In Hiding

My fortunes have always been tied to the waters. The son of a mariner, I’ve lived in six states and one foreign country, following the tides of cold war and peace wherever they went. So when Gorbachev tore down the Berlin wall in November of 1989, I’m not sure he was thinking that all the way through. It’s like he wasn’t even considering the effect that releasing millions of people from communist oppression would have on the life of a nineteen year old Navy Brat going into his Freshman year at Long Beach City College.  I’m sure if he’d know that as a direct result of that decision I would end up on the streets of Seattle six years later in the midst of a riot with no college degree and a Meth addict as my wingman, he would've thought twice. 

Peace can be bad for business, a truth that we’ve seen borne out in our economy during the years of peace and the various wars since Gorbachev conceded the ideological point in 1989. So as we slowly realized that the USSR had always been just a paint job over a rusting infrastructure, we had to face facts that there really wasn’t any justification for the mammoth Military-Industrial Complex that we’d allowed to become a core pillar of our economy. The long and short of which meant that my Dad lost his job with a Southern California military contractor, and we had to move to the middle of nowhere, following the tides of Puget Sound and their ferries wherever they went. Which pretty much ended my dream that Long Beach would be the place that I put down roots after two decades of living like a rolling stone.

I began trying to get out of Kingston, Washington the day I moved there. It took me a thousand days to accomplish, and not before I went to my first funeral, picked up a drug habit that would persist for seven years, and watched any thoughts I had for higher education go up in smoke. I hadn’t been back since getting out early in ’94—except once at Christmas time—for almost two years. Other than my parents, Kingston’s only claim to fame is a ferry terminal. Otherwise it was a podunk town, population seven-hundred-twenty. Make that seven-hundred-twenty-one when I moved in on the day of my twentieth birthday, July 6, 1991. There had been more kids than that in my senior class at Long Beach Poly. 

Beautiful downtown Kingston, jewel of the Middle of Nowhere.

It was a place of extreme isolation, loneliness, and rejection for a twenty year old from California. The hysteria surrounding the emigration of Californians to Washington at the time is hard to exaggerate. It was often manifest in the vandalism of cars, hurled epithets right out on the street, and extreme prejudice in hiring practices. Although I had great job experience, solid references, and could type 85 wpm, I still wound up mopping piss off the floors in the dementia wards of an Alzheimer’s care facility. This after three months of searching for work as my only mission in life, beating down the door of the housekeeping manager, Judy, to get it, and somehow selling her on my lifelong passion for the field of adult incontinence. 

Occasionally people from my old life would come to visit me in my exile in no man’s land, but were rarely as entertained as I was by getting high in my parents’ basement. Oddly, they wanted to go places and do things, and since I try to be a good host, I would take them to the only place there was to go: Seattle. Kingston is forever from anywhere, on the opposite side of Puget Sound from Seattle, and the best you could hope for is to leave my parents’ house and be there ninety minutes later, if everything went like clockwork. Then there was the promise of the same odyssey on the return trip; which was the main reason I rarely ever went to Seattle and didn’t really know my way around. 

To save money on what was a pretty expensive outing, with gas, parking, and ferry tolls, I would often leave my vehicle in the park and ride and just walk onto the ferry.  Unfortunately, that limited what we could do on the Seattle side, once we were there on foot. During the day I would take people to the Space Needle, or Pike’s Place Market. Sometimes treating them to a cup of Joe at the world’s very first Starbucks, where the mermaid is still proudly letting her boobies fly free on the sign. Boobies aside though, a cup of burnt coffee is pretty much the same anywhere, so it wasn’t that much of a draw. 

If we went at night though, the only other choices within walking distance were the Déjà Vu Strip Club and The OK Hotel Café. It didn’t take me long to learn the lesson that I could be sexually frustrated for free anywhere, as opposed to the outrageous cover charge and two-drink minimum that the Déjà Vu demanded, so logic and economics won out over my more prurient interests every time. Which just left The OK.

The OK Hotel Café is literally the bottom rung of the Seattle music circuit. If you have a four-track demo tape, you can play there. That's all it takes. It’s under the viaduct on the south waterfront, near Pioneer Square. At the time the area was a grungy, hipster shopping area by day, and by night a fringe area with free parking and a smattering of muggers and call girls, so your options were wide open.  

As dingy as The OK was with its rough, nicotine-permeated bricks, exposed ductwork, and inchoate art-adorned walls, it held a significant place in the heart of what had become a burgeoning music scene. The very first time the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was performed live was at The OK. Bands like Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and The Posies cut their teeth there, mostly because it was the only place they could if they refused to tease their hair and wear spandex-covered codpieces like the Hair Band douches that were dominating the scene before the advent of Grunge.

The OK’s history and musical pedigree aside, the standards for entrance were not high, and you were more likely to hear a grunge-polka band screaming banal obscenities like, “White nigger, black trash!” than you were to find the next Queens of the Stone Age in their nascency.  Although it had been featured as a hangout in the movie “Singles” and I’d even seen Ken Stringfellow just chilling there one random night, by and large if you went expecting to find some underground bistro or secret enclave of artistic revolutionaries you were in for a disappointment. It was just a dive. But a dive with late hours and no cover-charge, so if you came to visit me in the 90’s, that’s where I took you. Sorry about that.

That said, I had no reservations at all about taking Doug the Slug there the night of Sunday, October 8, 1995. I could not have cared less about entertaining him, and was looking forward to putting him on a bus at the earliest possible opportunity. Doug was the only frenemy I’d ever made in life, and having him around was always a mixed bag at best. He’d twice tried to ditch me when the cops rolled up on us, only to find himself with a ticket from the first incident and an arrest the second time. Doug was washed-out and rail-thin, with an unkempt brown shag, more a nest than a hairstyle. He looked for all the world like a baby-faced version of the singer Beck, and was a bit apprehensive of everything.  His tics made him seem on-edge and guilty all the time, even when he wasn’t spun out on Meth, which was rare. 

We’d met on a ditch-digging job in Springfield, Oregon shortly after my long-term girlfriend dumped me in January of ’95. The asshole job foreman referred to him as Doug the Slug, because he was lazy, slow, and sucked at digging—really, at work of any kind. Eventually, I'd shortened it to Sluggo, because it seemed apt. We never had much in common, except a penchant for chain-smoking and getting high on our respective vices. He favored anything that would amp him up, mostly Meth but sometimes Coke and even Angel Dust. Meanwhile, I'd been stoned or tripping continuously for over four years straight, wall-to-wall. I had wheels, and he had some cash from his Meth sales, although never very much because he was constantly getting high on his own supply. Neither one of us had anything else going for him at the time, so we kind of fell in together.

As such, Sluggo was the only friend from the most recent chapter of my life I’d been in contact for the better part of a year. Not entirely by choice. We had a mixed history of some good times, an unusual number of brushes with the cops, and mooching off each other when the money was low. He’d sold me some meth a few times, so it wasn’t like I was staking out any moral high ground in the relationship myself. Even so, most of what I felt for him was disdain, though tempered by a feeling of gratitude for a favor he’d done me once, thus burdening me with a sense of obligation to help him get up out of the ditch his life was in continually.

Eight months before the night of the Seattle riot, Sluggo had offered an escape from the rapid downward spiral my life had been in, by inviting me to go to Yellowstone National Park with him to work for the summer. I wound up going without him because of a shoplifting charge he had to answer for, although I saw to it he made bail before I left him in the dust. It seemed the least I could do, and it was certainly the most I would do in any event. 

I thought I’d never see him again, but he caught up with me in Yellowstone six months later, by which point I’d changed my name and had a spiritual awakening that had virtually rebooted my entire personality. The months of seclusion from all friends and family, the immersion into a life of adventure, escape, and unconditional acceptance by some of the best people I’d ever met had allowed me a kind of reinvention. I felt like I'd been reborn and set on a new path in life.

Outlaws Saloon and Pizzeria. Bad Men & Wild Women. Or so the sign used to read.

But seeing Sluggo again, and lugging him along with me, was like coming down from a mountaintop monastery into a garbage dump. There was no explaining to him all the ways I’d grown and changed, or all the insecurity and self-loathing I’d shed like a hateful skin. It didn't help that he got fired in less than a week and set up a meth operation just down the hill from Mammoth Hot Springs in a little burgh called Gardiner. Still, I knew I could never repay him for holding that door open for me, whether he meant to or not. So when I heard the scuttlebutt down at Outlaws—a watering hole in Gardiner—that the cops were getting ready to lower the boom on Sluggo’s small-time Meth operation, I went straight to his place and made him pack a bag and leave with me right then. 

The cops busted the place forty-five minutes later while we watched from the terrace at Outlaw's, tilting back a couple of Black Dog Ales at Outlaws. Nothing like celebrating a bullet dodged with some brewskis at ten in the morning. It wasn’t at all dramatic, the landlord just let the three cops into his apartment when he didn’t answer the door, no guns drawn or anything. Hell, one of the cops had clipboard. Those three cops probably accounted for the entire police presence in little Gardiner, but it was still pretty anticlimactic. With nowhere to go, Sluggo asked if he could just blow town with me. I said he could, then charged him five hundred bucks and his pair of rollerblades to ride with me on my way out of Dodge.

Because fuck him, that’s why.  

Tiny little Gardiner, MT on the Yellowstone River.

Sluggo and I pulled into Kingston early in the morning of October 8. A snowstorm had been dogging us all the way from Montana and through Idaho where my truck had broken down, forcing us to stay in Coeur d’Alene overnight while I made repairs, which gave the storm a leg up on us. After yet another run-in with the cops, just inside the city limits of Spokane, we were on our way again, but inside the teeth of the blizzard. Lucky for us, it became a massive squall of rain as we reached the desert plains, though it stayed with us all the way to the Olympic Peninsula, trying to wash us away the whole time. 

Unbeknownst to Sluggo, I was planning to stay with my folks for a couple of weeks while sending him on his merry way back to his Grandparents in Springfield on a bus. I wasn’t sure where home was going to be after my life in hiding, but I needed somewhere to decompress and I didn’t want Sluggo hanging on and dragging me back down into the ashes from which I’d arisen. 

Like everyone, he got a load of the nothing going on in Kingston and immediately wanted to go do something else, haranguing me about his boredom and how lame Kingston was. So it was off to Seattle, although this time we took my truck because I had plans Sluggo could know nothing about.

The ferry crossing at night is a beautiful thing. The cabin lights cast a glowing fringe on the water all around the ship that makes the ferry look like it’s drifting on a pool of light, delivering it’s passengers to the shores of Elysium. Seattle after dark is a gem, rightly described as the Emerald City, every bit as mesmerizing as the lights of Vegas, minus the cynical edge of hustlers transacting in appetites. The fury of the rain had spent itself by the time we made the crossing and the sky was clear and sparkling, like the clouds were too exhausted by their attempt to eradicate us to remain. The air tasted clean, the deluge having washed out the unique mélange of marine air, hydrocarbons, and hot electricity that is Seattle’s scent. The streets were slick and velvety like a newly minted currency, awash in the halos of street lamps, but curiously empty. Granted, it was a Sunday night, but in a town of two million there’s always somebody out and about. Not so on October 8, 1995.

I’d spent the previous eight months in yet another exile, but one of my own making this time. I traveled from Oregon to California, to Washington, to Wyoming and Montana, with a mere two phone calls and one letter passing between me and anyone I knew, like a man in hiding. So I was slightly relieved to find Seattle all but empty, having dreaded the crush of people after my monastic retreat. It had left me detached from the hustle and flow of everyday life, so days of the week felt like strange distinctions that I wasn't really equipped to register. I only knew it was Sunday because my Dad had warned me not to miss the last ferry because the Sunday schedule is abbreviated and it would be easy to get trapped in Seattle. Aside from that, I felt totally removed from what the world was doing. 

I had no idea what Summer blockbusters I’d missed, or what political chicanery was threatening the very foundations of our democracy. I did know that Jerry Garcia and Wolfman Jack were dead, but that only reminded me that I was out of weed. Which in turn made me glad for a second that Sluggo was around, because he could always spot who was holding in any crowd and wasn't shy about making inquiries to purchase. Not that there was anyone around to hit up on the slick, eerily empty streets. I wasn’t sure how to feel about hanging out with Sluggo sober, since it had never happened before, but there was nothing to be done about it. So I lead the way south along the viaduct, past darkened industrial spaces broken up by a patchwork of oddly-themed pubs, all vying for their share of the waterfront booze buck, and toward The OK.

Sluggo was lagging behind, always slightly out of breath from smoking, drugs, and a life of general dissipation that had begun years before my own, and was taking its toll on a guy too young to be wheezing like he did. We were almost halfway there when, as if on cue, people began pouring out onto the street from bars on the viaduct and harbor sides of the street, en masse. The mystery of the missing Seattleites had been solved; they were all at some communal liver-punishing event we knew nothing about. The obviously drunken crowds were universally raucous and single-minded in their ebullient migration out into the streets like a horde of jovial zombies. They were streaming out doors on both sides of the street up and down the viaduct, boiling across the sidewalks, past the parked cars and out into lanes of traffic with abandon, shouting and hollering with drunken gusto.

The OK Hotel Cafe, before it was gutted by an earthquake.

There were no flash-mobs in 1995, so the inexplicable emergence of this crowd of heckling ruffians was at once amusing and alarming. Finding ourselves instantly in the midst of this raucousness of people hooting, hollering, and drumming on car hoods was like being air-dropped into the middle of a party on its way to police intervention. As buoyant and cheery as they seemed, there were just so many of them, and they were kind of insensate in their haphazard celebrations, disregarding obstacles and polite boundaries completely. 

I grabbed Sluggo by the arm and began to power-slalom through the crowd, rebounding like a pinball off inebriated revelers, who almost all failed to even take notice. A couple of times I even thrust my fist into the air with a hoot and holler, so we could blend in until we figured out what the hell we were supposed to be so happy about. When we finally broke free of the gaggle of them and were nearing The OK, we saw that another much larger group was approaching from the South. Much, much larger.

“What the hell is happening?” Sluggo asked in his reedy quaver. Looking around for a place to duck out of the path of these hooligans I was about to shrug my ignorance when someone answered his question.

“The Mariners won, man! Beat the Yankees in game 5! We took the pennant!” the reveler exuded. Then with an ominous sounding level of annoyance he turned on Sluggo and asked, “Where you been, man, living in a cave?”  Like Sluggo’s ignorance was an insult to the very dignity of the Mariners' victory.

“Pretty much,” I responded, herding Sluggo along and away from the drunken agitator. “Go Mariners!” I called on the way past him, not quite connecting on the hi-five I offered up as a distraction, which seemed to sate his anger. “Hell, yeah!” he responded and turned back to whatever shenanigans awaited him. We headed away and toward The OK, which was also toward the wave of thousands coming up the viaduct toward us.

Sluggo asked, “Where are all these people coming from? What’s down there?” 

I thought for a second then said, “Mariner’s Stadium. The game must have just let out.” 

We made it to the entrance of The OK just as the river of stadium fans intersected with the bar crowds. We hopped up the step into the relative safe harbor of The OK’s entrance alcove just ahead of the crushing mix of hi-fiving and chest bumping hooligans as they greeted each other with raucous cheers.  

I said, “Shit, this is gonna get wild!”

And it did. The pedestrians far outnumbered the cars, but there were still plenty of vehicles trying to wend their way home from the game. Everyone seemed affable enough about the ensuing traffic jam, and I had the sense that most all the horn honking was celebratory and not in annoyance with all the hijinks. Sluggo and I stood one step up off the sidewalk on the alcove stoop of The OK, a single stride away from the fray, but strangely removed by those mere inches.  For one desperate moment I became powerfully agoraphobic, realizing that there were more people on the street in front of me right then than lived in all the places I’d been the previous eight months put together.

I turned from the scene in an effort to stifle the rising tide of anxiety, pretending to read the playbill beside the entrance to The OK. The double doors were of smoked glass, so opaque as to be black, and cast no reflections. I lit up a Camel Wide, taking a long, deep drag and allowing the nicotine to work its magic as I willed the anxiety to pass. For a minute I ruminated about life in a world where bats, balls, and hometown pride were worthy of an amiable riot in the streets. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the idea that I was supposed to care about it all again. I wondered if I even could, after wandering places of vast silence where none of my plans or anyone’s ideas about life meant anything. A place where wild things ruled. 

Then Sluggo said this unlikely sentence:“Hey, isn’t that Eddie Vedder?”

After a moment to process the fact that he’d actually said what I thought, I turned and scanned the parade of people going by on the sidewalk and running hither and yon in the street. Without pointing–a bit of restraint that Sluggo could always be counted on to demonstrate–he said, “Just standing there by the parking meter.”

There were two figures standing at the curb, barely five feet from us and, besides ourselves, the only others in sight that were not in a frenzy of motion. The figure to the left, a tall, bearded man with striking eyes and long black hair, who looked like the Guru you’d want to find at the top of the mountain, was Kim Thayil, the lead guitarist of Soundgarden. To the right, leaning on the parking meter was a shorter man, his head tilted down and partially obscured by an authentic New York Yankees batting helmet, the hard plastic ones they wear at the plate. Not a fan-store knock-off, mind you; this one looked like it'd been kiped right from the Yanks' dugout. With his hair tucked up under the helmet, it overshadowed him such that it made for an effective disguise, albeit a dangerous one on this particular night. I would’ve looked right past him, as literally thousands of people were doing right at that second, but somehow Sluggo had seen him straight away for what he was: Eddie Vedder, hiding in plain sight. 

Sluggo knew of my lifelong affection for Eddie, and the faux tension between his favorite band, Nirvana, and my favorite band, Pearl Jam, was a constant source of bickering between us. But in that second, he didn’t care about our running debate and just wanted me to have a nice moment with someone that he knew I loved. 

“Dude, go talk to him.” 

I looked at Sluggo for a minute and then asked, “What could I possibly say to him that he hasn’t heard ten thousand times, just today?”

“Who cares? This is your chance! Don’t blow it.” 

But I felt a strong aversion to being “that guy,” so instead I leaned back against the blackened glass of the doors of The OK and pulled on my smoke for a minute. I’ve never worked so hard at appearing blasé as I did for that minute while trying to scrutinize them purely from my peripheral vision. Eddie and Kim were looking up and down the street, clearly scanning the crowd for someone. Kim must have seen him, because he raised his hand to signal somebody and called out “Scully!” As I saw their friend weaving his way toward them through the crowd, I realized that my moment was slipping away.

Just then, Eddie began to go through a pantomime of what every smoker that’s ever lived would recognize as the search for an errant lighter, absently patting at the pockets of his jacket and jeans. Without thinking, I pulled my scarred, ancient zippo from its ready home in my left pocket like a gunslinger with an instinctive urge to draw. I skipped down the step and over to Eddie in a single stride and executed my signature slap-snap trick to light my Zippo and brought the flame up to chase the tip of his smoke. We made eye contact for the briefest of moments over the guttering flame that we sheltered between us in our cupped hands, protecting it against an October chill on the waterfront breeze.

“Nice hat,” was all I said. 

He smirked around his smoke and gave with a knowing bob of his chin in acknowledgement. “Thanks, brother,” he rumbled in a scratchy baritone. Not wanting to ruin a singular moment with fawning sycophancy, I turned a crisp about-face on my heel and went back over to Sluggo on the stoop. 

“That’s it?” Sluggo asked, in exasperation. “After all these years?”

There’s no explaining the sublime geometry of a perfect moment to someone who doesn’t see it. You either get it or you don’t. So I just said, “Yup.”

“They’re leaving, we should follow them,” he suggested. 

I didn’t turn to watch them go. 

“No, man. Let them have their night, and we’ll have ours.” I pulled hard on my Wide one last time then let it drop to the stoop, twisting it under the heel of my Doc, because this was the kind of joint where people stabbed them out on the shitty formica tabletops and no one even blinked. “Besides, we wouldn’t want to miss…" I squinted to actually read the playbill this time, "Squirrel...Nut...Zippers?”

“That does not sound promising,” Sluggo said, craning his neck to watch anonymous fame disappear into the melee, never to be seen again.

“No,” I said as I pulled on the blackened door of The OK. “It sure doesn’t.” 

And they weren’t. The jazzy-polka-ska-fusion octet pretty much stank up the joint, which is really saying something for The OK. I’m not sure even being high would've mitigated the punishment of listening to them for that hour, but it couldn’t have hurt. It'd be a couple of years before those zany kids got their act together to put out their one-hit wonder, "Hell." 

By the time they did, I was sober and Doug was out of my life for good.

When we emerged from the dank, smoky hole of The OK the general rowdiness of the street had dissipated, though there was still a noticeable swell of people out late on a school night. A contingent of revelers who didn’t want their moment to end, although it did just a few days later when the Mariners were eliminated from World Series contention. True to his inerrant Spider-Sense, Sluggo almost instantly found a dude that was holding, and I bought a nice, fat sack with the cash I’d gouged Sluggo for to give him the ride home. 

At the same time I forbade him from buying any Meth from the guy, both because I didn’t want to have it in the vehicle with us in case we had yet another of our legendary run-ins with the law, and because I genuinely wanted him to quit what was quite obviously destroying his life. He bitched about that for a while, as we wandered the streets in seemingly aimless fashion for a time. 

I treated him to a couple of beers from the stash of his money in my pocket, and then pulled the whammy on him when we got to the bus station unannounced, at which point he just about hit the roof. I couldn’t have cared less. I bought him a bus ticket back to Eugene, told him I'd mail him his meager knapsack of stuff, then clapped him on the shoulder as a by-your-leave and made for the door. I tried not to see it as karma when I missed the last ferry of the night, and had to freeze my ass off sleeping in my truck in the dock parking lot.

Oregano, or weed. You be the judge.

I killed some time trying to get high off of what turned out to be a very generous bag of Oregano that I’d paid fifty bucks for. My compliments to whomever rolled and manicured the freshly picked sprigs into such a convincing facsimile of tasty buds. Sincerely.  Scammed by some random hustler, I just laughed it off with a little equanimity, thinking that I probably prevented Sluggo from snorting some lines of Borax when I put the kibosh on his intended purchase of what would no doubt have turned out to be a skillful counterfeit as well.  Who knows, I might have even saved his life, or at least his sinuses anyway. I never got around to telling him about it, but there probably wasn’t much point. 

By the time I got back to my folks place it was almost 7:00 AM, Monday morning. I sacked out from the crappy night’s sleep in my truck, and when I woke up my Mom greeted me with the news that she had found my “stash” when she went to wash the nicotine reek out of my jacket. She was pretty upset at first, especially as I laughed uproariously and told her she had to try it. She was aghast at my impertinence until she found out it was Oregano. At which point she made the most expensive Pesto in the history of the world, and laughed at me, not knowing she ate fifty of Sluggo's bucks. It was delicious.

I returned to Eugene a month later into the open arms of lost friends, like Moses coming back down the mountain. In time I even roped Sluggo into hanging out with me again, this time amongst a better class of people, in hopes of being a good influence on him. We got together sporadically for a while, until he pretty much ruined the following New Year’s Eve–’96 into ’97–with his drunken belligerence and projectile vomiting. Which, coincidentally, was at a totally different hellhole by the name of The OK, in Springfield, Oregon. 

Yet another OK. A generous description

I 86’ed him for good not long after, when he boasted to me of leveraging sexual favors from recently graduated high school girls, using wine coolers he would buy them with their own money, and then refuse to give to them until he’d had his way. That was all I could take. I may not have staked out any moral high ground in that relationship, but even I knew that when you find yourself down in a ditch, at some point you gotta stop digging. But he was just so dedicated to staying in that particular ditch the rest of his days, that eventually I realized I couldn’t save him. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, when you realize that you really can’t save anyone at all. Makes you realize how lucky you are if you even find that grace yourself.

I came across him one last time in ’98, a thousand days after the night of the Seattle riot, when I’d put down those roots at long last and had been sober for almost three months. He was literally in a shallow ditch on the side of the road, walking along in it because there were no sidewalks in the industrial wastes west of town where the roads were choked by semis parked along both shoulders, while forklifts and industrial traffic dominated the streets. I’d found a decent job driving truck out in that neck of the woods, and was on my way home when I spotted him. I pulled over and gave him a lift. Gratis this time. 

For a minute I was actually glad to see him, thinking we might compare notes on how the years had passed. Then I saw that he was just completed faded; so spun out on Meth that the black of his pupils completely swallowed his eyes until they looked like holes in his face. I knew that no time at all had passed for him. He was a little scruffier, and more worn around the edges, but it could have been a day—instead of a year and a half—for all that had changed in his life. I gave him a ride to where he was going, which seemed to be nowhere, and never saw him again. 

For two guys who started out digging their respective ditches together and following the same roads to the same places side-by-side, it’s hard to fathom how we wound up at such different ends. I guess it’s true what they say, those that seek shall find. And it seems that those that won’t, remain lost all of their days. Either way, you can’t stay in hiding forever. Change may be an automatic function of time and entropy, but progress is not.  

Like my close, personal friend Eddie Vedder has sung to me on more than one dark and stormy night:

“In hiding, I swallowed my breath and went deep, I was diving. I surfaced when all of my being was enlightened.”

Thanks, brother. Nice hat.  

Bird Karma

Not a bad day for a Thursday, although I woke up on the couch, either having crashed there before I could make it to bed, or having been exiled for another bout of snoring in the middle of the night, I have no idea which. Either way it’s not so bad, it’s comfortable enough. But it means that I have to wake up when the wife gets going, instead of an hour later when Matt Lauer shows up to tell me what to worry about today. 

We’re both quiet in the morning (The wife and I, not Matt Lauer. That guy will not shut up), so there’s not much conversation, just the shuffle of feet and the burbling of the coffee pot. On a good day, I get a cup down my gullet before I head out the door, but on most days I choke it down on the way to pick up my business partner for the day’s work. Which means at least a couple of swallows wind up in my lap as I slalom around the morons and school buses that contrive to make me late. Hot coffee in the lap is actually more effective at waking me up than drinking it, but I think the Surgeon General would frown upon that use.

Today we headed deep into the backwoods for a siding job. We live in a smallish town, but the place we’re headed to makes it seem like a bustling metropolis. It’s about a thirty minute drive down a country road that rolls along the McKenzie River, running parallel to the railroad track through increasingly rugged terrain. In the Midwest, they might call these mountains, but here in Oregon they’re just hills. The outlying edges of the Cascade mountain range that bisects the State into east and west. The further we go, the more sparse the houses become and the larger the plots of land delineated behind skeins of barbed wire become. The traffic is mostly log trucks, freighted with bundles of Cedar and Douglas Firs for the local mills. These guys are paid by the load, which means they drive like madmen so I always yield the right of way.

After we pass through the so-called town of Jasper, really just a wide-spot with a gas station and general store, it’s on to the turnoff for the town of Fall Creek. Population 120. As we depart the alluvial flood plain of the river and head into the foothills, the trees begin to tower over us creating a verdant canopy over the road. From the air, the furrowed draws, arroyos, and saddles look like folds in rough green cloth. The buildings are older back here, where homesteaders started driving stakes into their claims a hundred and fifty years ago.

There are random smatterings of outhouses and barns. Cows, horses, sheep, and the odd herd of alpaca populate the softly rolling hills. One of the barns, which we refer to as Wavy Gravy, is so old and decrepit that it’s begun to implode on itself. The ramshackle leaning and sagging of its roof and walls has bent the shingles into long squiggles that make it seem that a wave is moving down the length of the barn. That means it’s time to make the turn up the rutted gravel driveway that leads to today’s jobsite. It’s helpful to have memorable landmarks like that, since there are a thousand little ruts, paths and roads that disappear back into the trees never to emerge again. 

The house we’re re-siding is a rental, and it shows. It hasn’t seen a lick of maintenance in ten years, if it’s been a day. The old cedar shingles are just dated as hell, and there’s a patina of algae over every smooth surface. The landlord is trying to get the place refinanced so we’re throwing a facelift onto the old beast, using a stack of siding that he’s cobbled together over the last year or so to do it. It’s a mix and match jigsaw puzzle of primer colors and grain textures, which pretty much equates to a white-trash camouflage in these parts. The siding is covered in mud and footprints from laying around under drippy eaves on various pieces of property that he owns for the past who-knows-how-many months. Years, even. It kind of hurts my heart to be involved in this kind of haphazard project, thrown together in such slapdash fashion. I think it’s against my religion or something. But the landlord pays cash on the spot, which covers a multitude of sins in any religion. Especially mine.

The renters are all quite amiable, although I can’t believe how many of them are shoehorned into the little cracker box.  A couple of times, we hear one of the couples screaming things at each other, followed by a spray of gravel being thrown from the tires of a car leaving angrily. That’s one of the strange parts about working in and around other people’s homes; you’re pretty much living with them, so manners wear thin pretty quickly. They have a legion of dogs, Labs all. Seems like I see a new one every day, and never the same one twice. The tenants come out a couple of times a day for smokes, and always make conversation with us. They’ll be painting the siding when we’re done to earn credit toward their rent, so they have a vested interest in us finishing in a timely fashion, since the good weather is supposedly coming. No sign of it so far. The rain has been pretty much relentless.

It’s never much fun working in the rain, although in Oregon there’s pretty much no other choice. If you wind up doing this kind of work for any length of time, you have to invest in some quality rain gear. The first year I tried a variety of cheap stuff, shying away from the daunting sticker shock of the higher-end wear. But you either end up rain-soaked from the poor quality, or sweating to death inside the hermetically sealed envelope, and then you’re soaked anyway. Eventually you realize that this is your life, and spending one third of it in wet misery is ridiculous. Either get busy getting an indoor job, or get serious about being outdoors and pony up the four hundred bucks for the good gear.

My business partner and I set a decent pace, but tend toward the methodical rather than the expeditious, especially in this kind of weather. He’s a couple of years older than me, and we’ve known each other forever. In fifteen years, I can still count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him in a bad mood. I’m pretty level headed, but next to him I’m a moody hot-head. I’m the planner and the cut man, while he installs the product and finds all the things I lose in my absent minded ways. Seriously, he once found a metal cog from a tool that I dropped in someone’s garden. It was a disc the size of a dime, and brown in color. The tool was useless without it, and I looked for almost an hour. He found it in the brown dirt in less than five minutes.  I refer to him as the “work wife," and he and my actual wife have an alarming number of traits in common. They even drive me crazy for the exact same reasons. I can actually finish my own sentences from time to time, although neither of them seems to think so. Nonetheless, we get along well and he keeps my coffee cup full when we’re on the road.

The rain has pretty much turned this whole place into a mud pit. And I'm talking country mud here, not like the slippery stuff in your average suburban garden. This is the ancient, glacial flow mud that the wheels of civilization sink into and grind to a halt. It splatters onto everything and just walking back and forth from the cut table to the work area throws up enough muddy blowback to paint me brown from the knees down. The viscous quagmire also conducts electricity, a fact which I was reminded of today when an extension cord fell down into the mud soup at my feet, and proceeded to light me up with inducted voltage. It was like my exposed skin had been plunged into an anthill. Not really painful, but disconcerting and uncomfortable until I figured out what the cause was. As if spinning blades, pneumatic nail guns, and heights weren’t enough. Now even the mud and random electrons are turning on me. Aces.

We’re working to finish up the siding project that the landlord and some of his motley collection of friends and weekend warriors began. Which means we pretty much have to pick a point to start making things right again, and find a way to blend out their amateurish efforts.  If DIY TV could really teach you to do it, guys like me wouldn’t have a job. Or as they say on jobsites the world over, “That’s why girls don’t play the game, coach.” It’s hard to tell sometimes where it’s their screw ups and where it’s just some rather serious imperfections in the structure itself. It’s undergone some significant remodels and additions during the course of what appears to have been a very rough life. I almost think that this shanty began its life as a chicken coop back when my grandpa was still a gleam in his own daddy’s eye. I’ve run into stranger things on the job before.

Once, we gutted a house to the studs after a fire and found that literally only seven studs in the house were single piece from floor to ceiling. The whole rest of the structure was made of random parts and pieces scabbed together to cobble up a Frankenhouse. It’s like that out here in the country, where they ain’t got no fancy Home Depot. Sometimes things really are made entirely of bailing wire and duct tape. 

Conversely, I’ve opened up some walls to find delights, historical curiosities, and numinous talismans: newspapers from the McKinley era, circa 1896; Bible verses and Satanic prayers scribbled in crayon or laboriously carved inside wall cavities; glyphs and arcane symbols scrawled in attics, basements, and dead spaces. Like our houses are really just time capsules, waiting to be opened. Secret historical archives being curated unbeknownst by homeowners, until some disaster or change of plans breaks open these veiled vaults, exposing the curious tidbits of their antiquity.

Lots of things are different about working this far out into the middle of nowhere. Running to the store is not really an option, and there’s no bathroom. Unless you’re a dude. Then the world is your urinal. Around the same time everyday, sometime in the two o’clock hour, a jackass brays for about a minute. Not my business partner, mind you. An actual jackass. No idea why. The horses all get it in their head to take off running any time the rain quits for more than twenty minutes, which it does for some stretches in the mid-morning and again in the afternoon. I guess they’re trying to shake off the wet and cold? I have no actual idea how things work out here. I was raised in LA, so this is as alien to me as any sci-fi landscape.

It’s kind of nice out here though, all things considered. Mud and jackasses aside, the ground and hillsides are covered in thickets of blackberries, ferns, and honeysuckle that make the air smell like you could eat it. The half dozen or so cars that roll out and then back in during the weekday are all populated by amiable people. Without exception, every single person that comes by smiles and waves. It’s confusing at first, this senseless friendliness. Do I know these people? What the hell are they smiling about? Still, I could get used to it. On one of the adjacent properties there’s a couple of farmgirls that come out every day to feed the horses and work on a tractor that never seems to go anywhere. It makes me think of that great line from the John Denver song, “Grandma’s Feather Bed." It goes something like: “I guess it ought to be said, that I’d trade ‘em all plus the gal down the road for Grandma’s feather bed… Well, maybe I ought to reconsider about the gal down the road…”

I can see why. 

And while I wouldn't want to live out here, it might be nice if I could take a little piece of it home with me. Some essence of this pastoral stillness, to borrow just a bit of the bucolic serenity that is banished by the insectile hum of our ceaseless toiling in the city. These country folk have their little totems and monuments at every corner. Their lives here seem to be mementos of some imaginary bygone day with none of our modern existential decay. I know it ain't so, but everything about this place says that it is.

I’m sure we seem equally strange to them. My iPod blares a pretty wide variety of music all day long. When in a customer’s house I have a playlist of safe, folksy-classic rock-blues-pop songs that contain no rap, cursing or shredding guitars, and it plays below conversational levels. But out here in the boondocks, it’s pretty much a free for all. I’ll walk away from the cut table and N.W.A is menacing my white ass, but when I come back Joe Bonamassa is wailing about the Black Lung Heartache. Maybe that’s what that Jackass is going on about, who knows? He wouldn’t be the first one to give me crap about my music. Over the last fifteen years of remodels and construction I’ve learned that only Country and Classic Rock are safe choices, and to never, ever let anyone know that I love Oingo Boingo and The Cure. But now I own the company, so they can all suck it.

That was actually a hard choice to make, deciding to go out on my own. I’d been laid off enough times to know that I wasn’t coming back from the latest round of cutbacks. And since the economy was taking an epic, years-long dump, it’s not like there were that many options. Most days I feel pretty good about the decision. It’s alright. You know, aside from dealing with the inane bureaucracy of government and the ineptitude of all the faceless corporations we have to curry favor with to stay in business. On the bright side, we take as many coffee breaks as we want, and deciding on our own level of OCD perfection, which has its charms. Of course, some days I wish I was still punching in an out on someone else’s dime, when any problems are their problems at the end of my day. I especially feel that way in the morning on the way to the job. But once the music is going, and the hammers are swinging it gets better.

Today was an especially challenging day, work-wise. It was chock-full of technically difficult angles and cuts to figure, the kind that separate the craftsmen from the hackers. Every time it goes well, I spare a grateful nod to Downtown Gary Brown, my high school Geometry teacher from Long Beach Poly. It was one of the few classes where I didn’t bitch about how I was never going to use the lessons in real life. And now I do. At least I don’t have to eat any crow along with my daily avalanche of sawdust. Words like acute, complementary, and obtuse come to mind, and I still remember what they mean. This is where that knowledge and my exacting nature work together. 

When a seat cut, two different rake cuts, and a notch all have to be scribed onto the same board—based on only two reference measurements—that's when the money talks and the bullshit walks. When we were done, I realized that none of the guys that trained me over the years could have pulled off what I did. They would have to choose between speed (their default setting) and just caulking the huge gaps that “you can’t see from the ground anyway." Or else spend half a day getting it right, while burning through piece after piece the very limited supply of reclaimed siding materials at our disposal. Realizing that you’ve surpassed your Sensei only feels good for a minute. It’s a nice minute, but it ends when you realize that you’re on your own now. No one to look up to or fall back on.
 

When we started siding that particular gable after lunch, I spent a little time prepping the area and fixing some loose boards. At that point I noticed several holes in the plywood substrate, one of which a little bird kept trying to fly into. I tried keeping him away, knowing that it was about to become a crappy piece of real estate for him to own. He did make it past me once, but I scared him out of there with some sharp raps of my hammer, and then got it covered up before he could make it past me again. But as the hour went on, he persisted. I started to feel bad, since I knew I’d evicted him and it was raining cats and dogs out. He would fly out in a wide arc and land on a branch across the road and stare at me for maybe thirty seconds, and then make another attempt to get past me. Like he was thinking, “Man, I could’ve sworn this was the place.”

We kept working of course, wondering at his strange behavior, and remarking aloud to each other when he would seem particularly aggressive, which is not really in character for a Nuthatch. Of course he was only one of the nuisances to deal with, since the place was overrun with Yellowjacket nests and really huge spiders everywhere. But things got a little more serious after the first hour became two and he came back with reinforcements. They took turns dive-bombing us for the next half hour. Three Nuthatches, all working in tandem like a squadron. As annoying as it was, it was also kind of cool. They’d take off from their branch across the road, barreling up for altitude and then drop out of the sky, wings laid out flat like an incoming P-51 on a strafing run. If we turned to face them, they’d break off early. But if our backs were turned, the little assassins would buzz the tower pretty hard. These little bundles of pins and feathers blazed past our ears by inches, and the furious beating of their wings was always a little startling. 

 Finally, it dawned on me why they were being so tenacious.

I went around the corner from the gable and climbed a ladder up into the eves, where I could finally hear the cacophony of little chirps over my job-site radio. Of course their babies were in there. It was the only explanation. Even the Yellowjackets weren’t that vindictive when we dispossessed them. The babies were trapped now, essentially buried alive. 

There were only two choices: make a hole for the parents to get to them, or let the babies die. I learned the hard way years ago that you can’t touch a bird’s babies or nest. They will instantly disown them and allow them to starve to death. There was no way to get the babies out of the attic, so the choice was to undo hours of work or let evolution punish the birdies for a poor choice of homes. After eight years of working for my previous sensei, I know exactly what he would have done. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation. “Oh, well” he’d say, shrugging in his hapless, apathetic way.

This is actually one of the times that it’s nice to own the business and get to make the call myself. And when it feels pretty good to know that I have surpassed my old mentor in more than just craftsmanship. After a little pondering, I found a place to let the Mommy and Daddy get back into their aerie and to their babies without damaging my work. It was technically a no-no to drill into the attic through the blocking designed to keep critters out, but it’s far from the worst problem that old dump has working against it. So much for conducting business with lead pipe cruelty. I must be getting soft in my old age. Or maybe I'm just becoming more conscious that I need all the Karma I can get my hands on. 

When I got home, I found that the dryer had conked out on me. A belt that had been threatening to go out for months finally did, and I had to jury-rig a clothes line on the outside of the house to hang dry the sheets and our unmentionables. I feel a little claustrophobic as the weight of yet another bill lands on my shoulders. But it’s alright, tomorrow is another day, and when the hammers start swinging I'm sure I'll feel better. For today, like my friends the Nuthatch Family, I've got somewhere to lay my head and that's all that matters. Thanks to the makeshift clothesline, my pillow smells like outside, so it looks like I got to bring some of that country living home with me after all. 

Maybe that Karma will kick in tomorrow. You never know.