Globes

My sister-in-law posted this on FaceBook a couple days ago to celebrate Earth Day:

I had a flashback to a piece of artwork I did back in the very early 1960s. Besides the basic concept, what surprised me was how similar our globes are.

Full Dorsal.

You can get away with anything,

 Esquire magazine, April 2015

if you wait long enough:

Two Virgins album, November 1968

Tanks for the Memories...

My1934 Ford 1-ton  truck has carried a wide variety of goods during my tenure as its owner (1971-present), when its doors bore the "Demon Hauling" business name and a variety of painted-over phone number testifying to my frequent changes of residence). Before I acquired the truck in 1971 I think it spent most of its life hauling boxed prunes and apricots around one of the many orchards around Almaden California (in the then lush Santa Clara Valley). All the stuff I hauled and all the places I went in this truck is another tale altogether. In this post, I'm focusing on a specific type of cargo: water storage tanks.
From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, I lived in Mariposa, California with Edna and our kids (Aischa, Gabriel, Nicolas). As part of my "Carpentry Etc." business I did occasional work for Sylvia Schaefer (not sure of the spelling of her last name) who owned a local and free "penny-saver" paper (with her husband Jim) that competed for a while with the historic Mariposa Gazette. The Schaefers lived on a hilltop near town and their land had water problems; that is, they had drilled several wells over time to find a reliable water source and none of them produced much water. This lack was complicated by the fact that Sylvia liked to garden. So I created for them a complicated  plumbing and electrical system that linked all the wells and turned each one on when there was water available. The system worked well enough that the Schaefers decided they wanted a larger storage tank to capture the output. They found a used one that was for sale in Catheys Valley by Rita and Tony Kidd. My job was to haul it and install it. Thus, the photo below, taken by Sylvia as I struggled to get the heavy steel tank off my truck and avoid any loss of control could have sent that tank charging downhill uncontrollably - to the detriment of the tank and my reputation. So, I used a lot of ropes and proceeded with extreme caution. And, eventually the tank was landed safely on its bed of gravel and railroad ties.

Fast forward to 2015 (!) and the place Melina and I live on Triangle Road in Mariposa. Last year we installed a 2500 gallon tank as a water/fire-fighting reserve. This tank draws from our main well and, through a booster pump, feeds the house and Melina's gardens. Because of the drought we have experienced here for the last couple of years, we both have thought a lot about ways to save rain water, reuse gray water, and possibly pump water from an old, shallow well on the property. We haven't gotten very far on the plans and details, but when I saw a 1500 gallon tank for sale over in Ponderosa Basin (on the fb SWAP Mariposa page) we knew we had to get it.  As you might guess in this dry region, tanks are in big demand these days and used ones don't come up for sale very often. So I immediately agreed to the selling price and committed to pick it up ASAP. Saturday morning (3/21/15) found us rambling down Triangle Road in the very same Demon Hauling truck. At the place, a young man came out of the house to watch us load it. He volunteered that we might want to turn it on its side and roll it onto the truck bed. But, I wanted to load it right side up (and have it sitting flat on its bottom for more stable travel) and so we pushed and winched it up three 4x4 skids on the back of the bed, only to find, with the tank half on and half off, that the tank's diameter was a few inches larger that the distance between the stake sides of the truck. Just a bit embarrassed, I volunteered that he was right. And so,we let it slide back down, tipped it on its side, and rolled it up and onto the bed. We then spent about a half and hour strapping it down. The photo below shows it at our place, near the house and gardens. FYI, unloading a plastic tank is a lot easier than unloading a big steel tank; Melina and I handled it easily. Just where it will eventually be installed and how we will use it and supply it remain to be discovered. The adventure has just begun!

Sycamores, Then and Now

Etching, made in May, 1963, of a sycamore on a creek West of Gilroy, Ca. 

(The etching was made on the press at Foothill Junior College (in Los Altos, Ca.) where I was a first-year student.)

 

Sycamore at bark on a tree at our home in Mariposa, Ca.
(Photographed after a heavy rain on December 12, 2014)

Back to Front - On the Water

A mashup: Nick, Bear, and me in Dad's rowboat on the Merced Falls Diversion Dam - and - Gabe waterskiing behind my boat on the Sacramento River.

We'll Never Know...

The subjects of these two poems seem to have little in common, but within each is this feeling about things we will never know; just a feeling...

In Praise of my Sister

by Wislawa Szymborska

My sister does not write poems
and it's unlikely she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who did not write poems,
and her father, who also did not write poems.
Under my sister's roof I feel safe:
nothing would move my sister's husband to write poems.
And though it sounds like a poem by Adam Macedoński,
none of my relatives is engaged in the writing of poems.

In my sister's desk there are no old poems
nor any new ones in her handbag.
And when my sister invites me to dinner,
I know she has no intention of reading me poems.
She makes superb soups without half trying,
and her coffee does not spill on manuscripts.

In many families no one writes poems,
but when they do, it's seldom just one person.
Sometimes poetry flows in cascades of generations,
which sets up fearsome eddies in family relations.

My sister cultivates a decent spoken prose,
her entire literary output is on vacation postcards
that promise the same thing every year:
that when she returns,
she'll tell us, everything,
everything,
everything.

Tape Message 

by Fred Staal

There was a message
in the cassette tape I bought,
at the yard sale, in that dusty little town,
just a block off the river road.
The music is long forgotten,
but on a card inside the case, neatly printed:
    Keith and Judy-
    Have a great adventure!!
    I look forward to hearing from you,
    Arnaz

OK, at least now
I know your names,
hidden away in that anonymous little town,
then going away on great adventures,
or at least one, anyway.
Writing postcards,
and a couple brief, indifferent letters to Arnaz:
about the long hike to the ruins,
the two days of unimaginable intestinal distress,
and the last two days, balmy and languid;
Ah, symmetry.

And then again:
tedious hours in a stuffy airplane
and the tiresome drive...
back to the little town and
that little old house,
and the relief
of its simple walls,
dark and cool,
bearing tales of excitement,
and memories of other simple walls,
colorful and exotic,
of unfamiliar flora,
of disturbing fauna,
and so much sun...

How can this have happened
and I don't know a thing about it?
Or how much more I should explain!


Note: In Praise of My Sister is translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire. I found it in "A Book of Luminous Things" - a lovely anthology of poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz.

Halloween and Family History

This is a story about family Halloween photos...

 In June of 1984 Edna and I sold our home and embarked on a big trip to find a new one. We traveled in a 1974 Chevy van that had once been John Lee Hooker's band bus. I bought it from his son's girlfriend, who acquired it as a gift after it had been in a wreck while on a tour in Idaho and somehow managed to limp home to Gilroy. I fixed up the van and added a big bed that filled the back of the van (for Nick, Edna, and me). It was built about a foot and a half above the floor so we could store clothes, food, and cooking gear underneath. At window level I added a small bed behind the driver's seat for Gabe and another across the back for Aischa. Thus we traveled for months and months. October's end and Halloween found us in Texas, having fled West from the ravenous mosquitoes of Louisiana's coast. Towards dusk, in a small town whose name I no longer remember, we located a park with picnic tables where we could fix dinner. Edna brought out a pumpkin we had bought along the way and we encouraged the kids to have a go at opening it up and carving the face. When it was done, I got the urge to capture the moment on our Polaroid camera. I opted to pose them as three human heads and one pumpkin head (turned out to be a Halloween tradition we subsequently followed for several years). I always wondered where the inspiration for that shot came from.

Fast forward 30 years. A marriage to Melina and a move to Mariposa brought to the surface an anonymous cardboard box that turned out to be holding old photos my Dad had collected for me. Some were from the days of my earliest memories, that is, the late 1940s. There were photos of my brother Mickey and me with cowboy hats and six-guns, posing behind a tumbleweed, and others of us hanging out in the front yard. Amongst those was this shot. That is me behind the stone wall lining our circular driveway. And that's Main Street in El Cajon behind me, along with the back of the signboards advertising the Bella Rosa Trailer Park and a big open field. My Dad (and Al Johnston) owned the Bella Rosa and he named it in honor of his wife/my mother Rosalie, and he managed it from our home in the front. In those days, we were surrounded by small farms and open land, all the way to those mountains in the background (need I add that Main Street in El Cajon is no longer quite so bucolic).

There is no information on the print, but I'd guess it was Halloween, 1948. And that's me, one human head, with three pumpkin heads, and the likely inspiration for my 1984 Polaroid. Only took 66 years for me to work all this out. Weird, huh?

 Closer...

Oh, I mentioned that Main Street, El Cajon wasn't so bucolic anymore. Here's the view from our front yard now. 

 And here's what our front yard looks like now:

Actually, down a little side road to the right of this center, about a block back, there appears to be the remnant of a small trailer park, essentially just a strip of asphalt, some concrete: pads, and the occasional RV.

 ... and Google has this curious listing:

BELLA ROSA TRAILER PARK 619-442-7709 El Cajon CA ...

www.sbn.com/California/El-Cajon/.../BELLA-ROSA-TRAILER-PARK

Have you done business with BELLA ROSA TRAILER PARK in El Cajon, CA? If so, please provide a brief commentary or review to share your experience with ...

I still haven't worked up the nerve to give that phone number a call...