A Bistro of One's Own

"There was the scent of the sea as we passed the display of oysters on their bed of crushed ice, the rich whiff of butter warming in a pan, and, coming through the air every time the kitchen door swung open, the pervasive–and to my untraveled nose, infinitely foreign–hum of garlic." Mayle, French Lessons








One of the great consistencies of Mayle's work (with the exception of a Dog's Life, I suspect) is that his protagonists tend to personas of Mayle himself, as mentioned before, middle age or beyond, usually once or twice divorced, and an eloquent wannabe hedonist.  For their time, his books captured, I believe a sort of sentiment of the age, a desire to use a little extra cast to travel and live the good life for the man of charm and semi-means. For the likes of me, I have tried to capture this persona myself, most successfully with a series of food writings that resemble his Provence A-Z, which, in turn, took its inspiration from MFK Fisher's own title of the same name.  Even the wonderfully inquisitive short essays were rooted in the Mayle charm of the well seasoned traveler, seeking the high points of culture and some anecdotal findings. I had wondered yesterday if, in order to reach a voice that was compelling and well worth writing, if it wouldn't be quite fun to turn such a type of character – the amateur food sleuth that is – to something more of a young adult's book, what I would certainly categorize as otherworldly departure from the standard fare of that age which seems to be quite generally hollow and far too often menacing and needlessly exploitative of some flashier forms of contemporary culture. I really have to say I like the idea of our protagonist as a sort of independent minded young foodie who hires himself to seek out these little mysteries around the neighborhood. We used to get this sort of unsentimental mystery of youth in the Great Brain Series, books that I always loved, in which the young protagonist was always a bit of the fray, seeking out his assignments from others.  The idea that a young man would want to create and establish his own restaurant is very fascinating. A little with, a little wisdom, a little Maylian.

"One piece of advice was a model of clarity: I should never attempt to get involved with what he referred to as 'their lingo.' Speak English forcefully enough, he said, and they will eventually understand you." – Mayle, from French Lessons







Playing the novice to a new culture takes a delicacy of sensibility that not everybody has.  Sam might have to tip toe around the fact that he had never been a chef per se, only a chef domestique, otherwise known as a stay at home dad whose favorite parts of the day usually had something to do with reading a gourmet recipe, planning a menu, and then off to the grocery store with a kid or two to pick over the produce. Was this chefing? In his mind, yes, and, after all, isn't that in the end all that counts? When the gravestone is laid over at the end, will the words say that everybody knew precisely who he was and they all knew there was no way he was ever a great cook. Or, he often wondered, could he fudge it a little bit, and put on that stone that he "always loved cooking?" This gave him some ideas for the Bistro of One's Own – to make a sign out of stone with some immortal words scribbled all over it.  He thought again...maybe this was a little bit morbid, especially he was in essence starting from scratch. Wait, that was it! "From Scratch!" How clever he could be sometimes, he thought to himself while nobody else was looking, of course.

He looked back over to Clara. If she was to be his partner in this little escapade of an adventure, she would have to see the future of the place for herself.  Sam looked over her light and loose hair, bubbling in the wind a little, and could see the very tip of a sailboat off along the northern shore of Lake Mendota, deep, blue, and pleasant.

A Bistro of One's Own

"Like many of his generation, he had very little good to say about the French – an odd lot who couldn't even understand cricket. But he did admit that they knew their way around the kitchen..." Mayle, from French Lessons








The Mayle character has several things in common each of his books, whether fiction or non-fiction. There is always the past career, which seemed to swallow protagonist whole, often hectic, very demanding, quite chatty and seemingly hollow altogether but that held the attention of Simon, or whatever name, because of its creative promise. He was a creative trapped inside a popularity contest, always with one wishful eye on a future life that might allow for that creative self to full emerge, be what it needed to be...and it had to have the place! Here is where the Provence books come in – they are deceivingly real, despite the cover make-up and despite the subject material of coming to a new land, full of potential romance. We can't forget that the book is actually stocked with complaint: the mistral, the leaky pipes, the slow to action workmen, the visitors (the very ones that they had tried to escape). Escape, of course, being the key concept throughout: to escape the gray drudgery of the English Channel and moving toward the mostly sunny delights of the south  of France. It's this nugget of desire that informs Mayle's work: it is grown up romance in this way. Adults do continue to hold on tightly to those remote nuggets of romance left in the mind but that we often don't have it in is us to full realize these because so much of it has been drained by...previous careers, for example. It is the place itself that becomes the romance, the characters are new, if often somewhat disgruntled; they are not depicted as necessarily menacing but harbor a certain instinctual locality that cannot be pierced by your own foreign projections onto them. And there is the food and the drink...this also helps. What better way to preserve the romance of place than to sing along the journey with the assistance of a little French wine and dabbling away at every charcuterie you find on the web of rues? All of this is captured by a voice that tries to charm not harm. Cultural criticism never makes it much further than a jocular ribbing. It is universally accepted to make fun of self and other as long as it is not intended to either elevate oneself too far or denigrate the other too low. Mayle does this superbly, with a witty but innocent voice, humorous but not simple gunnery or sentiment. These are cultural cues that are no doubt hard to create for oneself. It is either there or it is not. For my own Bistro of One's Own, it becomes an investment in time and energy. The world circles around in its slapdash way, full of plans and difficulties, but underneath it the writer has to stave those things off long enough to shoe horn in the light voice of the mild humorist. We need luck, time, and a lot of commitment.

"She was looking particularly witchy today in her most ruined cowgirl boots and stained apron, with three enormous cauldrons boiling on her old monster stove. Witchy with a country-western motif." – Kingsolver, Flight Behavior






4

The borrowing from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is really quite amazing in this book. By calling her mother in law Hester, we were given a little nod in this direction right away, called after, of course, Hester Prynne, Prynne itself carrying some meaning for Hawthorne in his own book. Hawthorne had settled into Salem Massachusetts after living in Concord Mass in the Old Manse, a house built for him by none other than Emerson's father. Hawthorne spends an enormous among of energy in trying to capture for us the patriarchal culture of Salem in his introductory notes to Letter, going as far as to say that he could not conceive of a more male oppressive caste than what he was finding there at the time. As we read Flight Bahavior, at any time that we might be thinking that this is a sort of tightly packed socially critical novel, full of symbols and religious allusions, really, think again; take a look at the allegorical Letter again and we can begin to see that Kingsolver actually does us the great great service of providing us all kinds of little narrative tidbits to actually keep this 400 page book quite readable, including many references to modern culture (she describes the Judd family, for example), and offers us a narrative voice that very often provides of us humorous relief, such as the line above "Witchy with a country-western motif." This all done for the sake of readability. I have virtually no doubts that Kingsolver could crucify the Cub and Dellarobia family if she chose; in fact, as it is set up against the beauty of the butterflies to come, their magestic visage and their unfortunate situation of having to fly north as a new flight behavior, this could become a true screed. Heck, you could turn this thing into a book of essays and just go after folks for their attitudes. That Kingsolver uses Pastor Ogle as a take on Dimsdale, for another example, gives us a little bit of playfulness, a sort of shot over the bow of the folks that are being skewered down there in Tennessee. We know that the author is thinking that this makes her personally mad, but to lay it all at the doorstep of a farming family who may or may not decide to lumber for money, well, this is a culture problem too, they are just wrapped up inside it and misguided. The scene that plays out as the congregation is a loose little narrative without much to give it substance or stability. Each family member goes off into their own little niche of the program, and each sort of seeks out their own 'home' in church. This is purposeful. All of it, I believe, is purposeful in how it is showing that, as opposed to the true miracle of the butterflies up on that mountain, traditional religion has lost its vitality, literally. Any religion that doesn't stop to smell the roses just isn't really very real to put it bluntly; and of course that is the essential problem with sustainability and religion today: religion exists still but for what purpose if it can't get its followers to dig in and love their land, their earth...their creation! Either traditional religion needs to redouble its mission or it is already lost. We presume that what is to come is a positioning of nature as potential religion, a kind of reversal of Scarlet Letter, because the call there was a need for a loosening of the strict standards of belief, to allow for a woman in crisis. Now a woman in crises, well she might be painted as famous, a kind of oddity to be believed or looked at as a spectacle.

A Bistro of One's Own

"The early part of my life was spent in the gastronomic wilderness of postwar England, when delicacies of the table were in extremely short supply. I suppose I must have possessed taste buds in my youth, but they were left undisturbed." – Peter Mayle, from French Lessons







To go from a cooking instructor and house husband to an owner of very small yet enchanting bistro is such a zig zagged road that I sometimes wonder whether I can retell it truthfully – almost as though parts of the story someone else has made up and kindly inserted into my real life without me knowing so that when I consider it myself I pick it up and examine it something like a stranger's scarf found in your closet. There is one moment, however, that I remember as well as I could any other. I was standing on the second level of a Barnes and Noble Bookstore at the sheik outdoor mall The Grove in Los Angeles looking through the food writing section, picking through some of the usual suspects that show up on the shelves with beautiful hardcover books and I realized that, within a year, I would open my own place come hell or high water. Now, these fellows with their own signature books and signature charm, they nearly all had gone through the long paces of chef's storyline: maybe skip high school, walk into the best restaurant you can when you are, say, 16, offer your services as bar back, perhaps become a sous chef at 19, then head into culinary school, experience behind you, and off you are into the restaurant biz, long nights, hard parties, and incomparable experience. Ten years later a book of your best craft made into a stately book with your very own face on it. Guys like me opening them up wondering if someday I could do it too, but without all the experience? Well it worked.

Notes on A Bistro of One's Own

"The best house, everybody had said, in central London–large, elegant, almost secluded at the end of a quiet Kensington square. Caroline had spent three years and God knows how much money decorating it until it had reached that state of mannered perfection which made the disorder of normal daily life unthinkable." – Peter Maybe, from Hotel Pastis







June 27

Well now to plan out a novel...let's see, first and foremost you must pick out a few things, a little like a wish list, I suspect. There are those people that you decide to characterize for the next year or so – you can't forget that you will have exhibit both patience and some generosity if you plan to wake up in the morning to say hello to them over and over again. And let's not forget about voice and tone – better pick out the right textures there also. Who wants to write a dark tragedy when the soul is actually crying out for some humor? Action, point of view, context...what point are you trying to make? With all of this, I know from the past that I might of course crave the contours of a social novel – reading Kingsolver right now, Flight Behavior, which is a take off on the Scarlett Letter, the social novel of that century – or that a farce would be fun, but at the end of the day, I really can't stand living inside the grind of either radical departure of all things gloomy or all things hilarious. I've gravitated toward the writing of Mayle ever since A Year in Provence, probably the most important book I've ever really read because it captures something of the spirit of things that I share – it's a sort of desire for lightness against the usual norms we set out for ourselves of the serious. To put it another way, I tend to spend my days listening to smooth jazz, all the while the Wisconsin weather trapping around the neighborhood a little like a fiend, literally. I think Mayle (now so sadly passed, as of 2018), was very much a recipient of the same inner genetic tendency to see need to see bright colors and smell the wafts of the baguette carried along the waves of the Mistral, despite (and against) a British backdrop of a previous life. Let's not forget that to take the broad leap across the pond and shuck the Brits for the Provencial is really quite a step. Yet Maybe does a wonderful job of not turning his past life as ad exec into some trap of cultural mores and psychic disenchantment; instead it always receives a humorous past, as if to say, yes, I was indeed trapped inside poor weather and poor hours for many years, but this great escape is not necessarily something to be found only in the Provencale sunshine, but something to be rebound inside my very own voice and perceptions. His plots are relatively loose and his little sly criminals full of human humor, just like us. These are light and full of watercolors, not deep green and brown Dutch Masters. Of all the literature I have read, Mayle is the only writer I have ever fully depended on and understood, over and over again. An old friend...seemingly – my own fault here – my only friend, really in this way. To be a romantic in a world gone either mechanical or digital is close to a full time job. How do you do it? You can listen to smooth jazz; you can cook it out; you can write it out; or maybe live it out if you are extraordinarily nimble in the matters of balancing real life with that of the fantastic.

"I've never planted anything outside this early, so I'm curious to see what will come of them." – Carl H. Klaus, from My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season








June 25


To say its summer now feels far more genuine that if we would have said it a week or ago, or a week before that; it seems that any date past the school year for children constitutes summer, although we all have to wait for the magical 21st of the month when, if all goes well, the rain disappears for awhile, the sun blankets the earth for more days in a row, folks hold on with a bit more security those natural smiles because they know they can count on getting outside and living their lives more fully again. Here in Madison – the midwest in general – we are experiencing expectations a little different this year, as others. We experienced some profound beauty in months previous, the kind of stuff that makes the gardener and the outdoorsy type make that secret wish with the devil: I promise I will do everything I can to be good if this dreary spring goes away and the sun comes on in to settle. Didn't really happen this way; June has been wet; for those of us who need the green, it becomes a kind of crawling period of time, always waiting for the days of expectation. Now, I will say this, as June 21 hit, so too did a nice patch of clean weather and this city has been alight for a few days now by foot traffic and festivals, bright colors and, whether we all like it or not, a lot of pale untanned skin poling through those shorts legs. Yesterday was as fine a summer moment as I can truly boast: we put on a writing workshop at Tenney Park, which is positioned at the south edge of Lake Mendota, where the lochs let lake water down into the Yahara River, which then travels through the isthmus to Lake Monona, where I live on a classic corner sporting a bridge and arching trees.

Reading Behavior

"It did get her out, among people. Whether friend or foe hardly mattered; they ate with their mouths closed and wore shoes without Velcro. She hadn't been much of a player in public after the diner closed six years ago, and hadn't planned on missing those long days on her feet or the wages that barely covered her gas." – Kingsolver, Fight Behavior




3

Social (socially active) novel is a series of revealing contrasts. Authors tend to set up a panorama of how things are, and contrast those scenes and characters with the way things need to be. So the poor boy with heart is shown in the seedy city among the urban cannibals. The great authors, like Kingsolver, do this without telling us about the intentions of the contrast. The old naturalistic social novel, sometimes Howells, Crane, and certainly Upton Sinclair, turned some of those subtleties into commentary and, in essence, did much the work for us. It seems Kingsolver, early on, does a nice job suggestiveness and subtlety. The scene in which the family climbs into those fir trees to check out the unusual phenomenon that is occurring there reveals the contrast between those witnesses that might take heart in something beautiful and 'otherworldly.' Dellarobia has an inborn sense that they are witnessing something that is not is not normal and feels of the religious; but we notice that this 'witnessing' is contrasted with the starker version of explicit or traditional religion, which Cubs' parents would claim but seems to offer virtually no connected values. The traditional religion becomes hollow in comparison because it doesn't show, through the family, anything of a true compassion, anything of a true curiosity, of a love or understanding of the higher value of a natural occurrence which should be, in its more purer form, something to behold of 'creation.' I think this is one of the most potent points that cultural critics can unearth in contemporary spiritual culture (if that is even an accurate phrase today), and that is the idea that traditional religion has a tendency toward making outward verbal claims for belief, but when tested for value, the true components of spirit are not present. A farmer, for example, truly at one with the 'Lord' would recognize the importance of acknowledging and then hopefully preserving 'creation.' Yet other values persist -- logging the farm to pay off debt seems to be a virtual model of modern mechanical 'dis'-belief. The machinery of culture doesn't have the time nor resources to cull out the best parts of human nature. If Cub's family walked up into the woods, saw the butterflies, and then cried out alongside Dellarobia that this was a beautiful sign, or maybe warning, and began in the conversation of how to help the butterflies, then readers and those very same cultural critics would have to disarm and accept the decency of traditional religious values..."that the way it used to be." Instead, a kind of hollow claim of voice over substance is depicted. In the absence of both the old sturdiness of traditional religion, and the not yet encountered environmental spirituality, the land goes uncared for. The earth is, literally, in limbo; hence the bizarre northern migration to Tennessee of a species that has tended toward homing in Veracruz Mexico for millennia. Dellarobia is shown to exhibit some values of both the passing and the coming of the spiritual. She had been religious until her father lost his inner light and now has been co-oped by a family that doesn't particularly shine; although, she has found, as it suggests above in the quote, some partial needs for relgion. "It did get her out, among people." This statement is a kind of coarse and uninspiring logic of why folks still 'go to church.'  As these contrasts continue, I will be looking for the contrast even further between the perceived purposes of the church and the perceived purposes of the new cathedral on the mountain.

Reading Behavior

"Summer's heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in its turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone." – Kingsolver, Flight Behavior







2

We know that we are inside of what we might characterize as an old-school-meets-new-school social novel when the first fifty pages of a 400 page novel continues diligently to lead up to the promised catastrophe, in this case something (we know, we expect) to do with climate change, as indicated above. There has been some fairly important debate in the not to too distant past about the need and quality of the social novel – some things to consider are that they tend to be big, complex, and revealing, all attributes that we know doesn't tend to find as much of an audience as when folks literally had to read for entertainment (think previously mentioned Howells and Wharton). I think it's important to continue the conversation here, in order to be true and fair. As a reader, I have already mentioned I like all things Kingsolver, because she is interested in the natural world, and she is utterly talented with language. In a way, that is all it takes for me; but of course she is quite tremendous with character as well. I think way back to the wonderful beginning in her Homeland stories, with such ability to write beautifully and capture people simultaneously. Look back at Henry James or even Dickens for that matter...Updike...all of them, let's face it, naturals at the art. However, I will say that at this point Dellarobia and Cub feel a little bit like caricatures of something else; perhaps a bit of judgement built up against both? Of course both of these types exist out there. Thankfully Dellarobia is being provided that double sidedness to her character in which she is admitting to her faults on a day to day level, and also secretly craving some something else. This seems a dynamic set up and interesting. And yet Cub is, frankly, a bit too much of a cardboard cut out. I realize that we need to have that kind of staged counterpoint, Cub's thick dimness that represents a strand of American backwardness toward climate change. I happen to believe, though, that Cub's character could have been given another immediate layer of complexity and that, in fact, the plot would have been enhanced even a bit more. What if, for example, Cub happened to love trees secretly; maybe we come to find out that, as a kid, he used to spend hours up there in those mountains, not necessarily learning anything about them but appreciating them in his own simple way. Now the day comes when the loggers arrive. Granted, in this case Cub might still go along with the project of cutting for cash, but look at the conflict created in a man who might be perceived and dumb, dull and blind, becoming, in his own way, conflicted, but still making the wrong choice and caving into his parents wishes. I think this tends to capture the essential problems of sustainability a little more accurately: harm we accomplish against nature does not always tend to be one bad person's character ruining things, but instead has a strong tendency of simply following social and economic culture, which generally doesn't stop to ponder the beauty of this forest, these trees; instead seeing things still as commodity over community (Leopold's phrase). What really hurts would be to consider if perhaps Cub wanted to save those trees and had some small inkling of taking that farm over and turning it organic, but that he can't do it because of hundreds of pressures, like supporting his family, etc. This reminds me very much of the quandary of so many farmers: inside their souls would they not like to escape the negative impact of mono crop corn farming, indebtedness, and inability to truly care for the soil. I think so. How do you do that though when the money only comes trickling in as you ship off your corn on the train heading east? That is how you pay for giant machines you have on lease and the very life you've built around you on debt and future prospects. I am projecting my own interest onto these characters which is only interesting if it reveals strengths or weaknesses of the novel as it is. As a man reading this book, and who is very interested in sustainability issues, I would say that I am finding this a weakness of the book so far, but that I am also predicting that it become quite useful as Dellarobia moves along her journey deeper into the story.

Reading Behavior

"...I grew up running wild in the woods with little adult supervision, studied biology as a college student, and then went to graduate school in biology. I am one of thousands of species that live in this place, and I don't ever forget the other ones are there." – Kingsolver, from a "Conversation with Stephen L. Fisher"





One of the more enriching ways to read a book is to simultaneously write about it in response, either as notes or in a more fully articulated way.  These are nothing more than elevated notes -- therefore, there might even purposefully be an error here and there; a misplaced semi-colon, even a wrong turn in predictions. Only at page 45, it's obviously impossible to do much more than size up the book, so to speak, to make some speculative remarks about what seems to be coming, or to comment on early style or maybe even some of Kingsolver's previous works. I used to teach Kingsolver's short stories, titled Homeland, what I felt then, especially on initial reading, were a fantastic blend of realisms.  It is covered somewhat in the more public critical response (non academic) that close readers tend to be leary of novelists taking on too overt of political or environmental concerns within their fiction; the fear is always, just as with the Jungle, for example, that style and human character will be superseded by the axe to grind. This is a difficult argument to work through because, as with all high quality novels – that is to say, non surface level, and carrying depth – all novels, all the time represent ideas underneath the creating of the characters. In a way, this is impossible to avoid because the writer has to create minds, as Kingsolver reminds us in her own interview, and those minds are only ever going to become just so complex on paper; you need the real thing, in person, to become real. Therefore, every action and motive assigned to each character must relay something about that person, there is no real choice. Random motions and pieces of dialogue are not going to work for a serious novel. And so, if Dellarobia comes to represent a backwoods, country 'type' so to set up a character that is instinctually dismayed by her surroundings and seeks transcendence, this works as both a legitimate character trajectory and will also likely serve nicely as a foil to the non growth trajectory of Cub, her husband who is more limited in his thought process. It's true that this foil character creation can immediately look political at the outset – much has been said in the recent past about backwardness in America, sometimes especially in the south, and this segment's opposition to environmental concerns, but it all becomes far more compelling knowing that Kingsolver is not merely using a political program to set this up, but of course has lived the dual life in the American Southwest and then the Appalachian region. We sense, based on her background, that she would do what is necessary to both 'call out' perceived bad behavior by these types of characters in real life, but would not prejudge all in one basket, so to speak. We trust that she would also admire much of the rural south and an agrarian economy, as featured so well in her great family memoir of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In a roundabout way, what I am getting at is that if the 'novel as political / activism' is handled by the right novelist, the thoughtful, experienced, authentic, then, frankly, the novel is enhanced, not diminished, I think. To put it another way, if we think about what so often makes the modern novel is all of the opposite qualities just mentioned: a kind of surface description, with somewhat random actions, and that don't harken back toward any ideas at all. Pick up any hardcover novel, by some very less known author, and begin to read, and we see a kind of hollowness playing out, which is extremely disappointing considering that is has been true in our past that our novelists are looked upon as our cultural bellwethers. They are the ones who are supposed to put their mind's fingers on the pulse of things in culture and capture it on the page. Think of William Dean Howells or the great Edith Wharton. These were very real, talented, and invested novelists showing us ourselves. If the modern novel, short on substance, is any indication of our times, we live in a kind of shallow and random environment, a lot of breath and image but little substance. This is a major bummer. I am thankful for Kingsolver's providing us with some 'there there.' I would go one step further, to finish this short reaction: the single most under represented substantial topic in novel writing today is sustainability concerns. We received some of this treatment in movies like Avatar, but really sustainability could serve as its own branch of literary production, much in the same way as existentialism once did, or democracy, or even other topics such as Marxism, naturalism, determinism, and right on down the line. I will be continuing to look for this tension between believability in character and the 'program behind it...' interested.

"But why the winter holds me and how I make it through – those are questions I never before tried to answer except in the pages of a daily journal I kept during the winter of 1994-5. This daybook takes stock of things in and around the nineteenth-century brick home in and around the nineteenth-century brick home in Iowa City .... savoring the vegetables, herbs, and fruit that grow on our three-quarter-acre lot..." – Carl H. Klaus, from Weathering Winter







June 21


It's more than a little possible that no one from the midwest needs another journal claim on the weather, not really. The wonderfully hidden tone in Weathering Winter, from Klaus's daybook, is that, let's face it, it's not necessarily the season of winter (or often other seasons for that matter), that we really hang onto in this climate, but instead it's the other stuff that comes around it, after it, on top of it, or, as I'd like to write about, the very necessary imagination to often escape it. If you pay too close attention to the long and thawing days of spring in Wisconsin, for example, you're bound to get yourself in some trouble, unless you are the rare ice fisherman who knows that these long bleak days, although gray and dreary, do allow for some last days of sitting on that floor of ice before it melts and the fish might very well see you coming that much better. I'd like to create a journal of days that talk about those moments that are other than the ones right here before our eyes. It was, after all, only a few weeks back that the it was so hot and humid here in Wisconsin that for all of those of us who had spent the previous months literally salivating over the coming gardening season, had to hide inside or take our weeding in small doses, unbearable heat getting the very best of us.  These past few days, only a week or two away from balm, are cooler – thank you so much – but lo and behold we are now in some kind of upper midwest flood season. We all know the grind of this: our lawns and gardens are untouchable, but the weeds don't pay attention to our anguish. In fact I'm quite certain that there are now few remaining cracks in the cobbled path along the side of the house here that has not sprouted up in any number of a variety of weed species. So green, so lush! But all needs to be plucked...some where down the road. A certain mild anger stirs up as I walk along the sides of my yard and I envision the day coming when I get my chance at all those miniature trees that are trying to sprout in those cracks. In a way, oddly, I can't wait to tackle my yard, rid it all of the thorny leaves, and then it dawns on me that it had been only a month ago that I had felt a mild anger against the slow pace of the coming of the planted yard! I began to wonder, does this seem like a positive cycle of thinking?

I found myself referring back in my mind to an entirely different world than all of this – our trip to Vail, Colorado, five days of sunshine, green colors, lively creeks, bike trails and the Betty Ford Botanical Garden being walked by a hundred people all sporting casual warming clothes and sunglasses. I believe my old reading friend Peter Maybe, author of so many memoirs and fiction of life in souther France, had many such moments as he had been, in his previous life, living either in London or New York, and also bewildered by the sheer amount of time and energy that he was spending on desiring to be anywhere except precisely where he was at. There are a few things we know: London can be a dreary and foggy affair (why wouldn't it, an island, surrounded by water, perched on the northern Atlantic), and New York, bless it for its mechanical intensity, is ultimately a gritty and jangly city that is rarely going to get any four star reviews for its weather either. The answer for Mayle was a swatch of sunshine along the Luberon and, despite the growing pains there, what a difference it made. Sunshine clear and blue air. Smells, no doubt, of the vineage; occasional rain, yes; the Mistral, for certain. However, like Vail, and other cities that brag the 320 days of sunshine a year statistic (maybe the most critical known to mankind), most all things become worthwhile to bear when bathed by the pleasant companion of the soft touch of sunshine and an agreeable climate. My daybook then is a homage to the fair weather fan in me of fair weather. If it is here, in Madison Wisconsin, and allowing me to move about my business, I will most certainly celebrate it; if it doesn't which is seemingly far more often, than I will take a sun needs elsewhere, onto travel of the past or onto travel of the mind. Mine then will have to begin with days in Vail, when the hours were pretty and long, the bike trails ready, the raft rides outrageous, the pine needles along the floor of Booth Falls muskily earthy.

"Explored upstream and got our first lesson in arrowhead thickets. They are barren deserts, full of unkillable but dog killable rabbits, and travel is difficult to impossible." – Leopold, from Round River "The Delta Colorado"











June '18


We had to get to the Wolcott Sage Ranch by 9:30 via mostly interstate, but once of I70, a few turns marked by mile sticks and then onto Horse Ranch Trail, one of the dirts that is surrounded by sage brush and then more sage brush in every immediate direction. Part of the hillside was charred and still smoldering from a wildfire that started the day before by the hand of a few fellows who thought, despite the drought, it was a good day to target shoot explosives. Sometimes you are left to really wonder to what lengths some will go for a very brief entertainment and what I've always called ego-flare. Emergency vehicles from more counties than we could count lined a turnoff along the road and men were either driving or walking back and forth up into the approachable crevices of the dry and burned out hillside. Later, throughout our horseback ride, two helicopters passed overhead in one direction to scoop water from a small nearby lake, then back over the smoke to do what they could to counter a fairly stiff breeze that had begun to stir up just in the past few hours. This was a relatively brief and small introduction for us to this rugged terrain, the kind of stuff that is usually seen in the distance at about 70 miles per hour on I70, but never understood. We could see that this was quite a recreational area previous to the wildfire, with one old RV laying a tilt along the roadside with no one in it. To the other side, a group of trailers had descended with dirt bikes and I could out of the rear view mirror a snake of trails rise up through the dust along the lobes of other foothills. A grouse station stood along the way as well, with words that said 'grouse wings here,' I suspect as precaution against hunters taking big birds and simply letting the feathers fly along with the tumbleweed. We were heading to the horse ranch for a two hour horseback ride, but there was also side by ATV available, some camping, and now a wild fire. Off the beaten track, that was for sure....

"The taste for country displays the same diversity in aesthetic competence among individuals as the taste for opera, or oils. There are those who are willing to be herded in droves through 'scenic' places; who find mountains grand if they be proper mountains, with waterfalls, cliffs, and lakes."  – Leopold, from "Country"









June, Vail Co.


We waited at the hotel at Lionshead corner for only five minutes before the Sage Outdoors shuttle came up to pick us up curbside. We found a lucky patch of sunshine there at the corner, one we won't forget, because the Colorado morning -- although the afternoon will soon swelter to 90 – is notoriously cool, especially in rafting bathing suit and sickles sandals. We had heard that the Gore Creek run wouldn't run this spring because the snowfall was down this past winter, which translated to low water, which then translated to more exposed boulders than most any of us would care to try to navigate, so we headed to Eagle instead, only a half hour down the road, a class 3 rapids where the water was still high enough to comfortably float three 8-man rafts without the constant barrage from rugged rocks.  On arrival we got out and started to suit up – wet suit, wet shoes, helmets and sturdy life jackets. The rules are fairly easy for a guided whitewater trip, but to the total newcomer such as my 12 year old daughter, it all can feel a little like a lead-up to an emergency to mostly be avoided. We find through our quick training session that really it is the ability to follow orders quickly that can make or break you, literally. Seven of us hit the water, paddles down, helmets tight, down deep in the beautiful enormous crevice of this Vail Valley, so dynamic in its varying features from red rock cliffs, full of rusting iron, and then lush high aspen in the foreground and still the snow capped peaks of 14' ers in the background.  If nothing else happened of noticeable drama on our raft ride, all of us would finish this lower Eagle run, one would hope, with a profound sense that not only are the Rockies otherworldly, but they are enviously the world many of us would love to some day live in. This bold water, zig zagging along the bottom of the green drama, is something like a wild exclamation point, recreative, beautiful and, we certainly all hope (if the fisherman dotting the shores were any indication) full of life and cared for in some invisible ways by the ranchers who run this valley.  For an hour and a half we are called upon to left forward one, or right backwards two, and the raft, quite responsive for such a giant yellow mass of rubber on water, dashes left and right with fair responsiveness, as we dance around the buried dangers that line the bottom. When we enter a rapid without quite such precision we are reminded immediately by splashes that offer freezing temperatures and despite the wet suits awaken the sleepiest of warming skin.  Near the end of the trip, one particular patch has been reengineered for navigation and for recreation. As we approach it of the blind horizon kind, one long line of water that does not reveal its bottom. If it were a water fall it would look all the same but of course we trust that it nothing more that a few feet drop; on entering, I can only imagine, if I had the time, that all faces, experienced or not, would opened wide and wondering. My daughter stoops in amazement, paddle in hand, her left foot secured in the raft billow in front of her and, I'm quite sure, let out a wild scream of thrill and probably survival as we swooshed up and down, side to side in waves half as tall as I am. We all got wet on this run, and can't wait for the slow long curve ahead which we see now holds pure mountain sunshine and three fly fisherman yanking at trout. We thought at that moment we'd do this again tomorrow if it weren't for the horseback riding we had already booked with the same company.

"I walked out into the woods and thought about this for a long time, but I couldn’t see any advantage in that kind of life for me—all the advantage would be for Miss Watson. I decided not to worry about praying and being good anymore." – Twain, Huck Finn

Dad says that I'm a little like the kids of old. Sometimes he just stops there, and doesn't say much more and other times he explains what he means by that. He said that his own dad grew up on a farm and got into all kinds of good trouble, living with four brothers. They did chores all day, especially in the summer, just when other kids were mostly working on their baseball game, but he and his brothers were bailing hay. I have to say that doesn't sound that great either. I've mowed before enough times to see that that kind of work probably isn't my thing. But I like to be outside all the time and can't really stand sitting around the basement playing games and watch giant screens with oddballs running around all the time. I think that's what dad means when I'm like kids of old. He knows about the treehouse across the street and down the park. It hadn't been used in twenty years Mr. Renner said. Kids had come and gone already. It had just been sitting there, and I noticed that. I also noticed that there was a boy my age who started coming along to the backyard and I have to say I just walked up to him one day and asked if he had ever thought of making that tree house a fort. "It's overlooking the lake. We could probably fish from the front window," I said. I have to say he looked at me very funny. Dad says kids don't really talk to each other anymore just at each other. I believe him. When I looked into Seiler's eyes (I call him by his last name) he didn't want much to do with me. I probably seemed a bit of an odd one myself, a girl, thirteen, on my own walking along the shore of the lake and looking for adventures. Seiler was from Chicago and he had the scared look on him. Scared of just about everything. I understood that too, I really did. I hadn't seen my mom in months. It was funny I thought – she moved down to Chicago herself, and I wondered if ever Seiler might have seen her sometime by total accident then I realized that probably wasn't real realistic. "What do you do in a fort?" he finally said. He wore bright clothes, a bit baggy on him because he was as thin as it gets, a short short hair cut, and had ear buds up around his neck, that kind of thing. 

"Tom said, “Now we’ll start our club and call it Tom Sawyer’s Club. Everyone who wants to join has got to make a promise and write his name in blood.” – Twain, Huck Finn










June 15


Finally, toward the end of the afternoon (sillily really knowing the heavy heat), I drag the single out onto the bay shore, take my shirt off (in Wisconsin sun can be a premium, take it when you can get it), and start paddling through the back bay, past the slip holding barely bobbing pontoons and out into the middle where I can the old and wonderfully familiar real house boats sagging in the corner. These are funny structures, not many of them left along the Black River here in LaCrosse, but in their own way they seem coveted, remote, yet bobbing right here in a line against the newer backdrop of condos and a new highway. If they weren't in such disrepair I think I'd be there biggest fan; as they stand now unfortunately they look like they could sink any day and in fact two months back one did. You can't help but wonder what all those household items that had accumulated over the years in the kitchen and living room looked like twelve feet down in the dark waters of the Black River! I keep paddling. Houses up there to the north with back yards that are terrific beaches, smoothened by rack, littered by the recreational resources of kayaks, beachouses and even a wonderful tree house. Huck would be proud. I push quickly through the edge of the bay to where it turns out to a larger bay which then rallies into the main channel of the Black, a tributary of the Big River. At this edge, to the south, is a remarkable shore slash island that is sometimes entirely submerged and sometimes full exposed, as it was today, green and grassy, holding up some massive shag hemlocks, all kinds of overturned trees, no doubt a hundred years old, exposing a root city all its own. When the water's right you can weave in a out of these suburban backwaters, the sound of the semi truck not at all far in the distance, but right here in front of you this most pristinely backwater channel you'll find in these parts. I park for minute at bank that is usually underwater, but right now, under full overhead sun, the bottom is exposed and friendly, showing darting minnows and timber lost from its trunk years ago. I look up and there is a yellow bird up in branch two that is so yellow it seems to suck the color from the rest of the surroundings. Everything else is vivid green now by early June and there are plenty of other little flutterers flittering about, but what is this particular bird? Many times I have my bird book with me, this would be an easy find, about a five inches, peculiarly vivid, maybe shagging the water off its wings, not sure. But I don't have my book with me. Frustrated for a few minutes, I realize that it's just fine not to identify a single thing. There are a few things I know that seem even more important than the scientific variations: I'm on the water, it is cooler right here under the shade, this backwater is an aesthetic masterpiece, ever changing, ever in flux, and that the nature right under me and now above, is going about its business, probably a lick harassed by the concept that I care about its species, family, or genus. Did I get all those right? I'll go on to sit here for a while longer under these backwater trees. I'm so damn quiet that I watch this yellow bird go through some kind of drying ritual not yet ever seen. I'm sequestered enough away from the interstate that I'm not ruined by the noise. I see that there are some things that can't be taken away from you. Like these little patches of old world paradise where the life is real not made-up, like you and I. I place a finger down into the water, only a few inches down. It hits some old rooted timber, been there before I was a crying baby. There's a lot to think about, there's nothing to think about. What we all know: it's more important than me.

Look at All that Water

"Tom and I walked quickly into town where we could see only three or four lights. Almost everyone was asleep. Near the town was a big river, a mile wide, and very quiet at this time of night."
   – Twain, Huckleberry Finn

"Like any reports in this world, the ones that follow are only as reliable as the reporter, who in this case makes no special claim for himself, except that he too stock of things every day during the growing season of 1995." – Carl Klaus, from My Vegetable Love




June 14

Shores


If I put myself in the moment properly I realize that I can twist my body around from facing the kitchen counter and look out the back sliding glass door of this nice little place off the Black River -- running into the Big River in just a couple of miles – and watch all the action of the back bay, including, just now, a quiet train of geese glide from a thick green shoreline, seemingly gaurded by a handful of oaks, lush as moss finally now in mid-June, over to the docks, full of pontoons. That's just the beginning. Across the way is a gem of a neighborhood, and I wonder, almost daily when I give myself a chance, how more folks don't know about this stretch of houses whose backyards aren't yards at all, but beaches, truly, and strictly speaking. Boats are set up either on lifts or floating, rarely shaken, for the no wake is important back here when sand in the back yard and any rippling wash that keeps coming up on shore will surely lap as much back into water. Folks here in the back bay don't like losing parts of their backyard. We're only a quarter mile from the LaCrosse airport, which sends up a smaller plane or two this way, but nothing severe, enough to keep up interest, nothing more, nothing less. Fisherman troll the back portion slow and sure, often standing with their back up against those fisherman seats, hats on, poles up, line frequent and, I must say, the catches fairly lucky, mostly the rough stuff like sheepshead and even gar, but the occasional northern can be stole I've been told. Blue sky. Good neighbors. Keep the town out of mind. You get the idea. Huck Finn talks about this kind of stuff in the first few paragraphs of the book named after him. River life. Water. A culture. A place that is in perpetual flux, unpredictable, lovely to look at, below the surface, most of us hope, healthy and holding so much life that when we dip our toes into the mix there is still a certain kind of hair raising thrill that maybe, as my youngest daughter says, "a shark down there." I'd like to spend some time in life rededicating another look at water. I think I like shores, a lot. Where land and water meet? Are you kidding me? The world right there, considering both art and life, both big ones I'd say.  

Writers, like everybody else who try to do things daily, need some accountability. As someone who writes, almost daily, the flame of inspiration, well, it comes and goes. Should sound familiar to just about anybody who has walked the earth. One day things look fun, an adventure; another could go kiss gristle. I've always found the best writing subjects are the ones right under your nose; the key isn't really floating around out there in the ether of ideas, but instead they are the home ground, so to speak, but seen with either new eyes or maybe more particularly important for us, with appreciative eyes. I've noticed over the years that everybody, again, who walks around this earth long enough seems to be challenge here and there with the idea of appreciation. Huck Finn says he needed to get away from his nice house in order to live the way he needed to. Why is that? Nice houses are something like self-sculpted dreams. But there's big problems when we get what we want: we tend not to want it any more after we've had it. I don't think Huck even wanted it in the first place, which makes him a true river rat and not just a wannabe. Oh what the hell, let's admit it now: I'm a wannabe river rat, but maybe, just maybe, a bit of a Hick Finn down there in the soul, so I will make a deal with myself, how's about take a look at the river a little differently than I have; take a look at the Yahara River, Madison, where I live across the street, a little differently and instead of analyzing it with the modern scientific eye, let's just see if there's still a little adventure out there, a little romance (yes, it CAN still exist), and talk about it some in an essay a day for a year. What do you say? Are you game? 

"Animals are hushed.
Birds fly but don't sing
yet a white turtle plays on the pool's sand floor under riotous spray,
sliding about with the torrents."
    – Wang Wei, from "A White Turtle Under a Waterfall"




Booth Falls


There is one rock glistening from the cliff above.
We cannot tell if it is wet
or just capturing the mid-day sun like the side of a diamond.
Here we are zig zagging
along the alpine layers of aspen and Douglas,
the trail a smoldering smell of aging pine needles,
but alongside the trail,
down the cut the roaring snowmelt of Booth Falls.
It sucks into roaring nest all other sounds.
We become aware of the cliffs.
We might picture the wild courage
of the forest bear or mountain lion
stretching down to the rocky bank after a sleep for a sip.
We look away wanting to know only so much.

"So perhaps this book is merely an invitation to walk home ground, to understand what the terrain is now and what it has been across time, and how the transition that created what it is now came about...something that one day might interest another such seeker, someone looking over her shoulder while she attentively walks her own home ground." – Robert Root, from Walking Home Ground


The invitation is simple: take a second look at the familiar surroundings of where you live – step away, so to speak, from the sidewalks and common roads of our daily lives (although these too of course count) and move out onto the periphery of the city trails and see another city, another town, another home. That refocusing is how Root's book works. He wanted to reassess what it means to live in the drift less area of southwestern Wisconsin (currently Waukesha area for him), and see if you could re-envison place by considering the writings and viewpoints of Muir, Leopold and Derleth, three of the more prodigious writers of the last century chronicling the land and this state of Wisconsin. Walking Home Ground is a simple invitation also because it is written in a style that, frankly, doesn't particularly resemble any of the three more famous writers above -- Leopold, Muir, or Derleth. Leopold's writing, all said, has a distinct feature of becoming something close to biblical in its taut narrative (especially the Almanac), symbolic metaphor and overt morality. It has been said of Leopold's writing that for some its blunt conclusions can come across as somewhat dogmatic and may serve as a turnoff to more casual readers; but that his concision, for others, is a fabulously expeditious way to get the heart of things. Either way, Leopold's voice is distinct, poetic, sometimes prescriptive, but also wildly prescient. As for Muir, his also is a voice that is considerably more literary than you and I might write. Although his The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is a neutrally stylistic chronicle, books such as My First Summer in the Sierra often reach to similar literary heights as Leopold, captivated, frequently, by fits of worshipful praise of the holiness found in nature. It is remarkable to consider that Leopold was not raised with any particularly religious underpinning other than a very deep respect for natural resources, but that Muir grew up under the thumb of a very soberly religious father so that one man's writing becomes a sort of lifelong quest to attach unknown religious sentiments to nature, and the other (Muir), who essentially finds a freedom of religious expression in nature from a religion of constriction presented to him in his youth. Both are essential Emersonians, both of a stock of true brilliance, but one a trained scientist, and one a self-trained polymath. The two no doubt would have made an exhilarating pair to observe observing the same landscape of the Baraboo hills. Derleth, the third writer looked at closely by Root, was the most profuse writer of the three but also, seemingly, the most scattered in his topics, and perhaps to some degree the least interested in the ideology of nature. Derleth's seems to be a voice far more in tune to the people that populate the landscape, in a voice that is less philosophically examining but more interested in the character of things, a trait found in storytellers and novelists. If a reader determined that she wanted to get to know a small Wisconsin town, its people, and how they live within the landscape of the valley of the Wisconsin River, she would certainly turn toward Derleth, with his brood and swooping sentences that wax poetic and earnestly try to capture every noticeable detail. Root does a remarkable job floating across the overlapping circles of these three writers' devoted chapters. With an eye and a style of a journalist (without interviews) he is able to avoid turning Home Ground into literary criticism or, for that matter, any kind of explicitly supportive tract. In other words, Root doesn't let on that he is a secret Leopoldian and that the two other writers are good but that they own everything to Leopold. He doesn't compare and contrast at great length Muir and Derleth, as another example. This neutral entry into the three writers becomes the style of the book. Nor is Walking Home Ground particularly personal. There are no severe encounters with Root's personal sufferings or spiritual triumphs; he talks some about his backgrounds in Colorado or Michigan, but causes of things isn't really the point of the book either. Instead, the title carries the essential news of the book: Walking Home Ground is truly about the inbvididucal experiences of taking hikes, looking around, meeting an occasional trail walker, and all the while considering what our other writers might have seen in their time. Without heightened praise or criticism, the invitation becomes, I believe, exactly what it should be: we are all (potential) walkers of our home ground. We can look toward the greatest of the documenters of the drift less area, but it is our observations and time spent out on the trail that is ultimately what has to matter. Get out there yourself! What are your descriptions and experiences? By reading, walking, and describing, we become the Robert Roots of the world, and we have as much of a right to our position as any other. And so, in this way, this neutral approach to chronicling and to juggling the voices of others, we are left with a book that is as much about time as anything else. Nature writers will have a tendency to write about the trail, as though from some outside or critical positions, or they show us the trail. Leopold does this in many of his writings, but most especially in Round River, a nice collection of journals that capture time. Muir certainly does this in My First Summer – we are placed in the mountains with him and we see the finite details of the trail. We spend time with Muir. Derleth does this also in Walden West. We walk around Sauk with him in documentarian style and see the world through his eyes. The cover of the book is a 'walking by' rendering of a fence post, a bluish sky, and a hawk crossing in the slight distance. It looks something like a live yet subjective portal into just another beautiful day out on the trail.

L.A. Lost and Found:
The Grove

"The lean days, blue skies with never a cloud, a sea of blue day after day, the sun floating through it. The days of plenty – plenty of worries, plenty of oranges. Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down for dinner. Oranges, five cents a dozen. Sunshine in the sky, sun juice in my stomach." – John Fante, Ask the Dust









Park your car up in the megalopolis ramp a bit off Fairfax and walk down into the Grove in the heart of LA. Here's the place where the Disneyland world meets the grit of the surrounding city, another oasis, where there is a drop-off valet for mall walking customers who ring their Jaguars and Lexus in for a car wash as they shop. You descend down five flights of stairs at the edge of the parking ramp and by the third you catch a glimpse of the washrack, where the guys are washing those cars, keeping them buff and tight for the long ride back home up along the curves and galleys of highway 1 under a sun that do doubt bakes on every bird stain and every grain of dust. Walk past the trolley car garage, closed in right now by an luxurious glass door, there it sits this fine machine ready to chug out at certain hours, creating an effect of old home old town LA pleasantville. One day we visited the back

end of the Grove, past all the chic shops and spent time meandering through the farmer's market stalls, meat shops, model shops, coffee plazas and taco tanks. Today we had a couple of hours to kill and stopped at an elegant little sushi shop called Blue Ribbon, fine interior, wood and glass mixed and sternly beachy, five sushi operators behind their counter cutting out the sushi bites. These are the moments of oranges for us – these little respites against the cacophony of this particular city, where we can sink in somewhere, see the clean lines, the clean food; Fante talks much of the gritty tough and surviving days of LA in the early 30's. They made him hungry and gave him some subject matter, sprayed all over the place, to pluck like oranges themselves. I'll take the oasis's as a visitor. Tried a fine tuna and soba noodles bowl and those little ruby red cubes of tuna were sparkling jewels of soft meat. Two glasses of a good pinot noir and the waiter sharp as a tack, what else do we need? The

Grove, just outside the door? A wonderful post-meal walk of shops and a brick walkway, fountains for the sound, all the folks in their couture cloths walking hand in hand with their gelato and espresso dixie cups. As the sun sets out over this long shopping stretch, there is some hope, there is a stalling of the noise and anarchy of the LA street. It is the person who never walks down these cobbled rocks and sees the jet stream of sunshine across the windows that don't find oasis except in redoubled vice, redoubled want, the redoubled monotony of hunger which so often turns to judgement and bitterness, the very essence, it seems, that stirs in Fante's book. We walk briefly back into the stalls of the farmer's market. It is a bustle of preparation for the night. Clinking glasses, voices rising up in volume, and as I look back out west, I can see some jutting of mountains turning to dust themselves by the dark. I have now found two places worthwhile to land in LA: the dusty rough mountains of San Gabriel, and right here, its opposite, at the Grove.

L.A. Lost and Found:
The Inn of the Seventh Ray

"Yes, it's true: but I have seen houses in Bel-Air with cool lawns and green swimming pools."  – John Fante, from Ask the Dust












When you get into the little debates over what is good and what is bad in L.A., the old arguments seem not to work. What is good, what is bad, exactly, when, as you drive along Sunset Blvd. you may just as easily see the sleekest Cadillac carrying the sleekest man you have ever seen out of the sleekest magazine, rolling out of some long tunnel gated driveway hidden by palms and a security system, as you will the poorest homeless man you have ever witnessed out on the street right along the next corner, standing there, ripped pants, his leg wrapped around the pole of a stop sign, looking down into the abyss of everything, smoking as though he were nothing more than a machine. In the

distance the mountains could be dust grimy arroyos so full of invasive cacti that it would scare you to walk through such scrub; or those same mountains could be great billows of punchy green overlooking the blue meridian ocean, where a sleek little white sailboat traipses across the scene as though painted. One restaurant is bold and luxurious down such a such street; the next is a tin box covered in graffiti, caged up, barred, and a shock that it still is in business. No, LA, it seems to me isn't a good or a bad, it is just one big 'is,' an experience, a sort of patched together dream of road and palm, car and biker. LA doesn't give you enough time to judge it. In New York the blocks are recognizably either shady or fine. Walk down one boulevard and enter into shops and restaurants that are formal and clean; walk down another and enter into someone elses place, theirs, not yours. In LA you could do both at the same time.

We drove past all of this in Santa Monica and wanted to get up into the Mountains up into Topanga National Park, up above Malibu, through highway 1, past the boardwalk beaches and there rose the California that I remembered -- the sea coast cliffs, drawn up, poised, as if about to dive back into the ocean themselves. So dramatic these scenes: lane upon lane of frantic traffic -- again, cars all mixed, luxury and barely working -- sea to one side, surfboards and crackling little white waves, and then the mountain to the right, a fine dream. We drove up into the foot of the Topangas just as a woman jumped out of the back of a car randomly naked, ducking back in at the sight of the next wave of traffic. Some mountains bear little traffic. These, as you get rolling up, the traffic is just starting. People live up here you've got to remember. These aren't hide for the quiet hills. These are the hills that people have been eyeing up for two hundred years trying to find little footholds at any flat spot

you can imagine. Exactly. Exactly what we found at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, a magical little hillside art palate of a place, nestled in a little valley holding a cool creek, birds coming in to drink, dark and moist, green, overhanging, wild branches that meet you right at your outdoor table. I ordered a blackened cod with grilled kale and asparagus. The fish was steamed and light as butter. As other customers came into this little arboretum, the voices began to take over where the beauty of the hillside quiet had been. It was too bad. Little fountain noise here was pitch perfect. I ordered a Scrimshaw Pilsner. It went good with the scenery. A ptarmigan danced across a draped limb over the creek. This was to be my California. Up inside the hills. Out of the ghost like scenes of the city. Ghosts all over the place down there. Ironic ghosts -- the kind that think they are inside the true pulse of life, but are really just of the grateful dead, pushing their time across the days, asking the dust no questions.