Bruce Willey

Decadal Intuitions: A look into the future from on high

 Can’t change the past; it wasn’t built to last. Can’t change the way it goes, nobody answers cause nobody knows  —Michael Houser

Those who regularly follow this column (thanks Bob, thanks mom) may recall with certain fondness that, under the influence of nitrous oxide, I predicted we would be blessed with a black man in the White House. Spinning in a dentist chair more than two years ago with a laughing gas coursing through my neurons and a drill whirling into tooth number 21, I also predicted a woman vice-president. That didn’t turn out to be true. But since Hillary is in the White House a lot nowadays, I’ll give myself a tie score. Astrologers do it all the time.

So thanks to my overwhelming success and (mostly) undefeated record, I thought I’d tackle the next decade. This time, though, with a different prescription because the last one left me dizzy and besides, my teeth are not as British as they once were.

Marijuana seemed like a good choice given that it will be legal in California beginning January 1, 2018 anyway. Maybe sooner. Depends, in part, on the economic recovery. But before I put fresh water in the bong, I warned myself about my inherent optimism, a trait that could make me trip and reach for unattainable utopias to steady myself.  Yet, a little idealism never hurt anyone’s feelings except the Republicans. 

 Phewww… (cue bubbling sound) Hooeww.

Is that someone at the door? No? In that case, gotta say this techno music has so much going for it than meets the ear. Speaking of which, why is it that our eyeballs are as round as the planets? Connection or coincidence?

Kidding. Just dipping a finger into stoner cliché’s to be sure this is “kind bud.” Turns out it is. Santa Cruz’s finest. In the process I’ve slipped into the present tense without even noticing. Might as we’ll stay here, wherever “here” is in this given moment—a task that is not as easy at it sounds. (Look mom, no hands. Bob, I’ll save the rest for you.)

Anyway. Where were we? Ah yes. Sarah Palin. I know. Major buzz kill. But she’s running for president. Not to worry though; she’ll drop out of the race midway just like she did in Alaska. Dick Cheney will consider running. Think I’m stoned out of my gourd? I am. Cheney along with Lou Dobbs (major hurdle with the Hispanic vote), that Mormon pretty boy dude who ran last time (can’t recall his name right now) and that bass-playin’ preacher bro (ditto). The fact that I can’t remember their names, even while jacked up on the reefer, doesn’t bode well for their national name recognition.

That prophetic brilliance aside, what my two fans really want to know is: will Obama win reelection? This kind of political forecasting is far beneath my talents, not unlike a weatherman stepping into the rain and calling for a chance of showers. But sometimes I must stoop to the level of my readers, especially Bob. So yes, Obama will win. Here’s why.

All those angry populist pundits who jumped the gun and accused Obama of not getting anything done in the his first year of office are going to eat their proverbial shorts beginning in the summer of next year while taking a good long whiff of Rush and Beck’s skivvies through 2012 and beyond. Obama and Congress will eventually pass a universal health care plan even if means in 2015 Joe Leiberman will have to suffer a painful death from the last known strain of swine flu. Obama will also squeeze a climate change bill out of Congress that will, in hindsight (2020), be weak but influential. Media buzzword of the same year: “Climate Migration.” As now, we won’t be talking about polar bears and mangroves, but human beings and Floridians. 

And the economy? Prudent forethought of this magnitude calls for another bowl. That, and economics—macro, micro or my own—is not exactly my strong suit.

Back now… Whew! Totally discombobulated. Where were we? Oh yes, pondering the future of junk food or junk bonds? Can’t recall which. Whatever the case, I’d practically kill for a bag of ranch flavored Doritos right now. This, despite food-related diseases like diabetes will continue to climb, then begin to taper off around the end of the decade. Behind this encouraging trend will lurk much-improved health care for the poor, health care they couldn’t afford when insurance companies were privately owned and traded on Wall St. Preventive medicine that includes an emphasis on fresh, local food sources will hit its stride around 2014 after Michael Pollan becomes head of USDA. During his confirmation hearings Republican senators will read aloud from his book “Botany of Desire,” with particular emphasis on the chapter regarding marijuana. They’ll accuse Pollan of being a pothead but he’ll get off with a slap on the wrist for immersion journalism. I digress… It the Herb, mon.

Red-hot career advice for the coming decade: Farmer. With continued and later, widespread interest in locally grown, organic food, independently-owned farms will sprout all over this great, paved land. Parking lots will be peeled away and strip malls slashed and replaced by small farms. At least some of them, anyway.

Redder-hot career advice: Anything and everything to do with clean energy technologies, or put another way, everything China is doing right now. We used to be the leader in eco tech long before it was called green, long before China started making more than just plastic toys. It’s embarrassing and true at the same time (deadly combination): dirty air China has a better green energy plan, manufacturing base, and government sponsored R&D than we could hope to achieve in five years. Of course they’re communist. This should be expected. But maybe we can do it in ten years. Here’s to hoping we can lest all that stuff about America tanking like the Roman Empire. It almost happened, but Bush didn’t know how to play the harp.

Cultural trends: Facebook, Twitter, and blogs like this will seem so yesterday in a little more than five years, especially after Google buys both and sells all personal information to what’s left of the too-big-to-fail corporations in 2016. Pithy manifestos like what you ate for dinner will be measured with the same profundity as farting in public (next month).

Someone once said if we don’t study history we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. I’m a firm believer in this, but once you study history, even a little bit, you realize that history is just a collection of repeated mistakes. Every once in a while, though, there’s a paradigm shift, an Age of Enlightenment say, and humanity makes leaps and bounds. That’s what we’re going to have to do in the next decade. Will we do it? I haven’t the slightest clue. But I’ll go out on a limb to say it’s up to each of us. 

Almost forgot. The economy will get better. Pretty soon. Here… Happy New

Impersonating President Carter

If memory serves, my awareness of this country’s political process was the result of an impersonation of Jimmy Carter. A civic-minded seventh-grade teacher asked for three students to prepare a speech that reflected the views and politics of the then three presidential candidates—Jon Anderson, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. After the speeches, we were told we would debate each other and the students would vote for the candidate of their choosing. This had to be 1980; I must have been 12-years-old.

 I don’t know why, but my hand shot for Jimmy. Might have been my interest in regional dialects or my taste for peanuts for all I know. In retrospect, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. As the kind of student who sat at the back of the class, hopelessly drowning in a horny ocean of pre-adolescent hormones, this would have been last thing I would have normally done, much less volunteer for. Standing up in class, impromptu, was enough to cause a life’s worth of priapic mortification.

 Terrified at what I’d gotten myself into, I wrote a short speech after listening to a campaigning Jimmy Carter on the radio. Then I went to the bathroom and smiled with all my teeth and practiced becoming President Carter.

 “Deaha Americun citizens,” I began the next day in class. My classmates erupted in laughter. I smiled ever more broadly in caricature. “We are gathered here tuday…” I don’t remember the rest of the speech, nor any of the debate with Anderson or Reagan. I only remember my version of Carter won the election and a few months later Jimmy Carter didn’t.

 And I think I may have cried a little. Had I known then that my formative years ahead would be spent with Ray Gun and father Bush—12 long years to be exact, plus eight years of Bush redux—I might have wept a little harder or killed myself prematurely. Nevertheless, that day in the classroom I became one with Jimmy Carter in my political leanings.

 As we’ve all heard, life has a way of coming full circle. It’s just the circles whirl faster while we spin around the sun, the years shorter with each passing. In this case, nearly 30 times before I saw, in the flesh, the man that had unwittingly given rise to my political consciousness. Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer, politician, president, peacemaker, painter, poet, sitting not but ten feet in front of me at Emory University in Atlanta with a large bandage on his hand. 

 He’s older of course—85 years and counting—but the same broad smile was wholly intact. So, too, the Plains, Georgia accent, though not as thick as I remember, thinned perhaps by belonging to the world now rather than a single Southern state. Carter had come to talk about creativity. About his poetry, novels, his memoirs, non-fiction (25 books in all) and his woodworking, painting; how all this ties into his life, a former president who has, without question, lived larger than any other past presidents.

 He’d spent the previous day feeling nauseous and was half way through a blood transfusion when he appeared on the stage. “I slipped out of an IV (at Emory Hospital nearby),” he said, holding up his bandaged wrist, “to be with ya’ll.” Two Secret Service bad-asses scanned the crowd. A guy with a large medical bag looked nervous. Carter would leave in the morning for Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and China on another Habitat for Humanity mission. He needed to be in full health. 

 He spoke of his influence—William Faulkner, James Agee, Dylan Thomas, Vincent van Gogh—and the importance of optimism in creative thinking and endeavors.

 “I don’t consider myself to have a particular talent,” he said. “I think anyone can do something new, something creative, and learn to do it in a satisfying way. You have to have a dream that you will succeed otherwise it would be too hard to pick up a paintbrush or a pen or a woodworking tool.”

 In a lot of ways he right on both accounts. Carter won’t ever gain the distinction of being this country’s best and brightest poets or writers. He’s stretched to the limits of time as it is being the most prolific ex-president in history. It’s a wonder he’s managed to fit so much into his days. Some of the furniture he makes by hand requires more than 300 hours to build. Oh yeah: Carter took up skiing at the age of 62 and considers himself a fairly dedicated birdwatcher these days. And the Evangelical wing of the Republican Party should appreciate the fact that Carter has given the Bible study at his church for the last thirty years, a task that takes hours of contemplation and mediation…. but they probably won’t. 

 It seemed that Carter had grown tired of talking about himself and his creative process. He’d already elegantly connected the creative process to his 30-year goal of bringing peace to Israel, his long-standing affiliation with Habitat for Humanity, the growing chasm between the rich and poor.  “I’ll read a few poems, then,” he said.

 A poem about growing up in Plains, his African-American childhood friends whom he fished with, until one day when he turned 14, he learned the terrible truths about prejudice. Another about his days in the Navy in a submarine, listening to the calls of humpback whales. And a love poem about his wife, Rosalynn, which ended with the lines: “With shyness gone and hair caressed with gray / her smile still makes the birds forget to sing / and me to hear their song.”

 Corny? You had to be there. Had to hear the faltering in Carter’s voice as he fought his way through the emotion of simple words for his wife. Amidst a standing ovation he bowed, smiled broadly and disappeared off the stage. We stood there, clapping, still smitten by the peanut farmer’s presence. I don’t know what we were expecting—an encore, perhaps? But when he didn’t return, we slowly, and very quietly walked out of the auditorium into the late-afternoon rain. 

East and West: Cycling the Berlin Wall

It's been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down to roaring applause. So with little fanfare, I've decided to cycle the entire Wall—or what's left of the old Mauer—all 160K of it. There's a dedicated trail, both road and off-road called the Mauerweg (Wall way, basically) and I've been trying to follow the directions in German though this fact leads me to find myself lost and off route. 

Doing the Wall in sections during the best light is alos getting me in shape for the big all day push coming up next week. Sometimes I am accompanied by my mother-in-law, Cora Schaumann who I've dubbed "Mauer Mama." Other times I go solo, heading out to the Mauerweg from the flat near the Botanicher Garten near Steiglitz. All of this riding has given me the time to ponder the notion of fences...the good, the bad, and the ugly side of keeping some people in, other people out. All while I move unfettered through this great city of Berlin.

Here Comes the Sun

The time has come to look at climate change with more precision

Just a few days past the official start of summer and while much of the nation sweltered under a heat wave, the House narrowly passed what was largely regarded as a “landmark” climate change bill. The Waxman-Markey Bill, which would limit carbon dioxide pollution and require the use of renewable energy is only due to take effect two and a half years from now—this despite what would seem an existential urgency for all human kind in the most dire terms possible.    

 With their heads in the sand and their sunburned asses in the air, 212 congressmen voted against the bill including 44 Democrats. (Only eight Republicans members of the House voted for the Bill, but let’s applaud their bravery.) Yet for most climate scientists the Bill is an utterly, undeniably watered down version of what needs to be done—about as effective as fighting a forest fire with a wet towel—and will do little to halt what we are doing to the planet. Nonetheless, it is a start. 

 Sitting outside in Big Pine near the melt waters of the Palisade Glacier, the Sierra Nevada’s biggest piece of ice, I read the transcripts from the House decision on the Internet. While I read the arguments coming from the floor of the House, I pondered my split second of geologic time on this earth sandwiched between a thin crust separating me from the hot magma below and the thin, delicate atmosphere protecting me from the coldness of space, the searing atomic rays of the sun. I also mused how much the Palisade Glacier has shrunk since first walking on it twenty years ago. At the rate it’s going I’ll be lucky to depart this earth with a shred of ice left.

One thing, though, about the climate change debate stood out loud and clear. Representative Paul Broun of Georgia stated that climate change is nothing but a “hoax perpetrated out of the scientific community.” His remarks were met with a loud applause. This, coming from a state whose capital city gets the not so flattering moniker “Hotlanta.” Well, Mr. Broun and others, wait till your Southern climate is more like Panama without the ocean influence. It will come, far sooner than you think if MIT scientist are correct in surmising that Illinois will be more like East Texas, New Hampshire like South Carolina. The climate is rabidly sliding south. 

 Despite the overwhelming consensus among the climate science community that humans have, and are, contributing to climate change, the impulse within the media, within our elected officials, within ourselves even, is to find an ever-dwindling, fringe voice of global warming skeptics, or contrarians. The truth, to put it simply, is too much to take even though we know that many of these climate contrarians are funded directly or indirectly by the oil industry and other carbon-based industries.

But you don’t even need the world’s top climatologists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who have been issuing dire warnings that life on earth is being adversely effected by warming for years now, to understand the reality of the situation. Just step outside to witness the rapid melting of glaciers and polar ice caps, small islands being swallowed by rising seas, or the fact that the last nine out of 10 years were the hottest on record since 1860. The harbingers are here and they are way scary.

 We need to realize sooner rather than later that the threat from terrorism is nothing in comparison to the global terror of a warming planet. That the real Jihad doesn’t issue forth from a Madrassa or training camp in Pakistan but from a coal-fired smokestack, from the rear of our cars, from our way of life. And by this implication we are all terrorists on a suicide mission, carbon strapped to our bodies like bombs.

 James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified in 1988 before congress that he was 99 percent sure that human-induced global climate change was happening. Since then his language and urgency have matched the threats caused by dangerous carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. (If Hansen’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he is the same scientist who made headlines after he accused the Bush Administration of suppressing the scientific research about global warming. “It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States,” he said, regarding the muzzling he has received by his government employer.)

 Hansen more recently called on chief fossil fuel executives to be “put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature.” He has also called (in a recent New Yorker article) freight trains carrying coal, “death trains.” Our language and consciousness addressing the problem must change too in accordance to the problem. If we don’t, the next generation will look back on this critical time in our planet’s history and see the Senator Broun’s, the ExxonMobile’s, the Hummer owners, all those who stood by and did nothing, in the same way we look back at Nazi war criminals.

Because maybe, if the language of global warming were as precise and hardboiled as the facts, we would be more apt to act. Maybe it would be more difficult to create a false sense of security, a protective barrier between the overwhelming scientific evidence and our need to be sheltered from such a dire predicament. There’s simply too much at stake to be in denial. And to those that voted against the climate change bill, applaud yourselves. Each clap is the thunder of global terrorism writ large on our very survival, our precious lives, our own and only planet.

The Plane Crash You Die in Could Be Your Own

Without attempting to be crass or insensitive to the people who die in plane crashes, the last one—as of this writing—was beautiful. It pictured a cemetery in Montana, the old stone grave markers in long perspective to the edge of pines, the last tree on the right in orange flames bursting forth under  a ruthless cloud of black smoke. Beauty amid terrible chaos.

Perhaps the juxtaposition of cemetery and the fuel tank exploding in flames is an over-cooked metaphor, one that even a Hollywood pyrotechnic would think is over the top.  But the reality is the Holy Cross Cemetery lay under the approach for the Butte airport, as good as any place to let the dead rest. That is where it crashed. 

The photograph, taken by Butte resident Martha Guidoni, is slightly tilted to the side, an angle that suggests the camera was lifted to the eye in haste. Yet this somehow adds to the amateur charm of the photograph and the fact that she and her husband did not intend to take pictures but save anyone who would be alive. Her moment of capture spares us the horrific scene of an actual aircraft filled with 14 living souls slamming into the ground at hundreds of miles per hour. All we see of the devastation is a burning tree, as if we are witness to a lighting strike, the first tree to be burned in a forest fire. 

Guidoni says she heard the plane’s engine and saw plane drop. “Right into the ground,” she was quoted in the LA Times. “And then it was immediately on fire. It just shot up in flames, and it looked like it caught some of the headstones on fire, that’s how hot it was.”

I stared at the picture on my computer screen, then quickly glanced through the Times article, then back to the picture again. Then I clicked cross-country over to the New York Times, hit the National link, and scrolled down to their story. The picture was bigger, the grainy, pixels still intact. The victim’s names were not released. It only said that 14 people were on board, seven of whom were children. The plane, a Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 turboprop, had begun its flight in Redlands, California, flying to Oroville for refueling and to pick up more passengers. There, Tom Hagler, owner of an aviation business at the airport, witnessed the children playing about the airport (“A lot of really cute kids,” he said) and the adults stretching their legs. He was the last person to see them alive.

From there the plane traveled over the upper Great Basin of Nevada, over the Sawtooth Range of Idaho and into Western Montana. Along the way the pilot changed his flight plans for reasons yet unknown.

I clicked on Facebook, a daily voyeuristic chore in case there’s news about my “friend’s” lives that I should know about as it pertains to me, and noticed a strange posting from my brother. “Mark Willey is remembering playing GI Joes with Erin J. Rest in peace my friend.”

Erin Jacobson was my brother's best childhood friend. A couple of years ago, my brother, mother, (who also lives in St. Helena) and I went out for pizza with Erin. I hadn't seen Erin since he was in grade school, a thick round of curly brown hair on his head, a quiet, thoughtful, peaceful kid, as I remember. Now he was grown up, a prominent doctor in the area with a burgeoning ophthalmology practice in Napa and St. Helena. And there in that upscale pizza parlor in the Napa Valley, he was much the same as that faithful friend of my brother those years ago. His childhood qualities were still recognizable—a difficult task in the continuum of life that is often contaminated by adulthood progress.

I emailed my brother to be sure this was the same Erin Jacobson that he had known. He emailed me back: “I used to hide from my mom when she came to pick me up from playing at his house. He was the kind of friend you just wanted to keep hanging out with. We used to walk into the hills together and put red ants down black ant holes, then count how many made it out. We dug a fort once, in the side of a hill, and a snake crawled right out from between Erin's legs. He picked it up and moved it where it would be safe from our shovels. I remember the day he didn't come to school because he'd been bitten by a spider. It wasn't a good day without him and I couldn't wait to go by his house on my way home and make sure he was okay.

“I think though that he was a better friend to me than I was to him. It seems, as I remember back, I leaned on him, depended on him, more than he on me. He was there to listen on one of the hardest days of my high school life, the day after mum told me why she and dad had divorced and that she was going to fight my wish to see him half time. I don't remember helping Erin through any tough times. He was always so steady, but he helped me.

“One day, in early fall, my fourth grade year at Loma Linda Elementary (near San Bernardino, CA), Erin and I sat perched near the top of a jungle gym. I told him that I would be leaving Loma Linda to attend a little school in the mountains and asked him if he would come with me. I wish he had, or that I had stayed. We stayed in touch and were good friends again for a year in high school before he moved to Napa Valley, but I would like to have made more memories of his friendship. The ones I do have are all good and that will have to be enough.”

With this the plane crash came into focus and my mind’s eye went beyond the photo of the cemetery and up into the fuselage of the plane to where Erin must have grabbed his wife’s hand, must have pulled his seatbelt tight, his daughter closer as the plane swayed violently in the air. The terror of time slowed to wide-open seconds of consciousness; not so much his life flashing before the eyes, but the denial that all of this was really happening. And I hope that Erin and all those aboard possessed a hope that they would live. And failing that, they did not know the split second their good life ended nor felt the ache of losing it.

This is the first plane crash where I have known one of the victims. For that reason it is a crash that hits closer to home. Now, as I remember Erin Jacobson and his family it will be impossible to erase that photograph of the last place he and his family experienced life. A Montana pine burned into my memory, the blackest of smoke trailing into the sky. It is still a beautiful image, made poignant and without irony by the gravestones honoring the dead. I just wish it hadn’t happened.

Reefer Madness?

originally appeared in GT Weekly, March 10, 2009

 A candid look into the near and possible future

I think here in California, we can understand $14 billion is something that can’t be blown off. The state deserves to have a piece of it. —San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano

March 2, 2010 Santa Cruz, California

While the rest of the nation continues to slide into economic despair, California, which legalized marijuana three months ago, is well on its way to recovery. In his State of the State Address last night, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and other state legislators including John Laird and Joe Simitian for bringing the bill to his desk that removed “all penalties in California State Law on the cultivation, transportation, sale, purchase, possession or use of marijuana, natural THC or paraphernalia for persons over the age of 21.”

 The bill taxes marijuana in much the same way tobacco, beer, wine, and spirits, and has thus far raised millions of dollars in tax revenue. Once one of the most financially beleaguered states in the country, the marijuana legalization has filled state coffers, freeing up state funds that were once used to combat the illegal drug. Additionally, the state is expected to save billions of dollars annually because it no longer incarcerates marijuana criminals.

 “This state of California has always been the leader in the world with our movies, our technology and now this, ” Gov. Schwarzenneger said, holding an unlit, cigar-sized joint. The Governor says he does not intend to start smoking the substance himself, yet readily admits to imbibing in the past. “If my wife Maria had her way, she would rather I do smoke a doobie than smoke my cigars. This would probably be healthier for me and you know I am all about health. But she would like me to be a whole lot of other things,” the Governor added to much laughter and applause. Later, the Governor, who has a small bit part (playing himself) in a film called the Expendables that features a pro-pot message and mercenaries trying to overthrow a South American dictator, hosted a private party on the Capital Lawn in celebration of the successful bill he signed into law. Ziggy Marley was the musical guest and played a Peter Tosh cover song—twice.  

Following California’s lead, other states including Oregon, Washington and Massachusetts (led by outspoken Senator Barney Frank), are rapidly pushing legalization legislation through their own state capitals. Arizona and Nevada, which has seen a rash of violence and large marijuana growing operations on federal lands since the Mexican Mafia drug cartels left California, are both considering similar legislation. Republican Senator Orin Hatch of Utah, who has strong ties to the vitamin supplement industry, also stated in a press conference last Tuesday that, “Yes, I believe marijuana is natural… for the most part.”

Most notably, however, President Obama issued a statement when California passed the law last year, saying that his cabinet and acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Edward Junith, were looking at legalization on a federal level. More recently, when asked to unequivocally state his opinion on federal marijuana legalization during a press conference, the President said: “Look, I’ve said it before during the campaign and I’ll say it again: of course I inhaled. That was the whole point. Now I know this is a difficult issue and I know there will be a lot of states that say this is not for them. Well, that’s okay too. But states that do (want to legalize) then they should, and I pledge that the federal government will stay out of their affairs.”

 The President also added that he passes the Bill of Rights each day in the White House on his walk to the Oval Office. “Our Founding Fathers knew what’s up. It’s probably printed on hemp.”

But not everyone is happy with the new law. Republican governors, house members and senators have vowed to fight any federal legislation legalizing the drug that comes their way. Mormon Church leaders are already raising money for extensive advertising campaigns to help stop legalization in other states including their own, Utah. And California marijuana growers, distributors and sellers say they fondly recall the days before legalization when they raked in huge profits.

With legalized and taxed marijuana growers now get only modest sums for growing the plant. “You don’t have to be looking over your shoulder anymore or up into the sky, but the black market was ever so awesomely kind to us,” says Mike Girschell, a Humboldt County grower who now farms an acre of the crop out in the open organically. “These days, I might as well be growing strawberries. ”

Other growers have adjusted to the falling markets by propagating stronger, organic strains of marijuana aimed at the burgeoning boutique markets, namely the pot cafes that have sprung like wineries after prohibition was repealed in the 1933.

Santa Cruz County on the Central California Coast took the lead long before the drug was legal. It has since reaped enormous benefits from the legalization. Housing prices are once again sky high, and the city has redirected the funds it receives from the marijuana tax towards education, health care and shoring up its crumbling coastline. Tourism is also at an all-time high with people flooding the county, a county that has been compared to the Napa Valley but with a decidedly more herb-scented twist.

 Standing behind the counter of MMJ (Mademoiselle Mary Jane), an upscale pot café that serves 40-plus varieties of marijuana along with freshly made, gourmet sandwiches, is owner and manager Damon Orion. Once an underemployed underground music writer, he says business is booming with tourists coming from all over the country to sample his carefully selected, high-end wares. “I used to think I would never see this happen in my lifetime,” he says, pushing strands of long hair out of his eyes. “Now this day has finally come, and you know what, it’s…well…hard to remember those days before legalization.”

Recently elected Santa Cruz Mayor Chip!, whose parents failed to pass on a legitimate surname or heritage aside from a measly exclamation point, is also pleased with how the legalization has turned out for the city. “We were known around the country for our liberal, compassionate views on medical marijuana thanks to crusaders like Valerie and Mike (Corral, of WAMM). But we also have to remember that people come to Santa Cruz because of the arts, its music, its theater, which I now think rivals anything that New York City can muster.” 

Others in Santa Cruz City government are taking a wait-and-see approach. Some believe that the new economy, fueled by taxed weed, might be a pipe dream to good to be true.  “Before we build a salt water treatment plant, put solar panels one every downtown building, purchase Prius police cars or erect a floating stage in the San Lorenzo River for U2 and Radiohead to play here, I’d like to know if this economic model is sustainable,” says City Manager Peter Koht. “After all, unlike the media reports, this isn’t utopia. First, let’s take care of the homeless problem and figure out where we’re going to put all these artists that have flooded the city. We have the money to do it. We just need to find a way to spend it with prudence. Still, I have to say, I find it funny and not without a tad of irony that it took an economic crisis for us (Californians) to see the light through the smoke and mirrors of a failed drug war and policy.”

Down on the postcard pretty beach Santa Cruz Police Chief Howie Kerry eyes the swarms of tourists who have flocked to the area in search of a buzz and a little herbal enlightenment. Surfers, who once fought over waves, respectfully wait their turn, too stoned to raise a fist. Kerry says the local Santa Cruz populace have been smoking pot for so long that to them the excitement over legalization has already sort of burned itself out.    

“But see all these people on the sand?” The Police Chief says in front of the Coast Hotel that is now booked at least six-months in advance. “I used to bust them when they’d be all loaded up on booze and what not. Now, they’re quietly stoned out of their minds like a bunch of sea lions without the bark.”

Chief Kerry says he “thanks his lucky stars” on his uniform that meth and heroin are still illegal, still wholly proven to be unhealthy and still a major societal problem. Otherwise, he adds, he’d be forced to lay off some his officers. Given all this, he says aggravated assaults, rapes, burglaries, and even traffic violations have fallen well below the norm since he’s been able to devote more officers to what he’s come to term, “serious crimes.”

“But I suppose there’ll come a day when I’ll be handcuffing a cigarette smoker,” he says. “Make sense, really, the way things are going.”

        

        

        

          

 

 

 

Holy Rollers and Paint Pilgrims

Salvation Mountain

Slab City

Last December my father and I drove down to Salton Sea from his home in San Bernardino. With our camera bags in the backseat and my dad’s rat terrier Little Joe between us, we turned off Highway 10, heading south along the eastern edge of the man-made sea in search of good images and the easy friendship between a father and his son, as he is apt to call me.

 My father taught me F-stops and shutter speeds when I was still a boy. A few days later, having absorbed the interplay between aperture size and the velocity of light still untethered in my young mind, he taught me how to drive. I must have been inching up on twelve-years old. We were driving to Alaska on the ALCAN highway at the time in a four-wheel drive pick-up (blue, I recall) with stick shift and a third-hand, beat-up camper on the back.

 Sitting there in the cab, I remember the Yukon light streaming in through the window, fondling my Dad’s Spotmeter Pentax, bringing it to my eye to take a light reading. Later, he pulling over to the side of the road and we switching seats as I cranked down on the clutch, scooting way down in the seat to reach the pedal, the interplay between clutch and acceleration, and without it, lurching forward. How just like F-stops and shutter speeds, they both had to work together. Eventually I got the hang of it and eased out on the unpaved highway, permafrost underneath the dirt road that cut through the endless spruce.

 A few miles later a semi came barreling over the hill. Coming closer I panicked, overcorrected and began sliding off the road. My father grabbed the wheel and brought us back onto the road into the dust of the disappearing truck. End of driving lesson.

 But the photography lessons continued. And I was dutifully reminded of them as drove down the road to Slab City. What follows if our few hours there before dark, exploring the seldom visited piece of California. 

Arboreal Angst

An uncensored, unscripted, unleashed look at the autumnal falling leaf

 Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling. —Franz Kafka

For the past week I’ve succumbed to capturing one small but significant moment in the natural history of deciduous trees. That is, when a leaf leaves its potent attachment to the tree, strikes out on its own, and floats down to earth.

Maybe it’s the economy and my severe underemployment that has allowed for such petty rapport with leaves. Perhaps it’s this native Californian (myself) who is slowly, inexorably being swamped by the fibrous torture of these Georgian woods, this Southern mélange of hickory, ash, maple, elm, hemlock, beech, oak, and pine that hide sun, vista, and all sense of direction. Or perhaps it is finally a Zen thing, my own life departing from summer to autumn (the new 40) and manifesting itself in the infinite metaphor of life, death, and propitious rebirth that falling leaves so obviously imply.

Whatever the case, it is not easy making photographs of them. A hot-tempered, boozed-up hummingbird would be far easier to ensnare photographically. Once the leaf becomes airborne they take on a personality of their own, swayed by the unconditional bind of nature and nurture—wind, water, temperature, photoperiodism (the length of day and night) and the shape and weight of the leaf, respectively. Only a few fly perfectly like paper airplanes, gliding graciously into the viewfinder. Most, if not all, spin and weave and flail in the air for only a few seconds before cluttering the ground to become the bane of rake and blower in the worst case, and the fodder of compost on the spongy forest floor in the best.  

But these airborne leafy moments are nonetheless transcendent, graceful affairs, playing out billions of times in the autumn air. They are the moment when part of the tree sheds its source of gathering sunlight for photosynthesis and goes willingly into dormancy until spring when it starts the process all over again with a new bud. All this at exactly the point of the departed leaf, the zone of abscission, the bundle scar, as any good botanist will tell you. It is a moment as light as the few ounces each leaf weighs but a moment as profound as the tree itself, rooted as it is without the means to wander.

For those that know their way around an f-stop and a shutter speed, I use a long zoom lens (Canon 70-200mm L-series 2.8) often with a 2X extender that effectively bumps up the focal length to 400mm attached to an SLR digital body. In order to isolate the falling leaf from the busy background of trunks, stems, and leaves that have yet to fall, a wide-open F-stop (f 2.8-3.5) is key, which further complicates the challenge of getting the pesky leaf to be in focus. But with a wide-open lens, this generally gives me the crucially fast shutter speed; which come to think about it, the shutter is often called a “leaf.”

One day, while walking through the woods near a nearby lake on the Emory University campus, I found an abandoned hexagonal stone building, presumably for controlling the water out of the lake. Missing a roof, when a gust of wind blew leaves would flutter down in the most benevolent and well-behaved sort of way. I came back the next day armed with two off-camera strobes to light up the dark interior—a leaf studio as it were—and waited. Sure enough, the leaves bound in through the missing roof, but once out of the wind they floated unflinchingly into view, the strobes suspending their flights.

Outside, because the leaf is so often moving fast in the dappled light of the woods, I focus the lens manually since the auto focus most always is attracted to the background rather than the fast-falling leaf. I chase this leaf hither and thither all the way to the ground hoping that at least some of it is in focus. That’s the angst aspect of this enterprise, though I’m sure the tree feels a bit of it too.

I’ve set up some hard and fast rules that I hope bring honor and character to the profession of leaf photography. No mendacious use of Photoshop with a leaf spilled into a better background. No manually throwing the leaves in the air or the employment of a ladder with a delightful rhinestone-clad assistant atop it. No strings or monofilament line attached. And no monkey business like a pet chimp shaking the leaves out of the tree despite the hand-in-hand satisfaction a walk in the woods with a fellow ape would give. None of these methods have I deemed acceptable. Only the leaf leaving its nine-month mooring to the tree by natural means is allowed or even considered. Anything short of this is man-made trickery. 

Technical details aside, pictures of falling leaves are either mistakes or strokes of luck. Gravity, light, and leaf must all morph together in the great autumnal hand of God and the Mother of all Nature. Well, something like that. The thing is, I know the metaphor of falling leaf is deep, deeper than the obvious one that falls off the trees of our short-lived and precious lives, but I’m not sure I really want to go there at the risk of sounding sentimental and trite—as if I haven’t already succumbed. Even it does it warrant an explanation, I’ll just say that right now I’ve chosen to avoid thoughts about death and my own existential place in the universe for the simple fact the leaves have begun to teach me that life is best lived with all the spontaneity of Now! They have forced me to rethink the relation I have to nature and time, whether I’m wasting it or putting it to good use. Like the Zen master hath said, “Awakening to this present instant we realize the infinite is the finite of each instant.”   

The French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, considered by many to be the father of photojournalism, said that he thought himself a Zen-archer, becoming the target in order to “see” the subject he was making a picture of. “Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards,” he said. “Never while actually taking the photograph.” Exactly. Said like a true leaf photographer who has since joined the same fate as a pile of leaves.

But would simply watching the leaves fall without documenting it bring the same pleasure of awakening? And what changes the experience when you have a record of it? Because my own Zen-ness needs work, the questions remain as ubiquitous as an album of family photographs worth saving from a fire or a stack of old black & white photographs laying for sale on a flea market table. What is left of our own short flights through this world often amounts to few photographs that last about as long as the life of an average tree.

So the thinking about falling leaves comes afterwards, if at all. Watching the leaf zigzag this way and that has forced me into the humble moment that is part and parcel to the grand connectedness of life.  Why, just as I ate a sandwich or brushed my teeth, or even took a photograph, it’s likely a million-plus other people in the world were doing the same thing at the exact moment with the nearly the same thought. (“This sandwich is quite satisfying and nutritious;” “What a pain in the ass, but at least my teeth won’t fall out as fast;” “That’s somewhat interesting. Let me raise this camera to my eye and take a photograph.”)  

And so on and so on. But collectively the leaves and us make a measurable impact on the earth. Consider the Keeling Curve, the iconic study of the world’s fluctuating (and increasing!) CO2 levels. Using instruments based on the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, the Curve measure the cyclic variation of CO2 in the atmosphere and looks somewhat like a jagged waves climbing a steep slope of beach. The upswing of the wave, which each represent a year, are in part the result of all the those billions of leaves decaying on the ground in the fall  while the downswing is all the new leaves photosynthesizing and taking the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the spring. All fine and natural in the interface between the botanical and the atmospheric, between plant and sky. The disturbing, guilt-ridden thing, though, about the Keeling Curve is the steep climb it makes over the years, a soaring rise that is the result of you and me. Of our desire to find more comfort and perhaps too little transcendence. To chew, digest, burn, and fly from the past into the beyond while nature falls away.

That’s the environmental coda for the day, but to get an idea about how many leaves fall, it’s best to step into the state of New Hampshire where leaf peepers, as they’re called, come out in mass each fall. A state where long winters provide time to ponder such practical questions about leaves. The newspaper Telegraph Nashua reported  that the New Hampshire Forest Resources estimated that the 4 billion trees living in the state produce 1.9 million tons of fallen leaves each season. Staggering numbers considering how imperceptible the weight of one leaf feels in your hand. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that these arboreal statistics were gathered “off-the-record” from the Forest Service. Employees there wished not to be identified “probably because they should have been doing something useful instead,” the reporter wrote, unable to contain a little leafy editorializing of his own. 

And I suppose so should I. The leaves will soon be all stripped from the trees; already my favorite falling leaf-producing red maple that gets the full brunt of breeze is shorn, a skeleton of bones stabbed into the increasingly cold ground. But today, for just a few hours at least, I’ll go watch the leaves fall one last time for the year. This time I won’t bring the camera or the metaphors. Instead I’ll attempt something I haven’t really done before. Watch them fall plainly without preconceptions. To open the senses to the moment, crackling leaves underfoot, the flittering flights of fancy in the air, and all the rest of the leaves that have yet to fall. Then I’ll get back to work, or what’s left of it to do.  

End of the Line for the Word Maverick

Originally appeared in The Villager, New York City, Obama.com, and GT Weekly, Santa Cruz, CA.  

Words evolve like fish and are sometimes just as slippery. But it’s always a little sad to witness a perfectly good word wither and die on the vine of our lush and leafy language. This year, amidst one of the most compelling and important elections in American history, we mourn the passing of another word—Maverick. 

John McCain ambled into the campaign as if he owned the word. And rightly so, in some ways he did. We don’t need to be reminded (again and again and again…and again) that Senator McCain was a war hero that spent four hard years in a Vietnamese prison camp. That when he was offered his freedom he turned it down to let those who’d been imprisoned longer go free. Or that his stilted and overwrought walk and mannerisms is the result of bone swallowing beatings and torture that would make all of us crumble. 

Political mythologizing aside, if that doesn’t show some beef-stew maverick-ness, then I don’t what else does. McCain’s years in congress, as we know (once again, and again, and again), were marked by maverick-sized tussles with his own party that branded him the unbranded. Until this year, I’ve always held a rather spongy spot for Senator McCain. Without a doubt, the world would still be a better place had McCain won the 2000 GOP nomination instead of Bush, who administered an exquisite Roveian torture on McCain that disfigured his name and reputation during the primaries. 

But they couldn’t take away the maverick in McCain. In fact it grew as he slipped further into his role as the unfettered senator in hot pursuit of greased government pork. All fine and good, all very maverickesque, I suppose, even for a liverish-looking snowbird with a comb-over. 

Yet it’s easy to forget where maverick came from in the first place and what it’s doing in our lives. As a surfer, I’m afraid the first association that comes to mind is Maverick’s, the heavy, 25-foot-plus waves that break off the Half Moon Bay coast. Maverick’s got its name back in 1961 from a dog (by the same name) that swam out to the break with its owner. Dog-paddling into the fury of the roiling ocean exemplifies the notion of maverick, at least in the canine world. But as it turns out the word originates, in part, from the animal kingdom. Maverick comes out of Texas by way of a man named Samuel Augustus Maverick—land baron, lawyer, politician and reluctant cattle rancher. Maverick refused to brand his cattle, which in Texas in the 1860’s was considered a major faux pas, akin, I suppose, to a Republican calling Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance” as McCain did when he was still living up to his namesake. 

Sam Maverick didn’t brand his cattle, the story goes, because he really couldn’t care less about ranching and the fact that he considered branding an inhumane practice; quaint bovine thoughtfulness when you consider that Maverick owned slaves. Whatever the motivation, his fellow ranchers accused Maverick of being able to claim all the wandering, unbranded cattle as his own, an important consideration before the invention of the barbed wire fence. It was reported that Maverick got into many a heated, six-shooters-drawn fights over the ownership of unbranded herds that might or might not have been his. 

So for lack of a better name, cattlemen began to call unbranded cattle mavericks and the word stuck. Maverick’s ranching antics may have not been to everyone’s taste, but he has more in common with McCain in another historical twist. Though Maverick had participated in the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, Mexico regarded Texas as a rebellious territory and in 1842 sent troops to show the Gringos they were still in charge. 

Maverick and other Texans tried to flee but were captured and forced on a three month-long march to the prison town of Perote, east of Mexico City. Maverick and his Anglo cohorts were given hard labor and endured food rations. When Maverick complained about the treatment he was put into solitary confinement. Like McCain, Maverick was offered his freedom only if he would admit that Mexico had a legitimate claim on Texas. Maverick refused, saying, “'I cannot persuade myself that such an annexation, on any terms, would be advantageous to Texas, and I therefore cannot say so, for I regard a lie as a crime, and one which I cannot commit even to secure my release.” Maverick would go on to be a state legislator and become known as a Texas patriot. 

For what it’s worth, Maverick also happened to be a progressive Democrat. He died in San Antonio in 1870 holding nearly 60,000 acres of land, and of course all those countless unbranded cows. 

So how did McCain come to butcher the good name of a Texas patriot and render his maverick-ness meaningless? It’s all too evident that once McCain became the GOP’s nominee, once his own party branded him, a party whose base is the Christian conservatives, his maverick image and the very word itself began to lose all meaning. Sure, McCain is still desperately brash and unpredictable as the suspense leading up to the last debates attests and more importantly, the grave, flippant choice of his maverick-lite running mate Sarah Palin. Yet there’s a big difference between being plain old stubborn and being a maverick. 

The Oxford American Dictionary defines Maverick as “an unorthodox or independent-minded person: a person who refuses to conform to a particular party or group.” McCain has shown that he is not only a flip-flopper, but a sell-out to boot. Perhaps the sad lesson in our fractured political make-up is it’s simply impossible to be a true maverick and win an election. 

Thankfully, though, with the death and murder of one word comes the hope of a replacement of another to enter the lexicon. McCained: verb. 1. A person of singular and restless grit who, through the influence of power and desire to triumph, loses all vestiges of their former self. 2. A person (usually a patriot) relegated to a footnote in history by succumbing to a dominant ideology that is notably backward in thinking. 3. Forced betrayal of principles resulting in dangerous conformity and conventionality.

Not All Those Who Wander are Lost

Give or take 15,000 years ago a feral dog decided to hell with hunting all day. Why not instead hang around groups of semi-sophisticated apes who use hunting clubs and flint arrows? In return for helping with a few chores such as locating their food and a few well-placed barks at the lions creeping around camp, the dogs could pick up a few meat scraps and leftover bones, not to mention far more time for long naps. The symbiosis worked all too well.

Leap forward to last week and this less than sophisticated ape, albeit one who owns an old Mac computer, found himself staring into the eyes of a lost dog out in the front yard. There are a lot of loose dogs in Big Pine not to mention loose people, in this town of 1,300 souls or so. And this being a decidedly rural county many people have a dog or two. It cuts down on the loneliness. 

I slowly walked up to the dog and stuck out my hand for the dog to smell. If I’d been more in tune with the canine mind I would have bent over and let him smell me properly. But thankfully my shoddy sense of smell spares me from such intimacy with strange dogs. The dog didn’t bite. It simply wagged its tail and lifted up its paw to shake.

Around the dog’s collar was a piece of rope, frayed and dirty. I figured it was a stray from the Indian reservation across Highway 395. The dog himself (after looking under the hood) was mottled gray and brown with big paws and an oversized head. I gave him a drink of water and he lapped it quickly, looking up at me with such kindness that I felt, at the risk of slipping poorly on a balmy patch of sentimentality, nothing short of an instant connection with the dog.

I figured the dog would have some water and then be on its way to wherever it was going. Leash laws? What be-damned leash laws? Most local dogs here are often seen doing what they wish, which to my human perception consists of a cat chase that goes hither and thither, a dip in glacier-fed creek or the Owens River and running to and fro for the good feel of it. This is probably entirely wrong. A lot of dogs, no doubt, are simply (or sophisticatedly) on the hunt for a good smell off a pole or a fence where they find the estrus of a heated, perhaps amenable bitch or the acrid testosterone levels of males indicating intent of territory. The 220 million scent cells per all-powerful nose (in comparison to our mere five million) must blissfully rapture them into the simple yet nimble world of dog.

But instead the dog stayed and followed my to my office in the backyard of the cottage. There, it laid down with a great sigh and preceded to ogle me while I worked. I looked over its coat (clean), its heavy tongue (healthy) and its glassy, somewhat foggy eyes (jaundice?!).

I Google-searched “dogs-glassy-eyes.” A few pecks down I noticed a small picture of a dog that looked much like the dog before me.  From an animal shelter Website advertising the dogs they needed to give away, it pictured a catahuola hound. Ah, would never have guessed. Never heard of the breed before having a childhood-based bias towards shepherds and experiencing the honor of knowing three of them growing up. For some reason I had resisted the urge to get another dog after I’d watched my Karla, a German Shepard, die a long painful death due to hip displacement. With dark thoughts now I hear her back claws dragging on the sidewalk. What was no doubt intense discomfort, even terrible pain, Karla insisted on taking a walk with me. We walked slowly at dusk, she behind me while I talked to her in quiet, reassuring tones. I found some grass and we sat down in the near darkness and I rubbed behind her ears. It was the last walk we would take.

That heart-wrenching story aside, dogs are a real hassle. It always perplexes, even dismays me a little, to see guy walking his dog with a plastic bag and a pooper-scooper. It calls into questions about who’s the owner, the master/dog continuum, and human dignity. Of course it’s the right and proper thing to do if you’re a dog-owner, the latter a term that completely justifies the good deed of picking up shit.

And I’m always on the move and home is not always where the heart is. It wouldn’t be fair, not to mention expensive, to crate around a dog cross country, sometimes across the Atlantic. 

My Internet search for catahoula hound yielded more information than I could take in one sitting, but I did learn a few things that stuck out. For one, the hound is Louisiana’s state dog and they have webbed feet, making them premier water dogs. The Spanish Conquistadors liked these Indian dogs so much they tried to trap and take them home to Spain. I was getting somewhere, and somehow the dog started looking better. That day I coaxed it in the truck and went climbing at the Buttermilk boulders above Bishop. The dog was hesitant at first, but soon was pulling off moves that would give a bighorn sheep pause. I began to really like this dog and by late afternoon gave it a name: Birkie, after Birch Mountain that rises above Big Pine. Wanted to keep it local. By nightfall I found myself negotiating the pet aisle at Vons where I found a confusing cornucopia of dog food for sale. What would my waiting dog like?

For four days we climbed, played fetch, swam in creeks and lakes, played fetch some more. I never became a dog-owner because Birkie insisted on taking a crap once he was on Los Angeles Department of Water and Power land. Birkie was never short on pure loveliness, he never begged for food or climbed on the furniture. At night he slept at the foot of our bed where we could hear him dream.

In case I was accused of dog-nabbing, I put up Found Dog signs at the grocery store and gas station. Finally, on the fifth day, in an effort to do right and perhaps get Birkie some shots and a license for his collar, I took him to the dog shelter. As it was someone had called, someone who knew his name, someone who would be right over to pick Birkie up. I threw a stick across the dirt parking lot of the shelter and then sat down waiting for Birkie to run back to my side. He liked to be petted on his large cheeks, then across the top of his head between his floppy ears. I sadly obliged, while looking down the road for his owner to show.

When the owner arrived in a Ford pick-up, Birkie didn’t even move when his rightful name was called. In fact, even though it’s only been a few dog-less weeks, I can’t recall what the man called his dog. But eventually Birkie was coaxed in the back of the truck. He didn’t even look back as they drove away. I went back in the shelter and the two women in the office recognized my sorrow. “We’ve got a few really nice dogs up for adoption,” one of them said. They trotted out some big dogs, the size of Birkie. “Let me think on it,” I said.

And I did. But I was unable to get Birkie out of my thoughts. Friends come and go, some for a few weeks, some for decades. It’s the sad truth of it all. Birkie had visited for a little less than five days, but in that time I could feel the earth going around the sun and had smelled the sagebrush with more clarity and perhaps canine clairvoyance than I had ever mustered. To me Birkie will always be lost in the sense of the J.R.R. Tolkien saw, “Not all those who wander are lost.”  Only now I find it necessary to stop myself from walking around the neighborhood in the chance I discover Birkie tied up with crusty bit of rope; in case I find myself hugging a wandering friend in someone else’s backyard.

 

 

 

      

 

      

Big Noise, Small Boys

The louder the noise the smaller the equipment 

Let’s get one thing priapically straight: Men who ride extremely loud motorcycles have extremely small penises. The louder the bike, the smaller their naughty bit. Though the empirical evidence of such a correlation is scant at best, the phenomena has gone beyond the reaches of urban myth.

To date, there hasn’t been much research to prove this. Studying such a correlation would simply be too dangerous, far more life threatening than the study of active volcanoes or attaching satellite tags to great white sharks viciously mating with each other.

Imagine this: Sound researcher (acoustician) measures the decibel levels of a Harley pulling into your generic biker-bar. The sound is off the charts. As our biker dismounts his steel steed, raising one leg over the saddle like a hound pissing on a hydrant, the scientist timorously approaches the man. 

“Excuse me kind sir,” our acoustician says. “I measured the sound of your ride at 135 decibels, a mere five points below from what is considered the threshold of pain. My colleague and I—yes that man in the locked car over there—are trying to determine if there is a acoustical correspondence to the vociferous sound wave propagation emitting from your modified, after-market exhaust pipes and the size, weight, length, girth of a motorcyclist’s penis. Would you like to participate in our study? I’ll gladly offer to buy you a drink for your troubles.” 

But science often bumps up against the planet’s great mysteries without conclusive evidence. This fact doesn’t stop us laymen from covering our ears as another sonic discombobulation roars by and exclaiming to ourselves, “Oh my, that dude is so loud he must be smaller than a...(insert your favorite species of protozoa here).” Since the cops are generally too busy to enforce the noise ordinances or want to be hullabaloo outlaws them selves, calling up this theory lowers the decibels by a factor of about two (20 db). Rather than be pissed off about the sudden gale of sound we can instead be muddled with sympathy.

Isn’t it sad, we say to ourselves, that a man could become so small that he would feel compelled to compensate his powerlessness with a loud motorcycle. Stranger still, that he would brazenly announce this fact in public with every twist of the throttle.

In this country, new motorcycles must not make more than 80-decibals of noise, which falls somewhere between the sound of a vacuum cleaner (70 db) and a lawn mower (90 db). Yet, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council, a not-for-profit trade association that promotes motorcycling and the motorcycle industry, nearly half of the five million or so motorcyclists in the United States modify their exhaust systems to make them louder.

One of the makers of the after-market pipes goes by the name of Samson Exhaust. “Every product has been thoroughly tested to improve performance, enhance appearance and give the sound customers are looking for,” says its Website. And what sound are customers looking for? The names of the exhaust pipes tell it all: Slasher, Rip-Saws, Cannons, Hell Raiser, Shark Bite, Ghetto Blasters, Big Guns, Short Schlongs.

Okay, I made the last one up. But just remember: It only took a pair of scissors and a brave woman to sap Samson’s strength. 

I rode a motorcycle for a few years. A 1974 Honda 550 that I bought used so I could attend UC Santa Cruz. It had a lot of muscle (at least I thought so) and without it I would found too many excuses to skip class, the biggest being the mobile cattle corral of the campus shuttle. I was trying to expand my mind not limit it, and the motorcycle did more for my education than a pile of textbooks reaching the handlebars.

It got better gas mileage than a hybrid, and after class I often found myself cruising up either Highway 9 for no better reason than the sublime joy of leaning into a turn.

This being an old motorcycle, eventually my muffler cores rotted out from the salty sea air. The bike got louder and louder and my penis became meek with alarming miniaturization. My sex life suffered too. Soon I began to do the unthinkable: stuff my pants with various phallic-shaped vegetables that resembled my former manhood. Squash left to ripen on the vine well into autumn seemed to work best. And my once, ever-so glorious Florida now looked and felt like the state New Jersey.

In quiet desperation, I inserted steel wool up the exhaust pipes, which helped some with the noise abatement. Consequently, my penis grew back in physique and conceit, almost to the point of being comparatively normal—and no, I don’t find pleasure in comparison. But the steel wool eventually rusted away and I retreated back into my small world. Of course the university chicks didn’t know my travails. All they saw was a badass biker, a rebel defying the tofu laws of convention. With my considerable powers of male intuition, I was certain they all wanted a long ride through the redwood forest. And I would have stopped and given it to them had my mufflers been working properly.

Eventually, the bike broke down and I bought a car. It was a difficult decision, made easier by a few near accidents with lane-hogging SUV drivers, who as it turns out, also share the same compensating affliction (along with men who own 50-foot yachts and red Italian sports cars) but with even more severity.

But I miss the good Honda bike. Even now, when a see a motorcyclist cruising the highway, I am filled with wistfulness and petite penis envy. Someday, when I am old and golden and my thoughts no longer include sex every nine minutes, I’ll buy a Harley. Once more I’ll feel the cares of the world flying effortlessly below my chrome mufflers on the rushing road. Besides, by then motorcycles will have electric engines. And all I will hear will be the sweet swoosh of wind in my face, my penis as durably stiff and wrinkled as winter squash. 

Bruce Willey, writer at large, was last seen heading into the hills to escape the noise and the wrath of the Hell’s Angels.