and I walk over to wait in the park, carrying a handheld radio tuned to the KMUD news.

Most of the dozen people lounging around the park hush themselves to hear the broadcast. The KMUD news director Cynthia had made use of the suggestion I’d stressed most to her, to interview Duke! The interview fills nearly half of the ten-minute story, with Duke expressing himself in the most persuasive method known, a perfect well-spoken combination of emotion and logic. He hits hardest with, “This park was built for veterans and there were several here. The police told them they were no longer welcome.”

Returning to the Veteran’s meeting at its starting time, the voice from the phone Paul arrives to share his view. Also appearing is Bill, the friend of Prophet Mark for whom I’d recently posted two fire trucks on Craigslist. The members of the veteran’s association sit around 3 long tables positioned in a bracket shape, with the open end of the bracket being the guest speaker location. Each guest is allowed a maximum of five minutes speaking time, then the meeting doors will closed to the public.

Paul goes first, screaming red-faced at the vets until the chairperson demands order. Paul storms out of the building. Now having the full attention of everyone in the room, Bill and Mark take a more sedate approach. Bill requests that the community work towards a mutually-beneficial goal. Mark reiterates his tsunami prophecies, “There will be many more homeless here after the waves hit the coast.”

…..

Bill offers to buy Mark and me dinner at the Cadillac Wok, a local restaurant owned by Laotians. This marks my first dinner out in some 3 months.

Returning to camp later, I describe the day’s dramatic events to Sarah while the skunk invades our space once again.  I sit up late in the dark typing up an email for the Independent.

Thur. 7-15-10:

Considering yesterday’s events, the Mateel lunch is served at the Mateel today even though the kitchen slowly fills with increasing numbers of Reggae on the River volunteers. The meal coordinator Babette purchases pizzas to limit confusion between the two crews.

A new face named Chris appears to do the dishes, grumbling anytime anyone else touches a dish. Known as the “Dish Nazi”, Chris had apparently washed nearly every single Reggae on the River dish last year. Babette hands me a box of pitcher lids, “Could you wash this?”. I set the box on the edge of the sink, asking Chris, “Do you want to wash these or shall I?”.

“NO, NO, NO”, Chris replies, promptly directing another volunteer to remove the box of lids, my que to leave the kitchen. Sitting on the stage using my computer, I only respond to specific requests for help such as unloading Reggae on the River food deliveries. Although I’d told Babette of my refusal to reenter the crowded kitchen, she is still somehow able to convince me to make three giant pots of tea on the stovetop.

Meeting Sarah back up at camp later, we count out over $500 cash in the hot sticky evening air.

Fri. 7-16-10:

Mateel coordinators Babette and Scott had both said they needed help today in the kitchen but neither of them are present. A tall Rastafarian with dark glasses requests that I assist with vegetable chopping. Dish Nazi lurks nearby. My single chopping task completed, the Rastafarian seems to be  indirectly asking me to leave.

Annoyed at having gotten up early for almost nothing, I return to camp. Sarah is still there, having taken the day off work in order to open a bank account. We board the clean air-conditioned bus to Garberville, cost $1.50 each.

Enter Umpqua Bank. A young banker gazes seriously upon a printout of Sarah’s credit report, “Sorry, you can come back later and talk to the manager, but I can’t open the account for you right now. You have a credit score of 542. We require at least 550.”

“I still like you even though you are not good enough to have a bank account”, I assure Sarah as we depart. Next stop Redwood Community Credit Union. “Sorry, you need to be a local resident.”

We enter a popular local restaurant, its antique sign featuring neon animation of a chef flipping a pancake. A waitress snaps at me for picking up a menu off the counter. Refusing to dine under such conditions, we enter the more friendly Blue Room Cafe for a cheeseburger lunch.

Noon. Library opening time, our destination for the day’s remainder. Mateel Chef Amy also happens to be present. “Do you want to rent that cabin of yours?”, I ask her.
“I was hoping you would.”
“How much per month?”
“$200“

!!!!!!! A place to live !!!!!!!! $200 month!!!!! Even for a little cabin off the grid this a deal here! A car will probably be needed considering Amy’s remote mountainous locations, but at this price there should be plenty of money available for that.

6PM. 104 degrees. We seek out the air-conditioned bus back to Redway, finding that the next one will not pass through town for another 2 hours. A young homeless woman screams wildly on the sidewalk,  distraught over the loss of a piece of clothing, “I SAVED UP FOR THAT HOODIE FOR 2 MONTHS! I JUST WANT SOMEBODY TO SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD!”

Thumbs out on the north end of town, a large white pickup truck stops. It’s the giant Keith, the Mateel’s volunteer kitchen coordinator for Reggae on the River, pressed with the task of serving some 500 people per meal.

Sat. 7-17-10:

Enjoying our first morning of leisure together in some time, Sarah and I sit around camp sipping coffee while writing. I smoke Camels, watching chipmunks and a whiteish squirrel scamper about the woods, with the chipmunks coming within a 3-foot proximity.

Sitting next to the little league ballfield I post 8 days of blogs then leave Sarah to do her online activities while I shop for groceries. Reggae on the River kitchen coordinator Keith is entering the store wearing an apron as I’m departing. “How are things going over there?”, I enquire.

“The men in white coats are coming. I always need help.”

I drop the groceries off back at the park with Sarah then arrive to the Mateel kitchen. Keith directs me and another volunteer to unpackage 10 fifty-pound cases of chicken thighs. Following his recipe, I next use a high speed chopping appliance to prepare enough jerk sauce to cover all the chicken. Outside, some thoughtful individuals pass around the best of the best local product I’ve yet encountered. Time slows, food jiggles strangely.

6PM. We travel to Benbow State Park, the Reggae on the River location, with enough food in the back of Keith’s truck to serve over 500 hungry volunteers and performers. The line stretches 50 people long even before serving begins. I dish out the rice, 4 hotel pans full of it, one scoop at a time. The long line shortens not before 2 hours have passed, then two more hours of hungry stragglers.

Curious customers are not uncommon. One young woman stares intently at each server with heavily dialated pupils. Another appears straight out of Africa, dark brown skin over sharply protruding bones, stoned eyes, wearing only a fabric wound around his waist, big glass water bong in hand. The man responds only with a positive grunt when I ask if he would like a scoop of rice.

Of the hundreds of customers, only a handful are not polite, with many highly praising the volunteer kitchen crew. However, one wirey little man complains repeatedly about the fact that he must wait for the next batch of chicken to be grilled, finally walking away in disgust. Upon return of the chicken I call over to him, “Hey chicken man”, to which he does not respond. Another complainer whines, “Who was that guy who just walked into the kitchen and scooped out his own rice.”

“That was Sanyu. He’s a volunteer.”

“Well he should put some gloves on.”

……

Arriving back to Redway about midnight, I find the headlamp just where Sarah said she would leave it, deep in a culvert by the roadside. I find her tucked soundly in bed. “Did the skunk bother you tonight?”, I ask.

“Yeah, I threw a stick at it. It looked surprised like its feeling were hurt then it just slowly walked away with its head down.”

Sun. 7.4.10:

The plan was:

Post Bill’s fire trucks online.
Go with Cisco to to the fireworks display at Benbow State Park.

-Neither happened.

What happened:

Sarah ran away.

Wifi fails at the ballfield. Cisco fails to show at the arranged meeting time. Sarah and I sit at the Mateel Center office porch for wifi. There we get into a recurring argument. Many of our online accounts are shared and Sarah regularly forgets the passwords of the ones that she’s in charge of.
We depart the Mateel, not having posted the fire trucks. Sarah walks faster, on ahead in the direction of camp. I stop at the supermarket to purchase ground beef for dinner. Nearing the camp trail, a man named Michael asks that I buy him a sandwich. Return to supermarket then proceed to camp.

-No Sarah
-No Sarah’s purse(she had been carrying it).
-No evidence at all that she had returned.

Darkness falls. Still no Sarah. Eat hamburgers alone.

Mon. 7-5-10:

All throughout the long chilly night she does not return, but not as much as a sleeping bag in her possession. The animals take the opportunity to act very strangely, probably due to all the many distant firework explosions. A never-before-heard call is sounded repeatedly The dreaded skunk invades the hut time and time again, at times entirely careless of my presence. Every few minutes it returns. I shine the flashlight. Like a ferret with a bad aroma it continues its regular business, only scurrying when I make deliberate attempts to scare it.

Knowing Sarah’s last heading was towards Garberville, I walk there this morning. None of the regular street people have seen her. “I saw a nice butt go into the laundromat”, says Kelley, the friendly old homeless bead jewelry maker. Sure enough, there is a nice butt there, but not Sarah’s. Former Mateel chef Scott also hasn’t seen her. He invites me to do paid work with him on a farm today, but considering the situation, I decline. Great timing for this first offer of work in months. Compounding the great timing, Sarah and I were both supposed to be doing paid work today with Cisco on that very same farm!.

I use Scott’s phone to call Sarah’s. No answer. In a stroke of good timing, she calls back just as I’m walking away. “Did you leave town?”, I ask. “No”, she replies after a long pause, “I’m in town…..at least as far as town is considered here. I’m in the woods digging a hole.” Mysterious. We agree to meet at camp later.

I return there and begin packing the black backpack I arrived to California with two months ago. If Sarah is digging a hole in the woods then it can only mean she’s building her own camp.. She is moving out. I decide one of two things will happen:

#1: Sarah needs a break from life in the woods. I will ask if she would like to go stay with me at my brother’s house for a few weeks in Southern California.

#2: If she is not interested in working things out then I will attempt to spend the summer living in the expansive Northern California outback, surviving on the locally-plentiful spring water, river fish and wild plants.

Fully packed. Lounge around the camp for hours. Waiting. Sarah descends the canyon nearly two hours after the sun has ceased shining into it. Her clothing is unfamiliar.

“Why is your bag packed?”, she asks with an expression so sad that I instantly know she hasn’t moved out.

Storming back towards camp last night, shed encountered Cisco and ridden with him to Benbow State Park for the fireworks display. Still not yet ready to face me afterwards, she’d spent the night in Cisco’s van, parked on the rural property of his friends. Today she had stayed on the property assisting Cisco with gardening work. Her unfamiliar clothing was a giveaway from the property owners.

We talked. I unpacked. She’s staying.

Tue. 7-6-10:

Sarah, exhausted from her recent runaway experience, sleeps in late as I go on to volunteer at the Mateel. She appears there to eat lunch then goes on to spend the afternoon writing at the ballfield. Meeting her there later, I utilize the wifi to finally post Bill’s fire trucks on Craiglist and a national free classifieds site.

In case anybody reading this collects old fire trucks, read below.

1944 International Pump Truck:

Runs and drives. First private owner. Large belt-driven Bean pump. Winch. Title and previous bill of sale. Originally owned by the US military. Previously owned by Whale Gulch, CA Fire Department. Nicknamed “Igor”.
$3500.

1966 Unimog Flatbed Fire Truck – Excellent Condition:

Produced by Mercedes Benz. First private owner. New motor with 800 miles. Undercoated. 20,000lb Warren winch. New tires.Complete owner’s manual. Previously purchased from the German military by the Unicasa, CT Fire Department.Remained in service up until the Unicasa FD received a Homeland Security grant, requiring them to sell off older equipment.
No tank or pump included, flatbed only. $9700.

Wed. 7-7-10:

Overnight visits from the skunk are becoming increasingly frequent. 5:30AM wake up. Paid work to be done! For the first time since arriving nearly two months ago, there is money to be made.

Walk to Garberville along the mountainside highway overlooking the Eel River as the sun breaks over the ridge. Cross 101 Freeway twice. Descend into the valley towards Tooby Park. Sun obscured by the hills again as we pass through an old growth of redwoods. There it is, the destination, Southern Humboldt Community Park, the entrance right across the road from Tooby Park.

…
The boss, Farmer John, is standing in the driveway with his shaggy dog as the sun breaks over the hills again. He directs us to a barn, located further down the gravel lane past a locked gate, “Feel free to look around, I’ll be up a bit later.”

A veritable city of hay towers in front of the barn, nearly 2000 bales stacked 20 feet high. Following a nearby trail I come upon an overgrown slaughterhouse in the woods. Most of the roof is missing. The only thing left inside is a set of meat hooks attached to a pulley system. Returning the barn, it’s mostly empty except for some piles of neatly stacked wood, a few hundred stalks of garlic hanging in a corner, and an early-1900′s-era automobile. A sign on the old car reads that it was originally used on the farm. “Most people are too fat to even fit in there now”, Sarah observes of the vehicle’s tiny wooden seat.

We climb to the top of the hay city, observing the scene below as a man and two women attempt to load a stubborn donkey onto a livestock trailer. The animal is happy to go any direction but towards the trailer, to which it repeatedly responds with an abrupt stop. The humans patiently coax for 30 minutes, leading the donkey in circles till it finally gives in. “Horses and donkeys don’t want to work harder than they have to. They always take the easier option.”, Farmer John explains of why the running-in-circles system works.

A hay crew of 7 people has arrived by the 9AM starting time, including two familiar faces, Scott and Duke. Scott, former chef from the Mateel lunch, had talked Farmer John into giving us this job. Duke arrives with his new brown puppy, almost perfectly behaved despite its very young age. Never in my life have I seen a homeless person, or any other for that matter, get a puppy to be so compliant. There are few like Duke on the streets.

Hay moving begins. The bales are thrown onto an electric conveyor belt leading to the barn’s second floor. Like something straight out of a horror movie, Farmer John wears a long steel hook on each hand, tossing the bales effortlessly. Most workers of course choose to labor in the shady barn rather than the pounding sun outside. Noticing that the shady crew is constantly ahead of the sunny crew, always waiting for bales, I volunteer to switch.

The air quickly rises to 90 degrees. The conveyor belt’s electric motor exhausts itself repeatedly, overheating in the sun, shutting down automatically. It’s as if the motor is watching out for the workers, requiring a cooling break each time we do. A structure of bales is placed over the motor for shade but it continues to require breaks every 15 minutes or so. Farmer John is the only one to utter a complaint, but even he appears to need the breaks.

Lunch break. Two workers leave for the day. A woman delivers surprisingly delicious veggie burritoes. Sitting around a plastic picnic table in the barn, I chat with Farmer John. He’s “Head Honcho” of this 400+ acre not-for-profit community-owned farm. “Does the farm sustain itself financially or require outside funding?”, I ask. “We’ve been making it on our own, actually”, John replies.

Cyclists, walkers, runners and horse riders pass by on the farm’s public trails. Done. Not done. Done. Not done. “Let’s do one more stack”, Farmer John keeps suggesting. In my extreme exhaustion, concentration is required in order not to throw bales 20 feet down onto the workers below the stacks. Bales lightly roll into Duke and Scott on a couple occasions, but they are apparently too tired to complain.

When working below the stacks, dragging bales towards the conveyor, I discover the beauty of the steel hooks, which make it possible to grab hold of bales much more quickly and comfortably than opposed to carrying them by the strings. The hooks are long enough that I can drag the bales behind me while only bending down slightly. The rest of the crew dragging bales towards the conveyor quickly jump on the hook bandwagon, dragging bales in the same way. From then on, no available hook is left unused.

….
End of the workday. John gives us $130 cash and a ride back to Garberville in the back of his truck.. Duke and Scott, also along for the ride, offer to split the cost of a hotel room with us. Not ready to part with that much of our hard-earned cash, though, we decline. Walking oh-so-slowly along the steamy highway, we make our way back to Redway. At camp, it’s a dinner of Shake-N-Bake breaded chicken washed down with rum-n-coke’s!

Thur. July 8, 2010:

Sarah chooses not to volunteer at the Mateel today. I arrive at the usual time but Chef Babette is nowhere to be found, the building still locked up. “I’ll be there at 10“, she says in a phone call. Waiting, I stroll across the street and discover Sarah at the laundromat, washing her own clothes but not mine. Also there is Elk Woman, an elderly fellow Mateel volunteer. I purchase doughnuts and juice for the three of us then return to the Mateel.

Still no Babette. The building’s alarm screams as I’m waiting on the patio, accidentally activated by the new office intern, a pretty young girl of apparent high-school age who probably weighs about as much as a case of oranges. I enter the kitchen alone once the alarm has silenced, but with the pantry door locked, not much can be accomplished. I turn on the lights, put down the mats, heat the ovens and coffee machine.

Another volunteer arrives, an older man with a hood and dark glasses who offers to start setting up tables. Elk Woman arrives, making her first task of the day to scold the hooded man for entering the kitchen. Not wanting to loose the only useful volunteer of the day so far, I inform Elk Woman that the man is indeed a volunteer who has been working. Elk Woman responds with a startled look and an “Oh”, then turns back on the hooded man with a vengeance. “He(Garth) shouldn’t be correcting me and you need to wash your hands if you’re going to be in the kitchen.” The man retorts calmly, “I just need some creamer in my coffee.”

Only so much longer can I keep justifying my presence here with, ‘but homeless people get to eat the food I make for free’. The insanity, absurdity and disorganization is wearing beyond thin.
Babette calls again. She’s at the community farm picking up produce. She requests that we begin preparing some foods that are available in the cooler. Utilizing a few pans left out of the locked pantry, we boil a few dozen eggs and bake some Jenno-O turkey packages. Babette arrives at 11:30, just 30 minutes before the lunch is scheduled to be served. Mateel center manager April walks around with an angry face, knowing the late start will mean she goes home late.

Noticing the lateness, more people than usual offer to volunteer. In the haste to cook fast, Babette accidentally runs one of them off with a blunt comment. Serving time 1PM. Sarah arrives to assist with clean up. We drink bagged Pabst Blue Ribbons in the laundromat while my clothes wash. The hooded Mateel volunteer sits in the abandoned lot next door, who speaks to us in great factual detail about biblical human history in a voice so soft that I must tilt my head to understand.

Fri. July 9, 2010:

I awaken to the skunk sitting on my legs. It slowly waddles off when I raise my head. Was the skunk just sniffing around for food or has it worked up the courage to try and sleep with us?

With four more hours of hay moving scheduled at the Southern Humboldt Community Park, we arrive at 9AM to begin. Finding nobody there, we extend extension cords to the barn, switch on the conveyor belt and begin stacking bales on the second floor as previously instructed. Duke arrives a few minutes later, saying Farmer John doesn’t want us to move any more bales into the barn. Upon arrival of the farmer, he is not concerned though, simply requesting that we stack the rest of the bales outside the barn next to another stack of bales there. That other stack is nearly 20 feet high, and the entire mound of hay must be covered with a massive tarp.

This work is for Sarah and I alone, with everyone else working on other parts of the farm. The sun beats down, quickly sending the temperature into the mid-90‘s. I get so hot that I feel chilly, a warning sign of heat stroke that sends me into the shade sipping water for some time. Sarah works just as hard. We complete the hay stacking and cover the stack with the tarp while taking a series of short but frequent water breaks.

Cleanup. John gives us his truck to move the loose hay and broken bale segments. In 5 or 6 truckloads, we neatly stack the broken segments into a livestock shed and pile the loose hay in two piles near a chicken shed. A sign on the chicken shed reads, “Warning: Mean Rooster”. Farmer John pays us $40 cash each and drops us off in downtown Garberville.

….
Much needed clothes and a coffee pot purchased from the thrift shop. Nearly every pair of socks I own has a hole. Supermarket, purchase two bottles of $3.33 wine and enough food to last the weekend. These things were important considering we would be spending the weekend in the mountains with Amy, our fellow volunteer friend from the Mateel.

Although Amy has no mobile phone, we find her just where she said she’d be, at the library. We drive in her little aging station wagon to her friends’ house in Redway, where she’d said we could take a shower before going on out into the mountains. While Amy does have a house in the mountains, the house has no shower or internal running water whatsoever. As we are learning about this area, a lack of such common comforts is not uncommon.

We immediately get a uncertain vibe from Amy’s friends’ house. A sign on the front of the house comments about witches. The interior is filled with cat propaganda of every kind. “There used to be seventeen cats her”, explains an attractive younger woman named Nicole who wears bright red lipstick and a long skirt. In the kitchen is a big man they call “Cousin Mark” who found childhood fame as a member of the Mickey Mouse Club. Mark breaths heavily with apparent great labors. His speech is nasily but very friendly. Also in the kitchen is Cocoa, a thin older man I recognize as a frequent diner at the Mateel lunch.

Amy leaves to attend a medical appointment, saying we can take a shower in her absence. The man Cocoa seems somewhat annoyed by our presence, though, so we just sit silently in the living room, waiting. Realizing that Amy may be gone for sometime, I finally ask Cocoa if we can take a shower. This man that has eaten the Mateel food Sarah and I have prepared so many times just sighs and continues walking, saying over his shoulder, “I don’t know. We’re just really busy today.” He returns a few moments later to apologize, but does not offer the shower.

Considering the hay day, a cleansing is greatly needed, so we return to our camp and douse ourselves with wonderfully frigid creek water. Returning to the house afterwards, Amy has returned. Mateel chef Babette and her young daughter Katie are also there. Being the hottest day of the year, nearly 100 degrees, we all lounge around the living room for two hours. Amy’s car has a history of overheating ever since she ran it with the fan belt broken some years ago.

Joining the living room conversation are two more residents of the household, an elderly woman with a walker named Jennie and her middle-aged daughter Jackie. Jennie, despite her extreme age, is extremely calm, cool and intelligent, with a vast memory of her many years. Speaking to her in certain angles of light, I notice her left eye is made of glass.

…..
With the worst of the afternoon heat past, we make the 30 minute trip to Amy’s 40-acre property, with the last few miles being on gravel. Amy was once cut off from civilization for two months due to a recurring landslide blocking the highway. Her property sits at 1300 feet, consisting of several structures on a gently sloping hillside. The next ridge to the east is all that separates her from the Pacific Ocean. The property was logged in the 1950′s, with all the old growth trees removed. Despite that loss, the forest towers everywhere, with the only reminder of what was being the occasional massive stump measuring several feet across.

Amy directs us to our own private cabin! It’s located on the other side of the driveway from the other structures, where she lived before building her current house. The cabin and every other structure was built almost entirely by her and her alone. Only with the house did she have assistance, and that was just one person whom she needed only to speed up the process. Having learned construction by hanging out at construction sites as a young girl, she has put her knowledge to extensive use.

Sarah and I settle into the cabin, a single room with a small mattress on milk crates. In one corner is a tiny wood stove. On a counter top in another corner is an old iron 3-ring gas burner. There is an empty desk and some mostly-empty shelves. A few dresses and blouses hang above the bed. The ceiling is lined with white plastic sheeting. All considering, it’s wonderful. The cabin was previously occupied by a woman claiming to be Amy’s long-lost daughter, who was reportedly killed at a young age in a traffic accident. The daughter hastily departed the property upon being caught in the act of stealing from a neighbor some time ago.

Scattered around the yard is a wild assortment of junk and original artwork. A full-size painted cement woman with yellow eyes waves next to the driveway. Oversized unpainted cement heads rest here and there. Amy’s house and the structures near it are fenced in high with chicken wire. She sits at her cluttered kitchen table listening to the radio. Her home consists mainly of one big semi-circular room lined by windows on one side. A few mosquitoes have slipped passed the screen curtain on the front door. They bite the back of my neck as I cook chicken breasts and pasta on an iron burner identical to the one in the cabin. We sit up long past dark, continuing to talk rather than watching a movie as planned.

Sat. July 10, 2010:

With Sarah sleeping in late, enjoying her first real shelter in months, I walk around the property early this morning. A papery bee nest the size of a small basketball hangs on the rear of the cabin, which I do not notice till hearing the buzz above my head.  Following the driveway uphill, I pass two other homes but see no human beings. The nearer of the two homes belongs to Amy’s land partner, who is only home a few weeks out of every year. The further home is another property entirely. Later do I learn I was trespassing. The “No Trespassing” sign had apparently blown away.

We sip coffee with Amy at her kitchen table then follow her behind the house while she waters the garden there. At one end of the garden are the 4 solar panels that power her home. Under a waist-high roof attached to the rear of the house is the bank of 6 or 8 batteries of about the same size used in automobiles.

The biggest surprise of this weekend at Amy’s house is the fact that she has Internet access. Despite having her own access, she drives once per week into Garberville to use the Internet because she has no computer. Turns out that she has Internet because she had to have Internet to get a phone. With no regular telephone company providing service to this rural area, the locals use a VOIP system(Internet telephone). A mountaintop tower provides a wireless signal at just under $100 per month.

Knowing Sarah and I have a computer, Amy curiously asks that we find out if she does indeed have Internet access. In one corner of her house is a power inverter, power strip, two power adapters, a Internet router and the device that powers the antenna system. Conveniently, an Ethernet cable is plugged into the router. Hooking the other end of it up to the laptop, I discover that Amy does indeed have Internet access. She had been considering removing the phone service but now appears to have changed her mind, wanting us to help her purchase and set up a cheap laptop in the future.

I attempt to walk down the mountainside to a creek below it but am deterred by dense brush. Sarah and I fall asleep in the cabin. Amy is found to be making potato salad upon our awakening, in preparation of a party at a local strawberry farm. We arrive to the party too early 6PM, before any other guest.

….
Sarah and I befriend one of the first arrivals, a young man named Elijah who works on the farm. He once started a non-profit utilizing an old bus that he converted into a traveling soup kitchen. Elijah shares his rolling tobacco. “Could you move further away with the cigarettes?”, a woman asks, although we had been smoking some 20 feet away from the gathering. Certain other types of smoke are inhaled freely and not complained about by anyone in attendance. Here and now I had confirmed it to myself beyond any doubt; Northern California is the most liberal place on the planet.

A dozen bluegrass musicians arrive before dark, playing in a large circle atop a makeshift plywood stage in the yard. The bass is homemade, an overturned steel watering tub with a rope running up through it. The bass player sits high on a stool, with the other end of the rope attached to a wooden pole. Moving the pole changes the tension on the rope as the player strums it, resulting in a surprisingly effective bass.

Many bottles of wine and a few dishes of food appear on two portable tables. We sit on a blanket with Elijah plotting our coincidentally similar ideas of an alternative world order, ideas that Sarah and I have developed in increasingly great detail during our frequent periods of boredom over the past weeks.

“Social networking finally makes the idea possible.”

“I hate it when I get those Farmville requests on Facebook. People send things like ‘Help me water my cows’ and I’m thinking, ‘NO, for REAL, help me water MY cows’.

Sun. July 11, 2010:

I awaken to a small deer peering up towards the cabin window. Sarah brushes her teeth out underneath the big nest of swarming bees. “I know it’s there”, she assures me, completely unconcerned. After having breakfast together, Amy drives us some seven miles to the main highway, dropping us off there so we can hitchhike back to Redway.

The very next car stops, Becky, who hadn’t picked up a hitchhiker since one smoked in her car and gave her the flu some years ago. Becky, a local coffee shop owner driving a clean new air-conditioned car, tells of the “Golden Road” she had as a youth. Straight out of high school she was recruited by a government program to bring young women to Washington DC and train them as secretaries. She traveled Europe doing such work, changing jobs on a moment’s notice without a problem. In her most extreme move, she decided in the middle of the night to relocate from Berlin to Paris, but then on the train she met a girl from London and decided to go there instead, where she found a secretarial job in the Parliament building. So much for that Golden Road today.

……
Thanks to Becky’s quick ride, we arrive to Redway in time to attend a “Community Journalist” meeting at the local radio station, KMUD. Attended by 8 people, the meeting is held in Studio B, the same room in which we had been on the air some weeks ago when invited by Mateel Chef Bob to be guests on his show. The meeting is led by Terri Klemetson, an attractive young blonde who has enough energy that she may be at risk of spontaneous explosion at any moment.

“Can you collate for me!”, Terri asks wildly a few minutes before the meeting is set to start. Sarah and I staple stacks of handout packets as the other meeting attendees arrive to Studio B. The meeting begins, with the point being to organize an emergency response team of volunteer journalists that can be activated at any hour of any day to report on anything from fires to alien invasion. Terri spends the meeting time going through the handout packet page by page, elaborating greatly on many details, speaking as fast as the human mouth allows.

To the great credit of this fast talker, she’s a good organizer whose speech usually ceases the moment anyone else chimes in. The discussion among the group is in depth and practical. Terri becomes increasingly animated with each new idea. Seated right next to her, backed into a corner, she lightly smacks my arm with the back of her hand to elaborate on a point I’d suggested. Not expecting the backhand, I jump slightly, but she doesn’t appear to notice.

The meeting lasts 3 hours but I find it entertaining for the most part. An attendee tells of how a new police deputy is misbehaving in Shelter Cove, seizing individual pot plants and parading around town with them on top his truck. Terri tells of how she was recently threatened by members of the listening public when reporting on a certain drug bust.

……
The intense summer heat finally having set in for the season, Sarah and I spend the remainder of the day attempting to stay cool. As is the norm for this area, the next several weeks should regularly climb above 100 degrees. Funny thing is that just a few miles away at the coast the temperature often struggles to rise into the 60‘s. A relatively short drive can mean a difference of 50 degrees.

Mon. July 12, 2010:

As the Community Journalist meeting was breaking up yesterday at KMUD, the organizer Terri Klemetson had mentioned that anyone was welcome to stop by the station any weekday before 2PM to assist with news story research. With nothing better to do today, that’s what I decided to do. Sarah chose to stay behind at camp and spent the entire day.writing in her notebook.

Upon my arrival to the radio station, Terri immediatly makes good on her offer, directing me to a free desk in the office upon which I plug in the laptop and connect to the wifi. She rattles off a series of requests at high speed as I take notes on a yellow Post-It pad. For the next three hours I research two topics; a nearby spiritual retreat called Area 101 and the Mateel’s Reggae on the River event.

A majority of the time is spent searching for the legal standing of Area 101. I find no record of the retreat being registered as a marijuana dispensary or marijuana collective, although several people had recently been arrested there in an undercover drug operation while an event was taking place. With all Internet research leading to dead ends, I switch to phone mode, but even the person answering the phone at the Mendocino County Sherrif’s office does not know what the retreat’s legal standing is. A phone call to the county tax assessor’s office does reveal the property’s parcel number, which I use on the tax assessor’s website to retrieve records. The hope was that the online information would reveal when the current owner had purchased the property, but the only available data was related to property value and recent tax records.

Although much of the information I gather is not suitable for the today’s news stories, Terri is impressed by my having accessed the tax records, inviting me back later in the afternoon to sit in the studio while she prerecords the day’s broadcast.

I rejoin Sarah at camp for two hours, making grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch before returning to KMUD. Terri is found there in her tiny studio connected to the newsroom. “I’m in recording mode”, she explains while not ceasing motion, “so I’m going to be running around like crazy.” She directs me to take her desk in the newsroom and make phone calls to request email copies of press release faxes that the fax machine had not printed clearly. This takes just a few minutes then Terri invites me to stand in the tiny recording studio with her while she prepares her broadcast.

For two hours I wear the second set of available headphones, observing and listening to the recording process from beginning to end. Terri gesticulates her arms and hands wildly while speaking into the mic, positioned in front of a Macintosh computer screen running audio editing software. Her hands never cease, rapidly punching keys when not moving to her voice. She occasionally stops to ask my opinion on certain wordings, “Is that English?”, “How should I say this?”. For the Area 101 story, she decides against my recommendation of the phrase, “drug arrests”, explaining that it’s not politically correct in Northern California. This place never ceases to amaze with with its own specific brand of liberalism!

We finish the recording and upload it to the engineering studio minutes before the news is set to begin playing at 6PM. The broadcast has already started when I depart the station a few moments later. Wow, this reporter(Terri) is good, and to think, she claims to not even have any formal journalism training! I’d initially misjudged her excited personality as erratic, but it’s actually quite the opposite. Little more than 24 hours after our initial meeting I now consider her quick skills an asset to the community. She will certainly go far if she stays in this field of work.

….
Returning to camp, I find Sarah to STILL be writing on a bench by the fire pit. Apparently, she had maintained that same position all day long, pen in hand the whole time. Considering this, and considering how much I enjoyed doing the news today, I think to myself that we may be a destined reporting team.