Memorial Day and into the summertime summertime sum sum…wherein temperatures rose. When I was a kid and going up the desert with George and Bruce – Owens Valley, Funeral Range, Death Valley – we’d pass through old mining towns and I’d dream of what it would be like to dream away time on one of those wooden porches looking out over some desert valley.*
More than sixty years later it seems I’m finding out, remembering, although in fact the original version was definitely higher up the alluvium in drier hills. But this will do…
Meanwhile it warmed; in the park muddy dogs precluded contemplation and brought quite a
lot of the outside in to an increasingly filthy house, all the more conspicuous come Wednesday’s
raking light when by 7:37 they were abandoned, confined and howling, and I was gone
down empty roads up to Eagleville, Cedarville [not shown]
and Alturas where
Four Seasons Hardware was maskless as it ever was, the Holiday more cautious than last year
and at ten, passing the last door Lefty went through alive on the way out of town, over Cedar Pass to Rabbit Traxx’ considerably cheaper gas and down the Valley, despairing as ever over
the way our Trumplican Party continues to accelerate their overthrow of America-as-we-knew-it at home while simultaneously sending figurehead fuckheads to Israel in support of dear Benny because if it’s the “only democracy in the Middle East” what good is it to them if the supreme[ly corrupt] leader can be voted out of office**? Sets a dangerous precedent for any aspiring Trumplican DINO***. South of Eagleville thoughts turned to fires as one last year had kissed
the road for four miles above the Bare Ranch, receded west for a little but then returned to 447 a few miles into Nevada. Further down the highway evidence of the Poodle Fire, which we’d watched in horror last summer on interactive internet maps from distant Colorado,
had jumped the road down much of the canyon. Then it was home to dirty dogs
and over a hundred that afternoon.
Next day more of the same…after lunch while one of Willey’s guys
was out attempting to resuscitate the Chev four friends and a dog came by to visit. They eventually returned to Reno, the truck fired up but wouldn’t run – “bad gas” the diagnosis – still.
After all those people Thursday the dogs were too many people too…dogs are, after all, people
too. But there we were. I eventually extricated the inverter, got it onto a dolly and into the
repo on a day cool enough [95] for lunch on porch but in ‘n’ out of unease walked only to Wall Spring where huge dead limbs covered our seldom used platform and the Inkies flushed a deer.
So into another weekend, warm,
as overheated skies sketched feminine profiles
or clutching fingers…
Monday preparation in anticipation of Bill Fox’s arrival to choose/approve
the paintings I’ll loan to NMA in November took the morning before a leisurely lunch catching
up. What with the conversation and taking the inventory he was here until L. pulled in at three
following two exhausting weeks of California [including but not limited to installations in Woodside, overseeing H Street’s east wall stucco, the Mare Island Brewing Company’s Benicia outpost’s opening, packing for five months away and other worries]. Bill went back to his Reno dinner guests and we dined on the porch on corn but not oysters as the Holiday had had none
…would have been too long to have kept them anyway.
Speaking of too long, too long away; that Monday dinner was over a week ago, and the subsequent week left little opportunity for ketchup, er, catching up.
More [but not much] on that anon.
*Interesting how Linda’s “Gramma Seed” could easily be taken for some sort of mining equipment.
**He DID get voted out but whether he and his DINO***enablers will allow that to stand remains ever uncertain.
***Democracy in Name Only, duh…
As usual, we are left on our own, to laugh, wince and grump. Mr. Natural loves to clean house!
Have you ever seen the film Dean Spanley? You would love it.
Our drive down 5 to help convalesce Alex was highlighted by seeing all northbound lanes on the Grapevine blocked by a crashed semi-truck of trash, creating a 16 MILE backup; luckily we were heading south. But, diverted east onto the 10 and the 15 (to avoid accidents on 405 and 5) we encountered +100F temps thru Lake Elsinore (apparently soon to be Dry Lake Elsinore), almost too toasty to bear in the convertible. Your temps at Wall are concerning, not to mention the horribly trashed inkies tracking desert indoors. Good luck with all that!
Lucky [relatively] in traffic but…what convalescence?
The more I read here, the more I appreciate the unrelenting rain on the roof this evening….hopefully to dispel any evil designs and future schemes of the wildfire gods….
Just out of curiosity and my slight fixation on the black dogs: I’m wondering what is their instinct after rolling in the dirt? Shake it all out? Take a swim? Hurry into the house to shake it all out there? Or just accept it as flattering ornamentation? Their instinct? not yours.
And responding to your reports from that end, here’s a weather note from the East Coast: this March was essentially a Spring month–it has always been winter before this. It was also mostly dry as a bone. Blooming in “the garden” has been consistently at least two weeks ahead of the historical schedule, also very little rain, not drought, but very little, and day after hot day of pretty much cloudless skies. This was also the third winter that the ground did not freeze. It used to freeze solid for most of the winter. Are we getting used to this yet??
Very nice illustrated update, Mike. BTW, what is bad gas?
What I never knew was that if gas sits too long it breaks down to the point of non-combustion as well as gumming up the fuel system…thinking the issue was more condensation I’ve been keeping the tanks in the Chev topped with with a gallon or so here and there for years so for all practical purposes the bulk of the fuel is years old…after draining one tank and putting in new fuel it still doesn’t run, however.
“Gramma Seed” isn’t abandoned mining equipment, it’s UFO debris. Parts of the Nevada desert are strewn with the stuff I gather, and there’s a concentration in a secret off-the-map site in southern Colorado.
Shhhh…
In spite of my very late response to this group of images, I really liked them — mostly because quite a few of them were collage-like in their composition….very intriguing. While I loved the image on the Inky rolling in the dirt (ashes or worse), I felt guilty about that pleasure when I read a more recent blog and realize they can’t be allowed to gambol and roll indiscriminately…. :-(.
not that they don’t gambol and roll indiscriminately…to their and the floors’ detriment.