#something something he stopped in oregon before driving along the west coast on his road trip

[craigularory-joe]

Day 14

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 13: The Regrets Are Useless] [Series Finale]

A/N: Below are your final predictions. Let's see how you did... 🥰

Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍

Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, med school Aemond, character deaths, nature, drinking, smoking, drugs, Adventures With Aegon™️, pregnancy and childbirth, the U.S. Navy, road trip vibes.

Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.

Chapter title is a lyric from: “Whatsername” by Green Day.

Word count: 6.1k

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Rain pours outside the cabin, mist-shrouded pine trees and still dark water, a place in southern Oregon called Lake of the Woods. The twin-sized bed with a thin foam mattress was once used by kids attending summer camp, capture the flag and s’mores, hikes and scary stories, but now the children are ghosts and the monsters are real, stumbling down streets and lurking in dark places, licking blood from what’s left of their lips.

Aemond is here but he’s also not, a castaway on an island where the world never ended, his hands in your hair as you straddle him, your hips moving tentatively, his lips and teeth at your throat, the sharp points of his canines like fangs.

“Am I doing this right?” you murmur doubtfully. “I feel like I’m definitely not doing this right…”

“Shh, you’re great, you’re incredible.”

“I’m sorry I don’t know how to do everything already, I’m sorry you have to teach me—”

“Stop,” Aemond commands, a sharp sigh through your hair. “I love this. I love you. I want to teach you things until the day I die.”

The nervous tension in your muscles unravels—peddles thrown into water, campfire smoke vanishing into indigo night—and now his hands are on your hips, steadying you, guiding you. You link your fingers around the back of his neck and try to find a cadence that isn’t uncomfortable, ungainly, effortful. You wanted to try this. You want to experience everything with him.

“Take your time,” Aemond is saying like it’s difficult for him to keep a train of thought, his eye closed, his cheeks flushed, blood-colored blooms like a dusk sky. “I’m fine down here, don’t worry about me…”

Rain drums against the windows; lightning flashes in the sky and thunder growls. From the front porch of one of the other cabins, you can hear the indistinct droning of conversations and Aegon strumming the acoustic guitar he brought from the beach house. It’s something you’ve overheard him singing before, one of his strange midcentury darlings, a song that should be too old for him to know the words to.

“All you big and burly men who roll the trucks along

Better listen, you’ll be thankful when you hear my song

You have really got it made if you’re haulin’ goods

Any place on earth but those Haynesville Woods…”

Your skin gleams with a cool sheen of sweat; there is a draft through the cabin walls that makes you shiver as you cling to Aemond. You roll your hips a certain way and he moans—suddenly, involuntarily—and you know you’ve found the right rhythm.

“It’s a stretch of road up north in Maine

That’s never ever ever seen a smile

If they’d buried all them truckers lost in them woods

There’d be a tombstone every mile

Count ‘em off, there’d be a tombstone every mile…”

Aemond is kissing you deeply, desperately, trembling hands and gasping shallow breaths. And there is not just euphoria written into the lines of his face; there is disorientation, there is wonder. He barely manages: “Alright…um…if you want me to last longer than about thirty more seconds, you should probably slow down…”

“No,” you tease, grinning as you bite at his full lips.

“When you’re loaded with potatoes and you’re headed down

You’ve got to drive the woods to get to Boston town

When it’s winter up in Maine, better check it over twice

That Haynesville road is just a ribbon of ice…”

Aemond cries out, louder than you’ve ever heard him before—you’ve never had privacy, you’ve never truly been alone—and then again, a helpless ecstatic sound, pleasure so overwhelming it almost starts to feel like pain.

“Quiet!” you whisper, giggling, touching two fingers to his mouth. “Everyone’s going to hear you.”

“Oh my God,” Aemond says. He falls back onto the mattress and brings you with him, his arms wrapped around you, kissing your cheeks and your forehead as the two of you lie there panting and entangled, his blue eye astonished. “Okay, okay, I need a minute. I think I just burst an aneurysm.”

“I killed you?” you purr with feigned distress, basking in your conquest.

“You can kill me whenever you want. You can kill me five times a day.”

“When you’re talking to a trucker that’s been haulin’ goods

Down that stretch of road in Maine they call the Haynesville Woods

He’ll tell you that dying and going down below

Won’t be half as bad as driving on that road of ice and snow…”

Aemond stares up at the ceiling—a steep gable roof, a motionless fan—and now you can tell he’s thinking about his family again, discorporate screams, misplaced trust. Otto Hightower’s bones were found in the shower, meaning he likely died before or not long after their power failed and water would have run out in the municipal system. They were probably killed before you and Aemond ever met, distant galaxies lightyears away, remote long-dead stars. And so all the blood you paid to get to California was wasted.

“Do you ever think about the people you have saved?” you ask gently as your fingertips trace the ridge of his scar. “You stitched yourself back together. You healed Aegon’s burns. You sutured Cregan’s arm. You got me and Rio down from that transmission tower.”

“I guess I did,” Aemond says, but his voice is ambivalent, as if none of these things count. He has not found someplace safe for you yet. His job is not finished; his triumphs may only be temporary.

“Aemond…back in Pennsylvania…why did you decide to help us?”

“Luke spotted you guys, and we all talked it over. If it had just been Rio, honestly, I wouldn’t have taken the chance. A man his size, and possibly armed…could be trouble, you know? But I figured since he was traveling with a woman and you seemed to be with him by choice, he was probably okay. And then when we first met, he was so protective of you…didn’t want me touching you, didn’t leave you alone…I realized he had to be a good guy.”

“He was,” you say solemnly. I was supposed to remind him about the racks. I was supposed to warn him. But you didn’t warn Rio about what was waiting to kill him in that sand-swept grocery store in Winnemucca, just like you didn’t warn Jace about radiation or Baela about the way the rungs of the ladder that ran up the side of the grain bin were rusted and creaking, and maybe there is more than enough blame to go around.

“And then after Battle Mountain, as soon as we found the gasoline and ammo, I knew we had to go back for you. It hit me all at once. I couldn’t protect you by leaving you with Rio and Cregan. And I couldn’t let you go. I’ve never had something like this before. I didn’t know it existed. I told the others we were turning around, and Aegon said: Thank fucking God. Rhaena took off sprinting towards the car.” Then Aemond kisses you again, but tenderly this time, slowly, like you’ll have forever and there’s no need to rush. “I’m going to get you to Odessa. I’m going to take you somewhere safe.”

The rain is stopping; there are still a few hours of daylight left.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Hey, Chip Skylark. Check it out,” Aegon says, grinning at you from where he’s sprawled on the wet dock and smoking a cigarette, wearing his neon green plastic sunglasses, his left leg finally freed from its bandages and on full display. You’re all wearing the same things, stolen t-shirts and shorts, sweatshirts at night when it gets cold, sneakers you can walk hundreds of miles in; but Aegon won’t give up his Sperry Bahamas. “It’s nature’s tattoo.”

You sit down beside him and admire the scar tissue, red knots and white cords, jagged terrain like a mountain range, organic highways and bridges and trails. “It’s a roadmap.”

“That’s appropriate.”

You’ve been traveling on foot for two weeks since Criston’s white Tahoe ran out of gas and was abandoned in the town of Mad River, California. Now you are only about ten miles from Odessa, close enough to reach in half a day but too far to get into town before nightfall. This time tomorrow you’ll be there, and it will either be a haven or a wasteland, and if Rio’s parents’ community in Odessa has disappeared then so has your last idea for where to go. Absentmindedly, you skate your fingerprints over the bumps and grooves of Aegon’s leg like a blind man reading braille. He shifts and clears his throat; you’ve made him uncomfortable somehow. You lift your hand away.

“I’m sorry, does that hurt?”

“Nah. I can’t really feel anything besides pressure. The nerve endings got fried.”

“Oh.” But now you don’t know what you did to upset him. Aegon doesn’t provide an explanation. Down the dock a ways towards the shore, Rhaena is reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and listening to the pink Sony Walkman formerly owned by a little girl named Ava. Inside whirls Green Day’s 2004 album American Idiot, which Aegon took from his bedroom at the beach house to add to his CD collection, a cultural archive, a gift for posterity. Cregan is teaching Daeron to fish with poles he found in one of the cabins; Helaena is bringing them worms. Aemond and Luke are gathering things dry enough to burn—books and wooden chairs from inside the cabins—and piling them up so Cregan can cook dinner once it’s caught.

“So,” Aegon says, changing the subject, scrutinizing you as he puffs on a Marlboro Gold. “Everything going okay?”

You know what he means; he must have heard Aemond earlier. “Yup.”

“Got it all figured out?”

“Sure did.”

“Great. I’m happy for you,” Aegon says, and yet there’s a twinge of melancholy he’s trying to hide. It must be hard for him; he and Daeron are the only single ones.

“We’ll find you some suitable candidates for your harem when we get to Odessa.”

He chuckles. “Oh, come on.”

“Guys, girls? Do you have a preference?”

He’s smiling wistfully down into the water, a dark rippling mirror. “I have too specific a preference, that’s the problem.”

“Yacht girls in bikinis. Golf cheerleaders.”

“There are no cheerleaders in golf, you yokel.”

“Okay, well…I’m sure you’ll be very popular with the lonely, traumatized, widowed women of the apocalypse.”

Aegon gazes morosely out over the lake. He pitches the end of his cigarette into the water, and your eyes catch briefly on the black ink of the tattoo on his forearm: It’s not over ‘til you’re underground. “I don’t know. I’ve been sober for two weeks and now everything is annoyingly clear.”

“What’s bothering you?”

He waits a while before he answers, evasive. “I’ve never been good at anything.”

“Everyone feels that way sometimes. Luke thinks he’s not good at anything either.”

“But Luke’s nice. I’m a rat bastard.”

You laugh. “You’re kind of nice, Aegon.”

“Yeah right.”

“No, seriously. I like being around you. You make me feel better. You’re like…” You ponder how to word it. “I feel like I could tell you whatever and not worry about being judged for it.”

He snorts. “As if you’ve ever done anything judgeable.”

You shrug, peering out over the lake. “I abandoned my family. I stopped sending them money, I stopped calling. And when everything happened…the zombies, the world ending…I didn’t even consider going back to Kentucky to try to help them. I went west with Rio instead. And now they’re probably all dead and it’s my fault. That’s evil. I couldn’t have gotten away with that level of betrayal. I must be cursed.”

Aegon is watching you, eyebrows raised. He has never heard this before. “But your family sucked, right?”

“Yeah,” you admit. “I think it would be hard to argue they didn’t.”

“So fuck ‘em,” Aegon says simply.

You smile at him, touched, grateful. “Okay. Fuck ‘em.”

“I’m relieved my family’s gone,” Aegon confesses, something so brutal he’d never tell anyone else. “I mean…I feel kind of bad about my mom and Criston. But as long as they were alive, I’d always be the person they raised. And if I could bring someone back, it wouldn’t be any of them. I’d pick Rio.”

“I would too,” you say softly, staring down at the faint burn marks on your palms from when you were stranded on that transmission tower with him, talking him out of suicide, so adamant that both of you were going to make it to Oregon. And you were wrong.

“So if you’re cursed, Pita Chips, sign me up because I’m right there with you.”

Rhaena pulls out an earbud and says to Aegon: “I don’t get this album.”

“What?!” he exclaims.

“It’s so good!” you concur. On the shore, Cregan is spearing several gutted rainbow trout on sticks so they can be roasted over the fire. Ice is gleefully gulping down fish organs.

Aegon continues: “Whatsername! St. Jimmy! Jesus of Suburbia!”

Rhaena blinks, glancing between you and Aegon. “But neither of you grew up in the suburbs.”

“It’s not about the suburbs, Rhaena!” Aegon replies with frenetic hand gestures. “It’s about being disillusioned and angry and failed by all the adults in your life, and self-medicating, and losing love every time you get a taste of it, and wanting to burn everything down and start over. It’s about hating the world and the world hating you back.”

“Okay, sure. I still don’t get it.”

You say: “You might have had too happy a childhood.” And you and Aegon burst out laughing.

“You guys are so weird,” Rhaena says, but she’s smiling. She stands up, gives Aegon back his Walkman, and walks to the end of the dock where Cregan is cooking the rainbow trout. Aemond and Daeron are gathering up the aluminum buckets found at the campground and set outside earlier today to collect rainwater. There is one five-pound bag of trail mix left to share, and then all the food is gone. If Cregan doesn’t kill something, you won’t eat.

“We should go help them with dinner,” you tell Aegon.

He groans. “Should we really?”

“Yeah. We should.”

“Fine.” He takes your hand when you offer it and struggles to his feet. Then you inhale a lungful of the scent of roasting trout, and startlingly powerful nausea punches through your stomach, so repellant you have to clamp a hand over your mouth to stop yourself from retching.

There has to be something wrong with the fish. It’s never smelled like that before.

Aegon seems baffled. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Does the trout smell right to you?”

Aegon sniffs the air like a labrador. “I guess…? I barely smell anything.”

“Well you probably destroyed your nose cells with all the coke.”

“That’s discriminatory. Addiction is a disease.” But his brow is furrowed with concern. “Seriously, are you okay? You look awful. Not like that. You know what I mean.”

“I’m fine.” You don’t feel fine; but everyone down by the fire is chatting and joking around nonchalantly, and surely if there actually was something wrong they would have noticed. “I’ll be back in a second.”

“Sure,” Aegon says, perplexed.

You hurry past the others and take refuge in the cabin you’re sharing with Aemond. Inside the trout smell isn’t so strong. You sit at the edge of the bed and suck in several deep breaths, trying to calm down, willing the confounding wave of nausea to pass.

Did I eat something bad, did I get bit by a spider or something…?

You are checking your arms and legs for little raised bitemarks when Helaena enters the cabin and shuts the door behind her. When she opens her burlap messenger bag to root around inside, you glimpse photographs she must have taken from the beach house, the frames left empty on the mantle of the fireplace. Then Helaena pulls out a pregnancy test, just one, Clearblue.

You gawk at it. “What are you doing?”

“You look sick,” Helaena says matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s that.”

She is puzzled, wide innocent blue eyes. “Why not?”

“Well…I mean…that would be freakishly quick, wouldn’t it? Like…quick as in immediately. People can’t get pregnant the first time they have sex, right?”

“Huh. They really don’t have sex ed in Kentucky,” Helaena says, and leaves you alone with your pregnancy test. You don’t feel so nauseous anymore, but you sneak around the back of the cabin to take it anyway, because now you’re thinking about the possibility with a vividness you’ve never experienced before: a round blossoming belly and tiny handprints and Aemond cradling his child in his arms. And by the time you get the result, you aren’t even shocked. It feels like something that’s supposed to happen.

You and Aemond don’t have a moment alone together until after dark, sitting on the porch swing outside your cabin for first watch, everyone else asleep, Ice dozing serenely by your feet. The only sounds are the breeze through the pine trees, cool and damp, and the hoots of owls, and the chirping of crickets and cicadas.

“So guess what,” you say casually as moonbeams float rippling and fractured on the surface of the black-glass lake.

Aemond smiles drowsily, not expecting anything. “What?”

“In approximately eight months, I might be having your baby.”

At first, he doesn’t speak; he only studies the test when you hand it to him, and then looks at you like he’s not convinced you aren’t angry, like he can’t quite bring himself to believe that you’d want this with someone like him. “Are you afraid?”

“No,” you answer honestly. Maybe you should be, but you aren’t. “I’m hopeful. I feel like as soon as I realized it, everything got brighter. And now I’m thinking about the future instead of the past.” They’re not going to grow up like I did. They’re never going to think they aren’t loved. “What should we name it?”

“Not Otter.”

You laugh, trying to muffle it so you don’t wake anyone. Ice lifts her head and stares at you curiously, her shaggy grey ears straight up.

“I don’t know, I’m terrible with names,” Aemond says; and now he’s smiling again, a wide radiant smile, and you know he’s thinking about the future too. “Hope or Peace or something. Something happy. Something about starting over.”

You take his hand. “I can’t wait to start over with you.”

“Just one more day,” Aemond says.

One more day.

~~~~~~~~~~

“So what am I going to do in Odessa?” Luke asks as the eight of you—nine, if you count Ice—trek eastbound on Route 140. You are about five miles from Lake of the Woods and halfway to your destination. It’s only 80 degrees and overcast, good walking weather, although there is a looming threat of rain, occasional rogue drops and far-off rumbles of thunder. “Everyone has valuable skills except me. Chips has great aim and can build things, Daeron has his compound bow, Aemond is basically a doctor, Rhaena is learning how to shoot guns and treat injuries…”

“Aegon has skills?” Cregan jokes, casting him a good-natured grin. Aegon acts like he’s going to whack Cregan with his golf club, which he’s spinning around haphazardly. Both his Marlin .22 and acoustic guitar are slung across his back. There aren’t many bullets left, but everyone has a few.

“Aegon can navigate,” Luke says. “And probably impregnate ten women a day. Very useful during a population crisis.”

“We don’t need that in the gene pool,” Rhaena notes.

“You wrote stories in college, right?” you ask Luke.

“Screenplays, yeah,” he says hesitantly. “But I wouldn’t say I was super talented or anything.”

Aegon claps him on the shoulder “Well I’ve got good news for you, kid. A big chunk of the world’s screenwriters are probably dead now. So you’ll look so much better in comparison!”

“Thanks…?” Luke says.

“What I mean is,” you continue. “You could write books for people to read, since there aren’t really libraries or Barnes & Nobles anymore. And you could interview people to get their life stories and then record them so they aren’t lost forever. The next generation should know what the world was like before the zombies.”

“Yeah,” Aegon says as he pets Ice. “Someone has to tell them about blue raspberry Icees, right Blue Raspberry Icee?”

“Maybe,” Luke says thoughtfully, and you notice that he’s smiling a little.

Ice begins whining, and there is a rustling in the woods to the north, low-hanging branches of bigleaf maple and dogwood and Douglas fir trees being forced aside. “Zombie!” Aegon announces, pointing. Immediately, Daeron nocks an arrow and then releases it, and the figure draped in the shifting shadows of foliage drops to the ground.

“Hey Aegon,” Daeron says after a few seconds.

“Yeah?”

“That was actually a zombie, right?”

“Totally,” Aegon replies, but he doesn’t sound certain.

Aemond turns to his older brother accusingly. “How sure are you?”

“Like…50%.”

“Aegon!” Rhaena cries, petrified, and everyone rushes off the road to investigate.

Blessedly, the felled creature is long-dead, a former park ranger whose tan uniform hangs in gore-stained tatters. The nametag reads: Underwood. The arrow pierced its soft rotting skull and remains lodged there until Daeron pulls it out to be used again, giving Aegon an impatient scowl as he does.

“Close call,” Aegon tells him. “Think they would have charged you as an adult?”

“Lord almighty, that gave me a scare,” Cregan says, chuckling. Helaena spies a blackberry bush and begins picking a handful, and Cregan goes over to join her. Rhaena and Luke are telling Aegon that he needs to be more responsible and should have waited for Luke to confirm it was a zombie with his binoculars. You exchange a glance with Aegon: he rolls his eyes, you offer a smirk of commiseration. Ice is already trotting back towards Oregon Route 140.

You haven’t told anyone else that you’re pregnant yet, but eventually they’re going to notice that Aemond won’t leave your side. He sighs and asks you: “Have you had enough of this little field trip?”

“Definitely.” You head for the road. Aemond walks with you, placing you not on his left side but on his right where he can see you. You ask, smiling: “You don’t trust me to watch your blind side anymore, huh?”

“I prefer the view the way it is.”

You are only a few steps from the black artery of pavement that cuts through the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, a 114,000-acre preserve of wilderness that somehow—although it is 2,500 miles away—reminds you a bit of eastern Kentucky, endless emerald forests, the omnipotent shadows of mountains. And because you are on Aemond’s right side, he can look down and see something just in front of you on the earth strewn with knobby roots and pine needles and dead leaves.

“Don’t!” he shouts, snatching your forearm and yanking you backwards, and he’s never touched you like this before—so forcefully, so violently—and you stumble and almost fall, and your arm burns and aches where he grabbed you, and people are asking what’s going on, and you peer up at Aemond with confusion, fear, mistrust.

“Why…?”

And then you hear it rustling from the same place where you were standing a moment ago. The others yelp and dash out of the way as the snake escapes into the woods, a drab spotted olive green, a rattling tail, an angular skull like an arrowhead.

“Aemond?” you say, because he hasn’t moved, hasn’t made a sound. He looks down, and your gaze follows his. On his right calf, just a few inches above his ankle, are two small puncture wounds from the snake’s fangs, each dribbling a thin river of blood.

“Northern Pacific rattlesnake,” Helaena says, her voice shaking, tears welling up in her horrified eyes. “Venomous.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Aemond has one arm draped across Cregan’s shoulders, the other over Aegon’s. He’s moving slower, or is that just your imagination? His steps are less steady, his breathing more labored. His leg is swelling, a deep blue phantom of a bruise spreading beneath his skin, so tight it looks like it might split open.

“We’re almost there,” you say; you keep saying it, because hopefully that will make it true. “We’re only a few miles from Odessa, and we’ll find people who can help us.”

“Aemond, you’re a doctor,” Luke says.

Aemond’s voice is weak, pained, hazy. “I’m not a doctor.”

“You know what I mean!” Luke yells, frantic. “How do we fix you? What can we do?”

“Nothing,” Aemond says listlessly. “There’s nothing you can do without a hospital. I’ll either get better or I won’t.”

“People in Odessa will know how to help,” you insist. “They’re outside all the time, they hike, they hunt, they fish, they’ve seen snakebites before. They must have. They’ll have treatments.”

“Aemond,” Rhaena breathes, and you turn to see there is blood running from his nostrils. You scream, and Aemond touches his fingers to his face and then watches as they come away bloody.

“Put me down,” he tells Cregan and Aegon.

“No—” you begin, but then his knees buckle and he’s on the pavement anyway, blood pouring from his nose and his lips, blood filling up his right eye. Cregan walks to the shoulder of the highway, his head in his hands. Aegon stays beside Aemond, and you’re kneeling there with him, both of you using anything you have to clean the blood from Aemond’s face: the corners of your shirts, your bare hands.

He’s covered in blood, you think. Just like Jace, Baela, Rio.

“Can’t clot,” Aemond is murmuring. “The venom causes coagulotoxicity. Internal bleeding too. I feel like…like there’s all this pressure inside…”

Rhaena is taking Aemond’s pulse like he taught her to, fingers on the underside of his wrist. “It’s really faint,” she says quietly.

You grab a plastic Gatorade bottle filled with rainwater out of your backpack and tilt it against Aemond’s crimson-stained lips. He manages to swallow some of it. “Aemond, listen to me,” you say as calmly as you can. “You’re so close. We’re almost there. I need you to hang on a little longer.”

He shakes his head, slow dizzy motions. “It doesn’t matter.”

“They might have doctors in Odessa.” This is a fantasy, but you can’t resist it.

“Even if they do, there won’t be any antivenom. And it’s too late anyway.”

“No,” you say savagely, a sob ripping through your throat. “We didn’t cross 3,000 miles so you could die here. I won’t let you. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not fair.”

“Aegon,” Aemond says, reaching for him, drained and fumbling.

Aegon catches his hand. “I’m here.”

His eye—crystalline blue corrupted with red, blood in clear water—drifts to his brother. “You have to get her to Odessa. You have to help take care of everyone.”

Aegon is weeping. “Man, it’s supposed to be you. How can I still be here if you aren’t?”

“You can do this,” Aemond says.

“I’ll try.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, Aemond,” Aegon says, then crawls away on his hands and knees and collapses on the pavement, gutted, inconsolable, hemorrhaging grief instead of gore.

Everyone is crying and touching Aemond—his face, his hands—saying goodbye, accepting tasks, and they come away stained with red, and rain has begun to fall from a dark sky growling with thunder. Rhaena takes his medical kit. Helaena takes his Glock and stows it away in her messenger mag. Then Aemond looks for you, and now you are alone with him here in the middle of the highway, two golden lines on black asphalt, and with your thumbprint you whisk away the rivulet of blood that is spilling from his eye.

“You’re going to be okay,” he whispers as his heart fails, as his lungs fill with blood instead of air, as his pores leak rust and ruin. “Odessa will be everything we hoped for. I just won’t be there with you.”

“You can’t leave me,” you’re saying as rain patters against the road. I left my family and now my family is leaving me.

“Love,” he sighs, almost too softly to hear. “I don’t want to.”

You lie down on the pavement with him and rest your head on his chest, feel it rise and fall beneath you as the rain descends in sheets. And then Aemond exhales, deep and rattling, and he never tastes oxygen again, never speaks, never touches you. You don’t move from where you’re lying. You’re there until you’re drenched to the bones with rain and the world is a cold mist of pine trees, of wilderness, and you can never go back to any of the places you’ve been before, you can never get back the people you’ve left there.

Aegon is shaking you. “We have to keep moving,” he chokes out through tears.

You reply without looking at him. “I’m giving up now.”

“No you’re fucking not. We have to walk to Odessa.”

“Everyone’s dead in Odessa. Everyone’s dead everywhere. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to stay in a world like this.”

On the periphery of your vision, you can see Aegon glancing at the others, standing just off the highway and under the canopy of the pine trees. He seems defeated, he seems lost.

Then suddenly Aegon turns back to you. “Hey!” he screams, so loudly you jolt upright, your palms on wet pavement, rain dripping from your hair. “I’m still alive. You’re still alive. This isn’t over yet. I said I would get you to Odessa, so that’s where we’re going. Stand up. Right now.”

Aegon holds out his hand. Thunder booms, lightning strobes, and then you take it. He pulls you to your feet and hesitates, as if he didn’t think he would get this far. Then he throws his arms around you, a crushing desperate embrace, a wordless devotion, a silent vow, sobbing into the curve of your neck, tasting the copper and iron of his brother’s blood on your skin.

“We have to keep moving,” he says again, like an apology, like he understands how impossible it feels. “The storm’s getting worse. It’ll be too dark to see soon.”

“We can’t leave him alone like this.”

“That’s not Aemond anymore,” Aegon pleads. “Aemond’s gone. And he would want us to live.”

Now the others are here on the road too: Daeron, Helaena, Cregan, Rhaena, Luke, Ice whimpering and licking scarlet stains of blood off your hands. You’re all holding each other; you’re all any of you have left. Cregan carries Aemond off the pavement and on a patch of grass alongside Route 140, the seven of you cover his body with branches of pine needles and white petals from dogwood trees. Rhaena is the first person to begin walking again, heading east. One by one you follow her. The downpour is torrential; if you are attacked now, you are nearly blind. Aegon stays beside you no matter how slow your steps are. You think if he disappears, you will too; the strings that tie you to the earth will fray and unweave and your bones will turn to mist, your voice will only be the wind howling down mountainsides. You have no way of knowing how long you’ve been walking or how many miles are left. You wonder what will happen to Aemond’s child if there is nothing for you in Odessa.

The rain is stopping. Now you can hear crows, woodpeckers, formations of geese honking in a foggy sky and squirrels scrabbling up tree trunks. Falcons perch watchfully on dead power lines. Rare aisles of sunlight are breaking through dissipating clouds.

They rise up out of the verdant jungle, a tangle of Pacific ninebark and blue elderberry: four figures in green camouflage, two men and two women, all wearing tactical sunglasses and wielding assault rifles, M16s you’re fairly sure, automatic and with 20-round magazines. Daeron moves to nock an arrow and then stops when he sees you’ve put up your hands. The others follow your lead: palms empty, willingly surrendering.

It’s them, you think dazedly. The people in Odessa. They’re alive, they’re real.

“Please cooperate and hand over all your weapons,” one of the women says, fifties, muscular, alert hawkish eyes.

No one moves. Then you unholster your Beretta M9—received from the U.S. Navy almost exactly five years ago, a different lifetime, a different world—and hold it out to the woman in your open palm. And now everybody else is giving their weapons over too: Aegon and Luke’s .22s, Rhaena’s Ruger, the spare Ruger and Aemond’s Glock hidden in Helaena’s burlap messenger bag, Daeron’s compound bow, Cregan’s axe. Ice peers up at Cregan anxiously, her yellowish eyes wide, but she wags her tail when he runs one of his large, calloused hands over her rain-soaked fur.

Aegon is still clutching his golf club. One of the men stares at him, incredulous. “You can keep that, son,” he says.

The woman nods to the men. “Nick and Glen will escort you five miles up the road, and then return your weapons. We ask that you keep moving and do not turn around. We don’t want trouble, but we can defend ourselves. Don’t think you can double back tomorrow and try to loot us or anything. This is your only warning. Do you understand?”

Aegon nudges your hand with his knuckles, then taps you harder when at first you’re too shellshocked to notice. You have to explain. You have to tell them why you’re here.

“I…I…” You begin, unable to make the words leave your lips, rats from a sinking ship, plummeting bodies from a burning building. Here you stand on a precipice, and with so many other people to save. “I served in the Navy with Bryan Osorio. We left Saratoga Springs together. He told me it would be safe here.”

Now they are interested. Slowly, the woman lowers her M16. “You know the Osorios?”

“I do.” I’ve known them for half a decade.

“Could any of them identify you and verify what you’re saying?”

“His wife, Sophie. She’s blonde, and she likes elephants, and she had a baby recently.”

The woman is scanning the faces behind you. “And where’s Bryan?”

“He’s not here anymore,” you say, and now you’re sobbing again. Aegon is squeezing your shoulder, his head bowed. “I’m sorry. I wanted to help him get home. I was supposed to warn him, I was supposed to stop it from biting him, but I didn’t and now he’s gone—”

“Okay, okay.” The woman motions for you to calm down, but her voice is kind. “Who are these guys? Your colleagues, your friends?”

“They’re my family.”

“You can vouch for them?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll all submit to searches for bitemarks?”

“Yes.”

The woman turns to the men she called Nick and Glen. “Take them inside, will you? Get the ID verified and then we’ll process everyone.”

“Got it,” the older man says. And then, to you and your companions: “Follow me.”

Nick and Glen lead you into the forest, the canopy of pine needles so thick the daylight turns to dusk, and you think of lightning bugs, of firelight, of drinking Guinness on the beach with Rio on Diego Garcia. There are several patrols, groups of four or five, that approach to stop you until they see Nick and Glen and wave you through. Then the trees open into a meadow of buttercups and daisies and pink fawn lilies, and beyond that an immense village, some houses decades old, others currently being constructed with logs from pine trees. There are hundreds of people tending to livestock, hanging up laundry to dry on clotheslines, digging in gardens, making candles and soap and butter. There are children playing without fear, giggling as they chase after scampering dogs, challenging each other to games of kickball and Uno.

In front of one of the houses that predates the apocalypse, brick with a screened-in porch, there is a small blonde woman standing in a garden, smiling and chatting with a middle-aged couple. The baby she carries against her chest in a blue sling has dark curly hair like Rio’s.

Sophie and the baby are here. They’ve been alive the whole time.

You rest a palm on your belly without realizing you’re doing it. “What happens now?” you ask Aegon.

“The rest of our lives.”

It is unimaginable, it is impossible, it is so full of luminous potential you feel like the light will spill out of your pores like blood, it’s an oasis, it’s a second chance, it’s an island in the vast lethal untamed blue of the Indian Ocean.

“Let’s go,” Aegon says softly, taking your hand and leading you across the field of wildflowers, kaleidoscopic blooms in the last days of summer.

[jaeminlore]

The World is Ending and I'm With You

SPINOFF | PLAYLIST (pls listen while you read)

summary: and i won't sleep through this. i survive on the breath you are finished with. words: 6.1k+ category: angst, fluff, suggestive, mark won't stop talking about how he used to be a cub scout warning(s): death, religion mention, death mention, implied sex ohoho i'm getting bold, littering (not from mark bc he's a good boy), unedited a/n: john mayer song that's kind of an easter egg, and a poem at the end by someone called s.b.,,, also you don't have to read the spinoff to read this one :) but it does take place in the same universe/timeline.

You never were one for smoking. Your mother always told you it would increase risk of cancer, and in turn, death. But now the world is ending, and your mom hasn't been home in a few days. So, you smoke.

The convenience store you work at doesn't have many packs left. Your manager has some stupid rule about rationing stock now that delivery truck drivers are quitting at a rapid rate. They don't want to be stuck on the freeway when the meteor hits. Which makes sense to you, but it's all your bitter manager seems to complain about.

You take a pack out from behind the clear screen and extract a stick. You're in the middle of lighting it with a lighter that most certainly isn't yours when a wide-eyed boy appears in front of the counter. He dumps a basket full of snacks onto the register, followed by a plethora of hygienic products.

"You worried we'll run out?" You try to joke. Really, this is a small town, and your store is the biggest one in town (which isn't saying much at all.) It's completely possible.

The boy shrugs. "I'm gonna hit the road before everything goes down. I don't want to be here if a riot starts. Also, I want to find my soulmate."

"Don't we all?" You say, blowing smoke out of your mouth.

The boy coughs and gives you a short glare. "Something to look forward to, at least."

You throw the still-lit cigarette across the store. Part of you hopes it will catch on something and burn the store to the ground. But it goes out on the cold linoleum floor. You look at the boy again. "I'll give you all of this for free if you let me come with you."

(Mark isn't sure why he chooses a road trip in the first place. It's not like his beat up old van can outrun the end of the world. Maybe deep down, he hopes it can.

He also isn't sure why he's let you tag along, save for the fact that he really needs to stock up on food, just in case. And he's also lonely. Maybe talking to someone will calm his restless soul.)

-

Mark has a giant van. There's a mattress in the back, complete with a blanket and pillow. He tosses his groceries in the back and clumsily shoves the key in the ignition. "Are you sure about this? I'm going across the country."

You light another cigarette. Five packs stolen from your store sit in his glove compartment. "We have what? A week left? I have nowhere better to be."

He takes this answer and begins to drive. The radio is staticky, but you can make out the preacher's message of salvation in the last days. You wonder if it gives the boy comfort. It gives you anxiety, so you take a long drag and focus on the weird way the cigarette smoke warms your mouth. "I'm Y/n, by the way."

"I'm Mark." He turns down the radio. "I'm pretty sure my soulmate is in California, based on my tattoo."

"Okay," you say, because you really don't care. You haven't believed in soulmates since your parents got divorced. You throw the cigarette out of the window and try not to think about the way your moon tattoo burns against your collarbones. "Does your tattoo say California or something?"

"No, it's just a sun."

You want to call him dumb. Or stupid. Or an idiot. "California isn't the only place on earth with a sun, you know. And apart from that, it's a huge state. How are you gonna find your soulmate in a week?"

Mark takes an anxious sip of his gas station slushee. "I know it's stupid, okay? But I feel drawn there, so it's my only shot."

You lower the sun visor and grab the pair of aviators that are hooked onto it. "Well I feel drawn to the sea, so let's go to the beach first."

(Mark wants to tell you that he knows he won't find his soulmate. His soulmate is probably dead with the rest of the world that got caught in the atmosphere change. His soulmate is probably farther than California, but for some reason the state is stuck in his mind.

He remembers his aunt's beach house. Solar generators for electricity and water. A familiar place to stay in the end. But for now, he wants to take his chances on the road. He doesn't want to be dormant, and he knows you don't either.)

-

Mark hits Oregon at three in the morning. He nods off once and veers into the side of the highway before you finally convince him to pull over for the night.

He parks at a truck stop and the two of you take showers, using what products you and Mark bought (stole). You use more than you need. Shampoo gets in your eyes.

Your eyes are still burning when you meet up with Mark at the van. He's already asleep, an open bag of chips beside him. He must've been too tired to even eat.

The back of the van is covered in those battery-powered clip-on fans from the mall kiosks. Mark told you earlier that he had bought them on sale. You had asked earlier why he hadn't just stolen them.

He told you he believes in heaven, and doesn't want to hurt his chances of getting there. You told him you don't think good works matter anymore.

You eat the chips and fall asleep beside him, ignoring him as he mumbles random phrases in his sleep.

(Mark lays down on the mattress. The van is hot, even with the windows cracked, even with the cheap fans, so Mark feels his skin beginning to get sticky with sweat. He doesn't want to eat. He doesn't want to sleep. He doesn't want to breathe in this foggy air and think about the inevitable.

He wishes you would just come out of the shower and join him. He waits for what seems like ages, until he's too worn out to keep his eyes open. He falls into a restless sleep, not noticing the way the mattress dips when you join him.)

-

"My dad was a mafia boss," you say, spitting a sunflower seed shell onto the dashboard. The Clash is playing from Mark's radio, and the station wavers in and out as you drive across state lines.

"Really?" You've found that Mark's eyes grow obnoxiously big when he's surprised about something. His mouth forms a little 'o' shape and his voice grows softer. It's adorable, so you make it your mission to surprise him as much as you can. That, and road trips are pretty boring when the world is ending.

"No."

"Come on!" Mark pouts. You can see it in your peripheral vision. "Stop lying to me. I bet your dad doesn't even have a cool job."

"Guess then," you taunt. "By the way, we passed the California-Oregon state line like, five minutes ago."

Mark gasps and rolls down the window, looking back towards the passing highway, as if the sign is going to still be there. "I can't believe I missed it! This could be it. This is where we find our soulmates."

You spit out another shell. "I'm hoping my soulmate's name is Long Beach because that's where I'm going."

"Let's stay together," Mark says. He's biting his thumbnail, eyes towards the empty road in front of him. "I don't know how many more of us will be left."

You want to correct him and say that there are plenty of people left, and yet you know that a lot of people took the pill. Or got sick. Or killed in a raid. Funny, a meteor is scheduled to hit the earth and people decide to leave early. Or they lose their humanity entirely, and take people out with them. Truthfully, there aren't many people left at all.

"Okay," you say. Your eyes stay on his face a little longer than necessary. You take note of his wide, innocent eyes and wonder if he even understands what's happening. Or maybe he just looks like that. But really, all it does is make you want to protect him from the inevitable.

Maybe there's a secret spaceship you can hide him in, and he can start a new, albeit solitary, life on the moon.

You'd never make it to Area 51 in time. That's where they keep the spaceships, right?

(Mark doesn't know how to tell you that he doesn't even care about this stupid soulmate thing. He just doesn't want to be alone. He doesn't want to say that, because it means he has to vocally admit that he is alone. Truly. Not by choice.

He was out of town when his family got the flu. The atmosphere got too much. Whatever sickness killed and left as soon as it came, took them too. And he had to go. He had to get out, as far away from the east coast as he could. So he decided on the west coast. And then he decided on you.)

-

"Let's get our tan on!" You joke. The clouds are heavy and dark above the water. It looks like the sky and the water are becoming one, however slowly or quickly. You grab Mark's elbow and pull him towards the sea.

The waves roar against the silence of the land. There's a family down the ways, barely noticeable under the pier. You watch a seagull fly down towards the family and steal something. The little girl shrieks, but you don't know if it's in excitement or fear.

The beach is distractedly empty. No people — save those already mentioned — are anywhere to be seen. There's debris everywhere: old umbrellas, coolers, and towels are half-buried in the sand.

The tide is coming in higher (something the news channel probably warned about) and for some reason, it makes the world feel incredibly small.

Mark has already got his legs in the water. It's lapping at his clothed jeans, but he doesn't seem to mind. His back is turned to you. He's facing the horizon, still and silent.

You hate to ruin this for him, but as the mood grows more dismal, you want to lighten it.

You sneak up behind Mark and jump on his back. Your weight catches him off guard, and the two of you plummet into the cloudy water. Mark yelps when the water hits his torso. You fall in after him and grip his shoulders. Closing your eyes tight, you hold you breath and lift your face above the surface. "Feel refreshed?"

Mark coughs. He rubs his eyes, wincing when the salt reaches beneath his lids. "Why would you do that?"

"It's fun," you say.

Mark begins swimming into the deep water. He looks a bit like a lost child, doggy paddling in the vast sea. He grins, and his lips are a bit lopsided. You notice his cheeks grow hollow when he smiles. "You scared me, Y/n."

The sentence ends timidly, like he isn't sure if he's allowed to say your name out loud. But you like it. It's hesitant and soft; loud because it's the only word spoken for miles; quiet because it's Mark. You wonder briefly how to get him to say your name again.

The two of you swim until you can't touch the sandy floor below you anymore. Mark holds his own, but you struggle a bit. "They were right about the tide getting stronger."

"Here," Mark swims over to you and wraps his arm around your waist. "Stay close to me."

Something akin to reticence settles against the wall of your skull like the numb reminder that this is all very weird. Mark is a stranger, and you're cross-country with only him. It bothers you that your mind is already growing attached; your heart already growing attracted. This is the last thing you need to happen during your last days on this literal godforsaken earth.

You swim back to the shore first and lie on the sand. It clings to your wet skin. The tide laps at your feet. The sun is going down, and the air feels overwhelmingly muggy. You close your eyes.

(Mark thinks about the waves. He thinks about the frequency of your voice when he splashes you. He thinks of how your smile seems even prettier at this time of day. He thinks about the way you pulled back when he asked you to stay. While he knows this isn't exactly the time to fall for someone, he can't help but feel like he's starting to.

He watches you fall asleep in the sand. Your cheeks are red. Your eyelashes flutter against the tops of your cheeks. Your lips are chapped. Mark finds that he wouldn't mind kissing you. Or just simply being by your side.

For a few solitary moments, he doesn't even think about the end. Just the now.)

-

It feels like you blinked, but when you reopen your eyes you find that time has certainly gone by. Mark is sitting a ways away, stoking a makeshift fire.

"I was a Cub Scout," he says.

"I need a smoke." You go back to the van and pull out a pack and a lighter. Your brain feels fuzzy from having fallen asleep on the beach, and your back itches from the sand that has scratched its way down your shirt. To distract yourself, you lean against the van and take a drag; look up towards the sky.

It's a dark reddish black, some ominous code that the world is definitely coming to an end. Clouds swirl hazily against each other and you can see that a storm seems to be forming over the ocean. Months ago this would've been beautiful. An instagram-worthy shot, a coffee pot topic, and nothing more.

Right now it sends a chill down your spine.

You drop the cigarette and head back to where Mark is sitting. He has some kind of pot out over the fire, and what looks like a can of soup inside. The can itself is tucked neatly in the little box Mark has beside him. You wonder why he cares so much about a planet that's already dead. "Thanks. For, uh dinner."

"Yeah," Mark clears his throat and shifts in the sand. "That's what friends are for."

"We're friends now?" You raise your brow at Mark while he hands you a bowl of soup along with a spoon.

"I sure hope so," Mark quips. "I don't make soup for just anybody."

You laugh at that. Your heart stirs in excitement. Your stomach growls, so you ignore the heaviness in your chest and take a bite of your soup.

That night you fall asleep with a belly full of food and sand down your shorts. It's half-ideal, half-hell, but Mark gives you a hug before the two of you tuck in, so it's okay.

(Mark wants to say that he wishes the two of you were friends a lot sooner, but that would be weird. He's only known you for like, three days. Maybe he's delirious.

But he gives you a hug before you fall asleep anyway. He hopes you can't hear how fast his heart is beating. It's stupid anyway, he thinks.)

-

Four days left. Give or take. You aren't completely sure to be honest, and that brings on an entire onslaught of horror that you've never really felt before. There's something so terrifying about this whole thing. It's like you've knocked on Death's door, and you have no idea when he's actually going to open it.

Mark hides it well. He drives the two of you down to Hollywood Boulevard.

It's trashed. What was once the walk of fame is now defaced with graffiti, food, trash, and what looks like human feces. You throw up in the fake bushes and Mark pats your back while you do.

"Guess I won't get my picture with Kermit the Frog then," you joke.

Mark's eyes suddenly widen. He grabs his backpack straps. "There's a Kermit the Frog star?"

"Yeah," you laugh at Mark's expression. "My aunt was obsessed with The Muppets. She had a laminated picture of the star in her sewing room."

Mark bites his lip and averts his eyes. "I have a Polaroid. Not much film, but we might could get a few pictures."

The stars have to be cleared first. Mark comes up with the idea to sneak into one of the restaurants nearby and using their cleaning supplies. And since you have all day and nothing to lose, you agree.

The thing about a large and empty place like Hollywood Boulevard, is that every shadow feels like a threat. Memories of dystopian movies come flooding through your memories when Mark hands you a giant broom. You wonder if some evil man with a god complex is going to come and kidnap you both.

But the only people the two of you ever see is a man in a small shop that looks like it contains weed.

You and Mark sweep away as much debris as you can, while avoiding anything that came out of a human body. The graffiti covers a lot of the stars, but after a few hours of walking and sweeping, the two of you find it.

"Kermit," Mark breathes a side of relief before laughing out loud. His laugh is stark against the silence.

You join him anyway. "I can't believe we found Kermit! My aunt would be so jealous right now."

"Your aunt sounds weird," Mark says, no real bite to his remark.

"She is," you confirm. "She's up in Maine somewhere. At least, you know, last I heard."

Mark senses the change in tone and drops his backpack to the ground. He pulls out a baby pink Polaroid camera. He points it at you. "Say cheese, Y/n."

There's your name on his tongue again. That sound itself has you beaming as you lean against the brooms long handle and cock your head to the side. The camera clicks.

Mark takes out the picture and shakes it before he looks at it. "Cute," he says casually, then he tucks it in his shirt pocket.

"I want to see it," you say. You hope that if you don't acknowledge the warmth in your cheeks, Mark won't either.

"Too bad." He sticks his tongue out at you. And before you can retort, he squats down beside the star. "Okay, let's get a picture of this bad boy."

You squat down too. You match Mark's peace sign and smile in the direction of the lens. The camera clicks.

Nothing comes out. "Shit," Mark mumbles to himself. "I guess I had a lot less film than I thought."

You're about to apologize, feeling like maybe you should've put up a bigger fight when he offered to take your picture.

Mark seems to read your mind. That, or he's just too nice for his own good. He pats his shirt pocket and gives you a generous smile. "Worth it, though."

The sky is getting progressively darker as the two of you walk around, occasionally pointing at places you would've liked to go, had the circumstances been different.

You both eat from snacks you find in a convenience store. You take the rest and leave it in the truck. "What should we do now?" Mark asks.

The light from the store across the street flickers. You look at the neon leaf and then back to Mark. "Have you ever gotten high?"

(Mark has gotten high before, and he tells you so. What he doesn't tell you is that the picture in his pocket is getting heavier as the seconds pass. What he doesn't tell you is that this picture may be the only evidence left of you in a few days. Maybe it will disappear with the rest of them. Mark briefly wonders if a fireproof box would work against the end of the world, and whatever that entails.

He wants to tell you that he would immortalize you in a million different pictures if he could. He would show the dying world a million different ways to breathe again.

Instead, he only nods his head. "Yeah, but it's always fun to do again.")

-

You're positive it's the fact that you've taken one too many hits of whatever joint that weed guy rolled up for you. 'Said it was his best; he was saving it for something special. Since the world is going to hell, he shared it with you.

And now you're in the bed of Mark's van, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the way Mark's lips wrap around the joint. He has a really pretty mouth, you realize, and you want to say it out loud but something heavier takes hold of your chest and you bury it down with all of your other fears and revelations.

Mark coughs. Puffs of smoke blow out into the hot van, and he winces at the smell. "Didn't the guy say this was the special stuff? Why does it still stink?"

You take the joint from him and package it up, hoping to save it for another day (or maybe you just don't want to get so high that you can't focus on Mark's face.)

Mark scrunches his nose and leans back against the cool window of the van. "We should sleep outside tonight. It's too hot in here."

"Under the stars?" you ask. You feel your heartbeat pick up, but it falls just as quickly, and you settle back into the blankets. "Don't wanna move."

"I'll move you," Mark says, a mere whisper against your right side.

You watch him open the trunk. He hops out. "Come on, Y/n. Take my hand."

His hand is warm and calloused and rough and you want to ask him if he can actually play that guitar in the back of his van or if it's just for show. Mark lets you sit on the concrete of the pier. It's warm beneath your skin. Mark parked the van right against the pier, so the two of you could sleep right next to the edge.

While you hang your legs off of the edge, Mark drags the mattress out and pushes it right up to the railing. "Didn't peg you for a stoner."

You grab the blanket he throws at you and lie down on the mattress. "I'm not," you say, no bark to your words. "You're just better at it than me."

"At smoking?" Mark laughs. "I only took one hit. You took, like, four."

"So?" You pout and refuse to return his stare. Instead you try to focus on the stars, and the way their alignments seem off. You wonder if it's the end of the world, or if it's just the weed. "I wish we had more time."

The candor in your voice causes Mark to finally settle down. He lays down. His shoulder brushes against yours, and when his fingers twitch, his knuckles touch yours. It stirs up a gentle longing in your heart. What might be. What never was. You turn to face Mark. "We haven't found your soulmate, yet."

Mark lets out a shaky breath. Something between a gasp and a sigh. He blinks, looks at you like he's indulging, and blinks again. "I don't know if I want to."

(He knows he doesn't want to. Hasn't for a long time now. But your innocent worry has him thinking. Has him wondering how much a soulmate is worth in the end.

He thinks of how you let your guard down when you're high. He thinks of the jolt of electricity that zips down his arm when your fingers touch his. He thinks of your face, so close to his and yet he's so, so afraid of leaning in. Or letting go. Or scaring you away.

Mark doesn't have to find his soulmate. There's no time, and no lead. He thinks that he'd be disappointed anyway.

At the end of all things, he thinks he'd just rather be with you.)

-

"Where'd you even learn how to siphon gas?" you cough. The air is growing thinner. An estimate of three or four days left, and the air is beginning to fall against the atmosphere like a weighted blanket. Ash and dust rise from the ground, and you keep a bandanna around your nose most of the time.

Mark spits gasoline out of his mouth and shoves the nozzle into his van. "Cub Scouts, remember?"

"Who knew Cub Scouts would prepare you for the end of the world." You kick the van's back tire.

Mark lifts his own red bandanna around his mouth. His jeans are scuffed up from the dirt and grime of the gas station, but the fact that he keeps his shirt tucked in and fastened with a belt is more endearing than it needs to be.

"Too bad I never earned my saving-the-world badge, right?" Mark chuckles. A sad silence follows.

You slip into the passenger seat beside Mark and place your hand over his as soon as it's placed on the gear shift. "What did you want to be? Before the news?"

Mark opens his mouth. Then closes it, laughs to himself and shakes his head. "It's stupid."

"It can't be stupid," you say. "Nothing you like is stupid."

Mark's neck flushes red. "I, uh, want to be a rapper."

"Still?" you whisper.

"Is that pathetic? To pretend the world isn't ending?" Mark lets himself glance at you for a solemn moment.

"I don't think so," you say. "If I've learned anything from you at all, Mark Lee, it's that you're full of hope. That's not pathetic at all."

Mark flips his hand over so that your fingers intertwine with his. "Thanks. You, uh... You've taught me a lot of things too."

"Like what?" You lift your feet onto the dash and squeeze Mark's hand.

"I don't want to say right now."

"Okay." You pull his hand into your lap and run your fingertips over his calloused palms. "Hey, I've been meaning to ask you this, but do you play guitar?"

"Yeah," Mark turns down a neighborhood of beach houses. "Remind me to play for you sometime."

(Mark likes the way you touch him first. He likes that you let him hold your hand. He likes that you pull his hand into your lap. He feels so much peace that for a brief moment, he thinks that if the world were to end right now, off-schedule, he'd be okay with it. He doesn't know how to tell you that you're teaching him to be okay with the end. He doesn't know how to tell you that he finds forever in these small moments with you.)

-

Mark takes you to his aunt's empty beach house and the two of you move your stuff in. He finds the solar generator, and the two of you take showers for what seems like the first time in awhile. You don't feel like wearing anything, welcoming the generated AC. But, out of respect for Mark, you adorn undergarments and a large t-shirt stolen from his "clean" suitcase. (He has a "clean" suitcase and a "dirty" suitcase, which is another thing you really admire about Mark.)

When you come out of the shower, towel around your neck, Mark is sitting on the corner of the bed. His own towel has been thrown over the window-side wicker chair, covering a starfish pillow.

What startles you is the fact that he isn't wearing a shirt; only a pair of black sweatpants. A pair of glasses you've never seen before are perched atop his nose. They slip down every time he looks towards the neck of his guitar. He strums out a sour chord and scrunches his nose. "Ah," he shakes his head at the instrument. "She needs a good tuning."

You're drying your hands with your towel, eyes hazy and focused on the way Mark's bare shoulders tense every time he strums a particularly bad chord.

Mark Lee is really pretty. His black hair is still damp, and a few droplets fall onto his cheeks. "Here," you rush out, not wanting another distraction in his favor. "Let me dry your hair. You'll get a cold."

Mark sets the guitar aside and you stand between his legs. "What song should I play for you?" He closes one eye and peers up at you with a close-lipped smile.

You hum. Toss the towel over his face so he won't notice how warm your face is getting. You dry his hair off with a few massages. "What's the one that makes you most happy?"

"I dunno," Mark says. "I like Come Back To Bed."

"Then sing that one to me." You toss the towel to the floor. For a moment, you wonder what it would feel like to run your hand through his hair. After all, you did just dry his hair, which is kind of an intimate thing already. But maybe touching it would be crossing the line. Maybe reaching out to tuck that stray hair back behind his ear would reveal too much. Unravel what you've been trying not to show.

But the world is ending, so it's time to have courage. You swallow your fear and reach out. When you run your fingers through his soft hair, Mark sighs in content. "That feels nice."

"Y-Yeah?" you say, because anything else would come out as a squeak.

Mark's eyes are closed. He leans into your touch and when your hand trails down the side of his face, behind his ear, he places a kiss against your inner wrist. "Yeah," he says, breath hot on your skin. "I'm... I'm glad I went into that convenience store a few days ago."

"Me too." You sense the mood drifting, so you sit beside Mark and pat his guitar. "Now play me something."

Mark nods, a big dazed. He picks up his guitar and begins to sing to you, and you think his voice sounds like the hope of a new dawn.

(Mark wants to bottle up the color of your blushing cheeks and paint the sky. He wants to hold you close to him and kiss you breathless. He wants to say so much more than he does.)

-

Mark makes eggs. You make waffles. They're both a little burnt, but they're made with love, so it's fine. You eat as much as you can, tired of all the convenience store food. "Thank God for your aunt's well-stocked, solar-powered beach house."

Mark giggles. "You know, she was gonna sell it later this year. She wanted to move to the mountains."

"I'm glad she didn't," you say. "This isn't a bad place for... you know."

Mark blinks. Solemnity drowns his face. "She rented a cabin in the mountains. Didn't want to die in the city she was born in. This was the best place I could think of for the end."

"Do you think it will hurt?" You don't want to ask, because it's such a dismal concern. However, you wonder if you're the only one worried about your last moments.

Mark shakes his head. "I think it will be very quick. Like a sneeze."

(Mark wants to say that he's terrified of a slow death. Or dying before you. Of having to watch you die, or leave you alone in this world. He wants to say that he's scared to death and every step feels like a closer one to the grave.

He thinks of telling you, but what difference would it make?)

-

That night after your shower, you find Mark in the kitchen, washing the dishes. "You don't have to do those, you know."

You wrap your arms around Mark's waist, and as soon as you make contact, he shudders. His body slumps against the sink and he hiccups a sob. "I'm scared, Y/n."

"Mark..." you turn him around as gently as you can and pull him into your embrace. "It's okay. It's going to be okay."

"Times almost up," he chokes. "We don't know if it will happen tonight or tomorrow– and I don't want to leave you."

He lifts his head from your shoulder and presses his forehead against yours. It feels a bit like the way a cat might ask for a scratch. But it feels more like Mark wanting to be as close to you as he can. From here, you can see his wide eyes magnified from tears. He sniffs.

You bump your nose against his and shift your hands up to his shoulders. "Mark, I think I love you. I know it's too soon, but we don't really have much time anyways, so I thought I should tell you. I know now isn't a good time, and I'm probably being extremely selfish for saying it while you're crying–"

"You're not," Mark blurts just before he kisses you.

He holds your face in his hands and pulls you against him. His lips are soft and smooth against your chapped ones and you like the way his breathing gets heavier when you reach up and twirl your fingers through his hair. "I love you too."

His hands shift to your waist. He backs you up until you hit the counter's edge. "Jump," he mumbles against your mouth.

You jump onto the counter and wrap your legs around Mark's middle, pulling him flush against you as you go to kiss him again.

He kisses bites your bottom lip and when you gasp at the pain, he leans back to smirk at you. The look on his face makes you want to either slap him or melt into his touch. You choose the latter, leaning back as his lips begin to trail down your jaw. "I don't ever want to let you go."

"Then don't," you say.

(Mark thinks having sex and making love are two different things. He thinks your pink shorts look really pretty against the color of your skin. He thinks of the sounds you make, and the softness of your stomach. He thinks of purple marks on your thighs and the way you say his name like it's worth something. Like it means something. He thinks of looking into your eyes and telling you that he loves you. He thinks of kissing your lips and your neck and your chest and your hips. He thinks of you trembling against him. He thinks of cleaning you up and pulling his hoodie over your tired form. He thinks of kissing your forehead and falling asleep to the sound of your heart.

He thinks of the stain glass picture his aunt has in her kitchen right above the sink. A poem about the sun and the moon. A picture of the two kissing. The words ring like an anthem in his head. He thinks maybe soulmates always find each other in the end.)

-

It happens in the night. You get up to get a drink of water. Your legs are sore but your heart feels warm.

You take small sips in front of the sink and look out of the window. The clouds are dark and red again, but you're distracted by a little hanging picture suctioned to the pane. It's a stain glass picture, painted gaudy blue and gold. You can see the vivid picture of the sun and the moon, fitting against each other like missing puzzle pieces. There's a poem painted in messy scrawl, but you make out the words easily enough.

Tell me what is more beautiful;

The sky seems to get closer.

How the moon lets the sun shine throughout the day.

The air seems to get warmer.

Or the way the sun lets the moon glimmer at night.

The sky darkens, and you close your eyes. You think of Mark alone in the bed and hope he won't wake. You hope he won't know that he has to go alone. You want to run to him, but you know this is nothing but a second on earth, and you're all out of time.

(Mark wakes up when his skin feels like it's scalding. He sits up and notices that you aren't beside him. You're gone, and he knows it's the end, and he knows he'll never see you again, and the thought claws it's way down his throat and breaks his heart from the inside out. And he's all out of time.)

[bananaairplane]

Land and Sea

I ran away to sea. We sailed into the Bahamas early yesterday morning, after leaving West Palm Beach at sunset. Leaving the inlet that protects the harbor where we had been anchored from the ocean, the boat began to roll on ocean swells. The Gulf Stream runs northwards about five miles off the coast. The lights of Florida fell behind us and the sky opened up overhead, bigger and more studded with stars than I’ve ever seen it. As we sailed, Orion rose and climbed overhead, wheeling off to the south as dawn approached. After barfing up two dramamine tablets, I was ready to take my first watch.

I felt the pull of the sea as soon as I hit the Oregon coast this fall, and also for a good while before that. It’s a constant theme, the sea. A wide open space of freedom, and another kind of wilderness. I drove back and forth past a cargo dock in the days before departure, on provisioning runs and to get a tooth looked at for a possible emergency root canal— no, I just haven’t had a teeth cleaning in rather a long time thanks to the pandemic. Big orange containers marked “Tropical” were stacked around the cranes and one or two big ships. I thought of my great uncle the sea captain, who sailed ships like these to East Asia in the 1930s. This pull I felt toward the water, is it something like what he felt, running away to sea as a teenager? Who can know, I immediately thought, and why does it matter? Why do we look for explanations of our behavior— good or bad— in the past? Heritage holds the promise of connection— that we are not alone in how we feel. It offers reassurance that we’re not alone and justifies our choices by offering an explanation for them. In doing so, though, it gives the lie to the fantasy of breaking free. If the longing for freedom is an inherited trait, like my narrow eyes or my freckles, then it isn’t really freedom so much as a fulfillment. I don’t think this is the right way of looking at it. We all have the same destination in life, but we choose the lodestars that will guide our passage there. They are not infinite, and the choice not entirely free— freedom is an odd imperative because, like nature, it is so poorly defined. But we do have a range of action within which to shape what we do. Do it consciously.

Every trip has two parts: departure and arrival. The switch happens somewhere along the way— possibly the halfway point, but not necessarily. The valence of departure is broken, and your focus swings around toward where you’re going. I took off from San Diego two weeks ago, aiming to catch this sailboat in Florida. I did not know very much about the boat, or the people on it. I didn’t know how long I’d be on it, even— just that we were headed to the Bahamas. I could not answer even the most superficial of the follow-up questions people asked when I announced my plan. All the way through the desert I was leaving California. I felt the places I’d been pulling back, and saw before me everything I was leaving. The beginnings of a life in Oregon, the friends and family scattered down the coast all threw a strong valence out over the highway as it stretched before me.

I blew across the white gravely desert of Arizona, listening to an audiobook of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, banned for indecency when it came out in Britain in 1915. Alternating descriptions of quivering flesh and pointed arches boomed at maximum volume over the whoosh of the road. The sky felt like a glass dome placed over the earth, and in places where the road began to rise gently it felt like my car might take flight. Then the highway thickened into Phoenix and I stopped at the first of a string of worn out roadside motels.

Roadside motels, offer a smooth, hard surface to the consciousness, unable to become particular and therefore familiar. Well, not smooth— more like lumpy in the way a wall is that has been badly painted. And not so hard, either: Why are all the lampshades in cheap motels dented? How many ways are there to dent a lampshade? Or is it the same way, over and over? One clumsy salesman is roaming around, all elbows, putting the same dent in squared-off Days In lampshades.

In New Mexico, a man sat in front of the souvenir shop/ gas station with his dog, looking for a ride to Las Cruces. The exits feel perfunctory— the land around them is as vacant as anywhere else along the highway. Buildings are placed far apart and gratuitously set back from the road, like they didn’t have enough of them so they wanted to really space them out for maximum effect. In New Mexico the land turns orange and the mountains are red instead of the inky blue of California. As you begin to hit Texas, the grass picks up, thickening into shrubs and then live oaks as you get out of the hill country. It is deeply dark on I-10 at night west of about San Antonio. The only lights are white and red columns on the road and the glow of the yellow lines. After El Paso, the lights of Juarez shine off to the left, like distant land when you are at sea.

I stopped in San Antonio for a day off the road with my aunt and uncle and a masked, impromptu Thanksgiving. Every place you stop is sticky: it’s hard to push back out into the the empty current of the road— even more so when you drop into a warm cocoon of kin. We stood around in the kitchen catching up, a dog shuttling around at our feet; the next day was filled with the project of preparing and eating food. In the evening, my aunt and I popped open tubes of dough and rolled up Thanksgiving leftovers into little pastry pockets. When I got back on the road, the arrival of the East Coast announced itself with the thick roadside vegetation of the Bayou and torrential rains. After the austerity of the desert, the excess of vegetation and water felt messy, crowded. It also marked the shift into the next chapter. I had definitively left the West behind and now, instead of the backwards pull of the beginning of the trip, I felt the tug of arrival pick up. In Mobile I parked and went for a walk with a friend through neighborhoods of deep porches and old plaster. I wound up in St Augustine for several days at the house of old family friends, to await the results of a Covid test before joining the boat.

The periodic connections with people and places along the way felt incongruous— so much for wilderness, or the idea of the long drive as some kind of mystical journey of self-discovery. Thanksgiving leftovers and cozy afternoons on back porches felt like cheating. But that’s the lie of departure again. There is no radical break, only a series of arrivals that, like the other half of a parenthesis, reshape the meaning of the departure.

[jafreitag]

Grateful Dead Monthly: Oxford Plains Speedway – Oxford, ME 7/2-3/88

On Saturday and Sunday, July 2 and 3, 1988, the Grateful Dead played two shows at the Oxford Plains Speedway in Oxford, Maine.

Oxford Plains opened in 1950 as a half-mile track, but was later shortened to three-eighths. According to the Wiki, it’s the largest sports venue in Maine, seating 14,000. The Speedway has hosted events in the NASCAR Busch Series (sort of the minor league for stock cars), but back in the late ’60s, it hosted three NASCAR Cup Series races – two won by Bobby Allison and one won by Richard “The King” Petty.

Yes. That’s Richard Petty in his trademark powder-blue #43 Plymouth. If you had 1960s motorsports figures on your GDM bingo card, right on!

In June of 1988, the Monsters of Rock tour with Van Hagar, die Schorps, Dokken, Metallica, and Kingdom Come stopped in Oxford.

And if you had Van Hagar and/or Dokken on the bingo card, sweet!

The following month, so did the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead for two nights. Our very own GD Editor (and Lester Bangs wannabe) ECM attended. Here’s his extended and incredibly awesome personal reflection.

Thirty-three years ago Deadheads flocked to Oxford, Maine for two days of peace, love and music. The weather was great, the scene was chill and the Grateful Dead played dream set-lists for what would be their last shows in Maine and yours truly was fortunate enough to have been there. It was one of the very best experiences I ever had seeing the Dead and I often wish I could relive it again. So, gather ‘round the campfire and let’s get started, shall we?

PROLOGUE: Summer’s here and the time is right

I had just graduated from college in June 1988 and after treating myself to a 2-week backpacking trip to Europe I dutifully hopped on tour with the Grateful Dead, because like… isn’t that a rite of passage? The mail order Gods were very kind to me which was no small miracle when you consider the huge influx of new fans on the scene in the wake of Touch-mania due to the commercial success of In the Dark. Another factor that contributed to making tickets tough to score was the fact that the band opted mostly for small, outdoor sheds for this tour instead of the ginormous stadiums they had played the previous two summers. I scored tickets for Pittsburgh (6/26), SPAC (6/28, my 22nd birthday) and both nights of Oxford Plains (7/2-3). The latter was a venue the band had never played and it also happened to be the tour closer which raised the stakes even higher. In addition, there was a rumor that the band might add a “surprise” extra show on July Fourth (alas, that never happened). And, of course let’s not forget about the band’s storied history of playing legendary shows in Maine such as 9/6/80 (Lewiston) and 10/12/84 (Augusta). Needless to say, the Oxford shows were highly anticipated by everybody.

Prior to Oxford, I attended Pittsburgh and SPAC with my brother Dan and a bunch of friends. I could write a separate essay on those incredibly fun adventures alone but I will save that for another day. I attended Oxford with my childhood friend, Brad, whose family had a house in Whitefield, New Hampshire which is a tiny, rural New England town near the White Mountains.  We used that as home base to travel back and forth to the shows which is only about an hour and a half drive. The plan was to stay for the July Fourth holiday after the shows and then return home to New York.

BACKGROUND: Jumping queues and makin’ haste, just ain’t my cup of meat

Before I review the shows, I must first describe the scene/vibe since it was such a big part of the overall experience.  Like most of the surrounding area, Oxford is a small, rural, New England town with a population of about only 4,000 people. It is quiet, serene and wooded. Within that setting is an unexpected attraction – the Oxford Plains Speedway, a car racing track that was established in 1950 and seats 14,000 people. In 1988, the Speedway decided to dabble in rock concerts – something the tiny town was ill-prepared for. Here are just a few obstacles that quickly come to mind:  A single, one-lane road was the only access to the Speedway, very few local hotels and a police force of one(!)

On June 25, 1988, Oxford hosted the Monsters of Rock Festival featuring Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica and Kingdom Come. A torrential downpour combined with rowdy fans left the site trashed.

Now, before we get all judgy about metal-heads, let’s acknowledge that the Grateful Dead scene was not without its own problems. As I mentioned, the commercial success of the album, In The Dark, resulted in an incredible influx of newbies known as “Touch-Heads.” The show at SPAC on June 28th was a disaster as ticketless fans crashed the gates and rushed the ramps that led inside the pavilion. As a result, there were scuffles with security and lots of arrests. It turned out to be the last straw and consequently, the Dead never played SPAC again.

The town of Oxford had good reason to be concerned about the Grateful Dead concerts that lay ahead just one week after the Monsters debacle and the news about the Dead show at SPAC just a few days prior. Fortunately, the band and its fans sent around a plea to leave nothing but footprints. The 90,000+fans that descended upon the tiny town of Oxford not only gladly complied with that request but harmoniously co-existed with the residents. Maine papers reported that it was a most enjoyable weekend for all people especially the towns people.

THE SCENE: Strangers Stopping Strangers

Grateful Dead archivist, David Lemieux, had this to say about Oxford:

“It seemed a little out of the way, which is why it was a good place to end the tour. It was a nice mellow place. I was bummed that they never played there again because everybody I knew who went to the Oxford show, to this day, will say it was one of the most fun Dead shows they ever saw. They were great shows musically, but they were just fun…It was extremely easy-going. It was a West Coast vibe on the East Coast. I heard from so many people who said it felt like an Oregon Dead show. That’s the highest compliment for a concert on the East coast.”

David Lemieux thought so highly of the Oxford shows that he included July 3, 1988 as the show to represent the year of 1988 for 30 Trips Around the Sun, the special 50th anniversary box-set that featured one complete show for each of the thirty years the band performed. Note that the box-set also includes a second Maine concert – the Augusta Civic Center show on October 12, 1984. Supposedly, the Lewiston show on September 6, 1980 would have also been included if a better audio source existed.

My friend, Brad and I arrived in the town of Oxford in the early afternoon on July 2nd. Getting there was slow. There was a lot of traffic congestion because of the one-lane road leading to the Speedway. Many people abandoned their cars and opted to walk. Enterprising locals let Deadheads camp and park on their lawn for a small fee.  As our car inched along we were able to check out the scene. And what a scene it was! The town of Oxford had been transformed into a little Dead village. The vibe was incredible – perhaps resembling a latter day Veneta or Woodstock.  Deadheads were grooving everywhere — swimming in streams, hanging out in fields, playing hacky sack, tossing Frisbees, hiking along the local route through the small town. Everybody was friendly, smiling and having fun together. Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand…

The parking lot itself was nothing more than a giant, dusty, plowed dirt field but the scene was outrageously good. The weather was perfect and the Speedway parking lot circus was in full swing – thousands of happy people, tents, cars, hissing nitrous, tie-dyed flags, loose dogs running around, fireworks going off, Hibachis, ice chests and goo-ball hawkers everywhere.

The “Shakedown Street” was enormous – two huge avenues of merchandisers selling everything legal and illegal from bagels to ‘shrooms. Everything was “kind.” Kind beer for $1, kind water for $1, kind cigarettes and kind bud… Kind, kind, kind.

Cops ignored just about everything. To be fair, they were greatly outnumbered. Supposedly, the town’s sole police officer was aided by about 30 officers from the Maine State Police and neighboring communities, but the sheer number of people was overwhelming.  

Fortunately, the Dead had the foresight to set up a field office out in the parking lots. People from the Grateful Dead office were out in the trenches all weekend long handing out garbage bags, keeping their pulse on the rhythm of what was going on and even scolding destructive trouble makers when necessary. This turned out to be crucial in keeping things peaceful, clean and safe for everybody.

SATURDAY JULY 2: Life may be sweeter for this, I don’t know

The scene inside was mellow – a giant field surrounded by a racetrack and bleachers. Delay PA towers placed behind the soundboard made hanging out in the back of the field pleasant – you could dance or lie down on a blanket and hear the concert perfectly. In fact, a lot of tapers set their rigs up directly behind these towers and were able to get very good audience recordings of these concerts.

We went into the show early so that we could see the opening act – Little Feat. They had recently reformed after being inactive due to the death of Lowell George in 1979. Now in 1988, they were opening for the Dead to support the release of their new album, Let it Roll. It was exciting to see them rekindle their magic for fans both old and new. Some clever vendors sold bumper stickers on the lot that said “DEAD FEAT.” The band was in fine form and they turned in a really strong set consisting of everything you would want to hear from their live album, “Waiting for Columbus” mixed in with songs from the new album.

After Little Feat finished their set, Brad and I decided to upgrade our spot. Unfortunately, between the sea of people and the big open space, we got separated. I knew that finding him would be almost impossible and I wanted to get some good real estate for the show so I decided to make my way up towards the front. It was still early and there was plenty of space. I eventually settled in front the soundboard where I knew the sound would be perfect. I mingled with some friendly Heads while we waited for the band to take the stage. They were a bit older than me and took me in when they heard that I got separated.

At one point, we noticed a hippie girl in a long flowing dress gracefully floating through the crowd. She was wide-eyed, smiling and clutching a single red rose. She eventually made her way over to our area. She stopped and stood directly in front of me, staring and smiling. She was in a state of euphoria, radiating beauty and kindness but not saying a word. I stood there paralyzed with awkwardness not knowing what to do except smile back. Ever so gracefully, she held the rose out for me to smell, which I did, and then she was off. It was a beautiful moment that encapsulated the entire weekend at Oxford.

It was still daylight when the band took the stage for the first set. Since I was up so close I could see how relaxed they looked. The beautiful scenery was clearly agreeing with them. I remembered what Phil said at the beginning of the Veneta show – “This is really where we get off the best.” I hoped and prayed that this was one of those times.

The band surprised us by opening with “Iko” which juxtaposed the mellow vibe we were feeling with a celebratory one. I looked around and watched people laughing, dancing, and hugging. This was not a typical high-energy East Cost rocking version. Rather, this was band easing into the first set in the late afternoon on a summer day in Maine with a “feel-good” purpose.

The band continued that easy-going vibe into the next song – Jack Straw. It started out almost too mellow. However, by the second jam we have lift-off as Phil carpet bombs  the Speedway, taking no prisoners.

Next up is a copacetic West L.A. with a slinky groove that acknowledges the “Speedway.”

While the band is tuning for “Memphis Blues,” the audience starts a “Let Phil Sing” chant. This was the norm at most shows following the “Box of Rain” bust out in Hampton in 1986. However, what wasn’t normal was for Phil, who is notoriously reserved on stage (at least in the latter years), to respond to those requests as he did on this occasion.  Cleary in good spirits, Phil has some fun with the audience:

Phil: “Don’t you think the guys in the band are going to get jealous if you yell for me all the time? I want you guys to yell for Mickey, Bill, Jerry and Brent, alright> Next time you see somebody yell ‘We want Phil’ you yell ‘We want Brent’ or ‘We want Mickey’ alright? Thank you.”

That brings Jerry and Bob to the microphone, who add that we should extend our requests to the crew – “We want STEVE! We want KIDD!” – and even to volunteers from the audience(!) This naturally draws lots of laughter and applause. Everybody was having a good time.  

With that that band tears through one of the best renditions of “Memphis Blues.” Bobby’s Pepto-pink Strat lit up the Maine sky. Once again, the crowd begins to chant Phil’s name.

Bobby: “Phil can’t hear you. He’s been stone deaf for eight or ten years now. If you hold still he can read your lips. Brent can’t hear you ‘cause he’s run for it.”

Jerry: “Don’t listen to Weir. He’s been crazy for years.”

“Row Jimmy” is superlative. Although it was played at SPAC just three nights earlier, who could complain when such a great song is repeated? Jerry’s notes blissfully echoing into the cosmos. The audience gently swaying to and fro…not too fast and not too slow…it’s the common way to go. Weir uses his guitar to do his paddling shtick during one of the choruses. Classic Bobby.

The band closes the first set with three of the new songs that were introduced earlier in the tour – “Blow Away”, “Victim of the Crime” and “Foolish Heart.” All were well received. Everyone listening intently.

The setlist for the second set is of what dreams are made. Although nothing the band played could be considered a “best of” performance, everybody who attended would agree that this was a delightful set of nighttime, outdoor music.

The sun begins to set behind the band as they gently ease into the opening notes of “Crazy Fingers” creating a breathtaking visual and aural landscape. “Life may be sweeter for this, I don’t know…” The outro jam was everything you could want in “Crazy Fingers” starting with Phil’s lead lines on the high neck of his bass as Jerry picks away in the background. The instrumental journey builds to the next level as Jerry takes over with a delicate lead that flows into the Middle-Eastern flavored jam.

The “Playin’ > Uncle John’s > Terrapin” sequence that follows is divine. Bobby delivers the verses in Playin’ with oodles of confidence and then the band drops into a luscious spacey jam led by Phil’s bouncy bass lines. This drifts into an anthem-like version of “Uncle John’s Band.” Garcia’s mid-song solo is pure bliss. Smiles abound everywhere. The song oozes with kindness and joy and melts into “Terrapin” – Counting stars by candlelight…and eventually we come to the Drums/Space segment of the show.

Supposedly, all the fans that had travelled without tickets were “miracled” when the doors opened as the band went into “Drums.”

Post-Space, the band finishes in fine form with short, but solid versions of “The Wheel  > Gimme Some Lovin’ > Watchtower.” The audience cheered when the band sang, “so glad you made it” since Oxford was not easy to get to.

Then, we get the Holy Grail – Morning Dew. Jerry goes deep with his vocals – especially the final Anywaaaay…Phil and Jerry trading melodic licks in the quiet part…the song building momentum… and then the kind of triumphant, powerful  ending  that makes your hair stand on end….Magical, Electric, Spiritual.

Instead of ending the show, we are treated to a rocking “Sugar Mags’ as a bonus show closer. Rock Star Bobby strutting around the stage with his long, shaggy hair and getting the crowd all fired up. The “Quinn the Eskimo” encore is basically an audience sing-a-long that leaves a big smile on everybody’s face.

There is a video of Set 2 on YouTube if you are interested.

The post-show parking lot scene picked up where it left off. Fireworks and bonfires burned, lost dogs wandered everywhere, people were passed out in the dirt and thanks to the Dead’s crew, a slew of Deadheads scurried around with garbage bags trying to clean up.

SUNDAY JULY 3: All I know she sang a little while and then flew off

On Day #2 the band turned in two sets of music that were inspired and full of energy but the game ball rightfully goes to Brent Mydland for his outstanding performance. Over the two days at Oxford, he played some of his best songs and was a very conspicuous presence in the 2nd set on this evening.

The band comes out raging with “Hell in a Bucket” complete with the same motorcycle effects that were used on the album, In the Dark.  Bobby thoroughly enjoys this ride and gets off on Healy’s vocal effects. “Sugaree” is competently performed. Brent lights up “Walking Blues” with a fierce B-3 organ solo.

Bobby then steps to the microphone and continues the joke from the day before by saying: “There’s a guy down there saying let Mickey sing. Now he’s obviously never heard that. You can have it if you want it.”

Garcia delivers the first real highlight of the day – a funky and twangy “Jed” which benefits greatly from Brent’s bouncy keyboard work. Garcia growls some of the lyrics.

Queen Jane fills the “Dylan slot” nicely and features heavenly solos by Jerry and Brent.

The set-closing “Bird Song” at sunset is easily the highlight of the show, and perhaps of the entire weekend.  This one gets jazzy and goes way out there into a scary meltdown before building to a huge peak. An added bonus to those who were in attendance was the ultra-light plane that appeared during the jam and circled around overheard. The audience cheered in delight and started pointing up to the sky. The band looked confused as they noticed the audience’s attention being diverted from the stage to the sky. Alas, the distraction probably killed the jam. However, the pilot took a perfectly timed graceful swoop over the stage as Jerry sang the last verse.

Like most people, I was expecting one more song since “Bird Song” rarely was a set closer (at least in 1988), but I’m guessing that the distraction of the plane combined with the potential danger it presented caused the band to err on the side of safety and prematurely end the set after just 6 songs. However, they would make up for that in the second set by playing 6 songs before “Drums ,” which was also pretty unusual. Another unusual aspect of that set was the absence of a Garcia ballad but I am jumping ahead of myself.

In between sets, there was an epic drum circle at the back of the Speedway. Also during the set break Brad and I ran into an old friend from high school, Kevin, who we hadn’t seen in years and we wound up hanging out together for the rest of the evening which was a lot of fun.

As the band took the stage, the audience started a Help/Slip/Frank chant (not played since 9/12/85) but….paradise had to wait until the fall ‘89.

Set two starts off with a highly charged “Touch of Grey” that gets the crowd’s energy going. Immediately afterwards, Bobby strums the chords to “Looks Like Rain” but stops suddenly and instead the band breaks into “Hey Pocky Way.” What a great call! This is an immense version that showcases Brent. The dance party is in full swing.

Bobby eventually gets his way with “Looks Like Rain.” He delivers passionate vocals while Jerry delivers a textbook performance of the noodly musical “raindrops” that was a trademark of this tune in the 80s. The band breaks routine with “Estimated Prophet” by giving us a double dose of Bobby instead of the usual alternating Jerry/Bob sequence of songs. The mid-section jam builds to a nice head and Bobby gives his best screeches before the final jam which is fluid, if not standard.  

“Eyes of the World” is short but sweet. However, the real buzz about this version of “Eyes” is Brent’s piano solo(!) which was fantastic and a very rare treat since that was not a song where he would typically take a solo. He should have done it more often!  Brent really brought his game to Maine. Phil also steps up for the jam. Everyone is pitching in and listening to each other making for some really strong interplay.

Normally, “Eyes” would wash out into to “Drums” but on this evening the band made the unusual decision of tacking on another song. In addition, it was very unusual for the band to play 6 songs before “Drums.” Here, Brent performs his new song, “I Will Take You Home” for just the third time. His vocals and keyboards are delivered tenderly. 

During the “Drums/Space” segment, Mickey ups the ante with The Beam. Just when things can’t possibly get any weirder, Jerry brings us back to earth when he starts picking the notes to “GDTRFB.” Each of the instruments fall into place and soon we are chugging along at an upbeat pace. Brent takes a B-3 organ solo and hands it off to Jerry who builds things to a thrilling peak. Bobby continues the high energy streak with a segue into a raging “I Need a Miracle” complete with audience participation.

The show has an unusual close to it. The double-barreled rocker, ”Dear Mr. Fantasy/Hey Jude” ends with some very funny, over-the-top vocal stuff. Bobby and Brent trade incoherent screams/yelps that may be technically deficient, but the energy is amazingly high.

The “NFA” encore has a cold start with just the vocals before the music kicks in which makes for yet another unique aspect of this show.  Full crowd participation goes on for five minutes long after the band has left the stage and probably the Speedway

Mmm-bop mmm-bop bop bop…

Epilogue: Never had such a good time

Brad and I returned to the White Mountains in New Hampshire to celebrate the July Fourth Holiday with his family. We stopped in Springfield to check out the Basketball Hall of Fame on the way home. A few weeks later I traveled to Boulder, Colorado to visit some more friends in the mountains. We visited Red Rocks even though there was no concert. I wanted to experience the vibe and imagine what it would have been like to see the Grateful Dead perform there.

A month later I was working at a “Big Eight” accounting firm in New York City. It certainly was a reality check but it didn’t stop me from attending 7 of the 9 shows the band played at Madison Square Garden in September. The memories of Oxford and that summer are some of the best in my life. Ah, to be 22 years old again…

Thanks, Ed. That was great!

Transport to 7/2/88 on the Live Music Archive HERE.

Transport to 7/3/88 on the Live Music Archive HERE.

Video Sources:

7.2.88 – Set 2 (voodoonola2)

7.2.88 – Set 2 (Kevin Tobin)

7.3.88 Lot Scene

Finally, if you had bad fan dvd art on the bingo card, you’re welcome.

And if you had “the original” Jerry plane dropping a Phil-bomb on your bingo card, you win. Seriously!

[Ed, we sent GDM bingo cards to all the blog followers, right? Right? Dude, idk. I didn’t, did you?? Omg. This was a thing in a zoom meeting mid-Covid. You don’t remember that. Ok. Cool. I know that 31 Days gets way more likes than LN on the ‘gram, and that’s great, really. But bingo was my idea to juice the audience. And now what. What? We are so busted. Corporate is gonna be pissed. WFH is totally over. I hope the bathroom remodel is done at HQ.]

Bingo plan aside (apparently), I will send something random – could be a snapshot, a stick of gum, a two-dollar bill, or basically anything that fits in an envelope and requires one first class stamp – to the first three people who post something substantive about this show below the line. Get to work, hippies! Free sh!t is the best

NOT kidding. Mail will be sent.

More soon.

JF

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[thedaveandkimmershow]

Okay.  So we don't know it yet, but someone (or someones) removed the hubcap of the Rialta's left rear tire. Including the lug nut covers.  While we were in the Rialta. That's a discovery that's still ahead of us, though.  

The day actually begins with waking up to a very cherry blossom tree posing beside us.  

A brief word about our sleep during this adventure: we both wear watches that keep track of steps, heart rate, blood pressure, and so on. The watches also keep track of our sleep and the quality of that sleep which we can then observe in a phone app that breaks it down by hours slept, time spent in light sleep, time spent in deep sleep, and so on. The app then rates our sleep, which is the metric I'm most interested in because so far... the scores don't play out the way I think they should. Poor quality sleep falls in the zero to sixty range. Sixty to seventy-five is considered "secondary". Seventy-five to ninety is "good". Ninety to a hundred is "excellent".  

With me so far?  

Now, I've worn the watch for several months now and, in that time, I only ever score in the middle to high range of "good". In my own bed. Indoors. Temperature controlled. "Good"... is my best score. 

But then sleeping at these rest stops along I-5 in the back of an RV, I started scoring in the "excellent" range. For example, 60-ish miles north of Roseburg, the watch app documents six deep sleeps where I usually only score five at the most. Plus, my score's now firmly in the Nineties.  Apparently, then, my sleep quality really grooves in the back of RVs parked in rest areas next to busy interstates.  

Who knew?  

So we pull out of the rest area without our left rear hubcap and lug nut covers without realizing it. When eventually we stop for gas first thing, though, Kimmer spots it just as soon as we step out of the RV.  

Pretty creepy to know that happened while we were right there just a few feet away.  

Movin' up the freeway afterward, it's 10am by the time we hit Eugene for a morning Starbucks run. Interestingly, this one has three tables in its dining room open for seating. Which is a revelation since I haven't seen a single Starbucks with anything open in its dining room for over a year. So this is both different...  and super normal.  

Okay so something we've been thinking about: when... do we actually and intentionally start going home?  Because just out of idle curiosity, I check Google Maps... and Astoria's a doable thing for us if we wanna take another night to ourselves. Plus, we won't have to backtrack all the way to I-5 in Portland once we leave Astoria. We can cross the Columbia river and sneak up on Kelso, Washington, from behind and join I-5 there. A grand idea for sure... but we're still experiencing the occasional transmission hiccup or misfire. Couple yesterday. Once this morning. And with Astoria only three-ish hours south of Seattle, we decide to add that to our list of future road trips along with the miniature golf tour we thought up on our way out of Medford, Oregon. Better to do Astoria, after all, when it's summer... since right now it's overcast along the coast with rain in the forecast.  

For us, right now, then, we're gonna hug I-5.  

Now the parking lot we're in for Starbucks is also the parking lot for Trader Joe's a little farther away. Which is where we pick up our salad lunches (Cobb salad and Spicy Arugula & Quinoa salad, btw) before continuing north on our way to Tualatin.  Along the way, Kimmer's Zooming with our new hot spot. I realize it's not new tech... but wow.  

It's liberating.  

By the time that meeting's over, we're stopping in at the Fred Meyer in Salem which is something we seem always to do going both directions. In this case, we need to score some dry ice for our cooler and we need to top off the air in each of the Rialta's well-traveled tires. And as we did on our way south, once again we spot the "High Ped Activity" sign the local DOT's placed before the Market Street offramp.  

"High Ped Activity"  

High Pedestrian Activity. Meaning... Meaning two densely-packed tent encampments wedged into the spaces beneath I-5 on either side of Market.

"High Ped Activity" indeed.  

Now while I'm pumping up the RV's tires, I look up just as traffic on Market on the west side of I-5 catches the red light while traffic coming off the freeway southbound is clear to turn onto Market eastbound. They're turning onto Market through the stretch of road that runs underneath I-5 where the encampments are. And right then... as southbound traffic coming off I-5 gets the green, a man in a wheelchair decides to cross the street from one encampment to the other and is nearly hit by an SUV.  

Yeah.  

It was a very close thing. And the image of it's something that's indelible.  

At quarter to one we're on our way north again, stopping, finally, at that Comfort Inn where, yes, they hand me the wayward Rialta cushion we accidently left in our room eleven days ago. Then it's duplicating the keys to the Rialta at the key place next to Fred Meyer that's finally finally finally open. Then the GoodWill in Tigard, a town that's basically attached to Tualatin. Then the Dollar Tree down the street a ways. Then that Whole Foods that's just barely north of Tualatin but in Tigard... with an employee by self-checkout who basically looks like a young version of our friend Jeff. Plus there's the guy working in hot foods where we get our $10 special meals who worked at the Seattle Whole Foods in South Lake Union a few years back, 2016, our daughter’s store. 

After we buy our dinners, we drop them in the Rialta and walk across the parking lot to that REI that's right. There.  We're over at REI 'cause we're still interested in solar powered gear and want to know what recommendations they have. Nice guy we spoke with, by the way, with fifteen minutes to close. He talked about the brand REI sells, Goal Zero, and explained his personal experience buying products from that company.  

Then the store’s officially closed and we’re outta there with fare-thee-wells all around. :-)

Now we're back, sitting in the Rialta, eating our dinners and discussing  our plans, the first of which calls for us to spend a night or two at an RV park along the mighty Columbia River. So we call an RV place but it's after 8 already, too late in the day to accommodate us. Also, it's turning out that many such RV parks don't accommodate RV's built before a certain year. And no matter what year that is... the Rialta we're driving was built before it.  

So an RV park along the mighty Columbia River's not something we can make happen. Not tonight.  

Maybe tomorrow morning, though.  So we figure that, since we wanna stay in the area, better to backtrack a touch and spend the night at the nearest rest area south of where we are and then see what's possible tomorrow. Which is how we wind up at French Prairie Rest Area Northbound... but only after missing the southbound exit because my phone died even though it was on charger up front with all our other electronics. I missed the southbound exit eleven miles down I-5 'cause the nice lady in Google Maps didn't say to take that exit. So I didn't and had to eat another ten miles southbound before turning around and doing those miles all over again plus the ones we would've done had I taken the exit I was supposed to take in the first place.  

Yeah.  

It was another not great moment for me.  

By the time we arrive at French Prairie Rest Area Northbound, it's 10. Interesting thing, though, the place looks closed. Like for construction.

Fortunately, and even though there’s construction going on, French Prairie's basically a two-parter: the parking lot in front that's under construction... and the massive parking lot in back where all the 18-wheelers, RVs, and everyone else spends the night. There's a second restroom building back there (open only during daylight hours). There's even a huge solar panel farm behind all of that. 

So. 

What initially looks very small and closed for construction... is really a huge parking lot with plenty of space and facilities and woods and grass. Basically hidden behind a façade that screams "Closed".  How very clever.  

This is our home for the night and SPOILER ALERT we manage not to have anything stolen whilst sleeping this time around.  

Once again, Hot In Cleveland... 

And then we're out like lights  :-)

[guttersvillemayor]

Look At The Stars

[There was something about being able to look up into the night sky and see all the stars shining down on me that somehow brought me some semblance of peace… or at least it did until I felt two bodies lay down on the grass on either side of me. Dahlia and Reba. My saving graces lately. Even without touching me, I can feel their loving presence enclose me and it almost brings me to tears so much that I have to close my eyes for a moment to get a hold of the turbulent emotions swirling inside of me. When I had woken up the next morning in Dahlia’s house, Reba was already there, set to take me by my parents’ house and then drive me to Alabama. No questions asked… Although she did talk to me a little about things in the care. It was just part of her nature and she never pressured me to talk from the moment I first saw her sitting by the bed. Luckily Dahlia had been able to assure that my parents wouldn’t be home while I gathered my belongings by taking them out to brunch with Jasper and the kids. It was easy enough to explain that I had gone to the beach house earlier than planned now that the engagement party was over. No one needed to know Reba was there with me for the week or the reason for my hasty retreat to the sanctuary I’d made for myself. Dahlia was set to come for the weekend, pretending to bring Reba for a girls’ trip before bringing her back home, leaving me to figure out what the hell I would do moving forward. Thankfully it wasn’t hard to get an appointment with a local doctor that same week. While I didn’t doubt the test Dahlia got me was right, I still needed to hear it confirmed by a medical professional. It wouldn’t feel real otherwise and for most of the week I had felt like I was moving around in a fog waiting for that moment, for things to sink in. Without any sound but that of the nature around us, we laid there and looked up at the stars for who knows how long until finally Dahlia spoke up. “So… I honestly don’t even know where to begin.” That was saying a lot from the woman I’d come to see as a big sister who always knew how to help me through tough emotional stuff. I didn’t realize just how much I’d relied on her though, but now I couldn’t imagine myself going through all of this without her. Since the night of Wendy and Jonah’s engagement party, she’d given me equal parts space and guidance. Her and Reba, who as a counselor seemed to have a better idea of where to start. “Do you know who the father is?” A small fit of laughter bubbles up my chest and escapes as I process the question. It should be so simple to answer and I never imagined needing to be asked such a question. Yet here I was, under the stars on a breezy, yet still decent night with my de facto sisters talking about the father of my unborn, out-of-wedlock child. My hands, already resting on my stomach, press down slightly as my fingers splay open as if to somehow try and feel the child I just learned was growing inside of me. It was a logical question to ask. Who was the father of my child.] Well it could be the bartender I met in Arizona, or this mechanic who helped me fix my car on the way up the west coast, or there was a hiker in Oregon who I hung out with a few times… [My eyes stay glued on the stars above me, but out of the corner of them I can see Dahlia’s head turn to give me a bit of an incredulous look while Reba stays in place, unfazed. No doubt thanks to her professional training. I didn’t want to talk about the father of my child or even think about him. Not right now, not while I was still trying to process the simple fact that I was going to have a child. There was always no doubt in my mind that I would be a mother one day. Even for my more tomboy ways, I was still a mother hen with my friends and family as my brothers well knew. But this was so far from how things were supposed to go. Life was just starting to make sense and get on track for me. “I thought you hadn’t been with anyone before you left. Are you saying you’ve been with three guys in the last few months?” Dahlia’s tone is incredulous and, whether she meant it to be or not, a tad judgemental. This, more than my own words, gets Reba to react as her hand closest to me reaches out and lightly rests on top of my arm. The action seems to make Dahlia notice just how her words came out and she repeats the action on my other side, while I try not to let her words mess with my overwhelmed emotions. Guess it wasn’t a good idea to give them such a flippant answer. They weren’t my brothers, and this wasn’t any old conversation. “Want to tell us what happened while you were out on the road?” Reba asks trying to redirect us back on the right track. My eyes close tightly as I picture him and a few tears escape from beneath my eyelids, remembering our time together.] Obviously it wasn’t planned or anything. Not meeting him, not sleeping with him, and definitely not this. [I move my hands over my stomach to clearly indicate what I’m talking about. “So it was one guy?” Dahlia’s voice this time is softer, more the understanding sister I’ve come to know and love.] Yes, but he was all of those things. We met while on a trip to the Havasupai Indian Reservation in the Grand Canyon. There was a group of travelling bloggers and such who had put it together and that’s how we were introduced. We all flew into the village via helicopter to save us a long trek in and out of the area, and once we arrived everybody seemed to split up into little groups. At first it was me, him and the people who invited both of us to join the trip. But after a few hours, he and I had set off on our own to the first waterfall and for the next few days we trekked up and down Havasu Creek stopping at each of the waterfalls along the way and setting up camp when night fell. [“What’s his name?” Reba interrupts me and while it would have sounded more inquisitive from Dahlia, coming from Reba I know she asked it more to confront the truth of my situation.] Pedro. [My voice so soft and low when I force myself to say his name, but only his first name. Last thing we needed was my brothers to get wind of who he was and go searching him out. Behind my eyes that remained shut, it’s easy to envision his smiling, laughing face. His scraggly beard never filling in fully no matter how many days he might go without shaving. His broad shoulders and tall, muscular physique that somehow hardened and softened depending on the situation. Or how he’d speak like any other American until he was either drunk, excited or simply talking about home and let his Hispanic accent slip through. More tears fall and I wonder if he’d want to know and I have to shake my head when I remember why he was on the road himself. Clearing my throat, I go back to telling Dahlia and Reba about my time with him.] He was also a blogger, well he’s technically an author who wrote a couple of great books that sold well and now allow him to basically travel around anywhere doing whatever he wants. He even has an RV camper that he lives out of when he’s not driving around. After that first trip, we kept running into each other. Some times planned, some times not. He was the one who suggested that I’d like to see the Pacific Northwest and drove up with me when my car broke down after San Francisco. [Both Reba and Dahlia’s hands tighten on my own as my voice hitches slightly. However, I have to laugh to release the tension that is building up in my chest. My eyes opening back up as I turn my head towards Dahlia.] You know how all my brothers were worried that it would happen to me when I was in the middle of nowhere with no one to help me and them all so far away. But he was there, and because he has to deal with his RV so much, he knew what was wrong and how to fix it. I didn’t even have to worry about telling anybody about it afterwards. Then I got that place outside of Portland and I’d occasionally go on trips with him when he was in the area, but I knew that it would never be anything serious. [I tilt my head back towards the twinkling stars and take a calming breath, willing myself not to get emotional as I tell the next part.] Before we ever… did anything, he and I talked about a lot of things. He’s older than me… or either of you. [Dahlia tries hard to keep from gasping while Reba calming asks, “Is he a lot older than us?” Her diplomatic way of asking me Pedro’s age has me laughing as I can only imagine what they are picturing in their heads.] He’s not old enough to be my father, that’s for damn sure. He’ll be 45 on his next birthday, so not much older than y’all and my older brothers. But that meant that he knew what he wanted out of his life and was interested in me just starting to really find what I wanted out of mine. However, if the RV and travelling lifestyle hasn’t given it away yet, settling down and having a family wasn’t really on his to-do list. He was very upfront about it and I understood. While I connected with him like I had never done with anyone else before, I never imagined that this would happen. Honestly, I’m still not sure how this happened as I was pretty damn careful. But none of that matters, because I know this isn’t something he wants. So why bring this into his life and complicate things… [My voice trails off and I wonder yet again if he’d really want to know despite his saying he wasn’t looking to be tied to anyone other than the family he already had. “What about you?” Dahlia follows up Reba’s question with her own words. “Is this something that you want, Emma Jean? Because while I know your parents and brothers might not agree if you decide otherwise, this is your life, not theirs and you are free to do whatever you want moving forward.” The fierce protectiveness in her voice means more to me and was something I needed to hear more than I realized. Coming from a very religious family, more so with my parents than my brothers, the idea alone of telling them that I was pregnant was bad enough that I didn’t even want to think about any of my options or any discussion about them I might have with my family. Especially my mother and father. Picking up on the rising tension, Reba’s calming voice once again draws me back to the present. “There are different ways you can proceed from here, but what you need to remember is that we will always be here for you and will help you out any way that we can. I know a few different programs and such if you might want to go the adoption route.” “And you don’t have to talk about this with anyone you don’t want to until you are ready.” That alone assured me that neither Reba or Dahlia would tell my brothers what was going on with me. I didn’t have that assurance with Wendy. A part of me feeling horrible for not feeling like I could trust my childhood best friend with this, but she hadn’t felt like my best friend in so long that she had instead become Jonah’s future wife in my mind. And while Dahlia was Jasper’s wife and Reba would one day soon be Jackson’s, I didn’t have a complicated history with either of them. Another bubble of laughter bursts forth as I admit to myself that it didn’t matter who I had a complicated history with at this point, but rather I should be focusing on what I was going to do. With a nod, I let my body settle and look at both Dahlia and Reba. My hands turn over to grip theirs in an affectionate squeeze.] Thank you for both being here with me, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to just lay here under the stars for a little while longer. [“Of course.” Reba says without hesitation as she slowly sits up, pulling her hand back. Dahlia nods in agreement and sits up as well but not before pressing a soft kiss at my temple like I’ve seen her do with her own children. And then they’re gone back into the beach house as my gaze takes in all the stars above me, reminding me of my time under them with Pedro. How that first time with him had been so unexpected and amazing and precious to me. A part of me had doubted I would ever find someone interested enough in me to have that happen even once, let alone repeatedly with someone who clearly knew what they were doing. My heart rate picking up slightly at the memories of and with him, especially when we were out on one of our journeys under the stars. Was one of those times when we created the little one who had thrown everything in my life off course? Was he under the stars right now, camping out somewhere, writing for his travel blog or his next novel? For a brief moment, I questioned whether or not he was missing me before shaking my head and closing my eyes. When we parted ways, it was with the idea that we’d most likely see each other again once I was back out on the road so I knew he was more focused on his own journey until our paths crossed once more. That was all in the air now as who knew when, if ever, I’d travel again like I had with him. Under the stars without any cares beyond our current adventure. Quickly, I shut my eyes, unable to look at the stars anymore and what they symbolized to me now. Would I ever be able to see them without thinking of him again or what had come from our time together? Instead, I focus on the image I saw earlier in the day on the sonogram and the heartbeat that froze me and seemed to roar into my ears until I heard the doctor point out just how small my baby was. ‘No bigger than a sweet pea.’ Making this more real than when it’d been joked about it with Reba on the car ride from New Orleans.] I really don’t know what I’m doing here, Sweet Pea. [With a shaky breath, my body rolled over onto my knees to turn my back on the sky as my hands came up to rub my eyes and wipe away the remnants of any tears I shed. Then once I felt as composed as I was likely to get, I stood up and headed inside to try and figure out what my next step forward was going to be.] 

[easyfoodnetwork]

To Find Hope in American Cooking, James Beard Looked to the West Coast

James Beard in 1972 | Photo by Arthur Schatz/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

In an excerpt from The Man Who Ate Too Much, the culinary icon returns to his hometown and begins to articulate his vision for American cuisine

James Beard looms large in the American culinary canon. The name is now synonymous with the awards, known as the highest honors in American food, and the foundation behind them. But before his death in 1985, well before the existence of the foundation and the awards, Beard was a culinary icon. In The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, John Birdsall tells Beard’s life story, highlighting how Beard’s queerness contributed to the concept of American cuisine he introduced to a generation of cooks.

Beard’s ascent to food-world fame wasn’t immediate. He came to food after an attempt at a life as a performer, and following a stint in catering and a gig hosting his own cooking show, Beard’s early cookbooks weren’t smash hits, his point of view not yet fully evolved. In this excerpt from The Man Who Ate Too Much, Beard embarks on a cookbook-planning trip through the American West, including his hometown of Portland, Oregon, with new friend and collaborator Helen Evans Brown and her husband, Philip. It’s there, after a whirlwind 25 days of eating (which read as especially envy inducing now), that Beard begins to define American cuisine for himself and, eventually, the country. — Monica Burton

The Man Who Ate Too Much is out on October 6; buy it at Amazon or Bookshop.

American cooks in the early 1950s were in the grip of frenzy. Shiny new grills and rotisserie gadgets, advertised like cars, loaded with the latest features, were everywhere. Outdoor equipment and appliance manufacturers rushed to market with portable backyard barbecues and plug-in kitchen roasters, meant to give Americans everywhere — even dwellers in tight city apartments — an approximate taste of grilled patio meat.

Postwar technology and American manufacturing prowess propelled infrared broilers such as the Cal Dek and the Broil-Quik. An Air Force officer, Brigadier General Harold A. Bartron, retired to Southern California in 1948 and spent his time in tactical study of a proprietary rotisserie with a self-balancing spit. He named it the Bartron Grill.

There was the Smokadero stove and Big Boy barbecue. There were enclosed vertical grills with radiant heat, hibachis from post-occupation Japan, and the Skotch Grill, a portable barbecue with a red tartan design that looked like an ice bucket.

In New York City, the high-end adventure outfitter Abercrombie and Fitch and the kitchen emporiums of big department stores did a bustling business in these new symbols of postwar meat consumption. There was even an Upper East Side shop solely dedicated to them, Smoke Cookery, Inc. on East Fiftieth Street. The only trouble was that many buyers of these shiny new grown-up toys had no clue how to cook in them.

For weeks in the spring of 1953, Helen tested electric broiler recipes, an assignment from Hildegarde Popper, food editor of House & Garden magazine, for a story called “Everyday Broils.” A few broiler and rotisserie manufacturers sent their new models to Armada Drive for Helen to try.

“The subject turns out to be a huge one,” Helen wrote Popper; she had enough material to break the story into two parts. “Jim Beard, of cook book fame, was here when my rotisserie arrived,” she told Popper, “and he was a great help to me.”

Word got around the New York editor pool. Suddenly, Helen and James seemed the ideal collaborators, storywise, to cover the new subject of grill and rotisserie cooking: West Coast and East, female and male, California suburban patio cook and Manhattan bachelor gourmet.

Meanwhile, cookbook publishing was surging. Doubleday became the first house to hire a fulltime editor, Clara Claasen, to fill its stable with cookery authors.

Schaffner took Claasen to lunch to discuss how he might be able to help. “She is very much interested in the idea of an outdoors cookbook,” he wrote to Helen afterward. “This would combine barbecue, picnic, sandwich, campfire and every other aspect of outdoor eating.” Schaffner and Claasen lunched again. James and Helen’s “cooks’ controversy” idea had run out of gas (Schaffner hated the idea anyway, especially after reading first drafts of a few Beard–Brown “letters”), so Schaffner managed to steer Claasen toward a different kind of collaboration for his two clients.

In November 1953, Helen flew to New York. She and Schaffner met with Claasen at the Doubleday offices. On a handshake, in the absence of James (who only the day before had returned from France on the Queen Elizabeth), they decided on a collaboration: an outdoor cookery book to be authored by Helen Evans Brown and James A. Beard.

Everyone was happy: Schaffner for nailing a deal for two clients at once; Claasen for bringing new talent to Doubleday. Helen was getting what she needed: a book with a major publisher. James was getting what he wanted: a reason to get even closer to Helen. Perhaps this was only the first in a long future of collaborations; they might one day even open a kitchen shop together and sell a line of their own jams and condiments. The possibilities were endless.

Claasen was eager to draw up a formal contract. All she needed from Helen and James was an outline.

Under the glowing cabin lights of a westbound red-eye flight on April 3, 1954, James found himself eerily alone. TWA’s Super Constellation was an enormous propliner with seats for nearly a hundred passengers; that night, James was one of only four. He planned to rendezvous with the Browns in San Francisco later that week, but only after he took five days on his own in the city he’d loved as a boy. From there, the three of them would embark on a weeks-long research trip in the Browns’ Coronet convertible, stopping at wineries and cheese factories throughout Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Helen needed to do research for a magazine article she’d long wanted to write. She and Philip had asked James to join them five months earlier, in December 1953.

Nearly a decade after the end of the war, San Francisco was a place of resuscitated glamour, with much of the shimmer and confidence James had known in the city of his youth, when he and Elizabeth would ride the trains of the Shasta Route south.

His plane landed in drizzling rain. For his first luncheon of the trip, James chose a place of old comfort: the dim, wood-paneled Fly Trap on Sutter Street. He wore a suit of windowpane-check tweed (the jacket button straining above his stomach, his thin bow tie slightly askew), eating cold, cracked Dungeness and sautéed sand dabs. The stationery in his room at the Palace had an engraving across the top, an illustration of pioneers trudging next to oxen pulling a Conestoga wagon. Above them floated an apparition: the hotel’s neoclassical façade rising from the fog. “At the end of the trail,” it read, “stands the Palace Hotel.” James imagined himself the son of the pioneer he’d fancied his father to be. Was he now at the end of something or the beginning?

Courtesy W.W. Norton

Helen Evans Brown

He spent his days and nights eating: A luncheon of poulet sauté with Dr. A. L. Van Meter of the San Francisco branch of the Wine and Food Society (they had met on the French wine junket in 1949); dinner at the Pacific Heights home of Frank Timberlake, vice president of Guittard Chocolate; a trip to San Jose to tour the Almaden Winery and meet its owner, Louis Benoist, over a marvelous lunch of pâté, asparagus mousseline, and an omelet. James dined at the Mark Hopkins with Bess Whitcomb, his abiding mentor from the old Portland Civic Theatre days — she lived in Berkeley now and taught drama at a small college. She wore her silver hair in a short crop; her gaze was warm and deep as ever.

Helen and Philip arrived on Sunday, and on Monday the tour began with a day trip. Philip drove the Coronet across the Golden Gate Bridge north to the Napa Valley, with Helen riding shotgun and James colonizing the bench seat in back. The afternoon temperature crested in the mid-seventies and the hills were still green from winter rain. Masses of yellow wild-mustard flowers filled the vineyards. They tasted at the big four — Inglenook, Beaulieu, Charles Krug, and Louis Martini — and lunched with a winery publicist on ravioli, chicken with mushrooms, and small, sweet spring peas. James kept a detailed record of their meals in his datebook. Elena Zelayeta, the San Francisco cookbook author and radio personality, cooked them enchiladas suizas and chiffon cake.

Next day they crossed the bridge again but swung west from Highway 101 to visit the farm town of Tomales, not much more than a main street of stores and a filling station. Among the rise of green hills dotted with cows, at the farm and creamery of Louis Bononci, James had his first taste of Teleme, a washed-rind cheese with a subtly elastic texture and milky tang. Within its thin crust dusted with rice flour, James recognized the richness and polish of an old French cheese, crafted in an American setting of rusted pickups and ranchers perched on stools at diner counters. It stirred his senses and revived his love for green meadows with the cool, damp feel of Pacific fog lurking somewhere off the coast.

Philip drove west to the shore of fingerlike Tomales Bay, where they lunched on abalone and a smorgasbord that included the local Jack cheese and even more Teleme.

The car had become a mad ark of food.

The road stretched north along the coast: to Langlois, Oregon, with its green, tree-flocked hills converging in a shallow valley, where they stopped at Hans Hansen’s experimental Star Ranch. Born in Denmark, Hansen spent decades making Cheddar. In 1939, with scientists at Iowa State University and Oregon State College, Hansen had begun experimenting with what would be known as Langlois Blue Vein Cheese, a homogenized cows’-milk blue inoculated with Roquefort mold spores. (Production would eventually move to Iowa, where the cheese would be known as Maytag Blue.)

They hit Reedsport, Coquille, Coos Bay, Newport, Cloverdale, Bandon, and Tillamook. They stopped at cheese factories, candy shops, butchers’ counters, produce stands, and markets. Already stuffed with suitcases, the Coronet’s trunk became jammed with wine bottles and jars of honey and preserves; packets of sausage, dried fruit, nuts, and candy. The backseat around James filled up with bottles that rolled and clinked together on turns, with apples, tangerines, filberts, pears, and butcher-paper packets of sliced cured meat, smoked oysters, and hunks of Cheddar. The car had become a mad ark of food. James hauled anything regional and precious on board, as if later it would all prove to have been a myth if he didn’t carry some away as proof that it existed.

In Tualatin, south of Portland, they dropped in on James’s old friends from theater days, Mabelle and Ralph Jeffcott. To a crowd that included Mary Hamblet and her ailing mother, Grammie, Mabelle served baked shad and jellied salad, apple crisp, and the homemade graham bread — molasses-sweet and impossibly light — that was famous among her friends.

They lunched on fried razor clams and coleslaw at the Crab Broiler in Astoria and had martinis, kippered tuna, salmon cheeks, and Indian pudding at the Seaside cottage of James’s beloved friend Harvey Welch.

In Gearhart, James trudged out to Strawberry Knoll, walked across the dunes and onto the beach. He regarded Tillamook Head, just as he did as a boy at the start of summers. He felt a weird convergence of past and present: the sting of sand whipping his face and the smell of charred driftwood lingering in the rock-circled dugout pits of ancient cookouts.

For James, the Northwest displayed a delightfully slouchy elegance he’d almost forgotten about in New York. It had taste without snobbery. At the Pancake House in Portland, they brunched on Swedish pancakes with glasses of buttermilk and French 75 cocktails — the sort of high–low mix he had aimed for at Lucky Pierre. Why did Easterners have so much trouble grasping the idea?

Before a meal of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, they sipped a simple pheasant broth that, dolled up with half a dozen gaudy garnishes and called Consommé Louis-Philippe, would have been the jewel of Jack and Charlie’s “21” in New York. Food here had honesty. It declared what it was. Like James, it was anti-“gourmet.” Its purity was the ultimate elegance.

Thus far, James had fumbled at articulating a true American cooking. He’d taken rustic French dishes, called them by English names, and substituted American ingredients. There was something crude about such an approach. This trip had showed him American food made on French models — Gamay grapes and Roquefort spores and cheeses modeled on Camembert and Emmenthaler that tasted wonderful and were reaching for unique expressions, not just impersonating European originals. It had given James a clearer vision of American food taking root in the places it grew.

As a boy, he had glimpsed this with Chinese cooking, how a relative of the Kan family, a rural missionary, adapted her cooking to the ingredients at hand in the Oregon countryside. How her Chinese dishes took root there, blossomed into something new; how they became American.

They trekked to Seattle, where the Browns went to a hotel and James stayed with John Conway, his theater-director friend from the Carnegie Institute days. John’s wife, Dorothy, was a photographer. She shot formal portraits of James and Helen in the Conways’ kitchen — maybe Doubleday would use one as the author photo for the outdoor cookbook. They took an aerial tour of oyster beds and wandered Pike’s Place Market.

Philip then steered the Coronet eastward across Washington, through the town of Cashmere in the foothills of the Cascades, where they stopped at a diner for cube steak, cottage cheese, and pie that James noted as “wonderful” in his datebook. In Idaho, at a place called Templin’s Grill near Coeur d’Alene, they found excellent steak and hash browns. There was a Basque place along the way that made jellied beef sausage, and a diner in Idaho Falls with “fabulous” fried chicken and, as James scribbled in his daybook, “biscuits light as a feather.” The fried hearts and giblets were so delicious they bought a five-pound sack to stuff in the hotel fridge and eat in the car next day for lunch.

“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!”

The squat, industrial-looking Star Valley Swiss Cheese Factory in Thayne, Wyoming, with a backdrop of snow on the Wellsville Mountains, produced what James thought was the best Emmenthaler-style cheese he’d tasted outside of France, but this was American cheese. They had delicious planked steak and rhubarb tart in Salt Lake City, but bad fried chicken and awful pie in Winnemucca, Nevada, was the beginning of a sad coda to their journey.

Soon they were in Virginia City, home of Lucius Beebe — brilliant, bitchy, rich, alcoholic Lucius Beebe, dear friend to Jeanne Owen and the Browns and dismissive of James from the minute they met in New York City fifteen years back.

Lucius enjoyed the life of a magnifico in the nabob splendor of the Comstock Lode, among the graceful wooden neo-Renaissance mansions, peeling in the searing Nevada sun, built by nineteenth-century silver barons. His husband in all respects, save the marriage license and church wedding, was Chuck Clegg. Chuck was quarterback-handsome and courtly, in contrast to bloated, prickly Lucius. Helen and Philip were fond of them. They wanted to linger for a few days, which turned into four days of heavy drinking and blasting wit, much of it at James’s expense.

“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!” James wrote in his daybook. He disliked Virginia City, with its steep hills one couldn’t climb without wheezing. One day, they all had a picnic on the scrubby flank of a hill, under a brutal sun. Chuck and Lucius brought a Victorian hamper filled with fine china plates, Austrian crystal, silver, and antique damask napkins. They ate cold boned leg of lamb and beans cooked with port. They lingered so long, over so many bottles of Champagne, that James’s head became badly sunburned. Back at the motel, Philip, drunk, tried splashing James’s head with gin, hoping it would bring cooling relief. Everyone cackled at his plight.

Finally, twenty-five days after they set out from San Francisco, Philip steered the Coronet home to Pasadena.

“The trip is one of the most happy and valuable memories of my life,” he wrote to Schaffner from Pasadena. “I garnered a great deal of material, had a most nostalgic time in parts of the west most familiar to me and saw much I had never seen before. It was splendid, gastronomically speaking, to be able to see that there is hope in American cooking.”

The best and most interesting food in America was inseparable from the landscapes that produced it. It was all right there, in country diners and small-town grocers’ shops; in roadside dinner houses and bakeries. All you needed to do was look.

From The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard by John Birdsall. Copyright © 2020 by John Birdsall. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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James Beard in 1972 | Photo by Arthur Schatz/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

In an excerpt from The Man Who Ate Too Much, the culinary icon returns to his hometown and begins to articulate his vision for American cuisine

James Beard looms large in the American culinary canon. The name is now synonymous with the awards, known as the highest honors in American food, and the foundation behind them. But before his death in 1985, well before the existence of the foundation and the awards, Beard was a culinary icon. In The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, John Birdsall tells Beard’s life story, highlighting how Beard’s queerness contributed to the concept of American cuisine he introduced to a generation of cooks.

Beard’s ascent to food-world fame wasn’t immediate. He came to food after an attempt at a life as a performer, and following a stint in catering and a gig hosting his own cooking show, Beard’s early cookbooks weren’t smash hits, his point of view not yet fully evolved. In this excerpt from The Man Who Ate Too Much, Beard embarks on a cookbook-planning trip through the American West, including his hometown of Portland, Oregon, with new friend and collaborator Helen Evans Brown and her husband, Philip. It’s there, after a whirlwind 25 days of eating (which read as especially envy inducing now), that Beard begins to define American cuisine for himself and, eventually, the country. — Monica Burton

The Man Who Ate Too Much is out on October 6; buy it at Amazon or Bookshop.

American cooks in the early 1950s were in the grip of frenzy. Shiny new grills and rotisserie gadgets, advertised like cars, loaded with the latest features, were everywhere. Outdoor equipment and appliance manufacturers rushed to market with portable backyard barbecues and plug-in kitchen roasters, meant to give Americans everywhere — even dwellers in tight city apartments — an approximate taste of grilled patio meat.

Postwar technology and American manufacturing prowess propelled infrared broilers such as the Cal Dek and the Broil-Quik. An Air Force officer, Brigadier General Harold A. Bartron, retired to Southern California in 1948 and spent his time in tactical study of a proprietary rotisserie with a self-balancing spit. He named it the Bartron Grill.

There was the Smokadero stove and Big Boy barbecue. There were enclosed vertical grills with radiant heat, hibachis from post-occupation Japan, and the Skotch Grill, a portable barbecue with a red tartan design that looked like an ice bucket.

In New York City, the high-end adventure outfitter Abercrombie and Fitch and the kitchen emporiums of big department stores did a bustling business in these new symbols of postwar meat consumption. There was even an Upper East Side shop solely dedicated to them, Smoke Cookery, Inc. on East Fiftieth Street. The only trouble was that many buyers of these shiny new grown-up toys had no clue how to cook in them.

For weeks in the spring of 1953, Helen tested electric broiler recipes, an assignment from Hildegarde Popper, food editor of House & Garden magazine, for a story called “Everyday Broils.” A few broiler and rotisserie manufacturers sent their new models to Armada Drive for Helen to try.

“The subject turns out to be a huge one,” Helen wrote Popper; she had enough material to break the story into two parts. “Jim Beard, of cook book fame, was here when my rotisserie arrived,” she told Popper, “and he was a great help to me.”

Word got around the New York editor pool. Suddenly, Helen and James seemed the ideal collaborators, storywise, to cover the new subject of grill and rotisserie cooking: West Coast and East, female and male, California suburban patio cook and Manhattan bachelor gourmet.

Meanwhile, cookbook publishing was surging. Doubleday became the first house to hire a fulltime editor, Clara Claasen, to fill its stable with cookery authors.

Schaffner took Claasen to lunch to discuss how he might be able to help. “She is very much interested in the idea of an outdoors cookbook,” he wrote to Helen afterward. “This would combine barbecue, picnic, sandwich, campfire and every other aspect of outdoor eating.” Schaffner and Claasen lunched again. James and Helen’s “cooks’ controversy” idea had run out of gas (Schaffner hated the idea anyway, especially after reading first drafts of a few Beard–Brown “letters”), so Schaffner managed to steer Claasen toward a different kind of collaboration for his two clients.

In November 1953, Helen flew to New York. She and Schaffner met with Claasen at the Doubleday offices. On a handshake, in the absence of James (who only the day before had returned from France on the Queen Elizabeth), they decided on a collaboration: an outdoor cookery book to be authored by Helen Evans Brown and James A. Beard.

Everyone was happy: Schaffner for nailing a deal for two clients at once; Claasen for bringing new talent to Doubleday. Helen was getting what she needed: a book with a major publisher. James was getting what he wanted: a reason to get even closer to Helen. Perhaps this was only the first in a long future of collaborations; they might one day even open a kitchen shop together and sell a line of their own jams and condiments. The possibilities were endless.

Claasen was eager to draw up a formal contract. All she needed from Helen and James was an outline.

Under the glowing cabin lights of a westbound red-eye flight on April 3, 1954, James found himself eerily alone. TWA’s Super Constellation was an enormous propliner with seats for nearly a hundred passengers; that night, James was one of only four. He planned to rendezvous with the Browns in San Francisco later that week, but only after he took five days on his own in the city he’d loved as a boy. From there, the three of them would embark on a weeks-long research trip in the Browns’ Coronet convertible, stopping at wineries and cheese factories throughout Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Helen needed to do research for a magazine article she’d long wanted to write. She and Philip had asked James to join them five months earlier, in December 1953.

Nearly a decade after the end of the war, San Francisco was a place of resuscitated glamour, with much of the shimmer and confidence James had known in the city of his youth, when he and Elizabeth would ride the trains of the Shasta Route south.

His plane landed in drizzling rain. For his first luncheon of the trip, James chose a place of old comfort: the dim, wood-paneled Fly Trap on Sutter Street. He wore a suit of windowpane-check tweed (the jacket button straining above his stomach, his thin bow tie slightly askew), eating cold, cracked Dungeness and sautéed sand dabs. The stationery in his room at the Palace had an engraving across the top, an illustration of pioneers trudging next to oxen pulling a Conestoga wagon. Above them floated an apparition: the hotel’s neoclassical façade rising from the fog. “At the end of the trail,” it read, “stands the Palace Hotel.” James imagined himself the son of the pioneer he’d fancied his father to be. Was he now at the end of something or the beginning?

Courtesy W.W. Norton

Helen Evans Brown

He spent his days and nights eating: A luncheon of poulet sauté with Dr. A. L. Van Meter of the San Francisco branch of the Wine and Food Society (they had met on the French wine junket in 1949); dinner at the Pacific Heights home of Frank Timberlake, vice president of Guittard Chocolate; a trip to San Jose to tour the Almaden Winery and meet its owner, Louis Benoist, over a marvelous lunch of pâté, asparagus mousseline, and an omelet. James dined at the Mark Hopkins with Bess Whitcomb, his abiding mentor from the old Portland Civic Theatre days — she lived in Berkeley now and taught drama at a small college. She wore her silver hair in a short crop; her gaze was warm and deep as ever.

Helen and Philip arrived on Sunday, and on Monday the tour began with a day trip. Philip drove the Coronet across the Golden Gate Bridge north to the Napa Valley, with Helen riding shotgun and James colonizing the bench seat in back. The afternoon temperature crested in the mid-seventies and the hills were still green from winter rain. Masses of yellow wild-mustard flowers filled the vineyards. They tasted at the big four — Inglenook, Beaulieu, Charles Krug, and Louis Martini — and lunched with a winery publicist on ravioli, chicken with mushrooms, and small, sweet spring peas. James kept a detailed record of their meals in his datebook. Elena Zelayeta, the San Francisco cookbook author and radio personality, cooked them enchiladas suizas and chiffon cake.

Next day they crossed the bridge again but swung west from Highway 101 to visit the farm town of Tomales, not much more than a main street of stores and a filling station. Among the rise of green hills dotted with cows, at the farm and creamery of Louis Bononci, James had his first taste of Teleme, a washed-rind cheese with a subtly elastic texture and milky tang. Within its thin crust dusted with rice flour, James recognized the richness and polish of an old French cheese, crafted in an American setting of rusted pickups and ranchers perched on stools at diner counters. It stirred his senses and revived his love for green meadows with the cool, damp feel of Pacific fog lurking somewhere off the coast.

Philip drove west to the shore of fingerlike Tomales Bay, where they lunched on abalone and a smorgasbord that included the local Jack cheese and even more Teleme.

The car had become a mad ark of food.

The road stretched north along the coast: to Langlois, Oregon, with its green, tree-flocked hills converging in a shallow valley, where they stopped at Hans Hansen’s experimental Star Ranch. Born in Denmark, Hansen spent decades making Cheddar. In 1939, with scientists at Iowa State University and Oregon State College, Hansen had begun experimenting with what would be known as Langlois Blue Vein Cheese, a homogenized cows’-milk blue inoculated with Roquefort mold spores. (Production would eventually move to Iowa, where the cheese would be known as Maytag Blue.)

They hit Reedsport, Coquille, Coos Bay, Newport, Cloverdale, Bandon, and Tillamook. They stopped at cheese factories, candy shops, butchers’ counters, produce stands, and markets. Already stuffed with suitcases, the Coronet’s trunk became jammed with wine bottles and jars of honey and preserves; packets of sausage, dried fruit, nuts, and candy. The backseat around James filled up with bottles that rolled and clinked together on turns, with apples, tangerines, filberts, pears, and butcher-paper packets of sliced cured meat, smoked oysters, and hunks of Cheddar. The car had become a mad ark of food. James hauled anything regional and precious on board, as if later it would all prove to have been a myth if he didn’t carry some away as proof that it existed.

In Tualatin, south of Portland, they dropped in on James’s old friends from theater days, Mabelle and Ralph Jeffcott. To a crowd that included Mary Hamblet and her ailing mother, Grammie, Mabelle served baked shad and jellied salad, apple crisp, and the homemade graham bread — molasses-sweet and impossibly light — that was famous among her friends.

They lunched on fried razor clams and coleslaw at the Crab Broiler in Astoria and had martinis, kippered tuna, salmon cheeks, and Indian pudding at the Seaside cottage of James’s beloved friend Harvey Welch.

In Gearhart, James trudged out to Strawberry Knoll, walked across the dunes and onto the beach. He regarded Tillamook Head, just as he did as a boy at the start of summers. He felt a weird convergence of past and present: the sting of sand whipping his face and the smell of charred driftwood lingering in the rock-circled dugout pits of ancient cookouts.

For James, the Northwest displayed a delightfully slouchy elegance he’d almost forgotten about in New York. It had taste without snobbery. At the Pancake House in Portland, they brunched on Swedish pancakes with glasses of buttermilk and French 75 cocktails — the sort of high–low mix he had aimed for at Lucky Pierre. Why did Easterners have so much trouble grasping the idea?

Before a meal of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, they sipped a simple pheasant broth that, dolled up with half a dozen gaudy garnishes and called Consommé Louis-Philippe, would have been the jewel of Jack and Charlie’s “21” in New York. Food here had honesty. It declared what it was. Like James, it was anti-“gourmet.” Its purity was the ultimate elegance.

Thus far, James had fumbled at articulating a true American cooking. He’d taken rustic French dishes, called them by English names, and substituted American ingredients. There was something crude about such an approach. This trip had showed him American food made on French models — Gamay grapes and Roquefort spores and cheeses modeled on Camembert and Emmenthaler that tasted wonderful and were reaching for unique expressions, not just impersonating European originals. It had given James a clearer vision of American food taking root in the places it grew.

As a boy, he had glimpsed this with Chinese cooking, how a relative of the Kan family, a rural missionary, adapted her cooking to the ingredients at hand in the Oregon countryside. How her Chinese dishes took root there, blossomed into something new; how they became American.

They trekked to Seattle, where the Browns went to a hotel and James stayed with John Conway, his theater-director friend from the Carnegie Institute days. John’s wife, Dorothy, was a photographer. She shot formal portraits of James and Helen in the Conways’ kitchen — maybe Doubleday would use one as the author photo for the outdoor cookbook. They took an aerial tour of oyster beds and wandered Pike’s Place Market.

Philip then steered the Coronet eastward across Washington, through the town of Cashmere in the foothills of the Cascades, where they stopped at a diner for cube steak, cottage cheese, and pie that James noted as “wonderful” in his datebook. In Idaho, at a place called Templin’s Grill near Coeur d’Alene, they found excellent steak and hash browns. There was a Basque place along the way that made jellied beef sausage, and a diner in Idaho Falls with “fabulous” fried chicken and, as James scribbled in his daybook, “biscuits light as a feather.” The fried hearts and giblets were so delicious they bought a five-pound sack to stuff in the hotel fridge and eat in the car next day for lunch.

“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!”

The squat, industrial-looking Star Valley Swiss Cheese Factory in Thayne, Wyoming, with a backdrop of snow on the Wellsville Mountains, produced what James thought was the best Emmenthaler-style cheese he’d tasted outside of France, but this was American cheese. They had delicious planked steak and rhubarb tart in Salt Lake City, but bad fried chicken and awful pie in Winnemucca, Nevada, was the beginning of a sad coda to their journey.

Soon they were in Virginia City, home of Lucius Beebe — brilliant, bitchy, rich, alcoholic Lucius Beebe, dear friend to Jeanne Owen and the Browns and dismissive of James from the minute they met in New York City fifteen years back.

Lucius enjoyed the life of a magnifico in the nabob splendor of the Comstock Lode, among the graceful wooden neo-Renaissance mansions, peeling in the searing Nevada sun, built by nineteenth-century silver barons. His husband in all respects, save the marriage license and church wedding, was Chuck Clegg. Chuck was quarterback-handsome and courtly, in contrast to bloated, prickly Lucius. Helen and Philip were fond of them. They wanted to linger for a few days, which turned into four days of heavy drinking and blasting wit, much of it at James’s expense.

“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!” James wrote in his daybook. He disliked Virginia City, with its steep hills one couldn’t climb without wheezing. One day, they all had a picnic on the scrubby flank of a hill, under a brutal sun. Chuck and Lucius brought a Victorian hamper filled with fine china plates, Austrian crystal, silver, and antique damask napkins. They ate cold boned leg of lamb and beans cooked with port. They lingered so long, over so many bottles of Champagne, that James’s head became badly sunburned. Back at the motel, Philip, drunk, tried splashing James’s head with gin, hoping it would bring cooling relief. Everyone cackled at his plight.

Finally, twenty-five days after they set out from San Francisco, Philip steered the Coronet home to Pasadena.

“The trip is one of the most happy and valuable memories of my life,” he wrote to Schaffner from Pasadena. “I garnered a great deal of material, had a most nostalgic time in parts of the west most familiar to me and saw much I had never seen before. It was splendid, gastronomically speaking, to be able to see that there is hope in American cooking.”

The best and most interesting food in America was inseparable from the landscapes that produced it. It was all right there, in country diners and small-town grocers’ shops; in roadside dinner houses and bakeries. All you needed to do was look.

From The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard by John Birdsall. Copyright © 2020 by John Birdsall. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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[televisedbirdwatching]

A Picnic against Harbor Drive: Neighborhood Associations and the Fight Against Freeways

In his book “Portland in Three Centuries,” historian and PSU professor Carl Abbott writes: “On a summer day when the mountains and coast beckoned many Portlanders, 250 adults and 100 children spread their blankets and opened their coolers and baskets on a barren strip between four lanes of busy traffic on Front Avenue and an even busier four lanes on Harbor Drive.”

This postcard shows Front Street to the left, a grassy median, and Harbor Drive plus offramps. Steel Bridge in the background. From here.

The picnic took place on August 19th, 1969, organized by a fresh group of political activists. From the 1950’s through the 1970’s, traffic planners got a little highway crazy: a 1955 report by the Oregon Department of Transportation recommended the construction of 14 new freeways in the Portland Metro area. Even after Interstate 5 was constructed on the east side of the river, city planners wanted to expand Harbor Drive on the west side of the river, completely cutting off pedestrian access to the Willamette downtown.

Harbor drive no longer exists- today, we know of it as Tom McCall Waterfront Park. Though the park bears Governor McCall’s name, we can thank the efforts of a few civic-minded Portland families hosting a picnic on a busy median on a summer day. They called their group Riverfront for People.

Here’s a photo from one of the picnics. From here. 

The picnic was the first of a number of such demonstrations over the course of that summer. The protest was organized by Allison Belcher and her husband Bob. Allison said, “I was ironing clothes, as was the wont of females to do of that time and I heard on the radio that the Highway Commission was going to put this road right down through where the Oregon Journal property was along the river, so I called up Ira Keller [chairman of the Portland Development Commission—one of the city’s most powerful, mercurial figures] on the telephone and I said, ‘what are you doing, why are you doing this?’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t be bothered—you’re just a housewife.’” This quote and many of the other quotes from the RFP organizers come from an excellent interview conducted by Tim DuRoche, here). 

Allison started making phone calls, reaching out to people she had met through a shared interest in the upcoming 1970 City Council election. In the meantime, her husband Bob got in touch with his architect coworkers- folks interested in the historical preservation of west-side waterfront buildings and folks with a vision for a more vibrant Portland than the east side riverfront’s maze of concrete represented. 

This is an image from a 1932 planning report by Harland Bartholemew. Notice the riverfront green space on both sides of the river. During the war, the eastside riverfront would be lost to industrial uses and freeway I-5. Notice the “city beautiful” style buildings. City of Portland Archives. 

This gif from this bikeportland article shows ODOT’s proposal to widen I-5 along the eastbank of the river even further, creating a ridiculous overhang over the eastbank multi-use path. 

The picnic worked. The Riverfront for People organizers got the attention of Governor Tom McCall, who, even before the picnics, had spoken about his hope of creating a public greenspace along the waterfront. The alliance between the regular folks- the 350 people who showed up to have summer picnics on a highway median- and the political establishment built a powerful coalition able to resist the 1970’s hunger for more miles of concrete.

However, despite their new and powerful ally, Harbor Drive wouldn’t officially close until 1974. That’s five years of difficult political work to achieve their goal. This political work helped inspire a new generation of citizen leaders in Portland politics. Carl Abbott writes: “The process of neighborhood planning between 1957 and 1967 was as straightforward as its content. City Planning Commission reports make no reference to neighborhood groups or citizen involvement. They were prepared by city employees for their colleagues in city hall.” 

However, as part of the Harbor Drive campaign, Belcher and others began showing up to city hall meetings, demanding to have their opinions considered in the decisions that shape their city. Belcher said, “It was something new for Portland to go down to City Hall and testify—everything had always been run by these people who’d been in power for a long time and they didn’t discuss it with anyone. There really hadn’t been much change or access up to that point.” PSU professor Ernie Bonner notes that 120 people attended the January 14th, 1970 meeting of the State Highway Commission, where a closure date for Harbor Drive was officially set. 

Harbor Drive helped usher in a new era of citizen engagement in local issues. Allison and Bob Belcher protested alongside Vera Katz (namesake of the Eastside Riverfront Recreational path) and Gretchen and Steve Kafoury (Parents to commissioner Deborah, and longtime political officeholders themselves) to demand that the City Club of Portland allow women as members. Bob Belcher: “What began with Model Cities and then Neil Goldschmidt coming on to Council … was part of this something wonderful that was happening in Portland of that time. It was post-Kennedy—there was a huge energy in the air … there was a lot going on, all that turmoil in Vietnam, but there was an underlying current of all these things on a national level. …Our great virtue was the times energized us—it was a hopeful time. We were pretty outraged and we were young enough that we thought we could make a big noise about this.”

Their ‘young outrage,’ ability to build connections with establishment politicians like McCall, and savvy campaigns for councillors Anderson, McCready, and Goldschmidt would create the initial energy required to defeat the proposal for the Mt. Hood Freeway when it came up  in 1975, and would then help to divert the funds necessary to create the first branch of the MAX light rail line in the metro region. Activists were also successful in defeating a plan to build a 12-story parking garage on the site that is now Pioneer Courthouse Square.

A picture from the early days of the Marquam Bridge. Photo here. 

The west side of the city, with Harbor Drive. Look at all of that open space between the Standard Insurance Building on 5th and the riverfront! Photo Here. 

In 1973, councilman Goldschmidt became Mayor Goldschmidt, and created the Office of Neighborhood Associations. This plan helped formalize a pathway for democratic engagement in city politics. However, the neighborhood associations could be an institution that’s beginning to show its age. In 2019, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly picked a fight with the neighborhood associations in Portland. Quoting from this article in the WW, she argues “Eudaly says neighborhood associations too often represent white homeowners and exclude renters, people of color and immigrants. And, she says, they serve as gatekeepers who stand in the way of denser development and the construction of more affordable housing.”

Eudaly proposed an ordinance that would help bring new voices and interest groups to official budget, land use, and development discussions; discussions currently limited to the formally-recognized and geographically-based neighborhood groups. The WW notes “currently, six identity-based groups—including the Urban League, the Latino Network, and the Immigrant & Refugee Community Organization—receive funding,” but are not currently invited to participate in those discussions. Eudaly’s ordinance hoped to change that. 

2019’s Eudaly v. Neighborhood Association title fight portrayed the neighborhood associations as the white, home-owning, baby-boomer villains: a political vanguard keeping people with younger, fresher ideas out of the traditional channels of political access. These, of course, being the same villains who once organized to stop the expansion of two freeways, created a key downtown greenspace, forced the city to adopt a progressive view of transit planning, and helped establish systems for democratic engagement in city government.

The Portland west side waterfront today. Photo. 

In his interview with the Belchers, DuRoche asked “if we were in danger of becoming complacent or resting too much on the laurels of past successes —and forgetting how to organize and coalesce around neighborhood, regional issues—I was greeted with a rousing, “Yes.”

“I would frame it this way,” Bob Belcher elaborates. “With this event of 40 years ago, this was kind of like our neighborhood—downtown. We lived in Irvington, but in a way, we worked downtown, we played down there, we just wanted it better. …These days we’re grappling with a regional project [the Columbia River Crossing] that has a misunderstood impact on this city and surrounding, adjacent neighborhoods and all kinds of ramifications that we can’t begin to understand. It’s ended up to be not just a simple neighborhood issue that a lot of us in the past could identify with and get rallied to, with an Allison Belcher haranguing us to get out and go to the picnic. It’s far more complex … how do we make the point these days?”

The Columbia River Crossing is no longer the Freeway Fight du jour: attention has now shifted to the I-5 freeway expansion through the Rose Quarter. It’s worth taking another look at Bob’s words above: are freeway projects today really more difficult to understand, ‘far more complex,’ and not just ‘simple neighborhood issues?’

In my last article, I wrote about the Seattle Labor Temple; at one point, a bustling center for labor activism; today, nearly empty. Less than a mile away, three glass domes built by Amazon serve as a new kind of temple to the American Worker. It’s clear from these features of the built environment that the nature of labor has changed. Perhaps labor activism needs to change as well. Considering Bob Belcher’s perspective, how have the fights against freeways changed? How does transportation activism need to change? How do the traditional methods of civic engagement need to change?

However, I think the other thing to consider is the effectiveness of Allison Belcher’s simple protest- a picnic in an unlikely place- and the spirit of activism it inspired in the Portland community. At the end of the day, said Belcher and fellow organizer Jim Howell, it was really about giving their kids a chance to get to the river. If we let the freeway take over the riverbank on both sides, they couldn’t have that chance. “It wasn’t political,” said Howell. “It was Civic.”

-----

I tend to get deep into research holes while writing these. This is part bibliography and part recommendations. 

Carl Abbott’s book “Portland in Three Centuries.”

Carl Abbott’s book “Politics, Planning, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City”

https://www.pdx.edu/usp/planpdxorg-riverfront-people

https://metroscape.imspdx.org/a-riverfront-park-runs-through-it?print=print

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2019/09/11/chloe-eudalys-neighborhood-war-the-populist-commissioner-hits-back-against-critics-who-say-shes-strangling-portland-democracy/

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/archives/article/24741

http://rebelmetropolis.org/the-portland-riverfront-that-almost-was/

https://portlandtribune.com/but/239-news/463929-376278-learning-from-portlands-harbor-drive

https://www.cnu.org/what-we-do/build-great-places/harbor-drive

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2019/04/12/chance-repeat-history

[gethealthy18-blog]

A Quiet Weekend Getaway to Pacific City, Oregon

New Post has been published on https://healingawerness.com/news/a-quiet-weekend-getaway-to-pacific-city-oregon/

A Quiet Weekend Getaway to Pacific City, Oregon

My husband and I are very fortunate to come from families with strong family traditions. And by some divine (or non-divine!) intervention, none of our traditions overlap. I joke with people that one of the best decisions Curt made was marrying a Canadian Jew. We never have to decide whose house to go to on Thanksgiving or Christmas and it’s safe to say Curt is available on all Jewish holidays. But once we got married we made a conscious decision to start some traditions of our own. Given that we love to travel, it’s no surprise that our “tradition” has turned into a trip together in the middle of the holiday season. While we are incredibly grateful for our communities, setting aside a few days to escape the holiday madness has turned out to be a really great choice for the both of us. And for year #2 of our holiday travels we picked: Pacific City, Oregon.

Now this is where I should add some context. Last year we travelled to Hawaii and while it was a lovely escape (and the weather can’t be beat!) we didn’t leave feeling the most refreshed and energized. Hawaii is beautiful but it’s busy and there is A LOT to do. What we’re beginning to realize is that our ideal holiday escape needs to be a bit quieter and under-the-radar. We’ve always found our best trips to be in the off-season- Banff in the off-season was one of our favorites of all time- so we thought: “why not skip the beach and go for something a little off the beaten path?” That’s how we landed on Pacific City, Oregon.

Since moving to the West Coast I have sadly travelled very little of the Pacific Northwest. Until this trip I had been to British Columbia (twice) but never to Oregon or Washington. We only had 4 days and the flights between San Francisco and Portland are super cheap we opted for a trip to Oregon. This is where I should also add that we love.our.dog meaning we travel with him as often as we can. So we decided to fly into Portland and then head to the Oregon Coast for 3 days of rest and relaxation.

There are two Oregon coast towns that have been on my bucket list: Pacific City + Bandon, Oregon. I’d love to get to Bandon one day but it actually makes more sense for us to drive there since it’s quite a long drive even from Portland. Given our time constraints and the fact that Pacific City is under 2 hours from Portland I knew we’d landed on the right spot. So now let’s get into the nitty gritty because even though I want to keep this small surfer town a secret forever, we are kinda obsessed and couldn’t not share it with you.

Where is Pacific City Oregon?

Pacific City is a coastal Oregon town roughly 2 hours west and slightly south of Portland. Some of you may be familiar with Tillamook Dairy and Tillamook National Forest. It is a 20-30 minute drive south of there. There is not a ton going on in the area but if you love stunning coastal views, rainforest hikes, sand dunes, surfing (or watching surfers) and a few delicious food options you will love Pacific City.

We flew into Portland and spent the night there before heading out the next morning for the coast. For those of you planning a similar trip, we stayed at the Kimpton Monaco (dog-friendly!) and somehow managed to eat at 4 different restaurants in a 16 hour time span. Note: do NOT miss out on a meal at Shalom Y’all or skip out on Blue Star Donuts. Both are worth the wait!

Where to stay in Pacific City

Bar none you have to stay at Headlands Lodge + Spa. I actually found out about these guys on Instagram when they messaged me over 2 years ago about coming to visit. It was right in the middle of our wedding planning so timing wasn’t ideal and I was not particularly interested in travelling. I saved a link to their website and knew I’d be back one day. These days I prefer not to travel on sponsored trips as there can be a lot of pressure to capture things and not really live in the moment. That’s why I chose not to reach out to them as The Healthy Maven. Curt and I just travelled on our own and payed for our stay. To say that we fell in love with this place is an understatement.

The rooms all have ocean views and our room in particular had a beautiful open tub, fireplace and insanely comfortable bed. Not to mention that they are super dog-friendly and even left a bed, a bowl, treats and note for Bodhi when we arrived. The staff is super friendly and accommodating and you cannot beat hot tub views of the Pacific and direct walking access to the beach.

What to do in Pacific City Oregon

The piece that Curt and I loved the most about Pacific City was that there was plenty to do, but not so much that you felt badly sitting on the balcony reading or lounging in the hot tub. This is a destination where relaxation and activity have a perfect marriage. Here are some of our favorite things to do in Pacific City:

Walk the beach + Climb the Sand Dune

Like the California coastline, the Oregon coast is beautiful. Walking along the beach is so serene and quiet. Enjoy the views of Haystack Rock or if you’re up for it climb the massive sand dune at the end of Cape Kiwanda. Fair warning: This is no joke of a sand dune. Prepare for an epic uphill battle.

Hike through Rainforest 

What makes the Oregon coast different from California is that it’s full of beautiful rainforest terrain. I’ve never seen that many wild mushrooms growing in one place. It is peaceful and stunning! Our favorite hikes:

Whelan Island Loop – veer off to the beach. It is quiet, beautiful and the perfect place for your dog to run around

Sitka Sedge Hike – an easy 3.5 miler through the rainforest and coast. Heads up: in the fall and winter it is Snowy Plover mating season to prepare to keep your dog on leash.

Hike from Pacific City – there wasn’t a name for this trail but if you hike directly from town over to Dory Pointe Loop you can catch a trail behind the houses that takes you up into the hills with beautiful views of the coast and secluded rainforest hiking.

Surf or Watch the Surfers

Curt is a surfer but this trip he opted to leave his gear at home. That didn’t stop us from spending many hours watching the surfers out catching waves. If you don’t have your gear, head over to Moment Surf Co to rent some for a couple of hours. If you’re there in December like we were you’re also likely to see some whales out there alongside the surfers.

Go clamming, crabbing or fishing

Again, we didn’t get around to doing this partially because it was cold but also not a great activity with a dog. Would love to try it out on another trip though.

When you get tired of all the activity, you know it’s time to eat!

Where to Eat in Pacific City Oregon

There are not a lot of options on where to eat in Pacific City but of the places that exist they are pretty damn good.

Meridian – this was the restaurant at Headlands that specializes in local, pacific northwest cuisine. It’s definitely pricey but the food is good! If I’m being completely honest: it wasn’t mind blowing but I did appreciate the focus on local ingredients and the convenience of it being right in our hotel couldn’t be beat.

Pelican Brewing Co – in many ways Pelican is what put Pacific City on the map. They have a huge array of craft beers and standard pub food. The food isn’t incredible but it also isn’t bad. Perfect for an easy dinner or food alongside a beer flight.

Ben & Jeff’s Tacos -SO GOOD. Get the fish tacos and guac and chips. We tried this on the last day but I wish we’d gone sooner so we could have had another meal here. It’s counter/window service so perfect for a casual lunch.

Stimulus Coffee – the local coffee shop in Pacific City. Coffee is great and bread is freshly baked each day. Perfect for a quick morning breakfast or snack.

All in all, Curt and I loved our stay in Pacific City and definitely plan to go back. I’d imagine it’s more bustling in the summer but being there “off-season” was great too – especially for the surfing and whale-watching which arguably means we weren’t there off-season at all. If you’re looking for a quick weekend escape on the west coast, I cannot recommend Pacific City enough!

Like this post? Here are a few other travel guides you might enjoy:

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[samanthasroberts]

Hunting Bigfoot: 4 Things You Learn Chasing Fiction

I recently moved to a snowier, woodsier part of the world and noticed one day while taking a shortcut home that Bigfoot probably lives near me. There are a lot of trees and foreboding areas that look like the sorts of places in which gentle folk like me are made into the forest brides of beast-men. But how could I know for sure?

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s finding the worst bar in any given town and making it my own. I easily located this town’s scruffiest bar that featured dead animals mounted on walls, and in no time had found no less than one man who claimed that he had heard from someone several years ago that there was a guy who saw Bigfoot around here once. Hot damn! A solid lead!

On the promise of picking up his bar tab and also returning to the bar later and picking up more of a bar tab, I got this guy to join me on a hunt in the woods. Now, you may be asking, “Felix, did you just pay a drunk stranger to take you into the woods alone?” And to that I say: You forgot that I got him to bring a gun.

This is Dan. He’s loaded with beer and ammunition!

#4. Drinking Outdoors Is Fun

My new friend Dan isn’t the sort of man who appreciates small talk, pop culture, or me. But I bought road beers and we were pretty much set to have an adventure. We drove about 20 minutes out of town to a massive swath of forest that Dan told me had a big lake somewhere in the middle of it and was the place some people said Bigfoot had been spotted. Already it had grown from maybe one guy to some people. I was super psyched.

In preparation for our journey, we packed not just beers but several snacks, an emergency flare (lest Bigfoot abduct us while a helicopter is flying overhead), and outdoorsy crap like a compass, a small hatchet, some matches, and a mickey of whiskey.

I’m not much for hiking but luckily neither is Dan, so we were in the woods for a solid 15 minutes before we stopped to have a drink. Our brew of choice was a fine Canadian ale known as Flying Monkeys Smashbomb Atomic IPA. I bought it solely based on the silly name, but it was actually pretty fantastic and I solidly recommend it for all your Bigfoot-hunting needs.

It’d be better if there were actually monkeys serving it, but other than that, A+.

Dan and I had a good sit in the woods, during which Dan proceeded to tell me about his younger days in a biker gang and a variety of related activities I won’t relate here, because I’m dumb but not that dumb. This was some secret-keeping beer we were having, and Dan may not have been the best tour guide in retrospect, but here we were, in the woods, with a gun. A gun and stories of Dan using a pool cue to destroy an entire room full of men in the most brutal, Deadpool ways possible. I’m glad I met this strange fellow.

Several beers later and Dan and I were having a pretty decent time, still within sight of the road. But alas, this was no joke expedition … or, well, it was, but I was still looking for Bigfoot. We had work to do.

#3. Losing Yourself Is Easier Than Finding Bigfoot

We set out in a direction I will call straight ahead. I know we packed a compass, but it was packed and, honestly, would it have made a difference to know if we were headed north or east? How could it have? We were looking for a legendary man-ape.

Dan told me as we walked that coyote activity in this area has been very much on the rise lately. There’s just a huge population of them. I’ve never seen a coyote outside of a Warner Bros. cartoon and was having a hard time reconciling my image of a cartoon wielding an anvil with an actual wild dog that probably has rabies tearing open my scrotum. Dan assured me they rarely attack humans unless they’re starving or in large groups, then, without missing a beat, added, “Or maybe not.” I almost forgot Dan is not a woodsman, merely a fellow drunk I met at a bar, and I am about as much an expert on what we’re doing as he is.

“I eat a lot of Jack Link’s, though.”

We stumbled upon a number of tracks that could have belonged to Foot, but definitely not Bigfoot, unless I have been grossly misled regarding sizing in this matter. Most were probably squirrels and assorted other woodland turds, but there were definitely some deer tracks as well, and in my mind that was close. The bigger the animal, the closer to Bigfoot. If we found moose tracks we’d be pretty much where we needed to be.

We trudged on through snow-covered underbrush, slightly tipsy and with no clear direction. Dan had brought with him a 20 gauge shotgun, which he said would probably work for taking out Bigfoot if we got him to stand still long enough. I’m no gunsmith and assumed any shotgun was probably good for blowing a Bigfoot’s leg off, until Dan told me this was his rabbit-hunting gun. He had a license only for small game this year, and he wasn’t going to get fined by bringing a higher-powered rifle into the woods when it wasn’t season for hunting something like elk. Dan had no faith in our expedition. Although he did point out that, if we shot Bigfoot with the 20 gauge it’d probably slow him down enough for some photos, so I should be fast with my phone and snap a pic or two. Maybe see if he’s down for a selfie.

#2. Winter Is Stupid

The worst time to do anything is winter time. According to my phone, it was about 4 below zero. For you Celsius types, that’s 20 below. Why the hell would Bigfoot be out in this silly-ass weather? Even bears have the intelligence to hibernate. Bigfoot should be snoozing under a pile of tarps in an old fishing cabin.

There was a brief moment when I encountered a smell that could be best described as unwashed skunk vagina somewhere out in the woods. I heard a rustling in the underbrush, and I thought we might be on to something. For those who doubt the veracity of my claims, I have photo evidence:

Got wood? Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ahhh …

Like all good photos of Bigfoot, this one mostly requires you to be as drunk as I was when I took it and to have a lot of faith that I know the sight/smell of Bigfoot’s dick when I see it. But for real, do you see that in there? I know it looks like a twig, but I ask you, what do you think Bigfoot’s dick would look like? Probably a big, veiny twig, right?

Before I string you along anymore, I’ll let you know that was a twig. Bigfoot’s dick, even if it is twig-like, is probably attached to a Bigfoot and not a tree like this one was. But did you feel the suspense there for a second? Now you’re living in my world. The world of a Bigfoot hunter!

#1. Bigfoot Is Not Real

Let’s assume for a moment Bigfoot is real, the title of this section notwithstanding. He’s generally considered a “he” right? Not to point out the sex so much as the singular. There’s just one. Bigfoot’s a lone wolf, him and his veiny twig-dick, wandering the woods and stealing forest brides and whatnot. Most Bigfoot sightings have been in Washington state, California, and Oregon. He’s basically a West Coast kind of guy. I’m on the East Coast, so right away my chances are pretty pathetic. Sure, New York and Ohio have some sightings, but so does Russia. Point is, I’m in the wrong neighborhood, and I’m looking for one guy. One big, hairy guy who makes a point of never being found, because no one’s ever found him. Do you know what the odds are of me finding him?

I actually calculated the odds on this for you, in case you’re not good at these complex, veiny equations. Keeping in mind the time of year Bigfoot is most often sighted in these various locations, as well as the time of day and methods used for tracking Bigfoot and the actual odds of me finding him here, at this time, were fuck no. Fuck no I can’t find Bigfoot, because he’s not real.

Consider that humankind has found the coldest natural object in the entire universe, fossils from the first living veiny beasts on Earth, that stupid affluenza kid, and numerous missing plane crashes. If there were a race of hairy man-beasts populating the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else in North America, there would have been some kind of definitive evidence proposed by people who are not named Bubba or Cooter.

Dan and I finished our beers in the woods. We found one track that was probably mine.

Size 11 … ladies. Or guys who want to buy me shoes.

I also found a frozen turd that really made me laugh but the picture turned out pretty blurry due to my laughing as I took the photo. It wasn’t a Bigfoot turd, probably a raccoon or something. Still, that’s hilarious to me.

Dan decided he’d had enough of being in the woods with me, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d mostly wasted our day and provided little to no purpose for our journey other than the laziest attempt ever to discover a cryptozoological legend. Fortunately, that made my attempt just as relevant as anyone else’s, because come on. What would be a “serious” attempt at finding Bigfoot in 2016? Some kind of thermal-imaging drone and satellite tracking? That seems like an expensive prospect for a big fatty waste of time.

Dan called his wife to pick him up once we got back to the road. She seemed like a nice lady who could fight me and win with little effort. Neither of them offered me a ride. As I watched them drive off, I wondered if perhaps Bigfoot was now watching me from the trees and feeling a kinship with me as I, too, was now alone. But of course he wasn’t, because remember, he doesn’t exist. He and that veiny dick I’ve been asked to keep writing about are full-on fiction. No, the only stranger watching me from the woods was a friendly serial killer or public wanker.

I wondered why it is that so many people seem enamored with the idea of Bigfoot. Is it the mystery? The idea that, in a world of smartphones and WiFi and driverless cars, we could have somehow overlooked a man-beast living right under our noses? Possibly. Mostly, I think, it’s what I like to call Dorf Contrarianism. This is the idea that a stupid person will dig in like a tick when confronted with something they feel threatened by, in an intellectual fashion, telling them they’re wrong. The person doing it may not be trying to intimidate our Dorf, or even patronize them or talk down to them in any way, but that is how Dorf perceives it, because Dorf is not smart enough to know why it’s happening but is smart enough to know they’re being corrected. And they don’t like it. So they outwardly refuse it so thoroughly they must embrace the very opposite. They must hunt Bigfoot, simply because he is not real. They must drink that moonshine because it could make them go blind. They must fuck that cousin even if the baby’s going to always be leaning a little to the left. Such is the contrarian nature of Dorf. And that’s what keeps Bigfoot alive.

Check out other mythical monsters of lore and bull crap in 5 Myths That People Don’t Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes, and fear the shelled back of The Beast of Busco in 7 Monsters That Bigfoot Hunters Are Too Scared To Believe In.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see why ghosts are definitely real in 6 Most Eerily Convincing Ghost Videos On YouTube – The Spit Take, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook, and see if you can find Bigfoot in the comments. We hear he’s a fan.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/hunting-bigfoot-4-things-you-learn-chasing-fiction/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/hunting-bigfoot-4-things-you-learn-chasing-fiction/

[jimdsmith34]

Hunting Bigfoot: 4 Things You Learn Chasing Fiction

I recently moved to a snowier, woodsier part of the world and noticed one day while taking a shortcut home that Bigfoot probably lives near me. There are a lot of trees and foreboding areas that look like the sorts of places in which gentle folk like me are made into the forest brides of beast-men. But how could I know for sure?

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s finding the worst bar in any given town and making it my own. I easily located this town’s scruffiest bar that featured dead animals mounted on walls, and in no time had found no less than one man who claimed that he had heard from someone several years ago that there was a guy who saw Bigfoot around here once. Hot damn! A solid lead!

On the promise of picking up his bar tab and also returning to the bar later and picking up more of a bar tab, I got this guy to join me on a hunt in the woods. Now, you may be asking, “Felix, did you just pay a drunk stranger to take you into the woods alone?” And to that I say: You forgot that I got him to bring a gun.

This is Dan. He’s loaded with beer and ammunition!

#4. Drinking Outdoors Is Fun

My new friend Dan isn’t the sort of man who appreciates small talk, pop culture, or me. But I bought road beers and we were pretty much set to have an adventure. We drove about 20 minutes out of town to a massive swath of forest that Dan told me had a big lake somewhere in the middle of it and was the place some people said Bigfoot had been spotted. Already it had grown from maybe one guy to some people. I was super psyched.

In preparation for our journey, we packed not just beers but several snacks, an emergency flare (lest Bigfoot abduct us while a helicopter is flying overhead), and outdoorsy crap like a compass, a small hatchet, some matches, and a mickey of whiskey.

I’m not much for hiking but luckily neither is Dan, so we were in the woods for a solid 15 minutes before we stopped to have a drink. Our brew of choice was a fine Canadian ale known as Flying Monkeys Smashbomb Atomic IPA. I bought it solely based on the silly name, but it was actually pretty fantastic and I solidly recommend it for all your Bigfoot-hunting needs.

It’d be better if there were actually monkeys serving it, but other than that, A+.

Dan and I had a good sit in the woods, during which Dan proceeded to tell me about his younger days in a biker gang and a variety of related activities I won’t relate here, because I’m dumb but not that dumb. This was some secret-keeping beer we were having, and Dan may not have been the best tour guide in retrospect, but here we were, in the woods, with a gun. A gun and stories of Dan using a pool cue to destroy an entire room full of men in the most brutal, Deadpool ways possible. I’m glad I met this strange fellow.

Several beers later and Dan and I were having a pretty decent time, still within sight of the road. But alas, this was no joke expedition … or, well, it was, but I was still looking for Bigfoot. We had work to do.

#3. Losing Yourself Is Easier Than Finding Bigfoot

We set out in a direction I will call straight ahead. I know we packed a compass, but it was packed and, honestly, would it have made a difference to know if we were headed north or east? How could it have? We were looking for a legendary man-ape.

Dan told me as we walked that coyote activity in this area has been very much on the rise lately. There’s just a huge population of them. I’ve never seen a coyote outside of a Warner Bros. cartoon and was having a hard time reconciling my image of a cartoon wielding an anvil with an actual wild dog that probably has rabies tearing open my scrotum. Dan assured me they rarely attack humans unless they’re starving or in large groups, then, without missing a beat, added, “Or maybe not.” I almost forgot Dan is not a woodsman, merely a fellow drunk I met at a bar, and I am about as much an expert on what we’re doing as he is.

“I eat a lot of Jack Link’s, though.”

We stumbled upon a number of tracks that could have belonged to Foot, but definitely not Bigfoot, unless I have been grossly misled regarding sizing in this matter. Most were probably squirrels and assorted other woodland turds, but there were definitely some deer tracks as well, and in my mind that was close. The bigger the animal, the closer to Bigfoot. If we found moose tracks we’d be pretty much where we needed to be.

We trudged on through snow-covered underbrush, slightly tipsy and with no clear direction. Dan had brought with him a 20 gauge shotgun, which he said would probably work for taking out Bigfoot if we got him to stand still long enough. I’m no gunsmith and assumed any shotgun was probably good for blowing a Bigfoot’s leg off, until Dan told me this was his rabbit-hunting gun. He had a license only for small game this year, and he wasn’t going to get fined by bringing a higher-powered rifle into the woods when it wasn’t season for hunting something like elk. Dan had no faith in our expedition. Although he did point out that, if we shot Bigfoot with the 20 gauge it’d probably slow him down enough for some photos, so I should be fast with my phone and snap a pic or two. Maybe see if he’s down for a selfie.

#2. Winter Is Stupid

The worst time to do anything is winter time. According to my phone, it was about 4 below zero. For you Celsius types, that’s 20 below. Why the hell would Bigfoot be out in this silly-ass weather? Even bears have the intelligence to hibernate. Bigfoot should be snoozing under a pile of tarps in an old fishing cabin.

There was a brief moment when I encountered a smell that could be best described as unwashed skunk vagina somewhere out in the woods. I heard a rustling in the underbrush, and I thought we might be on to something. For those who doubt the veracity of my claims, I have photo evidence:

Got wood? Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ahhh …

Like all good photos of Bigfoot, this one mostly requires you to be as drunk as I was when I took it and to have a lot of faith that I know the sight/smell of Bigfoot’s dick when I see it. But for real, do you see that in there? I know it looks like a twig, but I ask you, what do you think Bigfoot’s dick would look like? Probably a big, veiny twig, right?

Before I string you along anymore, I’ll let you know that was a twig. Bigfoot’s dick, even if it is twig-like, is probably attached to a Bigfoot and not a tree like this one was. But did you feel the suspense there for a second? Now you’re living in my world. The world of a Bigfoot hunter!

#1. Bigfoot Is Not Real

Let’s assume for a moment Bigfoot is real, the title of this section notwithstanding. He’s generally considered a “he” right? Not to point out the sex so much as the singular. There’s just one. Bigfoot’s a lone wolf, him and his veiny twig-dick, wandering the woods and stealing forest brides and whatnot. Most Bigfoot sightings have been in Washington state, California, and Oregon. He’s basically a West Coast kind of guy. I’m on the East Coast, so right away my chances are pretty pathetic. Sure, New York and Ohio have some sightings, but so does Russia. Point is, I’m in the wrong neighborhood, and I’m looking for one guy. One big, hairy guy who makes a point of never being found, because no one’s ever found him. Do you know what the odds are of me finding him?

I actually calculated the odds on this for you, in case you’re not good at these complex, veiny equations. Keeping in mind the time of year Bigfoot is most often sighted in these various locations, as well as the time of day and methods used for tracking Bigfoot and the actual odds of me finding him here, at this time, were fuck no. Fuck no I can’t find Bigfoot, because he’s not real.

Consider that humankind has found the coldest natural object in the entire universe, fossils from the first living veiny beasts on Earth, that stupid affluenza kid, and numerous missing plane crashes. If there were a race of hairy man-beasts populating the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else in North America, there would have been some kind of definitive evidence proposed by people who are not named Bubba or Cooter.

Dan and I finished our beers in the woods. We found one track that was probably mine.

Size 11 … ladies. Or guys who want to buy me shoes.

I also found a frozen turd that really made me laugh but the picture turned out pretty blurry due to my laughing as I took the photo. It wasn’t a Bigfoot turd, probably a raccoon or something. Still, that’s hilarious to me.

Dan decided he’d had enough of being in the woods with me, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d mostly wasted our day and provided little to no purpose for our journey other than the laziest attempt ever to discover a cryptozoological legend. Fortunately, that made my attempt just as relevant as anyone else’s, because come on. What would be a “serious” attempt at finding Bigfoot in 2016? Some kind of thermal-imaging drone and satellite tracking? That seems like an expensive prospect for a big fatty waste of time.

Dan called his wife to pick him up once we got back to the road. She seemed like a nice lady who could fight me and win with little effort. Neither of them offered me a ride. As I watched them drive off, I wondered if perhaps Bigfoot was now watching me from the trees and feeling a kinship with me as I, too, was now alone. But of course he wasn’t, because remember, he doesn’t exist. He and that veiny dick I’ve been asked to keep writing about are full-on fiction. No, the only stranger watching me from the woods was a friendly serial killer or public wanker.

I wondered why it is that so many people seem enamored with the idea of Bigfoot. Is it the mystery? The idea that, in a world of smartphones and WiFi and driverless cars, we could have somehow overlooked a man-beast living right under our noses? Possibly. Mostly, I think, it’s what I like to call Dorf Contrarianism. This is the idea that a stupid person will dig in like a tick when confronted with something they feel threatened by, in an intellectual fashion, telling them they’re wrong. The person doing it may not be trying to intimidate our Dorf, or even patronize them or talk down to them in any way, but that is how Dorf perceives it, because Dorf is not smart enough to know why it’s happening but is smart enough to know they’re being corrected. And they don’t like it. So they outwardly refuse it so thoroughly they must embrace the very opposite. They must hunt Bigfoot, simply because he is not real. They must drink that moonshine because it could make them go blind. They must fuck that cousin even if the baby’s going to always be leaning a little to the left. Such is the contrarian nature of Dorf. And that’s what keeps Bigfoot alive.

Check out other mythical monsters of lore and bull crap in 5 Myths That People Don’t Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes, and fear the shelled back of The Beast of Busco in 7 Monsters That Bigfoot Hunters Are Too Scared To Believe In.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see why ghosts are definitely real in 6 Most Eerily Convincing Ghost Videos On YouTube – The Spit Take, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook, and see if you can find Bigfoot in the comments. We hear he’s a fan.

source http://allofbeer.com/hunting-bigfoot-4-things-you-learn-chasing-fiction/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2018/03/hunting-bigfoot-4-things-you-learn.html

[adambstingus]

Hunting Bigfoot: 4 Things You Learn Chasing Fiction

I recently moved to a snowier, woodsier part of the world and noticed one day while taking a shortcut home that Bigfoot probably lives near me. There are a lot of trees and foreboding areas that look like the sorts of places in which gentle folk like me are made into the forest brides of beast-men. But how could I know for sure?

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s finding the worst bar in any given town and making it my own. I easily located this town’s scruffiest bar that featured dead animals mounted on walls, and in no time had found no less than one man who claimed that he had heard from someone several years ago that there was a guy who saw Bigfoot around here once. Hot damn! A solid lead!

On the promise of picking up his bar tab and also returning to the bar later and picking up more of a bar tab, I got this guy to join me on a hunt in the woods. Now, you may be asking, “Felix, did you just pay a drunk stranger to take you into the woods alone?” And to that I say: You forgot that I got him to bring a gun.

This is Dan. He’s loaded with beer and ammunition!

#4. Drinking Outdoors Is Fun

My new friend Dan isn’t the sort of man who appreciates small talk, pop culture, or me. But I bought road beers and we were pretty much set to have an adventure. We drove about 20 minutes out of town to a massive swath of forest that Dan told me had a big lake somewhere in the middle of it and was the place some people said Bigfoot had been spotted. Already it had grown from maybe one guy to some people. I was super psyched.

In preparation for our journey, we packed not just beers but several snacks, an emergency flare (lest Bigfoot abduct us while a helicopter is flying overhead), and outdoorsy crap like a compass, a small hatchet, some matches, and a mickey of whiskey.

I’m not much for hiking but luckily neither is Dan, so we were in the woods for a solid 15 minutes before we stopped to have a drink. Our brew of choice was a fine Canadian ale known as Flying Monkeys Smashbomb Atomic IPA. I bought it solely based on the silly name, but it was actually pretty fantastic and I solidly recommend it for all your Bigfoot-hunting needs.

It’d be better if there were actually monkeys serving it, but other than that, A+.

Dan and I had a good sit in the woods, during which Dan proceeded to tell me about his younger days in a biker gang and a variety of related activities I won’t relate here, because I’m dumb but not that dumb. This was some secret-keeping beer we were having, and Dan may not have been the best tour guide in retrospect, but here we were, in the woods, with a gun. A gun and stories of Dan using a pool cue to destroy an entire room full of men in the most brutal, Deadpool ways possible. I’m glad I met this strange fellow.

Several beers later and Dan and I were having a pretty decent time, still within sight of the road. But alas, this was no joke expedition … or, well, it was, but I was still looking for Bigfoot. We had work to do.

#3. Losing Yourself Is Easier Than Finding Bigfoot

We set out in a direction I will call straight ahead. I know we packed a compass, but it was packed and, honestly, would it have made a difference to know if we were headed north or east? How could it have? We were looking for a legendary man-ape.

Dan told me as we walked that coyote activity in this area has been very much on the rise lately. There’s just a huge population of them. I’ve never seen a coyote outside of a Warner Bros. cartoon and was having a hard time reconciling my image of a cartoon wielding an anvil with an actual wild dog that probably has rabies tearing open my scrotum. Dan assured me they rarely attack humans unless they’re starving or in large groups, then, without missing a beat, added, “Or maybe not.” I almost forgot Dan is not a woodsman, merely a fellow drunk I met at a bar, and I am about as much an expert on what we’re doing as he is.

“I eat a lot of Jack Link’s, though.”

We stumbled upon a number of tracks that could have belonged to Foot, but definitely not Bigfoot, unless I have been grossly misled regarding sizing in this matter. Most were probably squirrels and assorted other woodland turds, but there were definitely some deer tracks as well, and in my mind that was close. The bigger the animal, the closer to Bigfoot. If we found moose tracks we’d be pretty much where we needed to be.

We trudged on through snow-covered underbrush, slightly tipsy and with no clear direction. Dan had brought with him a 20 gauge shotgun, which he said would probably work for taking out Bigfoot if we got him to stand still long enough. I’m no gunsmith and assumed any shotgun was probably good for blowing a Bigfoot’s leg off, until Dan told me this was his rabbit-hunting gun. He had a license only for small game this year, and he wasn’t going to get fined by bringing a higher-powered rifle into the woods when it wasn’t season for hunting something like elk. Dan had no faith in our expedition. Although he did point out that, if we shot Bigfoot with the 20 gauge it’d probably slow him down enough for some photos, so I should be fast with my phone and snap a pic or two. Maybe see if he’s down for a selfie.

#2. Winter Is Stupid

The worst time to do anything is winter time. According to my phone, it was about 4 below zero. For you Celsius types, that’s 20 below. Why the hell would Bigfoot be out in this silly-ass weather? Even bears have the intelligence to hibernate. Bigfoot should be snoozing under a pile of tarps in an old fishing cabin.

There was a brief moment when I encountered a smell that could be best described as unwashed skunk vagina somewhere out in the woods. I heard a rustling in the underbrush, and I thought we might be on to something. For those who doubt the veracity of my claims, I have photo evidence:

Got wood? Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ahhh …

Like all good photos of Bigfoot, this one mostly requires you to be as drunk as I was when I took it and to have a lot of faith that I know the sight/smell of Bigfoot’s dick when I see it. But for real, do you see that in there? I know it looks like a twig, but I ask you, what do you think Bigfoot’s dick would look like? Probably a big, veiny twig, right?

Before I string you along anymore, I’ll let you know that was a twig. Bigfoot’s dick, even if it is twig-like, is probably attached to a Bigfoot and not a tree like this one was. But did you feel the suspense there for a second? Now you’re living in my world. The world of a Bigfoot hunter!

#1. Bigfoot Is Not Real

Let’s assume for a moment Bigfoot is real, the title of this section notwithstanding. He’s generally considered a “he” right? Not to point out the sex so much as the singular. There’s just one. Bigfoot’s a lone wolf, him and his veiny twig-dick, wandering the woods and stealing forest brides and whatnot. Most Bigfoot sightings have been in Washington state, California, and Oregon. He’s basically a West Coast kind of guy. I’m on the East Coast, so right away my chances are pretty pathetic. Sure, New York and Ohio have some sightings, but so does Russia. Point is, I’m in the wrong neighborhood, and I’m looking for one guy. One big, hairy guy who makes a point of never being found, because no one’s ever found him. Do you know what the odds are of me finding him?

I actually calculated the odds on this for you, in case you’re not good at these complex, veiny equations. Keeping in mind the time of year Bigfoot is most often sighted in these various locations, as well as the time of day and methods used for tracking Bigfoot and the actual odds of me finding him here, at this time, were fuck no. Fuck no I can’t find Bigfoot, because he’s not real.

Consider that humankind has found the coldest natural object in the entire universe, fossils from the first living veiny beasts on Earth, that stupid affluenza kid, and numerous missing plane crashes. If there were a race of hairy man-beasts populating the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else in North America, there would have been some kind of definitive evidence proposed by people who are not named Bubba or Cooter.

Dan and I finished our beers in the woods. We found one track that was probably mine.

Size 11 … ladies. Or guys who want to buy me shoes.

I also found a frozen turd that really made me laugh but the picture turned out pretty blurry due to my laughing as I took the photo. It wasn’t a Bigfoot turd, probably a raccoon or something. Still, that’s hilarious to me.

Dan decided he’d had enough of being in the woods with me, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d mostly wasted our day and provided little to no purpose for our journey other than the laziest attempt ever to discover a cryptozoological legend. Fortunately, that made my attempt just as relevant as anyone else’s, because come on. What would be a “serious” attempt at finding Bigfoot in 2016? Some kind of thermal-imaging drone and satellite tracking? That seems like an expensive prospect for a big fatty waste of time.

Dan called his wife to pick him up once we got back to the road. She seemed like a nice lady who could fight me and win with little effort. Neither of them offered me a ride. As I watched them drive off, I wondered if perhaps Bigfoot was now watching me from the trees and feeling a kinship with me as I, too, was now alone. But of course he wasn’t, because remember, he doesn’t exist. He and that veiny dick I’ve been asked to keep writing about are full-on fiction. No, the only stranger watching me from the woods was a friendly serial killer or public wanker.

I wondered why it is that so many people seem enamored with the idea of Bigfoot. Is it the mystery? The idea that, in a world of smartphones and WiFi and driverless cars, we could have somehow overlooked a man-beast living right under our noses? Possibly. Mostly, I think, it’s what I like to call Dorf Contrarianism. This is the idea that a stupid person will dig in like a tick when confronted with something they feel threatened by, in an intellectual fashion, telling them they’re wrong. The person doing it may not be trying to intimidate our Dorf, or even patronize them or talk down to them in any way, but that is how Dorf perceives it, because Dorf is not smart enough to know why it’s happening but is smart enough to know they’re being corrected. And they don’t like it. So they outwardly refuse it so thoroughly they must embrace the very opposite. They must hunt Bigfoot, simply because he is not real. They must drink that moonshine because it could make them go blind. They must fuck that cousin even if the baby’s going to always be leaning a little to the left. Such is the contrarian nature of Dorf. And that’s what keeps Bigfoot alive.

Check out other mythical monsters of lore and bull crap in 5 Myths That People Don’t Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes, and fear the shelled back of The Beast of Busco in 7 Monsters That Bigfoot Hunters Are Too Scared To Believe In.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see why ghosts are definitely real in 6 Most Eerily Convincing Ghost Videos On YouTube – The Spit Take, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook, and see if you can find Bigfoot in the comments. We hear he’s a fan.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/hunting-bigfoot-4-things-you-learn-chasing-fiction/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/171848317867

[allofbeercom]

Hunting Bigfoot: 4 Things You Learn Chasing Fiction

I recently moved to a snowier, woodsier part of the world and noticed one day while taking a shortcut home that Bigfoot probably lives near me. There are a lot of trees and foreboding areas that look like the sorts of places in which gentle folk like me are made into the forest brides of beast-men. But how could I know for sure?

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s finding the worst bar in any given town and making it my own. I easily located this town’s scruffiest bar that featured dead animals mounted on walls, and in no time had found no less than one man who claimed that he had heard from someone several years ago that there was a guy who saw Bigfoot around here once. Hot damn! A solid lead!

On the promise of picking up his bar tab and also returning to the bar later and picking up more of a bar tab, I got this guy to join me on a hunt in the woods. Now, you may be asking, “Felix, did you just pay a drunk stranger to take you into the woods alone?” And to that I say: You forgot that I got him to bring a gun.

This is Dan. He’s loaded with beer and ammunition!

#4. Drinking Outdoors Is Fun

My new friend Dan isn’t the sort of man who appreciates small talk, pop culture, or me. But I bought road beers and we were pretty much set to have an adventure. We drove about 20 minutes out of town to a massive swath of forest that Dan told me had a big lake somewhere in the middle of it and was the place some people said Bigfoot had been spotted. Already it had grown from maybe one guy to some people. I was super psyched.

In preparation for our journey, we packed not just beers but several snacks, an emergency flare (lest Bigfoot abduct us while a helicopter is flying overhead), and outdoorsy crap like a compass, a small hatchet, some matches, and a mickey of whiskey.

I’m not much for hiking but luckily neither is Dan, so we were in the woods for a solid 15 minutes before we stopped to have a drink. Our brew of choice was a fine Canadian ale known as Flying Monkeys Smashbomb Atomic IPA. I bought it solely based on the silly name, but it was actually pretty fantastic and I solidly recommend it for all your Bigfoot-hunting needs.

It’d be better if there were actually monkeys serving it, but other than that, A+.

Dan and I had a good sit in the woods, during which Dan proceeded to tell me about his younger days in a biker gang and a variety of related activities I won’t relate here, because I’m dumb but not that dumb. This was some secret-keeping beer we were having, and Dan may not have been the best tour guide in retrospect, but here we were, in the woods, with a gun. A gun and stories of Dan using a pool cue to destroy an entire room full of men in the most brutal, Deadpool ways possible. I’m glad I met this strange fellow.

Several beers later and Dan and I were having a pretty decent time, still within sight of the road. But alas, this was no joke expedition … or, well, it was, but I was still looking for Bigfoot. We had work to do.

#3. Losing Yourself Is Easier Than Finding Bigfoot

We set out in a direction I will call straight ahead. I know we packed a compass, but it was packed and, honestly, would it have made a difference to know if we were headed north or east? How could it have? We were looking for a legendary man-ape.

Dan told me as we walked that coyote activity in this area has been very much on the rise lately. There’s just a huge population of them. I’ve never seen a coyote outside of a Warner Bros. cartoon and was having a hard time reconciling my image of a cartoon wielding an anvil with an actual wild dog that probably has rabies tearing open my scrotum. Dan assured me they rarely attack humans unless they’re starving or in large groups, then, without missing a beat, added, “Or maybe not.” I almost forgot Dan is not a woodsman, merely a fellow drunk I met at a bar, and I am about as much an expert on what we’re doing as he is.

“I eat a lot of Jack Link’s, though.”

We stumbled upon a number of tracks that could have belonged to Foot, but definitely not Bigfoot, unless I have been grossly misled regarding sizing in this matter. Most were probably squirrels and assorted other woodland turds, but there were definitely some deer tracks as well, and in my mind that was close. The bigger the animal, the closer to Bigfoot. If we found moose tracks we’d be pretty much where we needed to be.

We trudged on through snow-covered underbrush, slightly tipsy and with no clear direction. Dan had brought with him a 20 gauge shotgun, which he said would probably work for taking out Bigfoot if we got him to stand still long enough. I’m no gunsmith and assumed any shotgun was probably good for blowing a Bigfoot’s leg off, until Dan told me this was his rabbit-hunting gun. He had a license only for small game this year, and he wasn’t going to get fined by bringing a higher-powered rifle into the woods when it wasn’t season for hunting something like elk. Dan had no faith in our expedition. Although he did point out that, if we shot Bigfoot with the 20 gauge it’d probably slow him down enough for some photos, so I should be fast with my phone and snap a pic or two. Maybe see if he’s down for a selfie.

#2. Winter Is Stupid

The worst time to do anything is winter time. According to my phone, it was about 4 below zero. For you Celsius types, that’s 20 below. Why the hell would Bigfoot be out in this silly-ass weather? Even bears have the intelligence to hibernate. Bigfoot should be snoozing under a pile of tarps in an old fishing cabin.

There was a brief moment when I encountered a smell that could be best described as unwashed skunk vagina somewhere out in the woods. I heard a rustling in the underbrush, and I thought we might be on to something. For those who doubt the veracity of my claims, I have photo evidence:

Got wood? Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ahhh …

Like all good photos of Bigfoot, this one mostly requires you to be as drunk as I was when I took it and to have a lot of faith that I know the sight/smell of Bigfoot’s dick when I see it. But for real, do you see that in there? I know it looks like a twig, but I ask you, what do you think Bigfoot’s dick would look like? Probably a big, veiny twig, right?

Before I string you along anymore, I’ll let you know that was a twig. Bigfoot’s dick, even if it is twig-like, is probably attached to a Bigfoot and not a tree like this one was. But did you feel the suspense there for a second? Now you’re living in my world. The world of a Bigfoot hunter!

#1. Bigfoot Is Not Real

Let’s assume for a moment Bigfoot is real, the title of this section notwithstanding. He’s generally considered a “he” right? Not to point out the sex so much as the singular. There’s just one. Bigfoot’s a lone wolf, him and his veiny twig-dick, wandering the woods and stealing forest brides and whatnot. Most Bigfoot sightings have been in Washington state, California, and Oregon. He’s basically a West Coast kind of guy. I’m on the East Coast, so right away my chances are pretty pathetic. Sure, New York and Ohio have some sightings, but so does Russia. Point is, I’m in the wrong neighborhood, and I’m looking for one guy. One big, hairy guy who makes a point of never being found, because no one’s ever found him. Do you know what the odds are of me finding him?

I actually calculated the odds on this for you, in case you’re not good at these complex, veiny equations. Keeping in mind the time of year Bigfoot is most often sighted in these various locations, as well as the time of day and methods used for tracking Bigfoot and the actual odds of me finding him here, at this time, were fuck no. Fuck no I can’t find Bigfoot, because he’s not real.

Consider that humankind has found the coldest natural object in the entire universe, fossils from the first living veiny beasts on Earth, that stupid affluenza kid, and numerous missing plane crashes. If there were a race of hairy man-beasts populating the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else in North America, there would have been some kind of definitive evidence proposed by people who are not named Bubba or Cooter.

Dan and I finished our beers in the woods. We found one track that was probably mine.

Size 11 … ladies. Or guys who want to buy me shoes.

I also found a frozen turd that really made me laugh but the picture turned out pretty blurry due to my laughing as I took the photo. It wasn’t a Bigfoot turd, probably a raccoon or something. Still, that’s hilarious to me.

Dan decided he’d had enough of being in the woods with me, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d mostly wasted our day and provided little to no purpose for our journey other than the laziest attempt ever to discover a cryptozoological legend. Fortunately, that made my attempt just as relevant as anyone else’s, because come on. What would be a “serious” attempt at finding Bigfoot in 2016? Some kind of thermal-imaging drone and satellite tracking? That seems like an expensive prospect for a big fatty waste of time.

Dan called his wife to pick him up once we got back to the road. She seemed like a nice lady who could fight me and win with little effort. Neither of them offered me a ride. As I watched them drive off, I wondered if perhaps Bigfoot was now watching me from the trees and feeling a kinship with me as I, too, was now alone. But of course he wasn’t, because remember, he doesn’t exist. He and that veiny dick I’ve been asked to keep writing about are full-on fiction. No, the only stranger watching me from the woods was a friendly serial killer or public wanker.

I wondered why it is that so many people seem enamored with the idea of Bigfoot. Is it the mystery? The idea that, in a world of smartphones and WiFi and driverless cars, we could have somehow overlooked a man-beast living right under our noses? Possibly. Mostly, I think, it’s what I like to call Dorf Contrarianism. This is the idea that a stupid person will dig in like a tick when confronted with something they feel threatened by, in an intellectual fashion, telling them they’re wrong. The person doing it may not be trying to intimidate our Dorf, or even patronize them or talk down to them in any way, but that is how Dorf perceives it, because Dorf is not smart enough to know why it’s happening but is smart enough to know they’re being corrected. And they don’t like it. So they outwardly refuse it so thoroughly they must embrace the very opposite. They must hunt Bigfoot, simply because he is not real. They must drink that moonshine because it could make them go blind. They must fuck that cousin even if the baby’s going to always be leaning a little to the left. Such is the contrarian nature of Dorf. And that’s what keeps Bigfoot alive.

Check out other mythical monsters of lore and bull crap in 5 Myths That People Don’t Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes, and fear the shelled back of The Beast of Busco in 7 Monsters That Bigfoot Hunters Are Too Scared To Believe In.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see why ghosts are definitely real in 6 Most Eerily Convincing Ghost Videos On YouTube – The Spit Take, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook, and see if you can find Bigfoot in the comments. We hear he’s a fan.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/hunting-bigfoot-4-things-you-learn-chasing-fiction/

[epchapman89]

Where To Get Coffee In Newport Beach, California

Newport Beach is basically the California dream, what most people imagine when they think of California: long, white beaches with rolling waves; every car on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) adorned with at least one surfboard; Kobe Bryant lives down the road from Dad’s Original frozen banana stand, which may remind you of a similarly named fictitious frozen fruit stand of Arrested Development fame. The television drama The OC, once popular among American youths—I’ve been told—was also set in Newport. 

But Newport Beach, and its slightly inland neighbor Costa Mesa, is also another kind of dream—a sleepless, caffeinated one. Already home to standouts such as micro-roaster Portola Coffee Lab and former buildout Hopper & Burr, among other reputable coffee establishments, the two arguably coolest cities in Orange County have undergone something of a coffee renaissance over the past few years. Now, what was once a veritable specialty coffee desert is home to enough quality shops to keep an intrepid coffee crawler busy for days. Below is a sampling of some of our favorites, and if you need a snack break from all the flat whites in town, seriously, go to Dad’s.

Vacancy Coffee

Bonnie Williams and her husband, Oliver, opened Vacancy Coffee on the sleepy, northern side of Newport, where the city gives way to Huntington Beach. She describes the area as idyllic—right along PCH, next to a dog beach, just a stone’s throw to Frog House. But before Vacancy arrived, the neighborhood was crying out for a spot to grab coffee.  

“There’s a huge residential population there,” she says. A Gold Coast native, she wanted to re-create a welcoming takeout cafe that could serve locals as well as those coming to the beach for a surf, or commuting north in the mornings. “It’s a very common model where we’re from, where you’re walking along the beach and stop in and order your coffee,” she says. “So we knew that model worked. Customers love it for the vibe alone, and then the coffee is killer on top of that.”

Vacancy serves Toby’s Estate as its house roaster, but has featured nearby Common Room Roasters on drip as well.  

“The more people you get excited and dialed into a scene, which in our case is good coffee, the better it is for everyone,” she adds about the local community. “Everyone’s been really friendly and excited there are more and more people who are wanting to offer what we’re offering.”

Vacancy Coffee is located at 6480 West Coast Hwy, Newport Beach. Visit its official website and follow the shop on Instagram.

Bad Coffee

Bad Coffee is good. Or, at least that’s what Bad Coffee founder Bryant Trinh hopes.

“We’ve been open for two months now,” Trinh says. “Right now, we’re serving a lot of members of the neighborhood. There’s been an insanely positive community reaction. The purpose of the name was to open up conversations.”

Bad Coffee began as a pop-up inside a clothing store last October, but after a brush with a health inspector, Trinh decided he had to relocate to his own brick-and-mortar location. Thus, Bad Coffee began with Trinh taking over the lease from Hidden House Coffee, which was closing down to focus on other locations.

Trinh had worked at the nearby Portola Coffee Roasters for two years before branching off on his own, and has deep coffee knowledge to back up his bad ambitions. His shop operates as a multi-roaster, featuring a rotation of companies that would otherwise be hard to come by in Southern California. Right now, Bad Coffee features Brandywine Coffee Roasters, Color Coffee Roasters, and King State.

Trinh doesn’t yet know where Bad Coffee fits into the larger Orange County coffee scene, but is thrilled at the response it has gotten so far. It raises the question: With such bad coffee, who’d ever want to be good?

Bad Coffee is located at 1534 Adams Ave, Ste A, Costa Mesa. Visit its official website and follow the cafe on Instagram.

Daydream Surf Shop

Kyle Kenelly and Becca Mantei grew up in Orange County and met each other shortly before moving to the Bay Area for college. There, the couple says they were spoiled by the glut of world-class roasters in San Francisco and the East Bay, so when they moved back to Southern California after graduation, they found themselves with no place, apart from Portola, to get a cup of coffee. Along with fellow OC native and Sightglass veteran Aaron Dorff, the three built Daydream from the ground up, converting a blank canvas of a warehouse into, well, a dream, complete with a unique hand-constructed bar. Half–surf shop, half-cafe, Daydream is the next of kin in a long line of  businesses that combine the two industries.

“There’s such overlap between specialty coffee and surfing,” Kennelly, who has been surfing since he was eight, says. “If I’m going to schedule a morning surf with friends, we meet at a coffee shop. You hang out, shoot the shit with whoever’s working, figure out what’s happening wave-wise and then go. It’s just part of our morning process.” Mantei adds that everything from the brands they sell to the coffee they serve has been elevated; Daydream is the only place in the county where you’ll find Sightglass. “We had the space for it,” Kenelly says. “Why not fill it with everything we love? That’s one thing you do have down here that you don’t have in the Bay Area: space.”

Daydream Surf Shop is located at 1588 Monrovia Ave, Newport Beach. Visit its official website and follow the shop on Facebook and Instagram.

Neat Coffee

Located in the lobby of Costa Mesa co-working space FLDWRK, Neat Coffee opened in October 2015. It’s the oldest shop in this guide, and as such its owner, Ally Garvin, has been around to see her community expand over the past two years.

“There’s definitely been a change in people’s expectations for coffee,” Garvin says. “People are willing to pay more for better coffee, and realizing they like quality over convenience. It’s been cool to see that shift.” Neat serves Stumptown Coffee Roasters and local favorite Arcade Coffee Roasters of Riverside.

Garvin caught the coffee bug while working for an NGO in Uganda, while visiting a coffee farm. She was taken by the production process of bringing a bean from tree to mill to cup, and decided then that when she returned to the States she would open her own cafe. After working for years in shops around Orange County, including Sidecar, she took the plunge and opened Neat.

“Most of my customers come from outside FLDWRK,” Garvin says. “We’re right off the freeway, we get a lot of college students, and also a lot of people who work in the surrounding office area.” In her mind, Costa Mesa—with other popular shops such as Hopper and Burr and Portola Coffee Roasters just a few minutes’ drive away—has become something of a coffee destination, and so says it’s not uncommon to have intrepid coffee crawlers come through her door in addition to the regulars.

Neat Coffee is located at 270 Baker St E #200, Costa Mesa. Visit the official website and follow Neat on Facebook and Instagram.

Honor Coffee Roasters

Opened in December in Newport Beach’s Lido Marina Village, Honor fills the need for quality coffee in the extremely upscale shopping center. Founder Ken Schultz got his start in Portland, Oregon, before moving down south. But walking in this white, soft-wood enclave, it’s hard to imagine the space is a product of anything but Newport itself. Every picture taken here seems ripped from a lifestyle magazine, whether of the in-house roasted coffee, freshly made doughnuts, marble countertops, or visiting bandana-sporting dogs. But with a Slayer up front and Diedrich in back, Honor backs up its image with serious coffee worth traveling for.  

Honor Coffee Roasters is located at 3400 Via Lido, Newport Beach. Visit its official website and follow the shop on Facebook.

KIT Coffee

KIT stands for Keep in Touch, and was founded as a place to do just that by Eunice Huang and Jee Shin last October. “We wanted to provide a space that keeps in touch with the community,” Huang says, who grew up in Huntington Beach. While studying hospitality in college in the midwest, she knew she wanted to come home to open a cafe after graduation. Through a mutual friend she met Shin, an experienced restaurateur who had previously opened Costa Mesa’s Milk and Honey and Birdie, at a time when both were looking for a space to open up a coffee shop. Now, KIT embodies the owners’ shared vision, a space whose coffee program is as strong as its food menu. This means that at KIT, you’ll find yourself ordering sweet matcha brulee or avocado toast alongside a coffee from Sacramento’s Temple Coffee Roasters, Heart Coffee Roasters, or Coava Coffee Roasters.

“We wanted a place that’s super-welcoming,” Huang says. “To reach the person who’s afraid to enter specialty coffee shops all the way to the coffee connoisseurs.” So whether on a coffee crawl with friends or simply looking for a place to get a bite of toast and some homework done, KIT wants to keep in touch with you.

KIT Coffee is located at 1651 Westcliff Dr, Newport Beach. Visit its official website and follow KIT on Instagram.

Michael Light (@MichaelPLight) is a features editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Michael Light on Sprudge.

Photos courtesy of Max Callas.

The post Where To Get Coffee In Newport Beach, California appeared first on Sprudge.

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[annamcnuff]

Back On Track: Cycling The Pacific Coast Highway

I did something unthinkable this week. Something so against the fibre of my very being that it makes me shudder to even say it. Come in close, because I’m going to whisper it… I got a bus. In fact, I got two buses. Faced with a choice between a shorter inland route directly to Reno (meh) or getting back on the original planned coastal route via San Francisco (wahoo) - I opted for the latter. And, rather than drill myself with 100 mile days to catch up, I came over all sensible. Fancy that?

THE OREGON COAST, AT LAST

From Portland I threw Boudica on a bus South to Eugene, where it was just 66 miles to the coast, I hopped off and did what the Pet Shop Boys told me to do. I went West. To the coastal town of Florence.

I’d been looking forwards to meeting The Pacific for over a week now, and in my head it was to be a spectacular affair. Dashing ocean views, sunshine, Highway 101 sweeping dramatically close to cliff tops - perhaps even a light spattering of fireworks. Alas, when I found the 101 it was foggy, spitting (not even real rain) and I couldn’t see head nor tail of the ocean. Had I ridden the wrong way?

It had been an early start, and I decided that I at least deserved pancakes and so rolled into a little cafe. There I met Dave and Ron, who, clearly bedazzled by the Pink bike, asked me to pull up a pew. They shouted me brekkie with a side order of conspiracy theory chat and Ron shared his ‘rule of thumb’ (complete with amputated thumb, naturally). “Be patient, or become a patient he said.” With that I was gone. Down highway 101, past the insanely beautiful and quite surreal Oregon Sand dunes and on the 50 miles to catch bus number 2.

THE COASTAL EXPRESS

Bus number 2 'The Coastal Express’ was a bit of a gamble. It was the kind of bus who’s website was in different sized Comic Sans, included a photo gallery of 'Mike at the wheel’ and as you waited in the car park of the local supermarket, you weren’t entirely sure if it was going to turn up at all. But sure enough, a little 12 seater mini van eventually rolled into view. Once aboard, I was catapulted into the slipstream of someone else’s life. It stopped to drop passengers off at their homes, everyone seemed to be called Randy or John, and they all greeted each other with knowing questions: “How’s Linda doing?” “Did your Mom come down to visit in the end?”. It made a fascinating ride. I could see Boudica bobbing safely around on the rack at the front, and I enjoyed listening to the locals patter to while away an hour down the coast.

I got off the bus with just 20 miles to ride, to finally catch up Lydia and a third friend of ours, Laura. It was getting dark, and I was determined to make it. I started down the road with a gritted determination. Suddenly 'booooooofffff!’ - my back tyre exploded, leaving behind a big hole.

OOOO OFFICER

As if by magic (I’m honestly not sure where he came from) a Highway Patrol officer appeared. “You okay there mam?”. I babbled something about the back tyre and a bus and in true McNuff’ll-Fix-it-herself style “Oh I’ll be okay, I have Gaffa tape.” Then I stopped. And thought. Actually, this sort of is his job. And I was losing light. So I accepted his offer to throw my bike in the boot of his patrol car and drive me to town.

The poor bloke. I’m sure he regretted his decision within about 5 seconds. He relayed something rather official into the radio back to base “Um this is 90214, niner, we have an 1148, chaperone to the shoreline RV park for drop off, and return to post, over”. Well. How exciting I thought. And then I noticed all the pretty lights on the dashboard. And it began. The kid in the candy store was unleashed:

“What does this do?” One word answer. “Ooooo. And this?!” Silence. “What’s an 1148? Am I an 1148?” Two word answer. Silence. “So… Are you into sports?” “No, not really mam” “Oh. Well. You must go to he gym or something - you look like you pump iron….” Wow. I actually just said that.

He finally dropped me off 20 miles down the road with a smile and a nervous wave. I’m not entirely sure he thought I hadn’t escaped from the local mental asylum.

CALIFORNIA - NOT WHAT YOU’D EXPECT

The California coast is so very very different from how I imagined it to be. And I love that. I’ve seen nothing of the white sandy beaches, endless sunshine and abundance of beautiful bodies that Arnie likes to tell us about on tourism commercials. I think all of that business happens south of San Francisco. Northern California, is rugged, foggy, damp and windy. For the most part the sands are dark and the currents of the ocean too dangerous to take more than a quick dip. At one point, as the route left the coast and entered farmland, I turned to the girls and said “I love this, it reminds me of home.” I’m not sure if it was the whiff of cow turd in the air, the terrible road surface, the drizzle or the rolling fields, but something just screamed of England. Ah Blighty. How I miss thee so.

REDWOODS AND THE SONOMA COAST

California is nothing if not varied. The Redwood National Parks in the North are mystical places. Even more so when caked in a thick fog. We rode for miles along the 'Avenue of the Giants’, clad in high vis jackets, surrounded by some of the biggest tree-beasts I’ve ever seen. Each one watching over us like old grandfather time himself. I thought about the things they must have seen in the 800 years they’d been standing. If trees could talk…

But the Sonoma coast took the bicycling biscuit for me. Route 1 is one of those car commercial roads - a baby smooth surface that wiggles its way round cliffs, in and out of coves and even takes you up above the cloud line. At one point we were riding with our faces only a few metres from soaring birds of pray. It. Was. Epic.

Finally, slowly but surely we began to see more and more people on the roads. We met the 'weekend warriors’ on their way out from San Francisco as we descended into the city ourselves. Rounding the final bend and seeing the Golden Gate Bridge come into view made my lil heart skip a beat. It’s only a bridge. But when you’ve seen something so many times in pictures, to arrive there having travelled (mostly) under your own steam, makes it just that wee bit more emotional.

We’re exploring the city for a few days now before heading to the desert, and state number 5 - Nevada. It’s going to be hot like the sun out there, and there’s some big passes to climb. I cannie wait.