Maybe it was dumb of me
to buy a scanner, considering that I
have no electricity and would have to cart it over to Brenda's for
recharging. Getting electrical power on your land is not easy in
Humboldt
County. It's not simply a matter of calling P.G.&E. and saying:
"Hey, drop a
line off at my place." Nor is it simply a matter of money...a
lot of
money. First of all I would have to have a "code" septic
tank before the powers
that be at P.G.&E. would even consider my application. That's
the rule in this
county: septic before wires. It's like the utility people are some
kind of
Gods, handing down human priorities. You've got to have the right
place to shit
before you can see where you're doing it.
So I make do
without much electricity. I use a little twelve volt. I've found
out it's possible to do quite a lot with just a couple of car batteries
and
some items made to handle twelve volt. I've been in local households
that have
TV's, tape decks, blenders and coffee grinders all working off a
car battery
set up. When the thing starts to run down, you just haul the batteries
to a
friend who is hooked up to power and get a new jolt.
Other folks
around here have generators or solar panels...or both. And there's
the local dentist who has a complete hydro-electric system that
churns out more
juice than he can use, thanks to the babbling brook that crosses
his property.
Mind you, all
of these semiclass alternatives might never have existed if
P.G.&E. hadn't hooked up with the County Sanitation Department
in the septic
tank business. You might say they became, inadvertantly, the midwives
of
invention.
At one point,
I looked into getting a septic tank. I had the idea that all it
involved was digging a hole somewhere, and running pipes from one's
abode into
same. When I expressed this vision to the County Sanitarian (honest
to God,
that's his title) he gave me a look I can only describe as bemused.
He then
tried to explain, too patiently, about percolation tests and leach
fields, in
ten easy steps. About the only thing I learned from his lecture
was that it
was going to be a while before I would get either plumbing or electricity
through regular channels.
Since I wasn't
the only one to come to this conclusion, suppliers of
alternative energy sources have become busy and successful, even
without
growing pot on the side.
But there are
some limitations to making do. My little 12 volt system will
support handily, for example, only one 25 watt light bulb at a time.
This makes
for a lot of romantic candlelight dinners, and a highly increased
birthrate. Propane lanterns, on the other hand, are bright enough,
but give off
a ghastly light. Even Kiki looks weird and sickly under their glare,
a fact
she's well aware of, and which accounts for us sitting in darkness
or
candlelight when she's here.
Some day I'll
have it all. Electricity, plumbing...the works. I've been making
sketches in my notebook of the house I want to build. It will be
splitlevel,
with a full attic. I like attics. I want to fill mine with trunks.
Trunks go
with attics in my mind. I don't know what I'll put in the trunks,
since I don't
collect anything to speak of. Maybe I'll just collect trunks.
So besides chopping
wood, country living up here means charging one's batteries
in town (a tip: sneak the batteries into a motel on weekends for
this, to avoid
alienating your friends who are hooked up to P.G.&E.), and hauling
heavy tanks
of propane to one's dwelling. If you can manage it, it's also a
good idea to
have a CB and a scanner.
All of this carrying on is so you can remain "independent"
of the power
company, the phone company, and the trucks and meter readers that
accompany
these services. Growers prefer not to have tank trucks and meter
readers
crawling around their environs, and they sure as hell don't want
phone company
personnel monkeying around on poles that might overlook their patches.
As I enter my
third growing season, the overriding impression I have of my life
as a grower is of me grunting and groaning while wrestling a tank
of propane,
or a bag of greensand to where it needs to go. It's almost as if
I were an
evolutionary throwback. I even have nightmares sometimes that I'm
sitting in
the glare of my propane lantern grunting over a heavy pile of mammoth
bones.
Well, as I've
said before, I could always go back to Pacific Stereo. If I can't
stand the heat, I can get out of the kitchen. When the going gets
tough, the
tough get going. Geez, what kind of people mouth things like that?
Actually, I
don't yearn for justice; just mercy. And maybe that's what separates
the sheep
from the goats. I'm raving.
So what has
all this to do with my purchase of a scanner? Not a hell of a
lot. I just tend to free associate a lot up here on my hill. Maybe
it goes back
to the year I had a Freudian psychiatrist who helped me develop
a talent for
stringing together enough random words to confuse any issue and
irritate my
mother.
On the other
hand, although my scanner is of dubious value, my CB is a fine
instrument. Living so far from a phone it comes in handy. But that
scanner!
I guess I'd better explain.
No sooner had
I gotten the thing than the world came crashing in. Totally. See,
it turns out that everybody out there is talking, talking, talking.
And it
didn't take long for my ever ready paranoia to get aroused to the
point that I
knew all those disembodied voices were talking about me.
The Highway
Patrol, the Sheriff, the California Department of Forestry, the
Garberville Rescue Unit, the Fire Department, and the Department
of Fish and
Game were all just over the hill, blabbing about yours truly. Unkindly.
Luckily, this
stage didn't last too long. It helped to discover that my
reaction wasn't an uncommon one toward this newfangled toy. I mean,
here we
are out in the hills where you can't see or hear your nearest neighbor.
That's
spooky enough to a city boy like me. When a whole chorus of voices
suddenly
breaks that silence, it's enough to bring anyone to red alert.
Even though
I'd been ripped off and busted, or maybe because I had, the first
night I left my scanner on all night. I woke in a cold sweat every
time a voice
crackled into the darkness, "Ten-four." I knew what that
meant, but the rest of
the stuff was a muddle. So I got a list of the ten code and the
nine code, and
began translating, until pretty soon I could 10-20 or 10-67 like
a pro.
Eventually,
calm returned to me. I came to realize that I wasn't going to
overhear the Law discussing, in detail, how and when to cut down
my plants and
make my life generally miserable. With this tucked into my cranium,
I began to
enjoy hearing the ambulance inform the hospital that the patient
was breathing
easier and his blood pressure was normalizing. Listening to the
fire dispatcher
send units off to a brush fire over the ridge was reassuring too.
Less pleasant
was what I heard from the Highway Patrol and the Sheriff. They are
the
adversaries, and when I hear them talk about stopping some guy on
the road just
because he didn't "look right," I'd realize there are
two kinds of people: them
and us. And then I'd wonder how this came to be. Who built the barriers?
I think I'm
drifting toward the profound. Nice phrase, that. I see in the
distance a small boat in the fog, drifting toward the profound.
Is the third
season the test? Will I pass?
I just took
a break to make myself some coffee and to get some control. A good
night's sleep would help. I haven't had one since I got the scanner.
Even
though I no longer leave it on all night, I lie wondering what they're
saying
out there. First, the voices kept me awake. Now it's the silence.
I sit in front
of my tent, coffee cup in hand, and listen to the night...the
unamplified, natural night. Spiro curls up beside me, twitching
with dreams.
With the moon almost full, the hillside is almost as light as the
city I
remember.
When I first
came up here the locals tried to scare me with tales of the
"Bigfoot", the "Sasquatch", the hairy monster
of the north woods. But I always
felt safer with the possibility of its hairy presence at my door,
than I had
with the usual city risks of mugging and mayhem. No longer. Now
the "Bigfoot"
wears a baseball hat and a flak jacket, carries an M-16 and goes
by the name of
"CAMP."
