Charles

Degelman

Russian River Breakthrough

A Foray Through Place and Time

The Russian River flows into the Pacific just south of Jenner, California. In winter and spring, the current at the mouth of the river pushes steadily out to sea like a brave boat. As the dry season descends, the river dwindles. The surf builds sand spits that converge across the river mouth, forming a levee that blocks passage of fresh water into the ocean.

The levee serves as a hotel, launch pad, and breeding ground for a herd of seals. All day, dozens of the slippery pups sun themselves, lolling between the surf and the brackish lagoon that forms on the river side. The seals are usually the only witnesses to the breakthrough.

The first rain falls on the brown hills of Napa and Sonoma counties; the Russian River rises. A trickle winds its way between the smooth stone skulls of the dry riverbed. The flow increases, moving to refill the basin behind the sand levee at the coast.

Eventually, a thin wash of river water makes it over the hump, forming rivulets in the sand. Pressure turns to power. The wash becomes a rush, cutting a trench through the sand spit. The breach deepens and broadens and the river bursts through to collide with the breakers. The seals revel like slick wet dogs in the riptide, rolling in the chaotic reunion of river and sea, picking off fish in a food-chain rumba that will continue through the winter.

*

Just two hundred yards up the river basin from the seal colony, I sat ensconced in a rented cabin, staring at my computer. Enveloped in my own heartily anticipated solitude, far from my busy city life, floating in a nirvana gone wrong, I sat in silence and wrote nothing. What the hell? Did I need chaos in order to write?

Still burnt out by the last show, charred by the chaos of self-producing and performing, frayed by the needs of eager actors, blasé musicians, and Lily, my playwright partner, I sat in no sound (ambient surf punctuated by seal barks)  and wrote nothing. Convinced that I would, in all probability, never write again,  I put the Powerbook to sleep, rolled a joint, filled the Toyota tank with gas at the grocery and headed north along Highway One. I didn't know where I was going and I didn't want to know.  As the two-lane road unwound ahead of me, I smoked the joint. The snarl in my cabeza loosened and began to flow into the monkey chatter of meditation. My thoughts diminished in size and importance, imploded by my surroundings.

Browned bluffs fell away to the sun-flecked Pacific. An abalone boat, shrunken by the span of the ocean’s, horizon flirted with the rocks of the cove below. I passed the silver-gray planks of Fort Ross, a fur-trading outpost the Russians had built before the gold rush. The Russians had been imperialists, too, back then.

Through Gualala, Highway One rolls over the landscape like a sexual thing. The terrain dominates, forcing the road from sunlight to shadow, from the glare of brown hills to the rich, dark ravines of redwoods and manzanita that lined the creek beds; water flashed below, hawks and vultures circling above. Stoned, I reeled in the road beneath me, the tarmac riding the undulating landscape. I lost track of the miles until the roadbed climbed out of a creek bed and broadened into Point Arena’s main street.

Northern California’s marine forecasts extend from San Francisco Bay to Point Arena. Here, the flora turns with the weather. Eucalypti disappear. Doug fir, redwood, and spruce begin to spike the ridge tops. Timber trucks rush past on the narrow roads, making two runs a day out of the hills to the east. When you hit Point Arena’s blunt promontory, you have arrived in the Pacific Northwest.

Years had passed since I was here last. A gentle parade of health food stores, restaurants, and candle shops have come and gone. A computer outlet now occupies the old Elks Lodge. The winter sun had migrated toward the Pacific horizon and I had downshifted from high to hungry.

The Evergreen Cafe was closed. The old Texaco station was gone. Nearby, a new Chevron gas and food mart beckoned. A Taco Bell and a McDonald’s leered at one another from opposite sides of Main Street. At the top of the grade, the highway dog-legged to the left. I ran the fast-food gauntlet and climbed the hill, looking for one more culinary option. Through my windshield, a redwood watchtower stood outlined against coast and sky.

I pulled over and shut off the engine, heart beating. It wasn’t the structure or the landscape that prompted me to stop. These old wooden towers dot the California landscape from Fresno to Crescent City. A ground-floor tool shed supports a second-story chicken or pigeon coop. The two-floor shed holds an iron hoop-bound redwood tub above it all, providing water pressure to a nearby ranch or farmhouse.

This tower no longer saw duty as a tool shed or rabbit warren; it no longer bore the weight of a water-filled tank. The old redwood cistern now boasted a galley of chest-high portholes that looked out to sea; a row of well-tended planter boxes bordered a patio below. The structure had been scraped, re-fitted, and painted a quaint colonial blue. Years before, I had spent a rainy winter night in this water tower with a young woman named Kathy.

*

Spring, 1968, my first winter in California. I was recuperating from a teargas-filled theater tour of protest-embattled college campuses. I borrowed my cousin's Volkswagen bus to drive up Highway One. I planned to visit friends who had emigrated from their Pullman apartment in the Haight to a shack in the Mendocino pines.

A big Pacific storm battered the coast from Baja and the Gulf of Mexico. No matter — I was game for the trip north. Shrunken by the cold winters of Boston, I was in love with the warm, wet benevolence of the California rainy season.

The summer before, my cousin — in a zealous campaign to commit suicide by clambering up glacier-sheared granite faces in Yosemite – had rolled the VW bus off the outside of a curve in the oak and brown foothills of the Sierras. In less than five seconds, the bus transmogrified from cube to parallelogram, blowing out all the side windows

Miraculously, physics and the whimsy of trajectory had spared the front of the bus. My cousin and I popped in a new windshield and the thing still steered straight, so we put it back on the road.

I had offered Kathy a ride north. Actually, I didn’t offer. She had asked me, saying she had to get out of the city, had some friends in Mendocino. She knew of a place we could crash, halfway up the coast, in Point Arena. My brain lit up with images of the two of us lying naked in a cabin in the sequoias while rain washed the wilderness into a blur beyond the window panes.

Kathy was a living with a bunch of people in a rambling, unpainted fisherman's house perched on the hillside overlooking a Standard Oil refinery. Her pad was draped with potheads and generally unmotivated freaks, not very lively or interesting, but my cousin knew them all, and that’s how I met Kathy.

The day we were to drive north, the wet, windy warmth of El Nino softened the silhouettes of hillside fisherman’s shanties and blurred the belching dragon of the nearby refinery. I pulled the VW to the curb and honked. Kathy appeared on the upstairs porch of her rickety hillside castle. All arms and legs, she loped down the outside staircase like an Afghan hound.

My heart fell. She had a guy in tow, a ruddy monster with the red burn and bleached blond mop of a surfer, abalone fisherman, or dope dealer. Who knew? It seemed remarkable that the guy wasn’t in Vietnam, but anything that kept you from killing or dying in Vietnam was all right with me. Still…

Would I have to drive this boyfriend or whatever all the way to Mendocino?

Kathy climbed aboard. “He's not coming,” she whispered.

The galoot hooked a hoof around Kathy’s long neck and pulled her head through the open window. He pressed her face to his squat, sunburned puss and smacked her on the lips. “Be good.” He was trying to sound sweet. He pushed Kathy’s head back inside the bus.

“Don't forget to feed the cats.” Kathy arranged a knapsack at her feet and pulled an orange hooded fisherman’s slicker around her narrow shoulders. Professional garb. Her boyfriend’s.

“Don't do nothin' I wouldn't do.” The boyfriend or whatever glared at me.

I chose to leave it alone, staring instead at the weather through the windshield and bobbing my head to the rhythm of the wipers. I didn’t want to raise this guy’s hackles. I had been hit plenty by cops, and once I got sucker-punched at a non-violent demo. From my point of view, non-political violence was a waste.

The surfer-fisherman-doper stepped away from the distorted bus and I lurched us into motion. This guy had put the whole deal with Kathy on a different footing.

“Jeez,” I said. “You two look pretty cozy."

“Yeah.”

“Been together long?”

“No.”

“Oh,” I said.

We drove in silence over the camel-hump arches of the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, past the federal pen at San Quentin, past San Rafael Rock & Sand where a sway-backed quarry building hunkered in a gravel pit like a latter-day Noah’s ark. We pulled onto the freeway and pushed north, the wind billowing at our tail.

Rain lashed the windshield and blew past the open windows in a warm haze as we whined north into the rolling winter-green hills around Santa Rosa. I poked questions at Kathy but it was like butt-bumping a frog.

“So, where you from?”

She tucked long legs beneath the orange slicker.

“Originally, I mean. Nobody’s born here,” I continued.

Kathy looked out the window.

“Actually, I lied. My cousins were born here.”

“Oklahoma,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I was born in Oklahoma.”

Ah. She was starting to loosen up.

“Oklahoma. I’ve never been there.”

“Don’t go.” She leaned her chin on her knees.

“Who…me?” I turned to look at her. “Don’t go? Don’t go where? I mean, I’m not going anywhere. Well, actually, we’re going somewhere … through Gualala, around the corner at Point Arena, all the way to Mendocino, right?”

“Whatever. Just don’t go to Oklahoma.”

“Oh.” Hmmm, I thought. Quite a sense of humor.

She shrugged and stared through the windshield. “There’s nothin’ there.”

I’m an actor. When one actor drops his or her lines it’s often necessary for the other actor to launch into an improvised monolog. When the other actor recovers, it’s usually possible to stumble back to the script.

Kathy had apparently dropped her lines, so I launched into improvised monolog mode. I expounded on my theatrical adventures, the show we had done on all those campuses, the marvels of masked commedia dell’ arte, its medieval “street” origins, the anti-war ruckuses we had encountered on riot-strewn campuses.

I embellished a scene set in a diner in Boise, Idaho where an intrepid cluster of embattled hippies had played “If You Go to San Francisco” on the jukebox when we walked in. I jammed on pigs breaking windows at a U. of Wisconsin chemistry building where the makers of napalm tested their concoctions.  I extemporized the Monday morning that we snuck out of Minneapolis in at morning rush hour to avoid arrest for inciting to riot. I riffed on draft cards, tac squads, light shows, cop harassment, and the burning ROTC headquarters in Ohio. I invoked the names of Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendryx, Che Guevara, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Luther King. I was rocking out while the road wound beneath us.

*

Late that afternoon, we cruised into Point Arena. The storm had not abated and, with the sun going down, it was getting cold in the lopsided bus. At that time, Point Arena was still a hardware town, supplying ranchers and loggers and fisherman. A movie palace, a firehouse, the fisherman's cooperative, and a flapjack café loomed out of the rain-swept landscape. The Rino brand gas station sold fuel out of old hand-crank pumps. The concrete architecture harked back to WPA construction projects of the 1930s.

“So where’s this place?” I asked. “Where we can crash.”

“My friends told me that the name’s on the mailbox.”

“Wow,” I said. “A whole sentence.”

Kathy stared at me with hurt eyes.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just a little cranky, what with the cold and the wind and the rain and the noise of the engine and the overwhelming silence of the person sitting next to me. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m sorry, too.”

She did seem pretty damned forlorn. But what did she have to be sorry about? Some great, past, unforgotten tragedy? A loss? The plight of the world? I didn’t pry. I craved companionship, not angst. I had enough of  my own. “So what’s the name?” I asked. “On the mailbox.”

“Tucker.”

I stopped in front of the café. “You want something to eat?”

Kathy shook her head. “Let’s just get there,” she said. “It’s getting dark.”

“What, like the witches are gonna come out?”

Kathy said nothing. I had to admit, Point Arena didn’t look particularly friendly. I didn’t take lumberjacks to be sympathetic to longhairs, peaceniks, or draft-dodgin’ commie freaks. I had gotten the dirty hippie treatment plenty of times; it was rarely conducive to good times, good digestion, or romance, of which I was hopeful.

I pulled both earrings out of my left earlobe, tucked my hair under an old navy watch cap, jumped out of the crooked bus, and pushed my way into the café. A lean woman with a pale complexion and a bright-flowered apron gave me a head-to-toe appraisal.

“I’m looking for the Tucker place. Can you tell me…?”

“Just north ‘a town.” She squinted at me. “You a friend of theirs?”

“Friend of a friend.” I could feel my hair begin to creep out from under the watch cap.

“They ain’t there. The Tuckers. They been rentin’ the place to a buncha hippies.” She picked up a coffee pot. “You know that, dontcha?”

“That’s okay,” I replied. “We’re just staying the night. We…”

The lean lady floated to the far end of the counter to fill a trucker’s cup. She muttered as she poured.

The man glanced at me. A trucker’s pot belly pushed at his plaid shirt and stretched his suspenders. A purple engineer’s cap sat high on his forehead.

I waved.

The trucker stared.

“Nice hat,” I offered and backed out the door into the wind and climbed into the bus. The twisted VW door screeched as I pulled it shut.

“Just north of town,” I repeated.

Kathy said nothing.

“Wow,” I said. “Sure is quiet around here.”

I ground the crooked bus up the hill. The structures thinned, the highway darkened and turned hard left toward the coast.

“There it is!” Kathy nearly raised her voice. “Tucker.”

The Tuckers, whoever they were, had converted an old farmer’s water tower into a home. The top floor boasted chest-high portholes that looked out on the sea.

“Wow,” she exclaimed. “They said it was a tower. What a trip.” She leapt out, crouched by the door, produced a key, and disappeared inside.

I followed. A circular wrought-iron staircase wound to the second story where a flat-black, conical fireplace hung suspended from the ceiling.

I dragged in the sleeping bags and packs. I couldn't believe my good fortune. The place was totally cool. We were alone together. There were no interfering brother or sister hippies to be found. So much for malicious village gossip, I thought. The fireplace worked, the kitchen was full of pots, pans, bottles and cans, the rain was lashing at the portholes, and Kathy was mine, all mine. Silent, perhaps, but mine, nevertheless.

“It’s really cool,” she said, looking at him for confirmation.

“It sure is,” I replied, meeting her gray eyes. My confidence was boundless. We built a fire together. I cooked omelets on the stove. She toasted sourdough bread over the open flames in the fireplace. Things were looking up. Communication was possible.

We lit candles, smoked a joint. Kathy shed her clothes for a flannel nightgown that hung off her small, pointed breasts, flowed down her long waist, coming to a halt above her thin ankles. A gallon of Red Mountain burgundy roosted on the kitchen counter.

After dinner, we sat on the floor, the gallon of Red Mountain between us, and stared into the fire. Silently.

“Some trip, huh?” I said with bravado, and took a swig from the jug.

“Yeah,” she said, putting the jug back on the floor, untasted.

I made advances.

Kathy backed away.

I nuzzled.

She stiffened.

I bared a shoulder, grasped a flannelled flank.

“Stop it.” She was near tears.

I don’t remember what I said. I was half surprised, half pissed-off, and just it to make it larger than the percentages will bear, I was half un-nerved and another half guilt stricken. Perhaps I had said nothing. As I had in the cabin this morning, ‘way back in Jenner.

Lucy retreated like a snail to the shelter of her sleeping bag. She assumed a fetal position and covered her head. “G’night,” she mumbled.

I must have said goodnight, probably mumbled it. I fed the fire, drank burgundy, and brooded. Hadn't I driven her up here?  Shit. We had toasted our journey with wine – well, I had toasted our journey with wine – in front of a crackling fire but now I sat alone, my cold ass growing colder as the sea-wet moisture invaded the tower’s flooring. Why me? I asked. Or more accurately — why not me? Wasn't I an intrepid revolutionary? Wasn’t love supposed to be free? And free-flowing?

After all the war stories I had told her — sixteen weeks on the road, liberating campus radio stations, leading chanting students into war-research facilities — surely she understood the significance of the moment, of every moment in the revolution. This was one such moment, never to be repeated in the ongoing cosmic chaos. An intense and beautiful moment in the ugliness of a world at war. And speaking of war, dammit, wasn’t I a soldier in the war at home? Didn’t she like me? Didn’t she get it? Girls said “yes” to guys who said “no.” That’s what the bumper sticker said.

*

Soon after my first trip to Point Arena, big changes had come down – not just for me, but for everyone. As the war ground on, women — not girls — had declared a new war at home. They demanded to be heard at strategy meetings. They had shouted down the sexism in their ranks. “Vietnamese women and girls fight alongside the men and boys in their heroic guerrilla war,” they called out to the men. “Those Vietnamese women, aren’t they your heroes, too? We fight alongside you in our own streets. And we don’t need to be your heroes – or your heroines. You need to recognize that we are your equals.”

When the river rises the dam will break. As I watched the sky darken behind the tower, I realized that I was still unraveling the knots and sinews of an old power structure in my guts. Teetering there on the nexus of Point Arena’s interlaced biospheres, I knew what I would write about.

I started the engine. Comforted by its companionable tick and clatter, I started back down California Highway One, cruising through Point Arena and Gualala. Keeping the wide open ocean to my right, I steered around redwood ravine hairpins and retraced my path over still-warm, humping brown hills until I reached Jenner and my cabin on the Russian River. I turned on the cabin lights, brewed a pot of coffee, sat down at my computer and began to write about the river outside my cabin window and a long-ago, rain-washed trip I had taken in a lop-sided VW bus with a forlorn young woman who had wanted nothing more than a ride north.

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American Postcards