WALLY SAILS THE I-HARVESTER
OCTOBER 9, 2011
So anyway it was another week on the Island, our hometown set here in California on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. It's not a town in the Midwest, although there are a few who have expressed the desire to make it so; it's set here in California, which is a very different place from other places.
For good or for ill, it is different, and always has been. That's for sure.
A wharf-sizzler turned into a real dockwalloper this week but yielded to great weather on the weekend. Everyone huddled inside while the last dahlias glowed defiantly, the way Californians will do, amid the wind and lashings. Saturday bloomed gorgeous with sun and all sorts of outdoor stuff to do.
Nevertheless, reminders Fall has entered the room and quietly, but firmly shut the door on summer appeared everywhere. The Oaks on Mozart Street have been dropping their leaves dutifully in large piles, and the remaining Canadian geese have been making those extraordinary V formations to rival the Blue Angels. The air is cooler, despite the sun and the light gets this peculiar look that happens only in California and only in California at this time of year. Its hard to explain, and maybe those in SoCal do not experience this for all the smog, but its true. The shadows take on a dated look around here and the trees look older and that house over there looks like an art object now with its peeling paint and raggedy grass lawn. Inside, the sun spills over the kitchen table, where rosemary cuttings in a glass fragrant the air, with a softer look as if to suggest that time is shorter, and this patch will not last. Better move the rosemary and take advantage of changes coming.
The changes are subtle here. They don't grab you by the lapels and shout, "Hey look! Fall has arrived! Come gawk at the extravaganza! Buy something rust colored!"
No, for that you need to travel to Pasadena,where such behavior is tolerated. Its quieter here. Except for the occasional screaming and gunfire and strong-arm robbery. Except for that.
Still, when changes happen, it tends to unsettle folks. They get antsy, start to make plans, and even worse, act on them, sometimes out of sheer nervousness.
Wally managed to capture the find of the century in the form of an International Harvester Tractor on eBay. No one thought to bid on this thing, which was put out mistakenly for no minimum bid, so Wally was soon proud possessor of a bright green farm tractor, complete with rotary plow, backhoe, and a few more attachments for less than one hundred dollars.
Wally had some pity on the guy, who had imagined he would get about $40,000 for the machine, when it came to shipping, for the poor feller had not devoted a thought to that item as well. So Wally drove out with his truck and hauled back a full-sized iHarvester (with backhoe) on his boat trailer. This took a bit of creative engineering with 2x4s and good rope, but eventually he got the thing back and parked it in front of the Native Sons of the Golden West Parlor.
Why had the man sold a $40,000 tractor (complete with backhoe) for a C note? The sad man had shrugged his shoulders. "Great Recession. Mortgage done gone tanked. Lost ever thing."
The story about hauling a tractor on a boat trailer some 1000 miles to California is one best left for future and younger generations to tell, but you can bet your bippy there will be plenty more stories about losing everything to the Great Recession going here on out. We got plenty of those right now.
In any case Wally did not know much about tractors and the previous owner had scrubbed off all the markings for the shift to replace them with smiley faces.
Perhaps a clue as to how the man had lost his property.
Any case, Wally fired up the sucker and grabbed what he thought was the shift knob -- it turned out to be the linkage to the backhoe, which fell over onto the grass -- and not much seemed to happen, beyond some clunking sound. Puzzled he started pushing buttons and pulling levers at random there until suddenly the machine jerked into motion and lumbered toward the marina, while Wally tried to undo what he had just done. Didn't this happen to Johnny Cash in that movie . . . ?
His wife, Arlene shouted at him from the sidelines. What she had to say and the way she felt she had to say it did not help.
Well, the long and short of it was that Wally drove through the chainlink fence right off of the embankment to land square on Dalene Wickerbag's 20 foot skiff with a crash and something of a metal shriek. The gunwales buckled a bit, and there was a bit of smoke, but the assembly remained afloat with the back wheels in the water to either side as Wally desperately pulled strange lever after strange lever until something dropped down and he started moving forward, slowly, but steadily out of the marina, while his wife and a collection of observers shouted at him.
Wally left the marina mounted on a tractor that was aboard a skiff and propelled by the back wheels and an immense screw, intended during normal use, for turning the earth in a small field; for fear of sinking should he stop, he ceased all efforts of control and so fell apart emotionally and psychically as he entered the Bay on something very strange and mysterious.
A little uncertain what would happen should he shut off the engine, he "steered" his chimerical machine to the left, paralleling the Strand by leaning slightly to the side. Families with their kids dropped their sand shovels and stared. Several sail-boarders moved quickly out of the way.
Javier called out from shore. "Wally! What the heck are you doing?"
Wally shrugged, raised his hands. It was a fine day for a boat ride. The seagulls dipped and called and rose again over the water. The breeze was cool and gentle. A few light, puffy clouds hung merrily in the blue sky. And Wally sailed in paralyzed abject terror. To ease his mind he began singing songs to himself.
O beautiful for spacious skies
for amber waves of grain . . .
Wally's musical library was limited at best. So was his vocal ability.
Above the fruity plains!
America! America!
May something something beeeeeeee!
Several policecars appeared along the shore. Along with a firetruck. And his wife Arlene with them. They all looked pretty excited. Beyond the offshore mudshelf that extended some 200 yards out appeared the USS Boutwell, hooting its horns which were followed by a loud klaxon call designed to be heard at great distances in stormy weather. It was the cutter from Coast Guard Island. His wife was pointing and shouting something and suddenly all the police started running this way and that and the firemen boiled out of the firetrucks and a sailboarder came up to him as he made his steady, slow but sure way directly toward the riprap breakwater that stuck way out perpendicular to the shore.
"Dude! You okay?" The guy one the sailboard had a thick mustache in a face framed by the hood of a black wetsuit. He looked a little like a harbor seal from a cartoon and this made Wally laugh hysterically. The man looked quite concerned.
"I have seen them in the watch-fires of a hundred circling
camps,
I have seen them standing at the picketlines in the evening dews and damps;
I can read their righteous wishes by the dim and flaring lamps:
For the Union makes us strong!"
Several small boats began to converge on Wally as he approached the riprap. A man with a bullhorn shouted at him and the sailboarder got out of the way.
"Sir! Whatever has happened is not worth taking your life!"
More policecars arrived. O dear god, what a mess.
Several officers and firemen stripped down before jumping into the water. There was a policewoman among them and she was not bad looking.
He heard his wife calling. She was on the dingy with the bullhorn.
"Wally, I am sorrrrrrrrreeeeeee! Come back to shore!"
"I can't!" Wally said, intending to explain, but he had no bullhorn himself.
As the contraption neared the rocks of the breakwater, someone in a motorboat threw a lasso that settled neatly around his torso and he felt himself dragged from the seat of the tractor just as the prow of Dalene's skiff smacked into the riprap. The whole thing ground a little bit up the breakwater with a terrific shredding sound of metal before the tractor sort of slid backwards, canting to the side and went into the water amid quite an impressive amount of steam and smoke. Something on the tractor chose that moment to explode and a small fireball arose.
Meanwhile, the flailing Wally had been reached by the police and the fire, which was fortunate in that with the rope around him, he found his arms pinned to his sides and so could not swim.
"Help, I'm drowning!"
"Sir," one of the policemen said. "Just stand up. It is only five feet deep here."
The motorboat with the riata came up to them. It was Jose and Javier aboard the Golden Poppy, the official parlor boat belonging to David Phipps of the Sons of the Golden West.
"Where did you learn how to toss a lasso like that," David said.
"Mis antepasados eran los vaqueros originales," Javier said.
"It's true, Jose said. "The original cowboys looked more like Cheech and Chong and Denzel Washington than Clint Eastwood."
Javier tossed the end of the rope to the Coast Guard dingy and they used that to haul the gasping, sputtering, flailing Wally over the gunwales.
Arlene stamped her foot. "Damn fool! Look at you!"
You know, some people in other parts of the country would say this would be a good time for a slice of rhubarb pie, but we'll not get into that right now. We must try harder.
The episode did provide quite a mouthful to discuss at Jacqueline's Salon, at Firehouse #8, and at the Precinct where the men and women in blue all slapped each other on the back for getting it right this time. After last Memorial Day they were all good goddamned if they were going to have to fish out another floater. Saved another one!
That night the gossip continued at the Old Same Place Bar, where the Editor was celebrating a new job offer.
"What'll you be doing?" Padraic asked as he set down a shot and a glass of Fat Tire.
"Sweeping up at the Jack Sparrow Orphanage," said the Editor.
"O that's mighty harsh!"
The Editor shrugged. "A job's a job these days." And nobody pays a thin dime for things like his news media outlet.
"What other great projects you have going on over there?"
As it turned out, one of the staff writers had been inspired by a book written by Pastor Rotshue. What was needed around here was more a sense of individual place. What was called for here was a great history of the Island which rendered as it is -- completely unique and different and yet like all of California at the same time.
Padraic was dubious. "Aint that kinda contradictin' itself now?"
Well we all heard the President the other day. And a couple other voices as well. We have all gotten soft. We're no longer Number One in anything. We have to try harder. It will be a grand history going back to just how the bedrock of the Island was made, up through the time of the Ohlone and the Spanish colonial and to the present day.
"O my! Right back to the messa . . . the mezzo . . . the zoey . . . the infernal Mesopotamian area! Aint that as cute as pyramid Egyptian in a barn full of clay tablets!"
"Uhhh . . . sort of like that."
The talk along the bar turned to upcoming Holidays, meaning the long road of orange and black that culminates with Halloween and El Dias de los Muertos.
Eugene asked Suzie what she was planning to be and was she going to the Native Sons Halloween Ball.
"Leave off the girl," Dawn commanded. "She's too good for the likes of you, you old baggy poodlehunter!" Suzie laughed.
"I can see where I am not wanted," Eugene said.
"That's mostly everywhere. Go get a date more your own age!" Padraic said. "Besides she'll be working here that weekend."
"O and you will be dressed as something like Shrek, no doubt," Eugene retorted.
Padraic stood puzzled. "What's wrong with that? Sounds like a good idea! Wasn't the fellow as green as the old sod itself? I am all for the green. Its the orange I cannot stand. By god I could smash the lot of them . . .".
"Hush now, dear," Dawn said. "We have Lutherans among us. And they are good, daycent people."
"Ahhhh! I'm going back to check on the mash." And with that the big man, whose stock stemmed from the "light Irish" stomped through the portal in back to the rear. The light Irish are said to be descended from Vikings.
"What are you going as," Denby asked Eugene to make the peace.
"A ninja! And you?"
"I'm going as an hamster," Jose said to nobody listening.
"Well, you know this old bachelor rarely has a date for anything. While other people go out dancing, people like us have to work. I imagine a medieval minstrel if anything."
"That's a fine idea and appropriate," Dawn said. "Wouldya do us a tune now?"
Denby was agreeable. The open E tuning had cracked the old Montoya's finish near the nut, which now languished at the Thin Man's shop, but he had the Tacoma, which is a quiet sort of parlor instrument. So he did one by Dylan.
"Have to say, Joe Ely does this better, but you can't compare your hills to mountains," he said.
If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all . . .
The long howl of the throughpassing train ululated across the autumn leaves blowing among the crooked byways of the Buena Vista flats as the locomotive wended its way past the shuttered doors of the Jack London Waterfront, headed off on its endless rail journey to parts unknown.
That's the way it is on the Island. Have a great week.