Fourth of July in Cayucos

I’m raw and unbalanced, hung over from a bout with beer and whisky. I skipped going to work today. It’s gray, overcast and generally gloomy.

Besides, it’s a Saturday, and a Fourth of July weekend. I hate working weekends, especially holidays, but I’m getting used to it. In this economy, few can afford to turn down work.

I awakened early, before 7 a.m, and rode my bicycle to the park to practice aikido, a Japanese martial art designed to defuse conflict, with a friend. It’s been a long time since we’ve done this. It helps me keep an even temper.

Even with a hangover it felt good to tussle and talk. We usually talk politics and the economy. He hasn’t worked in nearly four months; I’m barely employed, working as a farmhand and laborer.

“There’s no work around here,” he says. “I may have to drive down to San Diego to pick up work.”

He’s a union carpenter and, until recently, supported a family of six; the last of his four children graduated high school last year. Finances aren’t as critical now as they used to be. Still, like everyone else, he needs to pay the bills.

“If I was smart, I’d find something to do with the military; that’s where all of the money is.”

Everyone but the banks and military is bankrupt, I say. “What’s wrong with this country?” We launch into another frustrated, cynical litany of ills that plague our nation: Militarism, greed, corruption in government and business, a weak economy and an empire in decline.

“This can’t go on forever,” he says, “we’re more than a trillion dollars in debt.” If anything, the message of the last two years of economic failure has been: The party’s over. The excesses of our revered material lifestyle have drained our accounts and left us empty handed.

Most Americans, hopeful as ever, seem to think the party has merely lapsed into a sustained lull. Things will get better, they say. The markets will regain their vigor, jobs will become available, and spending will save the republic.

Glossy red, white, and blue plastic streamers wave in the wind from houses along Ocean Avenue, which runs through the middle of Cayucos, the small California coastal town where I live, where tomorrow floats and troops of scouts, drill teams, and grass-skirted dancers celebrating the Declaration of Independence will march in a show of America’s love for “freedom.”

Cayucos loves a parade, and its freedom. Our small town plays host to more than 20,000 visitors during the Fourth, who come to celebrate their freedoms by eating hotdogs, playing in the sand, and shopping at the "Peddler's Fair," known by locals as “crap on the creek,” mostly throw-away junk.

The word “freedom” gets tossed around pretty easily these days, as if we all agree on what it means: Freedom of the press, speech and religion; the protection of personal effects from government search and seizure, the right to trial by a jury of peers, the right to bear arms.

More often, however, “freedom” becomes an amalgam of unspecified ideas and feelings, which patriots will defend to the death, about what it means to be an American, which usually includes waving the flag, getting goose bumps during the singing of the national anthem, and chanting “U-S-A!” at soccer games.

Upon closer review, this muddle of feelings and ideas about freedom just as likely arises from the belief that Americans are unique in exercising their right to get rich by whatever means possible, to spend money freely without end or hindrance, even when there isn’t any to spend.

“Freedom isn’t free,” we’re told in countless bumper stickers meant to remind us of the sacrifices that have been made on our behalf. Soldiers, mostly young men, have given their lives to ensure we continue to enjoy the clear advantages of being an American, including the right to spend our diminished earnings at any outlet of our choosing.

Fourth of July, as often as not, has come to be celebrated not so much for the Declaration of Independence from tyranny as for America’s great military empire and raw technological power, which still has not squelched terrorism, but nonetheless allows us to conduct full-scale war without the requisite sacrifices at home.

We can still shop at Wal-Mart and spend freely without guilt while others shed blood in foreign lands to stop the amorphous terrorist cell sprouting everywhere like a cancer across the globe.

“The military isn’t protecting me,” Patrick says. “My tax dollars are supporting the slaughter of civilians. That’s not independence.” Independence is being able to protect yourself, he suggests. “I don’t need the military to do that.”

In my weakened mental state, I don’t argue the point. He’s right, the War on Terror, as most wars, was a sham from the start. We still haven’t caught Osama bin Laden, our invasion of Afghanistan has become America’s longest-ever war, and the Taliban is as strong as ever.

“Why are we spending all our money over there?” he asks. “We need it here.”

Already, chairs have been placed in a mass claim for seating along the parade route. Police tape has been pulled through lines of chairs, marking seating sections between groups of the nearly 20,000 spectators who will gather for tomorrow’s parade.

They come from all points: San Francisco, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles. It’s the busiest day of the year for our little town of less than 4,000.

The parade features the usual Independence Day amusements: Spectators waving American flags, young gymnasts cartwheeling, local bands rocking on flatbed trucks, grannies dressed in patriotic colors, waving to the crowd from old jalopies.

Once, an outfit of youngsters from Fresno, dressed in paramilitary uniforms, marched crisply in rigid formation, looking distressingly similar to the Brownshirts who helped the Nazis in their rise to power.

“I’m not that patriotic,” Patrick says. “It’s all a gimmick.” If they can get you to believe their story, such as “we need this war,” he adds, they can get you to do anything they want.

Last year, one of the grass-skirted matrons from a beach-chair drill team bolted from the formation as it approached the entry point of the parade. “Hey!” she waved, beckoning me to wait for her. She threw her arms around my neck, firmly pressed her middle-aged buxomness against my body, and planted her lips on mine.

The rank smell of alcohol at 10 in the morning assaulted my senses. Before I could pull away, I felt her tongue probing my mouth. “Yuck!” I turned my head away and slipped out of her arms. She ran back to her group as if nothing had happened.

Cayucos is a friendly place. “Did you see that?” I asked my girlfriend.

“What?”

“She just put her tongue in my mouth.”

“Yeah, right.”

You never know what’s going to happen at the Cayucos Fourth of July parade, but one thing’s sure: Just about everyone here’s proud to be an American, with or without their hangovers. §

I never thought it would be like this

Worried that I might sink into a hole, squeaking out an inadequate living as a part-time farmhand, mom suggests that I look into an opening at Fairhaven Memorial Park and Mortuary, not far from where she lives.

“They’re looking for a funeral director,” she says excitedly.

“Mom, I’m not qualified for a position like that.”

“You might,” she responds. “You’re good with people and you’re low-key.”

I try to imagine myself—sober demeanor, faint smile, slight signs of hope and compassion carefully constructed across my face, voice subdued—doing the business of a funeral director: “So sorry for your loss. How may we assist you?”

A warm, professional grasp of the hand and on to the next order of business. “So sorry for your loss….”

“Mom, thanks. I’d really like to stay in the field I grew up with. I like stories.”

I’ve spent most of my adult life pursuing stories for newspapers and magazines. I grew up believing that there’s a place for stories that present life not as another promotional campaign but as it is actually lived by real people. Unfortunately, the market for these kinds of stories seems to be dwindling.

“You could get a whole bunch of stories working at a mortuary.”

“I’m sure I could mom.”

She tells me it’s worth looking into; the job has been advertised for more than three weeks, she adds; they might just consider me. “It doesn’t look like they’ve found anyone.”

“Mom, that’s what businesses do; they run an ad for a few weeks, build up a candidate pool, and make their selections.”

“Well, you could look into it, get some stories, write a book and get rich.”

“I’ll look into it, mom.”

It’s not a bad idea, really. There’s likely to be more job security in this business, of course, because there’s never a shortage of dead people. It’s unlikely to be a dead-end job (no pun intended), and the story possibilities…well, you’d have be six feet under not to see them.

I go online, find the mortuary website and locate “career opportunities.” The site lists openings for Assistant Sales Manager, Family Services Counselor, Sales, and Operations Manager.

I click on operations manager, curious what duties such a position at a mortuary might entail. Assign holes to be dug? Bodies to be dressed or cremated? Gravestones to be lifted, set into place? Coffins to be bought and sold?

The ad reads: “Premiere…mortuary seeking an individual looking for a challenging opportunity that offers the ability to grow and develop a strong employee staff.”

The “challenging opportunity” sounds interesting but the ad offers no details. I can only imagine the possibilities: “Hey Hector! How come you haven’t filled that goddamned hole yet? It was supposed to have been done yesterday. We have another graveside service scheduled in the next plot at noon. What’s taking you so long? … The furnace broke down again? Damn it! We’ve got five stiffs whose ashes we’re supposed to deliver by morning….”

As for growing and developing a “strong employee staff,” I like people but have never felt comfortable managing them: “Here’s the deal guys, I’m used to working a deadline, just not at a mortuary.”

Unfortunately, they want an “experienced manager with a minimum of 5 years of funeral home management experience.” That eliminates me right away. The call volume of “over 700 cases” a year I could handle. Hell, I used to handle almost that many calls in a week as a newspaper editor.

Additionally, the job prefers an individual who’s a California licensed funeral director. That’s probably a good idea. Someone with a license can be expected to get the job done right. No Maxwell House Coffee cans as urns in this business.

Next, the Family Services Counselor’s duties include “promotion of the funeral home through public relations.” Well, here’s another opportunity to create stories. “At Fairhaven, everyone’s dying to get in….”

I hate public relations. I agree with the late comedian Bill Hicks, who said that people who earn their living convincing others they should accept things that aren’t true, or buy things they don’t need, should just go ahead and kill themselves. “You’ll be doing a public service,” he says.

I also hate sales and skip over the remaining ads, so much for career opportunities in the funeral business. The year 2010 seems to be the year of deflated career options.

The latest reports suggest that many boomers like myself are working at “survival” jobs such as checkout clerks at chain hardware stores earning $10 an hour; or the lucky ones have found positions for which they are severely over-qualified at slightly more than $10 an hour and far less than the six-figure salaries they had before the economy crashed.

“I never thought it would be like this,” they collectively groan. “I was supposed to retire and spend my golden years taking it easy.”

In a recent Frontline episode on PBS, “Close to Home,” which features a local hair salon in the upscale Upper East Side of New York City, a woman in her mid-forties laments: “I’ve had to borrow money from my mother just make ends meet.” She’s embarrassed, and surprised that she’s admitting her sudden unexpected dependency as an adult.

A former middle-aged executive who’s been out of work for more than two years admits he never anticipated long-term unemployment. The hardest hit age group in the U.S. for periods of unemployment lasting two years or longer are people 50 and above.

And so it goes, as regular salon customers complain of their reduced circumstances: “I never thought it would be like this.”

Welcome to the economy of dashed hopes, where nearly an entire generation is forced out of retirement to survive the sudden loss of personal financial resources built up over a lifetime, where careers have been severely downsized or eliminated entirely, and where a banking industry on the verge of collapse, recently bailed out by the federal government, refuses to renegotiate home loans for people unable to make ends meet.

So far, we seem to be taking it in the shorts without much complaint, but here’s what one struggling homeowner recently said he’d do if the bank refuses to renegotiate: “If the fuckin’ bank comes after my home, I’m gonna call my buddy, who’s gotta ‘dozer, and I’m gonna have him bring it over here, and I’m gonna get on that thing, drive it off the trailer and plow it right through the middle of that fuckin’ house. And you know what? I’m gonna tell the bank, ‘You can have your piece-a-shit house.’”

Another friend recently called me a “malcontent” because I’ve never been happy with the status quo, with the little bit of truth or good that squeaks out of Washington, D.C. or Sacramento; I’ve never quite trusted Wall Street. I do, however, see something positive in the crumbling condition of our global banking and business enterprises, which seem to have forgotten the smaller economies of Main Street.

We’ve been challenged to reduce consumption, to find more sustainable models for doing business, to turn to our neighbors and friends for help and support, and to think independently from the “experts” who run our government and industry.

In my own neighborhood, we’ve talked about how to grow more of our own food, and ways to earn a little more money by selling the surplus, and saving money by doing more of our own repairs. Maybe it’s a pipe dream but already one of our own opened up his yard as a nursery because he can’t find enough work as a landscaper.

Selling plants won’t make him rich, he says, but it’s a better alternative to having nothing.

I’ve never lived so close to the ground, planting, tending crops, working as a farmhand, as I have in these reduced circumstances, thinking how much better it is to be above ground eking out a living than to be below ground pushing up daisies.

Still, there’s enough uncertainty and desperation in this economy for people like my mother to suggest that maybe, just maybe, her malcontent of a son might qualify for another ground-breaking endeavor. I won’t waste my time pretending that I might qualify for such an opportunity, but at least it’s an opportunity. §

The nexus of my grief

My life has been mostly a train wreck since the economy suffered a near-collapse way back in October 2008.

I say “way back” because everything moves so quickly now; it feels like ancient history.

But several possibilities are likely: I’m broke because I’ve never made getting rich a priority, never fared well in the money economy, and some things, like voraciously greedy bankers, are simply beyond my control.

The forces at work today have made an already bad situation worse and seem to have burdened many others besides me.

A neighbor told me a friend of his who retired from pouring concrete 10 years ago is back on the job, just to make ends meet. He’s older, in his 60s, but thank goodness he’s got his health.

“It’s better than nothing, I guess,” my neighbor said.

“Yeah, but it’s a shame that someone who’s already worked so hard to enjoy his last years working less has to go back to the grind.”

“Oh, he doesn’t mind. He’s gotten used to it. He’s adjusted. At least he’s working.”

A lot of people seem to be making these “adjustments,” coming out of retirement, buying fewer consumer goods, picking up groceries at the weekly church food charity, and moving in with family to reduce expenses.

And not everyone’s lucky enough to be working. Fortunately, I’m working but not earning enough to cover the bills. I’ve also thought about calling up family to ask if I can stay with them to ride this thing out.

Last week, a fellow blueberry farmer asked me to give him a heads up if we had any additional work.

One of his tenants, a landscaper who was among the first to employ me last year when my magazine folded, needs a job.

“Oh, you bet. He’ll be the first to know,” I said. “He’s a good guy. Always pays on time.”

“Yeah, well, he’s having a really tough time right now,” the farmer said.

I’ve got barely enough work to keep one person busy. I’m mowing, weeding, tending the irrigation system, and making minor repairs. Soon, I hope, we’ll be harvesting.

Lately, I’ve wondered what future I have in working as a farm hand. Like the guy who pours concrete, I’m adjusting, making the most of a bad economy, but more uncertain about life than ever.

Print, which I grew up loving, went out of fashion just days ago, it seems, and has suffered its worst losses since the big crash. More than 30,000 journalists have lost their jobs in the past two years.

Online publishers, claiming a lack of funds, have taken advantage of writer angst and desperation, either severely reducing the amount they pay, or not paying at all.

The “free” mantra that governs the Internet has made it difficult for publishers to claim any proprietary interest in the material they post. Publishers better learn quickly they’ll never control content as they did when print reigned supreme.

It’s everybody’s business now. It’s open game for any and all; readers contribute and shape the news as much as the suppliers; and no one dare try to sell the stuff.

Additionally, digital space appears to demand less content with lower quality. I hope I’m wrong.

A recent episode of Frontline, Digital_Nation, showed that our young, who were brought up in this high-speed digital world, think they are capable multi-taskers, able to work on their computers, send text messages on their phones, eat lunch and have conversation with their friends all at the same time.

Studies are beginning to show that the more we multi-task, the more our dialog suffers. We simply can’t absorb all the data that kids today claim they can do with ease. They’re not that good at retaining information. They consume and write in bite-sized chunks. They can’t sustain a narrative beyond three paragraphs.

Everything comes in bits and pieces. The word, which once held a higher place in our public discourse, comes cheap. We don’t pay for words any more.

The complete devaluation of the word has made making a living nearly impossible for old schoolers like me who enjoy reading and writing stories that last more than three minutes.

I try not to begrudge the circumstances. The rush to throw up everything online will finally settle one day and, I hope, rest upon more established values than speed and efficiency.

I hope that we haven’t lost our appetite for stories, or our respect for storytellers.

My neighbor told me that he was also making adjustments, realizing that nothing lasts forever, accepting the inevitable—loss, change, and finally death.

At our age, we come to accept these things because there’s no use fighting them. The key, we agreed, is to embrace the changes, make the most of what we have, and move on.

That doesn’t make it any less painful. Rather than avoid the pain, though, we both agreed it’s better to grieve our losses. Why pretend that a train wreck doesn’t feel bad?

“I’ve had a hard time not getting sucked into the idea that this is a cold, mechanistic, and cruel world,” he said. He’d gone away last week and asked me to take care of his chickens. When he returned, he discovered someone had broken into his home and stolen some cash.

“I can’t think of anyone who would do something like that,” he said, more hurt by the possibility that it might have been someone he knew.

My girlfriend said later: “These are trying times; you’d be amazed at what some people will do when they’re desperate. Even among the ones you think are your best friends. If a person’s hungry, it doesn’t take much to justify stealing from another.”

My neighbor said he counters his negative thoughts with the belief that nature seeks exuberant expression; life energy finds its fulfillment in flowering and reproducing. We can choose to celebrate or rue our lives. Nature asks us to find joy, he said.

“The only way I know how to do that,” I said, “is to grieve. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, doing my best to let things go. I may never publish again. I may end up a farm hand for the rest of my life. It’s not what I envisioned when I started out…but I’m doing the best I can to embrace the changes.”

He looked at me a moment and then asked: “What is the nexus of your grief?”

I didn’t know what to say. I thought it was the disappearance and destruction of an entire industry—a way of life that I thought would last forever. Maybe it was the loss of a common story, a shared experience.

“I guess I haven’t gotten over the loss of my dad, who died just over a year ago,” I said. He nodded. “Or it could be that I have no idea how I’m going to make ends meet.”

“Money,” he said.

“Yeah, money. Sad isn’t it, that the lack of money could make a person feel so bad?”

Not even money can take away a person’s grief, I decided later, but it offers the illusion of safety and protection. It buys us small escapes from our misery.

The nexus of my grief probably goes beyond the loss of jobs, or money, or even of family; it seems to go much deeper than that, to the moment of my birth perhaps.

What I know most of all, however, is that it has connected me to my neighbor more concretely than online social networking, more simply than a smooth-running economy, and just as completely as any train wreck. §

On a full moon after the rain

Great horned owls hoo-hoo in the trees across the street. Their deep, resonant calls echo through a canyon of hills surrounding our home.

The moon shines full on a landscape sodden from recent rains, two inches in a matter of hours last night.

We sit at the foot of a reservoir that has been mostly dry these past few years and is probably little more than half full now, even with the wet winter we’ve had so far.

Gov. Schwarzenegger warned not long ago that if we had one more dry winter, water conditions in California could become “catastrophic.”

I’ve celebrated the several storms that have swept the California coastline these past few weeks, keeping my fingers crossed that the dam containing the reservoir would hold and that mudslides in the state would be few.

So far, we’ve been lucky.

We’re still not entirely in the clear, but we can breathe a little sigh of relief that rationing water this summer will be much less likely than it was even a few weeks ago.

I knew this storm would be the one to get us. It rained all night. Two inches wouldn’t ordinarily make a whole lot of difference. But the ground is already saturated after weeks of heavy rainstorms. We found two feet of standing water beneath our house today.

I woke up to a cryptic email this morning: “Here are some websites to check out while you await the tsunami.”

I wanted to get outside and check the rain gauge, see what, if any, damage or flooding was caused by last night’s rain. The last time someone warned me about a tsunami it was my daughter calling me on the phone at 10 p.m.

“Dad, there’s a tsunami coming.”

“That’s not funny, Anna,” I responded. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I’m serious, dad. There’s a tsunami.”

I’ve since learned to take such warnings more seriously. Realizing this morning’s email was a tongue-in-cheek warning, I went online and checked the news, and learned of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile today.

A tsunami advisory had been issued for the entire Pacific coastline.

For some reason, the hooing of the great horned owls makes me feel at ease, even after I’ve gone to bed for the evening. In the middle of the night, they call from different locations around the hills, flying between cypress, pine, redwood and eucalyptus trees.

Sometimes, they seem to call from just outside the bedroom window. I don’t mind. I like hearing them sounding the hills as they hunt, or mate; I like knowing that they can cut through the night with deadly precision and silence, stalking their prey.

The great horned owl is a formidable bird of the night. Its powerful talons grip and tear, its wings beat like clubs, and its beak is razor sharp. 

I heard my neighbor Claude rummaging through his garage outside this morning, cursing and tossing planks of wood.

I went outside and walked up the hill to scan for slippage, new openings in the earth, where rainwater might have rushed in and caused erosion. The great horned owls spend a lot of their time on this hill.

A steady stream of runoff flowed from the next yard over, Teresa and Tim’s place, and down through Claude’s backyard, dropped a few steps and into the back of his garage.

“Damn it!” I heard him say.

I like this neighborhood because we’re the last out post where the wilderness meets the edge of town. Only five houses on the street, which dead ends at the bottom of the reservoir that ascends nearly 200 feet above us and opens to miles of wilderness.

Osprey and eagles occasionally soar hundreds of feet above the dam. Flocks of migrating birds pass overhead nearly every day.

The enormous earthen dam was built in 1961, with a capacity of more than 40,000 acre feet of water (enough to cover 62.5 square miles in water a foot deep). That’s a lot of water.

I try not to imagine 40,000 acre-feet of water crashing down the valley, which is shaped like an enormous toilet bowl.

If the dam ever breaks, a wall of water will swish around the hillsides, flushing everything in its path—houses, trucks and trees—down to the ocean barely a quarter mile away.

From the ocean side, a sizable tsunami would come into the valley and do essentially the same thing from the other direction.

With the dam towering nearly 200 feet above us, it gives us the illusion that everything’s fine. We can’t see the enormous body of water behind it. Out of sight, out of mind, except when it rains.

I think about it every time we get rain. I think about the hills sliding down on top of us in one huge wall of mud and debris.

The owls don’t talk much during the rain, but tonight it’s clear. The bright full moon throws its bluish haze over everything; it drips in through cracks in the curtains and lights up the room.

There’s plenty of food for the owls, which will carry animals two to three times their weight; they’ll eat rabbits whole, take out skunks and raccoons, and occasionally snag a dog or a cat. Their hoo-hoos give me a feeling of reassurance. The system works.

The runoff had piled up in Claude’s garage. Water had soaked several pieces of choice wood he’d stacked on the floor. We pulled the good stuff off the floor and he dried the place out as best he could.

We followed the flow of runoff and traced it back to Teresa and Tim’s place. She came out to investigate.

“Hey,” Claude started, “I was thinking of putting a few sandbags down to keep the water from your yard running into mine and into my garage.”

“You’re getting water?” she responded.

Her husband came out and the four of us watched as the water pooled near some of Teresa’s flower pots and then ran down into Claude’s yard.

“I could probably dig a little trench right here,” Claude said, stepping past her flower pots and to a low spot that ran between their yards and away from his garage.

“Or,” Teresa’s husband suggested, “we could just move some of these pots and see if that helps.”

“I’m not moving those,” she shrieked.

“Why not?” Tim asked.

“It’s just going to open up a whole can of worms,” she complained, “and I’ve gotta babysit the grandkids today.”

She made such a fuss about it, I walked away thinking: “You wanna see a can of worms, try looking into Claude’s garage.”

She was so unwilling to be inconvenienced. Tim, her husband, later moved the pots himself, allowing the water to flow freely away from Claude’s garage.

Claude finally got the place aired out and dried up a little bit.

The owls have been quiet for a while, and now the cat fusses to be let outside. I don’t worry about the owls attacking our cat. I’m more worried about the coyotes. The rain has stopped for now.

The surf pounds in the distance and the surges of ocean water from the tsunami ceased hours ago.

Claude and I rode our bikes down to watch the ocean before the sun went down. A crowd of young people danced and teased as the water lapped at their feet. Tomorrow I’ll finish pumping the water from underneath our house. §

Between ministry and sports writing

Tustin News Publisher Bill Moses took a deep breath, relaxed back into his leather chair, interlaced the fingers of both hands, and rested them on his chest. He gazed at me.

I had just asked him for a raise.

“You know I’m letting you be sports editor at my expense,” he finally exhaled.

I was earning $4 an hour, had just graduated from college and was beginning to develop a loyal readership.

“Really? That’s what you think?”

The area boasted numerous competitive high school sports teams which frequently dominated the playoffs and won state championships: football, girls basketball, soccer, baseball and water polo, a beehive of sports activity, including swimmers training for the 1984 Olympics.

I’d taken the sports editor position after completing an internship as a reporter at the weekly newspaper in the town where I grew up.

There were three high schools in the city, all jockeying for space in the local sports pages, wanting to be recognized for their hard-won battles and scores. Good sports pages meant devoted readers, subscribers, mostly parents of kids whose only glory might be to score the winning goal or to win an actual high school championship.

My readers let me know where they stood. They wrote letters to the editor, talked to me at games, told me secrets and asked me not to print things.

I got to know their kids, whose names and pictures I’d run in the paper.

I freely quoted the young athletes and let their color and personality show through, adding depth and drama to the sports pages. The feedback from readers was mostly positive.

Coaches encouraged their players to talk to me about their experiences during the game, how they suffered a beating or outsmarted an opponent, and to get used to the needling of sports writers.

This was especially helpful for those kids who planned to compete in college, a coach once told me: “It’s good for them to learn early on how the press can really fuck things up.”

Quoting the prep athletes was fine as long as opposing teams couldn’t use their printed words against them. “If I ever hear of an opponent using something you printed as a way to get back at us, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

Overall, covering local high school sports had been a positive experience.

I liked working at the Tustin News, even though it wasn’t something I wanted to do forever. For now, it was a fun first job as a reporter.

The only problem was that my wife and I couldn’t afford to live off $4 an hour. “What are you going to do if he refuses to give you a raise?” she asked.

“Hell, I could get a job as a janitor for $4 an hour,” I said. “I’ll give him my notice. If he doesn’t want to give me a raise, I’ll go somewhere else.”

Bill pointed to the many errors I’d let pass, told me that it wasn’t cheap getting me up to speed as a page editor. He was spending a lot of money on the presses right now and wasn’t sure he could afford any more expenses….

“I’ve never hung you up, Bill.”

“Once.”

“When?”

“We were late and it cost me a bundle.”

“If you remember, Bill, my pages were already finished when the ad department decided to throw another ad into the sports section, and not just a small ad but a quarter page. I had to cut an important story and shift things around.”

He lifted a hand from his interlaced fingers, and gestured for silence. We’d already had this discussion about late presses.

“Let me think about it.

Bill seldom gave pats on the back. As long as you didn’t hear from him, you could safely bet that he was satisfied with your work.

The next day, I stepped into Mr. Moses’ office ready to turn in my notice. I’d quit if he persisted in telling me that he was doing me a favor. I had nothing else lined up and nothing, really, to lose.

I’d already given up a chance to go into ministry.

Before going to work at the newspaper, I had been offered an associate pastor position at the American Baptist church down the road.

Pastor Hollywood, as my wife’s family liked to call him then, sat me down in his office one evening to show me that he had worked out the numbers and figured out a way to create a new position in the church budget. He only needed to get approval from the board of deacons.

The pay would have been about the same. The only difference was that the church would cover some of my seminary expenses and, down the road, a housing allowance perhaps, eventually a congregation of my own.

I liked Pastor Hollywood, even though he could sometimes come across as puffed up and buffoonish. His mantra, and his mission, was: “Bless people’s hearts and lives.” In spite of his sincerity, it always came off as a little bit vague.

He believed in me and allowed me to speak to the congregation whenever the spirit moved.

He wanted to build a family of believers, who’d gather weekly to pray, read and study the Bible, sing hymns, and occasionally sit down together for meals. He loved church barbecues and held them as often as he could.

He was more social than spiritual.

He kept a proud demeanor, with wide, grandiose waves of the hand as he blessed the congregation. “May the Lord bless people’s hearts and lives through you as you go about your week,” he’d say, his hand and arm passing over the flock.

He held his head high in the pulpit, slightly tilted, like an enormous sea bird, chest puffed out, feathers extended in a showy spread, which is how he earned the nickname “Hollywood.”

His showiness, however, always came across as a little bit stiff, as if God personally held him around his mid-section with a firm hand and turned him this way and that as he preached.

He looked down his nose at the congregation. Not in proud disdain but as one who’d once been raised to new life. The new life had long since disappeared but he still kept the composure of a child whose father was king.

He wanted to grow the church, he told me, and needed a younger associate to provide support and bring in new, youthful energy. “The board will probably go for it if I can show them how to work it out in the budget,” he said.

Pastor Hollywood’s offer appealed to me on several levels:

• The job would give me plenty of time to study and pray; and I’ve always liked time alone, although God presumably is never far away, if not occupying the same space—even in our most troubled, indecisive moments.

• I liked the idea of passing on a message of hope, letting others know they were never entirely alone and always loved, no matter who they were or what they did.

• I liked the experience of grace, of unmerited favor from a person whose love is unconditional, forgiving and kind.

• I could socialize, put off a real job for a little while longer, explore church life more deeply, and learn the ways of the Spirit.

• I might find a calling, a place for my best self to excel and shine as a beacon of light and grace.

“I have to warn you, though,” Pastor Hollywood told me, “just as many seminary students are as likely to turn bitter and leave the church as they are to find a place in it.”

He meant well and spoke the truth and it scared me. I had no plans of becoming bitter and leaving the church, but I could see how it might happen. Seminary students were among the most miserable people I’d ever met.

There were no guarantees, I decided.

Even with God on my side, I was learning, there would always be some measure of risk choosing a path, especially one that meant working in the church.

Prayer, the heart enlightened by the gospel, God’s truth, the Bible—all these would serve as signposts, I was told. When they all fall into alignment, I was taught, then I’d know without a doubt which way to go.

Unfortunately, most of my major life decisions had already been fraught with troubling doubts. The three-point method of discerning God’s will—aligning the heart through prayer, fellowship, and reading the Bible—made sense in theory but seldom worked out for me.

Does God want me to be a preacher or a journalist? Does God even care? More often, I stumbled into my opportunities and made my decisions based on what felt right and made the most sense.

I had worked hard in college to master the basics of journalism. I wanted to write and tell people’s stories. My parents, who were more interested in how I would support myself than in my ideas about following God, had pointed me to a career in journalism.

“You’re so nosy,” mom would say, “you’d be good at it.”

“I’m not nosy, mom. I’m curious. And I like talking to people.”

“Well, you are very social,” she’d add as if that was the same as being nosy.

Putting great stock in the Christian ethic that a child, no matter how old, should respect his parents’ wishes, I followed their advice.

In the end, faced with the choice of a career in ministry or journalism, I chose the latter, learning quickly that my professors were right: “It’s not a career where you’re going to make a lot of money.”

I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake choosing a career.

Bill Moses wasn’t religious as far as I could tell but he was a good Republican. He spent as little money as possible to keep his news business running. I was convinced that he certainly wasn’t going to spend another penny on me.

At a minimum, I would have appreciated at least 25 cents an hour more; an hourly rate of $4.25, but I’d already given up the possibility. I was ready to quit.

“Well, Bill,” I started, “I was thinking about our conversation yesterday….”

He stopped me mid-sentence. “How about $5 an hour?”

I didn’t know what to say. It seemed a huge increase. If I’d known better, I would have asked to think about it. Play out the drama. But I was too elated, realizing that he valued me enough to make such a leap.

“That sounds good, Bill.” It was the start of a long bumpy career that today has been devastated by the digital revolution. §

In the blur of an oak

There’s a turn in the dirt road that’s almost a blur to me, except for the fact that it’s both beautiful and dangerous.

I slow down first because it’s a blind corner and second because it dips dangerously fast into the creek 30 feet below.

One slight missed turn and a tumble down the steep embankment would easily be the end of a life.

The only safety net is an old oak tree growing out of and over the embankment. The road becomes most narrow, and the turn most dangerous, at the point where the spacious oak stands.

I’ve wanted to stop here, stand by the tree, protected by its cover, and listen to the creek recently washed with rainfall. It’s wild, green and alive here.

But it’s too narrow and dangerous to stop.

At the bottom of the turn a red tail hawk sits at the top of a post, watching over the fast-flowing creek. There’s a place where I can park and take in the view.

Lately I’ve been in such a hurry to get to the farm, I haven’t taken the time to stop. So far, it’s mostly a blur with occasional side-glances at the tree and the creek below as I pass by carefully, watching for anyone coming around the corner.

The road is surprisingly busy with trucks from Arizona, farmers on quads, electric service and delivery vehicles, tractors and pick-ups with surfboards on the rack.

The dirt road has turned slightly muddy and it’s slippery. I can see the tread of wheels and the mud they’ve splattered onto the road.

Today’s not a good day to stop. Despite the rain, and the slippery mud, the road has been busy.

In fact, as I make another less treacherous blind turn in the road, I’m startled when a middle-aged man in a ball cap, face gleaming in the gray of recent rain, speeds by me on a quad, the four-wheel workhorses farmers use to tend their fields, check on workers, and repair irrigation.

He didn’t even let up the gas but sped along, smiling brightly, as if he’d been set free from something, without care, fearless.

His cheerfulness brightened me as I kept saying to myself: “Everything’s going to be OK. Everything’s going to be OK.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the area about an heiress of the Arm & Hammer fortune purchasing property here, 3,000 acres some say. At least there’s been a lot of activity—new fences, a new corral, and plenty of trucks from Arizona.

“She brings her workers here from Arizona; that’s where she’s from,” a local resident told me recently. “She won’t hire Californians, at least none from around here. They’re not good enough.”

Most of the crew building the corral drove trucks with Arizona license plates and they worked day and night until they finished the job. Within days, they were bringing in cattle.

I could tell her crew was a different breed, even before I saw their license plates. Everything about them seemed large, like the desert, and imposing.

“She works them like dogs,” the local told me. “She hires only the best.”

I don’t know why but my first thought when I saw the guy in the ball cap was that he probably works for her. He didn’t look like someone who was being worked like a dog. He looked more like management.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to manage a farm. You’d have to grow up with it. I don’t see how it could be done any other way.

I had yet to face my worst danger, still ahead, one that had started the day before. I was happy to be out, testing the road, driving as safely as possible, wishing I’d had the confidence and reckless glee of the man on the quad.

I’d barely averted a disaster, a result of ignorance and a sudden need to relieve myself in the unoccupied workers quarters, the nearest building with functional toilets. You don’t sit on these toilets. You squat. There’s no paper. You bring your own.

I had turned on the irrigation to test the lines and make sure they were drawing solution from a tank with sulfuric acid. In my haste to get to the bathroom, I’d improperly turned off the system and water had backed up into the tank.

When I returned minutes later, the poly tank looked as though it was about to explode. It had expanded and solution was trickling down the sides. My stomach turned ill. I panicked.

Fearful that it was too late, I walked to the other side of the field, distraught and sick to my stomach, imagining an environmental disaster in which acid pours into the creek and the end of my farming days; I collapsed to the ground and sat and waited for it to explode.

I thought of Zorba the Greek, as everything around him turns to shit, and he takes it all in. There’s no time for whining or groveling, he says. Be a man! Take your medicine!

When I realized that it wasn’t going to blow, I returned to the sputtering tank, released the pressure by opening the lines to irrigate the field. A small amount of solution had trickled out onto the muddy clay. The rains were coming.

I wasn’t too worried about it reaching the creek and if it had there was enough water flow to dissipate what might have spilled into it.

Still, I made a call to the supplier. “ I think water got into the line,” I said, “and the tank started sputtering, trickling out solution.”

It should be OK, he told me. “Everything’s going to be OK,” I told myself after we hung up.

The next morning I began researching the hazards of working with sulfuric acid and remembered that I had left a wrench on top of the tank, which had been covered to keep the rain off of it. Acid is highly reactive to metals.

Again, I panicked and rushed to get out there, imagining the top of the tank steaming with the fluid remains of a wrench melted in acid.

In the blur of passing an oak in the tight corner of the road, both beautiful and dangerous, on a wet and rainy California morning, I found a metaphor for my life on the farm.

I know very little of the hazards and joys of this lifestyle. I’m making a dangerous turn in my life and what beauty there is passes with side-glances and an eye out for oncoming trucks.

I’m reminded too that to survive it pays to pay attention.

I’m also reminded that I need to find a place in the road to pause and ponder its beauty as well as its hazards, and to feel the wind in my face, like the quad driver who found pleasure riding through the mud. §

Aldolfo's grief

Aldolfo’s cellphone rang and he began an animated conversation in Spanish.

His mother died last week. I can’t be sure but I think he was trying to explain to a sibling why he wouldn’t be attending her memorial.

The day his mother died, Aldolfo asked if there was any work. I’d told him to take it easy. Nothing to do until mañana.

He left, appearing content, even though money and food were low and his mother was sick in a hospital in Mexico. He returned less than an hour later.

“Mi Madre,” he began, and let loose the saddest string of Spanish words I’d ever heard, even though technically I didn’t understand them.

The message, however, was clear: His mother was dead.

He’d received the message on his cellphone minutes earlier. He began to sob, I put my arm around his neck and he embraced me. Tears fell for a moment. Then he told me he still wanted to work the next day, and sadly turned away to walk home.

Unable to travel, he is the only child who can’t attend her memorial in Mexico. He’s stuck with me working on the farm.

“Maybe Decembré,” he said when I asked him the next day if he planned to go home for his mother’s memorial service.

“December!” That’s almost a year from now, I told him.

“No denaro.” He can’t go anywhere, with no money, or car. Like me, he’s stuck, living in a trailer across from the packinghouse. His sister lives a few strides up the dirt road in a home with a family of her own. They haven’t been around.

I’m guessing she’s with others—in L.A. or Mexico, I’m not sure. Her husband, who was already in Mexico and about to return home, is staying on a few days to assist the in-laws, according to Aldolfo.

I don't speak Spanish, but I'm beginning to understand him more as we both use signs, signals and Spanglish to converse. 


The lack of money was starting to get to Aldolfo. He’d asked me several times when he was going to get paid. He seemed worried, agitated.

“No denaro, no comida!” he exclaimed.

“You’ve got no food, Aldolfo?”

“No!”

I’ll do what I can, I responded. I don’t make the payments. I’ll let the boss know right away, I told him, which I did.

I brought him some comida, tamales and pintos the next day. I bought them with the last bit of denaro, about $10 in cash, which I had until my own payday. I understood his frustration, but I also wondered if he wasn’t playing me, if he wasn’t making a fool of me. How could he not have any food?

I’m a sucker for hard cases. I figured it was better to err on the side of foolishness than see a grown man go hungry. So I brought him food.

When his phone rang, we were moving about 500 heavy, water-laden, soil-filled, 5-gallon grow bags into place, a task that wouldn’t have been necessary had Aldolfo set them up the way I had shown him from the start.

This has happened before, where I’ve demonstrated how to perform a task, explaining verbally and showing physically how to do it, and he continues to do it another way.

He watches me as I explain how to move the bags so we don’t trip over the spaghetti tubing that feeds the plants.

I know he doesn’t understand me. “Aldolfo,” I say, “move the bags closer to where the tubes come out of the line so people and dogs won’t trip over them and break them. OK?”

I demonstrate tripping by pretending to catch my foot on the loop. "OK?" I ask.


I move the heavy bag so that it protects the connectors, prevents the loops from catching people’s legs and feet. He nods OK, indicating he understands. He goes after it, slowly moving the bags into place.

He misses a bag. I don’t get on him about it. I can move it later. But I’m amazed at how quickly he lets one go. Maybe it’s sloppiness, a failure to notice, a failure to care—or grief. I can’t be sure.

I had broken two connections the day before. Working alone, I tripped over the tubing and broke the connectors, which snapped right off.

I held a can of spray paint under my arm; I was marking the broken connections. When I bent over to pick up the loose spaghetti tubing I’d just broken, I managed to blast the paint into my face and eye.

My head already hurt and my eyes felt sore in the light, like a hangover, from the moment I’d awakened that morning. A friend told me it was a reaction to the radical pressure changes in advance of several storm systems about to slam onto California's southern coastline.

Each time I bent over, my head would ache and pound. I’d already adjusted 200 plants and felt terrible. The paint blast to the face put me over the top and I threw the can as far as I could in a fit of anger.

I was mad at Aldolfo for not doing what I’d asked him to do in the first place, and mad at myself for not watching him more closely. I was mad for not paying attention to how I was holding the spray can, and mad for doing work that wasn’t necessary, for picking up after Aldolfo with a splitting headache.

“It’s like watching a child,” the boss said once.

My newest neighbor, recently relocated from Arizona where he managed his father’s vineyard, said: “I hate to sound prejudiced or anything but sometimes I think they do it because it’s job security.”

You mean the workers purposely do things the wrong way so they’ll have work?

“Yeah,” he said, without hesitating, “I think they’re a lot smarter than we give them credit. They pretend not to understand and that way they can keep working.”

If that’s true, I said, they should be laughing at us stupid gringos.

“They are,” he said.

Aldolfo wasn’t laughing. When he hung up the phone, I heard a loud snapping sound, as though one of the bags had been suddenly pulled apart.

I turned and saw the top half of the heavy bag torn in two places where his hands had just tried to pick it up. He stood over the bag, back hunched over, arms hanging at his sides. He seemed frustrated, angry, defeated.

Until that point there hadn’t been any mishaps moving the bags, even though Aldolfo had continued to try lifting them instead of sliding them over the way I had shown him.

I stood up and walked over to him. “Are you OK, Aldolfo?”

He nodded his head, “Yes.” His eyes were red with grief and fury.

I watched as he continued to move the bags, he was listless and unhappy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to go home. He needed the work as much—maybe more—than I did.§