Sunday, November 6, 2016

Tim Wrote It 1999

We all have stories to tell of bizarre events and ridiculously unlikely meetings—of practically unbelievable incidents that cause an otherwise normal day to suddenly freeze in the present. Time seems to slow to a crawl, or feels compressed. And when these things happen, on occasion you experience them as if you’ve somehow stepped aside and are watching things unfold from the sidelines. And incidents that fit this description can instantly transform a worldview based on the assumption that human lives are ruled by randomness and chance.
That’s certainly been the case for me: having long since abandoned belief in any traditional conception of a “higher power,” I’m nonetheless convinced that there’s some innately mysterious influence at work and play in our lives—orchestrating, pointing the way, or providing timely wake-up calls with a gentle nudge. But what that enigmatic influence is: truly, I don’t know. And I’m fairly sure that no one has effectively come up with an adequate explanation. My conclusion, after decades spent pondering the matter, is that we are simply part of an active, intelligent, and creative Universe acting on itself. I call it “The Grand Swirl.” This much is certain: life is one colossal, unending miracle of creation and there’s a lot going on that we don’t understand. We tend to forget.
I try not to. While I may not exactly lead a “charmed” life, I have been exceptionally lucky (not to be confused with “fortunate,” though I am that as well) and my life, at times, gracefully takes on literary qualities and things play out like some universal allegory. I’ve not had a single brush with the supernatural but seem especially prone to improbable meetings, often in out-of-the-way places. Which have had the effect of supporting my conviction that, at a deep level, everything about our world is intertwined.

Early March, 1997, at the remote hot springs in Saline Valley: one of those nondescript events that’s later revealed to be a major juncture in the time-line that defines one’s life.
Just after sunrise, Diane and I were walking up the dusty road. We’d driven over from Lone Pine the night before and, delighted to be back, eagerly anticipated our first morning soak. The low sunlight’s sumptuous radiance was quickly spreading across the desert, revealing details of terrain that would disappear as the day progressed, and subtle colors that would become dull and indistinct. Imposing mountain ranges encircled the valley…a profusion of deep silence: these somehow adding to the feeling of security and comfort bestowed by his amazing and truly unique place. It still felt like home to me; in past years I’d spent much of each winter living here on the cheap—free camping, unlimited hot water—and had made many lasting friendships.
We had two pools to choose from. The larger—known as “the Wizard pool” (after a local character who built it many years ago)—is warmer and by far the more popular. Approaching, we saw half-a-dozen soakers in the larger pool, all men, talking and laughing loudly. Diane wasn’t very enthusiastic about joining them. “I don’t know… Sounds like a buncha rowdies.” Seventy yards away, “the volcano pool” (significantly cooler) was unoccupied. Like most Saliners, I preferred the Wizard pool at this early hour and replied, “Well, let’s at least go check it out first. Could be there’s somebody we know in there with the rowdies.”
They sure enough were a jovial bunch. Most of them were a group of friends from Plumas County camping together. As we walked up to the pool, Diane spotted one man wearing a hat emblazoned with the name of a ski resort in Wyoming, on the west (less popular) side of the Tetons: GRAND TARGHEE. Before moving to Lone Pine, Diane had lived just a few miles down the road from this fairly obscure ski resort. Her earlier disdain for the potential “rowdies” vanished. She met the hat owner’s eye and asked if someone gave him the hat or he’d actually been there. He had.
“I used to live just a few miles down the road from it…skied there all the time.”
 “No kidding! Had some great powder when I was there.”
So we dropped our packs and, just like that, found ourselves in the company of new friends—not an unusual state of affairs in Saline Valley. It’s a place where common ground is sought out by total strangers and, when found, put to the plow. At the least, people quickly determine which members of the Saline-regulars tribe they both know.
The cheerful banter and laughter hardly paused during that fateful soak. I say “fateful” because meeting the owner of that Grand Targhee hat, Jim Battagin (known to his friends as “Dr. Goose” or just plain “Goose”) presaged the end of my relationship with Diane. Dr. Goose—a very pleasant, insightful man with a dry wit and a twinkle in his eye—lived outside Quincy, a small town surrounded by heavily timbered country at the northernmost end of the Sierra Nevada. His description of a quaint logging town in a picturesque valley and of his homestead at the edge of a meadow—with an off-the-grid solar-powered house he’d built there—definitely piqued our interest. We promised to visit. (This, a variety of promise that’s often little more than social formality.)
But we dropped in on our new friend only a month later at the tail end of a road-trip to the Blackrock Desert of northern Nevada. At that time, I considered myself essentially married. (Diane, a newly minted nurse, had in fact left her husband to start a brand new life with me.) But it was becoming increasingly apparent that she wasn’t all that happy living at our remote outpost—a virtual shack (with fabulous views) miles from town, at the end of a long dirt road—and working in the austere Owens Valley. The semi-desert country was foreign to her. More and more, she missed having a network of women friends and we weren’t dealing with our conflict…as people often don’t. But I had no desire whatsoever to move elsewhere.
So when we visited Jim Battagin in Quincy she instantly loved the quaint little mountain town, and all of his many kind friends. A month later Diane abruptly left Lone Pine (and me) for Plumas County’s literally greener pastures. Not to downplay my shock and dismay, but it was a fitting move for her and proved to be for the best.

The following morning, in the Wizard pool again, there was talk about going on a hike. Dr. Goose mentioned wanting to search for wildflowers. (He was, in fact, a professional botanist.) He lamented not yet having learned much about desert plants and hoped there might be someone staying at the springs who knew the local flora. Before I could say anything, Diane spoke up for me: “Tim knows the plants.” The earliest spring flowers happened to be a burgeoning prospect at this time but only in certain places. Dr. Goose turned to me with a questioning arch of eyebrow. Placing myself at his service with a little bow, we made plans for a late-morning excursion up a wash draining some nearby hills—a place I knew from past experience would have early-bloomers aplenty.
            A bunch of us ended up going: several of the Quincy contingent plus two men from Berkeley who’d been in the pool both mornings. Les knew me slightly from previous trips. Rich and I had never met. He was more animated than his somewhat dour friend; both were married but without their wives along. Rich had a gentle, soothing voice and struck me as an amiable, very kindhearted man.    
That was one fine walk. After a wet winter we found undersized, understated flowers in abundance. I was impressed by the enthusiasm all these un-macho men displayed, falling for the subtle charms of tiny desert plants. Dr. Goose and I were on our hands and knees spouting Latin names—in our element, becoming fast friends fast.
            Late afternoon found us heading back to camp. The sun had just set behind the towering Inyo Mountains and, glad to finally be out of its intense glare, we took a rest in a narrow section of our wash where it cut through basalt bluffs. We all sprawled in the sand or lounged on bedrock slabs polished smooth by thousands of flash floods. I happened to be sitting closest to Rich. He’d overheard our talk and knew Diane and I lived in Owens Valley. We began talking about what it was like actually living there. His own ties to the Eastern Sierra went deep: Rich’s grandparents were Owens Valley natives—they’d owned land near the town of Benton and had also lived in Bishop. I’m unclear on the details; Rich himself had never resided in Owens Valley but one or the other (maybe both) of his parents had. He spoke fondly, with something close to reverence, of a life-long connection to the region. I told him about my own love affair with the Eastside and the circumstances of my landing in Lone Pine in the early 1980s.
            Rich told me of his particular fondness for the little town and its spectacular surroundings and of how he’d stopped there so many times over the last twenty-plus years during trips to Saline Valley. My talk of settling there in 1983 triggered a memory that caused him to hark back to that particular time and about how there’d been a really first-rate café in town right around then that was “sort of a health-food store,” as well. Hearing this, my head snapped up and I looked at him hard. Gazing off, he continued: “It was this funky place there on Main Street, in the middle of town. I forget what it was called…it went out of business years ago. But they served great home-made food. And they had Peet’s coffee!” (This gourmet brand—an amazing commodity to find in a backward place like Lone Pine—was, in those pre-Starbuck’s days, sold only in a small chain of coffeeshops in and around Berkeley.) “I loved going there and tried to stop every time I passed through. What was it called?” (This last, to himself.) “They had amazing sandwiches and soups, with fresh-baked bread.” Rich was remembering hard. He was staring at the still-sunlit Last Chance Range but from that far-off look I could tell that what he was actually seeing was the interior of that café. Me too. Vividly.
“One time—it was early spring…right around now, in fact—I stopped in on my way here. They had a bulletin board on the wall behind the cash register with a few things posted. I noticed this little scrap of paper tacked up. It was…sort of a poem….” (Now I was rigid with attention and looked over at Diane, sitting a few feet away. She was staring at Rich’s face with wonderment, her mouth slightly open and eyes wide.) “…a poem about spring. Springtime in Owens Valley. It really moved me…just seemed to capture the true feel of the land. And I took it. It’d been there awhile already and I thought, ‘what the heck.’ I had a friend who did calligraphy and she copied it out beautifully. Then I framed this thing and gave it to my mom. She loved it…had it in her bedroom for years. But she died a couple of years ago and it’s in my office at work now.”
            Diane and I looked at each other, astonished. And she said, in a neutral, matter-of-fact tone, “Tim wrote it.” Because, well, it was a matter of fact. I was the author.

After dropping out of college I moved to Boulder, Colorado and lived there from 1979 to 1982, working several jobs to support a bad rock climbing habit. Toward the last I began working on an all-climbers window cleaning crew but got laid off in November. I was out of work, nearly broke, winter was coming, and Boulder had started to get to me. So I decided to make a break of it and head back west. The only place I knew of in California that could really feel like home was the east side of the Sierra—somewhere, anywhere along the stretch of Highway 395, with craggy peaks on the western skyline. I’d been up and down ”the Eastside” on family camping trips since childhood and loved the entire region; it had all the mountains, desert, and wilderness I’d ever need.
            I began my quest for a new life the following January after a stint in Ventura, staying with the folks and working odd jobs. My best friend from Boulder had recently moved back to California as well. Gary’s parents had stakes in a time-share up at Lake Tahoe and the two of us got together there. My plan: go east from Tahoe into Nevada, turn right on Highway 395 and begin searching for work and a place to be.
At the end of a fun week the two of us said our goodbyes. I stood there waving as Gary drove off, climbed into my car, and turned the key to begin the next phase of my big adventure. But, incredibly, my trusty ‘71 Toyota Corona failed to start: it died, there in front of the condo. It had been running fine until that moment. Maybe it was from the cold—I don’t know—but when I turned the ignition key, something deep in the engine broke, rendering my formerly reliable Japanese sedan worthless. Having it towed to a nearby auto repair shop burned most of my meager savings. The mechanic told me “the gear on your jack-shaft stripped out” and he’d have to pull out the whole engine to replace it. My twelve-year-old car wasn’t worth fixing, he said.
My father ended up driving all the way from Ventura to rescue me and my possessions. I had less than $100 to my name when it was all over. And so, instead of making a new start, ended up—at twenty-four years of age—back in my home town, living with my parents. With no money, no wheels, no job, no prospects.
            My father, taking pity on me, loaned me money to buy another car. Instead of a car, I exchanged $3000 for a used Toyota pickup—in fine shape and a great bargain. With it came a cab-high camper shell and home-made padded flooring in the truck’s bed. (The woman who owned it had recently married; she and her husband had moved into an apartment complex and couldn’t keep three vehicles there. She hated parting with her truck.) This piece of good fortune turned out to be a defining moment in my life. The flooring may have been what turned me into a pickup gypsy—there was just enough room to curl up right on the soft floor in my sleeping bag. I set up the camper to make it livable, with a wide shelf above one wheel-well running the six-foot length of the truck bed. It held plastic milk crates full of clothes, food, and cooking equipment, with more space underneath. Curtains. It was my home-on-wheels for the next decade.
For a test run I drove my new rig up the coast toward Montecito to visit an old rock climbing haunt in a canyon nearby. I hadn’t been there since before moving to Boulder and actually go lost (not unusual for me) on the maze of winding roads, ending up at a dead end that turned out to be a trailhead accessing Forest Service land.
Finding myself at a new place, I figured I might as well take a little stroll. Within minutes, two guys passed me running back down the trail. (This was some while before trail running had become a “thing.”) I’d done some mountain trail running myself in Colorado so, on a whim I hailed them—well after they’d gone past—ostensibly to ask for directions. Back then, this was something quite out of character for me; I was still a shy-person. But we struck up a conversation, talked about trail running, and it turned out that these two lived—of all places—in Lone Pine. I told them it just so happened that I was getting set to resettle somewhere on the Eastside and that their town was to be my very first stop. One of the men, Dario, told me to be sure and look them up. I could find him or get his whereabouts at a local eatery: a place called “Country Road.”
            One week later I rolled into Lone Pine—it’d hardly changed since I was a kid—and parked along the highway. I planned to walk up and down the street and look the place over for a few minutes before pressing on but, in the exact instant I stepped onto the sidewalk, Dario stepped out of a shop that my truck was parked in front of. “Oh, hey, you showed up!” We chatted for a minute before he said, “Come on over to the store and I’ll introduce you to Robert.” We angled across the highway (“Main Street” in Lone Pine) and walked into “Country Road Café and Food Store”—half café, half health food store—where I was introduced to the proprietor, one Robert Frickel. Instantly, I knew he was a kindly soul and a brother of mine. I just knew. Late 30s, former hippie-type…trim and fit and, like Dario, an avid distance runner. Briefly, I told him my story.
In my truck, in a bucket, were the window cleaning tools with which I intended to make a living. So I told Robert, “Look: if you feed me, I’ll wash your storefront windows.” Grinning, he instantly replied, “Go for it!” I quickly learned that this was how Robert operated: he’d welcome strangers, especially willing ones, with open arms and promptly begin to formulate some sort of plan involving them. My first meal at his café was a turkey sandwich made with two thick slices of Robert’s freshly baked, whole-wheat bread. Instead of iceberg lettuce it was stuffed with alfalfa sprouts and grated zucchini. I sat at the counter behind a deli-style set-up and watched him deftly prepare it with loving care. Afterwards, I fetched my tools and cleaned the big front windows.
            So: I arrived in Lone Pine and within ten minutes had two new friends and a job. Of course, I ended up working at “the store” but never made a dime. Robert always had six or eight people working for him, all part-time. Most of them got paid while others—like Dario and me—put in a few hours here and there just for the scrumptious meals and a warm, inviting place to be. In short order I was doing clean-up jobs, making baked goodies, washing dishes, or helping mop up after closing time. Within a few days I’d met people who would become some of my dearest friends. I loved every minute of being there. Robert fed people—in more ways than one. I made money by hustling odd jobs and got in with the little-old-lady crowd; there were lots of widows around town and word quickly spread among them that there was this nice young man who was happy to scrub grimy kitchen walls and fix fences as well as clean their windows.
            It was still winter when I showed up in Lone Pine on March 12th. But Spring was starting to happen in the valley. The Sierra, on the other hand, was blanketed in deep snow. (The winter of 1982-83 had been monumental.) After a reconnaissance as far north as Bridgeport—where it was most definitely still winter—and some days spent up in the Buttermilk Hills behind Bishop, I headed back to Lone Pine and camped (parked) up on picturesque Movie Flat in the Alabama Hills. It was warmer and prettier there.
It had been cold and windy when I first arrived (still was, off and on) but there were some lovely days. I’d been around for a few weeks and, while the wind often howled and the mountains were still buried in snow, life was slowly returning to the desert lowlands—on the wing, popping from holes, and sprouting from the sandy soil. I was riding the crest of a wave of good fortune, experiencing new things on a daily basis, and was falling in love with the land in a fashion not unlike the way a young man falls in love with a woman. Frequently almost penniless but brimming with energy and enthusiasm, I felt my boundless potential. Each day arrived packed full of promise and I’d awaken to a view of Mt. Whitney turning pink on the Sierra crest, start my day with an exploratory walk among the golden granite outcrops of Movie Flat. Or I’d climb on the many rock formations scattered about—my own private climbing area, with 14,000 foot peaks for a backdrop. Every week or two I’d climb one of them. This was a personal frontier, my eyes and heart open to it all. Each morning I’d wake up thrilled to be where I was. It’s impossible to fully capture the raw, unprocessed joy of those days but this was absolutely one of the most nourishing portions of my life.
            So, I was acutely aware of my surroundings, noticing daily vernal advances, and after a few weeks got an idea: I’d write brief weekly “reports” about the state of the season—sort of like weather reports—and post them on the corked bulletin board behind the cash register. Knowing Robert would approve of anything creative, I didn’t bother to even ask. So, one sunny morning, drinking a second mug of coffee in my camp out on Movie Flat, I jotted down a few recent observations and tacked it up that afternoon. Had thought to post one weekly but…I’m not sure why…never wrote another.
Just a couple of months later, I scored a “real job” (of a kind) working up north on a trail crew for the Forest Service, out of the town of Bridgeport. I’d landed it through making the acquaintance of one Lorenzo Stowell—the Wilderness Foreman there—who I’d met one day, washing dishes while he was eating at the lunch counter. We became friends and I worked for him in the High Sierra backcountry just north of Yosemite Park  for ten weeks, starting in August. Then, after the contract job ended in October, I spent that winter and all my hard earned wages traveling and climbing.
Next April I was back in Lone Pine—nearly broke again—ready to make another go at settlement. In town, I ran into one of the women who’d waitressed at the café the previous year. Chris needed a lift back to her car, parked some ways out of town. On the drive there we were getting caught up and she remembered having a message for me: “Oh—there’s a thing I was supposed to tell you! Last year, you wrote something and put it on the bulletin board. Yeah? Well, some woman came in one day for lunch and saw it. She really liked it, I guess, and copied it down. This same woman showed up again last summer while you were up in Bridgeport and asked me to tell you that what you wrote had been published in some kinda “poetry journal” or something, somewhere over in the Bay Area. I don’t remember exactly what else she said.”

For laughs, I’d told Diane this anecdote about my first (and only) published work—that’s how she knew what Rich was talking about. All of us sitting in that obscure desert wash in the middle of nowhere were flat-out amazed by the improbability of this meeting. The odds of Rich’s ever meeting the anonymous author of what he considered literature were exceedingly low…but it happened. Diane: she’s long gone from my world and I haven’t seen Rich or Dr. Goose since. A couple of months later, though, Rich sent me a Xeroxed copy of the version done by his friend, as promised. (One of them had changed the format somewhat—making it at least look more like poetry.)
Frankly, I was not impressed and actually feel slightly embarrassed by the piece; it was neither intended to be a poem nor does it read like one. I didn’t think of myself as a writer then, much less a poet. I’d scribbled this thing down on a scrap of paper in five minutes and tacked it up on a corkboard behind the register in a funky hippie restaurant that served wholesome food made with love—a place with a caliber of dining experience few would expect to find in a moth-eaten tourist town catering to fishermen. Apparently, though, more than one person liked the little snippet so it did some good.
And through twisting channels, a precise passage of time, and a nostalgic bend in a conversation with a stranger, my faux-poem flew back home.
Well, here it is:


SPRING PROGRESS REPORT
                                              Alabama Hills Section
                                                 Lone Pine, California
                                                 As of Saturday, March 26, 1983

A few swifts and violet-green swallows have arrived.
The ravens are beginning to fly in pairs.
Lizards are coming out.
Desert sparrows, rock wrens and house finches
     are singing.
A few bees and ants are out but no flies or
     no-see-ums to speak of.
Shrubs are starting to green.
Approximately twenty varieties of flowers
     are blooming.
No butterflies yet.
Snow level at about 7000 feet.
Wave clouds beginning to form over Sierra crest.
Moon will be full in two days.



©2016 by Tim Forsell             17 Apr 1999, 24 Oct 2016



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