The Dying of the Cotton: The Ridiculous Life of The Stupid Cat

The Dying of the Cotton

“Dude, I think that you need a cat.”

Those fateful words were uttered in the middle of another sleep-deprived Colorado night back in the year of Ought-Four. My redheaded lady friend at the time – now my sweet wife – was the utterer. The ancient timber walls of the rancher’s cabin that I lived in were alive with mysterious activities. Every night, the dance of the deer mice began somewhere in the vicinity of the headboard of my double bed, then ran a hidden course that looped all the way around the small cabin in a loud circuit. Small shadows darted about the pine floors. Food supplies, both human and canine, were regularly attacked. The constant scurrying had my old dog Bear in a frenzy of frustrated patrols.

The last straw came when, lost in a pre-dawn codeine stupor while fighting the lingering Crud, I awoke to the tapping of a clammy nose upon my feverish cheek. Cracking one bloodshot eye, I made out the hazy image of a ragged-looking mouse sitting up on my chest. He was holding the keys to my truck in his outstretched hand. “We’re gonna take the Ford for a spin up to the Cardamone place. There’s a mouse party goin’ down up yonder…Cheese, milk, cereal by the barrel…the whole nine centimeters,” the rodent said nonchalantly. “Thought that you might want to know that you’ll probably be late for work today. We’ll be back around 11… Ish…” it added.

“Ohhh. OK. Thanks…I guess. But hey…can you put some fuel in the truck? I’m almost out,” I replied. My head was woozy. The room was spinning. “Sure, sure, bub. We’ll “put some fuel in it” the mouse retorted with a sarcastic wink and the flicking of his rubbery paws in the universal sign of mocked quotation.

When I emerged from my narcotic slumber it was past noon. I looked out of the window and saw that my truck was parked halfway into Miss Carolyn’s prized azaleas. I looked down at the kitchen floor and was not surprised by what I saw. At least a baker’s dozen mice were passed out haphazardly on the linoleum, smiles cast on their milk-stained faces, yellow curds clutched greedily in their awful paws. “Bear! Get em!” I shrieked. The half-Shepherd, half-Chow, half-human leapt into action from his nap at the foot of the bed. The mice all sat up slowly, watching his progress across the 10 feet that separated them with bemused looks, not unlike Monty Python’s French castle guards. Bear growled fiercely as he narrowed the gap, and was about to tear into the mess of them with a year’s worth of pent up, stolen-Alpo doggie fury when the entire stoned colony of mice bolted in every direction at once. All of them, that is, but one.

The Bear stood above him snarling like I had never seen him snarl before – well, other than every day the UPS man comes by that is. But rather than cower at the sight of the relatively enormous monster before it, the mouse produced a tiny white glove from beneath it, methodically straightened out each of its fingers, and then rudely slapped the menacing dog once each way across the nose in rapid succession before hopping off towards a large hole underneath the sink cabinets. Just before it vanished into its hole, the mouse looked back at the two of us, both frozen in stunned silence, and flipped us an exaggerated, arched back double bird, then wheeled and slipped into the darkness. We were still stilling there in frozen astonishment when we saw a creepy ribbed tail emerge backwards from the hole, followed by a hairy rat’s ass. Then, preceded by a discernibly gross, cheesy fart, and there before Jah Rastafari, Bear Anderson, and a shelve full of shocked-looking antique action figures, the Francophile mouse shat a row of shining black poo pebbles onto the kitchen floor. Prior to that moment, I did not think it possible for a dog to wince, but it became clear to me then by looking at the pained look on Bear’s face told me that it was indeed Time To Get A Cat.

Two weeks later, almost as if on cue, a mixed litter of black, white, and grey barn kittens were born in a loft of the ranch where I lived. My girlfriend (and now my wife) had by then moved into the 500 square foot cabin, along with her three beloved ferrets, and was insistent that we claim one of the litter when they were old enough to leave their mother, Muffin.

I had never owned a cat. Never really been around cats other than one that my roommates had in college – an orange tabby named Goat who mostly lived outside with the chickens and the couches. My parents had never had a cat, and I am fairly certain that their parents hadn’t either. I generally mocked those friends of mine that had cats as being soft. The concept was totally foreign to me. But Sharon had grown up with cats and after her own run-in’s with the mousey mafia that ruled our roost, I was assigned, literally, a tiny, bright-eyed white kitten with snappy black patches on its face and one paw and a long grey-stripped raccoon tail.

We brought him into the cabin and Sharon, her ferrets, Bear and I all watched in awe as this little furbearing rocket flew around our house, leaping from dresser to the bed, from the bed to the door sill, performing consistent acts of gravity defiance. Our neighbors Adrian and Susan came over to check on the brother of their two kittens, Pancho and Lefty. We all sat in a circle watching the kitten frolic, drinking Tullamore Dew scotch whiskey from the bottle, and pitching names for the thing. It was Adrian, a native North Carolinian like myself with deep roots across the south, who came up with the name that stuck: Cotton. I would later add an unofficial prefix to the name – Rotten.

Days turned into months and Cotton steadily grew from his initial miniscularity into a fine looking full sized cat. Within weeks of his arrival into our little cabin world, our mouse problem had ebbed into just an occasional brave (or stupid) loner who hadn’t heard the news: There was a new sheriff in town, and he wasn’t taking any prisoners. I have never seen Bear more happy. Finally we could all sleep in peace, except for the occasional sudden midnight flurry, usually followed by a contented sounding CRUNCH CRUNCH from somewhere in the kitchen area. One morning I awoke to find the cat in his customary place –lodged like a shiv, forming a perfect dividing line with the Bear dog between Sharon and I. I was stroking the soft fur on his head when my hand coursed over his face, where something tangibly out of place found my touch. Bleary eyed, I sat up and peered over at him. Sticking out of his smiling mouth was a tiny white glove. Cotton had found his true calling at a very young age. We should all be so lucky.

II.

Cotton lived what I imagine to be the most happy and fulfilling life a cat can hope for on the Shipp Ranch for several years prior to our 2005 move to the clean (but busy) streets of Carbondale, Colorado.  In the winters, he curled up and lounged with us in the cozy cabins. When the snow melted enough that his paws would tolerate the frigidity of the earth, he booked it for the pasture fences, where he would stalk the rails in a low crouch, feeding on a veritable Arc of wildlife – field mice, rabbits, birds of a hundred feathers, lizards, snakes, and the occasional Formerly Sentient Being To Be Named Later.

Despite the anti-camouflage of his stark white coat and his daring do in a heavily hunted predatory zone, Cotton survived and thrived at ranch life. He outlasted his mother and the three of his litter mates that were kept on the ranch, all of whom were picked off by a particularly wily pack of coyotes, though he regularly came home with fresh scars that foretold of difficult battles with larger mammals.

The move to our new townhouse was a blessing for Sharon and myself. We finally had our own place, along with the room to spread out a bit that any co-habitative long-term cabin-dweller eventually yearns for. The “kids,” however, seemed to lose a little bounce in their new city lives. No longer free to roam wide pastures and open space, and confined to the house for fear of the many cars and trucks that buzzed our neighborhood, Cotton and Bear both whined and whimpered at the front and back doors of the house, often one at each, an achievement of stereophonic guilt.

Eventually, we relented. With his regular, mournful moan becoming intolerable, and after a few long man –to-cat talks, Cotton was given the run of Barber Drive. It was not an easy decision. The irony of the name Car-bon-dale was not lost on me. We knew the possibilities that his street walking might bring. In the end, we figured that with the ideal life that he had already led, he deserved a chance to go out (in this case, literally) on his own terms. Survival of the fittest, carpe meow, all ‘dat…

I was not surprised in the least that he took to the dangerous city streets as easily as he did to the predatorily hazardous ranch trails. He was the quickest cat I’ve ever known, with extra cat-like agility. Regularly I would be sitting on the back porch overlooking the hubbub of Hendrick Drive when I would see a white flash emerge from underneath a parked car, dash across the road comfortably ahead of oncoming traffic, and disappear under the cars and trucks parked across the way. And, ever evening, just like clockwork, when the wife or I would go out on the front stoop and clang a tuna can with a wooden spoon, here would come Cotton, just as dirty and bloody and happy as ever.

III.

It was three in the morning in Posen, Michigan when polite knuckles rapped on the door of Sharon’s childhood bedroom door. I was there to meet her parents and multitude of strapping, protective-looking siblings, and, if everything went well, to ask her father’s permission to marry his daughter. Bleary eyed from the late hour and the gallons of pilsner consumed earlier at the bonfire meet and greet, we heard the voice of Sharon’s mother, Rita. She sounded concerned, but ever so politely. “There is a girl on the phone for you Corby. I think that she speaks another language. She wants to talk to you,” she said. Her tone worried me. Her tone worried me. There are, after all,  very few potential positive outcomes when a French woman calls your girlfriends parents house in the middle of the night of your engagement party asking for you.

Thanking my future mother-in-law, I took the call. “Zee cat, eez squieeeshed!” said the voice on the other line. I recognized it to be that of my TV station intern, Cecile, a Frenchwoman who was at our house watching the animals for us. “Zee cat! Eet eez squished…oh no I feel zo tereeebley!” she said again in a Franco lilt. “Eer. Talk to zee veterinarian,” she said sadly, pronouncing every syllable of “vegetarian” with utmost care.

The vet got on the phone and told us that Cotton had been ran over by a car. He said that Cecile had brought him in that night, but that he suspected the accident to have happened earlier, maybe a full day earlier. She had found him after hearing a low moan outside of our bedroom window – usually a sound only heard coming from Peeping Juan, the town pervert. “He doesn’t look good. He’s got a broken leg and pelvis. We can’t know of the internal damage to his organs until we get into surgery,” he said calmly. “I need a credit card for that,” he added.

Sharon was listening over my shoulder. She started to cry, which in turn made me tear up. I repeated to her what the doctor was telling me. She cried more. So did I. “How much is it?” I asked, pondering the impossible question that faces every pet or car owner: how much is your old friend, your family member even – life worth?

I am not a rich man. Never have been. Hope to be someday, like most probably do or should, but at that time to say that my finances were limited is an understatement. The vet told us that while he couldn’t be sure what the total costs might be, depending on the injuries found in exploratory surgery, he thought that $3000 was a good number to start with. The number hit both of us like a brick. When he added that “even with surgery there is a very good chance that Cotton will never walk with his back legs again,” I felt a whole wall of bricks tumble down on my suddenly saddened brain. “Or, I could put him down in a painless procedure. That costs about $200 bucks.” More bricks.

We asked to have a minute to discuss the decision and told him that we would call back in a few minutes. We called Carolyn, the owner of the ranch where Cotton was born. Carolyn Shipp possesses a unique combination of qualities: great empathy towards all living creatures, along with a Libertarian sensibility when it comes to business. We gave her the facts. She paused. Then she told us what we knew in our hearts already: with no easy way to pay and no clear promise of recovery, we should let the vet euthanize the cat.

Fighting back tears, I called the vet back. “Doc, we have to let him go. For all of the reasons discussed before. I need you to ask Cecile to hold the phone up to Cotton’s little ears so that I can say goodbye.”

“Well, if THAT is your decision, then I’ll just see what I can fix and put him up for adoption,” the veterinarian replied unexpectedly. “Excuse me? Did you just sa…” I stammered, shocked. “Yes you did. I’ll repeat it. If you are asking me to put this cat to sleep, I will not do it. I will fix him and then adopt him out to a caring family.” Silence. The weird silence of slow motion bricks tumbling down onto more bricks.

I threatened to sue right then and there. “I’ll have your fucking license for this stunt!” I yelled. Sharon sat amazed, sad. The veterinarian tried to explain what he meant. I countered and shut him down. He tried again. “I’ll tell you what. Let me see what the injuries are and we can figure out the payment later,” he said, humbled. “Well, obviously if he can be fixed, fix the boy. But I ain’t able to pay that kind of money, nor will I, after this bullshit phone call,” I iterated. It pained me to argue for the death of a good friend, but there were principles at play, and I am, if anything, a man of principles. We agreed on surgery. I was connected to Cotton via cell phone speaker to cat ear. “Hang in there buddy. We love you. Bear loves you. Doc’s gonna fix you up good,” I said, expecting that would be the last time I spoke to him. He did not answer. I thanked Cecile and tried to explain to her that she was in no way responsible. I asked that she take care of the dude the best that she could if he made it out of surgery and that we would be home within four days.

I hung up, and we stayed up the rest of the night fretting for Cotton’s life and deciding whether to drive home in the morning or to carry on with our trip as planned. There were elderly grandparents to visit with yet, and I still had a secret, seriously convoluted engagement plan complete with documentary film crew, special after hours private tour and post-yes (I hoped!) catered dinner in a historic lighthouse on Mackinac Island to see to.

To all of our excitement, except possibly Cecile, who had to nurse a partially paralyzed cat for several days, Cotton came out on the topside of surgery. The car had indeed broken his rear leg and shattered his pelvis, but other than a bruised spleen and a hernia, his internal organs had survived intact. Cecile told me to stay on and to go through with my engagement plan/scheme. By the time that we returned, Cotton had graduated from dragging himself around our condo with his front paws to gingerly walking. It was a miracle of sorts. I had condemned a dead cat to being deader. He not only survived being hit by a car, but my own execution order. We kept him inside after that.

IV.

Two years later, on the last days of the year 2007, our herd moved from the frigid winter chill of the Rocky Mountains to the relatively balmy climes of Monterey, California. I wanted to write a book and to find a way to advance my career in media. Sharon wanted to study dentistry. Bear and Cotton wanted some space. Off we went, into the maw of a massive winter storm, our lives jam packed into a U-Haul truck and chase vehicle.

We wound up in a wonderfully spacious ranch-style four bedroom house in the old Army base town of Marina, formerly Fort Ord. The house had a large fenced back yard AND a large fenced front yard. The neighborhood traffic in rural California was perplexingly, and blessedly, light compared to that of the small mountain town in Colorado from whence we had migrated. An enormous sand dune and the four-lane Highway 1 embankment was all that separated us from the glory and danger of the Pacific Ocean. At night we could sit INSIDE the house and hear the ocean roar. Birds were everywhere, much to Cotton’s satisfaction. From little sparrows to cormorants, seagulls to Snowy Plovers — you couldn’t toss a sourdough crumb without a dozen flying creatures clamoring over the score.

After a few weeks of beach life, it was decided that Cotton would once again be an outside cat. Maybe the calm, serene atmosphere of fog and ocean breezes got us to lighten up, or maybe the cats own outdoorsy personality and the telepathically transmitted insistence of his innate need to be Out There won us over, but out he went. Right away he picked up his hunting and general carousing as he had before. His street smarts were evident immediately. We watched him gracefully maneuver Brookside Place and the surrounding feeder roads. Maybe it helped that there was less traffic. Maybe it was that the roads there were built wider enough for three tanks to drive parallel to one another and still have room for a fleet of jeeps to be parked on either side of the road.  Perhaps or boy, by now known affectionately as “the stupid cat” had learned a little something from his run in with the Michelin Man.

Whatever it was, he had the outside cat game fully wired now.

Though fixed, and not necessarily burly by cat standards, Cotton fought like a wildcat with the neighboring cats until it was clear by the noises of each scrap and by Cotton’s studly saunter while leaving each catty scene that he had ascended to alpha of the Brookside pride. He had girlfriends at seemingly every house on the block. When he came home and did not eat his food, we worried some, until we were told by several neighbors that he was wont to visitation and meal privileges in several neighborhood households. He and his buddy, the Bear dog, now visibly aging, tag teamed the local bird population. Not a morning went by that I did not hear my wife’s sing song voice emanating from the living room. “See the birdies?” she would say in her best baby mama voice. It nearly brought the house down every time, with both cat and dog howling in agreeance while clawing into the glass door. Oh, they saw the birdies alright.

Several months later we brought home a soul who was unwittingly to become Cotton’s best friend and worst tormentor. Hondo the dog was born in a Missoula, Montana English Shepherd puppy mill.

It was on New Years eve later that year when I was to realize the sordid nature of his origins, but I should have known. The breeder’s business was called Shady Lane Puppy Farms.  We had looked around all over the regional papers for a pup from this particular breed, but finally were forced to ship Hondo in from out of state. He arrived at the San Jose Airport in a plastic and steel dog crate. He was tiny and scared and visibly confounded by his plight. To comfort him, I had brought along a film crew to document our meeting, along with large photo print outs of his new family. “This is your mama,” I said, holding up a photo of Sharon to the open crate door. He stayed cowering in the back. “This is The Bear, your new brother. He’s the best dog ever,” I said. A tiny, fuzzy black, brown and white painted ear perked, but that was it. “And this, this is your kitty,” I said, holding up the 8×11 color photo of Cotton. YAP! The pup snapped out of his apoplexy, rushing forth to sniff the photo. HIS kitty. It was love/hate/terror/love at first sight.

V.

My intended mission for Hondo was for the youngster to grow to be my old boy Bear’s friend and understudy as he entered his golden years. And while he took to that role with a natural canine camaraderie (though his herding instincts kept the aging Bear on his guard for sneak attack “drive bys”), it was the depth of his friendship with Cotton the cat that surprised us all.

The two were fast friends, literally. Cotton was prone to the “midnight zoomies,” a crack head-like spasmodic reaction to God-knows-what provocation. As a night owl myself, I grew to appreciate these impressive displays of deep-night random energy and strange feline athleticism, but the same cannot be said for Hondo.

Hondo is a weird sleeper. He splays out upside down like a hairy, de-shelled turtle. Cotton seemed to time his evening calisthenics to just about the time that Hondo would grow bored with my Sportscenter fixation, roll over and grunt himself to sleep. Then, with a punk spirit, the Goddamn Cat (Hondo’s words, not mine) would deftly launch himself from the top shelf of the couch down onto the sleeping dogs’ exposed belly, touching down only briefly enough to gather himself and steal a quick catty sneer at the startled pup, before bounding off down to the deck and sprinting off around the far reaches of the house. The poor dog, of course, had no chance. There was no catching a hyped up barn cat with rascality in his blood and evasive maneuvers woven deeply into his sinew.

VI.

We moved a total of four times during the Reign of Cotton. The third and fourth moves were rapidly stacked together, with (thankfully) just two months internment in the California Dutch hellhole known as Ripon, California.

That was the amount of time it took to kill my best friend Bear, who was riddled with two types of cancer and held a fragile football-sized tumor in his poor belly, contract a persistent case of walking pneumonia, pack our beach house up, move the family to Ripon to take a job writing for a couple of TV food show producers who turned out to be the sleaziest, heartless, lowdown scum sucking dirt bags in the history of an industry rife with sleazy scum suckers, drop off the family at our new house before promptly jumping on a plane to the Super Bowl in Dallas for work, find out that my dear Grandma had died in a fall, succumb to the gathering sickness in my hotel room, be excused to go home, fly to the funeral, deliver the eulogy, return to my new home to find out that I was fired, and spend a month looking hopelessly for work in a recession-ridden Central California town that neither Hitchcock nor Steinbeck could have dreamt up.

In that time, Cotton seemed resentful of our move to inner-suburbia. His forays out into the neighborhood were forbidden, as the traffic was regular and the bird-loving neighbors overt enough to let on that cats don’t last long in their hood, a comment that seemed to have nothing to do with the pace and regularity of the traffic and much to do with their Taj Mahalesque bird mansion that measured 25 floors and covered more lawn space than a live oak.

So, instead of his jocular life of outdoor adventures, he was cooped up, whiny, and dispirited. Not even a chance to have a go at the upturned, snoozing pup seemed to rile his mischievous instincts. Gone were the midnight zoomies. Instead, he slept all day, and moaned pitifully at the foot of the door all night.

VII.

Thankfully, fate intervened. One morning, as I teetered near my breaking point in Ripon following an ugly encounter with the neighbor over her perfidious threat to call the cops on us to have my old, temporarily dead 1972 Chevelle towed away as a neighborhood eyesore, I got a text from Dan Shipp, the Mississippi lawyer who owned the Colorado ranch that Cotton had been born on. “What y’all doin?” he asked in his trademark gentlemanly draw. “Pondering a good, old fashioned neighborly fire bombing, to be quite honest. As my lawyer, what kind of time do you think I’m looking at if I torch the neighbor skank’s bird castle?” I replied.

He must have sensed the mounting frustration in my voice, because within minutes he had offered us the chance to move back to his ranch to the little old cabin that we had lived in years before. Within 24 hours we were packed into a 21’ U-Haul, had accidentally knocked off the birdfeeder while backing the attached Chevelle-hauling trailer out of the driveway, and had abandoned uncaring California for the open-armed Colorado. As soon as we had negotiated our long-haul truck and trailer down the narrow dirt road that leads to Shipp Ranch, Cotton began mewing uncontrollably, sparking a mystified Hondo to follow suit.

VIII.

Back on the ranch, Cotton quickly regained his mojo. Now an adult, his mousing skills had sharpened to the point of mastery. Soon, he graduated to squirrels, then small rabbits, along with a steady stream of birds. To supplement his diet, he would throw in a green snake or two a week, a horrendous habit that he seemed eager to share with us by way of dragging the live, squirming snakes into the window before releasing them on our bedroom floor for further examination.

For these field hunts, he often teamed up with his uncle, a grey Maine Coon known as Mister Tigger. It was not unusual to see the two of them stalking a pole fence, one on the top row, and the other on the one below, each crouched low as they scanned the pasture grasses for prey. Inevitably, a family brawl would ensue over the prize, with Cotton regularly pummeling a cat so legendarily tough that it was fabled to have once fended off a coyote by blinding the dog with a vicious frontal Ninja-cat attack.

At long last, Rotten Cotton was back in his element, living what is surely the dream of all cat – wandering open country that was filled with feline delights, dominating the neighboring competition, then returning home to the small cabin at night to curl up under the tall legs of the old wood stove to slumber until his next adventure.

IX.

It was early spring when I got the call. I had started a new job with the local community college, and was in a meeting when my phone buzzed in my pocket. The number was not one that I recognized, but it was local so I decided to excuse myself from the meeting and see who was trying to reach me.

Though I deigned to admit it, I knew the reason for the call even before I answered it.

Cotton had been missing for four days. It was not unusual for him to stay out all night, but he always returned sometime early the next morning. This time he had not. His colleague Hondo had been wandering around for most of a week with a worried look on his brow, standing by the door looking out at all hours of the day, whimpering a bit at night. He eagerly sniffed the bushes on the mountainside beside the cabin on hikes to look for Cotton, both of us quietly hoping not to happen upon any soft white fur, soaked in red.

He was old, Cotton was. Near nine by now. Maybe he wandered off to die, I told my wife in an attempt to reassure her against the doom that we felt looming each night that he did not return. “No, he was fit and healthy. He’s been eaten. I’m sure of it,” she lamented. “Fucking coyotes…” She muttered. I kept a rifle at the ready, in case revenge opportuned.

Just in case, I made a sign and posted it on several power poles around the ranching community where we live. “White male cat with a grey coon tail. Goes by the name of Cotton, missing since Sunday,” it read. I chose two of my favorite pictures of Cotton for the sign. One was a shot that showed his full body, for identification purposes. In that shot, taken in the pitiful Ripon days when the one bright spot in our lives was the addition of a comfy leather couch that we purchased with money sent to us after my Granma’s death, Cotton lay splayed out on the top of the new leather couch, straddling the couch top like a horse saddle. His white fur glistened in the photo. His grey and black-streaked ears perked up and a quizzical look etched on his face as I stood behind him flipping him the bird. It was my way of warning him not to scratch our one good piece of furniture, which, amazingly, he never did.

The other photo that I included on his want ad was one taken in our condo in Carbondale, soon after he had miraculously recovered from being “squeeshed” by “zee car” and then doomed to the vet’s eternal needle by me, before being subsequently saved by the bungling vet.

This photo featured a close up of Cotton’s face as he worked his way into a bunch of historic peacock feathers given to me as a gift by author Hunter S. Thompson’s wife that I kept on my desk. The luminescent green-gold-purple eye of the peacock feather juxtaposed perfectly with Cotton’s own golden eye. The image represented to me everything to loved about the Stupid Cat: his indomitable curiosity, his penchant for adventure, and his mellow, kindly nature. He was not a bastard cat, whining for his way all of the time, clingy or spiteful. He was there when you needed him. Except now he was gone.

The caller asked if my name was Corby. He paused for a second. I studied his voice. It was oddly distressing. My legs gelled.

“Do you own a cat? A cat named Cotton?” he asked. My heart leapt and sank at the same time. Maybe…Maybe he had found the cat sleeping off a big, chipmonky meal in his barn? Maybe he’d finally found his lady cat and set up shop somewhere down the canyon? The possibilities raced through my head, quickly drowning out the budgetary thoughts that had been lingering just moments before.

Cotton had lived through many near disasters. He’d been raised on a ranch surrounded by coyotes that picked off all of his many relatives, hit by a car, condemned to die, and ran the high-traffic neighborhoods of California like a boss. Of lives, he knew many. But surely he had one good life left?

My mind churned through positive outcomes. The caller continued. “I’m…uh. Well, hell, son. I’m not sure how to tell you this…”

 *Corby Anderson is a freelance writer who works from the rickety loft of an old cabin in Emma, Colorado. His stories can be found here, as well as at corbyanderson.wordpress.com, Flipcollective.com, The Aspen Daily News, Monterey County Weekly, Canyon Country Zephyr, and BEER Magazine (the Playboy of beer rags), among others.

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Things I’ve Dropped In The Shitter, an essay

Ponder, for a moment, the lowly, oft-used, at times abused, everyday fixture of metabolic necessity – the toilet. It is, of course, a receptacle for all of your cast-off humanly bile and toxic waste. The toilet, or commode as it is known in the south, or shitter, as we lovingly say in the trades, has the singular distinction of sanitarily disposing of an entire species’ collective excrements. Over the years, it has also been the unfortunate splash landing spot for some of my dearest possessions:

Phil the Hermit Crab

My misfortunate, gravitationally-challenged relationship with the toilet started at a young age. Barely past the potty training stage, I was faced with the horrifying act of having to ship my beloved first pet, a  Hermit Crab named Phil, off to greener seas after he/she had made the awful decision to exercise his/her only form of self-defense against the tender skin of my brother’s scrotum.

As unenlightened children, we had for some reason engaged in a form of crustaceous Russian Roulette: taking turns sticking Phil down our pajamas in a timed contest to see who could handle the tickling of his shelly phalanges the longest without screaming. It was after bed time. The lights were out in our room, but this grand scheme had our competitive juices awash with muffled laughter.

The game went on for several “successful” turns, each of us enduring Phil’s weird traverses in our underoos…until disaster struck. In a shocking turn of events, what I had assumed would be some fun, cage-free exercise for my buddy Phil quickly turned into a nut-pinching fight for life that woke everyone in the house after the previously docile crab unexpectedly clamped his formidable left claw on Brody’s testicular region.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the sensation of having your gonads savagely scissored by an enraged sea creature, but judging from my brother’s reaction, it is scream-inducing unpleasantness.  Thusly ensnared in a bony, serrated vice, Brody emitted a sustained, high-pitched primal howl that I have since only heard in Tea Party conventions and small-claims court.

At the beckoning of Brody’s shrieks, my parents came bursting into our room, expecting the worst. Bewildered, they found us gripped with fear and screaming bloody murder. After ascertaining that I was not the afflicted one but rather suffering from empathetic emotions, my father set upon Brody to save him from some unseen demon. “What is it? What in Jehovah is going on?” he demanded. Biting both lips at once, tears pouring down his cheeks, the eldest Anderson son gingerly lifted open his drawers and pointed down to his nether regions with a quaking, inconsolable finger. “Ffff..ffff…fffil got his nads, Dad!” I yelled, reporting for my shock-muted brother.

The Phil Removal Project was quickly underway, and I will spare you the details due the graphic nature of the operation. For the sake of educational purposes (should this savagery ever occur to you or your own bright-minded progeny), I can report that the operation took no less than the use of a D-Cell flashlight, a rusted pair of my grandfather’s carpenters pliers, a jar of salt (Mom’s theory, relating to slugs), a wooden stick from the backyard (for Brody to clamp down on), a splash of hydrogen peroxide, and a large, perhaps overly-gluey Band-Aid.

Phil, mangled from battle, was handed to me to dispose of by my perturbed Dad. The toilet and the mysterious waters beyond offered the only thing close to Phil’s native habitat for which to reintroduce him into the wild. So, accompanied by a river of mournful tears, and with a splash pattern that would make a Chinese diver proud, I cast my best friend into the wilds of the Contra Costa County Sanitation System.

R.I.P. Phil.

Superman Toothbrush

Some time had passed since my sorrowful goodbye to Phil when I was again broken-hearted by dropping a vital possession into the toilet. I was ten then – old enough to have collected a few prized items of my own that did not also belong to my brother. One of those was my electric Superman toothbrush. I may have been a wee little feller and mostly reliant on my parents for food and shelter, but dammit I had electric Superman toothbrush, and together we could conquer the world!

It was near bedtime and I was “scrubbing my pegs,” as my Dad always called it, a strange term for dental hygiene now that I think about it, since at no other time in our youth did he utilize pirate-speak. Like all ten-year-olds, I was excited to get the actual brushing behind me so that I could go read more “Choose Your Own Adventure,” books.

It was in this Adventure-bound frenzy that I found myself rushing Superman’s main chore along. A quick lap around the gums was all that I had time for. As I wheeled to grab Dad’s Listerine off of the shelf next to the toilet, I somehow loosened my grip on ol’ Supey. Down he went, spiraling through the air like a buzzing, spitting, super heroic depth charge. I noted the unchanging, goofily grinning expression on Superman’s plastic face as he broke the water’s plane and slid down along the bowl into the muck that I had as yet neglected to flush.

It was at this time that I chose to let loose an undeveloped but aspirational string of 10-year-old swear words that would have made a drill sergeant blush with shame. Coincidentally, it was at this time that my live-in, elderly grandmother decided to check on my progress. Needless to say, Superman did not make a heroic return to the sink counter. Much to my chagrin, a well-used, tooth-marked bar of soap did, however.

The Only Expensive Pair of Sunglasses That I’ve Ever Owned

You know that predictable asshole named Murphy? The one with all of the Laws and the sick sense of humor who comes around to mock your regular inability to spot malady even when it is barreling down on you like a stroked-out trucker? I do. All too well. He nearly blinded me in 1998.

I was a lift operator at a ski area in Colorado, “living the dream” after my college years. Twenty-five-years-old, criminally handsome (so I’ve told myself), living on a half of a rotten couch for $200 a month, surrounded by impossibly beautiful mountains, adventurous women and piles of mostly illegal intoxicants.

The inevitable late nights of our ski bum existence always seemed to bleed directly into the next far-too-early morning, usually before light actually arrived, when we had to meet our snowmobile hop up to the bottom of the ski lift to start our work day. The sustained lack of appropriate sleep, combined with eye-reddening substances and the brutal glare of sunbaked snow made having a strong pair of sunglasses a vital necessity. Losing or breaking a pair was akin to jabbing yourself in the corneas with a flaming marshmallow stick. So, even though I made a total of somewhere south of seven dollars an hour at the time, I decided to throw down for the latest, most expensive pair of shades possible – a stylish pair of Bolle’s that ran me a season’s worth of oily tuna cans.

Being most of the way up a 12,000 foot mountain and far from a sewage system, the facilities at the bottom of the High Alpine lift consisted of a horrible smelling, freezing cold drop toilet. Using the head was something that was to be avoided at all costs. Everyone on the mountain ate the same disgusting processed food diet, and it proved out in decomposition stage. “Holding it,” was a way of life. Thus, the locker room facilities were often equally destroyed on a daily basis once everyone skied down at the end of the day, but at least they cleaned those. Poor fuckers…

As Murph would have it, you can’t always hold it, especially after consuming half my weight in malted barley and free Crab Rangoon (Phil’s revenge, I called it) the night before. So, off I went, bracing myself with a makeshift turtleneck gas mask to enter the lair of an assy beast.

Now, the thing about a homemade outhouse on the side of a mountain is, there isn’t much light to see your way around with. They were built with as little ventilation as possible, so as to contain the olfactory demon within. After all, nobody wants to pay $80 bucks to ski Aspen only to have their sense of smell permanently deadened by the gaseous emissions of lift-operators. Most days I considered the lack of light a blessing, given the god-awful creature that lived down below the wooden rim. But on this day, proud of my brand new sunglasses as I was, I decided to keep them on rather than stow them away on the bill of my hat. I figured they might work in tandem with the turtleneck mask and form an impenetrable shield against the evil that lurked in the High Alpine shithouse. Also, I was lazy.

Somehow I managed to find myself in proper unloading position without the benefit of illumination. It was on the hasty dismount that I ran into trouble. The elastic suspenders that normally held up my ski pants formed a sproingy lasso when unleashed, and when I stood to quickly evacuate the premises, they wrapped themselves around the iron toilet paper holder, yanking me violently around with enough force to lose my footing on the snowy pine floor.

I landed in a twisted heap on the shithouse floor, face-first on the brink of the death hole. My Bolle’s went hurtling down into the pit, forever sealing them in the mud of a thousand poo’s.

Dazed and dejected, I extricated myself by kicking out the shitter door, crawling to a blinding freedom. I was greeted with a chorus of bellowing laughter from my fellow crew members and cheers from the skiers who were craned around from a half dozen chairs, rising into the skies from the base of the lift.

Later, at the end of the ski season party, I was presented with a pair of sunglasses that were made out of duct tape and cardboard toilet paper rolls, upon which someone had written “Bolle” in fine black marker along the sides.

Cell Phone

Generally, the “five second rule” only applies to non-sticky food stuffs that have been dropped on a relatively clean floor. In some dire cases, this rule has to be applied to items that are both irreplaceably expensive and vital to your working life, such as my first iPhone.

Like many people, I enjoy good reading material when nature calls. It is an unscientific fact that the act of reading ushers along the biological process. In the past, I would go to great lengths to procure reading materials of any kind prior to heading for The Loo. But that was before Steve Jobs made all of our lives better by giving us unlimited options for restroom infotainment, all in a smart little box that fits in the palm of our hands.

And while the iPhone is a brilliant package of mystifying technological magic, I found out the hard way the one thing that it is not, is waterproof. So, when my entire working and social world made that inevitable, ironic plunge into the Bakersfield, California In N’ Out toilet after slipping out of my breast pocket during an unfocused attempt at flushing, I was faced with an unpleasant, split-second decision. Perhaps you’ve been there yourselves, and can empathize with my plight.

Despite what most of my former employers, girlfriends, and teachers would say about me, I consider myself a Man Of Action, an unflappable beacon of pragmatic agency. It is only due to this inner-Chuck-Norris that I was able to utilize my cat-like reflexes and follow its course immediately down into the water and fish my phone out of the fast food restaurant commode before the shock waves that its splashdown had created in the bowl allowed the traditional contents there within to recede back to their former resting places.

Just as quickly as it had entered the toilet, it exited, along with my hand, which did not escape as unscathed as the fetchee. Into the sink everything went for a wash. Fortunately, the In N’ Out had both paper towels AND a power blower, which I promptly forced into sustained usage.

I was just about satisfied with my efforts at drying out my afflicted tele, contemplating where I might find a bag of dry rice at midnight when the bathroom door swung open. It was a pimply kid in a paper hat, peering in on me with one crooked eyebrow, his foot holding the door wide open to the full dining room.

“Dude, are you number 130?” he asked hesitantly. I stared back at him from underneath the blower. “Your order is up and we thought you disappe…,” he added, pausing when he saw my phone in my hand below the air dryer. His oily head tilted to the south momentarily, and then his eyes lit up with delayed recognition. “OH SNAP!” he shouted, snapping the fingers on both hands at once for effect. He was laughing now, his voice rising and squeaking in a crescendo of pre-adolescent dynamic range. “Did you drop your PHONE IN THE CRAPPER!? Dude, that SUUUCCCKS! That happened to my toothbrush once!”

 

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Uncool Takings – a short story by Corby Anderson

Uncool Takings

By Corby Anderson

Eyes raw and spackled with cat hair, my mouth ravaged with an unknowable and toxic combination of the previous night’s gustatory insults, I wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water. Relatively speaking, this morning watering was the most important thing in the world, you see.

I crossed the kitchen linoleum one slow inch at a time, so as not to upset the booze-rattled inner ear. I reached into the cupboard, fingered the handle, and leveled the old mason jar to the cold water tap that fronts our refrigerator, and when the glass had filled to the rounded top, I claimed my blessed prize in great gulps.

As I drank of Mother Nature’s joyful tears, it occurred to me that something in my immediate surroundings was different. I glanced around. The walls were still painted in that sickly green foam color that our senile landlord named after herself. The cabinets were the same, as were the duck-themed curtains that my wife had hated but installed anyway after their much-ballyhooed presentation as a wedding present. It all looked the same, but something felt slightly amiss.

Down the street, a dog yipped — probably Ron Rivera’s dad’s cockerpoo –setting off a major quake that split viciously down through my grey matter. Holding my head together, and sipping my salvation, I studied the fridge — that oblong container of abandoned condiments and foreign cheese which, other than as the place where half-eaten boxes of white rice go to wither and die, serves as the artistic and archival hub of our household.

The walls and face of our fridge were barren and devoid of life. No pictures. No yellowing strips of newsprint with dumb headlines (“Brown Eyed in Acorn Probe” or “Satan lifts Flyers over Avalanche”), no early Crayola works of a future Master. Not one.

The stark white face of the Kenmore was a clean and unmanaged as a newborn’s conscience. No wet or smiling dogs, no super-soaking river wars, no camping sing-alongs, no shotgun weddings, no monochromatic sunsets, no bluish snorkelers holding hands underwater atop a dumbfounded turtle. Not even a random familial babe.

Fear T-boned my gut like a herd of rollerblading rhinos in a Chinatown alley. What was wrong? What had I done this time? I had just awakened on the ten-minute couch, but that is not illogical, or un-normal, for that matter. On certain nights of folly and mirth, I’ll claim the couch rather than roust the wife. Why wake a perfectly good sleeper, a far more innocent soul, with my rambunctious sleep-bound gyrations? It was late when the garage concerto came to an ugly head — at least 4:30 a.m., and there had been a half-hearted push for our heinously pickled band to head for the beach to gander at rare winter waves and a pissy, rising sun. But I do not believe that this meteorological mission occurred, judging by the lack of sand in my beard.

Why on earth would someone come in and steal all of our photographs and carefully vetted fridge magnets while leaving me utterly unscathed, I wondered: Had I ordered a new icebox in my stupor, one exactly like our old standby, but without the memories attached? Montel’s juicer, maybe. Likely, in fact. But no calls to Sears or Home Depot rang any bells. I had not won any bets, that I could recall. Nor had I lost any, at least none that required forfeiture of my magnetized collage. To the best of my knowledge, I had not made any donations to charity, unless you count Berto’s Beer Cave and Corner Market register No. 2 as charity.

But the receipt jammed into my chest pocket said nothing of photographs. Only a 750 milli-something jigger of Jagermeister, eighteen Coors Lights in can formula, a set of dominoes, seven Lucky Seven lottery scratchers, a gross of tequila-flavored beef jerky, several pairs of plastic sunglasses, a pack of Marlboros, Snickers bar, Snickers ice cream bar, tub of Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby, and ten gallons of low-grade diesel, which in hindsight is interesting because I think that I know for a fact that I did not drive to Berto’s, and even if I had, I do not own a diesel. Nor do I smoke. Much.

The things that go through your head when you are dying of thirst and your very past has been erased! Like mercury through a colander, my mind raced from nowhere to nowhere, coming to all conclusions at once. Robbed. Stolen. Targeted by some unknown syndicate. Maybe I was dead. Maybe I was someone else.

The chilly fridge water coursed down my singed gullet, easing the reflux, slightly cooling the kettle below. I studied the rectangle that stood nakedly before me. White skin, stretched square. Too white. Too square.

Suddenly, more than anything, even more than the water I had finally won, I wanted to have a round refrigerator. And not just circular. Round. Orb-like. No, not like an orb. Round. Let’s see the bastards try and strip my fondest memories from that, I thought. No one would dare molest a round fridge. Even hardened thieves would draw that line. It would be too weird and difficult to attempt. Like necrophilia. Or cricket.

My cell phone was dead, the life sapped right out of it by a pervading, innate laziness. So much for “smart phones.” Phones should know how to charge themselves by now. It’s 2010, ferchrissakes. Enough with all of these obscure plugs and tiny cables.

To hell with it. I grabbed the wall phone and dialed 911. A lady answered, sounding uncertain and tired. “I wanna report a theft!” I shouted. “Oh yeah? Of what?” “Whaddya mean of what? My goddamned pictures of my goddamned life. And the magnets. The fuckers took the magnets too,” I continued. I looked again through nuclear eyes. The Space Ghost magnet was indeed missing. “Aw…holy hell, my God. The fiends took Space Ghost!”

 

The line was quiet. Too quiet. I listened to see if she was calling in the APB somewhere in the background. No radio chatter. Nothing but dead air. Then I heard a faint sound. It sounded like someone snoring lightly. “Hey!” I shouted. “What the hell is this? First my house gets invaded, and then the cops ignore me? Are you fucking sleeping? I’ll have your badge, you reckless ditz!” That oughta wake her ass up, I figured.

“Corby,” she said, finally.

“Yes! Yes … that’s me. It’s about time. I’m over here with criminals running amok, bashing in doors and stealing magnets and … hey … howdidyouknowmyna …”

“This is your wife. I washed the fridge last night. The pictures and the stupid magnets are in the basket by the door. Come back to bed and stop making such a fucking racket!”

 

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My Walkin’ Stick – a short essay (!) by Corby Anderson

My walkin’ stick

*Note – This shortie was submitted to Outside Magazine for their Reader’s Essential Gear section of their upcoming 35th Anniversary Issue.

Of all of the various and sundry piles of adventure gear that I have owned over the past 40 years, I can think of no other that I absolutely feel naked in the outdoors with than my walkin’ stick.

Yep. You heard that right. Not my trusty Sierra Designs Meteor Light tent, with hundreds of nights to its register. Not my Benchmade knife. No, I’ve had others just as sharp. Not my Petzl headlight. It’s a replacement to the original one that got hucked into a frenzied crowd of a Mother Hips show in Big Sur during the devastating breakdown to their song “Magazine.” Not my Marmot puffy, Patagonia Micro Puff, or any of those things…

I cannot, would not go out in the outdoors without my old walkin’ stick. It’s an old six-foot Pinon pole, shaved of bark, whittled into a bear’s head at the top, pointy enough to fight off a Chupacabra attack on the business end.

My walkin’ stick walks me, you see. It calls to me in the night, whispering grand plans for morning hikes. It taps a bluesy rhythm all its own on the trail, keeping me on Corby Time. It balances me on rocky pitches and slick logs alike. It prods the Hondog when he lingers on a pile of coyote tung. Onward, it says. Further into the bush.

It’s just a walkin’ stick, but it’s my walkin’ stick, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the fancy store-bought sticks in the world.

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Sporks For Sticks – an essay about presence, by Corby Anderson

Sporks for Sticks

By Corby Anderson

5-14-12

Yesterday at lunchtime I went out for my weekly Sunday meal and newspaper ritual. I wound up in the wayside town of El Jebel. Hungry after a late night of playing music at a foodless bar, I ordered up a burger, some fries and a coke. I was fetching the ketchup/salt/straw/napkin paraphernalia and trying my damndest to not think about the week ahead yet when my ears tuned into a racket emanating from the dining room. Looking in, I saw that the ruckus was coming from a little Latino kid, maybe 5 years old, who was smacking the table that he sat at loudly and consistently with a pair of plastic sporks.
Consciously, I chose to sit as far away from the noise as I could. I spread out my papers and dug into the week’s news. I had brought my journal along and had some designs on writing a few pages as well, but after a few minutes of mentally trying to block the noise coming from the boy across the dining room, I found that the loud, rapid fire smacking of the spoons was overwhelmingly annoying and gave up the idea of writing there at lunch.

You know how a particularly out of place noise in a certain situation can just grate on you? Well, times that by two. Sure, I could get up and leave, but I was the customer here. I had purchased food and had a right to sit and read my paper in relative quietude, right? And here was this oblivious child, no parent in sight, ruining my long-anticipated Baconator moment! Were I an urbanite, you can just about guarantee that my outraged gourd would resemble a bobble head and my outstretched finger a windshield wiper.

I started to get up and go say something, but just before standing, a strong instinct told me not to.

I sat back and thought for a moment. I opened my ears, listening to all of the noises of the otherwise quiet restaurant. The crew hustle was blocked by the wall that separated us. The few other diners each sat alone, eating silently absent the occasional straw slurp. The kid smacking out a ratta-tat-tat-TAT on the Formica table top. The overhead speakers piped in an old rock and roll song. The kid persisted, smacking the salt and pepper shakers, leveling the paper pyramid of marketing material on the table. I went back to the Denver Post sports page. The headline was for a game that was two days ago. I glanced at the top of the page. Damn. Saturday’s paper for Sunday coin. I had gotten distracted by running into a good old friend at the newspaper boxes. Her husband is one of my heroes. He died for an hour a few years ago while eating a steak in Aspen, Colorado. He’s barely with us now. I hugged them both, and wished her a happy Mother’s Day. She showed me the charm that her daughter had given her at their breakfast picnic. I told her that it was beautiful, and how I though the idea of a breakfast picnic was ridiculously cool.
The song changed. In the split second interval of one song ending and the other starting I heard calm and quiet in the restaurant. Then, the jolting intro riff to Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” cranked up, and, once more, so did the kid on the sporks.
It was only then, with my annoyance squashed by an inner voice that occasionally tells me to live in the moment and just observe (the writer’s instinct?) and my attention properly relaxed and focused that I realized that the boy was actually drumming with those sporks, not just being a nuisance. He was hitting the spice shakers as toms, using the cardboard triangle as a splash. And though his tempo was off, he was actually pretty well matching the rhythm of the tune. Skeptical still, I waited for the legendary drum solo section, ready to dismiss the whole thing as an idyll kid’s dumb luck. I thought of the infinite monkey theorem – the one that says that you can give a team of monkey time enough tapping on enough keyboards and eventually they will write Shakespeare.
The fuzzed-out guitars fired into that old familiar staccato rhythm. Duh-duh-duh-duh-da-da-duh-duh! The bass followed. Then the stringed instruments dropped out and the drum solo came. The kid followed a half beat behind, reaching all across his “kit” of a table for effect. Astounding, I thought! He was mimicking an incredibly complex drum solo on what I had to assume was ear alone.
My drink disappeared, when the song ended I got up to get a refill. The kid watched me closely as I crossed the restaurant, putting his sticks down on the table. “Hey kid, you speak English?” I asked on a whim. He nodded and smiled. “Yes,” he said quietly. I asked him how old he was. He held up three fingers in each hand. “You ever played a drum kit before?” followed my line of questioning. “No,” he said, dropping his chin to his chest in a classic pout. I thought quickly back on my own youth, when I had tried out for jazz band as a drummer. “Look buddy, you need to get your parents to enroll you in a music class pronto! You’ve got chops!”
He motioned back to the rear corner of the restaurant. “Papa,” he exclaimed dejectedly, pointing with his back-cast thumb at a booth where a couple of employees were looking over a notebook, discussing work. I looked back at the counter. There was no one to be seen behind it. The kitchen was empty.
“Hey Dad-Of-The-Kid-That-Is-Sitting-Here-Drumming-On-The-Table!” I said perhaps a little too abruptly in an amplified voice. He looked up startled. “Is this your kid?” I asked, closing the distance, consciously trying not to come off as mad or weird. He nodded, getting up out of his booth. “Yes, yes!” He looked at the boy with a caring look that turned stern in the same glance. “What is wrong sir, is he being too loud?” “No, no. He’s fine. But I do think that you need to get him a drum set and into music classes, quick like! The kid has insane skills for his age. The longer you put it off, the longer it’ll be until you get to hear his real talent. And you know, there is nothing worse for a household than an ambitious, untrained drummer!” I explained with a grin.
The father walked over to his son, roughing up his thick black hair with a firm swipe, leaving a frozen rooster tail in his wake. They looked at each other. The son’s brown eyes beaming up at his father with excitement and love. The father reflected and magnified down the feeling in his own identical eyes. “Would you like that, Carlos?” he asked. The kid nodded in a brace of double time head shakes. “OK then, we’ll get you a drum for your birthday!” he said lovingly. “And sticks!” the kid replied instantly. “And a medium Coke, for me,” I added, rattling the ice in my waxy cup.

*Corby Anderson is a freelance writer who writes from the spidery loft of an old log cabin on a truck ranch in Emma, Colorado. His essays, literary, food and music reviews, PR work, novel excerpts, poetry and other detritus can be found at www.corbyanderson.wordpress.com, and he can be reached at corbyanderson@hotmail.com.

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Eulogy of Martha Rogers Tullis

Eulogy of Martha Ella Rogers Tullis

February 7, 2011

By Corby Anderson

On behalf of Martha’s entire family, I’d like to thank each of you for being here today to remember my Granma, and to celebrate a long life, well lived.

I’d like to say a few words today that might help to bring into focus just how special of a woman Martha Ella Rogers Tullis was.

When I think about the combination of qualities and attributes that made Martha such a great, unique person, several come immediately to mind, especially her incredible physical beauty and class, her unyielding love and support of her family and friends, her selfless generosity and her amazing home cooking.

Yesterday, at the gathering at Cumby Funeral Home, I had the pleasure of meeting many of Granma’s longtime friends for the first time – and being the inquisitive type, I took the occasion to ask some of them what one word that they would use to describe Martha.

Time and time again, you all replied with the word that I think perfectly captures her essence – “Beautiful.”

Martha Tullis was a fashion plate! She dressed with the sense of a true southern belle, which only served to further accentuate her already striking natural features and sweet personality.

Whether it was just on a run to the store, out to church, or on a cross-country trip, Martha was rarely seen without a classy ensemble, usually consisting of a perfectly tailored, brightly-colored jacket and matching blouse, smart skirt or pants, and accompanying shoes. And lord, she could accessorize – she had a myriad of interesting broaches and pins, jewelry and purses, scarves and shawls. That beautiful silver head of hair of hers was always precisely done, and had the unique ability to maintain it’s base form in the strongest gale or the wettest snow.

She loved to look good – for herself, and for her friends and family. And look good, she did. Indeed, she was beautiful, as she was so aptly described yesterday and for many years prior – and it was a combination of her love of fashion, but really her beauty was underlying – in her abundant natural warmth, her joy and love of life, her family and friends.

I look out here today and see so many familiar faces and I know that Martha is so very happy that you all came out to remember her. I see many family members – from all different generations – and it reminds me how much Martha loved all of you.

She was a deeply devoted mother who raised and loved dearly her two beloved daughters – my mother Phyllis and my Aunt Carla, both of whom she would do anything for.

I know that she cherished every minute of time that she was able to spend with all of her sisters and brothers – Ranzy, Laura, Lucille, Alice, Ruth, Edna, and Bobby and their spouses, their children, and the generations that followed – including her lifelong neighbors, Tommy and Theresa Cook, their sons Brian and Brad and their respective families, my brother Alton and his wife Noel’s son Jake – her adored Great Grandchild, and a special boy in Ohio named Kristopher who became like a Great Grandchild to her.

Grandma had a special fondness for my Dad, Glen, who she loved to dote on, and developed a truly inspiring relationship with his mother, Ruby, and also with his brother Harry and his own family.

And though the years have gained on us, let us not forget – for she sure never did – just how deeply that Martha Rogers Tullis loved and honored her late husband, my grandfather, Harold Tullis.

Together, they defeated the Nazi’s, made it intact through a World War, and built their dream home on Tobacco Road, which still sits there today as a testament to their love.

In that home, they raised a beautiful family and pursued their mutual dreams, and when Harold died a sudden death at a relatively young age, just months after I was born in 1972, Granma set about to seeing that their shared vision of the American dream through not only her own, but also through all of our eyes by participating so closely and sweetly in our lives.

She was as generous and selfless as anyone that I’ve ever met. As her grandchildren,  both my brother and I never say a holiday – and not just the major ones – or a special occasion that did not include a custom card, a hand written note, and a little money taped into the card with a little piece of scotch tape.

Martha, or “Moth-a” as many of you know her, would give her time, energy and money to anyone that she felt needed a little help. Her enthusiasm for deeds of good will never waned, even as her age advanced. In fact, over time it seemed to be gathering steam and her efforts doubled – sewing, visiting, listening, helping out, and cooking for her many friends and family.

And MAN could she cook! Now, I know that everyone here is going to say the same thing about their own Grandma, but I can say without a single doubt that my Grandma was the best cook on the face of planet Earth, a mantle that now thankfully passes to her keenest student, my Mom.

To me, her food tasted, looked, and smelled simply like home – like the south – like her: Sweet, loving, abundant and significant.

She was a master of her kitchen. When I was in college up in Boone years ago, I’d come down from the hills to visit with her and Carla for the weekend and when I would awake at her house I would rise to a mountain of biscuits, ham, sausage, grits, two kinds of gravy, eggs, coffee, and as I’d wolf that down she would start pulling the lids of the lunch that she had made earlier that morning – unleashing an amazing aroma of fresh collards, black-eyed peas, squash, cornbread, sweet tea. And while she was showing me that, she’d plan out dinner for me, just a few hours later – and inevitably start making her famous coconut crème cake or strawberry cobbler for dessert. I’d go back up to Boone with ten pounds of hot food in my trunk and at least ten more in my belly.

I was always amazed at how she made all of that incredible food, from scratch, every day, month in and month out, all for less money than most of us spend on a good dinner out. She had a true gift for resourcefulness and a depression-era bred ability to provide incredible food from her own bountiful garden.

And that is but one of the memories that I will always have of my Grandma – of her dancing around her kitchen, from one outrageously good smelling pot to another, humming, singing, calling us all to the table, and urging us all to “warsh up!” – suppers on and it’s getting cold…

Thank you.

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Grin and Bear It, by Corby Anderson (National Steinbeck Center “Travel’s With Charley” 2010 essay contest winner)

*The following essay was written as an entry for the National Steinbeck Center “Travel’s With Charley” essay contest. On Tuesday morning, as I sipped my luke warm coffee and stared out at the fog and mist billowing beyond my office window here in Central California, I received a call from Steinbeck Festival organizers congratulating me for winning the contest!

Dog is my co-pilot.

Grin and Bear It

By Corby Anderson

Beardog heard it first, as always. I was lost in a dream, chasing a fleeting strip of bacon through a swaying sea of corn silk. Good Bear and his own golden ears picked up on the rumble and rustled me with a serious-sounding growl just before a midnight flash flood ran in dark torrents past our campsite deep in Utah’s Lockhardt Canyon.

The flood arrived in an explosive, headlong clamor. Boulders smashed together in thunderous cracks and caromed down the otherwise dry wash just below where I had perched our tent earlier that day. Bear whined and howled at the sudden noise, but after some time had passed — impossible to know how much, as I had no watch, nor did I want one — we both fell back to sleep in the rain-dampened tent, lulled by the pattering rain on the fly and the rushing clatter of the brand new river.

It was our yearly desert foray, a time for harried man and hairy dog alike to commune with the rocks and sand, to stare sideways at Utah’s cantaloupe-hued hoodoos and hobgoblins, to scramble down cliff bands and up steep drainages to the canyons rim.  It was my down time, barely sufficient in my allotted one week of solitude to clear my head of the thought-pervading technology that possessed it in my workaday life.

Bear, the mystery mutt whom I had volunteered to raise up in an attempt to win over the stony heart of a hippie princess in Boone, North Carolina, ten years prior, was the ever-eager co-pilot, requiring for sustenance only the long exploratory hikes into the thorn-bound wilderness, a portion of whatever slop was for supper, a dented tin saucer of sandy water, and a warm fire to lay beside at night while an mal-tuned guitar plunked in its familiar whiskey rhythm.

Bear in our new swimming hole.

We awoke to find the path that we had driven in on  — the arroyo — completely washed out by the flood, a situation that persisted for four striking days. On the third of those, my truck battery died, an unfortunate situation in some regards — since wife and work were expecting me, us, back to their civilization sooner than the wilds would allow — but in other ways not. I was stocked with enough canned food, water and beer for a week or more.

Thoroughly isolated, there was nothing for us to do but play. And so we did, with gusto. We chased lizards, mapped stars, made up ridiculous songs about fleas and sticks, and barked profound declarations into the night.

When the urge struck, I wrote languorously in my journal while Bear napped in the scrape in the dirt. Or I napped and Bear sat alertly, defending our nest from wrongheaded buzzards and flies and long-tailed mice. Once a day I sat in the dirt and drew pen sketches of the monocline, and each time, as if keeping a schedule, Bear, as he is wont to do, wrestled with mud-stuck rocks in the now-trickling creek.

On the morning of the fourth post-flood day, a white Jeep appeared down canyon. I was nude at the time and wading in the creek (why not?), so I ducked behind a rock and slipped into my grungy shorts and a sweat-salted T-shirt to run out to meet the Jeep at the head of the camp.

Down Canyon.

It was the Sheriff, and in his Jeep were two lawyers from Boston, out to visit the scene of a recent death in the area. Dehydration. Outward Bound student. Lawsuits were piling up, and these men were there to investigate.

They were as shocked to see me as I was them. Bear wagged his tail and growled at the same time — his emotions as mixed as his genes. “What are you doing out here? Don’t you know that this is one of the most remote places in the country?” the lawyer in the front seat howled. The one in the back leaned out and jammed a video camera in my face. “Sure. That’s why we’re here,” I replied, grinning through cultivated whiskers. “Can I offer you boys a cold Coke?” They accepted in sun-sapped unison.

The flood still courses down the otherwise dry arroyo three days later.

I went to get the soda bottles, which were still perfectly cold in the cooler that was tucked away in a shady nook of deep maroon sandstone, although my ice was long gone. “That’s that gray shade Davis talked bout,” one of the Boston lawyers said excitedly to the other, pointing at the crease in the rock where my cooler lived. The second lawyer snapped a photo of my cooler.

With cables I had already pre-staged in hopes of eventual rescue, the Sheriff jump-started my truck. Once it was alive again, I left the old Ford running while I packed up camp, just in case . No sense in pushing my luck. The investigation expedition disappeared up into the canyon, and Bear and I had one last game of fetch with a forearm-sized chunk of gnarled grey Pinon.

I looked around and decided that this place is where I’d like to rest when it’s all over — somewhere quiet, open and unspoiled.

“Well, old buddy, I guess we’d better get back home,” I said. “Load on up.” The tired dog leapt into the passenger seat with the ancient stick still in his mouth. When I got in he dropped it in my lap, and looked up at me with an expression of what had to be absolute contentment.

“We’ll get lost somewhere good next year,” I said, scratching his dusty brown head as we bounced and slid back down the muddy wash.

Bear Dog and Whitey Ford.

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Change is Good, Change is Good…Repeat Until Change is Good – Commencement Address to the 2010 Graduating Class of the Pacific Valley School

*Today I had the great honor of being invited to give the commencement address for the two graduating seniors of the smallest high school in America – the Pacific Valley School, which sits along a beautiful, desolated stretch of coast in Central California, an hour south of Big Sur. This is my speech.

“Change is Good, Change is Good…Repeat Until Change is Good”
Commencement Address to the 2010 Graduating Class of Pacific Valley School
By Corby Anderson
June 17, 2010

Good afternoon, and congratulations to the 2010 graduating class of the Pacific Valley School!

It is with great honor and humility that I stand here before you today. I do not live here in Pacific Valley, but I really do love this community. The very idea that you all live out here in this harmonious, respectful and self-reliant way, on this desolate fringe of central California actually lets me sleep easier at night. I take great comfort in knowing that there are people living this way still.

Who am I, and why am I here?

Indeed. These two simple qualifiers were meant to serve as goal posts for  a series of notes that I scribbled out when I originally set about conjurin up my points for this talk. But when I sat down to do that actual writing, I realized that those two questions had opened up some pretty heavy existential gashes in my mind, each of which commanded days of contemplation to even begin to answer. So here is the condensed version.

Professionally, I am a video producer, a director of shows and events, and a media manager. Maybe a writer.

How I got here is a loaded question, considering the need for brevity here, so that you two graduates can get on with the rest of your lives. I do tend to go on at times, so I will do my best to explain that question as succinctly as possible. Suffice to say, prior to moving to the Central California coast two years ago, I was living a rather fun and adventurous life in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado, when I was suddenly stricken with an intense desire to move to the coast and write a book. I would like to say simply that the process was as easy as making up my mind, moving, setting up shop in Monterey and living happily hereafter. But it was not. Things don’t always work that way.

What it was, though, was a true leap of faith – something that I have recognized and embraced along every step of my journey to this podium. I gave up a perfectly good job, managing a TV station while making decent money in one of the worlds greatest ski towns, Aspen, Colorado, and up and moved my new wife here to the coast without any jobs lined up, with just a few Santa Cruz-based friends to show us the ropes of living here, no savings, and a ridiculous notion that I was going to come to Monterey and write the Great American Ski Bum Novel, despite having never written so much as a decent short story and having zero formal training in the art. And I did all of this right at the beginning of the greatest economic collapse in several generations.

I found this place, this utterly beautiful, outrageous dream of a community when I was assigned to write a story about your teacher, surf coach, meteorologist, botanist, jade sage, and fishing instructor (have I forgotten anything else? There must be more!) David Allen for the Monterey County Weekly, whom I have freelanced for since I sent the editor, Mark Anderson, whom I believe, gave this address last year, a taunting letter challenging him to a dual of verbs and pronouns. I should preface that with the caveat that I don’t even know what a pronoun is, I just thought that it would make for a good duel. “Captain Lingcod”, David Allen brought me here then and has now asked me back to impart some bit of wisdom that I might have scrapped off in my long carom through the business of broadcasting and media.

I have a profound respect for Dave Allen. His life’s deeds and adventures, his dedication to education, art and nature are inspiring and legendary, even if they are not yet known to the greater world. So I am proud to stand here before you at his suggestion, and you all should be proud of him and all of the rest of your teachers, administrators, and coaches at this amazing school. Over time, as you integrate into larger and larger communities, I am certain that you will both come to realize just how unique and special it was to have grown up out here in Pacific Valley, amongst the wild, rugged coastline, the hovering hawks, the playful seals, the timeless whales, the watchful mountain lions, and that deep blue sea that stretches out forever.

I have a mantra that has served me fairly well in my career and personal adventures. Drummer, can I get a roll? Good people of Pacific Valley, you might want to join me in this chant. “Change is good, change is good, change is good. Repeat until change is good.”

That mantra has come in handy for me specifically because I happened to develop an early passion for working in the world of radio, television, video and film production, while also having the luck (good or bad has yet to be determined) of precisely the start of the greatest upheaval in the history of the industry – what has become known as the Digital Age.

When I started, in 1988, I was exactly the same age as you two. At that time there were very clear career paths within the industry, and time-tested processes for successfully entering into each tract, whether it was radio, TV, film, or video production. Broadcasting was considered an art. It took years of interning, apprenticeships, and a series of low wage jobs in small markets until you were considered a true professional.

When I started in radio, we edited our shows by cutting the actual tape with scissors, and taping the good parts back together with masking tape. Grease pencils were involved somehow. Anyone know what a grease pencil is? Me neither, anymore. Must have been cool though, because I remember the name. But I digress. Remember now, this is just twenty years ago, and yet we had no computers, anywhere at school, home or otherwise. There were twelve channels of TV, new music came to us over the FM radio, and there were just a few channels that were worth a damn, nationwide even. Documentary film, one of my great interests, was then considered an exotic art form practiced by auteurs and reclusive directors who had washed out of Hollywood. You could not find their movies anywhere, even if you looked. It wasn’t until years later that movie rental stores came along, and even then mostly all that you could find to watch were the Police Academy films, Top Gun, and, curiously, Cheech and Chong.

Eventually, I went to college, studied TV and radio until they released me into the wild, and wound up going to work for a series of small video producers. Well, they weren’t small, physically. They were average sized, on the whole. But the companies were smallish, as were the video projects. But it was good work for a recent graduate. As new technology became available, I learned to edit video on a series of hybrid video editing systems, which were still tape based, and had no real memory of their own, but allowed us to digitally make edit marks here and there without having to build a show from “left” to “right”, sequentially. These systems cost $30,000 each, so the field of videography was relatively uncrowded due to the cost of entry into the business.

Meanwhile, the newspaper industry thrived, and if you could really write, magazines would pay you a dollar a word for an incisive bit of investigative journalism or a well-positioned, defendable essay. The really, really good writers got book deals. And in radio, the really good DJ’s worked in big city stations and were well paid, and perhaps better yet, were just as well loved as the musicians that they promoted. The best camera operators went to work for the big networks, and eventually for the new cable entities that cropped up. There was plenty of work, and it was delineated. You were pretty much one or the other, and within those channels, there were even more specific jobs that were specific, stand-alone careers. A living could be made at each of them. And then an interesting thing happened. What was it? Drummer, can I get a witness?

Change! And what is change? Good!

Almost overnight, the whole communications industry collapsed, knotted up, and grew immutably all at once. There was total upheaval on a grand scale, and all because of a little silicon chip and a whole shit ton of fiber optic cabling that made saving digital files easy and sending them across great distances even easier. Radio fell first, all of the small family stations that made each market unique were swallowed whole and lost to corporate syndicates and their dizzy drive to automate. If you have ever heard Tom Petty’s song “The Last DJ”, it is really a true rendition of that situation. And that was just ten, fifteen years ago. Now, just years after the digital revolution, corporate radio and the music industry got upended by the democratization of internet radio, satellite radio, and home recording studios.

The same thing happened with TV and newspapers a few years later. The Internet evolved and suddenly everyone could get any paper that they wanted, and advertise for free on Craigslist, which single handedly severely maimed, and nearly killed the newspaper business. That was just within the past five years. Final Cut Pro was introduced as a cheap and highly capable editing system, and suddenly everyone and their mother, literally, were editing video at a professional level. Today, just seven years after a solid editing system and professional camera would cost you upwards of $50,000 and taken up a whole room in your house to store, you can get an iPhone that has a professional-level camera and edit system on board for $200.

So what did all of this mean to us in the media, this change? It meant that we had to be diverse in our talents. We needed to be able to aptly to ten jobs across five fields of media rather than one within one. We had to become adaptable to the new technology, to quickly learn and master new skills to stay ahead of the game, since every college in the world was now cranking out entire classes of professionally trained communicators every December and June. It is in all likelihood that whatever it s that you wind up studying if you go to college, those skills that you will be learning will be applied to an industry that does not even exist today. It will be the work ethic, the communications skills, and the ability to adapt that you will bring to those unknown industries.

What this great technological democratization means for you two graduates is that there is greater opportunity to be paid well for your talents immediately, or as soon as your creative instinct is honed and becomes marketable. Because the technology is no longer such a roadblock to success, thanks to the falling costs of the equipment, you can enter the fray as soon as your originality is up to a sustainable, professional level. It is up to you, and how fast you learn on your own, in school, or at the sides of your mentors. No longer do you have to climb a very long and arduous, not to mention financially ruinous ladder of training just before you can be considered a player, or a decision maker, who, by the way, other than the salesmen, make all the money in the business of communications.

What I mean to get across to you as you embark on your life’s journey is that nothing stays the same, ever. You are entering a crazy world when you leave this hallowed place, thanks to this technological quickening. You can steel yourself for that change by taking what you have learned from all of these people gathered here to celebrate your graduation today and go get right after your dreams. Be ready and willing to seize on the opportunities presented to you when change occurs. Be part of that change, be ahead of it if you can, because there is no doubt that it all – your career, your family, your physical location will all change dramatically over time. Sometimes, over a very short period of time, as my experience has been. Change is the only thing that you can really count on. Even when it seems bad, it usually turns out for the best. And that is a good thing.

I want to leave with you just a few nuggets of wisdom that I have picked up along my path. The first is a saying that my dad has always loved. He learned it from his dad, who worked in a place that was just about as remote as this place – a small coal-mining village in the mountains of Virginia and Kentucky.

“If a job is once begun, never leave it until it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”

And here is another one. I saw this note tacked onto the refrigerator of a famous writer named Hunter S. Thompson. He put it there as a cautionary reminder to himself, and those famous artists and raconteurs who gathered in his kitchen, where he did most of his work. I had the chance to film there. The note said:

“Do Not EVER Call 911. THIS MEANS YOU!”

I am not sure how that applies to your lives, but maybe it will come in handy someday. I think that it means to be self-reliant, to think things through before asking for help, when you can.

Here is one from a writer who I think was one of the best philosophers of the last century. “Cactus” Ed Abbey, who lived in and wrote about the desert, amongst other things great and small:

“Concrete is heavy, iron is hard. But the grass will prevail.”

And another: “Do not waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes, you are ahead, sometimes behind. The race is long, and in the end, it is only with yourself.” That was from Kurt Vonnegut – who had the distinction of being the only novelist to have ever been bombed by the Russians, the Germans, and the Americans all in the same war.

And finally, this is one that I came up with after working in TV for years and years:
“All that we can do is take the lens caps off for one another.”

In closing, I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I wish you both Godspeed, and the best of luck. The future starts right now. Go get it!

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Radio Reunion: Geeks, Stoners, and a Few Cheesy Zombies Come Together to Celebrate a Rock and Roll Rebelution an essay by Corby Anderson

Radio Reunion: Geeks, Stoners, and a Few Cheesy Zombies
Come Together to Celebrate a Rock and Roll Rebelution

By Corby Anderson
March 21, 2009

The fact that in the long history of Bay Area high school radio institution KVHS- FM (90.5, Concord) only three people, all with the last name of Wilson, have served as the Faculty Advisor and General Manager is not the quirkiest aspect of the all-class reunion experience. No, that designation would have to go to the open dispute over the actual age of the legendary student broadcast operation.

The reunion paraphernalia for the ground-breaking hard rock station, based out of my alma mater, Clayton Valley High School, clearly promotes a 40th birthday party, which is great, except that I own a t-shirt, as do many of my fellow DJ’s, that nearly shouts “KVHS 90.5 FM – 25 Years and Still Rocking!” in faded silver silkscreen.

That shirt, which in my case is no longer a technical shirt, but instead now lives on as a squarish panel on a very comfy quilt made of other circa late 80’s shirts, some of which aren’t even mine (but that is another story), not to mention the strange fate of some classic heavy metal shirts ending up in quilt form, but which I deeply love because my mother and grandmother made it together as a family project, promotes what was indeed the slogan of the station for the 1989 school year.

Do the math, as at least some of us reunionees did, and you will see that the anniversary date is off by five years. If the station was 25 back in ‘89, then that puts the birth date of this rock and roll original back in the seminal, musically formulative year of 1964. Thusly plotted in simple math, it follows as logic that this should actually be the 45th anniversary, which seems close enough to just wait for the 50th, though I am happy to be involved in any case, because who knows what all can happen in the course of five years? All of this leads to the reality as that at some point – now or then is not resolved – someone screwed up the marketing. Which sort of makes sense, if you know Us.

All three Wilson’s are not in attendance at the first big alumni celebration of the station, but two of them are at the guarded entrance to the Clayton Valley High School Multi-Use Room, which I always called the “lunch room” because I was never in theater, which, aside from being the dreaded Saturday School detention facility was the only other official use of the room.

No, I was in Radio, and we had our own room. Two, in fact. And I am not entirely sure why there are two serious looking uniformed officers guarding this event, held on a weekend, at night, for adults (presumably). But judging by the depreciation of the surrounding neighborhood – my old stomping grounds – which I have seen only once in nearly twenty years, the police presence leaves me somewhat unsurprised, if not comforted.

Queuing up in a fairly long line of aged looking rockers and techies, two of my era-mates spot Mr. Wilson, aka Tom, who I always thought was THE Mr. Wilson. It turns out that our Mr. Wilson is really the 2nd Mr. Wilson, and he stands happily behind a sign-in desk alongside “Boss” Wilson, aka unknown, was his predecessor, and gives big officious hugs to all who enter into the realm of the KVHS reunion.

After scribbling out our names and tenures on sticky nametags with pleasant smelling markers, we enter into a well decorated lunch room where I once served 19 straight Saturday school detentions in a row, several of which were doled out for actually daring the offended detention master to “thank you sir may I have another”. I was not a model student in those days. But boy did I love KVHS, the very existence of which I can now look back on and say with confidence that it saved me from some terrible Dotcom infrastructure ditch digging career (or worse), and instead gave me, at the precocious age of sixteen, an avenue to succeed in broadcasting.

Milling about the room it is impossible not to note the varied styles of the gathered eras. It is, after all, a costume party (come as you were, the Facebook blast noted, along with the historical discrepancy prior mentioned), though I doubt that many people are in actual costumes so much as dressing normally. It is not a suit and tie crowd, and thankfully so.

By nature, radio people are a sentimental lot, and seem to towards getting fashion-stuck in time – usually at around the time of their perceived peak. In this case, with so many radio success stories intertwined with folks who just took the class as an elective to get out of PE, that peak time fluctuates more than a bit.

Through the crowd courses every type of worn out, washer chewed, glory days rock shirt that you can imagine, at times paired with a bleached, tight fitting jean jacket, which are inevitably adorned with equally killer rock patches and ironic buttonery. The youngsters who skulk around wield mean sounding chains that loop around their pants for no apparent reason, while the OG crowd, who seem to have the most fun of all involved, mill about sporting strange sweaters and hula wear. For the most part, the party attire follows the clear-thinking reasoning amongst radiots that says why dress up when no one is going to see you anyways. Comfort is king when heavy doses of personality are required. And anyways the marketing people said it was a costume party.

Mr. Tom Wilson has come besuited in a custom black KVHS letterman’s jacket with shiny leather sleeves, his name stenciled in on the left chest and a huge swath of needlework in the form of the ultra-blue KVHS logo emblazed on the back. His much commented upon jacket is unbuttoned at the moment, revealing the always fit Wilson II to be wearing a black t-shirt underneath with identical logo placement. The effect is powerful, a reminder that rock people, and the substrata of radio people in particular, are nothing without their swag, and conversely everything with it.

KVHS is known for being a rock station, at times skewing towards the speed metal version of rock, though it is a student run station, and thus the play lists run the gamut, from classic to classless (art is subjective).

Talking wistfully with my gathered micmates, I am reminded that when I was a DJ, I had a raging Neil Young fixation, which I satiated by playing at least two songs (my show, the coolly named Corby Anderson Show, was on Two-fer-Tuesdays, late night) of his per show, every week for two years, summers included. I remember too being afflicted with a major Zeppelin fetish, but having that love stymied by the preceding DJ, Jeff Roush, a kinetically charming airwave ranger who claimed them for his own every week, for two years, summers included, the hour just before I went on.

Not wanting to be repetitive, I would inevitably settle on Shaky Neil and his rattling E string, all presented via a priceless, now-vanished stash of deliciously weathered KVHS vinyl to the faithful listeners who could pick up the low power beast within a twenty-five mile radius of its broadcast tower up on Mount Diablo.

Circumnavigating the MUR/LR reveals several interesting reunion components, while also leading to a few disappointing omissions, such as a live guest DJ/interview booth, archival tape moments, or a sentiment stoking slide show). The middle of the room is a large, tabled off area manned by youthful KVHS’ers, and appears off limits to alums.

Inside the codger-free Black and Silver Zone a number of young staffers run around in gleeful oblivion, much as I did in my time on staff. This is their baby now, and though the old folks come to thrill at the sight, the thing lives on thanks to they who turn the knobs of Now. There seems to be a slight disconnect in the generation department, which is understandable. Some of us here are old enough to be their great-grandparents, a shocking fact given that the common thread between us is a hard rock station, which sort of paints the music scene in a light that I had never quite seen it before.

The cordoned off area takes up so much of the room that the guest alumni are corralled off to the far perimeter fringes, where they huddle in era-specific clusters by speakers that blare ear bruising modern metal. Occasionally, someone from a bygone age will intercede with a different group, but that sort of missionary work seems strangely rare, though I try to spend conscious time talking to whoever will chat with me.

On the surrounding tables are random objects, presumably put there for an auction, though this crowd does not seem at all to be the bidding sort. And not to rag on the auction selections, because these times are dizzy and nauseous and non-profit donations are historically weak, and you take what you can get, and of course the point is to support the cause, KVHS FM, which to a person we all love dearly. But at any rate, I don’t see anyone really paying much attention to the graciously donated but ill-fitting items, like the inexplicable Baseball Pack, which includes a framed Shoeless Joe Jackson black and white and some unopened Fleer card packs, or the Easter Basket menagerie.

Around the periphery, near the sign-in table, spins a raffle wheel. Its student barker has spiky black hair, blacker than black, actually, and wears a backstage credential hanging around his neck from a blue lanyard. I am instinctually drawn to the wheel. Show me a game that involves a rotating wheel, such as roulette, or the home version of the Wheel of Fortune, and I will inevitably become glued to it, trying to figure out the eroding rotation and guess the landing. My friend Brad says that I am a natural Wheel Watcher, but I don’t know what that really means. In this case, I do my best to avoid the KVHS raffle wheel because it is painted in a tractor-beaming, vanishing pinwheel design, and I don’t wont to get sucked into that sort of obsession at such a sentimental event.

The KVHS reunion is scheduled for two hours, and I imagine myself spending a good half-life over at the yellow hypno-wheel, drooling and stuffing my pockets with small orange paper tickets in hopes of winning the latest Killswitch Engage offering . I look briefly at the slowly ticking gyre, just for research purposes, and see that the wheel is divided into landing spots interspersedly tagged with triangular badges for all of the typical radio station swag that most of us would be thrilled to go home with – CD’s, shirts, posters, tickets…

Just as I am about to crack and give into my wheel fetish, a lovely face of vaguely familiar high-cheeked vintage comes rushing towards me from out of the geeky mass. I smile and prepare to hug warmly the incoming alum, but she just blows right past me and lands in the arms of an equally familiar male face who stands just behind me. My eyeglasses are somewhere south of here, lost in the course of a heated Big Sur ping-pong match the week before, so I cant see a damned thing for certain, a situation that is seriously complicated by the fact that everyone has aged by at least 19.5 years since last we met.

Looking at his nametag closer, I realize that the male is in fact one Jim Binas, who was a year ahead of me in the student radio program, and who once hosted a precociously polished morning drivetime show that was uncannily popular. Binas was also the operations manager at the time and, despite being just a year or two older than I, somehow he always represented an authority figure whom I avoided at all costs.

This one sided rivalry was probably the unknowable early pangs of developing professional jealousy, although compounded by the probably mistaken notion that (for reasons not clear to me today) Binas stole the giant neon pink speaker box that rode around in the rear bench seat of my 1972 Chevelle bumping Slayer and Too $hort at illegal decibel levels back in the summer of 1989.

I’m over it now. Seriously, I am, and was probably a false accusation in the first place, thought the mystery was never properly solved. It is possible too that Binas wrecked into that very same pea green Chevelle and damaged the front quarter panel in an after school parking lot incident, but I cannot remember specifics due to lingering effects of short term memory loss. It is almost certain that at the time I attributed each these offenses to Binas entirely unfairly, likely because of his achieved, Manish status. It is also now clear to me that for whatever reason, at the time I told no one about my issues with the jolly seeming Binas and seethed quietly for no good reason.

I ask Jeff R. if he remembers any of this drama, but it is clear that this was solo memory terrain. He just stares at me as if I am speaking Farsi, before launching into a deep welled round of ‘member when’s, which we all hail. And that is Roush’s gift; he is given to random, instant sentimentalism, paired with a long, relatively unobstructed memory. He is capable of reciting every line from The Brady Bunch (all 117 episodes, and the two movies,), and earlier regaled us with a scintillating twenty-minute oratory on the swell features of his newest tool, the best nose-hair trimmer in the world (model disremembered).

The blonde vixen who hugged Binas is standing near me, and I try to get close enough to read her dubiously placed name badge without seeming like a breast gawker when a student technician thrusts a wireless handheld microphone into her hand and says “You’re on, Sterling!” Of course! This confirms my suspicion, the tallish blond is no other than Sterling James, only the most awesome DJ that ever wore the black and silver t-shirt of KVHS.

My ears had grown accustomed to the booming speakers that were treating the assembled to a modern metal soundtrack which echoes like constant cannon fire throughout the cavernous concrete room, but when the honey drenched voice of Sterling James winds up, I am transformed to a different time, a time when a great voice and good looks equaled anything that a man could ever want in a woman. Now, in the flickering fluorescent light that beams down onto the MUR stage, I realize that old crushes never go away; they just get buried by reality, and rightfully so.

Sterling James immediately goes into golden toned, echoic banter focusing on the 40/45-year controversy, before calling up people on stage for some sort of ill-arranged costume contest. I hope that this will lead to some sort of alumni presentation, or panel discussion featuring the Wilson 3 and a few notable alumni, but in the end all that she does is MC the weird contest and then hand the mic back. So much for pomp and circumstance or historic self-examination. In the end, Boss Wilson, our founder father, wins the contest, and a fancy trophy, for dressing as he most likely normally does.

There is some sort of frantic scuffle going on over at the snack table quadrant, and so I hustle through the gathered clusters of ham waisted Disc Jockeys over to get a closer look. “They’ve got Zombies!” a woman screams deliriously as she fights her way out of the jumble. After a nervous moment, she emerges with two fists thrust triumphantly in the air. You probably have to have been a Clayton Valley Ugly Eagle at some point in your life to know with certitude that Zombies are, in fact, real, and that you can eat them, and that once you have tasted their flesh you will never quite be able to forget the hot gooey cheesiness of their piping innards.

Zombies, in this case, are not some undead horror show brain-sucking lepers, they are a cheese filled dough which for at least twenty-five years have been served at an odd moment in the CVHS student day known as “brunch”. Brunch is not quite breakfast, and not quite lunch, and most likely the result of everyone needing a cigarette break back in the 60’s. Zombies are the snack de jour at brunch time, and, along with their equally delightful culinary cousins, the Pup Dog (same ingredients as the Zombie: cheddar cheese, dough, butter – only with the added heat, chewy texture and grease droppings of a baked hot dog thrown in) they are served by select students (who get to leave class early to prepare their Brunch Carts for the onslaught) at sometime around 10 AM daily. In the course of my own controversial, slightly-less-than-one-year Brunch Carteering career, it is estimable that my total consumption of the malleable, cheese impregnated butter buns equaled somewhere around five-hundred of the fist sized mounds, which was not an abnormal uptake of Zombies/Pups.

Someone in the KVHS reunion committee had the absolutely brilliant, stunningly prescient idea to serve Zombies as hors dourves at the reunion/birthday party, and the arrival of a fresh bakers rack full of the iconic pastries has created a near riot along the kitchen frontage. I dive into the mosh, blindly clawing my way to the front, where I grab hold of two cheesy beauts and a requisite chaser – a small, square carton of chocolate milk, and then back out of the mob to search the fringes for some packets of mustard, where I run into an equally ecstatic former era-mate, Seanna Vail.

Ms. Vail is one year older than I. At one crucial time, along with her BFF Heidi, Seanna allowed an unintentionally mulletted, insecure fat kid with a radio fetish to hang around as a veritable equal, and thus gave me unknowable reams of street cred in the face of a vapid lot of rumor spun clique-tribes. Seanna and Heidi were the cool girls – their attitudes and antics were a bit risqué and amply anti-establishment, while staying essentially grounded and girl-next-doorish, which, actually, if you discount the master planned suburban acreage of the Crossings greenbelt that separated our neighborhoods, they both were. Plus, they were both totally hot and had great voices.

The intervening years have been kind to Seanna; she is trim and fashionably attired and radiates this infectiously youthful, adventurous energy, as always. We both mow down our Zombie stashes and milk chasers and try to play catch up over the din of the crowd, which is fever-pitchish now thanks to the well-timed costume contest and Zombie rollout components of the program. Soon we are joined by Jeff Roush, who has in tow a tall blonde woman who my memory glands indicate is one Lauren Bill, a delightful jokester who somehow seemed to run everything at our HS by the time that she was done there.

Our conversation turns to old radio pranks and screw-ups, hijinks and quirky colleagues. Very little time is spent trying to determine whom we, as a group of old friends, but essential strangers, are now as opposed to then. We just immediately dispense with the butt sniffing routine and start hanging out again, and if someone suggested that we all go grab a sack of Olde English 40’s and head up the brown oaken hills of Lime Ridge to make a run at some top heavy cattle, or over to Walnut Creek to make a mad dash through the sex-cult compound of the salt-rock gunning Purple People, then I am pretty sure that there couldn’t have been a better, more cohesive unit for the task.

As a reformed group (in more ways than one), we all head out on an impromptu self-tour of our old campus, which in that certain crystalline light of adulthood, looks it’s same, albiet bedraggled self. Out in the Quad – the place where used wads of gum flock to pool to die, and where brunch carts circle daily against the marauding hordes of hungry students, we come upon the Senior Tree – an old majestic Oak Tree that has for years been the epicenter of student spirit and localized patriotism.

Now it sits moated off by a deep well of dirt and an outer wall of cinder, it’s formerly paint caked trunk stripped to the bark and ringed with chicken wire. The sight is astonishing. If there is one thing that I thought would never change, it was the regular painterly molestation of the Clayton Valley Senior Tree. That oak is where panty raiders inevitably ended up hanging their booty, where rival classes and even rival schools doused the trunk with layers of (basically harmless) taunts and provocations, where camouflaged students were posted during times of high rivaling tension to guard against such egregious actions, where copy machined butt art was stapled, and where school pride emanated from. But at some point, someone, or some class must have seriously blown it with an overzealous graffiti job, and now the it sits naked, corralled and entrenched, and seems to be just an ordinary tree.

Around the corner of the rust-streaked concrete building comes the exalting paleton of KVHS’ers, heading en masse to the old studio for a tour of the facilities. Wilson/Tom leads the way and a long, excitable line forms at the door that leads into the small live studio. In the line I see more and more familiar faces, the change toll of two decades starting to melt away as the base personage of yesteryear emerges. Laughter abounds. Stories of crazed concerts and back stage brawls and engineering feats of epic proportions ping this way and that. I find it hard to concentrate on any one group, and so I sort of stand in the middle and lean in for a bit of each one, sampling the memory buffet.

It turns out that of this group of people who once participated in radio broadcasting at KVHS in a semi-professional way, notably high percentages are still passionately involved in the business. Some really talented DJ’s and sportscasters have made their professional marks after honing their chops at KVHS FM. The list is long, and it includes a slate of successful disc jockeys, A&R reps in the music industry, famous heavy metal musicians, a current SNL cast member, writers, network engineers, and filmmakers. Standing just outside of the old studio door, I cannot help but think about the most famous, seemingly the most successful and recognizable former classmate who is not here among us, Brandon Molale, and it isn’t because he is dead or something awful like that, it’s worse. Molale is banned from attending the reunion, or at least he thinks he is, and in large part because of me.

The story goes that in the waning days of our senior year of high school, I made some unconscionable error of judgment that resulted in my getting booted by Mr. Wilson II from the airwaves with just one final late night music show to go before I was to move on to bigger and better frequencies. Nobody remembers what I did to deserve the banning, but likewise nobody doubts that I did something untoward, and that whatever it was the penalty was probably justified. I was not a graceful kid.

In my stead, Brandon Molale stepped up to fill in on the night that was to be my last show, so as to give the time slot which once held great moments filled with my fake interviews, amateurish commentaries on school life, early dramatic efforts, and tons of Yngwei Malmsteen a proper going away show.

The pre-grunge hair band eras best heavy, loud, screeching rock scorched the airwaves that night. Y&T, the Scorps, Janes Addiction, Striper, Metallica, Primus, and some other obscure flourishes that only Molale could find to perfectly build a climactic radio show poured forth from the studios of KVHS. Unfortunately, so did flocks of unauthorized guests and illegal spirits. I know, because I was there, reveling in the whole wild scene and feeling the American Graffitesque shifting of time and purpose as I made out sincerely with my lady friend on a picnic bench around the corner. When we finished untangling our braces, we walked around the corner to the darkened hallway that leads to the studio, where to our shock we found a very awake, very befuddled and possibly irate Mr. Wilson locking the door behind him. “They’re all gone. I kicked them out. You are all in biiiig trouble!” he said, before running off.

As it turns out, for his role in the on-air going away party, Molale almost did not get to graduate a week later. Beer on campus, and particularly in the studio, was the main issue, it seems. Some sort of FCC violation was made, and in the aftermath I myself barely talked my way into getting to walk with my graduation class. The inquisition reached ridiculous proportions when my lady friend was called in from her school across the mountain to give her accounting of the incident, and also had to face interscholastic punishment. But Molale got the worst of it. We all scattered like so many dissipating sound waves soon after, and I soon lost touch with the big guy, who was already a legend at eighteen.

Six foot eight inches tall and, at that time – before reshaping himself into a celluloid Adonis- probably weighing over three hundred pounds; Molale was an intimidating presence that balanced his football tackle physicality with a real zest for fun and mischief and an amazing knack for networking. His legend started to grow when it was reported that in front of his parent’s house, he was jumped by a gang of a dozen bat wielding thugs who were prowling the streets during Halloween. When the melee was over, they took twelve runtish thugs to the hospital, while Molale collected a bucket of new bats.

I once went to a Motley Crue concert at the Oakland Coliseum with Molale, and lacking proper credentials to get backstage, I watched in awe as he took a Crue tape cassette insert and went to Kinko’s and made a backstage laminate, which looked almost exactly like the ones that the roadies had, and worked perfectly. In college he created an entire radio station out of thin air, and filled his dorm room with boxes and boxes of swag and music due to his savvy marketing and music industry connections.

All of that pales in comparison to the modern Molale. While playing college football at Fresno State, Molale was introduced to strength training, and he turned his youthful pulp into a manly pile of muscles that would put Shazam to shame. From there he became a Hollywood stuntman, specializing in football scenes. At some point, just about every TV show, commercial, or film that had a football player getting viciously brutalized in slow motion featured my old KVHS colleague Brandon.

Those gigs added up to speaking roles to the point that he now appears in substantial roles in Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller films as a part of the regular troupes, as well as dozens of other gigs, like Reno 911. Arguably, his most famous scene is in the Sandler film Mr. Deeds, where he plays the obnoxious redneck quarterback Kevin Ward whose father belts him good for using foul language in front of the ladies. His shrinking howl of “No, Daddy, Noooo!” is a moment of pure cinematic glory, and I mean this not just because I once shared airtime with the actor. Also, did I mention that he tends to get invited to Hef’s mansion on a regular basis?

Before the reunion, I looked Molale up to see if he was coming up from LA, and I was shocked to find out that he did not plan to because he still thought that he was banned from the station, and thus the reunion/birthday celebration. It didn’t make any sense. How could such a prime alumnus be banished from a celebration for an innocent mistake that occurred 20 years ago at the age of 18?

I told him that I would look into it, and if needed advocate for him. Then of course, I went and lost my cell phone and was basically unable to establish contact with a teacher who no longer worked at the station and whom I had not spoken with in a very long time. I did leave a message on the station answering machine, and at some point in the week prior to the big party, a student staffer got back to me and related that he thought things should be copasetic nowadays, judging by the known factors.

So, this I relayed to Molale late on Friday, only to find out that on his own he had made contact with the offended Faculty Advisor and apologized and worked out some of the lingering issues, but by then it was too late. And so KVHS alumni legend Brandon Molale was a no-show at the big reunion, which, standing inside the studio and seeing the old familiar console and that same old swing arm microphone, I felt semi-responsible and slightly terrible for.

I took solace in the image that I had of Molale concurrently poolside at the Playboy Mansion, bench pressing a squirming pile of playmates, and knew that he was OK, somewhere, though I wished that he was here to reminisce with, and deep down know the he does too.

Back outside in the fading light and the chilly-but-not-really air of early March, California, those who have cycled through the studio tour stand around by a row of lockers. One locker lies jacked open, it’s inner shell powder grey and toasted by a small book fire at its floor. Peering though a window into a classroom I see a large, orange hand lettered sign posted in the entryway, which reads in bold, sixteen year old mega-font “NOT A FOOD/EAT AREA! CLEAN UP YOUR MESS!” and I wonder if the message within contains more than just a warning cobbled together with poor grammar, but possible also a sage metaphor for life outside of these walls of innocence, and the scorched lockers of our youth.

But I don’t have much time to ponder this notion, as the larger group seems to have gelled into a core twenty or so who are itching for a drink. The call goes out – “lets go to the bowling alley!” and something about the way that it is said drives a deja-vu spike into my recall generator, and I feel a powerful vertigo wash over me, twisting time and place and alternate destinies together right there in between the E and D Wings of our old school. Am I here, now, or there then?

But in time, and hastened by the swelling movement towards the bowling alley, the dueling sensations fade away and mix in with the enduring airwaves that emit forth from the KVHS transmitters, and I am left with the happy realization that I am both, at once, and that Rocks.

The always lively Jeff Rouuuuusch, the lovely Seanna Vail, and the author enjoying a pre-reunion reunion.

*Corby Anderson is a freelance writer based out of Monterey, California.

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SOAKED! In the Muck at the 13th Annual Legendary Boonville Beer Festival

BEER Magazine
October, 2009
by Corby Anderson

Her name is Cookie, at least that is what she says it is, and I have no reason not to believe her. She is standing up to the ankles of her stylish galoshes in a thick, pasty brown mud puddle, in the rain, drinking beer and smiling wickedly. She says that she has lost her husband somewhere in the large crowd, but that she isn’t worried – he didn’t have enough money on him to get in trouble with.

Her yellowish hair is streaked with mud and lies in plastered dreadlocked clumps across her face. In her left hand she holds the tattered remains of an enormous turkey leg, which she gnaws at in kingly tugs. In her right hand she clutches two small tulip-shaped glass vessels, each half filled with a brew of some sort – which type she does not recall – and each with the words “13th Annual Legendary Booneville Beer Festival – May 2, 2009” laser engraved on them in what was once a nice white font. She takes a swig of one of the glasses and drains its contents and her eyes roll up into her head in what must be a sign of total satisfaction, or concentration (I hope), and then she snaps back and tilts her head sideways to go in for a pink chunk of bird muscle. As she chews, I cant help but reach out with my pointer finger and point out that her stringy black fu-Manchu mustache is caught up in her food, and she thanks me while laughing wildly and trying to dig it out with her pinky, and then she wanders off into the swirling crowd of rain-soaked beer drinkers.

Cookie is just one of many mustachioed ladies, not to mention men, milling through the Mendocino County Fairgrounds. Apparently, there was a pirate theme to this year’s event, which seems to perfectly match the edgy milieu of the Beer Festival in Boonville, California.

Boonville is a fairly remote North Coast town (about a hundred miles north of San Francisco) situated in the Anderson Valley, which has been made famous by the Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s successful brand, and which lies in the transition zone on the upper fringe of wine country and the southeastern edge of dope country. It is a beautiful place, a green, pastoral sixteen-mile long valley filled with creeks and sheep and goats and a fun lot of hardy locals. The entire town rallies around the Boonville Beer Festival in an admirable community effort, which is appropriate since all of the proceeds from the ticket sales ($40 in advance, $50 at the gate) go to various local non-profits.

The Beer Festival originated in 1997, when it served as the grand opening for the then-new Anderson Valley Brewery. That first year consisted of a free blowout featuring all of the Anderson Valley brands. It was such a hit that other breweries were invited in subsequent years, and the size of the crowds, and thus the proceeds for such vital local services as the AV Ambulance Service, the AV Volunteer Fire Fighters Association, and the Lions Club have grown exponentially. Without tabulating this year’s haul into the equation, the festival reports having raised almost $150,000 over the years.

The 13th “running of the beers” seemed to actually have a bit of luck going for it, despite the ominous numerological aspect. Even with torrential (think buckets pouring down through vertical sheets) rains and heavy fog, a boisterous crowd made it to the Fairgrounds intact and ready to sample the seventy-eight different breweries who tapped a total of three hundred different ales, pilsners, IPA’s, stouts, and barley wines. Many festive-ites, including most of the brewers and their families, came for the weekend, setting up camp in the middle of a Friday downpour that did not seem to want to peter out.

Musician Brad Manosevitz came in via a “terrifying ride on a tiny prop plane through a severe winter storm” that started in his home base of Aspen, Colorado. Once on the ground in California, he was still unsure of his luck as he made his way to his gig on the Beer Fest stage. “We were literally driving to the boonies!” said Manosevitz. “The road from the San Francisco airport to Anderson Valley was insanely curvy, foggy, rainy. You couldn’t see a thing, not even a foot in front of the car. It felt like we were going to die, man. And if we had wrecked, there was no cavalry coming to help,” he added in describing the gauntlet-like effort that it took for most people to actually travel to the festival.

Getting inside the gates of the Fairgrounds was a bit of a chore. A long line full of thirsty looking pirates snaked down the block in advance of the 1 pm opening. It was reported that last year some attendees did not get into the festival until it was more than halfway over due to long lines and organizational miscommunication. Learning from their challenges, considerable energy was put into fixing this year’s entry procedure by event organizers, and thus this years gate drop went considerably smoother, though it was not entirely problem-free, due in large part to the heightened urgency brought on by the persnickety rain.

Once entrance was gained for myself and several thousand fellow beer drinkers, the race to taste as many beers as possible in four short hours was officially, fully on.

The brewers near the entrance were mobbed immediately, a situation that a few astute attendees recognized and avoided by going further down to the end of the long wooden A-frame structure that housed many of the vendors. Seppi Morris, from Grants Pass, Oregon, decided the best bet was to stick close to one brewer station and try several varieties of their beers in quick succession. “It’s a four ounce glass. It goes down in one gulp,” he said as he posted up near the Habanero Beer cooler-kegs.

As the crowd thickened and movement became more difficult, my natural inclination to flee to open space took hold in a powerful way, and I found myself skirting around the corner to what looked like open grass. Once out of the crush and around the bend I was glad to see several large white tents set up in a large, open field, each housing twenty or so brewers who worked out of the center of a hollow square. Manosevitz’s distinct “Texas Counter-Country Folk Rock” blasted out of an old PA, and a sizable group of partying pirates danced various forms of jigs in defiance the inclement weather, which had thankfully downgraded itself from hard rain to drizzle status.

Every now and then, for no apparent reason, a roar would go through the crowd in a rolling wave from one side of the fairgrounds to the other. You could hear it coming at you like an earthquake, or a propeller plane. The short burst of group cheer seemed to happen in random intervals, and its origin was of great curiousity to me until the answer presented itself to me directly. As we walk through the crowd, I find myself coming face to face with an enormous straw hat that seems to have human legs and most of a female midriff attached. I try to avoid the collision, but like a guided missile, the hat just keeps coming at me, and when I dodge to the left, it too goes inexplicably that way, and runs right into my chest at a full marching pace. Having a long history of running into things, I was prepared for the contact, and thus soaked up most of the energy with a big net-hug, but even my powers of absorption cannot save the hat woman’s commemorative glass from launching out of her hand and splattering in shards on the concrete. When it happens, everything stops for about .5 seconds, and then the beer fans around us roar out a huge cheer and I hear the sound echoing off around the fairground. I realize then why the cheers occur. Some things you can only really understand by wrecking into them.

Just about anything, it seems, can be used to make a pirate outfit. Scarves, strange vests, bad hats, fishnet stockings, dreadlock’s that may or may not have been wigs. The female mustache and/or beard combo was quite popular, and took some getting used to. I noticed quite a few Oakland Raider fans in the crowd, identifiable by their black and silver pirate skull and cross-bones logo. At first I thought that it was just normal beer swilling garb for Raider fans, which would make sense geographically. Oakland is not that far from Boonville.

Lunchtime – always important to the mid-day beer drinking experience. Bewitched by an outstandingly sharp and effortless Great White beer from nearby Lost Coast Brewing Company, I mosey over to the vendor section, hankering for a soft taco made of vertically spit-turned Carnitas al Pastor, which is capped on the spit with a freshly corked pineapple, cooking into the spinning tube of pork meat with a sweet tang.

Out on the edge of the field, near the bratwurst vendor, a crowd had gathered in a circle, which looked all the world to be a fight in progress. Closing ground through the muddy grass, I see that it is actually an impromptu female mud-wrestling match. There, in the middle of the circle, several well-endowed ladies were grappling in the rain and goopy mud, which they gleefully smashed each other into. They were very dirty girls, completely covered in the grey-brown sludge, and seemed quite thrilled by the attention until they were upstaged by what turned into a full-on mosh pit of fellows who took no quarter of one another, punching and thrashing each other with brotherly aggression.

The crowd hooted and hollered, and finally settled into a Brazilian “ole, ole” soccer chant. An aging guy who may have been fully blitzed seemed to fancy himself the referee, and stood in the middle of the pit for quite sometime untouched by the carnage about him, until he too was tackled by the belligerents. After several failed attempts to get up from the slick muck, he finally succeeded in standing back up. One of the ladies pointed out that the ref’s cell phone, which was clipped to his belt, was caked with dirt, and instead of cleaning it, he grabbed the phone, held it aloft towards the low clouds Statue of Liberty style, and then appeared to screw the top off of the thing. It was a ruse in cellular form, which he revealed to all by pouring whatever liquid was contained in the faux phone-flask into his mouth from a good foot above his head. Most of the contents missed the target, but he did not seem to care, and why should he have? Once you are that muddy, a little spilled liquor only serves to season the pot.

We progressed around the fairgrounds to another semi-autonomous drinking section, which was called the Lamb Palace. The name probably comes from the fact that it actually is a lamb palace, or at least a place for lambs to be when the fair was on. The Lamb Palace is a corralled in area with steel gates and wooden sections that now held some of the more popular breweries featured at the Booneville Beer Festival, by the looks of things. Beer festivarians were literally squished into the corral, some stuck so far away from the taps that they could only stand there helplessly with their useless arms pinned to their chests. It looked like a stampede about to break loose. It was a dangerous scene, and a sobering trial for any claustrophobe.

Working my way through the enthused morass of multiply soaked drinkers, I was pleased to discover that one of my favorite beer makers, the Marin Brewing Company, were there with their newest brand, “Witty Monk” – a Belgian inspired wheat beer. In barnacle fashion, I was able to attach my shoulder to the wooden post that framed the MBC
section of the Lamb Palace, and spend a good moment discussing the beer with Head Brewmaster Arne Johnson, who has been at the Boonville Beer Fest every year (he thinks). Witty Monk is a light, fresh tasting bit of effervescent goodness that is so new that it doesn’t even have a label yet and is only available at the brewery in Larkspur. I wanted to discuss more, and perhaps catch some of the excellent swag (including thongs – not for me) that MBC was supplying, but the moment was fleeting due to the clamoring tide of humanity that swept me out the green-gated corral exit of the Lamb Palace.

Out around the corner from the Lamb Palace squish fest was a large barn-like building that was open on two sides through doors that spilled internal light and seemed to call me into it like a mother holding out a large blue terrycloth towel for a soaked child. It was then that I realized that I had been standing in the rain for a good ten hours, including time earlier in the morning getting geared up around the brewer’s camp. Every atomic particle of my being was logged with hydrogenated oxygen. Standing in the dry barn felt foreign, as if I was missing something dear – perhaps a water-based version of the phantom sensation known to amputees in which they can still feel their missing limbs. Only here, I could still feel the rain on my face.

Scanning around in the barn I came to see that it was almost totally empty, save for a few yellow bleachers, and at least three times as big as the Lamb Palace. Why the barn was not used for the purposes of Beer Fest instead of, or in addition to, the Lamb Palace, I do not know.

It is hard to keep track of time in a situation such as this. As the clock ticked on and the taps started to dry up, the insatiably thirsty crowd would swarm the nearest open tap. Following this flocking, I soon found myself drinking a fantastic can of ale from Dales Pale Ale, from the Oskar Blues Brewery in Colorado. “We’re the first micro to start canning our own beer seven years ago. We did it for the fresh factor. These cans don’t have the headspace that bottles have that allows oxidation to occur. Air is bad for beer, and also with the aluminum cans minimal light can get to the beer, creating the freshest package for beer,” says Oskar Blues Rep Meg Gill. Dales is a remarkably vibrant ale, with strong punch of hops and a good strong kick on the way down. That it comes in a sturdy aluminum can makes it unique, but the beer is a winner even if it were bottled like everything else. It has that rare oomph that people want in a beer, a distinctive tang. And it made for a great last beer of the festival proper, a fact that was driven home by the roving band of officials who were spread out and sweeping the grounds like ski patrollers, hollering while gathering up everyone and ushering the diehards to the gates.

After a day full of outstanding beers, great food, and bouncy music shared with a crowd of hearty hopheads in all-out element battle, the amazing thing is that it is possible that all of that was not even the best part of Booneville Beer Fest.

That distinction goes to the camping that took place in the fairground camp area, and for the brewers and their people, out at the nearby Anderson Valley Brewery grounds. There, I met up with John Kuhry, the General Manager of the host Anderson Valley Brewing Company, and his wily crew of party people and proceeded to dig on yet more beer in yet more rain. Due to the quick hitting nature of the crowded Beer Fest tap dance, I may have actually learned more about beer and the philosophy of beer making in one hour of strolling the campground, going from one brewery camp to the next than I did in four and a half hours at the Beer Fest.

Even the campground had quality entertainment. The Humboldt Firken Tappers are a full-sized big band who frequent beer events, especially the Booneville Beer Fest. Their motto is “the more that you drink, the better we sound,” and they sound fantastic playing their assortment of random covers from their tarped-in nook at the upper-camp. The Firken Tappers can be heard from about a mile away, and serve as the background music for almost the entire camp scene, except for the area next to our camp, and technically the area directly next to my leaky tent.

There, a beat-deficient man played a full set of drums at John Bonham energy levels, by himself, sans guitars or vocals, almost all night long. This doesn’t bother us all that much because we are away from our own camp for most of that time, but as the hours add up to a new calendar day (and then some), and lying down, or even possibly trying to dry off begins to sound oh so good, I am forced to ask him to please-for-the-love-of-God-just-stop-that-miserable-racket, once or three times. And eventually he does, with a delirious flourish, my guess is at about 3:30 am.

In the morning there is finally sunshine, and much rejoicing about that. We are left in a muddy mess, many with awful hangovers and lost belongings. But to a man, and woman, there are authentic smiles and abundant laughter as tents get shoved into car trunks and chairs dumped of rain puddles and kegs packed up into pickup beds.

On the way out, I stop by the Anderson Valley Brewing Company taproom and scoop up a few excellent tie-dye AVBC souvenir t-shirts. There, a long line has formed from the taps all the way to the back of the merch room. As it turns out, the line has formed by beer aficionados who are eager to get a special release of seven-year aged Port Barrel Stout – a 750 ml wine bottle that is being released only to those in the know, who attended the Beer Fest. Seven is my lucky number, I tell the couple in front of me. I was married on 7/7/07. So when I pay the man and go out around the back of the brewery to get my bottle, which is being handed off to people directly out of the cooler, scan the label of the beer handed to me and find that it is bottle # 77, I am only mildly surprised. It was just that kind of weekend at the Boonville Beer Festival.

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