I was just outside our RV, taking Spyro the boy dog for a brief late-nite visit to the Oleanders bordering the shuffleboard court, and realized it’s absolutely freezing out there. The cold winter has exacerbated and what our inside guage registers outside as 32 degrees is more like 15 or 20 given the wind-chill factor. It has been cold for about 24 hours and looks to continue even colder for a couple more days. This of course is very abnormal for Casa Grande (AZ) where we winter. It does get cool here, yes, but nothing like this. It’s to the point that the park maintenance crew had to bundle up every potted and flowering pot and there are seemingly hundreds. And still the truly frigid temps and winds haven’t stopped people from enjoying themselves. This afternoon I went to the pickleball courts to run some errand and, yes, there was another round-robin starting up, the men’s 3.0 I believe, a hardy group indeed, getting ready to play pickleball in biting breezes wearing long-johns, jeans and gloves. Amazing…I’m not sure if it’s more of a testimony to the fanatical addictive powers of pickleball or just the tougher-than-nails attitudes of the people playing the game. But me, I’m cranking up the heater another notch and staying in.
Monkey-Minding on Puget Sound
We are currently in the Thousand Trails park outside LaConner, WA., which probably everybody but me knew already is on Puget Sound. I never seem to pay attention to things like where I am, where I am going or what I’m doing and it’s a wonder I get anywhere or do anything and yet here I am, doing a new post from the relatively nice clubhouse with a slow but adequate Internet connection hooked to my barely working laptop which now will only recognize a direct Cat 5 connection…no wireless connectivity for me until the 401 fattens up sometime in the mid-century and I buy a new set of problems….but overall content as I look out over a wind-and-rain-swept Puget Sound and in the direction of the eagle which normally sits on the tree on the point shared with the local Indians who for some reason retain all rights to foraging for driftwood, shellfish, and fishing or crabbing off the beach. This is a very different kind of experience from our most recent times in Bend where we have a cozy house, a good broadband connection, and the jacuzzi tub works. Here nothing works. The spa is down, the Internet, while up, is painful, there is no 50 AMP service usually necessary to run the air conditioning but who cares as the sun isn’t shining, the misnamed honeywagon isn’t working, and so on. But it doesn’t matter. This is a beautiful place, stuck out into nature so that it becomes part of it, and it’s easy to look around and see His hand in anything and everything. And John and Marci say there’re mussels for lunch, and there’s also pickleball here, did I mention? More on all that, later.
Furniture from Costco
As some of you may know we have recently bought a “spring and summer” residence in Bend, Or., and thus have officially joined the ranks of “snowbirds” and will migrate to AZ with the rest of the pack sometime soon or at least by the end of September due to the pickleball tournaments which begin in St. George, Phoenix and other places of otherwise limited interest soon thereafter. However you cut it, though, moving into a new house, even one you intend only to occupy half the year, is a big deal, especially when you’ve recently given away at least half of the stuff you’ve had in storage for years just to cut down the fiscal bleeding from the monthly bites of the perpetually hungry storage units.
I’m not sure what you did the last time you moved into a new house but what we did was head for Costco. There was stuff we had to have…a couch in the living room, some office furniture, perhaps a bed….and we hoped they would have it, and in fact they did, and it all worked out well, except for the office furniture part. Did you know that you can buy stuff that’s labeled “easy to assemble” that actually has 54 major wood parts and over 300 pieces of hardware? All truth, and that stuff, no matter how good you are, is gonna take you a couple of days to assemble, and at the end you have furniture that’s too heavy to move, so if anybody besides us ever owns this house I bet they will own this same piece of furniture because I sure as heck know I’m not disassembling it, except perhaps with an ax.
Towards the end there was one step that I thought (even at the time) was especially amusing. Basically it was the installation of the “tower”, a piece consisting of a three-shelf mini-bookcase-looking thing about three feet tall and a foot-and-a-little wide. Since the overall construction is an odd combination of iron- or rubber-wood (very heavy) and ultra-dense fiberboard (even heavier) even this relatively small tower is, you guessed it, heavy. And for some unknown reason, where every other major piece is fitted together with metal dowels that snap into metal locking hubs, n this one piece sits on the desk with nothing more to secure it than six glue-strips, the backing of which you remove just before you put it into place. I thought this was odd….clearly glue wasn’t enough to hold a heavy piece in place….until Irene and I man-handled it onto the desk at which point it sucked onto the desk like a huge abalone on a rock, stuck like it would be there until the end of time, actually all good except that it was stuck in the wrong place by about half an inch, which to Irene and my perfectionists’ eyes was a miss as good as a mile. If you ever actually have been abalone diving you know how tough it is to pry one off its rock, right? It was twice that tough to get this thing to move, and the sound it made when it pried loose sent both Spryro the boy-dog and K.C. the girl-cat running at full speed for cover. I would have sworn it was taking the surface off the furniture at least, but it didn’t, and eventually all was well and it was properly re-secured, this time in its proper spot.
All is well in truth, now, and I write to you from that very desk, and it doesn’t look awesome but pretty good, and I bet you, when you visit, can’t find where the “tower” initially went. Consider this your invitation.
Throwing Up Emeril’s Food
When you are throwing up it’s hard to wax poetic, but afterward it’s a different story, isn’t it?
Emeril’s Table 10 in Las Vegas is not the typical restaurant Irene and I would eat in. We are far too frugal for that, but this one time it seemed like a good idea. We hadn’t eaten at all, lunch time was long past, and we had played indoor pickleball in the morning at the Dula Center, walked the whole of the bizarre and camp-ily covered Fremont Street several times watching the characters with too much money suck up perfumed oxygen while getting their heads massaged with unsanitary-looking battery-operated mutli-pronged stimulators and the other characters with no money at all discussing if a trashed then scrounged plastic bottle had a redemption value, looked for – with no success at all – a multi-way penny slot-machine ready to pay for our trip, had coffee at the dirtiest Starbucks we’ve ever seen this side of Bejing and generally needed nourishment and some positive reinforcement. This indirectly led us to Table 10.
The experience itself was worth the $50 lunch tab, I suppose. It wasn’t so much the food itself – described quickly the food was ordinary; Calamari as an appetizer and Mahi-Mahi sandwiches with cole-slaw. But, and I suppose this is Emeril’s genius – BAM! – it was all a bit different and (dare I say it?) better than its less-pricey competitors. The Mahi-Mahi in particular was (at the time at least) the best I’ve ever eaten…a small sandwich on a home-made roll but with a thick and perfectly-done tender fish steak nestled gently in a pineapple-tomato relish that somehow worked very well. Plus, like I said, going in we were starving and coming out we weren’t so you chalk up the experience to being an experience and thus allow yourself the extravagant mid-day meal. Plus – and, hey, my “I hate people” attitude aside, I am a people-person in some ways, or at least I’m a waiter-person, and I LIKED Julio, who probably didn’t take any more special care of us than anyone else, at least his patter with them seemed identical to his patter to us, but he made good eye contact and shared his own personal views of the dishes and he wouldn’t have steered us wrong, right? So it was all good….
Until, two hours later, in our motor-home, Spyro walked, K.C. the Kit scratched, me laying down for just a moment to “rest my eyes”….my stomach began doing an old and remarkably familiar dance that I thought I had left behind when I stopped drinking 25 years ago, and one thing led to another, which led to a brief bout with the porcelain pony….I will spare you details here….
…and this in turn led to a relatively short-lived series of fairly profound (for me) thoughts, of which I share a small selection here.
1. Is the experience of eating good food made less by the experience of throwing it up afterward?
2. We all know, and I don’t need to belabor, how food is processed and what eventually happens to it. So perhaps we should short-cut the whole process and only eat minimum amounts of food and only as fuel? Perhaps the whole thing of “enjoying” the food we eat is an artificial creation, an emotional overlay that we add to a process that isn’t worthy of the effort anyway, given that it all comes out in the end (so to speak)?
3. Does Emeril, in this case, owe me anything? Like my money back, an apology, a signed copy of his most recent cookbook? Or did he already give me what I paid for, and what I did with it was (somehow) my decision?
Obviously this type of mental masturbation does nobody any good. But, from the perspective of the range of alternatives presented to one when on their knees in the very tight confines of a motor-home water-closet, it’s better to think about those things than what is right in front of your face, as it were.
Or, in my usual fashion, did I miss the whole Zen-point…again?
A Different Reality….
When we left Casa Grande for the summer we headed for Las Vegas to hook up with son Roy and watch him play in a racquetball tournament. We could have chosen a more direct route to LV but decided in a fit of curiosity to detour a little by Lake Havasu and check out London Bridge, which we assumed, wrongly, was set into the lake as a tourist attraction. As you probably know the bridge is now, in fact, in daily use as a gateway to a peninsula (or perhaps an island) in Lake Havasu and to our chagrin we found that the reason we couldn’t find the bridge initially is that we had already driven over it. Our assumption of reality…that the bridge would be something other than practical….turned out to be false.
Of course no essay that describes Las Vegas is complete without having some reflection on reality, as basically Las Vegas turns reality upside-down. Nothing is as it seems here. This includes, interestingly, The Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, which is, by my reckoning at least, is perhaps both the most upscale and least real Catholic Church I’ve ever seen. Located just off the strip, within an easy chip-toss, appropriately, of the Mirage, with a pastor who delivered a sermon in which he sang parts of Handel’s Messiah and who discussed his interview on Fox News the night before (where undoubtedly he gave his opinion on the economy and on China’s role in environmental affairs), nothing in this church looked like a Catholic Church is supposed to look.
What does this mean, you ask? Well, it’s easier to answer by asking a few questions of my own. What other Catholic Church has two deacons whose job it is to follow along behind the priest when he is shaking holy water over the congregation with mops to immediately dry the marble floors? What other Catholic Church has vocational candles that are actually electrified and turn on and off with individual switches instead of actually burning? What Christian church of any denomination has a “Last Supper” scene cast in bronze at a scale of about six times life? There are many other examples but you get the drift.
But I am probably making something out of nothing. At the same time I seem to be criticizing, I have to say, to be fair, that the angel-voiced priest spent as much time talking about the upcoming food drive and the church’s mission in assisting folks who are HIV-Positive as he did singing. And the people in this decidedly upper-class building were as friendly as any I’ve seen anywhere, including Sister Pat, the semi-retired nun sitting in the row in front of us who shared that she had lived many years in San Francisco and for many years before that in Redwood City, which is next to San Carlos, CA., which is where, South of San Francisco, that Irene and I lived for many years.
So what conclusions can I draw from this, after all? Only the same one that I’ve come to realize plays so big in so many parts of my life. I don’t know much and what I do know is subject to change ‘cuz I’m probably wrong about that, too.
Half-Assed Conversations
Recently I was sitting half-cheeked on a bench at the pickleball courts, fidgeting uncomfortably because the wrought-iron bench presses (no matter which way I turn) directly on my blown hamstring muscle up under my butt, when Gart and Ralph came up, sat down and began badgering me as usual. I admit I usually am comfortable with their badgering because, after all, they are two of the best three or four players in the park, both far better than I, and if they weren’t badgering me they probably wouldn’t be talking to me, being the elitist pigs they are, and, emotionally shallow as I am, I always perceive any attention to be better than none so I take what I can get. But in this case they were particularly annoying, and here’s why.
First, Gart began by asking me why there weren’t going to be open courts available during certain times today. “Now that we’ve got 12 courts (up from 8), we should always have some open courts available!” Ralph chimed in with something equally inane and the two monologues went on unchecked for a few minutes, me not able to get a word in edgewise.
Finally I stopped them and told them the truth as it exists in my world-view. The truth doesn’t matter to this story but is as follows: it can get complicated but we have designated times for open play and during our busy periods at least four courts allocated to that, four reserved courts set aside for those who want to reserve them, and during periods where we are doing both reservations and open play we restrict the round-robins (organized play based on skill level) to no more than four courts. Thus, worst-case scenario, we would have four courts available to virtually any purpose known to man, excepting of course those who may wish to land small planes in liu of flying them into IRS buildings or some such. This can occasionally be superseded by club-sanctioned events, e.g. that very day (to Gart’s question) when we had Sarah’s annual Woman’s Mixed-Level Social scheduled (using eight courts), leaving us only four for the Men’s C Round-Robin and, for two hours, none for open or reserved play, and I was explaining all abut THAT when Ralph leaned over to Gart and asked “Are you getting any kind of an answer out of all this BS?”.
This, of course, torqued me mightily. Here I had actually given credence, if just for a moment, to the idea that they might actually WANT an answer and all they were doing was baiting me…again…and worst of all I bit. I should know better, but my intemperate response was that I was no longer talking to Ralph and was only talking to Gart, and that any further communication from Ralph to me would need to be routed through Gart, and we went on that way for a few minutes, much to their amusement and my continued irritation, until my butt hurt too much to continue and I got up and gimped off.
I don’t know why I waste my time on those two.
It’s a journey of HOW many steps?
Conventional “wisdom” discusses, among many, many other things of course, how the longest journey begins with but a single step, yes? Well, yes, but then it doesn’t go on to discuss how long that journey may be, does it? And well it shouldn’t as every journey has a different number of steps. Every fly-fishing season, for instance, Irene believes she has regressed back to beginning-caster level and it takes her some number of hours or even outings before she again feels comfortable and is demonstrating why she is what’s happening among female fly-casters. I, on the other hand, and here it’s probably because I’ve been fly-fishing for over 50 years, believe I could pull out a fly-rod after a year’s absence and within a few minutes I c0uld be casting like I had been on the stream yesterday, not to say my casting is perfect ‘cuz it certainly isn’t but functionality isn’t that far away for me. The length of my fly-fishing journey seems to be in the areas of mending line and matching hatches, which most experienced fly-fishers would probably rate as two of the top skill areas in terms of importance, certainly each more important than how far you can cast, usually, so it’s appropriate but disheartening that I can’t claim full-on expert-level across the board even after all this time.
That said, pickleball appears for me to be an even longer journey. When we arrived at St. George, Utah a few days ago for the warm-up week before the pickleball tournament within the Huntsman World Senior Games (aka Senior Olympics) I was totally jazzed and looking forward to showing everybody how good I’d become since last year, which you know right away was a major no-no. It wasn’t so much that “they” showed me different but more that my anxiety to show somebody something made my doing virtually anything correctly somewhere between difficult and impossible. It was only after we (Irene and I) had lost our first four or six games that I settled down and began to hit one shot at a time…at which point my game slowly re-appeared from wherever it had been off hiding.
This was all very disheartening until I was, today, playing against and later watching a few of the “big boys”, no names mentioned, who had come in from various parts of the country and arrived at the courts for their first outing of the season today. I was now playing adequately, as was partner Steve, and although we got beat fairly handily by the big boys it wasn’t as handy as it had been last year, and by golly they were missing a few shots that they would most always have made, simple down-the-line forhands for instance, or hitting lobs into the net, or serving long, or dinking shots six feet on the wrong side of the in-line, or whatever…just like Steve and I. And they were obviously pissed about it, too…just like we have been. But, over the course of watching them play for about two hours, they very quickly were regaining form and were suddently were hitting the shots they had missed just those few minutes before, and looking, once again, like the top-flight players they are.
What’s the point? I could make many points out of this simplistic set of observations but what this certainly has to bring home is that pickleball is not a 50-year sport for me, while it may be a 20-year sport for some of the so-called big-boys, and that, for me, I will have to simply give myself some time, each year, to get back into the game…head and body, assuming I’m allowed to keep playing for awhile. But all that said, I am a better player than I was at this time last year. And, even when I don’t show it, I know it’s in there and can be re-discovered, while last year it wasn’t yet there at all. And, God willing, there may be other improvements still available to me, and perhaps I will discover them….one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time.
The Difference is a Bald Eagle.
In RV-land, many of the parks where we stay begin to seem similar. This is, of course, a matter of design….true RV parks will consistently have certain features that we’ve come to depend upon. Among them are sewer hook-ups, 50-AMP electrical power, good water pressure, aisles wide enough to drive a big-rig without forcing walking passers-by to leap for safety, long-enough sites to allow you to tow your toad into it without unhooking if you are leaving the next day and are feeling lazy (or are just exhausted after a 300-400-mile pull through a consistent construction zone, say), enough distance from the nearest highway or busy road that you won’t try to sleep feeling like you’re still driving, no blazing searchlights blaring in through your privacy screens, Wi-Fi that works, and a pet policy that makes sense are just a few of the things that Irene goes through on her checklist as she and I are traveling down the road and she’s selecting our next destination. But these “necessities” also physically define the look and feel of the park, and it’s natural that they would.
This excepts State Parks, naturally. State Parks very wildly, so much that it’s almost comical. You can have parks that have nothing at all in facilities, parks whose most attractive feature is that they are there and nothing more. And you can have places like the one we went to last year in West Virginia that had terraced sites a million miles apart from each other, sites so long you could land jets in them, so level they could have been pool tables, high above a lake pretty as a postcard, across from a golf course as green as the fruit of a ripe Kiwi. A beautiful park, if somewhat orderly in its beauty.
Soaring high above even that nice park is this one, Henry’s Lake near Last Chance, Idaho. Not that it’s the fanciest ornament on the tree; it’s not. It’s rather plain and on a plain as well, a high-desert plain with a mountain range over 10,000 feet rising behind it. The sites are large and well-spaced and level enough for government work, but what this park has is surprises of the natural kind. Last time we were here, a year ago I think, I almost feel over a cow moose and we released at least six magnificent Cut-Bows, an unusual hybrid between a Cutthroat and a Rainbow Trout that can reproduce and grow like crazy…the six we caught were at all at least 20 and mostly 22-23 inches, making them all between 3 + and 5 pounds, good fish for any fly-fisher and the highlight of last year’s Western States swing. But so far our visit here has equaled last year by the simple unexpected arrival of two magnificent bald eagles….one of which was promptly chased and scared away by two very aggresive seaguls; the second of which cruised our site repeatedly looking for something….a dead rabbit? A small Cairn Terrier?….and in the doing making us feel as if we were, just for a moment, part of his life, and it’s a nice feeling, being part of the life of an eagle.
I’ll trade off full-hookups for an eagle any time.
Missoula Real Estate, Examined
As is now ordinary for us, having done virtually the same thing two years ago, we came last Sunday to Missoula, became re-captivated by this area’s many charms and subsequently spent all of one day (today, in fact) racking up over 100 miles driving the city from one end to the other, two increasingly car-sick but still-patient mutts in the way-back, careening down one real-estate-signed street, side-street, alley and crosswalk after another. I don’t care for this approach to examining a potential real-estate market because I come home end-0f-day grouchy and exhausted but the benefit is that we can eliminate whole areas; I know, for example, that I do NOT want to live in the (advertised as desireable) Patti Canyon area, as it appears to mostly feature 25-year-old side-of-mountain homes that probably would have been moderate subdivision properties at best if they were on the flat. The fact that they have views for miles is supposed to make people overlook their multitude of other shortcomings, I suppose, but they didn’t get past Irene and I who just kept on driving. The Target area, on the other hand, is a potential. This area, named not for the somewhat-nearby Target Store as you probably suspected, being as shallow as you are, but instead for the fact that, many moons ago, this area was a military target range, is eclectic at best, but at best is truly charming, backing onto the Clark’s Fork common areas in many places, home to mucho wildlife, great views, trees, and, of course, running water in the form of braided channels from this, Montana’s largest river (albeit a bit further downstream). When I call this couple-of-square-miles area eclectic I ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie…it is world-class Eclectic with a purposeful capital E. For instance, at one point we did a quick turnaround in a for-sale property that consisted of a tiny, fifty-year-old house on a dirt road. Next to it was a jumble-house of innovatively used apparently not-new materials…one side a mass of tiny paint-peeled windows, another side literally corrugated tin. On the other side was a wreck of a place with a tiny, completely rusted-out travel trailer sitting square in its gravel driveway where a car should be and with laundry hanging out on a pole off the back porch. But around the corner was a brand-new spec house that, the owner being outside and insisting on giving us a tour, obviously affluent ready-to-buy-ers that we are, seemed if not worth the $2M price tag, was at least close. This beautiful beast was 6,000 sq. feet of granite, marble, stone, semi-precious woods, and even the world’s nicest RV garage with antiqued cement floors and a total gourmet kitchen and full bathroom….just in case your visitors get tired being in their rig, I suppose. He regaled us with stories of sitting in the afternoon sun on the all-rock patio, watching a red-tailed hawk attack a magpie and capturing the whole fight on his massive telephoto lens. In fact the whole conversation felt like a “bigger than yours” kind of thing, if you get my drift, but on the other hand it was and is a quality piece of work. At the end he asked me what WE were looking for in a home. I was honest and told him; something about 1/3 the size on about an acre instead of the five acres. Graciously he pointed out another Target-area home location and suggested we check it out….it would only be 2,000 square feet “although it does have a finished basement”, as if that would be a negative. And, even though the price would be much, much less, you still have the same great views, you are still in the same superior neighborhood, you still are less than fifteen minutes from the many services Missoula offers and that attract us.
I have to say, though, that at the end of the day I am often glad I am still an RVer. We, too, have the same backyards as these guys, the same sunsets, the same access to superior Missoula services. And if our neighbors get pesty or that red-tailed hawk is too noisy eating his magpie dinner, we can change our backyard by the next day. I’d like to see Steve (the bigger-than-yours guy) try that trick.
I’m Totally In Control, Baby!
The title was meant as a joke. I have come to believe I control less and less as I get older. Well, that’s probably true but what I really meant is that I BELIEVE less and less that I’m in control of anything much. Let me give you one example.
Fishing in Montana has never been a slam-dunk and this year has been consistently difficult, with only one or two little fish showing up at netting time to be oh-so-carefully released, and they being here and there, not in big numbers, in numbers, in fact, every bit as small as they are. So when we arrived at Mountain Meadow RV Park outside the west portal of Glacier National Park this early afternoon and found they have a pretty little pond stocked with rainbow trout and restricted to catch-and-release fly-fishing, why, that was just my huckleberry, as it were. Not that I’m big on fishing for stocked trout at any time but hey, I haven’t caught any good fish this season and I could see rising fish from the coach as we pulled in front of the office. While Irene went inside to register and I was supposed to be unhooking the toad I instead walked over to check the pond out more carefully and son-0f-a-gun if there weren’t BIG fish cruising the surface slurping bugs, and from the dorsal fins no question they were biggish trout…probably 16-20 inches, from what I could see from shore. I couldn’t see, exactly, that they were feeding on any particular insects, there were a couple of random mayflies rising and dragonflies…the latter more often harbingers of mosquitoes than, of say, trout-calling caddis…were working the edges of the pond. Grasshoppers, cute little bite-sized ones, kicked up with every step I took and for all I knew the trout were merely eating the errant hoppers dropping in near the edges and off as not swimming towards the center of the pool rather than safety on the edges. (Apparently grasshoppers as a breed really don’t swim in any directed sense.) Anyway, how difficult could fishing to stocked fish in a little pond that obviously didn’t get fished much? At last, after a season of difficult, out-of-control fishing situations that showed themselves as blown-out, silt-filled rivers, temperature shifts of 30 degrees in a day and back again, effectively putting down any insect hatches and gluing shut the mouths of every trout, and rain, rain, rain….muddying the waters as said above but more important putting down the fish, who will feed in some conditions and definitely not in others, like for instance when we are there and it is raining.
But this one…this was easy. I was in control, or would be, as soon as we went and got set up and I could break away and sneak back.
Turned out I didn’t need to sneak; Irene was as interested in the little pond and its big ol’ fish as I was. Less than an hour later, dogs walked, coach set up, I was back at the pond and ready to cast to the still-rising trout.
And about 90 minutes later we left. I pounded the water, cast to slurp after slurp, never touched a fish, never had a rise, never saw a fish following…but they did continue to rise around me right up until the moment I left, demonstrating clearly as if it really needed it that I am not in control, and you could take the fish out the pond and put them in a barrel and ask me to shoot them and I’d still miss, because that’s the kind of fishing year we’re having thus far.
But it’s still a beautiful place, this Glacier, isn’t it? In fact, I can’t think of any place I’ve been that’s prettier. So, so what if we aren’t catching fish? Life isn’t about fish. It’s about whatever it brings on whatever day it brings it, and if I’ve ever made a statement that clearly articulates more LACK of control than this, well, I can’t remember making it.