Bruce Willey

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.

 

 

 

The Last American Road Trip

It begins when you can leave town, when you leave your common sense, your guilt and a large chunk of yourself behind. It could be four years of pent-up academic frustrations. It could be the many years at a job that fleeces your ability to connect to the sweet simmering world. It could be simply that you want to let the road show you the pace. To hell with schedules, unwanted phone calls, the hassles of your daily life. To be immersed in the vicissitudes of flux at just a tad above the speed limit is nothing short of being loyal to the human spirit.

So your car or your pick-up truck is a little low in back with the tent, the sleeping bags, a Coleman stove and lantern, food, cooler, foam mattress, the firewood. You will press on the accelerator and feel the precious gas pull you forward down the road. Nothing better than to see the gas gauge on full. So much promise and portent.  And it begins with a full tank of gas. It always does.

But you’re guilty as well you should be. Disbelief that you just paid well over $4 a gallon, enough to make you feel almost European. Disbelief that the oil in the earth will run dry just as sure as the mighty and seemingly endless Colorado River does not anymore empty into the Gulf of Mexico. You’ve got to do it now, now before it hits 10-15 dollars a gallon.

Perhaps you think you would be doing your part to save the world by taking a long bicycle trip. You would. But a bicycle won’t make it to Utah in two days. So you promise yourself just one more road trip, one more time to see the ancient layers of red and tan rock carved by inches of time.

So you head due east, running up the flanks of the Sierra by noon. It would have taken John Muir a week to walk the same distance. Muir thought horse travel was too fast. But Muir knew the pleasures of wildflowers not asphalt. And besides, his former path to the Sierra is now blocked by Wal-Marts, Starbucks, and corporate farms, the air as polluted as the Los Angeles Basin. He’d be lost now, another visionary homeless man in a wilting landscape.

You reach Yosemite’s Tioga Pass and drop down the eastern scarp of the Sierra, down into Owens Valley. At Big Pine you hang a left, and start ascending again to a narrow pass that will take you over the White Mountains, home to some trees that were already old when the Egyptians began building the pyramids. Then on into Nevada where you’ll turn right at roadside brothel that has since gone out of business because most long-haul truckers have turned to their wives for love when it takes $1,000 to fill up on diesel.

Making Las Vegas by nightfall, you’ll camp at the Red Rocks campground. A cactus-covered hill will hide the swift creeping suburbs below, but the strip’s neon glow will still penetrate the night sky. In the morning you’ll take a long walk into the canyons of Red Rock and you will feel finally that you have reached the Southwest. The wildflowers will be blooming against the black desert patina and you’ll realize that life on earth is tenaciously bold.

Still, the alarming proximity of the city will begin to fray your nerves. So you will travel northeast through Arizona for an hour where you’ll indulge yourself with some Meat Puppets, a lazily stoned punk rock band that has musically articulated the desert better than any other band in the history of rock & roll. Once you cross Utah border, you’ll turn off the music and let the tires and the wind take over the soundtrack. Two hundred or so miles the road weaves in and out of canyon lands, a rippling landscape so stunning and strange it seems as if it will kidnap your soul.   

By afternoon you’ll head south into Moab where the economy, once dominated by the search for uranium to blow the world to smithereens, is now the mountain biking and motorized off-roading capital of the world. Mud splattered jeeps roar in and out of fast food joints. Motorhomes bung the highway with gas tanks that take a month’s pay to fill. Moab, a Mecca in the desert where people religiously worship the dirt road or file into guided raft trips down the Colorado River. All fueled by oil from another desert a world and a white robe away.

So you head south, past the Hole-in-the-Rock tourist trap where you can pat a wallaby if you’re so inclined. Dipping down into Indian Creek you’ll camp for a few days amongst the junipers. You’ll build a bedroom with your tent and rocks for chairs in your open-air living room. You may even assemble a kitchen on a flat rock while the red sand slowly works its way into every cranny and hair of your body. And it will feel good; better still when you sit in the cold, mountain-fed creek.

At night you’ll make a campfire, noticing someone left their unpaid student loan bill ($38,984 due) and an outstanding medical bill ($567.34) near the fire pit. You use the bills for fodder and soon have a lively fire while you wonder about the guy who camped here before.

Next day the rain will come, bathing the sky with rainbows. The creek will come up to the floorboards as you cross it, and you will seek higher ground. So you head north to a place where desert towers stand like old, gossipy men. It will be impossible not to wonder what you will find on the tops of these summits, so you will tie into a rope and climb the ancient mud to a wild summit that ravens have vital knowledge of. 

Nearing the top with 700 feet of air below your feet you think you could very easily die, especially when you are forced to belly flop onto a snout of mud rock. But you must put this thought out of your mind. If you had any sense you would remember that the world’s food supply is in trouble. The strung-out economy is a few steps from collapse. The earth’s climate is showing the strains of one too many road trips. It would do the planet a lot of good if you jumped. One less Toyota truck on the road. One less mouth to feed. One less carbon footprint. But you’re gripped with your possible and immediate demise as it is.

As you look around, the Fisher Towers looking as though they were made by a giant hand dripping mud from the sky, you want nothing more than to get down and drive home. To feel the road under your seat just one more time before the road trip simply becomes a thing of the past.

 

Let Us Eat Cake

Like most Americans making under $75,000 but slightly more than $3,000 a year, I am giddily awaiting my tax rebate check. With each passing day, the walk to the post office becomes a lesson in patience. And at night I find it nearly impossible to sleep while I envision all the happy things I will purchase, all blessed with the pleasant notion that I’m not only reinvigorating the economy but saving it from certain doom. Six hundred big ones to do with whatever I please! I can hardly contain my bliss.

The problem is I can’t decide what to buy with my—make that our—collective $168 billion windfall. I suppose I could retire, but my meager work sometimes gives me a sense of purpose that only work seems able to provide. I have given some thought to a much-needed Mediterranean cruise. The island of Ibiza sounds nice—where I might spend a tall night in a foam of sweaty bodies and bubbles. Or I could get practical and buy a house, but nowadays real estate is only going down in value.

Of course, if I had gotten my act together sooner and procreated some children, I’d be coming into some real wealth about now. I’d be thinking about buying a Picasso. Each child would have been worth an additional $300. Give me a wife in a prairie dress, a bonnet for her head and 12 obedient children. Our generous government knows no bounds.

I’ve done some comparisons (not comparison shopping mind you, but rather what our President has said regarding my irresistible gift from the government): Last January, when Mr. Bush announced our tax rebates he said, “This package will lead to higher consumer spending and increased business investment.” He also said the economy was going through a “rough patch.” Based on past experience with our president, I took his words to be flecked with metaphor and Texas wisdoms. So the economy was like driving over a paved road with a few potholes. No big deal.

I don’t blame Bush entirely. Just his psychology. To my mind, the economy is about as easy to fathom, much less understand, as the universe. When I look up at all the millions and billions of stars at night I get to feeling small and insignificant. Thinking about the economy—the GNP, the trillion-dollar national debt, the money coming and going around the world at the speed of light and so on—becomes an exercise in abstraction and dumbfoundedness with an emphasis on dumbness. So much so that sometimes it seems as if George Washington is winking at me on the face of a single American dollar. For me at least, it is a dollar that has both lost its worth—literally and figuratively.

And economists who are trained to read the numbers can’t agree upon whether or not we are heading into a recession, coming out of one, or even worse, if the economy is truly tanking, like in 1929. It’s all a matter of perception and psychology; the old glass is either half full or half empty. If the economy is driven by our psychological awareness and our ability to perceive it in either optimistic or pessimistic terms, then I’m even more confused (and scared) in this sea of money and markets.

How, for instance, will my $600 help the economy? Or failing that, how will the $168 billion make a dent in the trillion-plus dollar slumping (an optimist term) economy? The economist Russell Roberts, explaining how the economic stimulus package works, was recently quoted in the New Yorker, saying it’s like “taking a bucket of water from the deep end of the pool and dumping in the shallow end.”

Looking at the half-full glass, Bush adjusted his enthusiasm about the tax rebate slightly by saying; “The money is going to help Americans offset the high prices we’re seeing at the gas pump, the grocery store, and also give our economy a boost to help us pull out of this economic slowdown.” In other words, the economic “rough patch” turned into a “slowdown” and thus might be more bone rattling than we thought. We may need something like a four-wheel drive Hummer to negotiate it.

Personally I feel sort of sorry for the man. If a long-lost friend gave me $300 out of the kindness of her heart because she thought it would be a good thing to do, I’d begin to approve of her quite highly. No such luck for our President. A recent Gallup Poll found that Bush’s disapproval rating hovered around 69 percent, the worst rating since the poll has been in existence (70 years).

All of this has made me reconsider the long night of bubbles in Ibiza. Perhaps I should instead buy rice and gas. But then my money will only go to China and Saudi Arabia, respectively. Perhaps it’s time to buy a lot of beer, then, since at least it is one of the few things still made in America. That, and some locally made cake. That should leave just enough money for some bread and cheap cheddar cheese for at least another month.

Smokin' Obama

Conspicuously silent amongst the roar of the current political campaign is a discussion about the other, longer-running war—the so-called war on drugs. Over the years, both wars have come to have the same undeniable whiff of being unwinable; both have caused unthinkable suffering; both were started in the first place under false pretenses and a crusade of fear.

Instead, the declared drug abstainers, Clinton and McCain, have aimed their schoolyard barbs at Obama for his relatively guileless admission that he once, twice, many times perhaps, partook in the pleasures of marijuana. Obama, also accused of inhaling rather lofty ideas mixed with piercing candor said, “Look, when I was a kid I inhaled … frequently. That was the point.”

Point taken. Never mind that as a black man, Obama’s chances of getting caught and jailed were significantly higher than with his white, pot-smoking peers. Or that he could have just as easily been mixed up in the matrix of torrential drug laws that unduly discriminate against African-Americans and Latinos. Consider the 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, which found that black people account for just 15 percent of drug users. But they are arrested on drug charges 37 percent more often than whites and convicted of those crimes 59 percent of the time, accounting for 74 percent of all drug offenders in prison.

So why is there hardly a peep about the drug war from Obama, the candidate that most stands for change, for justice, for racial equality? Because no doubt he’s been backed into his duplicitous corner of the drug war. A war where one can be forgiven if you’ve dabbled with illegal substances when you were young and stupid, but you just can’t admit that the experience might have been good when you’re grown up. In the monotony of war some things never change. Recall the former President Clinton (whom Obama is also running against). Bill not only did not inhale, but also didn’t enjoy the stuff when he didn’t inhale. Now that’s logic you can light up and smoke.

But since Obama has been open about his drug use, any mention of change in drug policy is likely to be fodder for his opponent John McCain. If and when Obama is finally nominated, expect McCain to go ballistic on Obama’s drug use, all in concert with McCain’s grand, old, but also joyless, puritanical party. In fact it has already begun. Recently McCain, touting his wisdom of military affairs in comparison to his Democrat rival, said Obama “doesn’t know an RPG from a bong.”

Which begs the obvious not- so-subtle point: Would you rather have someone in the White House who had intimate knowledge of an RPG or a bong? I suppose it’s largely a matter of how you define liberty ,and the means to get it.

Yet all this denial, finger pointing, and innuendo masks the collective denial of a war that we are really waging against ourselves. The masochistic enemy is us. Whether it’s through the lip of a bong, the damage done by the needle, the bottled evanescence of booze, the fevering ecstasy of religion, the jolt of caffeine, the deadly pacifier of nicotine, human beings have a god-given right and an evolutionary imperative to alter the shape of their consciousness. And we pursue this imperative with nearly the same zeal as we do for the essentials—sex, food, water, and a roof over our heads. Yes, there are a few among us who can’t make the distinction between moderation and blasting off to the moon. But the latter is already demonized beyond help as it is.

Once we are able to disentangle ourselves from our own stigmatizing and remove the social penalties for what people are going to do anyway regardless of the laws, then perhaps we can begin to see the human condition for what it is and isn’t. Just as an addict is told the first step to healing an addictive disease is admitting you have a problem, we can start to see ourselves without the deceit we’ve heaped upon our own heads.

It reminds me of the time when a good friend and I stepped out for a New Year’s celebration toke. We were, of course, young, stupid and wise beyond our years. Just as we prepared to “inhale frequently,” a member of the Santa Cruz Police spotted us and asked what we were doing. There was no denying it. She confiscated our stash, saying she was going to throw it into the San Lorenzo River. Then she let us go with a warning. Our kindly peace officer walked up and over the levee, and came back in a few seconds wiping her hands. We nary heard a splash.

So here’s hoping that Obama will rediscover his youthful indiscretions once he is firmly ensconced in the Oval Office. There, some late night, after all the world-shattering decisions have been made, perhaps he’ll pull out a trusty bong, light some A-grade, government-grown pot and smoke himself an enlightened bowl. Then with some clarity of thought while reaching deep into his consciousness, he’ll begin to see the other hopeless war that we need to pull out of. To bring the troops home, like the Santa Cruz cop on that long-ago New Year’s night, home to where she can smoke my pot in peace.

The American Peso and its Discontents

Greetings from Berlin. Most Thursday afternoons I find myself drifting down the street from where I live part of the year to a pub called Kamin. Hanging up my long wool coat, a coat that would make Gustav Mahler proud, I sit at a table and work, a “tall blond one” (Hefeweizen bier) within arm’s reach. Truth be told, I’m here right now.

The bartender brings her small russet-colored dog Casey to work and her hund (hound) has apparently taken a liking to me because we’re the only two creatures here that don’t speak German even close to fluently. She/he?—I’m too reserved to check under such fine fur—curls up under my feet, occasionally looking up at with me with such tenderness that I forget the hund is not exactly mein.

Kamin, I learned recently, means fireplace. In my extensive cultural bias I thought it might be a cutesy bastardization of “come in.” But the Germans, don’t seem to be fond of being cute with English words like the Japanese or Koreans. Whatever the case, it’s a welcoming name, especially when the sun hangs low in the sky as if in a perpetual late afternoon show of northern latitudinal weakness.

In front of the fireplace is a skunk rug. I don’t know if this is German humor writ small on the hardwood floor. The word for skunk is—stinktier.

So here I am, the American in Berlin, or rather the Californian, in the hope this distinction might excuse my country’s internationally agonizing gaffes and make me somehow more Canadian.

My money is no good here. Or at least it’s only three-fourths as good. For every dollar I exchange I get about 65 cents back in Euros. The Euro is so strong compared to the dollar now that it has become the preferred currency of international cocaine smugglers.

It’s almost too much of a truism to even point out that America’s respect in the world has been eroded in the last decade. I’m not sure if we were ever totally admired the way we think we were. Self-perception always seems to crow more than chirp. But it has certainly gone way south. And Europeans, if I may descend into broad generalization while my tall blond one gets noticeably shorter, look at America’s demise with the same satisfaction we got out of watching Britney Spears shave her head.

Which is why I am inundated by American politics nearly everywhere I turn here in Berlin. German newspapers put the debates on the front page. Television news programs have more coverage of the primaries than their own current political face-offs. Magazines run extensive spreads on Hillary and Obama, lifting them up (especially Obama who has been dubbed the reincarnation of Ich bein ein Berliner JFK) as saviors. As much as we want change, Europeans seem even more obsessed that a Texas-sized “Nero-conservative,” playing his harp as America and Baghdad burn, will thankfully and finally be supplanted.

Yet despite my reckless indifference to the notion of freedom fries, I’ve always had a distinct distaste for American Europhiles. America is a great country with fine food, music, art, innovators, unsurpassed natural beauty, ideas, bars with fireplaces and friendly dogs. And I’m just one Euro shy of my next bier, which would make it slightly easier to say I’m proud to be American in this Kamin. But bicycling past a 15th Century church yesterday (albeit bombed to hell by the Allies during World War II) is enough to make me think we are a very young, naive nation.

So is Germany considering… Embedded in the sidewalk in front of the former homes of Jews are small brass plaques that list the names of those who were ripped away to concentration camps, confirming that every society is prone to extreme levels of imperfection—to say the least.

But sixty or so years later, the bike lanes are wide and extensive, people are obsessed with recycling, don’t drive big cars and use small refrigerators. The food is increasingly being grown locally and is bio (organic). There isn’t a choice between paper or plastic because you bring your own cloth shopping bag. Public transportation can get you nearly anywhere you need to go and the economy is booming. Welcome to the European future.

Like it or not we’re globally connected now. If one large nation tanks we’ll all feel the ramifications. It’s no wonder the world is watching this election with great interest. And the world will keep getting smaller the more often we frequent each other’s establishments. Which was when one of the Kamin regulars approached my table and asked something of me. I told him my German was very bad. “American?” he asked. I nodded.

“Ah, OK.” And he turned and sat back down at the bar.

But I still had the dog at my feet and the windows became fogged up by the cold rain outside. The radio played David Bowie—a song written and recorded in Berlin about two lovers living on either side of the Wall, a Wall that is but a fading memory here. And the man who had tried to communicate with me sang along in nearly perfect English. “I wish we could swim, like dolphins can swim. Though nothing will keep us together, we can beat them forever and ever. We can be heroes, just for one day.”

The Future is a Gas

My dentist is a cloven-hoofed misanthrope. He is achingly awkward and I often find myself associating him with the smell of dead whales and briny interstate restrooms. That said, there are simply not enough malevolent adjectives to describe my dentist, nor am I able to find the words for my fear of him. But that was a start.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that he is also a greedy snit, which is why his office called to say that he would be perfectly willing to use what’s left of my paltry insurance money for the year.

“What do you suggest?” I asked.

“Well, 30 could use a crown,” his front office staff said.

“Which tooth is that again?”

“Thirty, second one from the back on the right side. It’s in all kinds of trouble.”

I suppose we had gotten off to a bad start. Lacking health insurance for the better half of my adult life, I’d had nary a checkup nor a cleaning in more than 15 years. So easing into the chair I asked the dentist if he enjoyed peering into people’s mouths all day. Having read some urban legend that dentists are more prone to suicide than other health care professionals probably prompted the question, and I was no doubt projecting my own suicidal thoughts about the dental arts, such as they are.

Nevertheless, the question and its answer reminded me of the time I was sitting next to a Hell’s Angel-looking dude with a Vietnam Vet patch at a certain mountainside bar one warm summer evening. After gaining his trust and camaraderie over a few pints, I inquired if he had killed anyone in Nam. He told me no, he hadn’t even fired a shot. He’d worked as a truck driver moving munitions and supplies, but I could count on being his first.

“I don’t mind staring,” my dentist finally said, opening his eyes really wide and freaky, “as long as people brush twice a day and floss. You, as I can tell, haven’t done either.”

He was right. I had gotten rather British with my teeth, even through they have socialized dental care to pick up the slack. I made some lousy excuses and he had bent over me with his clumsy bedside manner, injecting me roughly with local anesthesia.

So there I was, close to Christmas, squirming in the chair again. My dentist bent in low as if he had a secret to tell. “Would you like some nitrous oxide?”

“Why yes,” I said, my British teeth chattering in fear. “That would be brilliant.”

I’d never tried nitrous before, which for me is hard to comprehend having experimented, recreated and abused most other drugs on the black and white market. You had to be there, man, but it was enough to make the ’80s and ’90s into a grungy new wave version of the ’60s.

My dentist placed a mask over my head and instructed me to suck in through my nose and breath out through my mouth, almost the exact opposite of playing the didgeridoo and other bong-like instruments I’d learned to play so proficiently over the years. The gas itself smelled pleasantly like vanilla and rubber gloves. Soon I found it necessary to reassure myself that nitrous was a drug that was often taken by people who would never imbibe past a glass of wine, much less drop LSD.

Because in a few minutes or hours—I wasn’t sure which—I began to slowly spin. I might as well have been hog-tied to the top of a helicopter. I spun flat around in revolutions that made me lift off the ground and question the existence of both gravity and dentistry. This was slightly disconcerting considering that I was losing the awareness that my mouth was cranked wide open and my dentist drilling tooth number 30 to a nub. I needed to get it together, and fast.

But there was nothing I could do, so I dug deep into the psychedelic training of my youth and prepared for the visionary experience. And come it did. At first it was nothing but mumbled drunken thoughts, but reaching into the back of my head I slowly began to gain some clarity. There it was, off in the distance, sure as day—the future. The 2008 presidential elections were over and I could see George and Laura Bush chopping brush in Texas. Faintly, rubbing against the top of my skull, was the image of a black man in the Oval Office, a woman vice president standing over him and a former president decked out in a flowery apron baking oatmeal cookies in the White House kitchen. It filled me with a warm feeling, knowing that I would eat those cookies and still have my teeth.

Unbeknownst to me, my dentist drilled deeper and I witnessed the Democratic-held House and the Senate vote on a universal health care plan that the president quickly signed. The troops were coming home too, and the French, Germans and British were beginning to love us again while the Iraqis were loving us for leaving.

And then, my dentist switched on the oxygen and I began to slowly spin back into reality. To breathe the air and feel the pain. Happy New Year.

Keeping it Real: An Interview with Michael Pollan

Readers who have become familiar with Michael Pollan through his books about the natural and unnatural world of plants, food, and beasts know he is a dependably entertaining writer with an extreme case of curiosity. When faced with a story about the industrial food chain he didn’t just travel to a Kansas feedlot. He bought a cow. Calling Pollan a food detective is somewhat of an understatement. With last’s year’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” Pollan uncovered where our food came from. The highly acclaimed book had some people wishing they could swear off eating all together. With his new book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (The Penguin Press, $22). Pollan has again turned his multifaceted attention to what goes on the table, but with a simple and practical twist: “My aim in this book is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters.”

IS THIS A SEQUEL TO ‘OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA’?

Michael Pollan: It did grow out of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ but its not at all a sequel and is a very different reading experience. But it is a companion. ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ really told you where your food came from and this book is about how to eat given all that information. A lot of people who read ‘Omnivore’ where left feeling somewhat confused and anxious because they learned things about the food system that were very upsetting. They would say to me, ‘I’m afraid to finish this book because there will be nothing left to eat.’ I was destroying one food option after another. But I’ve never felt that way. The more I learn about the food system the easier it is to eat. I was getting a lot of requests from people who wanted practical answers when I spoke about food. So given all of this, how should we then eat? So this was really an attempt to develop some rules of thumb. The other difference is ‘Omnivore’ was much more concerned with environmental questions and this book is much more concerned with personal health. You know they are obviously connected and are hard to separate. And as it turns out the best decisions for your health are the best choices for the environment. Happy coincidence. .

BUT NOW THAT SO FEW OF US ARE FARMERS THERE’S AN AUTOMATIC DISSCONNECT BETWEEN HUMANS AND THE LAND. HOW DO WE RECONNECT TO THE ENVIRONMENT FROM WHICH OUR FOOD IS GROWN AND RAISED WITHOUT GETTING BEHIND THE PLOW?

MP: When you go to a farmer’s market you’re reconnecting to nature in a way. You’re seeing connections to the land that you don’t see when you’re at the supermarket which obscures those connections. It treats meat as a shrink-wrapped package with no particular animal connection. At the farmer’s market the farmers are there and the carrots are encrusted with dirt, which reminds you that yes, carrots are a root and come out of the earth. We reconnect with nature by eating whole foods and not eating highly processed foods. Processed food by its very essence removes nature.

IF CULTURE IS A GUIDE TO OUR EATING HABITS WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT AMERICAN CULTURE?

MP: I don’t think it’s our culture that is guiding our eating habits entirely. Food marketing is largely responsible too. I don’t think we yet have a culture of fast food. Culture of food has a lot to do with nostalgia, memory, your ancestors and your identity. At some point, at some very sad point, perhaps we’ll have a nostalgia for a culture that is McDonalds because that what their ancestors ate. We’re not quite there yet and hopefully we won’t get there. But culture is older and has deeper roots than McDonalds.
We also make up our cuisine based on other people’s cultures. We are a mongrel society in a pertinent way. I have nights when I’m having a traditional Asian meal and other nights when I’m having a traditional Mediterranean meal of some kind. We’re not limited to the traditions of our ancestors. I think the key is to eat from some tradition because there is such a reservoir of wisdom about food and health there that it would be a shame to ignore it. That wisdom is deeper and more effective than the wisdom we are getting from nutritional experts.

YOU POINT OUT ‘IN DEFENSE OF FOOD’ THAT THERE IS A $32 BILLION MARKETING MACHINE CONNECTED TO THE FOOD INDUSTRY AND THREE THINGS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR MUCH OF THE BAD INFORMATION WE GET ABOUT FOOD—FOOD SCIENCE, THE FOOD INDUSTRY AND JOURNALIST.

MP: Well I think it’s hard to place the blame on anyone. Everybody is acting the way they are supposed to act in the system. The companies are trying to sell as much food as they can. The scientists are trying to produce the best scientific information that they can. Journalists are trying to write the most exciting stories they can. But when they all get together they end up promoting a way of looking at food that’s not very helpful. The goals of the food industry and the goals of the eater it turns out are not that well aligned. The goals of the industry are to process food as much as possible because that’s how you make it more profitable, and as it turns out we are better off with the least processed food. So there’s a conflict there with the way capitalism works and the way biology works. We see that conflict over and over again. We see it on the farm where capitalism loves to sell farmers lots of products and technologies but in fact the most sustainable farms need very little products and technology. So there is a fundamental tension. And the nutritional scientist are well meaning. I think they exaggerate what they know and play down what they don’t know. And journalist are drawn to any kind of new finding especially if it conflicts with past findings. So a story about fruits and vegetables being really good for is not going to get as much play as the story about the kiwi being a magic, super food. But there’s nothing very new about food. Whatever is important to know about food is ancient knowledge. So I think it’s the institutional parallels of these three groups that is troubling. Nobody is trying to make us sick. Nobody is trying to make us confused.

YOU WRITE IN THE INTRODUCTION TO “IN DEFENCE OF FOOD” THAT YOU WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO WRITE THIS BOOK 40 YEARS AGO BECAUSE THERE SIMPLY WAS NOT THE SAME KIND OF FOOD OPTIONS WE HAVE TODAY. WHERE DO YOU SEE THE AMERICAN DIET GOING IN THE NEXT 40 YEARS?

MP: We have choices now that we didn’t have 40 years ago. There is a lot of positive movement in the American food supply. There is actually a food movement. There are many, many people who are interested in changing the way we eat. Farmer’s markets are capturing a corner of the food economy. Whole Foods is growing a lot faster than Wal Mart at this point. All that is very encouraging. I see organic getting bigger. I see local getting bigger. I don’t think industrial food system will go away, but my dream is that it will shrink. These other food chains will become more important and more influential. These choices that are now very common in California will get common everywhere such as local sources of meat and dairy. Re-Localizing of our food system would be a wonderful development. There are a lot of people that are getting into farming these days and that’s a very exciting development. So I’m very optimistic. I see that all trends are pointing in the right direction. Even as the fast food culture doesn’t disappear, I look forward to a time when McDonalds is serving grass-fed hamburgers and organic French fries. And that’s probably a mixed blessing in some ways. But it will be good for the land.

DO YOU EVER GET PEOPLE STARING OVER YOUR SHOULDER AND INTO YOUR BASKET AT THE SUPERMARKET?

MP: All the time. Everyone in Berkeley is in one another’s business. I’ve felt very self-conscious in the supermarket. In fact, right after I moved here I was shopping at a supermarket and I was reaching for my son’s favorite weekend cereal—fruity pebbles or something like that—and this tall bearded graduate student tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m watching Michael Pollan shop for groceries.’ Ah, this town is too small for me. And as it happened I was reaching for some non-politically correct food.

I’M NEITHER BEARDERD OR POLITICALLY CORRECT, BUT IF I MAY PRY, WHAT ARE YOU HAVING FOR DINNER TONIGHT?

MP: Yeah, you can. We’re actually going out to a Japanese restaurant. My son has just taken is last final exam for the semester and we’re going out to celebrate. It’s his favorite restaurant and we’re going to have sushi.