A Town Like Eureka

I am in mourning. After five seasons, my favorite TV show, Eureka, has called it quits. This funny, smart series about an odd little Northwest town where science-y stuff happens is heading off to Netflixland.

     But in a way, I’ll always have Eureka—and not just because I’m greedily amassing all the seasons on DVD. The connection goes deeper than that. The truth is, I sort of live in Eureka. I realized this the other day while I was driving through my own little Northwest town of Ashland, Oregon. At a stoplight, I spotted a strange sight: two teenage boys springing across the street on futuristic, curved stilts, looking like creatures from Star Wars. It was surreal, but honestly, it wasn’t all that surprising. We have a saying here: “That’s so Ashland.” This is a town where odd stuff—usually fun, often artistic, and sometimes science-y—happens. And one of the reasons why I like Eureka so much is because the fictitious town of Eureka reminds me of Ashland. I mean, a lot—so much so that I often wonder if the show’s creators, Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia, spent their vacations here, lazing around Lithia Park or doodling on their iPads in one of our homey cafés. The show is set in Oregon, and some footage was actually shot here in Ashland*. But there’s more to it; the two towns really are eerily alike. For instance…

Sheriff Carter arrives in Eureka after he wrecks his car while swerving to avoid a loose dog.

This happens in Eureka’s pilot, and it touches on two recurrent themes in Ashland: People who wind up here because of accidents, and loose dogs wandering the streets. I can’t tell you how people have told me that they were just driving past Ashland on their way to someplace else when something went terribly wrong with their fuel pump or transmission or whatever. They had to stay a few days…and never left. And now (10 years later, 30 years later), they’re still here and they never want to leave.

     And then there are the wandering dogs. When I first moved to Ashland, I was in a constant state of panic over the number of dogs meandering around town alone. In the Bay Area, where I’d just come from, a loose dog is an emergency, sure to get hit by a car. But I eventually found that in Ashland, where the speed limit is generally 25 mph, a lot of people walk their dogs off leash and let them wander far ahead or behind. So you often see dogs that appear to be roaming free, when in fact the owner is just around the corner. I don’t condone it, but that’s the way it is here. The phenomenon is so common that that I’ve come to call it the Daily Loose Dog.

People in Eureka have futuristic vehicles, like electric cars and Segways.

People in Ashland do too. I’ve never seen so many electric cars in my life, everything from kit-bash golf carts to SmartCars to Priuses. I’m constantly reminded of what Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear says about electric cars: that they’re a menace to pedestrians because you can’t hear them coming. It’s actually true. And Segways, those geeky two-wheely things made famous by Paul Blart: Mall Cop—we had those ambling up and down our bike lanes long before Kevin James climbed aboard one. Just the other day, I saw a cop on a Segway wheeling up a trail in Lithia Park. And an even more futuristic-looking ride, Glide Cycles, are made right here in Ashland. They’re an eerie sight—if you can’t see the rider’s feet (which are running smoothly along the ground), all you see is an arc of metal with a person dangling in the middle, whizzing down the path. I’m using Jamie Lusch’s photo from a news article here, which I hope I don’t get dinged for; you sort have to see a Glide Cycle to get it.

On the outskirts of Eureka stands a shadowy government facility.

Hey, we have one of those, too. It’s called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory. But unlike Eureka’s General Dynamics, which is shadowy and secretive because it makes weapons and strange inventions, our own Forensics Lab is shadowy because it’s in the business of fighting bad guys. In fact, according to its website, it is “the only lab in the world dedicated to crimes against wildlife.” Their noble work—examining the remains of animals and putting poachers out of business—is, like other real-life CSI jobs, more grim than glamorous. But, like General Dynamics, the Forensics Lab takes government money and puts it to astoundingly good use. (And you’ve got to admire any collection of scientists who work with Interpol.)

There’s something in the water. 

On Eureka, a lot of episodes revolve around some strange chemical getting into the air or water, turning townspeople into zombies or savages or drunken nitwits. In Ashland you hear a lot of running jokes about this, stemming from a persistent rumor that the tap water contains traces of lithium, a drug used to treat bipolar disease. There’s a grain of truth to it: A lithium spring bubbles out of the ground near Emigrant Creek, a few miles from downtown, and you can sip piped-in “lithia water” (which tastes like Alka-Seltzer and eggs) from a couple of fountains in and near Lithia Park. I don’t know if any of the lithium ever leaches into in our drinking water—and I’m sure the city would vehemently deny it—but people are weirdly happy here. It’s a bit Stepfordian at first…but after a while, you’re just as smiley as everybody else and you don’t care anymore. Which I guess should be a clue.

*Eureka used footage of Ashland’s City Hall to stand in for a street scene in the “Primal” episode. (For fans of the show, that’s the one with all the Nathan Starks). Don’t blink—the footage goes by fast. You can spot City Hall by its green awnings.

The Tools’ Tales

Gardening is a solitary business, and that’s one of its charms. For me, a day alone in the yard, digging and weeding, usually cures whatever’s been ailing me. But I’m not really alone out there. Oh no—some old friends are always with me. Lots of gardeners can tell tales about their favorite trowels and pruning saws. Here are some of mine, not all of which started their lives as gardening tools.

1) The broken Sheffield Bowie knife

This relic is one of my most versatile gardening tools, and also one of my oldest possessions. It slashes open bags of manure, cuts twine, slits open seed packets, derails dandelions, and does the work of about a hundred snootier tools. And because it’s dinged up already, I don’t worry about abusing it, like calling on it to sharpen a stake when I’m too lazy to go find the “good” knife. The way it came into my life had an air of divine providence: When I was about ten, I found it while I was out horseback riding one day. It was half-buried on a trail deep in the woods. At that age, I was obsessed with cowboys and outlaws, and finding this knife—dirty, pitted, and with a smashed handle that looked like a horse had trampled it—well, I thought it was the coolest find ever. I still do.

2) The two hand hoes

These two beauties were already antiques when I bought them at an estate sale about 30 years ago. The man who sold them to me said they’d been outlawed on commercial farms because you have to stoop to use them, making them hard on the backs of farmworkers. But these hoes, especially the larger one, are by far my most-used tools. I hack out hard, compacted soil with them, dig furrows, loosen weeds, and smooth out mulch with the these babies. One of them is at my side at all times as I work in the garden. I worry about the handles—the wood is deeply grooved from wear, more so every year. The fittings are good and tight, but the handles keep narrowing, like old bones. It’s hard to say how many decades of work they put in before I met them; I think of them as old draft horses who used to labor in front of the plow and the haywagon and now are called on only for a little light duty, like pulling a kid’s cart around the farm on the occasional Sunday. The rest of the time, they doze happily in the tool basket. They’re beautifully built, and I’d be hard pressed to find anything like them again.

3) The $1 paint bucket

This yellow one is the latest in a dynasty of cheap paint buckets that have served as weed bins, compost movers, fish emulsion mixing bowls, and precarious stepstools. I prefer paint buckets over fancier trugs and pails because they’re sturdy and lightweight, their handles don’t pinch, and they’re quieter than metal pails, which is handy when I’m out working early in the morning. I’ve never bought a new paint bucket; I always find them at garage sales for about a buck. I’ve only owned three or four of these in my life; each one lasts about 10 years. Eventually, they start to photodegrade and break apart, and the chunks are as sharp as shards of china. When one finally, well, kicks the bucket, I get a little choked up as I (carefully) carry the pieces out to the trash can. Then I hit another garage sale.

4) The fancy-schmancy spading fork

Okay, this one is a snooty tool, and I paid a lot of money for it. But I paid that money about 20 years ago, and this English beauty has never, ever let me down. Before I got this, I ran through a string of shoddy spading forks. Digging out a new bed was an exercise in frustration; I still have a muscle memory of straightening out bent tines by setting the points on a brick and stepping on them, one at a time. Finally I scraped together $100 and marched over to Smith & Hawken (now defunct), a very dangerous store for gardeners, and walked out of there with this fork and, I’m sure, a half-dozen pretty things I didn’t need. I’ve used this fork so much that the brand name has completely worn off the wooden handle, so I don’t know what kind it is. But the metallic “Made in England” decal still blazes like new, and its tines are as straight as the day it was made. This one never gets left out in the rain, not even for a minute.

5) The no-name aluminum hand tools

I don’t remember when or where I got these, but it was at least 20 years ago, and I’m sure I didn’t pay more than about $10 for the set. But I’ve never wanted another trowel—this one fits me perfectly, is lightweight and tough, and never rusts, bends, or splinters. And the fork is indispensable; I’ve dug out acres of burdock and Bermuda grass with that thing. The thin little transplanter, great for putting in two-inch seedlings, is just icing on the cake.

6) The homemade soil sieve

This one isn’t old—I built it a few months ago—but it’s a replica of two old sieves I used in my first garden back in the ’80s. Those earlier sieves sort of came with the place—I found them in an abandoned shed—and, as weatherbeaten and creaky as they were, they still worked like a dream. Nothing else separates rocks from dirt quite as well: You place the sieve on top of a wheelbarrow, put a few shovelfuls of dirt in it, and shake it. The rocks stay in the sieve and the beautifully sifted soil goes in the barrow, where you can mix it with manure or whatever before putting it back in the hole. These sieves are hard to find in stores; I saw one about a year ago, but couldn’t find one again when I needed it, so I made one out of pine and ½-inch wire mesh. The secret reason why I love these sieves so much: They make me feel like an archaeologist.

7) The perfect pruning shears

I don’t have a picture of these . . . because they don’t exist. I use pruning shears constantly—aside from the hand hoes, they’re my most-used garden tool—but I’ve never found a really good pair. Oh, I’ve had pruners that lasted for years, but they’ve always been a grumbling compromise: They don’t cut cleanly, they don’t fit my hand, or they’re awkward and slippery and I keep dropping them on my foot. Right now I have a high-tech pair of Fiskars that looked like a million bucks hanging on the wall in the store. They have a sweet spot, which sounds good in theory but drives me nuts: If you don’t cut in just the right spot on the blade, they just mash whatever you’re trying to cut, and then you’ve got a fibery mess that you have to saw at two or three times. Their big selling point is an ergonomic rotating handle thingy that, via some law of physics, gives you added leverage. The result is that, if you manage to find the sweet spot, they cut through heavy branches very easily. Too easily—I live in constant fear of lopping off a finger with those things.

4 Odd Things That I’ve Never Done

Life is full of things we never get a chance to do. Some, like flying to the moon or winning an Olympic gold medal, are just statistically unlikely to happen to any one of us. And then there are the things we never scrape together the money or time to do, like travel around the world or become a professional glassblower. But the other day, I got to thinking about the odd little things that, due to a bend in the road, we just never do, and we don’t even realize that we didn’t do them until years later, when we discover that everybody else has heard Frampton Comes Alive! or eaten Tofurkey or whatever. These strange little turns of events came to mind one Sunday morning while I was driving past a local church. As I watched the well-dressed parishioners amble in through the church’s front doors, I found myself trying to picture what they were going to do in there. But I couldn’t, because…

1) I’ve never gone to church.

I’ve been in a few churches for weddings and funerals, but I’ve never heard an actual church service of any kind, and I’ve never been in a house of worship on a holiday, like Easter or Passover. My four siblings, all older than me, had to go to church and sit through Sunday school when they were little; my parents, though they weren’t religious, felt that this was what civilized families did in the 1950s. But my dad, who could fix or build anything, always got stuck with “volunteering” to wire the church’s P.A. system or dig the trenches for its sprinklers. When my family moved to Sunnyvale, California, just before I was born, my dad took one look at the local church—a brand-new blank box with nothing but dirt around it—and said, “We’re not going to church anymore.” That was the end of religion in my family.

2) I’ve never changed a baby’s diaper.

In fact, I’ve only babysat an actual baby once, and that was only for about three hours, during which he didn’t poop. As a youngster, I didn’t like babysitting and avoided it at all cost. I had no interest in babies; I was the youngest in my family, and also the youngest among my cousins, so I didn’t grow up around babies; to me, they seemed like some sort of alien race, slow-witted and uncoordinated. Baby dolls terrified me—the glass eyes always staring, the weird little pouty mouths—so I gravitated toward stuffed animals and model horses. To this day, my maternal instincts are still M.I.A.; I worked with kids for a while in my 20s and liked it, but I never warmed to them enough to want kids of my own. And as for babies, I’m still nervous around them; they feel like overfilled water balloons about to pop. Plus, as Elaine said on Seinfeld, “No matter how clean they look, they’re always sticky.”

3) I’ve never seen Bambi.

Or Dumbo, Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or a lot of other children’s movies from the ’50s and ’60s. This was another consequence of having four older siblings; by the time I came along, my parents were tired of kids’ stuff. They were ready to be adults again, and the fact that they had an eight-year-old child in tow didn’t slow them down. They walked right past all the kidflicks, and instead took me to see movies that I had no business seeing, like Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, which was about stalking and abortion, and Wait Until Dark, which was about murder and heroin. Cabaret scarred me for life; even if the fascism and confused sexuality were over my head, they killed a dog in that movie, and I definitely understood that. Years later, my sister and I used to go to a local movie house on Christmas Day to see classic kids’ movies, so I got caught up on Mary Poppins, Lady and the Tramp, and a few others. And now, of course, there’s Netflix; the only reason Bambi hasn’t trotted onto my queue is because I know it will make me cry.

4) I never learned weights and measures.

I missed this part of elementary school, where you memorize how many pints are in a gallon and how many feet in a mile, because I skipped that year. My mother, a fantatic about accelerated learning, taught me to read before I started kindergarten. It gave me a tremendous head start—back then, most kids didn’t learn to read until the first grade—but it had an unintended consequence: I was bored at school, bored, bored, bored out of my mind. My mother had skipped a grade when she was little, so she thought it would be no big deal to have me do the same. But it wasn’t that easy; the school officials balked, and it took her a couple of years to persuade them. Finally, they caved and moved me from second grade to third, in the middle of the school year. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that this was why I knew absolutely nothing about quarts and acres, let alone furlongs and fathoms—they’d taught that segment early in third grade, the part that I missed. I ended up learning most of what I needed to know through grocery shopping. But I still don’t know how many feet are in a mile. And I’ve found it doesn’t matter.

Remembering Dad on Mother's Day

Last night, while I was looking for pictures of my mother to post on Facebook for Mother’s Day, I ran across the eulogy that I wrote for my dad’s memorial service. This past week was his birthday—he would have been 92—and he’s been on my mind a lot. But he always is; I think of him every time I saw a piece of wood (he could fix or build almost anything) or climb a ladder (he once fell off one and broke his back). For most of my life, he seemed to know everything, until he began showing signs of Alzheimer’s seven or eight years before his death. In the end, he didn’t know me or anyone else, and he couldn’t remember any of the houses we’d lived in or the Cessna airplane he flew or any of the cars he'd owned, except maybe the last one, which we had to take away from him. I delivered this short eulogy on a sunny day in Los Gatos in front of family and friends, and I wanted to remember back past the Alzheimer’s, back to who he really was, or who I remembered him to be.

June 9, 2007

I want to thank Dad for being a good dad, not complicated or ambiguous or demanding. I thank him for being so solidly good—a good man. He was simple in some ways, without an agenda or ulterior motives; he was almost childlike in that way. He valued learning and wonder, and he didn’t seem to care what people thought. He went crazy over handwriting analysis, astrology, self-hypnosis, biorhythms, waterbeds—anything to make life better and more interesting. We kids thought he was kind of a kook; we were embarrassed of him, like most kids are embarrassed of their parents. It took time and maturity for us to understand what a treasure he was.

Dad wasn’t rich, and didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t. His wealth was in experience, in stories, in places he loved and things he’d built. He never talked much about religion, but my guess is that for him, the underpinnings of the universe were a tidy garage, a smooth landing in a small plane, and a sympathy for old radios. He hated television, distrusted politics, and didn’t quite understand art. But he could fix your water heater, and he’d drive out to some godforsaken highway in the middle of the night to replace your power steering hose after it caught on fire again. He’d do whatever it took to get you back to living, so you could get on with your art or politics or whatever it was you liked to do, all things being pretty much equal with him as long as the belts were tight and the lines were bled and the wiring was wrapped and safe, so he could go home, knowing he’d done it right.

4 Things I Love about Basketball

Lately I’ve been filling out Nielsen diaries—lists of what I watch on TV, to be returned to the Nielsen company, presumably to determine which shows are hits and which are misses. But the Nielsens picked a boring time to monitor what I watch, because it’s May, and every night it’s pretty much “NBA playoffs…NBA playoffs…NBA playoffs.”

There was a time when I didn’t like the NBA. Years ago, I was a basketball purist—I watched only college ball. And every spring, after the frenzy of March Madness, I couldn’t bring myself to switch over to the NBA; after watching those college athletes play their guts out all through the NCAA tournament—which, for most of them, was the peak experience of their lives—well, after that, those guys in the NBA seemed like big, lazy showboaters. But then I got drawn into the NBA playoffs one year, and I got attached to a few players, like Tim Duncan and Steve Nash, who were just as articulate in interviews as they were gifted on the court. So I kept tuning in to see them, and the list of players I admired grew and grew—Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Baron Davis, Manu Ginobili. Now I have my bicoastal-hometown favorites—the Warriors and the Celtics—and my personal faves, the Spurs and Suns. And sometimes another team breaks onto the list, like this year’s fast, young OKC Thunder.

And just as I love the aesthetics of baseball—the slow pace, the arc of the human body as the shortstop makes a throw to first—I’ve found a lot of things to love in basketball, too. Here are four of my favorite things about it.

1) The athletes don’t wear many clothes.

All sports are cults of personality—for most fans, it’s all about the players and their ups and downs, and who we like and who we don’t. But the cult of basketball is more intimate than that of, say, football or baseball, because we get to see so much more of the athletes’ bodies—the shape of their knees, the tail of a tattoo snaking up past a collar, the scratches on their arms from those under-basket melees. And because they don’t wear hats or helmets, we get to see their faces the whole time—every expression, from sour contempt for a teammate who blew the play (think Kobe Bryant) to fierce, foaming, crazy-good competitiveness (think Kevin Garnett). For me, being able to see all this makes for a more personal connection to the players. Sometimes it’s too much intimacy; occasionally a player looks too undressed out there, like I’ve rung somebody’s doorbell and caught him in his underwear. But for the most part, it’s splendid to really see great athletes. And to address the obvious: Frankly, I’m surprised more women aren’t NBA fans.

2) After a free throw, even a bad one, all the teammates touch hands and encourage each other.

It doesn’t matter if that player has missed every freakin’ free throw the whole game—still, the other players walk over to him, touch his hand, and give him a heartening word or two. How often I wish life were like this. Missed deadlines, crappy sales figures, and a-hole customers could all be washed away if co-workers would just go over and touch each other’s hands and say, “It’s OK, we’ll get the next one.” I know that’s un-American, but I can still dream.

3) Jumping in the air is one of the most exuberant things a human can do.

Lots of sports feature jumping, but basketball is packed full of height-defying feats—hundreds of them in every game. And not all of them are part of the play: That iconic shot of Michael Jordan leaping in the air, the one that came to emblemize basketball’s airs-above-the-ground mystique, was taken after his game-winning shot against the Cavs in the 1989 playoffs. Basketball is full of mid-air maneuvers, many of which happen so fast that you can only see them in slo-mo replay. It’s like springboard diving without the water—bodies arch and twist, and still the guy with the ball manages to toss it up into an arc that goes in the basket, game after game. And the shot block—which requires the defender to jump even higher than the guy who’s trying to make the basket—is one of the most exciting and underrated plays in all of sports.

4) It’s deliciously international.

This season alone, NBA teams have players from countries including—among dozens of others—Cameroon, Turkey, Montenegro, China, Israel, Latvia, Venezuela, and Iran. A few years ago, there were times when the Suns had no Americans on the floor at all. Soccer’s the only other sport I can think of where you can see athletes from so many far-flung nations, all competing at the professional level. Just the exotic names—Goran Dragić, Luc Mbah a Moute, Hedo Türkoğlu—are enough to suck me in. It’s like a menu in a particularly intriguing restaurant. And I love to hear players taunt each other in Serbian.

Ghosts of Gardens Past

This past weekend, I broke ground on the new vegetable garden. My newly bought townhouse has a small back yard, and I can already see that this garden will be an adventure in rocks and compacted clay. I spent a few satisying hours shoveling out landscaping rock and boxing it up to be hauled away, then pulling up weed cloth and taking a few tentative stabs at the soil with the spading fork. It will need compost and manure, probably several years of it, but I’m game.

           

All the sweat and back spasms got me thinking about about the other gardens I’ve had over the years, each with its own distinct personality. Those gardens are like big, generous friends I once knew and then moved away from. Until now, I always rented, and I moved a lot. And every time, as I left a garden behind, I felt a hollow hole of regret open up inside me—who would take care of it now? Would the next person just rip this all out? And sometimes the questions were more existential, like: What does our work really amount to? Does it make a difference?

I still ask myself those questions, but even if those gardens are now (shudder) driveways and swimming pools, I still have the memories of all the soul-soothing work I did on them, and I have photos to prove it. So here now is installment 1 of gardens past: the first one.

Garden Past #1: Monte Sereno, 1984–1988

Oh my, look at that flannel shirt! I loved that shirt. This photo says “’87 Garden” on the back, so I was 25. This garden, nestled at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains, pretty much taught me everything: double-digging, woodworking, fence building, gopher-proofing, and how to lie on my back in the dirt and watch the clouds go by. In the photo, there’s a bean tower behind me, probably about eight feet high. On the wooden frame are sweet peas, which shouldn’t be flowering at the same time as the beans, so it must have been a cool summer.

I sort of inherited this garden. I was living in a one-room cottage (without a kitchen) that was once the maid’s quarters on a sprawling 1920s estate. Nextdoor were a broken-down greenhouse, a shed that had once held tractors and wagons, some abandoned pigpens, and a woodworking shop. The place had seen better days, and the gardener, who had worked there for more than 50 years, had just retired. I was renting the cottage from some friends, and we were left to take care of the place ourselves. So I had to learn in a hurry how to groom chrysanthemums—there were about 150 of them, scattered between two gardens—and divide iris rhizomes and prune cultivated blackberries. I knew zilch about gardening, so I armed myself with a thrift-store copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book, picked up a few tools at garage sales, and learned by the seat of my pants.

There were coyotes in the woods, lizards in the bougainvillea, and snakes in the grass. But the biggest challenge was gophers; I learned to plant twice as much as I needed and just let them have their share. Many times, in broad daylight, I saw full-grown plants twitch and then disappear, sucked underground. One night my cat caught a gopher, brought it inside, and dropped it, still very much alive, into her food bowl. It sat up in the bowl and looked at us warily. I shooed the cat into the other room and managed to trap the gopher in a jar. Then I walked it out to the end of the driveway and let it go in the grass. To my horror, the gopher turned around and ran after me, coked up on some sort of crazy Don Quixote mission. It chased me all the way into the house.

I lived there for four years and grew everything from squash and tomatoes to wheat and amaranth. The soil was so loamy and good that you could throw anything into it and it would grow. Crops came and went, but I always had two things: green beans and morning glories. At night, to give myself good dreams, I would lie in bed and think about morning glories twining up bamboo poles.

The story didn’t end well. My little house got caught in a property-line dispute between my landlord and a neighbor, and with just a few day’s notice, I had to move out. A week later, the cottage and all the outbuildings were bulldozed, and the place was eventually sold. When I visited it a couple of years later, the new owners had made it into a sort of miniature golf course, with a concrete-banked creek and little arched bridges over it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sad in my life, so bitter. I drove away, hoping the gophers were still there and raising hell.

            

States Avenue

We sat on that corner
and argued the politics
of rye & ginger,
too broke for breakfast.

We knew the park’s damp pillow
after a long night,
the muddy dogwalks
that led us home:

a two-room flat,
the landlord’s foul rendition
of “Stardust” in the garden.
Now these days rattle

with a pill-jar all their own.
I hear the late TV’s
overture to the lonely
repeated beyond these walls.

I think I see your slow dance
on the sidewalk, your misbegotten
groceries, the kitchen ready
to let you in, paused

in the scene you loved:
the spoon at ease against the bowl,
the dishtowel soft
and waiting for disaster.



(Appeared in Permafrost)


Posted for DVerse Poets OpenLinkNight, Week 41.
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