The Old Priest Grade

It is called Old Priest Grade. The name might be as such since it recalls the last person you might call out to when you begin your ascent, or descent, of this freakish piece of road, in central California. Call it what you will, it boggles the mind to think that it was the only way to get through the area for many years.
A little research shows me that the Old Priest Grade is about 2 miles long. I know it is steep because I navigated it, with my cart threatening to pull me down the entire way. It was as awful as any experience I had on my entire trip, and in the end cost me a big toenail on my left foot, from the intense pressure caused by my foot being forcefully jammed up into the toe of my shoe for so long. A real treat, that.
For many years cars and trucks have gone over the side as their drivers and/or brakes have worn out. Finally, several years back, a new road, ironically called New Priest Grade, was built alongside the Old Priest Grade, but three times as long and a third as steep, winding all over the place, and not much faster than the old road, actually taking much longer due to the distance and the fact that because of the zillion turns and twists drivers cant drive much faster than on the old road.
As I kept descending, I wondered at the numerous small pull offs and the water bottles that were there. At one stop, I notice that there were two water jugs, full, and with a small bag of Skittles taped to the sides. One also bore a note: “FREE SKITTLES—Sorry your car broke down. Call me…” and there was a phone number. I decided that the Skittles looked too enticing, but the water was a bit too off color for my taste. I also took the note. A call to the number on the note got a voicemail box. I left a message, which was not returned, until today. It turns out that a man named Austin and three passengers broke down or overheated on their way up the hill. Apparently, at the pull-off they discovered water, which alleviated their distressed radiator. They, as a group, decided to leave the water and Skittles as a "Pay it forward" gift.
Researching online later told me that the hill was literally a killer, of both cars and people. Lowlanders who had no experience driving in the mountains would routinely and sometimes tragically burn their brakes completely off and there were a lot of deadly rear end collisions at the lower part of the hill, or cars would go off the side of the road, and fatalities occurred that way.
So, a couple hours later, I made it to the bottom. The pervasive smell of brakes burning was intense. There were no accidents, no one died, a toe-nail would eventually be the only loss, and I got a couple of free bags of Skittles. Not such a bad road after all, I’d say.

What a load of BS...

Beware of BS
Snaggletooth Becky is her name
Lying, scamming, ripping off friends is her claim to fame
Brown-nosing her way into your house
And when you're not looking she's sneaky as a mouse
Years and years she's been on the run
Stealing from friends, it's all just the same
Sooner or later she'll get her just due
No more crying or lying, conniving or snitching
Shoving in shame like it was a game
Everything's quiet now, for she's disappeared
Though this time it appears she won't reappear
Cause fake, phony Becky
Was never here.


Well, someone in San Andreas, California, has it in for a woman named Becky.
Or maybe they don't.
I saw the above printed out on a piece of paper, and stapled to a telephone pole, in a residential area near the library, where I had spent a night camped in a courtyard/patio.
I read the paper twice. Wondered aloud who the hell Becky was, and what she had done to warrant such a loving tribute. I pictured a drugged out woman, living life by moving from friend to friend, leeching from them, and then moving on when the fan got hit. It appears that Becky might have finally been arrested, or worse, and more sinister, murdered. The words,"This time it appears she wont reappear" ring mighty suspicious to me. Sounds like drastic action has been taken.
On the other hand, this might be a load of malarkey. "Fake, phony Becky was never here"? Hmmmm. Was she? Or wasn't she?

Except.

It was a typical bus ride, until the voice behind me started to become louder than the rest of the voices. It started to increase in volume, and in the number of expletives, until it became the only sound on the bus. Everyone else stopped talking and was focused on the one way conversation.
"Look, "N-word." I ain't playin'. When I see you I got something for you...Im gonna hit you right in your mouth."
It went on, and what I figured I was hearing was a street rant from one guy on the bus to another of his gang, or posse, talking trash and threatening violence and retaliation. Strong stuff indeed, and not appropriate for the situation, but in a perfect world.... The bus driver heard it and was about to make a comment over the loudspeaker, when the words, "When your grandmother tells you to take out the trash, you do it, "n-word". Do you hear me?"
The driver paused, and it became obvious that this was a parent, a caring one, despite the threats of violence, who only wanted his son to listen to his grandmother, a woman who had obviously done a lot for the boy, emotionally and financially. "When your granny tells you to take out the garbage, you take it out. You understand me? You're almost sixteen years old and almost a man, and you know better than to disrespect my mama, your grandma, when she tells you to do something."
At one point, a young man of nineteen who was seated next to me, and in front of the man on the phone, spoke up, when the expletives were at their worst, and said, "Hey, man, there are kids on this bus." The man was quickly able to change gears, focus on the young man, and in a calm voice, said, "Please dont say anything when I am talking to my son." The young man backed out of the conversation, and it wound down, with the father telling his son, not yet a man, that he loved him and that he knew what the right thing to do was.
It made me think about parenting, and of a conversation I had had with the young man next to me, a dialogue that had occurred a bit earlier. He told me he was from a city in Alabama, where he lived with his parents. He was nineteen years old, and suffered from a disease like scleroderma or Palmoplantar keratodermas, which gives his hands and feet thick callous-like skin and underlying nerve trouble. It is enough of a disorder to warrant a disability, though, and the young man's parents had filed for disability on his behalf early on. Except.
Except that they were using the money he received, for his disability, to buy drugs ("everything in the book"), as he related to me. His father is hooked on crack, his mother meth and other drugs. Sounds like an ideal situation for a young man to fall between the cracks and into a life of drugs and apathy. Except.
Except that this young man wants more out of life than a constant high and of being a money tree for addicted parents.
He put a stop to the disability checks. He struck out on the road to meet his first girlfriend. She lives in Oregon. He lives in Alabama. They have a slim chance of making it work, given the distance involved. I know that.I think he knows that too, but he is making the effort. He wants to make something out of his life. He does not want the disability albatross around his neck. Because of his situation, he never graduated school or got his GED. He could be headed for a life of destitution and despair. Except.
Except, despite all of the obstacles in his way, he has the desire. Despite being small in stature, he had the resolve to speak up against the angry dad in the seats behind us. Despite the distance involved between him and his lady in Oregon, he has made the effort. Despite the pressure from his parents to continue being their personal ATM, he has managed to do things his way, and still manages to maintain a relationship with them...maybe the blood ties will be stronger than the chemicals that are polluting their thinking. They have a special kid there, and will see that, in time. Because their son wants more. And I think he will get it. It won't be easy, but as the cliche goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step." This young man has taken several giant leaps, and I wish him well. It was a pleasure meeting a young man named Justin, on a long bus ride, one day in August. It also was a different type of pleasure to hear a man, a black man, whose race has been so excoriated for having male "parents" who just plain don't give a shit, actually give a shit about his son, and how he grows up. Maybe there is more hope in this world than I thought.

They shuffle in.....Greyhound at night....ewwwww.

They shuffle in. Big, small, fat, skinny, clean, dirty, ugly, pretty, sane, and not so sane. They are the denizens of the night---those who ride the Greyhound buses to places far and wide, being dumped and unloaded like cattle at the station in Sacramento, California. There, they will sit, or lie down, or pace the floor, or walk around outside and smoke cigarette after cigarette, waiting for their connecting bus, or their ride, or any number of other possibilities.
At three AM, few of them are wide awake. They drop clothing,food, blankets, and after a few steps further, realize it. That is when they sluggishly halt and try to muster up the energy to back up and pick up their detritus. Sometimes, they drop more items as they try to pick up the one they originally dropped. Sometimes they just say a silent, “Screw it” and keep walking.
They all have one thing in common, though. They are all going somewhere. I am one of them. I am waiting for four hours for a bus to Los Angeles, where I will get dumped for a six hour wait, then I will board a bus headed for El Paso, Texas.
Im heading home to Tampa. I walked across this big old country, from Tybee Island, Georgia, where I left on the Ides of March, and I walked, bled, crawled, and occasionally rode short distances until I finally made it to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge in the early morning hours of July 31. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, and I had a wonderful time doing it. As physicists are fond of saying, though, for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction, and sadly that holds true for my situation: as great as the getting here was, the leaving here is a miserable and lonely existence, and it does not help that the Greyhound Bus company seems to hold their bread and butter (aka their passengers) in about as much disdain as is possible. Perhaps they know they are the only game in town for low cost cross country transportation, but it does not give them the right to mistreat people in cruel and hurtful ways. I have heard drivers be insulting to passengers, threatening to throw them off the bus for no apparent reason. I have also been treated as badly by a driver in San Francisco, who, with a wink and a nod to the baggage handler who could have placed my luggage under the bus, then turned his back to me and boarded the bus I was supposed to catch, closing the door in my face, and driving away. His actions resulted in my missing the bus, having to pay an extra fifteen bucks, and then having to wait eight hours for the next bus. There is a spot in Hell reserved for that son of a bitch, and I hope I am driving the bus on the day he is due to go there. Ill make sure he catches HIS bus. Count on it.
In the meantime, Sacramento is a sluggish and dull station….three hours to go.

The aftermath....

So, a few days later, and I am in Mammoth Lakes again. Resting as I journey back to the east coast, and the sunny climes of Tampa. The pain and swelling in my foot have not gone away and I finally had to do something that I never do without a bit of coercion---I went to seek medical attention at the E.R. There, the nice staff of Mammoth Hospital checked me out, a bit skeptical at first of a guy who claimed to have walked across the country--but who were convinced by a tough line of questioning and my answers.
X-rays revealed my foot to be broken--a small fracture, nothing too major, and with a bit of Advil and not putting too much weight on it I should be fine. The swelling will go away, and I'll be ready to do some other crazy stunt in the near future.
There remains the physical exhaustion. I do declare: the Greyhound bus service that I have railed about previously...is worse than ever. Leaving San Francisco, the bus broke down in Oakland, and we had to wait for 90 minutes for a replacement, only to be doubled up due to Oakland passengers being added to the mix. It was a nightmarish and uncomfortable 6 hour ride to Reno.
I missed my first bus--missed, they say, because my cart and luggage were not checked in properly, and while I stood there with my checked in tags in my hand, the driver turned on his heel, entered the bus and closed the door in my face, leaving me standing there, and prompting the security guard on duty to shake his head and exclaim, "Man, that was f--ked up."
Even that didnt bother me as much as the apparent disdain that the service has for their bread and butter, which is to say, their passengers.
But, in the end, it is a grimace and bear it type situation. So I do. I came too far to let a bunch of malcontents ruin my experience.

Like the man says.........

One of the many things that have been thrown my way since the beginnings of this walk across the United States was this: “Oh, someone came through here last month doing the same thing as you.”
Well, I beg to differ, but I dare say that while someone may well have been walking across the US for a charity or a cause, or just for a lark, it wasn’t the same as what I am doing, nor is what I am doing the same as anyone else. We all did what we do for our own reasons. There was a guy I heard about from a few people. He toted a cross on his back, with a wheel on the bottom to make it a bit easier to roll along. It was said that as he went across the bible belt, he almost literally had people throwing money at him. Was that his intention? I have no idea. Earlier there was the brave and talented Rachel Milano and her almost half ton wagon that she pushed all the way from Savannah, Georgia to Atlanta, getting sideswiped by a truck in the process. She was making folks aware of the awful stigma that child abuse carries with it for the victims of that heinous act, and was and is herself a survivor.
My favorite was told to me by Bob George, a retired teacher in Dodge City, Kansas, who related a story of a man who walked across the states wearing a shirt that said ”Live Life.” The man had had a son, but his son’s demons caused him to take his own life one day, suddenly and violently. As a way of grieving, his father decided to make that trip with that slogan printed on his shirt. It was how he dealt with his grief. It was a way for him to figure out his son’s death, and his life, and to come to terms with both.
Life. A short word, but all encompassing. We are born with no guarantees save one: that we will die. What we do in the scant time between the two biggest events of our existence is up to us, and it behooves us to make the best use of that time that we can, and enjoy every sandwich, as the late Warren Zevon said, upon finding out he was in stage 4 of a cancer that took him shortly thereafter. Don’t wait til you have cancer. Enjoy every sandwich, and cookie, and breath of air, NOW. Do something small, then do something huge, but do something. Sitting idly is your choice, of course, but then, as the darkness is closing in, you have no right to regret anything . Don ’t wait for someone tell you to get out there. Just do it. Do it for yourself. Do it to honor someone like the great Harry Chapin, as I did. Do it to honor your dead son, as the man with the shirt did.
I was thinking of that man today as I walked up the path to the Golden Gate Bridge. I think a lot about the bridge anyway, and a documentary that was made about it several years ago. The movie was not about the physical location or structure , but about how it becomes the location for a couple of dozen suicides a year. The downtrodden simply come out, walk on the pedestrian footpath, climb up and over the railing and step off…
The film is about those jumpers. The cameras that the filmmakers set up preserved the last moments of life for two dozen people that year, including a man named Gene Sprague. Gene was a misfit of society-- thirty plus years old, looking not unlike Joey Ramone, long black hair, black leather jacket and shades and that general look of one of society’s disenfranchised souls. He had no job and had left applications all over town, to no avail. He would visit the bridge frequently. He would lean on the railing, starng out into the bay. Sometimes he would pace back and forth, deep in thought, and then leave after a while.
On May 11, 2004, he left for good, climbing the railing with his back to the water, standing straight up for a second, and then, with arms tucked close, fell backward, allowing gravity to take him to oblivion. It was spellbinding and sad and pointless.
His family told the filmmakers that the next day they got a call from a prospective employer offering Gene a job. Too little, too late.
I was fascinated with Gene Sprague, and his decision. I wanted to go the place where he chose to make his last act in such a public way. So I went.
Ironically, there was a Relay for Life marathon going on, on the bridge. Sunday, July 31, 2011. The coincidence, like so many others on this walk, was almost too much to believe, again.
I’ve never been suicidal, except for one time a long time ago. I never got close to committing the act, because thoughts of my recently born daughter came into my head and the realization that I might not get to know her and watch her grow up very quickly pushed any such notions out of my head. The fact that I still do not know her very well at age 28 doesn’t matter. There is still time.
So Gene Sprague chose May 11, 2004 for the day he would take himself out. Ironically that same date is someone’s birthday. In fact, it is the birthday of many people. They choose to celebrate life, not end it. My friend Brian recently ushered himself out of this world as well, so thoughts of the selfishness of suicide have been on my mind a lot as well, in recent times. A permanent solution to a temporary problem, as Alex Bennett, ironically a longtime San Francisco radio personality, calls it.
So I walked onto the bridge with all of the dark thoughts of Gene Sprague in mind. I found the spot where he took his final bow. I even had my picture taken there. I did not see Gene’s ghost anywhere, did not hear the anguished final cries of others who took that way out, and did not shed a tear for anyone. Not Gene, not Brian. No one. I actually smiled because of what I saw and heard.
What I did hear and see were thousands of beautiful people running a relay for life. Celebrating life and encouraging people to do the same. Life. Live. Living.
As the great Liverpool philosopher John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” How right he was.
As the man in the t-shirt said.
“Live life.”
How right they both were.
I’ve stepped out on a very long limb, inspired by the spirit of a man who adored life and worked to make others lives better, Mr. Harry Chapin. At the same time I was chasing the ghost of a man who didn’t treasure that which he had. I’ve learned that life is what you make it. Life is too short to even consider an early exit. So, Gene Sprague and his ghost? I don’t need ‘em in my life.
Nope.
Not anymore.
Live life.
Peace.

A Madness to their Meth? Odd...

I spent three days in Lodi, California. It seemed like three weeks. Three awful weeks. I was sick, probably with food poisoning.
I met a lot of people while I was sick, which was an odd experience because I spent most of my time in the room, staring at my eyelids. Not once did I turn the television on. I did cross the street to the gas station a few times, and my presence at the motel was duly noted by a certain group of people who happened to see my comings and goings. My scruffy appearance ( I do look pretty rough at this point, I must say) probably prompted one of them to talk to me.
“You need anything?”
Me: “Like?”
“Crank”
Me: “Hell no.”
Okay.
Me: “Wait, can I ask you a question?”
I proceeded to tell the individual of my walk, my writing project, and asked for permission to sit in while he and his little circle did their thing in another room in the same motel. He said to go to my room and he would let me know. I went to my room and waited. For a while day and half I waited, sick and wondering if the question had been either dismissed or not remembered. Then came a knock on the door. nI opened it and there stood “Eric”, and he just said, “You still wanna hang out with us? It’s okay but no pictures and you cant use our real names.” I agreed and got up, following him all of a hundred feet.
We entered the room that he and his girlfriend/wife Amy lived in a temporary situation . It was set up oddly and there was a second small room where Amy’s little boy, Ryan, slept. That’s right, her 3 year old little adorable boy.
“Do you want some?” he asked me. I politely but firmly declined his offer. He already knew I wasn’t interested in any of what he was offering me—crystal meth, or crank, as it is sometimes called. Theb scourge of the country, and maybe the world eventually.
Crystal methamphetamine is a very strange drug for anyone to even contemplate taking into their body, since, as Eric confirmed my research, it is made in part with hydrochloric acid and other very noxious chemicals, and when it is inhaled, I can’t imagine that it doesn’t eat away at some part of your body. It is a very, very dangerous drug, and has been invading the east coast in recent years, and because it is cheaper and longer lasting, it will eventually overtake crack as the biggest and baddest drug out there. While fairly new to the east coast, as I said, it has been pervasive on the west coast for decades.
So while I sat on a kitchen chair, in a motel room type kitchen area, away from the fumes, Eric and Amy smoked their meth. I still could smell a chemical odor but it wasn’t too disturbing. I wasn’t aware that they had made a phone call for a delivery of more, and when the dealer showed up, Eric told me to turn around and to not look at him. It was a bit nerve-wracking, and I heard the dealer ask who I was, and the response was , “He’s cool.”
As they did their thing, we talked. I was a bit surprised at how normal they were. I asked if they ever tried to quit. Eric said that he did not care to stop, but Amy said that she had stopped for a while but was so hooked on it now that if she went cold turkey she would go into a coma for two days, and she couldn’t let Eric take responsibility for Ryan, who was fathered by someone else. They both said that they did not take the drug for fun, but just to feel normal and to be able to function. They both smoke it every day, not in large quantities but enough to maintain that “normal” feeling. What a life, eh?
I was concerned about something, or someone---Ryan. An absolutely adorable child, he appears to be as normal as can be, but being raised in a motel situation with crank smoking parents isn’t the usual, and when I asked about how they could do that with him present, they actually looked guilty and I thought that maybe I had crossed a line that might get me in a situation.
And then, as if to prove my point, little Ryan came out of his room and said he wanted to watch TV. Amy didn’t even try to hide her activity, and Eric didn’t say anything. I tried to distract the little guy, but I was a stranger to him and he didn’t respond.
As a former teacher, I was a “mandated reporter.” That means that if I see any case of child abuse, I am required by law to report it to the proper authorities. As a writer, though, it is a moral code violation to disclose sources. The child looked to be healthy, though, and that fact caused me to wait a couple of days before making that call this morning. Now that I am safely out of Lodi, I won’t have to look over my shoulder.
I have no idea of this was a typical example of this nonsense. I did hear more people talking about meth publicly than I hear on the east coast. The meth heads I’ve seen in Georgia look pretty bad usually, but not all do. Here, Eric, Amy and the few of their friends that came in and out seemed like normal people. Ironically it was my appearance that prompted Eric to ask me if I was in need. If I ran into either of them on the street, I wouldn’t be able to tell. Eventually, though, that insidious crap eats away at skin and bone and the results are exactly what you would expect.
I am including this piece because, as I said, it is something that I saw on my journey, even if I did seek it out due to being sick and bored in a motel room. Not every story is a pleasant one. This is one of them. I wish all parties well, but I was careful not to give them my blog info or any real location information, to be safe.