Being There, and Here

I suppose I have to start somewhere. I haven’t posted in months. I could plead overwork, had to complete two books and get a running start on a third, plus had deadlines for a flurry of zine articles. But truth is, I got caught up in the high speed California buzz and couldn’t catch my breath and slow down enough to write anything for Sojourner’s Journal. Also, and more importantly, we spent as much time as possible with loved ones we hadn’t seen in almost three years. Life never gives us enough time to be with those we love.

We went to social gatherings and out to lunches, dinners, graduations, birthday parties, and other events, and into culture shock. Living in European villages for the past few years did not prepare us for California’s current realities. We were overwhelmed by traffic, and by the cascade of consumer goods in vast malls, so many things we don’t need, or want, and by the constant hustle and buzz of daily life.

The best Chinese food west of Hong Kong is in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Mexican food, not talking tacos now, is good – if you know where to look. We took every opportunity to sample both. My oldest son was once a chef at five star restaurants and cooked for us almost every night we were home. I gained fifteen pounds the first month and spent the last month getting it off, most of it anyway. Still working on that.

Driving a little roller skate of a rental we rocketed from desert to beach to mountains in search of locations for photo shoots, and twice from So Cal to the Bay Area and back. We saw pelicans in the desert at the Salton Sea, and its shore lined with desiccated fish and abandoned towns, and felt the oven burn of the Badlands, and heard coyotes howling during star bright nights still heated from the hammering sun. We saw sea lions at the beach, hundreds of them spread out just above the surf line, protected by a fence and too far to catch with our cameras. We saw wonderfully strange people in San Francisco, and the bay in a lively mood, tiny whitecaps and a fresh wind filling spinnakers.

The central coast is now two hundred miles of wine grapes and a few truck gardens, no longer sere hills and wandering cattle. Now bees must be brought in from far away to fertilize crops. Bees can’t survive for long in California due to extensive pesticide spraying. Driving between Los Angeles and San Francisco, about 800 miles round trip through farmland, not one bug hit our windshield. I guess these pesticides really work. Dead zone is what it felt like.

The street vibe in LA is angry, edgy and verging on violence. The smell of half burned hydrocarbons and scorched tires hangs over everything within a mile of a freeway, which is pretty much everyplace. Traffic moves fast with about half of the cars dodging from lane to lane, tailgating, barely avoiding collisions, people driving as if they had just stolen their cars and the police were in hot pursuit.

On Pacific Coast Highway just south of Malibu a kid ran into the road and ML slowed done to avoid hitting him. This enraged the driver behind us. He passed us, cut in front and slammed on his brakes, his arm out the window throwing us the finger, ’It’s against the law to drive slow! Get off the fucking road!’ I don’t know if he didn’t see the kid, or just didn’t care. Los Angeles was once considered a laid back city, especially by New Yorker’s. No longer.
Twice I was almost hit by a car while walking across Ventura Boulevard. I was walking with the green light and in the crosswalk both times. One driver, a middle aged man in a newish Benz, swerved his car at me in a pretty good effort to hit me. I jumped clear and he screamed out his window, ‘Get a fucking car!’ Guess I wasn’t walking fast enough. Another driver skidded through an illegal uturn in the middle of an intersection and into the crosswalk with tires smoking and headed right at me. I slapped my hands onto his hood and vaulted backwards onto the sidewalk to avoid being crushed under his wheels. He gave me a look of exasperation, clearly from his point of view I had no business being on foot. Crossing Ventura Boulevard on foot is a series of near death experiences.

Now in California many are treading water and trying to stay afloat as the waves of the continuing depression wash over the country. Thousands of small businesses have closed. Malls and strip centers everywhere have vacancies. Those who have jobs work longer hours for less money, and many who had jobs now scuffle and hustle for a few dollars – selling hot dogs and candied apples on street corners.

Beat up motor homes line the side streets of Los Angeles with people living in them who have no place else to go. Police roust these motor home dwellers when homeowners complain about their presence, and they trundle off like injured elephants looking for a resting place. Other impoverished people sleep in storage units they had once rented to store their excess possessions. Others sleep under bridges, and still others under blue tarps in hidden corners of the urban sprawl. Motor homes and vans with people living in them also line the streets of San Francisco. But San Francisco is a more tolerant city. No one complains and the police look the other way.

We’re back in Europe now, and after some travel readjusting to life here in rural Bulgaria. Autumn colors are everywhere, leaves are still on the trees, and the air is crisp and clean and carries the scent of dry leaves. It’s cool at night, warm in daytime, a soft easy autumn. Yesterday I took a walk up through the foothills, following a dirt track up and over a ridge through the autumn forest with acorns falling from black oaks and sounding like light rain. I found a fountain that has refreshed travelers for two hundred years next to the track flowing with clear fresh water from a mountain spring. I picked rose hips for tea, and raspberries for pie, and listened to small forest creatures in the underbrush.

We now sojourn in a compound surrounded by seven-foot adobe walls. Inside the walls are a wide lawn, a vegetable garden, a grape arbor, and walnut, apricot and cherry trees. Grapes have been harvested and wine is fermenting in barrels in the barn. Walnuts and hazelnuts have been harvested and fill baskets in the barn next to the wine barrels. Two dogs diligently guard the premises when they’re not picking walnuts and cherries. Sharif is a large black Lab/Dalmatian cross; Mara a European Jackal passing as a dog. Both leap high to pluck cherries from the tree when in season. Now, they crack the few remaining walnuts on the ground and crunch up shell and all. Evenings Sharif curls up next to the fire. Mara climbs on the sofa with aspirations to be a lap dog, or lap jackal.

Outside our walls is a village of walled properties connected by unpaved lanes, many of them owned by expats, mostly Brits. There’s a reclusive American in the next village to the north. We talked once. The ‘Last Drifter,’ who sang with that group when younger, and sometimes sings at a café, lives in the same village. Many of the older local villagers receive a tiny, inadequate state pension (similar to Social Security in the US) and keep body and soul together with their gardens, chickens, a few goats or sheep. Others have larger gardens and make a living by selling their cabbages and carrots, radishes and onions, and honey from their bee hives, and homemade white goat cheese, and eggs, lemon cakes and fresh bread. One of our Bulgarian friends was military and has some interesting B&W photos from the Fifties. Another one once worked for Voice of America. Still another distributed samizadat (prohibited self published documents) during the Soviet period. Everyone has a story.

During the day we hear saws and axes as the villagers get in the last of their firewood for the coming winter, and sometime the soft clop of donkey hooves on dirt as they pull wagons filled with produce. At night there’s only the howling of wild jackals from the nearby hills, wind in the trees and the electric crackling of stars. Come deep winter the jackals will move in closer to the village, as will foxes, all of them looking to take the occasional stray chicken or maybe a goat that foolishly got out at night. Having only recently left California, and with some of my thoughts and much of my heart still there, I think of how very far this village is from California.