Fairbanks Juneau Anchorage

For the last few days, I have gone to sit with a friend who is dying. His lungs and heart are going, his face has the bugged out look of someone not getting enough oxygen. His hair, once clipped and neat, is a long, wiry shock and he wears a sweatshirt all day, watching tee vee from a hospital bed. 

The bed is in a crowded convalescent home which he hopes to leave soon. My friend, David, has lived for many years by himself in a tiny and dirty apartment hidden in plain sight amidst the Italian restaurants and knick knack shops of Cannery Row. Cactus has overtaken his walkway, his refrigerator is unplugged because the noise bothers him. 

He once gave me a calling card with only his name on it and his long ago occupation, house painter, crossed off below. There was no phone number or email address or contact information of any kind. Just a card announcing that he existed and hinting at what he had once had to do to survive. He inherited a little money around that time, but it didn't change his life much. He bought a long black Jaguar with a mobile phone that he never bothered to activate. The rare times he ventured out to have lunch with friends he wore an expensive wool overcoat and sometimes a well-fitting suit. He picked up the tab. Otherwise, he just crossed out house painter on his calling card and stayed home. 

Yesterday he was telling me about traveling to Alaska with his mom. It was cold but not snowy and they rode busses. It might have been as early as May and as he whispers he repeats the names of the three cities Juneau, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and I fill in the details when he gets confused over which was which.

A physical therapist appears and disrupts the story then disappears again. David starts over. It was cold and they rode a bus or maybe a train from Anchorage to Fairbanks. That had to be it because no one rides busses out of Juneau. A man in a good overcoat riding a bus across the sub-arctic with his mother, looking out the window. Maybe a snowflake falling here and there.

When he was done, I left a pile of old New Yorkers on his table and got up to leave. Out his window was a view of the pine forest above Monterey and it was raining. Raining in late May. I could see a few houses below, see their backyards. A few stacks of firewood, stray bicycles and garden tools not put away, back fences. It was likely our last goodbye and the hugging made him dizzy on his feet.

As I drove away, the names of cities in Alaska repeated themselves in my head. Like a jazz riff, a simple collection of chords that is anything but simple. The late season rain fell and was explainable by a complex interaction of gravity, Coriolis effect, and the temperature gradient of water off the coast of South America. I kept a look out for cops, because my beat to shit truck was not legal on the road anymore. 

The radio was off and the window open to the rain. The syllables of Anchorage and Juneau and Fairbanks repeated and merged, morphed and dissolved. Visiting with David crossed itself off my to-do list and was replaced by nothing. I can’t explain rain in late May. 

Novel chapter rough

Loud Fast Short

Lucy and Chris skipping rocks across the Carmel River, parallel to Rosie’s bridge. The slackwater where Lucy’s father once pointed out dying steelhead to them from the grating above. Lucy flinging random stones with a loose arm. Chris firing flat rounders low and hard at the surface. “Seven,” he says.

“Five.” Lucy ducks beneath the girders and sits on Chris’s skateboard, the one with the graphic of a skeletal chalice and rising, distorted bubbles. Pulls a brass pipe from her pocket and takes a puff of hash. Exhales with a sigh. The bridge shakes with the sound of hard urethane wheels over grating. Cracking and rumbling and diffuse, its constituents kicking boards up and scrambling single file under the bridge from the far end.

Lucy says, “Here come your Lost Boys.”

They greet with monosyllables and ironic tips of non-existent hats. Hands pulled from pockets and shoved back in. Walkman headphones around their necks. Not Milo looks away from Lucy, Jamison leans toward her, puts up his hand up. Lucy snorts, slaps it. “Let me see your shirt,” Lucy say to Not Milo.

Not Milo untucks the corners of his blue polyester tee-shirt for Lucy and Chris to see. A white outline of Ronald Reagan’s shit-eating grin face with crosshairs over it. “Came in the mail,” he says.

“Get’s right to the point.”

They scramble up to the tarmac, Chris skating ahead, the others straggling out behind. Lucy hiking along behind, a woven jute bag with her camera over a shoulder. Lucy sings: “The crew is me, the crew is you” as she shleps past Rosie’s Cracker Barrel and Country Store. Lucy calls out, “A posse, a brigade, a squadron. A flock of fledglings and aunt Lucy. Hi, Mrs. Sullivan.” An old woman in a pink sweater lifts her hand.

The wannabe village of Carmel Valley a dusty place not know for abundant of concrete or asphalt. Except to Chris, coming from further out, past the pavement of any kind, way out further in the valley, redeemed to civilization from a barren squalor of dust and oak trees.

To ride on things he isn’t supposed to, like parking curbs and walls and drainage culverts. To spend the lengthening summer days on reconnaissance with Not Milo and Jamison, spying over redwood fences and mapping grocery store parking lots, cutting brush back from cinder block retaining walls. To grub dirt from storm drains and sweep pebbles from the post office parking lot curbs. 

They have a shared vision of pavement, of dirt hills frozen into rideable waves. Not Milo’s father teaches them how to frame up curves and face them with spare sheets of masonite. They build plywood ramps and stash them in the bushes of the community center.  They make their own playgrounds and slide, bash, jump them into splinters and rubble. 

Chris foists punk mix tapes on the others, sends off money orders and xeroxed ‘zines come to his door. Chris in his Arrow shirts and careful buzz cut hair. His delicate fingers. His scarecrow legs in surplus Army chinos with safety-pin pegs.

He pushes along in front of the others, twitching and fast. He pushes away from the others, stops at Los Ositos road to wait for his sister, pops his board nose up, stands with it in the dirt. 

“Hurry up!”

Chris and Lucy have made a discovery, have found what the boys have all dimly hoped might exist, and so convened this expedition. To a place as monumental as the den of a yeti, a loch ness, a lost blue bucket of gold flakes. His sister eccentric to the skating, along because she come along. Black hair bobbing around her blue eyeglasses. 

Reunited, they walk a little further, then crawl through some brush, single file, to a hole in a fence. Chris has kicked the grape stakes in, one at a time, to ready the entrance. Then he is through, then they all are. The boys before Lucy assemble in numb silence. Surveying the backyard before them, mouths agape. 

Under a scattering of live oak leaves, surrounded by forgotten chaise lounges, it reveals itself: a big hole in the ground. A valley choked with sunshine and lavender, olive trees and fishing holes, and Chris has delivered them a derelict patch of sinuous, artificial, suburban squalor. A bowl to throw themselves into. An empty swimming pool. 

Butt cans full of sand, scattered between the lounges. Dirty topaz ring around the surface of things. A chaging building of sun warped redwood boards and red trim faded out to the color of old lipstick. The diving board luminous blue, sticking out like a tongue. 

The five split up and circulate to the rim of the square pool under separate directions, surveying the flotsam in piety. The deep end of the pool vertical, plunging, stained with the bodies of oak moths. At the bottom, a mucky eye of water, black with dirt and tannin, rimmed with turquoise rings the color of tropical oceans. Lucy standing back, watching the boys, bemused in a hashy cloud, boys with boards moving through the fog of recognition. 

The transitions, the curves, are short and tight, but it is all rideable. “It goes,” says Jamison, more a question than a statement. Chris and Not Milo nod their heads in unison.

“How did you find it?” 

“I could hear it. We were waiting for my dad, across the street in the truck. The wind was blowing but I could hear the oak leaves.” He nods his chin. 

“Oak leaves?”

“I could hear them blowing into the pool. But no water.”

Then it was a matter of leaving a shovel and a rake in his dad’s truck, at the ready for the long sessions he otherwise has spent in boredom and arguing with Lucy. His father there to buy or sell dope and the noise of Chris skating on the street unnecessary attention.

Now he hops out, throws his tools over the fence of the dark, A-frame house, its glass windows pointing north. Hops the short fence by stepping on a planter box. Then bucket and bailing, not hearing his father until his name is called up the street. A hillside of scrubby forest, the houses spaced far apart, and Chris hops the fence again without his tools. His father doesn’t ask, gives him a sidelong glance from the cab of the tuck. Lucy shrugging at him.

It has taken Chris several session to bucket and sweep the skudge out of the drain, his pants rolled up to keep from getting shmeggy. One last group effort, brooming the moisture around and wiping soil with Not MIlo’s  sweatshirt. Then sitting on the coping, feet dangling, Not Milo and Jamison drinking stolen wine coolers from Not Milo’s backpack. Chris, the lone adherent to the straight edge and Lucy who knows better than to drink with a pack of boys, random tokes of hash her only inebriation.

They feel some business with the place. They are surveyors on the edge of a grand canyon. Lucy the expedition’s reporter, watching the fifteen year old boys stare down a hole in the ground with the great wisdom her extra year of age imparts. She likes this, to be amongst scruffy boys doing something rather than the preppy girls her own age talking about pop stars. Lucy having made a survey of the bus stop of high school life, it’s boys and girls, and decided to take a sideline. Until she can leave, go to where the boys are worth fooling around over. To where and when the boys are going somewhere.

Jamiosn says, “This is it. This right here,” he bangs his fist on the blue epoxy surface of the diving board, “this is the place.” 

He is the first to get after the new danger. He sucks down his Bartles & James, slaps the tail of his board onto the coping, and calls: “HELLO IT’S ME!”

“Let it dry some more,” says Chris. Then when he sees his words have no effect,  “You have to name it if you drop in first.” 

Before Not Milo can suggest Chris make the first attempt, Jamison drops down the vertical wall. More like he jumps right down it, shouting as his front wheels hit the vert and he commits to the drop. For one long, rushing moment he is golden, falling just right. He is ahead of gravity. 

Then he hits the smeary, humus crusted drain and spins completely around, tearing a long gash in his knee as the pool sands him to a stop. His freed board clatters around him, rumbling like falling rocks in the echoey depths.

Not Milo rolls him a California Cooler from the shallow end and Jamison ties up the knee with his shirt. He gets up laughing, his bleached hair flopping around his face.  “BAHRG!” he shouts. “That really fucking hurts.” He forgets to name anything. 

The others dive down into the shallow side of the square concrete bowl, revolve around the dirty walls, surface to dive again, take passed out naps on the diving board. Lucy drags a lounge cushion to the edge, dangles her feet over, and pulls the camera from her bag. 

Chris makes a cartographic study of every transition of the pool. Starting in the small end, grinding his trucks every which way over the coping. Skating in tight little circles on the bottom, popping ollies and practicing entering each transition. It is only when he is sure of himself, sure of the conditions, that he starts into the deep end. 

He pushes his board down from the shallows and Not Milo stops in the middle of  a joke he is telling Jamison. Chris hits the high wall and circles in a long fluid sweep, pumping up and down the transitions, and then he is airborne. Just a bit off the bulging light in the diving board wall, grabbing the frontside rail of his board and throwing a fist in the air, a determined, posed, ridiculous frown on his face.

No sound of rattling catching him, rising just above the lip of things, everyone watching from the shallows in awe. His fist punching into the sky, his loose shirt flapping behind him. His first flight in the pool is a performance, a song. Loud, fast, short. 

He circles back to the shallow end, pops his board up, parks himself on the coping. Lucy looks at him as if she wants to muss his hair. Her brother is breathing hard, trying not to show it, elated. His lips, lifting slowly from the corners, almost form a smile.

Lucy pulls the camera from her lap, leans back to make his face focusable, clicks the shutter. Developing it later in the week in photography class, all it reveals is the moving image of Chris’s left hand, jabbing reflexively past the lens, moving through the frame like a blurry bird.

Calories and Pain

About a week ago, a week early by the calendar, Meals-on-Wheels brought a Thanksgiving dinner to my father's house. Turkey, cranberries, and three pieces of Saran-Wrap covered pumpkin pie. It had been a long and sad day and my father insisted that I eat something. I did not want to but started into a piece of pie to placate him.

I think of pumpkin pie as a most reliable dish, the Toyota Corolla of holiday food. As long as there is some kind of creamy, pumpkin-like delivery substrate, the cloves and nutmeg and whatever other spices come from the “pumpkin spice” container do the heavy lifting. I was explaining this to my father, because he had asked if the pie was good and I had said yes and no, and he had started to chuckle. The long, sad day had been preceded by another just like it and we had not had much to joke about. “That's so perfect,” he said, “that's just the kind of thing you would say. It's not good but it's good for being not good. That's so Josh.” His chuckle became a laugh, a slap of the knee, and then wiping tears from his eyes.

I'm not really sure what he meant, but I laughed just to laugh with him. My step-mother was in the hospital with three-quarters of an inch of blood on her brain, my father's oxygen machine whirred in the next room, and I was still loaded on morphine from my own visit to the emergency room. None of us had any money for food or gas or fulfilling our prescriptions. Each day we awoke, attended to whomever was in the worst shape, and my father and I returned home telling one another we didn't need anything to eat anyway.

That was my Thanksgiving for this year, calendar be damned. I am not in the mood for counting blessings, not that I don't have a great many. I don't care to wrap anything into a metaphor, though they do come to mind. I awake each day and say here comes another one. It is not a matter of feeling good or not good, it is a state of suspended agency, of worn out fight-or-flight response, of the eternal scrambling of poverty.

I don't care if it this means anything to anyone or not, I just want to remember it as I remember last year. I see myself, then, rain-soaked and smelling of sagebrush, tromping through the redwood forest with a shotgun. I was hunting quail, alone but not lonely, soaking in the wet and spice and riotous wind of the mountain top. I gathered nothing to eat for dinner, but in the evening a rare owl came to hoot with me in the gloaming.

It was enough, that day. Enough for me. 

The Cedar Chest

In the process of preparing to leave the Cachagua property, my mother has been making a list of things to sell and come up with mortgage money for her house in town. One idea she has is to sell back her family cedar chest to her brother's side of our clan. According to family lore, the chest was handmade by my great-grandfather from cedar growing on his farm in Salisbury, North Carolina during the Depression.

That is unlikely the case. The legs of the chest were turned on a lathe, the rails worked with a router, and though the side-boards are warped and imperfect, they were run through a planer, not rough-sawn. The finish, though it might not be original, is pretty modern.

If I sound skeptical, it is because another family heirloom, a child's rocking chair, came to me with the same story. I never really questioned the story until I had the little oak chair in my hands and could see plainly that it was also fashioned with shop tools.

The region around Salisbury was once known for its furniture mills. There have always been outlets in the area where local folk and tourist alike shop for bargains. It's pretty likely that these were the source of my family heirlooms. Possibly my great grandfather cut the wood and had someone else do the shop work, or played some more direct role in their shaping, but that is lost in the yeast of my grandfather's rather doughy capacity for embellishment. The man was a liar; a trait sometimes heart-warming when it came to creating family myth but less romantic when it came to broken promises or anything related to money.

I find value in these heirlooms because, and not despite, I know they come swaddled in family history that has its roots in distorted notions of humbleness. My grandfather parked his butt in the little rocking chair and my son did too. I hope his grandson does one day and I don't especially care if ol' Papaw whittled it with a rusty spoon by firelight. But it got me to thinking, because my mother holds the notion that the chest is probably monetarily valuable, of how we try and sell these stories to ourselves and others.

When I was about ten, some friends were holding a big garage sale and invited me to bring a few items. Though I was loathe to part with any of them, I set out a box of books with visions of Skittles and six packs of Jolt Cola as my pay off.

The thing is, I priced the books according to whether I had enjoyed them. At some point in the day, after not having many sales, a lady came along and pulled a Hardy Boys mystery from my box.

“Ten dollars,” she asked, “for this?”

“Well, yeah. It's really good.”

“But it was only $7.50 new.”

Needless to say, she didn't buy the book and I went home with the same heavy cardboard box instead of a sugar high.

In some ways, I have been like my mother in recent months. The sense of connectedness, of emplacement I feel in these mountains is a vital, invigorating part of me. I don't want to leave this place and so I have run around trying to duct tape and bailing-wire myself into a living situation or land deal that might allow me to continue dreaming my dreams, making my stories.

I have set out my little visions on the table, sent them in to the appraiser, and have come up with no place to lay my head, no gas money to get to town and back. I have deluded myself into believing that my connection to this place, which manifests itself in the stories I tell about it, is a visible, concrete thing. I have tried to parlay my articulations into some sort of scrip for rent money.

My stories are worth what they are worth, but it is not to be measured in mortgage payments.

Beneath his sport coat and golf shirts, there was a hillbilly in my grandfather's soul. A little barefoot, redneck boy whom he trotted out to demonstrate just how far he had come in life. He was, indeed, a self made man, a successful one. And like many who rise from poverty to excess, he romanticized his meager beginnings to make for good banter out on the fairway back nine. But he still rose sometimes, early in the morning, to drive out to a country cafe where he ate biscuits and red-eye gravy with the farmers and construction workers before they set out to labor with their hands. He was a great storyteller, and I sometimes wonder which venue he really felt more at home in.

In my mom, there is a young southern girl still trying to believe her father literally. And it still hurts her when the signature on the checks he wrote turn out to be forged. In some ways, she didn't really rise in the material world, going from the leafy suburbs of Durham to scrounging for mortgage money at age sixty-two. But I love that she still loves these stories, and that she is incapable of lying.

I've only been to the South via airplane and Volkswagen bus. I have my family's love of story-telling, but I don't really know, sometimes, if I am telling mild lies based on little truths, whether I am whittling with wood from my own property or turning out reproductions. I only know that I don't know how to cash in on them either way. Maybe that's okay. 

Hot Springs and Money

Yesterday I went out to Tassajara for the second time this season. It was my mother's sixty-second birthday and one of what the San Francisco Zen Center calls “locals' days”. The definition of who is a local and who is not, according to the Zen Center, is a little hard to swallow. Last year my friend Kua, who is one of the monastery's closest neighbors, called for reservations and was told they had all been taken. Mostly by people from San Francisco, which about 150 miles and several million people away. When another friend and neighbor of Tassajara, Michelle, called to make reservations, a well meaning receptionist started explaining to her how bad the road is. “I know,” said Michelle, “I grew up thirty minutes away.”

“No one,” said the receptionist, “lives thirty minutes away.”

Okay, it does take most folks closer to an hour to drive from Michelle's place to the Zen Center, but you get the picture.

The first time I visited this year, I stole a $20 water bottle from the office in a fit of pique. Something in me bridled at spending $30 just to soak in the springs. Mind you, I have a great deal of respect for the monks of Tassajara. I appreciate the rich heritage of DT Suzuki, the center's founder, and Tassajara's esteemed place in the role of spreading Zen in America. And the kitchen, birth place of the Tassajara Bread Book and many important contributions to the now robust organic foods movement, is an inspiration. But I needed a new water bottle and I felt it made the situation more just. 

I have been going to Tassajara since I was fifteen and would clear trails in the surrounding area. I certainly don't mind pitching in a few dollars for use of the kitchen's coffee and tea service, a few dollars to help with the work of the monks. But $30? To soak in a hot springs? Really, you espouse a life of non-attachment and simplicity but want to pay for yours by charging me a stiff fee to soak in hot water that comes to us all free of charge?

Tassajara, though it often feels like a world apart to visiting urban dwellers, exists with plenty of help from its proximal and societal neighbors. It sits at the end of a heavily travelled, improbably steep and rutted dirt road. County road grading, paid for by county tax revenues, makes it possible for the place to do business. When fires threaten the center, and they often do as it is situated in one of the most breathtakingly flammable locales imaginable, heavy federal, state and local resources are needed to help defend it.

And then there is the arrogance of folks visiting the monastery and the effect on our local community. Stories of pulling well-heeled bodhisatvas out of ditches and being thanked with no thanks are legion. Yes, many are just the well-yeasted gripes of rednecks and hippies who don't care for city-dwellers, but many are true. Humorless, self-important zennies are just really damned annoying.
So I think Tassajara owes us, the actual locals, something. And I think that something is low or no cost access to a soak in the hot springs that they did not create. No one owns a hot springs, it can only be taken care of. I think that even a monastery has neighbors, that we all depend upon each other, and basic access to such an important part of our mutual community should be shared, not exploited. Whatever the Zen Center wants to charge for actual services it provides to visitors—the great food, lodging in the cabins, instruction in zazen—is their own business and fine by me.

My own rudimentary sense of spirituality is literally based upon the existence of hot springs. Who needs samadhi or heaven or miracles when the earth itself spouts pools of soothing hot water out of the ground? Who can take seriously the search for personal purity in the face of such impersonal perfection? Who would charge other people for access to the heaven that actually exists right here and now? Unless the San Francisco Zen Center changes its approach to stewardship of the springs, I will continue to apply my own belief system to the situation. I will pay the exorbitant fee for using the springs, but I will recoup the cost to the extent I see appropriate. 

Roland

There was the time, after everyone had stayed up all night, that Jackie Coon stopped by and Roland got out his bass. Or the drive to the Highlands when he told me, without pity, “I love your old man, but he's a got a hole in his heart.” The way he would laugh at hitchhikers and say, “I decided a long time ago that I would give them a ride out of Big Sur, but not into it.” And finally, the day I emerged from three weeks in the Sierra wilderness to hear the news that he and Melanie had died within hours of each other.

But the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Roland Hall was his gait. A kind of imposing, solid shuffle that anchored a playful set of arms and a ready, mischievous laugh. The first time I ever worked for Roland, I remember mulching some flower beds when I heard the grave padding of his footfalls behind me. “Maybe, I didn't make myself clear,” he said, “It needs to more of a matrix. Like this.” He proceeded to get on his knees and fix my botched work himself.

I learned a lot about work, labor from Roland. His own approach to things resonated with mine: twenty minutes of philosophizing before twenty minutes of muscle on shovel work. He taught me how one is never too old or wise to be humbled at the feel of rich loam in one's fingers. And I observed that our little band of old coasties and young hippy kids could skate pretty far on the pull of Roland's charisma when it came to finding landscaping and carpentry clients. Even abstract painting, high-octane philosophizing, advanced meditators need to get in the dirt and make a few bucks. But it helps to have rich patrons already in awe of you.

I would have worked for free, just to ride around with Roland and hear stories of the old Big Sur and the beatnick days of San Francisco. The days when one could wander around the south coast naked, eating abalone, eeking an ascetic existence out of cutting firewood and caretaking. Rub shoulders with Jaime DeAngulo. I once asked Roland what changed with the hippies and he said, “The thing was, before the hippies all the bohemians I knew had a discipline. We were painters, or musicians, or meditators. But the important thing was, we had a practice. Something we did every single day. The hippies weren't like that.”

It is memorable to me that I first knew Roland in what were perhaps not his finest of moments. He himself once told me that his life had reached a zenith on Partington Ridge and in the desert of Arica, Chile that had dissipated when he had, “moved to town to sell things to assholes.” But when I became a teenager and learned landscaping and plants from him, it looked as if he had hit an older man's stride. He and Melanie lived a simple life, managing apartments and dedicating themselves to meditation and painting. I knew plenty of people Roland's age, and of similarly rich backgrounds, for whom such a transition fell like a lead blanket on their shoulders. But not Roland, the longer I knew him the more fully he radiated an ecstatic, high-wattage wisdom.

The other day I was reading an oral history of the Big Creek Preserve. It was recounted in the book how, when Roland had been the caretaker back when it was owned by the Farrs, his father had died there on the day of his daughter's birth. They buried him in a redwood log until the coroner got wind and autopsied the body. I have heard the story before, but I wish that he and Melanie were still around to tell it to me again.

Niches

I remember driving past the Castroville artichoke restaurant during the housing madness of the early 2000s. I was living in Oregon and there was this churning migration as one group of people moved to the cheapest place they could find displacing another group of people who then moved to the cheapest place they could find. And so on.

But Monterey county is a place of highly defined and long settled communities. Wealth is certainly a factor, but I reflected that someone living in Seaside would be highly unlikely to move the thirteen miles to Castroville just to get a cheaper place to rent. Even though the economics and class of these two places is somewhat similar. Such a thing would be quite common in Oregon.

Or to take another example, I am staying at a friend's ranch in Big Sur. But I only say “Big Sur” to paint an accessible picture of where I am. Within Big Sur, there are the south coast communities—Gorda, Willow Creek, Chalk Peak, Pacific Valley, Lucia, Esalen, Big Creek, etcetera. There are the Big Sur Valley niches—Apple Pie Ridge, Pfeiffer Ridge, Deetjens, Coastlands, Coast Ridge Road, Nepenthe, Molera, etcetera. There are the cliff dwellers along the roadside north of Little Sur. There are the north coast communities of Garrapata and Palo Colorado, both of which have many different divisions such as Long and Green Ridges, the bottom of the canyon, the upper canyon. Though they might well have much in common, a wild hair from Ragged Point is socially a very different creature than someone living in the Big Sur valley and working at the Post Ranch.

The other night at monday night dinner, someone told the sommelier that I was living in his neck of the woods, meaning the north coast. It lessened my already low opinion of him when he responded,”Oh yeah, I live in Palo. Where are you?”

"Up above Bottcher's Gap."

"Oh yeah. I used to go there for boy scout camp."

Well, I'm not at the Boy Scout Camp which is way down below Bottcher's. I am above Bottcher's, which would perk the interest of anyone with even a vague curiosity about this area. There is no one else above Bottcher's. And culturally I am not down in Palo at all. Call it north of the Little Sur and south of Garrapata.

This intense specificity of place is not unique to the Monterey area—or maybe I should say the Monterey/Pacific Grove/Marina/Charmel/Carmel Valley/Jamesburg/Cachagua/Charmel Highlands/North Coast/South Coast/Big Sur valley/Seaside/Mid Valley/New Monterey/Sand City/Pebble Beach regional association of approximate localities—but it is more highly defined than anywhere I have ever been. Pacific Grove proper is definitely not Pebble Beach and not Monterey. And living down by Lover's Point is a class away from living up off of David Avenue. And don't even think of telling someone in Jamesburg they live in Cachagua. Oak Grove is not Monterey and not Seaside, and I don't even know what Del Rey Oaks is about. Partington Ridge is a cousin to the Big Sur Valley, not an outlier.

I don't mention Salinas at all because the Salinas valley and environs are a different world, connected only by political geography. Hence the idea that moving from Seaside to Castroville or Prunteucky is a major migration.

The only thing like this I have experienced elsewhere is in the neighborhoods of Portland. The structure of that city, where each major eastside arterial street tends to have its own small, pre-automotive merchantile section, lends itself to organic, individual neighborhoods. But as Portland has become gentrified, as there become fewer and fewer areas to redevelop, that neighborhood camaraderie has descended into cliquishness. Having less meaningful distinction from each other, the neighborhoods now over-emphasize their separateness. For instance, an early-stage gentrification St. Johns resident is likely to look with disgust upon the foibles of late-stage Hawthorne gentry. A north Portland early, early stage gentrification neighborhood might look down its nose at the decadence of nearby Mississippi Street. I remember most of these areas when there was plenty of crack and prostitution to go around.

But Monterey county was long settled before WW II shipbuilding gave Portland its major growth spurt. And access to water, both of the potable and of the ship-receiving kind, had as much to do with the individuation of places here as trendy redevelopment and increasing wealth in Portland. I kind of like it this way, how the brush strokes of community character can be so nuanced and deep-rooted. It fits an area whose stunning diversity of ecosystems and microclimates give rise to it. It's a good thing.