Krazy in Kalifornia

I knew it was bound to happen at some point but for it to take as long as it did is a bit surprising. What am I referring to? (To what am I referring?) I’m talkin’ about me running into the nut factor, as I have in the past three days in California.
It started in Jamestown, a small village, not without its charm, in the foothills of the Sierra mountains. The place resembles an early twentieth century town, a row of shops and hotels lining the main drag, and a lovely little park in the middle of one side, with a large gazebo, some benches and tables, and enough privacy to make it a good enough place to sleep for the night. I was almost set up to do this. Enter Sherry.
At least, I think that was her name. She walked past several times, in shorts and a tank top, twitching and talking to herself. She carried a few shopping bags and other packages. She stopped in front of where I was sitting and asked me for five dollars for cigarettes. I told her I was broke and she got a bit confrontational. I ignored her and began to wonder if there was another place to go to. Now enter Brina, an older woman who knew Sherry. She distracted her for a few minutes and then after Sherry left told me not to let her sleep near where I was because she would try to steal from me. Great. I decided to spend money I didn’t want to spend and got a room, overpriced, at a motel down the street. Second floor, which meant that I had to lug my cart up the stairs, which I did. Room 20.
Wifi didn’t work. Phone calls were a hassle due to some bimbo at the front desk. Lousy night already.
Three AM—knocking on the door. I staggered out of bed and opened it. It was Sherry. She must have seen which room I went into. She basically barged in and demanded to use my bathroom. She was very loud, and I didn’t want to have a fight with a crazy woman, but I had to refuse. She left without a word. I went back to what sleep I could muster.
Part two, two nights later. San Andreas, California. Another small town, less charming than Jamestown, and basically a stopping point on the way to other places.
I was at the gas station talking on the phone booth phone via phone card, since my cell service stopped working due to cell tower issues. A man and woman walked by as I was talking and the woman asked me if I was okay. I nodded that I was and they left. I finished my call and headed for the library, a mile and a half away, where I left my cart after ascertaining it was a good place to sleep for the night, which was a Friday. I got on the library’s wifi and spent some time there, and then headed back to town for some drinks and snacks. As I left the store with my purchases, who should be walking along my path but the man and woman. Her name was Ann and the man was her brother Carl. Picture Farrah Fawcett’s body with Mickey Rourke’s head and you have Ann. Picture Danny Devito with a few extra inches in height and you have Carl. She was poured into her clothes and you could tell she had been a looker in her time. This was not her time, though, and her teeth were gone except for a few bottom remainders. The oddest thing though was the bandaids. Her cheeks were covered with big brown ones, and I asked her what had happened. She said that someone had thrown acid on her face. It got silent. Carl didn’t say a word, just walked along with a little innocent grin on his face.
They asked me if I was sleeping at the government center. I had no idea what that was, so they told me how it was just a place that they slept outside, behind the main building. I followed them to where it was and it turned out to be just a building that housed administrative offices of some sort. Ann said that at night workers went up on the roof and threw chemicals down on the people sleeping below. Oh, boy, I thought. Time to get a move on. I headed away to the library, which was almost literally next door. I spent a worried night wondering if I was going to be hassled by weird homeless people with band-aids on their faces. I wasn’t.
But, the next morning, as I left the library and headed back to the main road to continue my trek, who should I encounter but Ann and Carl. They asked me if I saw a strange woman with long hair walking to the library. I allowed as how I had not. They told me she had come intotown on the bus from Sonora and was very odd and they wouldn’t let her sleep with them.
I bade them good bye and left. Around the corner, at another building, there was a bench area like a bus stop. A tall woman sat there. I approached and asked her if she had run into the other two, and she told me her name was Cherish, and that she was there to visit her “husband”, a woman, since she was gay. The “husband” was in jail for some infraction and it was unclear when she/he would be getting out.
Cherish was a piece of work herself, very odd acting and with some strange ideas. She was missing the pinky finger on one hand and had some burn scars. I asked her what had happened and she told me that several years ago, while cooking chicken in a frying pan, she had a small stroke, and during that time she had grabbed hold of one of the pieces of chicken—still in the pan frying, and had just held her hand in the boiling oil for almost 20 minutes. It cost her the finger and surrounding tissue, and as a result can now only count to nine.
I was wondering when I was going to run across a crazy person, Ill bet those folks were wondering the same thing.

Phrog Jockeys

Derogatory term: camel jockey. Used as a put down of Arabs. Bench jockey: a second rate ball player content to sit in the dugout and harass the opposition. Frog jockey: well….
Okay, as crazy as it sounds, there are frog jockeys. Joe Kitchell is one of them.
In 2005, Joe ended a jumping drought for Angel’s Camp, “riding” Roy W. to a winning leap of 19 feet, 4 inches. That’s pretty damned far for a creature the size of a grapefruit to jump.
So what is the big deal about these here amphibians? The story goes like this: Mark Twain, early on, made his mark in the literary world with a story called The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, based on some stories he had heard from local tale tellers. He adapted their tales into his now-classic short piece, in a cabin located on Jackass Hill, a few miles south of Angels Camp, California. (Jackass Hill is named for the 200 or so pack mules that used to bring supplies through the area, on the road named for them.)
So, with Twain’s career under way, and the frogs now associated with Angels Camp, and Calaveras County, it was only a matter of time before frog jumping became a big deal. A contest is held every year at the local fairgrounds, and the winners (frog AND “jockey”) get a nice plaque, Hollywood style, on the sidewalk in the historic dowbtown section of Angel’s Camp. In 1954, Roy Weimer from Angel’s Camp prodded Lucky to a then world record jump of 16 feet, 10 inches. And he was the last local winner until 2005, when Joe Kitchell took the crop to Roy W (named after Weimer) and got to enjoy the benefits of the winner’s circle. Rumors about frog steroid use in the intervening years cannot be substantiated because all of the alleged participants were tragically served up at a local Chinese Buffet one evening due to a paperwork snafu.
Still, Roy W., clean and healthy, made his 19 foot jump, and Joe Kitchell saw fame and fortune in his eyes. Briefly.
He got to appear on the TV show, “I’ve Got a Secret”, for which he was paid 1000 dollars. “That’s more than I made for winning the contest,” he says.
And that was about it. Now, Joe works for the public works department, in part cleaning the sidewalks, including the very one where the bronze plaque commemorating his glory days. He doesn’t mind though, because it affords him the opportunity to wax philosophical about “phrogs”. (sorry)
“Frogs live for only three reasons: To eat, to not get eaten, and to make baby frogs.”
I asked Joe where the contestants come from. “Lakes and ponds,” he said. “About a week before the contest my team, the Calaveras County Frog Jockeys, goes out and rounds up as many as we can find. One night we got forty five. Some are too fat, or too thin. We try to get their body temperature up because the higher it is the more active they are.”
After the contest the winners, and losers are released back into the wild.
So where is Roy W these days?, I ask.
“He is out making baby frogs somewhere,” says Joe Kitchell, with a laugh.
Does life get any better? I mean it. Does it?

Yosemite, shared

After I visited Joplin, Missouri in May, it was three days after the tornado. It was almost too much to take in. That night I sat down and wrote the longest piece for my blog yet, about what I saw, preferring to just “spew” before my thoughts got jumbled.
A few days ago, I spent the day in Yosemite National Park. Again, it was almost too much to take in, but for completely different reasons. I decided to sit on my thoughts for a while to let the events of the past week sort themselves out as much as possible.
All of the superlatives about the place are deserved, to be sure. Half Dome, Yosemite Falls, Bridal Veil, the sequoia groves, El Capitan, and so much more that I didn’t get to see this time. If there is a more beautiful and breathtaking place on earth…
What made this so special though, wasn’t a bunch of trees, or waterfalls, or wild animals. It was a beautiful combination of factors, including the most important one: I was seeing that amazing place courtesy of, and in the company of friends.
Walking across the country is a very lonely and solitary endeavor, unless you do it as part of a group. I am not. The benefits of doing it solo are many: you get to go where you want, with no argument. You get to eat where and when you want to. You can sleep in small places that only have room for one person. And much more.
The downside of the deal is this: when you see a beautiful waterfall, or lake, or even just a deer standing and staring peacefully, there is no one to nudge and say, “Wow, check that out!”
When Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild’s tragic protagonist) was dying of starvation in an abandoned old bus in the Alaskan wilderness, after having spent several years seeking that state of grace that he thought would come from living off the land by himself, he kept a journal. Running out of paper, he began writing short entries in his bible, I think it was. As his days dwindled, he finally had an epiphany. Too late, but still the realization came to him before the curtain went down on his life, and in his bible he wrote, the following: “Happiness is best when shared.”
And so it was that I was so able to see and appreciate the miracle of Yosemite with friends. Rolf and Tessa, a unique couple if ever there was one. I met Tessa on Facebook, due to a shared love of music, and we had talked a few times over the past year, , on the phone and have swapped music many more times. Her husband Rolf I did not know at all. Yet when the time for my walk came, I was invited to stay with them for a few days if my route took me through their town of Mammoth Lakes, California. Tessa and I had a bond already but Rolf did not know me at all, and it created a bit of an uncomfortable scenario early on, especially since Rolf was working most of the first three days I was there, alone with Tessa. By the last day of my visit though, we had established a good rapport and it made the Yosemite experience all the better.
Once again the words of the late Christopher McCandless reverberate: “Happiness is best when shared.”
Especially when what is being shared is Yosemite, and its glory.

Randolph Hudson III, on the road to Nirvana

What makes Randolph roam the roads? Adventure. Nothing more.
Twenty years old, from Lynchburg, Virginia, Randolph and I crossed paths in Groveland, California. He was sitting at the library there after I got dropped off in the parking lot by my friends Rolf Knutson and Tessa Coker. He was reading a book about, or by John Muir. He has been walking across and around the United States in search of beauty, much like Everett Ruess, Christopher McCandless and many others before him.
A well spoken young man, he seems to be truly content with his journey, which began in March in Virginia and has led him across the country by foot, car and train. He has hopped trains, hitched rides and walked a long way to get here, and he is not done yet. His next move is that he is going to try to secure a job at Yosemite, working at trail management or something to be able to roam the park at will. His eyes drift off into a happy place just at the mention of Yosemite and it seems like it might be his Nirvana. He dreams of building a cabin somewhere and living off the land, something he has done for a while now, since leaving Lynchburg.
He has parents. He has two sisters. They all support, perhaps grudgingly, what he is doing and his folks even got him a phone so he can be in touch. He shuns technology, for the most part, but does check the internet when he hits a library on occasion. He vows to never have a Facebook account, but was interested in the address for this blog, so he could check out my journey.
We spoke quite a bit about travelling, and Everett Ruess, who disappeared from the Davis Gulch area of southern Utah at the same age that Randolph is now, 20. We also briefly talked about the doomed Christopher McCandless, who was only a few years older than Randaolph when he ventured into the Alaska wilderness and starved to death in an abandoned bus, all because he was unprepared. I dont think that Randolph from Lynchburg, Virginia, is in any danger of that. He seems to have his act together and his wits about him. I wish him well. Its nice to be living the dream and the life you choose.
When he left Virginia in March with a hundred bucks to his name, Im sure he had no idea how far he’d get. He has come far. Very far. Good for him. I hope he makes it to Yosemite, a short day’s walk away. I hope he gets the gig he is looking for and I hope he gets to spend a glorious year in his Nirvana. If I was a younger man, Id probably do the same thing, especially after spending an extra special day in that extra special place today. What the hell took me so long???
Times are very hard right now. With so many out of work, out of luck and out of touch, it takes a special brand of courage to leave family and comfort and hit the road in search of something less concrete. Randolph is a very brave young man, and I admire him for it.

If God has wanted us to be naked, we'd have been born that way.....

So, California is the land of granola eaters and hippies and hottubs, right. Right.
Today brought about another adventure, and another chance at something new. Whew. Am I glad THAT is over!
Rolf and Tess, my friends and hosts for the past several days, took me to a place called Little Hot Creek. It is a few miles up in the middle of nowhere, cow country, really, and the dirt road that got us there would be more than a match for any regular car. The Jeep we were in got us there with only a few loud scrapes and bumps.
“There” was a natural hot spring, water, full of minerals and heated by volcanic activity, and running from an aquifer somewhere, through a pipe into a man-made tub in the middle of a field. As we approached I saw a naked man run for a pile of clothing, donning a bathing suit in a matter of seconds. He returned to the tub as we approached, and explained that he had put the suit on as a courtesy, and expressed a little annoyance that sometimes families with children came there and he wasn’t taking any chances.
Rolf and Tess had been there before and told him that they had no problem with whatever he did and before I could bat an eye they were doffing their clothing, leaving you know who as the only one of the group with clothes still on. Ahem.
So, when in Rome…or California. I dropped trou and dashed into the water. The…very…HOT…water. Ahem.
I now know what happens physically when you boil eggs. Ahem.
Needless to say, shy boy here had no choice but to try not to stare, and I did a good job of it, I think. Our little trio was fairly modest in all aspects, but Mr Showoff, the fellow who was already there, had no compunctions about walking around with a bit of a swagger in his dagger, so to speak.
In actuality, it was a very cool experience. Not physically—the water was almost unbearably hot, but the freedom from clothing and being au naturel was surprisingly refreshing. I was the first to put my clothes back on and walked around the area taking pictures of the creek and the rocks. Then we had snacks that we had brought and left a little later. Before we departed, Rolf actually drained the tub of water and with a brush left there for the purpose, scrubbed a lot of the green slimy algae off the sides. The pipe has a valve that can be shut off to allow the water that is already there to cool a bit. There is also a drain pipe with a stopper. It is a very nice setup that seems to be maintained by those who use it. He refilled the tub and we left. If everyone chips in, something can function well for a long time, and so it was with the Little Hot Creek tub, in the middle of nowhere, where I got naked. Woody Guthrie wrote: California is a garden of Eden. Now I know what he meant. Pass the fig leaf….please??

Bodie, California

Many years ago in the Hudson Valley region of New York, there existed a small community known as Potterville. The town was nestled deep in the woods above Wawarsing, New York, and featured a few houses and buildings. The advent of modern roads and local industry apparently drew everyone out of Potterville, and the place quietly became a ghost town of sorts. Local teens used to make the 8 mile trek up the often washed out road that led to Potterville, and I was among them.
It was the local story that the place was haunted, and we would sometimes bring our uninitiated friends up there to give them a good show of it, but in truth it was a rather bucolic setting, the buildings weren’t terribly dilapidated, and overall it might have been a good place for a picnic if it was not in such a remote and hard-to-get-to location.
There was one very odd incident that I still cant explain, though. I had gone for a ride up the bumpy road myself, blasting music and just being a teenager. When I got to Potterville, I parked my car and started hiking around. There was a garage type structure, open doored, and I looked inside. On a cross beam, about 8 or 10 feet up, was a bird. It was a dead bird, and it was nailed to the cross beam. I was fascinated and stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of why a dead bird would be nailed there. It occurred to me that I had better go grab my friends and bring them up to show them, since we were always looking for some reason to keep telling people the place was haunted. I zoomed out of there, back to town, where I found a friend, Vinny Nigro, and we headed back up. I could not wait to show him the bird, and was really playing it up.
We arrived, parked the car and walked down to the building. Voila!!! And the bird was gone. I stared hard, and could not believe it. Then I thought that maybe I was looking in the wrong building. But I wasn’t. The nail was still in place but there was no bird, no blood, no feathers even. Just a cynical Vinny and a confused Jim.
I had Potterville in mind when my hostess here in California, Ms. Tess Coker, brought me up to Bodie, a ghost town in the Sierra Mountains of eastern California. It had been an old mining settlement in the mid 1800’s, and was a fairly productive one, but soon enough all of the gold and silver veins had been worked out and the population began to slowly decline. From a high of almost 8000 residents in 1880 and with 65 saloons and with a reputation as a lawless place with a red light district and a Chinatown, Bodie was booming. Then the gold went away and so did the people and by World War II there was no one left. And it just sat there. Winters up there are so severe that often the buildings would be completely buried and the summers are devilishly hot at times.
There are over 150 original buildings still standing, in a state of preserved decay. There is a store, a gas station, a pool hall, a church and a schoolhouse, a firehouse, as well as a hotel which probably was also the whorehouse, many residences and other structures. The landscape is littered with various mining machines,old conveyances, and other bits of century old junk. The state of California has taken over the care and preservation of the place and for 7 bucks a head you can spend the day there, walking around pretty much to your heart’s content. Some of the buildings are safe enough to enter and have been cordoned off in spots to prevent theft of the artifacts which still sit on old tables and shelves. The pool hall looks like you could in and rack em up and shoot a few games, after the dust has settled. The rest of the place is just quaint and atmospheric, and one cant help but try to conjure up the spirits of the long departed as they walked through the rough streets and went about their day.
The cemetery is a bit up the road with around 160 graves in evidence. The last burial there was recent, in 2003.
I didn’t see any dead birds. In fact, there was not much wildlife in evidence at all. There were, on this day, several dozen tourists, many from Europe, based on their conversations, and they were all fascinated with the place, as were Tess and I.
I would recommend Bodie to anyone who might like to see a real chunk of history, as it was, where it was. A huge bonus is the ride out of Bodie. The vistas of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada range are spectacular, and are yet more eye candy for those who like eye candy.
Not a haunted town by any means. But haunting it certainly is.

Larry Cunningham says "Hug a telephone pole"

It took place outside of Delta, Colorado. I was walking along at a good clip, trying to stay ahead of a pretty vicious thunderstorm which had been following me for hours. It was dark, windy and the terrain was flat and endless, yet another in the series of flat open areas that I have been stuck in as lighting and hail and rain have knocked me around for a dozen loops.
From seemingly out of nowhere a man appeared beside me. I had not seen his truck, a utility vehicle, as it has stopped behind me and had not heard him calling out to me, since my mp3 player was blasting away. I quickly shut it off and listened to the man, whose name was, I soon found out, Larry Cunningham. He asked me if I minded if he walked with me while he asked me some questions. He seemed harmless enough so I said it was okay. He had seen me walking for several days in a row and wondered what I was doing it for. I happily told him about WhyHunger and their mission. I gave him a card and he was thrilled to have it. He said he was going to go home and make a donation pronto.
I asked him if he thought I was going to avoid the storm. He looked at the clouds behind us and said, “No. Its going to get you pretty soon.” I laughed and told him that I was a sitting duck for the lightning, to which he replied, “Hug a telephone pole. It’s the safest place for you if you’re out in the open. The lightning won’t hit you full blast, but it’s the safest place you ll be. So if it starts to lighting, hug a telephone pole.”
The utility truck told me that he probably knew what he was talking about. So, next time it starts to lightning, remember those words: Hug a telephone pole.