Stories
Friday, August 2nd, 2013: Indoor Life, Stories.
Luna
In early childhood, I was one of those kids who rocked himself to sleep at night, sitting up in bed, staring at the window in the opposite wall. That was my first window. It was high above the earth, looking out across an overgrown field called the Vacant Lot that sloped down to the creek. At night, when the moon was bright outside, the top of my curtains formed a black shadow in the shape of a bat. I felt it was alive, a silent, motionless presence.
I had a small child’s desk below the window. One bright summer night, a pale winged creature like a tiny angel soared through my open window and landed on the desktop. Green, with a delicate forked tail, it rested there with its wings spread in the moonlight. In the morning, the luna moth was gone.
Time and Space
What is the history of windows? Many indigenous dwellings – the tipi, the wickiup, the African hut – lack them entirely. When they appear in cliff dwellings and pueblo apartments they’re small, set high in the walls, used primarily for light. Life was mostly lived outdoors; windows wasted precious heat in winter.
What about the relationship between windows and art? In Europe, early framed pictures were icons rather than scenes. When medieval illustrations first began to show landscapes, they were tightly framed like the small windows of the time. Windows in castles and forts were primarily small defensive openings, for scouting and firing on approaching raiders, although the fairy tale has Rapunzel using a tower window to beckon and admit her lover. But in the Romantic period, landscape paintings expanded to a grand scale which could never be encompassed by the view from a window.
The “picture window” and “view house” seem to be recent inventions associated with midcentury or “modern” architecture. Did those grand landscape paintings influence architecture, encouraging the American dream of becoming “lord of all I survey?”
Windows in urban tenements can be a primary social interface, opening onto bustling streets and steel fire escapes draped with laundry, or a symbol of frustration when they face a filthy, confining air shaft. The high, small, barred window of the prison cell has become a vivid image of European and American culture. A symbol of loss, isolation and helplessness, often too high to see out of, offering nothing but a tantalizing patch of sky and snatches of noise from the unreachable outside world, or worse, the terrifying approach of the lynch mob.
During my first year in San Francisco, a despondent office worker downtown famously jumped to his death from a high window in one of those monolithic glass skyscrapers, and he was quoted as shouting “We’re all just hostages from hell!” A friend borrowed that as a band name. But window suicide has a long history, acquiring legendary status during the stock market crash of 1929.
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Window on Fire
When I was eight, we moved to a small town where my second-story room had two very different windows. One looked south across the alley over the neighbor’s big side yard where we kids played football. The other was a double window over my bed looking west out onto the shallow slope of our porch roof and the Pennsylvania Railroad track that sliced through our front yard.
In warm weather, I woke to sunlight pouring through the south window, birdsong from near and far, and the cooing of a mourning dove on the telephone wire just outside, and I’ve always associated that window with the innocence and optimism of childhood, the joy of waking to a new day full of promise.
My room was larger and cooler than my younger brother’s, and I had a double bed, so on hot nights he would join me, and on the hottest nights, unable to sleep, we crawled out of the north window to sit on the porch roof in the dark, waiting for the night train to rumble slowly past on its way to the furniture factory a few blocks north.
A square fan had been placed in the open south window, and on those hot nights we kept it running. One night I woke up, coughing, to face a rectangle of flame and the room filling with black smoke. The south window had turned into a picture of hell. I ran to the head of the stairs and yelled down to my mom, then got my brother out of bed and headed down to safety. While my mom called the fire department, I pulled pots and pans out of the kitchen, filled them with water, and ran up to douse the flames, but the burning curtains had caught the wall on fire, the smoke was so thick I could hardly even see the fire, and I quickly gave up.
We were standing in the yard when the fire truck arrived; they raised a ladder to the window and put the fire out with a single powerful blast from their hose. They concluded that the fire was caused by a short in the fan’s electrical circuit. Most of the smoke had consisted of charred and vaporized plastic from the flammable fan housing; the resulting soot stuck to the surface of everything in the house, so everything had to be laboriously cleaned or discarded, and the walls repainted, and in the meantime we lived with our grandparents a block away. That night, we each took showers in their cement basement. I was blowing black soot out of my nose for days afterward.
My last memory of the windows of youth is from after my first year of college, when I was home for the summer. It’s afternoon and the backlit leaves of the big maple tree fill the view out the west windows just above my bed. My mom and brother are away and my girlfriend, still in high school, has lied to her father again and joined me for our first and only secret tumble in my childhood bed. She’s a freckled redhead and her skin is almost as pale as the white sheets. She rises and I can see her silhouette framed by those tree-filled windows.
Wizard of Lights
My dorm at the University of Chicago was a large old five-story, U-shaped brick building surrounding an unused tree-filled interior courtyard which was like a sanctuary. The building had previously housed an entire small academy, and more than half the building was vacant. I talked the janitor into letting me use an empty second-floor classroom overlooking the trees of the courtyard as a private art studio. One wall consisted of steel casement windows that opened outward; this may be where I fell in love with that style. I loved the ambience of working in the treetops.
Raging hormones and the continuing distance between my girlfriend and me left me helpless with desire much of the time. When frustration peaked late at night, I took buses and trains far uptown, past the Loop to the hundred-story John Hancock building, which was then the tallest building in the world outside New York City. Now, the 94th-floor observatory is a highly developed Vegas-style attraction, but then you just paid to ride the elevator and stepped out into a quiet, elegant, dimly lit space like an exclusive private club, in which the only attraction was the flickering nighttime city spread out below like a controlled burn.
The lake, to the east, was a void, but I spent most of my time sitting on the floor gazing west through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass at the dense converging grid of street lamps, immersed in my private fantasy of playing the city’s lights like an organ. My girlfriend had roped me into her Ayn Rand obsession and we were both at the height of our naive fascination with cities, architecture and engineering. I still felt like a helpless child, but being up there in the sky suggested that anything was possible.
Parakeets in Chicago
Finally my girlfriend graduated and joined me, again in secret violation of parental decree, and we shared a small, second-story apartment in an old brick building in downtown Hyde Park. Our kitchen window faced a window of an Italian restaurant called La Russo. It was only separated from us by a narrow alley, and we soon grew tired of watching and being watched by other diners, so we covered the window with tinfoil. We shared the one-bedroom apartment with another student, and we occupied the living room, which had a big sash window facing the busy downtown street and the larger high-rise apartment building opposite us – the only real “picture” window I’ve ever had.
At night we kept our lights off and watched the world outside. One upper window of the big apartment building across the street was always occupied by an old man writing at a desk, with a cat on his windowsill. We fantasized about this nighttime writer and made up stories about him.
The following year, we both transferred north to other schools, and found an apartment in a newer, mid-century high-rise near the lake, with steel casement windows. Our apartment was at the back, on the fourth floor, overlooking treetops with branches right outside our windows. During our first summer, we discovered a couple of parakeets living in an uneasy alliance with the flocks of English sparrows, following them around in their search for food. Somehow, learning from the sparrows, at least one of the parakeets was able to survive the brutal lakeside winters, and feral parakeets outside the window became one of the main attractions during our three years in that location.
We moved to California so I could go to graduate school, and the girlfriend dumped me for an older guy, a right-wing economist who supported her Ayn Rand fantasies. In the mild climate and lower-density suburban environment, I lived more of my life outdoors, and windows became much less important. My upper-story grad-school apartment had a sizable balcony with sliding glass doors, and for a year I actually slept outside on a folding cot – I was becoming more my dad’s son, fulfilling his dream of getting closer to nature.
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Objects of Admiration
After grad school there were a few short but intense and formative years – I was finally coming of age, and my post-ivory tower lifestyle was splitting into its two distinctive tracks: bohemian vs. nature boy. And I both found and created my dream home, the Terra Incognita loft in San Francisco, with its large, iconic windows facing different aspects of the filthy, dysfunctional, but vibrant South of Market ghetto.
Our front windows became the symbol of the loft. High above Fifth Street, a major artery by which commuters, shoppers and suppliers flowed off the Bay Bridge into the heart of downtown, our row of five tall arched casement windows, their wood frames painted blue against the white of the facade, were the old industrial building’s main decorative feature. The view was unimportant – the windows themselves were an object of admiration for the whole neighborhood – and they were our main social interface with the street below.
My young female artist roommates perched on the windowsill and smoked, gazing pensively off into the urban distance. When we were home, each of us came forward at odd intervals to catch revealing glimpses of our colorful neighbors in action. Olen, the gentle, friendly old owner of the dark, mysterious record store on the corner, with his bloodshot yellow eyeballs, offered to “take care of” parking tickets for us. We peered quizzically down from above as he was periodically visited by men in pale suits who removed small ice chests from the trunks of their Mercedes sedans and carried them into the store. Popeye, who lived in the large flophouse around the corner when he wasn’t MIA somewhere getting shock treatment, was a tall, trim and handsome man of indeterminate age with salt and pepper hair in a crew cut. He had a long, theatrical stride and occasionally crossed the street, stopping traffic, in flamboyant drag: now a general of the Confederacy, now a sailor in jaunty white cap and striped jersey. The small tenement next door housed an evolving population of more troubled souls. I happened to be at the window one morning when a psychotic young woman raced out the door into the busy street, stark naked and shrieking, pursued by her rescuer, a gentle man who clearly had his hands full.
The windows got me in trouble when I went over one night to check on a roommate who had run out into the winter rain. I saw him pacing and called to him, and when he didn’t respond I went down to retrieve him and ended up spending the night in jail.
It was also like the defensive windows of a castle; there were people we didn’t want, and we could check them out, negotiate or turn them away from our high vantage. Like the ex-cons from San Quentin staying at the halfway house in back, who showed up dazed and bloody with dubious stories, or the attractive female friend my suspicious new girlfriend drove away with shouted threats. I never saw her again.
But the windows were still our asset: in demand among fashion photographers as a backdrop, they were also a dramatic setting for our public music shows. And the ambient street noise they admitted was captured on my band’s recordings and became an integral part of some of our compositions.
State of Decay
My large, high-ceilinged room at the back of the loft had, in addition to an old-style pyramid skylight, a crumbling wall of rusting steel casement windows which I loved. They evoked the windows of my old college art studio, but in an advanced state of decay. Made of fogged, chicken-wire-reinforced glass, they faced south toward the elevated freeway which was only a block away. With gaps around the frames, they let in the freeway rumble at all hours, and the cold, wet air of winter. I replaced a broken pane with clear glass, and later I found five unglazed ceramic masks in the street that I glued to a row of windowpanes.
Out that window, I watched Dancy and his ex-cons sorting through his yard of trash down below. He operated a decrepit, nightmarish halfway house and salvage business behind our loft, and much of his jumbled industrial detritus was hard even to identify. One afternoon I was fortunate to be at home when I overheard the little Vietnamese boys who lived next door, and looked out to catch them setting fire to a mattress on the tar roof just below my window.
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Outside Looking In
I’ve never lived in a glass house or had a true picture window, but in the mid-80s, on leave from my San Francisco loft, my girlfriend and I spent a languorous, heavenly afternoon smoking good weed and listening to the sultry new Anglo-African star, Sade, while gazing out over the Los Angeles landscape from the glass wall of an architectural showpiece house on a hill in Silver Lake. So I know what it can be like.
The American modernist dream of the glass house paradoxically led to the “fishbowl” experience typified by the famous house at the end of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Designed to give the occupants endless views and the illusion of living in nature, the glass box sometimes resulted in a total loss of privacy and the reversal of the view from inside-out to outside-in. Indoor life became a diorama or shadow play, with the occupants on display for all the world to see. In the high-rise city, this is multiplied exponentially so the voyeur, like Jimmie Stewart in Rear Window, has a choice of domestic scenes to spy on, like a bank of televisions set to different channels.
Changing Views
Years of residential stability in the loft were ended by the Loma Prieta earthquake. I was briefly homeless, I briefly shared houses and apartments with friends and girlfriends, and I lived outdoors in the wilderness for a year. Sharing a friend’s decrepit Victorian in an Oakland crack-house neighborhood, I discovered that women enjoy being made love to while looking out a window, even if there’s no view. Years later, I was told something about the risk of exposure from a safe vantage point adds to the thrill.
From winter through spring I rented a garden cottage which was secluded behind a large house in Oakland. It was U-shaped, with windows facing a central courtyard like my college dorm, so that you could look from one wing of the house across into the other. One night in springtime when the orange trees were blooming, my girlfriend and I faced each other in opposite windows and theatrically stripped naked, then stalked each other through the house like hungry hunters, to clash in the central kitchen.
Later, I briefly shared a tiny studio apartment near Oakland’s Lake Merritt with the same girl. It was a rear unit and one of her windows looked out over the small parking lots of various buildings. One night in bed, we heard a female voice shouting. My girlfriend was closest to the window and jumped up to look out. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, we could see a girl backing away from a carport, where a tall guy advanced on her from the shadows. The girl was still yelling and now my girlfriend leaned out the window and yelled at the guy as well. She told me to call 911 and I started dialing. By that time there were more open windows and more people yelling, and the guy was backing off. My girlfriend had been the first to respond and I was both impressed and proud of her, and it taught me the importance of quick action. Don’t stop to think!
Within a year, I was back in the crack house neighborhood. The windows in my room faced a large house which had been vacant for a while. One morning I was awakened by the sound of boots on wooden steps, and peeked out my bedside window to see a full-on SWAT team with dogs, converging from all directions. My roommate was illegally growing pot in the basement, but he had slept elsewhere that night. I totally freaked out, running to the kitchen to call his girlfriend’s number. I heard more noises outside, but nothing seemed connected to our house, so I returned to the window, to see the cops breaking into the house next door. Apparently they didn’t find anything!
Living in Los Angeles with another friend, I occupied his upstairs “tower” room, with wood casement windows on three sides. To the east, they overlooked the front roof and the street. I was working in my room one day when I heard rustling outside the window. I looked out to see two raccoons scuttling across the roof. When I shouted at them, one came over to the window and stood up to his full height, threatening me with claws and bared teeth. The roofline he was standing on was just below the windowsill, so he appeared taller than me and was taking full advantage of it!
The dotcom boom of the late 90s brought me back to the Bay Area, where I continued to suffer from dysfunctional neighbors, from drunks to pyromaniacs, but never again found a vibrant neighborhood or good window views. After the dotcom crash I spent a few months as artist in residence in a cabin in the Mojave desert, where my studio had a bank of wood-framed casement windows with the best view imaginable across a spectacular landscape. They opened upward and had to be left open in the heat of summer, but a strong gust of wind could be expected at any time, so I acquired the habit of always anchoring everything in the room with a heavy weight, as if I were onboard a ship.
Screens
My current home is as different as night and day from most of my urban lodgings. I socialize with my neighbors, they’re well-behaved, and we have big yards or gardens and plenty of privacy. My windows are steel casement – my favorite kind, with all the attendant problems of rust, poor seals, energy inefficiency, difficult cranks and hinges – but they all look out on nature: the lush vegetation in my yard. It’s not a “view house” – my downtown neighborhood lies at the bottom of a basin surrounded by hills, with all the houses nestling among tall trees – but the dense vegetation outside my windows transforms with the changing weather and seasons, and what I hear typically ranges from silence to the songs of birds and insects rather than traffic or screwed up people.
Watching my loved ones age, I’ve become aware of how one’s world often shrinks to a view from a window. My grandma died looking out a hospital window at the peaceful homes of a small-town residential neighborhood. My old art teacher recently moved from a cabin in the woods to a nursing home where his only experience of nature is the bird feeder outside his window, and even that is out of his reach. For almost twenty years at the end of his life, my nature-loving dad, crippled and unable to drive, shut himself in a house with all the blinds and curtains drawn, claiming that the sunlight hurt his eyes. But on a deeper level, he had fallen victim to paranoia, fearing everything from his neighbors to names and faces he only knew from TV: politicians, immigrants, ethnic minorities, foreigners. TV news was his only window on the world, and it continually reinforced his fears.
So much of our lives is now spent in transit, watching – or mostly ignoring – the world passing outside the windows of our cars, buses, trains, and planes. I always take window seats in airplanes, since I view air travel as a rare and unsustainable opportunity to see the earth from above, and it continues to amaze me that most others prefer the aisle and ignore the view. But even those people are focused on the windowlike frames of their laptops and tablets. The screens of our electronic devices are now our main windows on the world, and they’re shrinking – they’re even smaller than the defensive arrow slits of those old castles and forts.
Friday, October 17th, 2014: Stories, Trouble.
25 years ago on this day, I was at work in the Berkeley Marina. My home, across the Bay in San Francisco, was, according to a well-travelled friend, “the most beautiful loft in the world.” But since building it out 8 years earlier, I had known that the tall, crumbling concrete building couldn’t withstand a major earthquake. Only 2 months earlier, there had been a sharp tremor in the early morning that knocked over and shattered a big mirror, and I had spent a week at a friend’s house until I was calm enough to return home.
On that Tuesday afternoon in October, I was standing in a doorway in our 2nd floor office when the wood frame building suddenly turned to rubber. Walls and floors rippling and swinging me from side to side, bookcases and filing cabinets crashing down, dust rising inside and outside the plate glass windows. Then, as the rolling and tumbling subsided, people began yelling to each other, climbing over furniture, coming together and heading outside.
I knew the moment had come – I had lost my home and studio across the water, and I was in shock – but Mae, my assistant, also had a home, and a partner, in the City, and I felt responsible for her. The phones and the power were out, but I had a new mini-SUV – my previous ride had been totaled a few weeks earlier by crackheads in a hit-and-run.
The long, straight Marina road, facing the UC Berkeley campanile and the Berkeley Hills, had been split down the middle, with the lanes separated by a wide crack, one lane lower than the other. Straight ahead, somewhere near campus and downtown, a mushroom cloud rose ominously, thousands of feet into the sky.
There was nothing but noise on the radio. We were just trying to get home – we had no idea what we would find ahead. When we reached the freeway, we could see it was a solid mass of stopped traffic. We turned onto the frontage road, where traffic was moving slowly, and made it to Emeryville, where we found a chaos of vehicles backtracking and looking for a way out, since they couldn’t get to the Bay Bridge and traffic lights were off.
I suggested that we try to reach my drummer’s house in Oakland. After a while I was able to reach the warehouse district on the other side of the freeway, where the main through street was completely jammed. Putting my new vehicle to the test, I drove over a curb, up an embankment, and across the railroad tracks, and following back alleys and back streets for miles, we finally made it to Mike’s.
“The Bay Bridge is down, and San Francisco is burning!” he shouted when he saw us. His house was fine and the phone and power were on, but we couldn’t get through to the City. On his TV, the same three video clips rotated over and over. In the first one, shot from a helicopter in the north of the city, block after block of fallen buildings were burning, as if they’d been bombed. All the power was out and the helicopter kept a safe distance. What we could see looked like a war zone. Another scene showed a smaller fire that seemed to be closer to the loft, and the third, taken before dark, showed the huge section of steel and concrete that had dropped from the upper deck of the bridge, cars piled up at random angles in the gap.
Mike’s girlfriend joined us, and we all sat around silently watching and waiting. Hours later, the phone rang. It was my roommate, John, calling from the loft. The power was out, things had been thrown around a bit, and a big chunk of concrete had fallen from the wall and crushed the toilet, but the building was still standing. Mae reached her partner, who was safe at home, with the power back on. We decided to try to reach the city by way of Marin County and the Golden Gate.
In the wee hours of the morning, having dropped Mae off at her Noe Valley apartment, I was driving through a canyon of dark tenements down a wide street filled with debris and lined with burning trash cans. All power was out here in the city’s core, and ahead of me, as far as I could see, the black silhouettes of homeless people lurched back and forth between the flames.
It took days for the government to respond. In the meantime, our landlord’s first response was to replace the toilet. Our neighborhood was one of the two most devastated parts of the city – parts of buildings had collapsed, killing people. Communications had broken down across the region, and we didn’t hear about the freeway tragedy in Oakland until days later.
Everyone’s lives and routines were put on hold as the streets filled with officials, cleanup crews, and dump trucks. I didn’t want to sleep in my threatened home, and Mae and her partner offered me their guest bed. Two days before the quake, a new roommate had moved into the loft, a young artist who had had a disturbing dream her first night there. In response, she had created a big spooky drawing, of three figures wrapped in shrouds, that was hanging on the wall in her room. After the quake she had been stranded in the East Bay, so I drove the long way around to get her. That night, we joined Mike and Kele high up on the Oakland Hills, gazing soberly over the vast metropolitan area with its new patches of darkness, freeways mostly empty, the usual rumble of traffic muted.
On Friday, the fourth night after the quake, power had been restored, and Leslie and I decided to sleep at home. The first night, I dreamed I was carried, suspended upright, though a dark tunnel beneath the earth, toward a glow that was the epicenter of the quake. As I approached the center, the glow increased, and I was filled with a growing sense of well-being, a sense that a great tension had been relieved. The earth was showing me what had happened, and why, and I woke up refreshed.
After the weekend, the landlord brought an engineer to look at the structural columns and foundation – all cracked through, with rusted and broken rebar hanging out like spaghetti – and our front door was red-tagged for demolition. It was the end, the end of almost a decade of artistic drama, an ever-changing community of inspired and unstable young bohemians – the highs and the lows, the all-night sessions of drawing, painting, jamming, rehearsing plays, partying, sharing ideas and passions. Could it also be a new beginning?
After packing and moving everything into storage, Leslie and I were brought together in our search for a new home. Property owners had responded to the crisis by raising rents across the entire region – they were asking twice or three times what we had been paying, even in the East Bay. So we slept on friends’ floors and couches. She got a temporary room in a dorm at her alma mater in Oakland, where the doors were locked at sundown and I had to sneak around back and throw rocks at her upper window to get her to let me in.
John had met his new girlfriend just before the quake, and they decided to squat in the red-tagged loft until the bitter end, camping in the ruins without utilities, hauling jugs of water to drink, bathe, and flush the brand-new toilet. They stayed for a month longer, until the doors and windows were boarded up by official decree.
Weeks after the quake, after two episodes of standing in line at makeshift government offices, Leslie and I finally got a FEMA voucher that allowed us to stay in a cheap motel in a poor neighborhood. Using a food voucher, we grabbed steak dinners at Sizzler and a six-pack of beer at a corner store, and climbed the urine-soaked stairs to our room. We ate, it got dark, we drank a couple of beers. We got used to the smell until we hardly noticed it. In the darkness by the open window, with the sounds and lights of the avenue outside, it began to feel like an exotic, romantic place, like a flophouse in Bangkok. Leslie got up, went over, and stretched out on the sagging bed. “Give me a massage,” she said.
Buddies, Walleyes, and the Call of the Loon
Tuesday, September 29th, 2015: Outdoor Life, Stories.
In June, 1958, my dad and his buddies traveled from our hometown of Marietta, Ohio to Lady Evelyn Lake in northern Ontario, and returned a couple of weeks later with ice chests full of 6-9 pound walleyes, muskies, and northern pike, which we spent the rest of the summer feasting on.
My dad drove his 1954 Studebaker Commander Starliner coupe. They crossed into Canada at Buffalo, New York, heading north past Toronto for more than 300 miles to what was then Haileybury, where they turned west onto a straight gravel road which took them 28 miles to Mowat Landing on the shore of the Montreal River.
Marietta, Ohio to Mowat Landing, Ontario
North Bay to Mowat Landing
There are no roads into Lady Evelyn Lake – that’s part of the attraction to people looking for good fishing. At the ferry landing, they unloaded their gear, including two outboard motors they’d brought, left their vehicles parked, and raised a flag to hail Halverson, the ferryman, who carried them to just below the falls.
Their gear was trucked above the falls to the northeastern finger of Lady Evelyn Lake, where Bob Gilmore’s cabin cruiser was waiting to carry them to what was then known as Bob Gilmore’s Fishing Camp on Bob Gilmore’s Island, now known as Island 10.
Lady Evelyn Lake and Island 10. Diamond Lake at lower left of center.
The men stayed in a log cabin and ate meals cooked by Ruth in the main lodge. For their daily outings, Gilmore had an assortment of classic cedar strip fishing boats made in Peterborough, Ontario.
One day, they navigated over to Frank’s Falls, on a western finger of the lake.
Midway through their time on the island, they cruised all the way south to the bottom of Lady Evelyn and portaged to Diamond Lake where they camped out.
They hog-dressed the fish they caught – popping the eyeballs, slitting them down the middle, removing all the entrails and blood – and spread them on ice for the duration. The mosquitoes were terrible in the evenings, but my dad came to love the eerie call of the loon.
On the way back, they stopped in North Bay on the edge of Lake Nipissing to pack their fish in dry ice for the drive home.
After that, it became a family ritual to set up the slide projector and screen so that dad could narrate the story of their trip and mimic the call of the loon. That slideshow was my first introduction to living off the land in an exotic wilderness. Apparently the memories sank in deep.
Thursday, February 4th, 2016: Outdoor Life, Stories.
I started life surrounded by hills that were covered with snow in the winter, in the western Appalachians. I’m 5 years old when I first show up sledding down the hill behind our house in a photograph. A few years later, we moved to the flatlands of central Indiana, where our folks had to drive us out to the golf course to find even a tiny hill. There, the local river had eroded some modest slopes we could sled down and trudge back up again. We’d heard about this exotic sport called skiing, far away in Colorado, but that was strictly for jet setting celebrities and a few local hoi polloi, doctors and lawyers and their families. And anyway, I was small and frail, perennially shut out of athletics by bullying.
In grad school in the Bay Area, after losing a long-term girlfriend, I became a temporary jock to rebuild my self esteem, and spent a couple of winters learning Nordic skiing and ski touring with friends and family. That gave me a small taste of the magic and majesty of immersion in the alpine landscape, but it all ended when I sampled art school and transformed myself into an urban bohemian. For the next 15 years, I rejected all things athletic and viewed skiing as an abhorred symbol of yuppie decadence.
Women, never underestimate your power to change men’s lives! In my early 40s, I was dumped by my latest sweetheart, a former high school athlete and skier, in favor of a younger guy who was a jock. My self-esteem was again in eclipse, and I accepted a friend’s invitation to take ski lessons. I figured it was time to throw out my old prejudices and hope that an adventurous attitude would eventually land me another fit young babe. In a way, this was the beginning of my years-long experiment with the yuppie lifestyle as I developed a new career in the tech industry, started hanging out with other overpaid professionals, and was able to take more expensive vacations.
And now, two decades later and recovering from hip surgery, with my last ski trip 6 years behind me, I’m looking back nostalgically at a magical period in my life when I had the opportunity to experience spectacular beauty, life-changing thrills, and a new feeling that my body, which I had always considered weak, had unlimited athletic potential, even this late in life.
For my first lesson, in 1995, I joined a friend from art school, at the tiny Mountain High resort in the San Gabriel mountains outside Los Angeles, on thin snow broken by rocks and clumps of grass. There, I mastered the snowplow and not much else, but I got a feel for the common resort layout of a lift to the head of a gentle valley between forested slopes, with the valley floor providing the easy way down, and the ridgetops leading to slopes clear-cut into steeper “runs” for more experienced skiers and snowboarders.
Snowboarding was the commonest topic of conversation for skiers at that point. My friend and I had unquestioningly decided to learn to ski because we assumed snowboarding was for kids. And other skiers spoke contemptuously of snowboarders as rude, inconsiderate, or overly aggressive obstacles on the slopes.
It was kind of like getting a dog or having a kid – my friendships began realigning with other skiers. A friend of a friend gave me her old late-80s PRE 1200s, very hot skis for their day. I bought a cheap pair of beginner boots, and was invited to a week in Park City, one of the most prestigious resorts in the U.S., with the family of an ex-girlfriend. From rags to riches in a couple months’ time.
That trip was an amazing opportunity to immerse myself in both the sport and the lifestyle. The four siblings and their spouses/partners were expert skiers from childhood. We rented two massive adjoining condos in town. In the daytime, the good skiers went off to bomb powder bowls, while my beginner friend and I took lessons and explored the blue runs, long bare ridges with infinite Great Basin vistas and broad deep side runs slashing down to the high-speed lifts. It was an unexpected and unfamiliar turn-on to be playing in the midst of a vast landscape populated only by people who were healthy, fit, athletic and full of energy, moving gracefully on the beautiful snow.
With a solid week of some of the best skiing in the world, I acquired the sense of controlled speed, but I also got a taste of the edge of risk and danger that would motivate me to advance to greater skill. At the end of the day, the good skiers would excitedly relate their exploits, many of which sounded near-suicidal. One of the group spoke of learning to ski on ice in Scotland; he showed off for me, barreling down a steep in a straight line then shooting past me off a snowbank to sail out of sight through the air. My beginner friend took a fall on one of those big ridgeside slopes and cracked a rib on the camera he was wearing inside his parka. And one day, later in the week, we joined a couple other guys on a side trip to Alta, a legendary skiers-only resort for hard-core experts. That turned out to be the day of the big blizzard.
We took two lifts in a row to get up high, and at the top, it was blowing horizontally with total white-out conditions. We literally couldn’t see where the runs were or began, let alone whether they were blue or black. We immediately got separated. I started down, found myself flying blind off an invisible cornice, tumbled into deep power, dug myself out, and spent the next half hour plowing between trees that materialized out of the storm, falling dozens of times but miraculously never getting hurt.
Eventually I made it down to the lodge, where the others were waiting. They’d all had the same experience, skiing blind, tumbling into deep powder, slowly feeling their way down through a world of grey. We rested, then doggedly gave it another try. Before long, the storm got so bad the lifts were shut down, and we drove back with our war stories for the rest of the group, slackers who’d taken the day off.
Nights in the condo were epic, everyone shoveling down masses of food, sharing music on the powerful stereo, the athletes in the group getting raging drunk, people wandering out to the jacuzzi through a haze of pot smoke. That was where I acquired my addiction to the “cold plunge” – rolling from the hot jacuzzi into a snow drift, and back again, opening my pores and then slamming them closed, shocking my capillaries, creating a natural rush that amplified the thrill of being high in the mountains in the winter at night.
On the last day we prepared a picnic lunch for the entire group and arranged to meet at a remote glade below the top of one of the farthest lifts. It was an idyllic finish for a trip that had almost no downsides, and had given me the confidence to pursue the life on my own.
My next trip was a day at Mt. Baldy outside Los Angeles, where you can literally go from the beach to the mountain in the same day. A very strange mountain it is, at the end of a long, steep canyon of ominous boulder-debris slopes, with a long rickety dual chair lift taking you from the often snowless parking area up to the ski lodge in a high saddle. From there, you take fairly short lifts to the peaks. There was fresh powder, 6-8 inches, which was barely doable for my level of skill, but I gamely followed my more experienced friend and did okay. The views, mostly over the smoggy suburban sprawl of the Inland Empire, were hazy but vast and golden. Almost a post-apocalyptic ski experience.
There followed a couple of seasons when I tried to advance but was frustrated. I don’t know if this is true for others, but my main goal, every time I hit the slopes, was to be able to do harder stuff. I couldn’t just relax and enjoy where I was at. I ventured alone over to Mammoth, the giant ski area in the Eastern Sierra, and stupidly took the highest lift to the top of the mountain during an icy snowstorm. There was an older woman with us in the chair, and when another person complained about the weather, she said sternly in a Germanic accent, “Good skiers never complain about the weather!”
Off the lift, I found myself at the top of a thousand-foot-tall wall, with overhanging cornices as far as the eye could see. I had absolutely no idea what to do, trying to stave off panic. I skiied along the gently sloping ridgeline looking for a safe way over into the bowl. There was none, but I found a point where the drop-off was only a dozen feet or so, and pushed over. I fell headfirst into powder, dug myself out, was wet and miserable, with 900 plus feet of steep wall to go down before I got to a manageable slope. And that was the way I got down, by falling and digging out, falling and digging out, over and over again.
My next girlfriend raved about Kirkwood, an “insiders” resort south of Lake Tahoe, so I ventured over there next. Another storm was just finishing, having dumped 14 inches of powder, so I enrolled in a half-day, one-on-one powder lesson on gentle slopes. It didn’t seem to help much; I spent the afternoon wearing myself out, struggling in the deep snow. I couldn’t find anything to like about Kirkwood and never went back.
Finally, flush with money during the dotcom boom, I bought a pair of high-performance boots with custom orthotics, and joined a group of younger colleagues who were avid snowboarders, and that turned out to be my ticket to the next level. We swept across the north shore of Lake Tahoe, from Sugar Bowl to Squaw to Northstar and Alpine Meadows. One guy took me under his wing and introduced me to terrain parks, where I ended one day with 60 feet of air and was hooked on jumping. My god, I can fly!
My last trip with the snowboarders was to Mt. Rose on the Nevada side, and that became one of my favorite ski areas of all, partly because of the view over my beloved Great Basin desert. Victor had a sexy long carving board with a photo of Mrs. Peel of the Avengers on its underside. Riding with boarders, I began to notice how incredibly graceful and cute the female riders tend to be. I sort of wished I’d learned snowboarding instead of skiing, and wondered if I’d switch at some point. I’d learned that the most obnoxious and dangerous people on the slopes were not snowboarders, but older expert skiers who tended to be arrogant and cut other people off going way too fast in tight spots.
As Mt. Rose became my “home” resort, I began focusing on steep black runs, even the scary mogul runs that the older skiers always bombed in their serious knee-pounding way. My style, with my knees and ankles hip-width apart instead of locked together like the old school, felt both natural and fast, and I developed a routine of both opening and closing the lifts – being first in the morning and last in the afternoon – warming up from blues to the hardest blacks by noon, grabbing a quick lunch and a beer, smoking a couple of hits from a joint on the first lift of the afternoon, then exploring the whole mountain for the best scenery and the most delirious rush, taking side trips through the trees, grabbing air off the upswept sides of runs, wearing my quads out with speed until sunset and the last long glide home.
Hoping to rope my less athletic artist friends into these newfound adventures, I organized a trip to South Tahoe and Heavenly, another legendary resort. The skiing was okay, but I didn’t like the mandatory tourist-dominated gondola ride, and the resort felt more like a plateau than a mountain. And my drummer friend took a bad fall and got whiplash. Was I jinxing my friends?
Even Mt. Rose turned sour over the next two seasons as I invited other colleagues to join me and they both ruptured discs there, at separate times. But before her injury, Sydney and I stayed at a shoreline motel and I had the amazing experience of diving from the jacuzzi into the freezing cold lake at night and swimming a long distance under the frigid black water, one of the greatest sensations of my life.
Back in the city, I landed a design contract involving a zillionaire who owned half of Vail, Colorado. Two colleagues and I attended a meeting there and spent a day skiing at the giant, plush resort. The day was brilliantly sunny but there was 6 inches of fresh dry powder, ideal for me at that point, and I had a total speed day of bombing back-side runs, impressing even my more experienced companions who joked about me disappearing in a blur in front of them.
As the dotcom boom began to crash, I discovered Dodge Ridge, a nearer and cheaper family-oriented ski area on a back road between Tahoe and Yosemite. It had a good steep rolling run under the main lift, a challenging terrain park, and a small back bowl that tended to catch deep powder. I stayed with a friend at a motel farther down the mountain, and we found the outdoor jacuzzi mysteriously filled with thick white suds one night; clearing them away, we took turns soaking then diving straight into the cold pool.
Cheap lift tickets at Dodge Ridge sustained me during the lean years after the dotcom crash; I was barely able to afford one brief trip to Mammoth with a friend’s family, where I discovered the joy of swinging tight turns through a steep chute between rock walls. Since the late 90s, skiers had overwhelmingly switched from the old long, straight skis to the new, shorter, parabolic skis. Everywhere I went, I was the last holdout with my antiques from the 80s, and on the lifts, people often gave me an ironic thumbs up for using old school skis. Then as I started getting work again, a client called me north to Seattle, and on the way back I stopped at Mt. Bachelor, a legendary volcano which unfortunately turned out to be under whiteout conditions. I skied as long as I could, but it wasn’t fun.
After moving to New Mexico and commuting to California for work, I was able to save up a nest egg, and by winter of 2007, I decided to treat myself to a luxury vacation: solstice at Ojo Caliente hot springs outside Taos, skiing at Taos Ski Valley for Christmas, and lodging at La Fonda in the heart of town, with a final night at the ultra-luxe El Monte Sagrado resort.
Unfortunately, on my first morning hike at Ojo Caliente, I developed a sudden excruciating pain in my thigh. I soaked in the hot springs for a couple of days, stretched, had a massage, and my leg got a little better by the time I reached the ski area a few days later. But by mid-morning it was spasming again, so I gave up, returned to my hotel to change, and located an urgent care clinic on the edge of town. The medic briefly examined me, scratched his head, advised getting an x-ray back home, and prescribed painkillers for the duration.
The next morning, I suited up to head out, but was barely able to shuffle stiff-legged across the hotel parking lot to my truck, with spasms locking up my thigh. Fighting it, I drove up to the resort, parked all the way at the back of the lot, stepped into my boots, shouldered my skis, and waited for the shuttle to the lodge. The bumpy shuttle ride left me in tears. I rested at the lodge for a half hour, then returned to my hotel.
I spent Christmas Eve lying in bed, drugged, but felt better the next day, so I actually spent Christmas skiing at Taos. I ultimately decided I didn’t like the world famous resort, for the same reason most expert skiers seem to love it: it faces north, and most of the slopes are in shade most of the day, which keeps the snow good, but to me it just felt dark and depressing, and way too steep, considering my newfound vulnerability.
That trip was the onset of my hip condition, which I was eventually able to treat successfully with physical therapy, exercise, stretching, and various other tricks for another 8 years before finally having surgery.
On camping trips to California and Utah, I found myself regularly driving past the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, where the Apache Tribe maintains a family ski area called Sunrise Park, at 3 hours the nearest ski resort to my new home. After getting my hip condition under control, I tried Sunrise and fell in love with the views across the high volcanic plateau, over vast white meadows and low forested ridges to symmetrical cinder cones on the horizon. The resort is never crowded and the slopes are reasonably varied, and when there I stayed in nearby Greer, a tiny, rustic year-round resort community.
On my last trip, in 2010, I stayed at Greer Lodge, a reproduction of a 19th century mountain lodge, with in-room jacuzzi. It was wonderful, but it was destroyed by arson a couple years later. At this point I was skiing in constant internal conflict between pushing myself to take risks and protecting myself from injury; the result was that I wore myself out at the end of the day and started crashing. The last day, I wrenched my knee and didn’t fully recover for months.
In the past few years, my ancient skis had started to trigger chuckles and snide comments from both skiers and boarders, and I didn’t feel like shopping for an expensive new pair. But closer to my heart, I was increasingly aware of the gulf between my values and my addiction, between my dream of living a simpler, more responsible life and the resort lifestyle with its large-scale destruction of alpine habitat and unsustainable ecological cost. I admired friends who did low-impact backcountry skiing, but I had no desire to follow them. It seemed that I had taken this particular addiction as far as I was going to, and it was a bittersweet realization. Those exposed mountaintops with their endless views across the alpine West; the storms and that beautiful fresh powder; the tall, straight Ponderosa pines and the deep blue shadows; the speed, the slash of ski edge across a groomed slope, the flights through the air, the adrenaline rush, the satisfaction of a hard stop; the cute chicks and board betties with their rosy cheeks and tight asses; the communal energy on the lifts, on the slopeside decks and in the chalets and lodges, the beer, the music, the nighttime soaks and dips and plunges, and especially that swim under ice-cold Lake Tahoe. Unforgettable, all of it.
Thursday, December 22nd, 2016: Stories, Travel.
Steak on the Floor
Shortly after noon, as I turned into the desolate gravel lot between the elevated interstate highway and the lonely railroad crossing at Deming, I saw some baggage piled at the edge of the small, open-ended shelter provided by Amtrak for waiting passengers. And when I rolled down the window of my truck to let in some freeway air as I ate a sandwich, a short, gray-haired lady emerged from the shelter to stare at me.
“Train’s running twenty minutes late,” she said. “I just got a message on my phone.” I was also set up for text alerts, but I’d been sitting on my phone so I hadn’t heard the tone. Not that I cared about a twenty minute delay at the start of a two-and-a-half day train ride.
While I was eating, I noticed two young guys wearing packs approaching the shelter, one Asian-looking, the other an Anglo kid pushing a bike. They were both dressed in globally stylish trekking gear and wearing garish neon sneakers, so they looked like aliens in this dusty old cowboy town. The Anglo kid started doing showy handstands and elaborate yoga poses while balancing on the railing of the shelter – the kind of thing a college student might do to impress chicks.
I finished my sandwich. Deming is a couple thousand feet lower than my home, and the truck was getting hot in the bright sun, so I joined the others in the scanty shade of the shelter.
“Have you taken this train before?” I asked the old lady.
“Sure, every year I take it to San Antonio to see my relatives. This delay is nothing. One time I had to wait five hours because some idiot stopped his car on the tracks and the train hit him. Probably some idiot committing suicide. Damn government people made us wait five hours while they checked everything out.”
“Well, I’ve had to wait longer than that,” I replied, surprised by her callousness. “You need patience if you want to ride the trains.” I winked at the young guys listening to us.
“Damn government regulations are killing everything,” she continued. “I wonder how much longer Amtrak will last, running on nothing but subsidies from the rest of us.”
I chuckled. “That’s exactly what we were saying thirty or forty years ago. But somehow it just keeps going.”
“Government spoils everything it gets its hands on,” she said.
“Well, I’ve worked my whole life in private enterprise, and that can be just as bad. I rode the private railways before Amtrak, and the equipment was old and shabby, the trains were dirty, and the service was awful. Amtrak is a big improvement over that.”
“It’s government regulations that killed the private railroads,” she insisted.
The young guys were talking about a transmission that was due to arrive here from somewhere else. The Asian kid had a British accent. “Did your car break down?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was making a grinding noise all the way from Las Cruces, and we only made it to Akela, east of here, where it finally gave up. We got a tow into town, and we’ve been waiting five days for the replacement. It’s a really big one for a Ford van, so it’s coming from somewhere far away.”
“I hope they found you a rebuilt one, so you didn’t have to pay for new!”
“Yeah, no problem there.” The Asian kid left to get snacks at the gas station across the road, and his Anglo friend looked back at us. “My friend is from Australia, he got tired of waiting and decided to take the train east.”
“There’s a lady that sells burritos at the El Paso station,” said the old woman. “The train stops long enough so you can buy ’em from her right there on the platform. Two dollars for a good burrito.
“Some people won’t buy ’em because they think they’re not sanitary. They only eat in the dining car. But I know what goes on in restaurant kitchens. I had a friend that was a chef in a fancy restaurant, and somebody came in just before closing and ordered a steak.
“That chef pulled a steak out of the fridge, threw it on the floor and stepped on it.”
I laughed.
“Then he just picked it up and dropped it on the grill. And I don’t blame him for a minute. In a restaurant, they make you work overtime but they never pay you for it. It goes on everywhere, all the time, people working for nothing.”
I wondered how that fit into her hatred of government regulations. Then we heard the horn blow, as the train came rolling in from the west.
Dining Car Dreams
At 5pm, somewhere between El Paso and Alpine, I heard a call for dining car seating on the loudspeaker, and realized no one had come through the coach taking dinner reservations, like they used to. A conductor told me you have to go up to the dining car and make a reservation on your own, but when I got there, there was only one table occupied, and the hostess said she could seat me now, so I took the first empty table.
A few minutes later, a tall, full-figured young woman wearing a formal, all-black goth outfit strode past and dropped decisively into the middle of the seat facing me across the table. She was pale-skinned, with a tiny jeweled stud oddly-placed above her upper lip, dark lipstick, and a delicate but ornate black choker circling her neck. The dining car is normally strict about seating four people to a table, but they left us alone for the rest of the evening, as the tables around us filled up.
She was quiet at first, nervously glancing out the windows from side to side, where the sun was setting behind blue mountains and shadows were spreading across the plain. She looked to be about nineteen years old. “The desert!” she finally exclaimed. “I love the desert!” She spoke with an Eastern European accent so thick I needed an effort to understand her.
“Where’d you get on at?”
“Sacramento.”
“Long trip! Where are you bound?”
“San Antonio. I grew up in Texas, so I love the desert, where you can run free as the wind.”
She stared at me out of big, dark eyes as I wondered how she ended up with that accent, after a childhood in Texas.
Suddenly she turned and grabbed a pen out of a glass by the window, and started drawing on the paper tablecloth. I watched her, entranced. She was outlining something that might’ve been part of a figure, but I couldn’t tell what part. She glanced up briefly to explain, with a serious look, “The tablecloth is paper, that’s why they give us pens.”
I was burning with curiosity, but I waited a few more minutes before asking, “Are you always drawing, wherever you go?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in art school?”
“No, I’d like to study, but I can’t afford it. I could only go if I got a scholarship.”
“That’s the best way to do it anyway. You don’t want to get stuck with loans.”
Her accent was driving me crazy, in combination with her exotic appearance. She was like something out of an old movie. And even in the midst of drawing, she still seemed nervous, glancing from side to side like a spy, or a fugitive.
She’d added a female torso, head, and long hair above the original abstract outline, and said it was Rapunzel. Her lines were scratchy and hard-etched with nervous energy. She talked about women’s hair as a locus of power. Her eyes blazed as she recalled an art teacher in high school who had tried to stifle her creativity.
I hadn’t yet said anything about myself, but now I told her about my own teacher and mentor, who’d seen my potential from the start, introducing me to avant-garde work and giving me total freedom to experiment. I was studying her drawing upside-down from across the table, trying to figure out all the lines. “I would like to show her nude, but they might not like it here,” she said. “I always prefer to draw nude bodies, but nudity means you are vulnerable and not secure.”
“Or not. I took a year of life drawing with nude models, and for them, getting naked was a job. Men and women, sometimes old people with sagging bodies, they just stood or sat there in the middle of the room with everyone staring at them for hours at a time, getting paid for it. They seemed to have lost all sense that they were even on display, let alone naked. In some cases, I think being naked can be a sign of strength.”
Her eyebrows went up and she looked at me wide-eyed again. “I never thought of that!” I asked her if she’d ever used pastels, but she didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. I told her how I’d migrated from oil painting to pastel drawing because of the immediacy and tactile excitement of blending colors directly with my fingers and hands, and she recognized, accurately, that it would be like using charcoal, but in color.
How strange that two frustrated artists, one young and barely emerging, one old and burdened with experience, should be brought together, entirely by chance, in this dining car rumbling across southern Texas at night.
She was out on her own in the world, but drifting without a plan. She said she’d lived in three different cities during the past year. She scoffed at Los Angeles, so I told her about my friends there who’d survived as artists by working in the movie industry.
I mentioned the Ghost Ship tragedy in Oakland, but at first she didn’t know what I was talking about – I had to supply a lot more detail before she could figure out what I meant. So I went on to describe the post-punk festival in San Francisco that had inspired me to create my own art space and community, long ago, and how important it is for artists to have communities and spaces in cities where they can be totally free to experiment.
That reminded her of Austin. “Austin is – I don’t know, I think it is the arts capital of the world!” she exclaimed. “They have this thing called Freak Week, where anyone can do anything they want anywhere! It’s amazing!”
We were passing through Marfa – the minimalist’s idea of an arts capital. Blocky shadows, dim sodium vapor lamps. Not a human in sight.
“Do you know what is my dream? My dream is to live in a bus!”
I told her about the young woman I’d met outside Silver City, a refugee from the artist loft scene in Chicago, who was raising her daughter in a bus parked in the middle of a corn field, beside a desert river.
The hostess announced the 7:30 seating. Two hours had passed and our world had shrunken to the brittle, glaring brightness of the dining car, sandwiched between mirror-black windows. She sat back, sighing. “Well…it is very nice talking to you, but I should be going.”
She offered me her hand. “My name is Candace.”
“Max.” I shook her hand. “I hope you find what you’re looking for!”
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