Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Station Hill.

In the northwest corner of the neighborhood, in the retail-heavy district lining the freeway, you could find dollar stores, electronics warehouses, asian groceries, burger shacks.  Only the most stubborn features of that landscape that existed a hundred years ago remained now:  the creek that fed the irrigation lines now flowed through corrugated steel and under truss bridges.  The hills that once challenged horse-drawn carriages now provided "vistas" or "bluffs" for the developers.  All the dutch style white houses and interurban tracks, all the storefronts with their plate glass and elaborate signs, all the taverns with massive oak bars and unsmiling bartenders had gone for good.  The hard shell of applied technology had covered all and the rare glimpses of human faces were seen through a lens:  car windows, box store doors, bank airlocks.   So the life that animated Station Hill had gone underground, or more aptly under its own frozen mantle, dark gray fingers of liquid water under the ice.

Don Rosner felt his phone vibrating in his jacket while he scanned the candy aisle.  He'd learned to exit early on the way back from the coast to buy his hard candy at the dollar store.  There was a certain mix that only they carried and he ate them on his way to work.  Work was still a couple days off today, though.  He liked to have a couple days at the duplex to clean out his grip, detail his truck and all the other little shit you had to attend to before the busy work week.

He looked at the screen.  It was Bill.  They had been working together and Don liked his style.  He would even ask for him specifically when the foreman wanted him someplace else.  He told him he missed him at the coast, they could have double dated.  "Oh yeah?" Bill said.  "Who's that?"  Don told him about Carrie, the garbage compactor drinks, the scene in the parking lot, the night in his room. "You gonna see her again?" Bill said.
"I might at that."  Don said that maybe it was better Bill wasn't there, she may have turned his head.  Bill formed a picture in his mind:  a woman slightly heavy through the hips, big breasts, round face, sharp chin.  Around the eyes a secret knowledge to be released as reproof, disappointment or the gentle chiding of pillow talk.  This was the picture of a girlfriend of his own, a woman he had not seen or spoken to in years.  Her eyes had been green.  She was the closest double to Linda, Don's ex-wife, based on the little Don had told him.

This detailed picture, based on such shaky evidence, was in fact fairly accurate.  Don, however, had not seen her eyes on first meeting, but the way she bent over her work, the economy of movement of a person either completely engrossed in their work or so practiced that their motions were seamless and without hesitation or abruptness.  In the crew cab, as he watched the alder buds in a pink blur past his windows, he could say without hesitation that he loved her motion, from the very first.

Bill gave Don his news:  the project was on hold, some legal tie-up.  The crew was laid off for now.  "Shit," Don said.  "And here I'd psyched myself up to go back to work.  Not to worry, I have a neighbor who gave me some side work one time.  I think he's a professor or something.  I'll cut you in if I can."  Bill thanked him and said he had to go, his wife was waiting in the car.  "You do what you gotta do," Don said.  "Drive safe."

So when Don turned at Laburnum he was already thinking of Mr. (Professor?) Binder.  He noticed the pale grey square of sidewalk, the new fire hydrant.  Then he saw the old Brougham in Binder's carport.  You had to hand it to him, keeping up a classic like that.  In his own way, he had style.  He decided to clean his truck, so he parked at the end of his driveway, so that he and the truck were visible across the green chain link fence from Binder's yard.

Binder emerged just as he was finishing up.  He knew his man.     "Hi Don," he called.  Don crossed to the fence.  "Hi Gil.  How're things?"
"Pretty good."  Gil threw his shoulder bag in the car walked over.  "It's lucky I saw you just now."  Side work!  Don thought.  Right on Professor!  "I just signed some papers on a property on the coast and it's going to need a lot of work.  I was hoping you might be available, you and maybe a helper."
"That is lucky.  I just hear our crew was laid off, and I happen to know a very good guy that needs some work.  Where's the property?"
"It's in a little town called Belmar.  You know it?"
"That is weird.  I was just there, I mean, just north of it in Tie Camp.  I painted a Best Buy up there.  So you're buying a house there?  It's a beautiful area."
"Yes, I was there doing research and I kind of fell in love with it.  I had a little money put away and I just decided the place must have been what I was saving it for."  

Don didn't really know Gil all that well, but he guessed something signal must have happened.  He just did not seem the type of guy to be impulsive about a thing like buying a house.  He didn't look different.  Same parka, same tweed jacket, same glasses.  Same funny walk.  Same Brougham.  But something had changed.  They worked out the details and Don finished washing his truck.  Then he went inside, turned the game on, opened a beer and called Bill.  "Good news," he said.

Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Tie Camp.  A coastal town that's never been much.  When the forest was all around, a tie camp for the loggers and mill operators and laborers that supplied railroad ties to the freight and logging companies in the region.  Early on, a muddy, gloomy, violent place.  The mill managed to keep the town going through the fifties.  Then a few beach cottages.  Now a stop between Rock River to the south and Pink Bluff to the north.  Still, incredibly, those same few cottages, keeping their registers, scraping and painting each summer.  More incredible still, a modest motor hotel, piggybacking on the guests turned away from the busier hotels in Pink Bluff.  Now the beneficiary of the expansion of Pink Bluff south in the form of an outlet mall.  Stop in at the motel sometime.  You can't miss the big cabinet sign, right off the coast highway:  The Lighthouse Motel.  The restaurant has good fish and chips, a decent selection of ales and beers.  Really the only night life in Tie Camp.  It boasts a wall of glass that looks out on a bluff over the ocean.  On Friday nights the lounge features canned music for dancing, sometimes singer-songwriters with amplified acoustic guitars.  In the off- season the restaurant and lounge are populated by locals and the workers from the outlet mall expansion.  One one of these Fridays a worker parked his crew cab in one of the many empty spots in front of the main entrance and walked through the sweet warmth of the lobby to the lounge stairs.  He found a table by the window, no problem tonight.

He watched the lights.  For minutes on end they would shine steadily, as if they were mounted on some distant headland, then would go dark suddenly.  Must be some dirty water out there, he thought.  He stirred his drink.  God damn his knee hurt.  Guess the drink didn't help.  But it fixed other things.  He looked around.  Most of the older types (easy, he was one of those 'older types') had gone home.  Some local guys were dancing on the little parquet floor with their girls.  One didn't even bother to take his measuring tape off his jeans.  The tune was "San Antonio Rose", one of his favorites.

He heard a glass break behind him and a woman's voice.  "Shit," she said.  He looked around.  She looked to be about thirty, thirty-five, overworked and disappointed about something.  She wore the burgundy apron and black clothes they all had to wear there.  "I'm so sorry," she said.  He wasn't sure whether she was apologizing for the language or the glass.  He figured it was the language.  "Shit, it's all right," he said.  At least he made her laugh.  "Hard night?" he asked her.  "Yeah," she said.  "Hard day too."  He thought about his long drive back to town, his stuffy hotel room, the blinking message light.  "Hey, do you ever get a break?  I mean, why don't you join me?"  He saw a jagged piece of glass under a chair.  "Don't move," he said.  He reached for the glass and put it on her tray.  "Thanks," she said.  She looked down at the glasses and schooners on her tray.  "Uh, I don't--  Sure."  He cocked his head.  "Wow," he said.  "That was not what I expected.  Usually it's no."  She smiled.  It came and went, like a short left-turn signal.  "Maybe you're asking the wrong people."  He stirred his drink.  "Yeah, you're probably right," he said.  "Anyway I'm well pleased I don't have to drink by myself.  I always thought they tasted better with someone."  She smiled again, this time longer.  "Me too," she said.  "I'm off in a few minutes."  He smiled back.  "I'll be here."  He sat back in the horseshoe and hummed in time to the music, tapping his fingers on the formica.

When she sat down her face had softened.  Maybe she's closer to thirty, Don thought, a bit nervous for the first time.  "You don't have to close?  I mean, I'm happy you're joining me, you don't know how-- but I figured you'd be here for the duration."  She cocked her head now and sipped through the tiny black straws in her drink.  They were drinking Long Island Iced Teas.  "Well," she said, sliding her glass back and forth.  "I was supposed to meet my boyfriend for a night out, but he had other plans."  Don put his hands on the table.  "Oh, shit," he said.  "I'm real sorry.  That really sucks."  She smiled with half her mouth and took another sip.  "Oh, it's ok," she said.  "I think I knew he probably wouldn't show up.  There was a part of me that thought he just might, but I think--" she slid her glass back and forth again.  "I think I really always knew it wouldn't last."  Don sighed and looked at his hands.  "I know how that goes.  Hell, I could be that guy."  His eyes widened a little and he stared at his drink.  "I AM that guy."  He shook his head, pulled out his straws and took a long drink.  The girl watched him and smiled.  "No, if you were that guy you wouldn't say that."  Don looked at her.  "I was that guy, but I think I just got tired of how it made me feel.  I'm Don by the way, Don Rosner."  The woman smiled and shook his hand.  "Carrie Taylor," she said.  "It's real nice to meet you," Don said.  "You too," she said.  "So what brings you to Tie Camp?"  Don sipped his drink.  "I'm a commercial painter," he said.  "We just finished a big project at the Tie Camp Outlet Mall, the Best Buy out there.  I took my vacation time now so I could see some of the coast.  My dad was a fisherman and I just wanted to see the ocean again.  I was down in Vegas before this gig."  Carrie stirred her drink.  "You staying here?" she said.  "Yeah," Don said.  "The company pays us a per diem to stay here and buy a few groceries.  It ain't much, but it's enough.  I'm so tired most days all I want to do is sleep anyway."  Carrie kept her eyes down.  "You have family out of town?"  Don stirred.  "Nah-- well, I have a little guy who spends most of his time with his mom.  We've been divorced a few years.  I've been on my own.  I see him as much as I can."  Carrie sat back and looked out at the ocean through the windows.  "That must be hard," she said.  Don looked out with her.  "It can be.  It ain't so bad.  We don't really get along, but my ex is basically a good person and she never makes any trouble when I want to see Sam.  It turned out as good as it could have.  God knows I was no picnic to live with either.  Fact, leaving me was probably the smartest thing she ever did."  He blew his breath out and drained his drink.  He let his glass down hard.  "How the hell did I do that?  We ain't even been talkin' for five minutes and I'm already talkin' about my divorce.  Come on Don!"  Carrie laughed.  "It's ok.  At least you're honest."  Don looked down.  "Nah, I'm just dumb."  Then he laughed.

It turned out all right.  They even danced a bit.  Then they had more drinks.  He thought they got into some kind of conversation about Jackson Browne, he couldn't remember.  She reminded him of Linda a little bit, and he wasn't sure if this was good or not.  If something had changed since his divorce it could be good.  That would mean that if he met another Linda that things could turn out ok this time.  That was if he wanted things to turn out at all.  He sometimes thought that Sam and his work was enough.  But there were other times-- like tonight-- when it was a real drag.  He would finish a big job somewhere and go back to the stuffy hotel room, the putty-colored phone, the ugly bedspreads, the ice bucket, the TV set, not always tired enough-- or sometimes too tired-- to go to sleep right away.  Then, he had to own, it was pretty lonely.  He turned from the window and looked down the aisle at the partition outside the bathrooms.  He had no idea of going back to the room with Carrie.  He didn't think that's what she was looking for, even if she gave the impression now that it was a possibility.  They'd had a lot of drinks.  And even if she was looking for something like that, and it pained him to admit it, he wasn't sure he would want to.  Didn't that same type of guy just let her down tonight?  And he wasn't doing so bad; he just wanted someone to have a few drinks with.  What was the use of hurting her feelings even more than they were already hurt?  He sighed and stabbed at the cubes at the bottom of his glass.  "You're losin' that killer instinct, Don," he said to the table.  "What was that?" Carrie said as she sat down.  Don looked up.  "Oh, I say I'm losing my killer instinct.  I haven't tried any of my lines on you yet."
"Come on Don," she said, sounding half-tired and half-indulgent.  "You don't use lines.  Rick used lines."  She put a lift on the word 'Rick', like a skier flying off a jump.  "You want another drink?" Don said.  She blew her breath out and looked at her empty glass.  "How many is that?"  Don looked at his, as if that would tell him how many had gone down before.  "I lost count."
"Then yes," she said, like a little girl peeling back her fortune in a cootie catcher.  "Your funeral," Don said as he twisted to signal the waitress.

He was relieved and disappointed when he saw Carrie head for her car.  He had been right not to press the issue.  She would go home and he would go-- well, not exactly home.  He would go wherever he went.  To bed.  They were in the chilly breezeway outside the front doors.     Then he was ashamed and glad when he saw her walk to the passenger side and try the door without even reaching for her keys.  How could he let her even head for her car?  They must've had at least five drinks apiece, all high-octane garbage compactor types.   Then the gladness was gone, replaced by a species of urgency and anxiety that he hadn't felt in a long time.  He even tried to fend it off at first, like a loud alarm early on a hangover morning.  God damn it, why now? he thought.  But then, was there ever a good time for this kind of thing?  What kind of thing, Don?  They were both dangerously drunk.  Nothing was going to happen.  One thing, she was not even getting into that car.  "What are you doing, Carrie?" he called.
"Going home," she said.  He didn't realize how drunk she really was.  "Belmar."
"Belmar?" he repeated loudly.  "You ain't driving down the block like that."  He walked over, double time.  "Come on, Carrie
," he said, softer.    "Give me those keys.  You can sleep in my bed, I've got a couch."
"You come on, Don," she said.  He couldn't decide if she was angry or amused.  "You sound like Rick."  Then she leaned on the fender, looking down.  At first he thought she had dropped the keys and he moved for them.  They were in her other hand.  She was breathing hard.  "Oh honey," he said.  "I'm sorry.  I should have stopped you.  Come on, let's just walk for a bit.  Okay?"  She put her hand on her forehead.  "Oh Don, I feel like shit," she said.  "I know," he said.  "Come on, let's walk."  She gave him her keys.

When she saw him pull out his room key she said "I knew it.  You're just trying to get me in the sack."  This time it was his turn to give her the half-smile.  "Believe me Carrie, even if I thought you wanted to, I wouldn't know where to start, I'm so tanked."  He jammed his car key in the knob.  "See?" he said, holding it up.  "My fuckin' car key."  They both laughed.  "Oh, jesus," he sighed as they walked in.  He felt for the switch.  "Why do you think I don't want to?" she said, before he found it.  He let the question settle into the warmth and general mustiness of a cheap coastal hotel in the off-season.  He even looked at the phone, almost hoping the message light was blinking; the signal that meant another job, another round of cheap hotels and watery beer in front of a flickering television.  He turned to her shape in the door.  "Well I ain't exactly what you'd call a catch.  And I guess I didn't want to get into anything when I could see you'd been let down once already."  She crossed to the blinds, opened them.  He turned on the lights.  She looked out at the black square.  "I know we're both drunk off our asses," she said.  "I just liked to think you wouldn't let me down if things were a little different."  He went to her.  "Hey, Carrie," he said.  "I had a great time.  I really like being with you.  Maybe my getting so drunk is my way of trying to do right by you, if you know what I mean.  I know that sounds fucked up."  He sighed and looked out, tried to find the lights on the horizon he had been watching earlier.  It seemed like a hundred hears ago.  Nothing out there but black.  His knee was hurting again.  Carrie sniffed.  Oh shit, he thought.  Oh shit, she's crying.  "Hey, come on," he said.  He took her to the bed.  "Come on.  It's gonna be ok."  She let him sit her down on the foot and he sat beside her.  He put his hand on her back.  He was terrified.  "Look, you get into bed, I'm going out for a smoke.  Ok?  See, there's the couch.  I'll sleep on the couch.  You get into bed.  You can worry about the rest in the morning.  It'll be a lot better in the morning, I promise."  She nodded, still sniffing.  She squeezed his hand.

He was relieved to find her in the bed with the covers pulled up.  He had smoked two cigarettes, hoping that gave her enough time.  He found some extra blankets in the closet and got into the couch.  It was a little too short.  Around two in the morning he got up and had another smoke.  His neck hurt like hell.

Something made him open his eyes.  Some of the darkness at the end of the couch had gone.  It felt like four, four-thirty.  "Don," she said.  "Come on, get off that couch.  You must be miserable."  He twisted to see her.  He must have made a sound.  "See?  Come up here.  I won't make you marry me, I promise."  He stared at the bed.  "Don.  You're keeping me awake.  I just want to sleep.  I know you do too."  He sighed, got up.  "Yeah, ok," he said.  He climbed in next to her.  She took his hand, drew his arm around her.  He was out like a light.

Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Station Hill.  A neighborhood built around a rural interurban station.  Greatly expanded after World War II by developers trading on the down payments of returning G.I.s.  Ranch styles, carports.  Small, carefully tended lawns.  Abbreviated split-rail fences.  Miniature wishing wells.

Laburnum.  Follow it to Maynard.  You see more passing cars, headed for Line Street and the freeway.  But at Laburnum and Maynard is a garden spot:  a large triangular yard with a modest water feature and dogwood tree.  Across the street a house that could be 16591's twin, with a smaller yard and a driveway instead of a carport.  Maynard is at the first light after you come down the hill from the freeway exit, so these houses seem to anchor that quiet backwater just south of all the noise.  Walk by 16591 slowly and study it.  The dormer is decorated modestly by vertical siding ending in a scallop pattern.  The dormer is a rich red-brown, the lap siding pure white.  Under the front windows is a parti-colored brick veneer.  A winding walk leads from the driveway/sidewalk corner to the front stoop.  The winters are wet and long here, so the entrance is sheltered under a deep eave.

 The dark corner is lit by a light fixture that seems to be a ship's light cut in half and mounted on the wall.  This, in fact, is precisely what it is.  The owner found the lamp in a stuffy shop on the coast and paid the price marked in grease pencil on a piece of masking tape.  He carefully peeled off the tape and cleaned off the gum with a solvent, then polished the brasswork and glass and took the lantern to a friend who was a glassworker.  He cut the brassworks in half and the glass while the owner bought a fixture that would fit under the glass and replaced the old jelly jar light with it.     Then he climbed in his butterscotch brown Brougham with the white vinyl top and drove to the glass shop.  His friend had carefully wrapped the half-lamp in paper and boxed it.  They talked for a while over some strong coffee, about the weather, the superbowl, the arrest of the glassblower's brother for a lid found under the seat of his squareback.

The glassblower, a sandy-haired, laid-back man named Stuart Smith, had considerately soldered some loops under the upper part of the brassworks, so the owner, whose name was Gil Binder, could mark their location on the wall above the fixture and drive some screws there.  He hung the lamp and was pleased with how straight and permanent it looked, as if it had always been there.  He was gratified completely when night fell and he saw the rich green glow it made by the front door.  Later he would sit on his couch in the front room, under a brass floor lamp, and read through a thousand-page typewritten report on ocean currents.  The couch was covered with a coarse-knit fabric decorated by exploded yellow and brown plaid squares.  The arms terminated in dark brown turned-wood posts that resembled the details on a heavy RCA console television that sat opposite.

Most nights, if you were walking down Laburnum, you could see him sitting there, either writing or reading.  He was a researcher and spent a great deal of time reading journals and reports and writing grants.  You would see his butterscotch Brougham first, parked in the carport.  The walls there were lined with well- concealed plywood cabinets that contained not a lot:  some diatomaceous earth, some ten-year-old potting soil, a bag of lime.  In another cabinet some well-worn hand tools and a small orange chainsaw.  If you knew him and knocked on the front door you may have heard Zoot Sims from behind the red and gold panes of glass set in the wall there.  And if you walked in and stood on the flagstone square on the other side you would have seen the TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck slowly turning in its place on the bookshelf by the television set.  Underneath was a turntable that played mostly instrumental jazz and what was once called, without irony or derision, "easy listening".  He was especially proud of his large collection of Jimmy Smith albums.  

That wall, that backed the television and stereo and separated the living room from the kitchen and back office, was covered with books and journals, mostly written on the subject of ocean currents, water composition and marine life.  Gil Binder was an oceanographer and taught at a community college about fifteen minutes away from his house.  The front regions, comprising the living room, its baked-orange enameled conical wood stove, nautical prints and blonde wood shelves, the partition, with its bullseye gold plastic panels looking on the kitchen and its orange countertops and dark wood cabinets, the vinyl-covered back entry that was usually crammed with outerwear and duffels, all of these were suffused with a faint smell of dust and burnt sugar.  For Gil Binder liked to make a sort of peanut brittle and keep it in a heavy jar on his coffee table.  Late at night, and sometimes into the morning, he would mark up reports and papers with a Flair felt tip and reach with his other hand for the heavy glass lid and jagged yellow-brown slabs inside.  His sister Susan would wonder, and comment to her friends, about his consistent lack of cavities, all the years he ate brittles and hard candies, from high school, through college, graduate school and his teaching career.  His shape, too, remained tall and thin, no matter how much of it he ate.  In fact he ate a great deal.  He was fond of spicy curries.  Susan used to say that he could have made a living as a competition eater.  Sometimes he would think about this when he watched a starfish envelop some soft-bodied animal over the course of a half hour.  

His sister was the only woman, besides his mother, who had died some time ago, who took any permanent interest in his personal habits.  He had dated in a small way in college, and even during his graduate work, but the relationships always ended amicably, if sadly, and he would catch himself settling into his brown and yellow couch with something like relief.  This lack of yearning on his part bothered him in some unguarded moments, but they were few and far between, and his work occupied his mind most of the time.

If you had walked down Laburnum one evening after an eternity of drives from the college in the Brougham, late-night papers graded, peanut brittle crunched, Flair felt-tips exhausted, you would find him, smaller, whiter, but still in his couch, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, a thousand-page report on one knee, the pages read curled under the spine in a wave of white.  Other than his appearance, nothing had changed.  The same Brougham sat in the same carport, the same bag of lime, now an antique, sat in the same plywood cabinet.

His career had changed a great deal.  An ambitious grant he had been developing for years finally had borne fruit, thanks to a friend who had been promoted to director of an important foundation.  His research had led him to the hamlet of Belmar, a coastal town almost dead but for a restaurant of some local note.  In fact, his research was connected to the restaurant:  their signature dish was a kind of rockfish that should have been plentiful up and down the coast but whose numbers had taken a nosedive except in the waters near the town.  He had gone just to meet the owner and tour the area, but now it was time to collect all the data he could find on the place and develop a hypothesis.

He remembered his conversation with Tom Madigan, one of the owners.  He seemed a valuable resource, a longtime resident who could give him the sort of first-hand data that you could only get in interviews.

He watched the light change.  The trees in the parkway had turned orange and gold and there was a hard grey-brown crust on the ground.  He passed the severe Lutheran church and waited for a woman to jog across the street.  She seemed barely aware of him.  What could she be thinking about?  Gil was always working on some problem or idea, turning it and seeing it from every possible angle.  But her expression was vacant.  Could you really have nothing in your head, a vacuum?  He was ashamed of the idea, because it was more than a little absurd, but he always thought that everything would simply shut down if you developed such a vacuum:  heart, spinal column, everything.  It seemed gruesome to him.

A yorkie terrier interrupted his train of thought by dashing in front of his car.  He saw its furry body and a leather lead trailing before he swerved and jerked forward.  At first he thought the transmission had failed and had torn itself out of the car.  Then he saw a geyser in front of the hood and realized he had struck the fire hydrant on the corner in front of his house.  His neighbor, Susan Hata, came running towards his car.  The dog was hers and she carried it like a bag of groceries.  It twisted in her arms, barking loudly.  She peered into the car and shouted at Gil, and at first he thought she was angry.  But she was shouting to be heard over the dog.  She wanted to know if he was ok.  He nodded, still confused.  He felt his neck and knees.  He felt a little tenderness on his knee but knew it was just a bruise.

Susan called the police and the city, then convinced Gil to come in her house and drink some tea.  She apologized over and over.  At one point Gil thought she might start crying.  He was mortified.  Gradually, though, the formality wore off.  She even waited with him while the city trucks and tow driver came.  After they had gone, he heard himself say "Sure" when she asked if he would like to come with her to walk the dog, whose name was "Princess".  He stood in her kitchen while she changed into a pair of heavy walking shoes.  This was what she was doing when Princess had run out.  He admired some prints hung in a vertical series by the window.  They looked like woodcuts, all of trees, all finely detailed and in different colors of ink.  She had made them; she used linoleum.  She taught printmaking at a local art school.  She used to camp quite a lot with her husband.  They liked to drive out to the mountains and scrublands around the town of Power and Light.  Gil had heard of it, usually as the definition of a place that was in the middle of nowhere.  But then he got sick, she said.  He passed away a couple years ago.   Stomach cancer.  Gil studied one of the prints, a coastal pine with its branches swept back.  "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.  She tied her shoe and rose to look out the window.  Outside was a small rock garden, landscaped with white quartz, some mossy stones and a pagoda lantern.  She rubbed her hands on her knees slowly, as if she were trying to scrub something off.  "I have my work now," she said.

That night, while he sat on his couch with his papers, he thought of her face staring out the window.  He pulled aside one slat of his blinds.  The beads that joined them made a dry, rattling sound against the glass.  He looked at her house, the empty yard, the darkened carport.  Next to the door was a litter of advertising supplements in tight white plastic bags.  He released the slat and it swung over the scene.  He got up and put on a Zoot Sims album, one with a sweet, complex version of the theme from "Rosemary's Baby".  He poured himself a glass of rye and lay on the couch and closed his eyes to listen to the music.

Later, the phone rang, but he was asleep.

Raiders of the Living Dead

A depressing Sam Sherman (Al Adamson, Independent International) programmer from the mid-eighties. Thirties western star Bob Allen and child actor star of The Toy, Scott Schwartz, have roles (All of Mr. Schwartz's recent credits, by the way, are porn videos).  The action is clunky throughout-- about the pace of an instructional film for heavy equipment-- and what should be scenes of shock to reward the patient viewer all happen off-camera.  The zombies that pursue the reporter Randall (Robert Deveau) are in regulation light-blue makeup and shuffle woodenly when they're not stationery (which is often), and most of the shots that feature them are so dark that no detail is visible anyway.   The one scene of genuine shock is the accidental death of a pet hamster, caused by a misfiring laser.  The scene is played as comic relief and as a final punchline we are treated to a gratuitously long and close shot of the animal's charred corpse.  Hilarious!  Other moments of levity are provided by the Three Stooges, as Randall and his girlfriend Shelly (Donna Asali) sit in the theater and heave in their seats as the trio punch and poke each other for two unnecessarily long sequences.  The culmination is a plodding, badly-lit sequence in an abandoned prison with 1940s-era "laser" effects.  The only bright spot, really, is the deliciously hackneyed theme song written (obviously and painfully) specifically for this movie.  Best of all you can hear it over the opening credits and spare yourself the other eighty-three minutes.  

Through the Hill

-for Meredith-

Back then, in his mythical childhood, the hill had been a place Dan was not to go, and in his desire to appear a good boy he never went there. Some of his friends did, and were caught or got away with it, but he never squeezed through the gap between the heavy iron gate sections. There was an older door, older even than the gate, which was old already--but it was a grave, an ornate boss in the hillside all stone and rusted iron, with an incongruously new lock set in. Even he pulled on the door once, nearly frantic with fear by the time the goading of his friends had moved him to action, frantic lest the door, which was loose in its opening, be pulled out of his grip suddenly by some occupant from the other side-- but there was no opposing movement, only a feeling of great weight and age and the certainty that if the door ever opened, he would not be the one to open it. Any number of improbable stories were told about the grave-- how there were zombies inside, or treasure, or Hitler's private journals-- and it was odd, this monument in a hillside topped by a tangle of broadleaf maples, blackberry canes and old man's beard-- but they had taken it for granted as they took everything else for granted.

Then, the summer before his senior year of college, he had come back to the neighborhood, still vaguely wishing to do well but with no corresponding plan on how best to do this. It was more delicious to walk out of his parents' house with some deliberately ambiguous cover about looking for work and simply strike out through the neighborhood. One of these days he took an unfamiliar turning and found himself in a back country of gravel streets and cottages set far back from the road, some of them on double lots, covered by pitted lawns and gleaming camellia bushes.

He wound his way through the maze of dead ends and courts to a broad, paved road with narrow shoulders. He recognized it as a thoroughfare he had seen as a child, from the car window. The badly-weathered signals and squat cherry trees had been landmarks to him then, to tell him he was close to home. Going out he had seen them with a pleasant anticipation, coming back, with a sense of tedium that settled in like a blanket.

The road climbed and left the neighborhood of trees and shaded drives and entered a region of large wooden signs, apartment blocks and churches. At the top of the climb, and here Dan was damp in his shirt and breathing hard, he could look down at a heavy wood, marching right up to the boulevard on both sides, and on his side, massive stone piers that punctuated an iron fence carefully maintained with glossy black machine enamel and topped with old-fashioned arrowhead palings. Between the piers the gate was open and a winding road snaked through a cemetery. Beyond the line of trees that started just downhill of the gate he could see the gray of the crypts and a hint of pink and white where the cherry and apple trees grew. He remembered the crypt door, its weathered green and brown front, the bright lock, the smell of brown betty blowing out from the cafeteria, the shouts of his friends in the schoolyard.

In a burst of nostalgia he walked through the gate and across the road, into the cropped grass between the monuments. He rolled up his sleeves and made for a line of maples that rose out of a canyon. As he approached the line of trees the graves grew more weathered, some almost illegible under their coverings of lichen and moss. At the trees a steep path, little more than an animal track, dove down to a region of cool shadows and running water. He took the path, picking his way between bleached limbs and the knuckles of roots. He saw what he thought was a stone, then another; one close to the trail he cleared and found a badly-weathered grave, one officer in the cavalry, died 1863. They covered the floor of the wood, some in rings of sunlight. At the creek the trail broadened and he noticed the ivory dots of recent cutting. In the trail he saw an angular shape and walked closer to see it. It was a pocket knife, its locking blade in the open position. It had an unusual inside curve and looked like a gardening tool. Initials were engraved on the blade. It looked as though it had been well-used for many years but well-maintained. He picked it up and heard a crash and rattle behind him. He turned and saw an old man cutting the twigs that grew into the trail with a pair of loppers.

The old man was the knife's owner, and when Dan showed it to him he accepted it gladly with an old-fashioned mannerism that reminded him of his own grandfather. The old man told him that the knife was a keepsake from his wife who had died years ago and it pained him to think that he may have lost it for good. The caretaker asked him if he was there to see a grave and Dan admitted that he was only passing through and that he went to school near there as a boy. The caretaker said that he had been here then, he had been there almost thirty years and had seen many of these trees grow from saplings. You see a lot of things in that time, he said. Like what, Dan said, what was the strangest thing you ever saw? The old man cut a branch. You mean ghosts, he said, with no inflection at the end. No, no ghosts, he said, but I did see a terrible electrical storm and the trees seemed to strain to the lightning. Even the blackberry canes seemed to straighten, as if they were trying to touch the sizzling cracks in the sky. Worst of all was in the civil war plot here, he said.

He explained to Dan that he had a theory about what happened after you put a person in the ground here and it had to do with an echo of their living self that remained to feed the trees and the flowers, that it was no mere handful of dust or bones or what have you, but spirit that strove in the things that grew. If the spirit was restless the trees would strive past their breaking point and come down with a vengeful crash when there was a storm; if the spirit was at peace the tree would put down roots as it should and strive as it should toward the sun and the winds. Here in this civil war plot he had seen a great many trees downed. Dan looked at the trees and saw most of them were broadleaf maples. He knew broadleaf maples were known for dropping limbs, but he didn't disagree with the old man. He wanted to hear more about his theory and what he thought about religion in general; he thought perhaps the old man had seen something stranger than what he had told but that he was holding it in reserve and Dan didn't want to spoil it. Everybody needs something to do, and if they can't have something to do they need somewhere to go, even the dead, the old man said. If they can't have that there's trouble. It makes sense to me, Dan said.

I have to see to some loose stones on the other end, the old man said. Can you find your way out? Dan said that he could and the old man told him to come back anytime.

That fall Dan returned to school and graduated as planned, because this was expected of him in a very specific way. What other things were expected of him he knew in a general way but this did not trouble him for the moment. He spent the next several years at a series of menial jobs and built a few relationships that ended in a way that he supposed could be seen as humiliating, though he had never thought so. But then he had never asked anyone straight out if they could be defined that way and now he thought it was just as well. He still thought of them all from time to time, for some reason, especially now, his first real attachment in college, perhaps because this was the one that seemed closest to whatever turning he had made to bring him to his current pass. She had been beautiful in an old-fashioned way, with pale skin and full cheeks and he had thought that he had loved her very much. Now he was not so sure exactly what form his emotions took but he still thought about her.

When Dan returned to the cemetery all of this was behind him and he was living alone. A friend from school days had written to him to tell him a mutual friend had died in a miserable way and instead of attending the funeral he had come to the cemetery. For some reason he found himself coming around to what the old man had told him more and more and he had to see if the old man was still there; he hoped that some of what he thought was age in that first meeting was a young man's self-absorption and that the caretaker was still puttering about the place. To his relief and surprise the old man was there; he found him oiling and rubbing down some gardening tools in a stuffy garage attached to a white cottage with dark green door.

The cottage stood just inside the gate and a respectful distance from the road, hedged in by tall laurels. The old man moved a little slower but did not seem materially older. He said he remembered Dan in such a way that Dan knew he was telling the truth and not simply speaking out of politeness. The old man told Dan that he was there basically as a watchman anymore; he had quit laying stone years ago and he managed only very specific and highly visible gardens. He had donated a sum to the remodel of the old chapel some years ago and he imagined they kept him on out of deference. The old man gestured and they sat on some wicker chairs on the porch and watched the limbs of the trees nod in the breeze.

Some weeks later Dan found himself out of a job and was feeling that something between relief, shame and languor that he always felt at such times and decided to rinse it out by visiting the cemetery. The old man was there, cutting the rubbery weeds around a monument with a pair of grass shears. Well, I'm out of a job, Dan said. Thought I'd come by. You out of work, the old man said without looking up. They need a guy. I'll tell them, put in a word for you.

Dan went to work for the cemetery then, coming every day to run the riding mowers and buzz the grass around the monuments with a heavy weed trimmer. Occasionally the old man would inspect his work and bring him instructions. Then one day he was gone. Dan went to the house with the green door and there was no answer. But there was an envelope under the door with his name on it. He opened the envelope and there was a key inside. There was also a note. The old man had gone, perhaps for quite a long time, but he wanted Dan to have this key. He was to go to his old school. He would find there what the old man wanted him to see. Dan turned the note over, looking for some further hint, some line of writing or map. There was nothing but blank paper.

The next day was a Saturday. Dan walked to his old school and wandered the playing fields, watching the tetherballs bong lazily against their posts, sat in a swing and watched the bands of grass, distant houses, trees and sky sweep up and down. He patted his pocket and heard the crinkle of paper. The note and key were inside. He felt something like a palpitation in his chest and a sudden feeling of unease, as if a falling stone had narrowly missed his head. He walked toward the back side of the fields, to the old door set into the hillside in its stone arch. He took the knob. It was warm. The door was as solid as ever. The lock was bright, freshly oiled even. He patted his pocket again. He pulled out the key and put it in the lock. It slid in easily. He turned the lock. The bolt slid back with a soft click. He turned the knob and stood there with his hand on it, breathing in the hot smell of steel, stone and grass. Then he opened the door.

There was a draft of cool air but it was fresh, with no hint of age. He stepped across the stone threshold and found himself in a tunnel of stone. At the end was an arch of green and spots of pink. A familiar smell blew into his face and he walked to the end. He passed into a clearing of cropped grass and cherry trees. Behind the trees was a black iron fence that described a circle closed by the earth wall he had passed through. The arch was the only access. In the center of the clearing was a flat stone. It was unmarked. By the stone was a bench, also made of stone. He sat on the bench and closed his eyes. He smelled the cherry blossoms and the familiar scent again. It was the scent of the girl he had left in college, and under it the scent of that night they had said what they had to say, the cool smell of bark and acorns and sluggish water. He tilted his face back into the sun. It was as though he had just left her. He cried a bit, then lay the note on the stone in the ground and walked back through the tunnel and locked the door behind him.

A breeze picked up the note and carried it fluttering over the fence and into the trees.

February 1st, 2012

A carnival of humiliation, a three-ring circus of disappointment: all that happened to that unfortunate couple, I think as I walk by a porch that has been jacked up to reveal the teeth of the joist ends and the black interstices, has happened to me, all in an interior moment... But I am fine, nothing wrong with me. This route has become the floor that I pace when the front room has become too small; its porches are reliably empty, its raised sidewalk slabs like the curves and planes of a naked back. The tidy front yards, though, are a reproach; pull yourself together, tuck your shirt in, stop feeling sorry for yourself.

I have just seen a film, an in-tight drama about a man losing his sight, the sort of thing that has perhaps become unfashionable because there is no way to be ironic about it, no way to sneer at it without exposing yourself. The ease of online communication has made us more cowardly instead of less so as the wizards claim; I include myself. We censor ourselves more heavily than ever before because always someone is reading, someone is watching. So we go to films that do the sneering for us and avoid those that still try to hold up a mirror.

In the golden age of Hollywood this sort of story was the bread and butter of the big studios: sentimental morality plays set against a modern backdrop. Those pictures that succeeded even beyond the narrow expectations of the producers did so because the emotion was real and overpowered whatever hackneyed "message" insisted on by the studio. In this picture, Light of Mine, there is no such studio hovering over the shoulder of the cinematographer, editor, actors and director; there is only the success or failure of the film as an artistic whole.

And what I have seen is the American west and its unique status as a monument you can travel through, lose yourself in and die under, or any combination thereof; a vast reflection of the loneliness of our nuclear selves and our popped-together cars; a fountain of youth for those with the fiber and wit to see it. Perhaps I see this, I think as I pass a porch cluttered with huddled chairs and trikes, one of which I suppose, at first, is the owner sitting and quietly regarding me; perhaps I see this or perhaps I am only seeing my own track through the lava fields of the past.

But even allowing for this, I am safe in my assumption. Am I not, after all, with all my warts and shortcomings, an American? Have I not also planted my corner stake here, no matter why or how? Mustn't it all come down to that, that we have our families and then we have our land, so different from the Old Country, where somewhere and somewhen they were the same?

The polis dozes. The only thing watchful here are the buzzing streetlamps, the pink/orange eyes that sleep during the day. I am glad; I can creep through unnoticed, continue to pace without attracting conversation. The film did succeed, it succeeded in the best way, really the only way a complete piece of art can succeed: in a way not intended by its creators. I did see the lava fields, I did see the granite mountains taking the sun full-on, now and then, at the same time. I did grieve, am grieving, have grieved, all while watching in the back row and now as I walk back through the last two hours.

The city wakes again; cars whip by like drone flies, tuned to a pitch of idiot frenzy to get there. Bicyclists ratchet down the chilly ways blithely, calm on the foundation that the entire mechanized world is out to get them. The customers of the all-night coffee shop sit in front of their devices, their faces dimly lit by their monitors, their mouths open. I don't want to see but I do see; there is no way to avoid it. I do the next best thing and hurry by, pressing to reach the next blank wall, the next pool of darkness. In a dark bus shelter across the street someone is shouting a song while their friend laughs.

Perhaps the blind man stays there in that darkness, reaching out to the textures he supposed in his sighted life, taking the measure of those odors and sounds that were merely color then; or perhaps it is more profound, perhaps more otherworldly. I pause and collect myself with him, what my father would call "getting a handle on the job"; I take the weight and measure of all that grief and expecting and waiting and lay it out on the arcade before me, the dim tunnel on Franklin Bluff. My own memories crowd in as I walk; this is the old neighborhood, after all. My own distant past has become a strata, a subject for a Piranesi to sketch in carefully-controlled vignette.

Here is the old apartment, another Waterloo; was there, in fact, any other kind of battlefield? After all, I endure, that is not the question; the question is what remains of affection, what remains of honor... Long after the cartridges are spent, long after the ball. Here the air weighs heavy on the silences and the drooping birches in the front yard. The lights of the doors are blank again, obtuse, with nothing to offer me but a muddy reflection of my own face. In a cowardly spirit I choose this street but hurry by when I see the familiar columns, the birches, so that farther down, by the church, maybe, I can repeat the old catechisms, the old responses: does she even think of this place any more? Probably not, and if so, not often. Why do I come this way? How can I not, I live here. What difference does it make if I take another street? It is still there, still speaking. So saying I hurry along in my grimy tunic with its tarnished epaulets like sofa upholstery.

Coast Visit 1/13-1/15/12

Our progress through the morning is unhurried and orderly and we are astonished to find ourselves leaving at nine thirty. The only distraction is our little black cat Anise, who meows incessantly for our attention and begins a series of mad dashes up and down the front room. When we leave she is stiffly carving furrows in a cardboard panel filled with catnip and staring at us with wide, round pupils.

We drive up Milwaukie to Powell and west across the bridge, stealing a glance at the new pedestrian overpass over I-5. Other than the usual exasperating line of cars merging left at the last minute onto the 405 ramp, the traffic is light and we negotiate the wooded curves over the MAX tunnel with no problems. Over a wetland past Banks we see a kingfisher perched on a power line.

In the Tillamook we see a sign of things to come in the basalt cliffs on the south side of the road, long confusions of icicles like tentacles draped over the trickling seeps there. I notice with irritation that the Tillamook Forest Center is closed for the season; I had planned to stop there and stretch my legs. We drive deeper into the forest and find an obscure trailhead, Keenig Creek, also closed to the public. I turn down the gravel access anyway and cross the old steel bridge. On the other side there is a muddy salient where I park. The Wilson is a green column boiling through its basalt and willow locks. I see a white shape at the bottom of a deep pool. From the bridge the view is unimpeded and I take in the postcard scene of the gorge, the pink alder forest marching down on either side and farther back the jagged slopes of fir and pine.

After an interval of battered steel barriers, yellow and black arrows and glimpses of the angry river through the alders we climb down for the last time into a landscape of flat fields and irrigation ditches. Before long the smell of cowshit fills the cab. The traffic thickens and we pass the familiar farms just to the east of Tillamook. In the thinning sprawl of markets and restaurants on the north side we spot the blue and yellow sign of the association's cheese factory and turn in. Inside the entrance is a modified microbus, foreshortened like a clown car and cut away to fit against a poster promoting their cheddar loaves. A fleet of identical buses has been deployed across the country to stop in various towns and, apparently, dispense free samples.

We sit in the near-empty cafeteria and eat grilled cheese sandwiches. In the gift shop I find a plastic mug with a built-in turbine, activated by a push-button in the mug handle, that whirls your chocolate milk into a pale brown maelstrom. Celeste buys a bag of cheddar curds and garlic cheddar end cuts. She laughs the day after we return when she pulls one out of the bag. It is the approximate size and weight of a street cobble.

We decide to drive the Three Capes Route; Celeste wants to see the Cape Meares Light since two particularly dim-witted thugs shot out the hundred-year-old fresnel lens one night a couple years ago. The damage is heartbreaking, an ugly rectangular hole in the heart of the lens and scattered pinholes all around it. The knowledge that the vandals were caught comforts not at all; the lens is essentially irreplaceable. The sea around the headland, though, is beautiful, made yellow-green by the early afternoon light and grading gently into a light gray haze at the horizon. We take a short walk along the crest of the headland and spot several golden-crowned kinglets, a creeper and a larger bird with a distinctly flycatcher-like bill that we decide, tentatively, might be a vireo.

In Pacific City we turn west to detour off 101 and cruise through the dense spruce forests north of Whalen Island. At the state park sign we turn, drive the causeway to the island and park in the gravel lot there. The island is actually a peninsula nearly surrounded by the bay; the interior is half-covered by a thick growth of spruce and pine barrens and dense rhododendron forest.

We walk the trail that skirts the perimeter of the wood and immediately are closed in by arcing rhododendron branches and manzanita shrubs. Every so often Celeste stops to shoot the mushrooms and brilliantly-colored orange fungus that has appeared all along the trail. There is also a strange, delicate frill of white lichen, itself like a tiny tree, that clings to the stem of a rhododendron. Eventually the sight of grey and green rectangles between the trunks becomes more frequent and the trail climbs a low bluff and onto a ridge covered by a pine barren. In places the moss overwhelms the pale yellow, but overall the sand and the evenly-spaced trunks of pine dominate. Soon a spur of the trail points seaward and we take it to the foredune, then struggle through the deep, loose craters to the wet pack below.

On the beach small congregations of plovers rush back and forth in the surf and drill in the sand. A silent crowd of gulls is taken aback by one of their number, who begins grunting at intervals, then shrieking, while the others look on. I search the margin between dry and wet, but I miss the tiger beetles of summers past. At a clearing in the sword grass we walk through a litter of brown and silver logs and withered bull kelp to the foredune and pine barrens. In the treetops are birds who fly and hawk like sparrows but who are slightly larger; Celeste watches them through her glasses but the lighting is poor and we can only see their outlines against the sky.

The day is finally waning but our timing is good. We see it all from the Yaquina Bay Bridge: the vast lobe of the bay spread out below, the spires on the bridge pillars stabbing into the air and the sunset a spectacular flourish of tall clouds like spun glass lit orange from within. The display is repeated as we cross the Alsea, but the colors have begun to deepen to a rich red and the clouds have lost their buoyancy.

When we emerge from the wood outside the hotel and follow the curve around the landscaping island everything white or tan has turned a dark blue and the greens have become black. We check in and the clerk, who I don't recognize, repeats the breakfast times and directions to the spa. Our shoulders drop perceptibly as we walk in the room; the air is a solid bat of warmth. By the time we walk to the Adobe for dinner the sky is black, but the clouds have blown away to reveal a dense mat of stars. The Pleiades are a fragile pennant in the scattered mess and Jupiter is the brightest object of all, a yellow-orange gem.

I order the crab pot again. There is not a layer of bread at the bottom of the cup as I had supposed. It must be mixed in with the meat, I say. We adjourn to the bar and decide on two extra-dry Stoli vodka martinis. A big woman with an experienced, no-nonsense air addresses herself to the task and mixes the drinks, then pours them into two squat vodka glasses who are set into goblets filled with ice. We are served empty martini glasses with the olive inside. At first all of this seems gratuitous, but when I finish my drink Celeste reminds me I have another still in the shot glass; it's two drinks for the price of one. This means that the Adobe serves four-dollar martinis. Who does that anymore?

In the morning we have biscuits and egg and cheese strata and watch a hummingbird perch on a bunch of heather outside the sliding doors that open on the beach.

We drive down to Cape Perpetua and pass by the turnoff for the long climb to the visitor's center. Our goal is a bit farther south, at the Neptune State Viewpoint. The last time we were there the tidepools were rewarding. The weather is now raw, with bitter wind and a swirling dampness. The sandy beach is fronted by a wide ribbon of blue stones and we stumble and pick our way over it and past an orange-brown bluff to a maze of basalt broken and spread like crust on a cobbler. The rock is black and almost iridescent in places; patches are a rich brick red, as if the long-extinguished volcanic heat had left a stain. I carefully thread my way along the tendrils and skeins of damp sand and suck my breath in sharply when I step on a diamond of what looks like sand but is actually a viscous liquid. The upper reaches of the rocks are covered with a curly black/red algae that has the slickness of wet ice. I climb to the top and pick a route to a certain oval well cut deep in the rock, a narrow crop or sac scoured by two cobbles dim and green at the bottom. I keep my face to the ocean and look for Celeste appearing and reappearing behind the black shoulders of rock. Her voice carries to me, sharp and rapid; she has fallen several times and banged up her knees. Her feet are soaked and these shoes are terrible for walking on the rocks. I offer to take her back to the hotel to change her clothes but she says no, she'll just stay off the rocks. We walk towards the bluffs again and the broad apron of blue cobble and orange/white logs. Back of the delta is a graceful bridge, an arch reaching over a broad gorge and underneath a pair of beachcombers with walking sticks and white five-gallon buckets. We never do decide what they're looking for. Back towards the sea, in the delta, the gulls ride the current into the surf and ride the flow of the wash back again.

We drive over another steep headland and into the dune lowlands of Florence, through the lumberyards, filling stations and box stores, to the tall woods around Woahink Lake, a gigantic octopus of water dotted with modest but trim ranch styles and high-rent developments.

At the north end we turn at a brown sign and park in a wayside fronted by a stone wall. We walk through a pulsing mist that seems forced through an atomiser and find a locked rental shed and an empty rectangle of floats that marks the swim area. The sky is a pale grey belly on the water. Somewhere behind the yellow dune mountains on the other side, whose faces are scarred by a graffiti of tire tracks and footprints, the drones of many motorcycles and dune buggies combine in a cicada-like monotony. If you could silence that, I said, this place would be perfect for a birthday party or picnic.

We walk down the access road to a massive log-and-shake pavilion with its eight-inch-thick pine sink counters and stone chimney. At the lodge Celeste shoots a small wooden plaque that commemorates its CCC construction in the '30s and restoration in the '80s. We drive around the lake and back through Florence. At the south end of Yachats some wealthy burgher is building their dream beach house, a monument to mid-century authoritarianism, all down-sloping, slashing lines and glass curtains. Celeste loves it.

By the time we return to the room we are hungry and chilled and ready to be indoors. We open the insulated shopping bag and have some of the salami and cheese we bought at Edelweiss, along with a couple German bocks. I look through the picture windows and see the surf netted in a lace of foam, behind a curtain of silver beads-- a memory in present time, a snow globe that you live inside.

Before we succumb to the pleasantly stuffy warmth of the room we pack our knapsacks and walk out again, this time to take the beach path to the center of Yachats and possibly visit the new garden there. The chill is profound, especially on the bluff trail that threads along the mats of sea thrift and grass in front of the Adobe. After a short detour through the neighborhood of modest ranch styles to the south of the hotel we enter a wetland dotted with tall spruces and dominated by reeds and willows. The swamp is covered by a network of broad, solid boardwalks with frequent bays built in where the walker can step aside and contemplate the black water and broken brown stalks. Kinglets forage for insects in the stubble, and among them a winter wren, perched so close to the water and moving so rapidly he seems to be swimming. He calls to us a short, abbreviated call, as if he were greeting us but too busy to stay and chat. On the other side we exit on a path between the Yachats Library and sewage treatment plant.

We pass the fire department and find Yachats Underground Pub & Grub. Inside, a large flatscreen is airing a football game and all the regulars are staring at it. One red-faced man with white hair lifts a remote and turns up the sound until it's blaring. We muddle through our beers over the explosive shouts and laughter and decide to walk back to the hotel when we realize that it's still hours to dinner and we're still working on lunch anyway.

We walk down to the ocean road again and see a long section of fence hastily repaired with fir two-by-eights and festooned with yellow caution tape. The posts on either side of the repair are buried on three sides only; the fourth side is exposed to the salt air again, in a freshly-exposed face of bluff whose missing portion has long since been washed away by the surf. Farther down the trail, just a hundred yards from the Adobe Hotel, another fence runs at the cliff and juts out comically, the rails cut off to point seaward.

Back in the room I drift in and out of consciousness while reading the passages about the Eastern Front 1914 in The Guns of August.

The restaurant is one I must have seen several times and not known for what it was. It shares a wedge-shaped parking lot with a grocery and is one of those low, tan coastal properties that seem to become anonymous almost the instant they're built, losing their identity and sense of optimism along with their paint and galvanized coatings. The inside is cheerful enough though, with loud vinyl tablecloths decorated with tropical birds and tiny colored bulbs strung inside the window frames. The name of the place is Luna Sea, after the F/V Luna Sea II, Captain Anthony. He is the owner and the fisherman who brings in the main ingredient: salmon, tuna, halibut, crab. We have fish and chips and it is good, with a few more pieces than you're given by the restaurants inland. The captain stumps in while we're finishing our plates and cheerfully greets us and inquires about our meal. We tell him it is good and he smiles and disappears into the kitchen. When we leave he is standing on the walk in front of the restaurant and breaking down cardboard boxes. He asks us where we're from and we tell him we wish there were more places like his in Portland. He admits he had thought of moving, but to Maui. But he says that if we find him a space he would take it and put us to work in exchange.

The night is long. The last thing I read is a description of General Samsonov's retreat through the forest outside Willenberg and the sound of his suicide in the pines.

I awake unrefreshed. The weather matches my mood; clouds press down unnecessarily close to the ocean and the shorebirds cast back and forth on the rocks as if they were trying to get out of the way. A mirage has been replaced by a familiar ache across the shoulders and behind the head and I seek to fix my gaze on whatever is squarely in front of me. After the usual taxiing back and forth between the beds and the harshly-lit sinks we walk down the breezeway to the heavy stairway door. The sweet warmth of the kitchen has filled the stairway, mingling with columns of heavily-scented hotel soaps, shampoos and colognes. We pad through it and find the dining room half-empty; still too full for me.

Behind our table a woman's cell phone intrudes, driving a wedge into the muted voices and sounds of silverware. The ring tone is some godawful pop tune, all ugly electronic false emotion and half-digested references to older, better originals. To compound the error the woman is amused; she laughs a loud, satisfied, cud-chewing laugh as the device chatters on. She never does answer the call; I don't look around but I can imagine her gazing raptly at the little piece of plastic with her mouth open, enjoying, child-like, the fruits of human progress. I imagine now a man much like myself except that he thrives on violent confrontation, a man such as this rising from his seat, politely interjecting as he picks up the phone, quickly hurrying across the lobby and through the sliding doors and hurling the offensive object far into the ocean.

Celeste picks up a paper, determined not to lose touch with any of the loud idiocy of the world outside, and grimly recaps the latest about the capsized Italian cruise liner. I stare out the fogged glass of the sliding doors and the grey/green wilderness beyond and am astounded that anyone could be casual in such a setting of sudden ruin. It must be the size of those things, I think. You forget that mere scale will not protect you. Because no matter how big your boat is, the ocean is bigger.

After the second cup of coffee I settle down a bit and I'm even a little wistful when we leave the room. I feel the same pang of something like grief when we take a last look around and check once more on the floor around the beds. Shortly, and in a very complete and traceless way, we will be gone from here.

Once we're in the truck a lot of these sharp points are smoothed and the hum of the tires and solid push of the wind against the cab act like a balm. I concentrate on the task of driving and maintaining my calm against all the usual irritations of the public roads. I even have a kind thought for the Yaquina Bay Bridge, a bastion of good sense and proportion and the willingness to recognize the beauty of what is; and the Bay is beautiful, a creamy desert of mud and sand decorated by a tracery of bird, human and clam tracks.

Incredibly, we enter the courtyard of the aquarium at ten of ten, their opening hour. A compact man in grey with a chunky camera is there with us; he glances at the closed doors and walks the other way. We follow his lead and visit a viewpoint framed by arching willows and a reflecting pool filled with grasses and fescues; the morning light paints the bay a pale blue/grey and I study the tips of the rotten pilings for kingfishers.

The sounds of a noisy group of eight-year-old girls are suddenly muffled and we walk back to the entrance. One door stands open and we walk in. The room contracts in the quiet and for the first time in a long time I study the exquisitely-detailed models of salmon and shark that hang from the ceiling. While I wait for Celeste outside the bathrooms I study an exhibit about the importance of the local shrimp fishery. The main panel is decorated by a pretty line drawing of a trawler.

The exhibits are not silent for long; the visitors trickle in and eventually the usual sounds of slapping sneakers and reedy demands to "Look at this!" fill the space. Celeste earns the bemused attention of two volunteers when she makes baby talk at an abalone that takes a kelp ring from her hand. We both are delighted by the surprise of a cluster of young grunt sculpin clustered on top a barnacle where we expected to see the usual pair or trio of adults. In the hallway that contains the Japanese Spider Crab exhibit we watch them sit back on their shells, legs in long Ms and Ns. They look out at us from the blue darkness. Celeste says they seem to be silently challenging you to approach them so that they can "kick your ass."

In the aviary the growls and shrieks of the warm mating season are absent and the birds content themselves with noisy, splashing flight displays over their ponds. One seems to go berserk and rockets around the enclosure like an out-of-control windup toy, finally splashing to a stop to shake its head and stare at us with one tiny, grey-green eye. We brave the cold a bit longer to visit the seals and otters. Hastily-made signs strung across the thick plexi that forms the side of the pond warn us that the otters are in mating season and "unusually agressive"; interaction is to be limited to viewing from a safe distance. We watch one float on his back in the black/green water and obsessively gnaw on his coat. Suddenly he seems dangerous and fearsome, no longer the clever jester beloved by the summer visitors. We remember another visit and the softball-sized crater of milky cracks and pulverized plastic that marked the place one of them had bashed a heavy shell against the enclosure.

Celeste wants to visit the gift shop and we tour the glass shelves filled with plush wolf eels, aquarium mugs and expensive paperweights. I'm weary of the experience and hurry through the circuit of the store, pausing only to examine an inexpensive but well-produced paperback edition of Moby Dick.

We forsake the turn to the noisy and fashionably industrial Rogue Brewing Company and drive instead across the bridge and into the strip of banks and restaurants on the north side. At a brown sign we turn and turn again, rounding a bank of tangled blackberry canes to find SE Bay Road, the main street of the Port of Newport. It is still early and parking is plentiful; I find a public lot across the street from a gigantic fish processor whose warehouse wall is decorated by a mural of fishboats riding a dark and stormy sea. We walk past the darkened portholes in the Ripley's Believe it or Not museum and into the light again as the walls of the processor move aside to reveal the port, a tangle of masts, rigging, winches and radio antennae. Across the bay we see the vast white rectangles of the newly-installed NOAA Fleet, duly welcomed by several commercially-produced posters that appeared in some of the local storefronts. And near the orange-and-blue ball of a 76 fueling station, the trim, white and red USCGC Cuttyhunk visits from Port Angeles.

Several blocks down we spot our goal: Local Ocean Seafoods, a restaurant and retailer that has earned the recognition of several reputable and/or fashionable reviewers. It's in the kind of square, ugly container that seems to be the kind of building everyone wants to see and be in these days, with immense curtains of glass set into dull grey steel pillars and one wall a fire department-sized garage door that opens in the summer months. While we're sitting next to it I can feel one of the ribs pushing into my knee whenever someone opens the entry.

The customers are all dressed in various shades of black, olive or brown and the place has a stuffy, expensive smell. The back of the space is dominated by an immense, stainless-steel hood and the open kitchen, with a bar surrounding. I look around at the plates on other tables: great square white things, the sorts of dishes a more modest place or home would use to serve several guests. Across from me a man lounges in his seat with his feet in the aisle. His shoes are expensive top-stitched leather, with the paper-thin sole and square toe that is the uniform of every successful urbanite. He is absorbed in some kind of smart phone, some small, glossy, rounded piece of electronics, the mere shape of which I have learned to detest in the last five years. I imagine his wife, who is attractive and seems absorbed in her food and not at all starved for attention, brought him here.

Our waitress is prompt and polite and has a heavy accent, Australia or New Zealand, I can't decide which. I try to stop myself thinking that the place somehow contrived to hire this woman for her accent. The thought is ridiculous but I come back to it, just like my unreasonable resentment of the guy with the shoes. I order the grilled rockfish sandwich. It is good, spicy, very tasty, with an interesting topping of coleslaw, but the bun seems gratuitously small and the fries in a cute, stingy pile hard by, instead of overwhelming the sandwich as in a less-fashionable place. Still, I am satisfied, and it is pleasant to sit there over hot coffee and watch the wind play with the forest of masts across the road.

We walk back to the truck on the other side of the street and listen to an immense bull sea lion shouting in one of the lanes, hidden by the Cuttyhunk and some big fishboats tied there. Celeste sees him and is appalled by his size. I imagine he owns whatever falls into the water, if his size is commensurate with the booming echo of his barks.

Until we reach Philomath the thought of dangerous weather is academic, a chance to tut-tut about the way the local news services have built an institution of weather-based hysteria based on a faulty understanding of modern satellite-based technology and a willingness to use it to whip up local residents and school districts.

But on a hill outside the town I am reminded that the weather is not great, in fact, downright bad, as the right lane is suddenly covered with grey-brown slush and my attempt to keep right and shed some of the traffic behind me turns out to be a bad bet and I enter a hundred-fifty-yard skid. Luckily the road is uncrowded and I manage to steer out of the sickening back-and-forth into a region of slush that is more liquid than ice, instead of the reverse. Incredibly, not a few minutes later a newish compact angrily passes on the left and rockets down the road, some bluff meathead trying to prove to his passengers how timid and silly we are and how rugged and competent he is. Apparently there is no room in his cramped brain pan for anything but this.

The mood lightens as we reach Corvallis but celebrations are short-lived. Out of Yamhill some drifting flakes become a blizzard and I can barely see the road. Celeste goes so far as to suggest stopping in McMinnville and waiting for a break in the weather. I contend that the weather would just worsen and we would be truly stuck; I press on and eventually we come out the other side. We pass Linfield and I react sourly to the sight of the new sign by the entrance drive. It is expensive, obviously so, marked up in a modern font made to suggest an old-fashioned one. There is a smooth, corporate pictogram of an acorn, and the whole thing fairly screams "business school." I hate it on sight.

King City is the usual nest of unaccountable tie-ups and frantic last-minute lane changes, but after the slush and shoulder tension of the coast range there's something almost nostalgic about it. We hiss down Barbur to the Ross Island ramp without incident and it is good to see the chain of brakelights like a bead necklace flung out the southbound ramp.

When we pull up in front of the house Anise is framed in the bottom center pane of the front entry, standing like a yard statue with her paws resting on the door. When we open the door she repeats the performance of the morning of our departure, running wildly between the back and front doors and savagely scratching on her catnip pad, her back arched. I miss my little tan lion and his calm trot towards us after a long trip and I suppose Anise is trying to make up for it by putting on a show, anyway I read it that way and it seems to make sense. Now she is sitting on the chair next to me with her eyes slit and her front paws folded underneath her. Perhaps she is agreeing with me.