Things get tense over fish tacos
Radio Summer pt 2: Calypso
Read Radio Summer pt 1: Pop here.
Birthday roadtripping / Oregon anarchy / Things get tense over fish tacos
It’s a blessing, having a summer birthday, for obvious reasons. Only once did I spend a birthday in school (summer school), grinding off-season, and all the cookies and brownies from my friends at recess still didn’t make up for the fact that all I ever want to do on my birthday is bunk off and frolick on a shoreline somewhere and be sweaty. And do psychedelics. That’s a newer addition.
My birthday is two days after July 4, so every summer since I’ve been a salaried adult I’ve taken advantage of the federal holidays and made a week of it. Usually, Johny and I go camping. This year, we decided to bring my sister and brother-in-law and take a long roadtrip up the California coast into Oregon, to a little town off highway 101 called Yachats where my aunts have a small cabin.
Here was the plan: Sis, Johny, and I drive about six hours up the coast to Arcata on July 3, sleep at the spooky Arcata Inn, then drive inland to Eugene to collect our straggler, BIL1, from the regional airport there (he isn’t in corporate, that righteous soul, and didn’t get the 3rd off). From there, we’d turn right back around and drive flat westward to Yachats, spend the holiday afternoon and evening with the aunts and little cousin. Then, on the 5th, we’d hit the road again and drive right back down into California, to a campsite about 30 minutes inland from Crescent City, where we’d meet up with two more friends, camp the 5th and the 6th, my birthday, and spend the hot days in the rushing glacial melt of the Smith River.
So that’s what we did. Early that first morning we creeped out of the tight city blocks of San Francisco and rolled over the Golden Gate Bridge, where we burst through the wall of fog and into the real California summer, where it’s deadly hot and dry. Past Marin, we sped past dormant construction zones on the sides of eight-lane highways and crunchy yellow hills in every direction. By the time we hit the ugly sprawl of Santa Rosa we decided to take the long way up and abandoned our route for the beautiful coast. We hit the coast at Mendocino, and we went up and up from there.
It was an epic adventure, cruising through giant redwood forests and misty ocean cliffsides and slanting golden sunlight that lay on mountains expanding endlessly before us.
Growing up in LA, I used to think San Francisco was Northern California, and it is, I guess, but there’s a whole other world up there, in that mystical top cut of the state. The entrance to what they call the PNW. When you start a north-going roadtrip from San Francisco, you come upon the real Northern California first slowly then suddenly, and it shocks me every time to remember how much wilderness there still is left in the world. Driving across the great American West like that inspires a kind of primal self-reliance, a feeling that the space between you and all the natural power of the world has collapsed and you are one with everything you can see. An urge to beat your chest and scream something sublime into the open sky.
I breathe the air! I drink the water! I eat the earth! I am life I am death Everything is everything I am God itself ahhhhhhrhrrhghghhghrhrhhhhrhhrhghg GOD NEEDS A BIGGER TRUCK!
When you reach those remote parts of the West, you start to understand why people out there don’t care about all the nervous compassion that lays thick in the air of the cities. Up there you find yourself under the influence of the rural American oversoul. You begin to imagine. Somewhere out there you’re stockpiling supplies. Loving your country, hating the government. Skinning a deer.
“Oregon’s always had a libertarian streak, but it’s more red now,” Aunt told us in Yachats. We strolled through the town in the afternoon sun as a little family, stopping to see the neighbor kid put on a little concert, plunking out Zelda songs on an electric keyboard in the parking lot outside the ice cream shop. A little girl floated stoically in a dirty dunk tank left over from the town’s celebration that morning. An American flag nailed to a fence flapped in the wind behind it.
At the end of the road there were was a military presence, two crew cut guys, young-looking, standing upright with machine guns in front of a wooden barrier. They said, “No ma’am, you can’t get down to the ocean that way. The town’s setting up the pyrotechnics.” After we turned back, Aunt told us, “They don’t even have an official police force in town. They share one with Waldport up the road. It feels kind of intense this year…”
Over fish taco dinner in the cabin there was big political discussion. Two nights before, Biden had gone totally catatonic in the debate against Trump, which we all agreed was ludicrous and deeply concerning. Aunt and BIL were convinced that if Trump wins this country will see its first dictatorship, and BIL started repeating lines about the consequences of its media coverage that we’d heard him say a few times already because they were just so true. “After the way the New York Times talked about Biden, if he doesn’t drop out on Friday, they’ve poisoned-pilled him!” But that didn’t matter, Aunt said, because no one cares about the Times anyway except for liberals, which she followed up with some other important things she’d read in the Times and raged about the stupid undecided voters. Other Aunt sat quietly, shaking her head. “People are tired,” she said, which was my opening, though I hadn’t particularly been waiting for it. I agreed, “Yes exactly, that’s it, the Democrats are operating from a place of “Not Trump” alone and they don’t have a vision for the future, and Democrat voters, and whatever undecided voters for that matter…though I’d never met one…but yeah, even Democratic voters, they’ve got nothing to believe in.” That got me beat silence. Aunt gave me a stare like I’d thrown up my hands and said “I don’t want to fight it anymore! Let the clowns win.” Which was not what I meant. I choked, tried to walk it back. I’m blue I promise! See these hands? Blue as a whale! Speaking of fish gimme those tacos omnomonomonomonmom!
Of course, what I meant to say was that elections come down to marketing more than policies, and if you think about it from who’s getting seriously fucked by the system and who’s chilling with their feet up… The party Democrats have either positioned themselves too high on a moral high ground to hawk the promise of an idealistic future and lure voters to the polls with unrealistic policies, or they’re a bunch of status quo conservatives who benefit from the system staying exactly the way it is. If the Democrats were good at politics they’d go in on one issue and sell the people a vision. “It should be universal healthcare, I think people could get behind that if they market it properly, but they seem really reluctant to say idealistic things like that. But that’s marketing, and it’s one of the ways the right gets people to the polls. They did it in the midterm elections in San Francisco. They put all these basically anti-poor-people props on the ballot that were pretty much bullshit, like the city just doesn’t have the money or manpower to ever carry the plans out, but it worked, it got their voters to vote. And the whole point was that a lot of them also had sneaky tax breaks for the rich and things like that in there that actually will affect things…” I said to Other Aunt quietly at the sink while I washed the dishes. That’s politics baby. And the Democrats might be bad at politics.2 Regardless, Aunt and Other Aunt are brilliant people, and to some degree countercultural, so I was surprised no one at that fish taco dinner were calling it what it is—a populist movement—and instead just splitting it down party lines, always a coded moral cleavage, whichever way you look at it. Left/Right, Good/Evil. It was an evangelical way of talking about things. Is it not about class? The comfortable and uncomfortable? Should we not be realistic and organized about this? There was a really successful union organizer named Jane McAlevey who said she could recognize if someone would be a good organizer based on one characteristic: If, personal values aside, their basic assumption of people was that they were justified in their worldviews, that everyone, themselves included, had a whole life behind them that added up to the way they thought about things…that people were not stupid, that they could be reasoned with…
On the beach after dinner, we tossed a frisbee around while giant fireworks blasted off feet away from us. Little kids picked them up after they’d lit them, chucking them at their friends for fun. Adults in big hoodies ran through the grounded ones like sprinklers. Every two minutes a huge one went off like BOOOOOM and we’d all whip our heads around and tense up for a few seconds. We couldn’t help it. And then we’d just move on. I knew Johny must’ve been thinking what I was thinking, about the guy in his frat who was blind in one eye from fucking around with fireworks when was in high school. Aunt wondered where those police-for-hire were now.
The sun was setting. I asked little cousin away from her parents what she thinks when we’re all at dinner talking like that. She did that thing that kids do where they say adult phrases and graft stilted adult mannerisms onto their little bodies and waved me off. “Oh it’s fine! I don’t mind it. I’m in the world enough to know about things.” I told her anyway, that I know it can be scary to talk about these things, but things go up and down in nations, especially ones as big as ours. Things get worse and they get better and that’s the way things have gone forever. And, I said, don’t forget that even if things get worse, people will take care of each other more than we all remember to mention when we’re sitting around talking about everything that could go wrong. People meet the moment. She said she knows she’ll be fine, it’s other people she’d be more worried about. “People will take care of each other,” I said. “They will.” They will. We turned toward the horizon. Things will always be not as bad as you think and also much worse than you think. I didn’t tell her that.
Days later, back on the road in California, after an hour of Top 40s, we scanned the radio for anything interesting. By then all our phones were long dead. It was a long and arduous trip, which felt right. Summer is a long and arduous season. We’d camped our two days on the river, where we ate peaches and Maui Onion chips and braced ourselves against the river current and just sat there all day. Sis joked that her book would catch fire when she left it out on the rock in the sun, that’s how hot it was. The night of my birthday, M and L, the two friends who joined us, played “Helplessness Blues” on their guitars just for me, and everyone who knew the words sang along. A real campfire time.
But now we were back in the car, dirty and dog tired, rolling down the highway through towns with Wild West names like Klamath, Eureka, Orick, Garberville, and Ukiah, names that mean nothing to anyone who doesn’t live in the state of Northern California, which really is a state of mind.
We left M and L at a diner in Klamath, where the lot next door was fenced off with chainlink and empty, except for the two giant emus roaming around, inexplicably, in the overgrown grass. It was just the four of us again. Sometimes I have to remind myself Sis and BIL aren’t just our friends, they’re the friends. From that car to the nursing home.
Explosion by Explainer
I was driving when we tuned into 91.1 FM, a station called KMUD. KMUD, the Redwood Community Radio, rolled deeply anti-capitalist; they didn’t run a single advertisement, just hours and hours of jaunty calypso so powerful that it gave me visions of sparkling stars above island waters despite all the PNW ahead of me. Sis and BIL were asleep in the backseat when Johny and I heard the following tune. It really made me laugh and sing along, and listening to it more closely now, says pretty much what I was trying to say at dinner in Oregon, but with vibes and style:
Thank you, Explainer, who died in 2022. Rest in peace. I like your album!
Brother-in-law.
Of course, this was pre-Kamala, which I find to be a hopeful turn. But we’ll see what happens…