Fish

I have a very detailed memory. I would not claim it is particularly accurate, but I find that I remember all sorts of minutiae about people and places from the past without much sense of hierarchy in their importance. Having returned to more or less where I started in life, physically, I have lots of interactions with people in which I recall mutual acquaintances with such detail that I mislead the person I am talking to into sensing a greater connection between myself and the person or subject at hand than really exists.

For instance, I asked a new friend here if a kid I grew up with named Jason was still around. I did not know Jason well, but we played baseball together and had many friends in common in high school. But you would think, from what I remember of him, that Jason had either been my best friend or else someone for whom I had a sycophantic attraction to. I have no doubt that the person I was talking to will see Jason, mention my name, and be confused when Jason cannot really recall me with any clarity.

By the same process, when I meet someone who has been here for a long time and we play that game of parlaying old stories on top of one another, I know that I leave a strange impression of being at once very familiar with this place and yet completely unknown in the community. I talk as if I have always been a part of this place, and yet no one knows my name.

A ghost.

I was driving home today, and a neighbor was hitchhiking down Cachagua Road. When I picked him up, he said that he had seen a rainbow trout in the flowing creek. I had forgotten this happens, how the dry leaf choked stream bed floods and then once clear the trout make their way fast up from the river to the bigger pools. People tell me the steelhead still make it past San Clemente dam and all the way to Jamesburg in a good water year.

It somehow made me feel a little better, to see an obvious metaphorical connection to my own life here. You see the trout and remember that they are part of this place, have their own nose for what goes on in the temporary streams, but most of the time they are invisible.

Back

I returned home last night, from a month away, and the creek was running. The sheer sonic size of it—the entire canyon seems to be reverberating and echoing with the noise of it—adds a different dimension to the day. When I am in the Northwest, it strikes me that one of the things I hate most about Portland is the lack of kinetic force in the winter. The skies are leaden, the wind does not blow much, there is no ocean to punch a hole in the monotony. The weather, the time, just sits there day after day.

That, of course, is how I experience it, not an absolute observation. Nonetheless, though the Willamette Valley winter rots my soul from the inside out, I think that I could probably endure a winter on the Oregon Coast. The ocean, the storm wind, these events alleviate the grey tension of the winter day for me. Clear and cold is my favorite winter recipe; the interplay of sunshine and stinging air is completely invigorating. I love mushrooms and fungi, but I am not myself suited to winter where they thrive.

In any event, the creek is rushing along and a big windy storm is on the way. After breakfast I could not take it any longer and decided I had to finally go for a run up in the "closed" national forest.

By the time I was a mile or two in, the rain picked up and the dozer-loosened soil was soft under my feet. I came around a bend where the true forest trailheads begin and saw in the distance a vehicle parked at the end of the access road around the dam. I turned around.

Further up the Carmel River I could see the blackened hillsides, though the water spilling over the dam did not look muddy or really even very brown at all. I could not help but notice though, that it seems to take very little rainfall anymore to fill the silted-up dam and get the spillway flowing.

Back toward the parking lot, a Forest Service truck was heading out into the rain. I slowed down, ready to take whatever warning the driver might wish to saddle on me for jumping the Cal-Am fence. But he rolled down his window and just asked how far in I had been, whether I had seen anyone else. I mentioned the rig at the trail up toward Blue Rock and we waved each other on. Sometimes people are just plain reasonable.

Weather

When I was a teenager, I used to say that it took seven years to understand the climate here. About seven years is what it takes to experience a good flood, a big drought, a fire. Rainfall averages—about 20 inches a year here, about 40 over the mountains in Big Sur—have a wide set of data to encompass. Twenty might mean a good number of fifteens in a column with a twenty-five here and there and a thirty-five and a ten. Right now it is raining so hard that I left the trailer to use the bushes and now my hair is soaked and my vest is drenched. It has rained about seven inches since late summer and the creek bed below is only starting to form pools. I am waiting for the day there is a current under the Tassajara road bridge so I can write down how many inches it took to get there.

The climate is mild here, on average, usually, most of the time. And then it is not, for a day or a week, maybe a whole season. Other than frost nip on my left thumb—let me check here, yep still kind of dull feeling in that spot—and on my penis—skiing in five degree weather in old army surplus wool pants with missing buttons, I'm not going to go empirical on that—the only serious weather scares I have had were in the Santa Lucias. I have been both hypo and hyperthermic in the very same spot on the Coast Ridge Road.

The latter was during a very hot day in August after two waterless days of hiking. It was not that I was careless but that I depended, after the first day, on a spring that runs 95% of the time. I pushed on through a mid-nineties afternoon, canteens dry, to arrive at the spring and find it a brackish, fly-covered, 5% mud hole. The next morning I collected some of the least disgusting brack and carried it with me, setting out early for the long climb out of Lost Valley. By mid-morning, my throat was dry, my skin was not sweating very much, and I had not peed.

I stopped along the trail and boiled up the brownish, tea-like water on my stove. I choked it down and felt thirstier than before, drier from standing over the stove. By the time I had climbed up to the ridge, I was faint and dizzy. I lay under a tree in what shade I could find, twelve more miles to go to the car, and tried to remember what the signs of heat stroke were. Far down below me, the ocean crashed around the rocks.

The dizziness did not subside, but the walking was along a road now. A dull, magnetic plodding took over. I had not been this far up on the road but knew that somewhere along it there might be a Forest Service truck or cabin. About a mile or so down the road, I rounded a bend and there indeed was a cabin looking out over the ridge, out over the ocean. On the porch, an old guy was drinking beer. He saw me and waved, offered me one when I hailed him. I sucked it down before getting up the nerve to admit I needed some water. I needed a lot of water.

A couple of years later I went back to Lost Valley in the winter and was caught by a storm. The camp there was shaded by big knobcone pines, the knobby cones being of football size and the knobs being more like spikes. As the wind whipped the trees around, a few cones fell from the branches and I had to choose between sleeping under falling cones of death or out in the open with no tent. I chose the open and the next day awoke in a soggy sleeping bag. There was more water than I could use and up on the ridge above me I could see what looked like snow.

I really don't remember why I had no tent or rain gear. Probably because, you know, the climate here is mild and I was about 19. I had been living in the snow in Oregon and thought I knew what I was doing though, come to think of it, my rain gear had been stolen there. Note to self: when your rain gear is stolen, that's no excuse not to get some more.

Trudging out of camp, soaked to the bone, rain falling fast, I could feel my hands getting stiffer and stiffer. My head was getting dull and foggy, as if each thought needed to be shepherded far across the pastures of my mind before it could be understood. One such thought was that I had to pee, but the realization competed with my hands' insistence that they were not going to untie the water clinched knot of webbing holding my pants up. I stopped and pleaded with them, my bladder entering the discussion and before the three of us could come to some compromise, a hot stream of piss gushed down my leg. I stood there, peeing in my pants, trying to decide whether the stink and humiliation was worth the warm leg.

Probably this took place within 100 yards of where I had boiled up brack a few years previously. But when I got to the ridge I found the wind blowing the trees sideways, and the ocean hidden in deep cloud, and patches of snow all over the Coast Ridge Road. I tried to believe that Pete was going to be there again, drinking tea from a thermos on his cabin porch, a warm oak fire going inside. He was not.

I walked the twelve miles (I think) afraid to stop for too long. The air was not horrendously cold, but I felt that if I stopped too long and tired I would not be able to get going again. My mind floated the idea that I could shelter for awhile and make some of my own tea, but my legs resisted, by now knowing enough of the turns in the road to convince the rest of me that I was almost there. No wait, now I'm almost there. Okay now.

Toward the end of the road, when I knew that soon I would be drinking coffee by the Big Sur post office and chuckling at the whole thing, well except for my piss soaked pants, the clouds parted just a bit. Down below I could see Point Sur, the line of surf on its northern beach a maw of white and blowing spray.

The rain here is cozy tonight, but not exactly comforting. The fire burned hills in the backcountry are probably not ready for this kind of drenching. Over on the coast, folks are probably starting to think about landslides.

The last big ones that I experienced as a kid, in 1986, tore out a section of Highway One between Big Sur and town, leaving people on the coast effectively islanded. My dad and stepmother lived in Big Sur then and I remember one day the three of us, cabin-bound, reading an illustrated version of Robin Hood to one another. By the fire, all day long, reading a wonderful book together.

I remember that delicious feeling of knowing that the earth had taken over the day. That kind of surrendering for awhile, staying inside in pajamas and looking outside wondering just how our house was tethered to the ground. Would it float away?

Seasons

The seasons here are impressionistic, washes of hot and cold, dabs of bright light and dusky shade, minutely etched variations of temperature from canyon to canyon. Warm blue skies and frosty mornings, shards of ice in the birdbath, boletus pushing up through the rotting oak duff. Each element blends and rubs against each other, blurs the micro-climates of the hour with the broad stroke of the calendar. Even at the height of a season no one color dominates the picture for long.

Yesterday I drove up Chew's Ridge and there were little bits of snow in the gullies at about 3000 feet. When I got to my friend's house, I was sweating in the hot sun. We sat on the edge of a steep canyon in the afternoon drinking beer and my head went drowsy, my feet ready to be planted in soil for the spring. Later, sanding finish off of rufous hardwood boards down at the Big House, the wind chimes tinkled the way they do in the regular summer heat breeze.

By the late afternoon today, sanding more decking, I had to find olive oil to rub my chapped lips. Honey bees buzzed in the pink-flowered shrubs along the driveway and the chimes rang in gentle cacophony. My hat was pulled down low over my sunglasses and I constantly adjusted my posture to avoid the full sun in my eyes. I forgot to drink water and when I went to the tap and sucked down a glass, the cold cramped my stomache.

Tonight it is cool again and the air around the trailer is oaky from the wood stove. A waxing crescent moon is bright in the sky, almost to the western horizon when I went outside last. I can hear the deer over in the draw between here and the big house. It has grassed up faster than anywhere else around and they gather there. I saw them today at mid-day, sprawled around in the plush green, the way they will do when the real heat comes.

Cachagua creek has not run yet, might not at all. When it is raining, I walk down to the bone yard by the road and listen for a current. On the little path down that way, I usually pick some artemisia, bitter wormwood sagebrush, and chew it as I walk. Past the wormwood, black sage covers the hill. When the air is wet, the smell of the sages is overwhelming on the road.

A mystery: the wild pigeons are in some kind of die off. A big one landed at the bird feeder the other day and waddled around like a drunk. Then I found a dead, unwounded one over on the road to the Big House. I mentioned this to a friend and he said that he had recently seen many dead along the Carmel River, pulled some of them out.

I have no idea if why this is happening or if it is a regular occurrence.

Wine

The property where I live is a mixture of benchland meadow and steep live oak/chamise covered hills. It does not take much imagination to understand that this would have been a mighty fine place for Indians to be back before the missions came.

The meadows are, so far as I can see, remnant creek bed from Cachagua creek's earlier, wetter life. They are covered still with big white oaks, whose acorns are choice eating. Down below us there is a rock known as Indian Rock, which is covered with mortars overlooking the most resilient pool of water in the often dry valley. One of the roads between here and the valley floor cuts through rotting granite, but at a certain point you can see the stones turn to water polished river cobbles, now about fifty feet above the water. If you are used to only driving Cachagua road, it comes as a surprise to stand in the meadow here and see that these benchlands are quite extensive, covering an altitude of about 1200 feet and harboring some of the last open oak meadow woodland around. For the most part white oak country is being crowded out by chamise and live oak, fire prone vegetation that kindles like gasoline soaked newspaper and chokes off everything around it.

When I was young here, in the late 70s, there was one winery called Durney. This never was wine country historically, but Durney was a tough old bird with money from who knows where, a son in law with a viticulture degree from Davis, and thirst to play El Patron. He originally built a small chapel in the fields, the way they do it in Spain, and encouraged his hispanic workers to worship there. They generally declined.

The winery long ago changed hands, and the software millions glut briefly put intense pressure on Cachagua to Napa-fy itself with “Executive Orchards” and other such nonsense. But in the meantime Durney had been joined by a couple of serious wineries, the most interesting of which was started by a relocated Swiss vintner more interested in getting hands dirty than gazing from his veranda. The wineries are a mixed blessing.

On one hand, they have augured a middle class in Cachagua. In most places that would not be the case—serious wine being usually the province of the rich. But this is not like most places, and our rich are generally richer than yours. For the most part they are an unpretentious sort, by which I mean they don't build McMansions. They tend to build extremely high end but modestly sized homes, many of them surrounding expensive art and breathtaking views rather than an extra five bedrooms. As such they were always a somewhat invisible class.

Used to be that between them and the backhoe driving, dope growing class there was not much representation. Much of the horticulture, manufacture, and service surrounding the wineries are jobs for people who do fall in that category, even if their standard of living would not look like middle class solidity in other parts of the country. The landscaper for this property is the kind of person who never existed in Carmel Valley when I was a child: a local kid who got a horticulture degree and is building a house on his labor rather than a trust fund or, like me and my ilk, a propensity to shack up together in trailers on remote property. Some of his work involves tending small orchards that produce modest amounts of grapes. The grapes are then bought by wineries and in exchange the owners are given cases of already bottled wine from years past.

But the wineries use vast amounts of water, and some of them lots of chemicals. During the fires last summer, everyone had to post at the bottom of the driveway a placard with a description of the water resources on their property for firefighters to see. It was sobering to read the astronomical well figures on the winery gates. This in a very dry valley, whose river downstream is ludicrously overpumped and where residential well permits are very hard to come by. It was clear that the wineries had been getting away with humongous allocations because of their agricultural status. I cringe to imagine what happens if they go bankrupt and are able to pass on all that water to subdividers. Alan, the landscaper here, spent the late summer triaging water supplies for his clients when their wells went dry.

The old Durney winery, or part of it, is across the road from here and I look out over it day and night. Two big white oaks stand near the top of the hill, a circle of grass beneath them. Occasionally wild pigeons flock there in the afternoon. I discovered last autumn that all the recent coyote shit was stained purple and when I looked closer saw that they had been eating wine grapes. I sleep a little easier knowing it is certified organic as their downhill slope runs right into the aquifer where my drinking water is pumped from.

The winery is now called Heller. Last summer, my friend Gary came to visit and I decided it would be nice to buy a bottle of their wine to drink while we had a barbecue overlooking the hill where the grapes come from. It was the most expensive bottle of wine I have ever bought and I was secretly hoping that it would suck so that I would not be tempted to make it a habit when friends visit.

But it did not. It was strong and delicious, complicated and oaky. It was everything you'd want your neighbor to be growing out of the same soil you live on. It was the only bottle of wine I have ever thoroughly enjoyed and remembered long afterward. As I write this, I can see the fields over there green and dormant. It's a good sight.

Food

My friend Joe stopped by on his way to town the other day. I had set aside a couple of pairs of shoes for him, left when a mutual friend had passed away. Joe lives high in the mountains, at over 3000 feet though he can see the ocean from his trailer. At such altitude, the mushrooms come on late and he left us some white boletus that his son had found. In exchange, we had some fresh squid to trade, caught by a client of my mom's out on the bay.

The squid was enormous, and I cut a big steak for Joe out of the white rubbery slab. In the freezer was a bag of tentacles and for dinner. That night my mom pounded them up and fried the squid while I sauteed up the boletus. The squid, I was later told, was a Humboldt squid, a variety that used to occur mostly in Mexico but has established itself further and further up the coast. My mom's client is also our dentist and when I asked if the squid was following warmer ocean water or expanding its range for some other reason he said that no one yet knows for sure. I asked him to elaborate, but he had a dremel tool in my mouth and probably misunderstood.

I confess that I like hunting and finding mushrooms more than I like eating them, but I was spurred on by my mom's suspicion. I pointed out that, had they been poisonous, Joe and his son would have already died. The boletes buttery and mild, the squid was hot and chewy. It was a good meal.

The summer I was fourteen, I took my first solo backpacking trips in the mountains above where I am writing this now. First forays into self-sufficiency both literal and concrete. I remember on one trip arriving exhausted on a hot waterless day at a springside camp to the west of Ventana Cone. As I boiled up water for ramen and pine needle tea, I sat watching the fog ramping up along the Coast Ridge and found myself growing teary and thinking of my mom and food. It had not hit me before what it meant that she had put food on the table every day of my life. How good that was. How I had taken it for granted.

Her own mother's food disasters are near legend in our family. We went to visit her once and she had made cheese cookies with so much salt that they sucked the moisture right out of my mouth. Picture Wiley E. Coyote after the Road Runner would somehow get him to eat a block of epsom salts. Another time it was chicken fried steak so dessicated and over cooked that it lay on the plate like, I don't know, a pile of frisbees. When I was a baby, she once gave me a bottle of orange juice before remembering it was of the vodka-spiked variety.

Her ineptitude was all the more baffling given that she had no real ambition to be anything other than a housewife, or so it looked to me at the time. She was a dark and bitter woman who kept gallon bottles of Old Crow stashed around the house and eventually smoked and drank herself to death. I'm sure that what looked like manifest complacency to me was much more complicated. No one has ever been able to figure out what she might really have wanted to be, least of all me, but I wonder sometimes if she liked to cook but was incompetent at it. Or perhaps she hated it and took neurotic revenge by refusing to get any good at it. Either way, her foibles have made me laugh much more than mild competence might have made me smile.

My own relationship with cooking has always been uneasy. There are certain people I love to cook for, though when by myself I could live on on noodles, chips, coffee for much longer than I would care to admit.

But for now I live in a valley capable of producing a palate of food at my door that includes acorns and boletus and good red wine, feral boar, heirloom tomatoes, roast quail, year-round greens, crawdads, fresh eggs, peppers, pears, thistle heads, fiddleheads, miner's lettuce, chanterelles, local beef, and most anything else you can think of from a good sized garden. I even remember a particular driveway that, years ago, was planted with some sort of cultivated wheat whose unripe berries were delicious. The kind of pretense and consumerist instinct that attaches itself to labels like Organic or Artisan or even Locally Grown, fall away and this abundance is just here. It has awakened an interest in food that has been long dormant.

Michael, the local chef who puts on Cachagua Monday Night Diner and used to run a fancy Carmel restaurant or two, once told an interviewer that he had moved to organic ingredients many years before it was chic because (paraphrasing), “It was something we did for ourselves. Shit, we didn't even tell the customers about it. It was just that eating things created by our neighbors, in our little speck of the boonies was what we wanted to do. And the food was just so much better, we were just so much more inspired and we didn't look back.”

Things which we can put our hands on fill us up with stories as much as nutrition. What is missing in so much of the food we eat, even in the self-consciously local and organic variety, is any tangible connection. Sometimes buying an overpriced boutique apple at a co-op, even when accompanied with a precise and well-meaning pedigree, can be just another exercise in distance. Not always, not inevitably, not for everyone, though it works that way on me. But my grandmother's shitty cookies have given me as much amusement over the years as anything else I have eaten. And mirth, as we all know, counteracts toxins of all kinds.

I think back to those days up in the mountains, coaxing my first meals over a blue gas flame, the smell of dried beans and soy sauce. How I had read from Gary Snyder that I could just boil up pine needles and—what do you know—it's not too bad a tea. How I spent a day half-starving in my tent as a torrential downpour kept me inside after I had decided to make an arduous overnight trip with no stove. How that was a root of the appreciation of my mother.

It's good to be home here.

Repair

My stepfather fancied himself a revolutionary. Che Guevara posters, old stories about the SDS, Irish music. In the days before the Berlin wall fell, he wore a big Soviet watch and organized Wobblies when there were no Wobblies to organize. Mention the election in Chile´ or union corruption and you could be in for an angry shouting match whether you agreed with him or not. I once worked him into a lather by pointing out that Marx and Engels were never workers, that their sympathy for the working class was born from the luxury of philosophizing and not the callouses of hard work. The angrier he got, the more I exaggerated their wealth. He could be fun like that.

He came to Monterey a bum, sleeping under the wharf and drunk. That he had gotten sober was a blessing and a curse. He had never gotten around to imagining how a revolutionary drunk might live when he was no longer drunk. No longer homeless, no longer romantically marginal. He did not want to live in the suburbs, have a real job, or wear a suit but sobriety and a relationship seemed to demand of him a change in things.

It was when it came to vehicles that this conflict was most obvious and eventually comical. Ray was a sucker for anything under $1000 especially if it had the kind of character he was looking for. As far as I could tell, character meant either not running or not running well enough that it could ever be mistaken for a practical, apathetic yuppy car. Revolutionaries drove MGs whose fuel pump cut out on left hand turns, Lincoln Continentals the size of small boats, VW vans with perpetually self-destructing engines, Ford Pintos wrested from the tow truck as the cops were scraping them off the street for impoundment.

When he and I and my mom first moved in together, Ray took it upon himself to teach me the fine art of carburetor rebuilding. It was his way of establishing a connection between us; we would rebuild the carburetor of the Yamaha motorcycle rusting in the driveway and I would have it to use. There were two problems: I did not want a vehicle and Ray did not actually know much about rebuilding carburetors.

I have since built and rebuilt many different engines and have never learned to love carburetors. All those small parts—jets and Venturi bowls, dashpots, convoluted passageways. For awhile though, I could do a California rebuild on a Subaru carburetor in about ten minutes. A California rebuild involves revving the engine very high then jamming the air intake with the heel of a hand or the surface of a rubber mallet and letting the resultant intense vacuum suck out any gunk in the passageways of the carb. Then I would remove the accelerator pump, a small piston that increased fuel flow under heavy load, and flex its rubber skirt to get a better seal.

But that was not the sort of future I saw for myself at sixteen, watching Ray mumble and fuss over a table full of jets and coffee cans. It did not help that Ray's method of working on mechanical things involved lots of confusion and frustrating outbursts. The fact was that, though he was a very good carpenter, he was not much of a mechanic.

You could tell by his hands, which were scarred and stumpy, battered and almost mesmerizing in the their paw-like bluntness. They were not hands meant to handle delicate things, as Ray was not someone good with anything delicate. Still I see now that he was trying to share something that became important to me, the skill to tune and fix, tinker with the little things upon which our physical existence depends. Long after the dogmatic leftist politics left me, this is something that stuck. We live in a world of carburetors and three tab roofing, LED screens blown fuses, rototillers and welded things. To get one's hands dirty is to dissipate the dependence upon abstractions, to take responsibility for our physical selves. I did not realize this then.

On a brutally cold eastern Oregon autumn, during which I was probably about 24, the sky was grey with threat of snow but the air was knife-like, the roads covered with icy crust, the roadside vegetation drifted over. The kind of days when the cows bunch along the fence line for the hay truck and the diesel lines of tractors and trucks freeze up with fuel that has not yet been winterized. I was living then out of the back of an 84 Subaru, a durable, economical car with enough traction to get around in the woods without breaking the wallet at the pump. There were a good number of years where I could measure my possessions in multiples of Subaru loads, usually one or one and a half. The half consisting of books and skis stored in friends' garages and basements.

It was the end of the season for working in the woods, and leaving the mountains ahead of the first snow storm my Subaru had refused to start. It was in the driveway of a cabin I had access to and, after cranking and cranking to no avail, it was too cold to even open the hood so I went back in and started a fire. The next day I had it towed the 30 or so miles to the garage in John Day where the mechanic looked at it with undisguised confusion. A week later I returned for it and managed to drive to the other side of town before it died again, taking my $150 with it.

My friend Larry came down from The Dalles with his truck, and we hauled the Subaru there on a trailer over endless miles of whitescaped earth. There was a mechanic then named Bob who had worked on Subarus since they were first imported. We towed my car to his shop and told him what was wrong. He opened the hood, removed the distributor cap, threw it in the trash with a comment about crappy aftermarket parts. Five minutes later I was on my way.

It was at that moment that I understood to live cheaply and with little margin in the boonies, I was going to have to rethink my relationship with cars. I was going to have to not ever let this sort of thing repeat itself, no matter what I might think of automobiles in the abstract.

I think back on when I did not care to know how to rebuild carburetors, nail up siding, install a garbage disposal and I remember that I was 16. I wanted to write poems and hike for months at a time, own very little. I wanted to live a life of the mind, to have few complicated things requiring complicated repair. It was a good idea, but if I were to be a monk I would be the kind put to work making sandals and robes for my brethren. Whatever there would be to analyze and repair, obsess over in that kind of work would occupy me no less than teasing out the electrical problems in my truck. Either way I still write poetry.

When little else in life makes sense to me, I install windows, build ethanol stills, repack wheel bearing grease. Do things with my hands. My left middle finger is misshapen from the day I grabbed a still spinning wood carving blade on an angle grinder. My left thumb has a long scar from when, at five, I tried to saw a board at my friend Elliot's with a hand saw. My right eye socket is dented from the curvature of a driveline that fell on it. There are too many other little scars from screwdriver mishaps and bashed knuckles to count.

A year or so after the distributor incident with my Subaru, I rebuilt the engine from top to bottom with a Leatherman tool, a handful of crappy sockets, a borrowed torque wrench. The Subaru 1800 engine has an unusual. horizontally-opposed design, with two symmetrical halves to its block. At the crucial point of reconstruction, the halves must be joined with a very delicate attention to torque. Just a bit too much, and the engine will seize and die the first time it is cranked. Just a bit too much and the crankshaft will knock around and bash holes into everything. The difference between too much and too little was explained to me by my machinist. He said that I needed to torque the bolts just so that I could feel the crankshaft seize for one quarter turn before the internal friction heated everything into place.

I got it right, but only after realizing that the torque figures in the manual were incorrect. It was the little motion of turning the shaft, letting it get into muscle memory the way the machinist had shown me, that prevented a huge disaster. I wrote the manual producer a letter explaining their error. I had learned to think, at least briefly, in thousandths of an inch. 150,000 miles later that car still lives on the streets in Bend.

I heard recently that Ray is drinking again, shooting dope, left town for Florida. I hope these are just rumors, but if not I hope that whatever he drove down south actually got him there. Perhaps it is a diminution, or a conceit, but these small things I can do with my own hands are also my politics. They are my way of cutting the world down to size, of being useful to family and friends, of increasing my own sovereignty. I think he would understand that by now.