Tag: #bookatrip

Adventure, Photography

The Language of the Desert

| thetembo
Reading Time: 3 minutes

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey writes, “And how could they hope to find this treasure which has no name and has never been seen? … Hard to say – and yet, when they found it, they could not fail to recognize it.” He suggests that the desert defies words but is “knowable when you see it,” invoking Justice Potter Stewart’s assertion (about porn). 

How do you speak desert? Its language is not spoken but sensed. You don’t study vocabulary—you attune.

Its alphabet consists of sun-bleached bones, twisted branches of juniper trees, and the striations of rock that mark time in colors.

You learn to read the shade as shelter, the cactus bloom as resilience, and the cracked earth as memory. You begin to listen to its stillness, feel its power on your skin, and sense its indifference with each breath. Every slot canyon is a whispered invitation to enter. Every lizard is a punctuation mark in motion.


Its nouns are Joshua Tree, Cushion Foxtail Cactus, Spiny Senna, Yellow-backed Spiny Lizard, Black-headed Grosbeak, Townsend’s Solitaire, Western Tanager, Chuckwalla, stark red Barrel Cactus, blooming Ocotillo, woefully un-cuddly Teddybear Cholla, purple-flowered Desert Willow, Desert Bluebells, and stunning Apricot Mallow.


Its verbs are the silences between the blowing wind, the curves of a canyon wall, the sparseness of the Joshua Tree forest, the steepness and rockiness of a canyon trail, and the ladder reaching toward a skylight opening in the ceiling of a slot.

Its conversation is not voiced but imagined in the claustrophobia of a slot canyon, the needles of a prickly cholla patch, and the vastness of an infinite basin. It shouts at you from within while clinging prostrate to the side of an almost trail, overlooking the abyss of a hundred-foot sheer cliff, and recoiling at the silence of a rock-hugging rattlesnake while gazing into the darkness of a twenty-foot drop. It sometimes speaks whimsically in an Ocotillo arch and among the rock formations: the Robot, the Skull, the Whale, the Claw, Kong, and the Big Crunch.

As Abbey writes, “The Desert waits outside, desolate and still and strange, unfamiliar and often grotesque in its forms and colors, inhabited by rare, furtive creatures of incredible hardiness and cunning, sparingly colonized by weird mutants from the plant kingdom, most of them as spiny thorny, stunted and twisted as they are tenacious.”

However you choose to arrive—whether in your Sunday dress and open-toed shoes, with your pet cactus to meet its wild cousins, or adorned with all the cosmetic enticements of human attraction—if you approach it with curiosity and respect, and take the time to learn even a little, you’ll find that the Desert doesn’t just open up; it communicates with you through an ancient, unspoken intimacy.

Writing

Sinister Frequencies

| thetembo
Reading Time: 7 minutes

I sat in a soundproof chamber lined with gray acoustic foam. I coughed but couldn’t hear it. The overhead light flickered, creating an eerie atmosphere.

The audiologist’s droning voice filtered through the headset, “Press the button when you think you hear a tone.”

I heard soft chirps at the same frequency, growing fainter with each button press until I presumably couldn’t hear them anymore.

She instructed, “Try to relax. It will give us a more accurate test. Close your eyes and take a deep breath.”

I was still groggy and must have fallen asleep because I didn’t remember leaving the booth. I opted for the SolTone 9x: the top-of-the-line, Bluetooth, AI-powered, forty-eight-hour battery, effectively invisible, state-of-the-art model. After the audiologist calibrated them for my hearing profile, I put in my new ears. Forgotten sounds danced in my brain with new clarity: the clack of the keys on the keyboard, a conversation in the hallway, and the sounds of traffic outside the office. I smiled, paid my bill, and left.

Two months later.

I was looking forward to my friend Owen’s visit. He always came over around five on Thursdays for drinks and to catch up. I inserted my ears and was met with the disappointing sound of them powering down due to a lack of charge. Those damn devices had been giving me trouble, not always sitting properly on the charger. What good were they if they didn’t work when I needed them?

Owen texted me that he was running late. Angry that the charger had failed, I put the hearing aids on it and ensured they were properly seated. I hoped to have some power in the units before he arrived. I noticed another voicemail but chose to ignore it.

Fifteen minutes later, I checked on the hearing aids to see if they had charged. The charger had fallen on the floor, the case open and empty. There was no sign of the devices. They were neither on the table, under the bed, nor in my ears. The doorbell rang. I decided to enjoy happy hour without my ears and search for them after Owen left.

After Owen departed, I scoured the bedroom, kitchen, and the bathroom.

Nothing.

I meticulously emptied the trash, piece by piece. The only thing that struck me as odd was the missing voicemail. I couldn’t recall deleting it, which added to my growing confusion. I tore the house apart for two days, my frustration mounting with each passing moment. I checked the security footage from the doorbell cam during the time frame from when I knew I had them to when I knew I had lost them.

Nothing.

The more I searched, the more perplexed I became. How could something just vanish like that?

I conducted the search again.

Nothing.

My ears were gone.

#

Owen visited one morning a few days later, sipping coffee from a thermos with his own SolTone 9Xs tucked neatly in his ears.

I stared at them. They were the same beige as mine.

“We both see the same audiologist and have the same model. You’re sure you didn’t take mine by accident?”

Owen appeared puzzled, then laughed. “These are mine. Got them a month ago. Same model, yeah—but I had to replace the first pair.”

“What happened to the first?”

Owen scratched his head. “Lost them. Honestly? I think I threw them out. I don’t even remember doing it. I only had the things for about two months, too. It was an expensive mistake.”

I winced and said, “I don’t remember losing them either. And it was about two months after I bought them. That’s a weird coincidence.”

Owen sighed. “Yeah, well, we aren’t exactly spring chickens anymore. You know how it is.”

“I suppose. Growing old isn’t for the poor.”

“Are you going to buy the replacements?”

“Not until I figure out what happened to the originals.”

As the days passed, a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Owen had been with me the night I lost them. Could he have taken them? Swapped them out? He had said they were the same model…

But Owen was my friend. Gaslighting me was something he would do, but I knew him. He would have come clean in fifteen minutes to have a big laugh at my expense.

Still.

#

That evening, I reviewed the security footage from the doorbell cam again, expanding the viewing window both before and after. I did not leave the house that day. No one entered before Owen arrived. Owen came and then left. I watched it once more in slow motion as if that would make a difference.

Nothing.

The video proved that I hadn’t gone anywhere. Yet, the hearing aids had vanished. By midnight, I had rewritten and discarded three theories: home intruder, faulty memory, and Owen. None of them held.

And now, another thought whispered in my mind: What if I did it?

Every crime has a motive, right? So why would I steal my ears from myself? I held the empty charger and muttered, “I loved having my hearing back.”

Still.

#

I booked an appointment with Dr. Peyme, my neurologist. She believed the most likely explanation was a loss of focus, but she indulged my fears. She ordered an MRI and cognitive testing and suggested a week of daily logs.

When the doctor’s tests came back clear, I was relieved that there was nothing physically wrong with me. I was healthy; there was no sign of early dementia, trauma, or dissociative episodes. It was a weight off my shoulders.

Dr. Peyme said, “You’re healthy, Clive. Not even the faintest sign of early dementia, trauma, or dissociative episodes.”

“I’m glad to hear that, but it doesn’t address the five-thousand-dollar question: Where are they?”

The doctor hesitated. “Maybe it was just misplacement.”

“I know what happened.”

“The mind plays tricks.”

I walked out of the clinic with a growing weight in my chest—neither fear nor sadness, but uncertainty. If there wasn’t an explanation, then I have a screw loose. This uncertainty was crushing, leaving me feeling lost and disoriented.

#

The following week, I was ready to surrender, realizing I would have to live with uncertainty. Without my ears, simple tasks became daunting, conversations were a struggle, and I felt isolated. I almost bought a new pair of hearing aids—almost. But something kept gnawing at me, and I couldn’t let it go.

Owen stopped by on Thursday for our usual happy hour.

I said, “They’re running a discount on the SolTone 9Xs over at the clinic. I’m tempted to get another pair. But it still bugs me what happened,” hoping that he would discourage me from giving up the search.

“Yeah,” Owen said. “Losing them like that. I know the feeling. But what will you do, say huh and what, and miss half the words in every conversation? Not hearing was hurting my performance at work. I probably wouldn’t have my job right now without them. Is it interfering with your work?”

Owen’s phone vibrated, and he said, “Hang on. I have a voicemail.”

He picked up the phone to listen. Owen blinked and put the phone on the counter without locking it. Then, like a puppet yanked by an invisible thread, he reached toward his ears. His face had gone expressionless, lips parted slightly. His eyes looked past me toward something empty and far away. He put the hearing aids in their case and walked toward the kitchen sink. He turned on the trash compactor.

“Owen!” I leapt up and ripped the case from his hands. He didn’t resist but looked blankly out the window over the sink. I smacked his cheek with an open hand.

Owen flinched, and his eyes refocused. As if nothing happened, he said, “Not hearing was really hurting my performance at work. I probably wouldn’t have my job right now without them. Is it interfering with your work?”

My heart skipped a beat.

“What?”

“What, what?” he echoed.

He picked his phone up from the counter. “Hold on. I just need to—”

“Need to what?”

“Delete this voicemail. It says scam likely.”

I took the phone from his hand again. This time, he resisted.

He protested, “What the hell are you doing? Give me back my phone.”

I glanced at the number and recognized it. That was it. That was the clue. A thought buried like a landmine in my head. 

#

“Give me my phone,” Owen said testily.

“Why did you take out your hearing aids?”

“What are you talking about? I’m still wearing them.”

Owen placed his fingers to his ears and said, “See. There…”

He appeared perplexed. “Huh? That’s weird. I don’t remember taking them out.”

“You put them in your charger just now. Don’t you remember?”

He opened the case in his hand. “No. I put them in to hear just before I came in. I was wearing them while we were talking. I swear.”

“The voicemail you were about to delete. It must be a trigger.”

“A trigger for what?” Owen was about to play the voicemail again.

“No, No! If I’m right, that voicemail will send us both into a hypnotic state.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do then?”

“Let me listen to the voicemail. I don’t have any hearing aids to throw out.” 

“Sure.” He handed me the phone.

I said, “If I start acting weird, slap me in the face.”

Owen shook his head. “I’m not going to slap you in the face. That’s crazy.”

The next thing I said was, “Nothing happened. I thought for sure. I guess I am the one that is crazy.”

Owen was staring at me white-faced, holding his phone, and I felt the sting of needles and pins on my jaw.

#

I prepared carefully. I charged a pair of old dummy hearing aids—the same shape and color. I booked a follow-up fitting with the audiologist, Dr. Bunco. I had to check the business card because I didn’t remember her name. I hid two mini-cameras: one in my glasses, the other clipped inside my coat.

When I arrived, Dr. Bunco greeted me warmly.

“Still no sign of your hearing aids?” the doctor asked, genuinely or not, I can’t say.

“No,” I said calmly. “It’s the strangest thing. I don’t know how I lost them. It’s as if I were hypnotized or something.”

Dr. Bunco’s mouth twitched.

She laughed awkwardly. “I—well, that’s—”

I said, firmer, “And the same thing happened to my friend, a patient at your clinic. Both of us lost them exactly two months after we bought them. Isn’t that strange?”

Dr. Bunco stood, turned, and walked over to a drawer. She opened it. Inside was a bin of hearing aid demos. But instead of handling them, she picked up the small waste bin beneath the desk.

I held my breath.

Dr. Bunco dropped a pair of demos inside. Then another. She stood there, staring into the bin.

I whispered, “Got you.”

Dr. Bunco turned. Her face was blank.

I pressed the emergency button on my coat. A prerecorded message went straight to a friend at the police station.

“Clive,” she said evenly. “You should be going now.”

“No,” Clive said. “I think I’ll stay.”

And then the doctor lunged.

#

The struggle was brief. I managed to dodge, knocking over the bin. Hearing aids scattered across the floor like dropped candy. A half dozen pairs—dozens of lives dulled into silence.

The police burst in three minutes later.

Dr. Bunco didn’t resist. She said nothing.

During the investigation, detectives uncovered encrypted files on Dr. Bunco’s work computer: patient hypnosis scripts, implant logs, and behavioral test data. She’d embedded audio cues into the hearing aid fittings themselves, planting triggers in the minds of her patients. A specific phrase delivered by voicemail would induce a mild dissociative fugue—a trance long enough to dispose of the devices. Once lost, patients returned, bought replacements, and the scam repeated.

Over forty patients had been affected. All had lost their hearing aids two months after purchasing them. Two months was the smoking gun. It was statistically impossible, even for old people. She was charged with fraud, unauthorized medical experimentation, and multiple counts of psychological abuse.

Owen stopped wearing his hearing aids for a while.

We both switched to a new clinic.

I bought new ones but would never again allow myself to be tested in a booth without another person present.

Adventure, Photography, Writing

Time Travel through SoCal

| thetembo
Reading Time: 12 minutes

Another installment of the Book A Trip Series

Although we often think of traveling through space and time as an exotic dream or a science fiction story, our minds routinely do this. We travel through the present, plotting the future while constantly remembering the past.

Episodic memory is the ability to recall specific personal experiences from the past. It is a mental time machine triggered by sensory information, including sights, sounds, words, and the memory of particular events. It doesn’t take much to trigger an episodic memory. Conversations, stories, music, and situations all induce our time travel into the past.

Semantic memory is the capability to recall time and experience independent, factual information, like the taxonomy of songbird species in California. Memory, learning, and imagination use the same neural networks. Learning changes memory. We change the person we are just by remembering who we were. Is the self a fleeting memory impossible to truly know? Imagination is a mashup of things we have categorized, playing them out as future experiences. It is time travel to the future.

According to “Why We Remember” by Charan Ranganath, scientists have found that the hippocampus, a small, seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain, primarily mediates episodic memory. In contrast, semantic memory involves neural networks in the neocortex, the gray matter of the brain. The two memory systems are interdependent. Repeated episodic memories translate into categories in semantic memory, which in turn can trigger episodic memories.

In a shameless plug for the “Book a Trip” series, travel and reading combine all the uses of those neural networks. Travel and reading add to the diversity of our experience and stretch the boundaries of what we can conceive. The brain combines these experiences in new ways. A book and a trip in the present are trips to the past and the future.

ER (previously referred to as GF in other posts) and I traveled through space and time on a Memorial Day weekend trip through Southern California. It takes a violent act of the imagination to picture my car as a DeLorean, but I know you can do it. When we weren’t making episodic memories, we were reliving them. Future episodic memories worthy of remembering are the trophies of travel.

We started the trip listening to Amy Tan’s “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” a radical departure from her wildly successful book, “Joy Luck Club.” John Muir Law’s “The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling,” inspired her backyard observation and drawings. Interestingly enough, the Laws Guide is on my bookshelf. Isn’t it on everyone’s? Okay. I might be off the beaten path on this one. But consider that I have read one book about a man’s observations of a square meter of ground for a year, “The Forest Unseen,” and another told from the tree’s point of view, “The Overstory.” What can I say? It stands to reason I would have the Laws Guide.

Despite their ubiquity, birds only fuel episodic time travel if you pay close attention to them. From my experiences in wild San Diego, I instantly knew that Amy Tan was from somewhere on the West Coast by her bird list. Through the observations of her backyard feeder, she has become somewhat of a bird expert. I will never mistake a Great Horned Owl hoot for a dove coo, but sadly, for me, a sparrow is a sparrow, and a warbler is a warbler. I have never learned to distinguish the white throat sparrow from the golden-crowned or the lesser goldfinch from the greater. Besides, who are we to judge the value of a goldfinch?

A rare sighting of the black-headed grosbeak for Amy is a distinct memory. It is an exciting event for her, and emotion triggers her brain to learn and remember. It is just another memory added into an undifferentiated clump of birds for the rest of us. Our brains lump the familiar and distinguish the different. The daily commute of one day is indistinguishable from the next. I will never forget that one drive on the AutoBahn at 150 mph. It makes sense. Our brains are filters designed to ignore the mundane and only keep what is important. It is the different that causes problems and what we need to remember to survive in the natural and social worlds.  

Charan says the brain works as designed when you forget where you put your keys, even when holding them in your hand. The links to memory get erased over time, especially with similar, overlapping experiences. His answer to forgetting is to accept it. Your brain is doing what it is supposed to be doing. I have yet to take his advice to heart. I find satisfaction in remembering and frustration in forgetting. It still pisses me off that a memory takes five days to percolate to the surface. If the goal of Jeopardy were to answer as slowly as possible, I would be the grandmaster. His one practical suggestion (that I remember) is to take the quiz before you start learning. It preps the brain for learning by setting it up to look for discrepancies. I always hated quizzes.

I formed episodic bird memories on a late lunch break at Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. Loons swam just off the pier, which brought back memories of kayaking on Wasson Lake in Minnesota, finding a nest hidden in the grass at the edge of a small island. I didn’t know loons hung out in the salt water, so I learned a new fact to tuck away in my semantic memory. I also had the good luck to spot a surf scoter, a large duck I had not seen before. I would just as soon forget the pigeons scavaging for food at our feet and staining the pier with the remains of their successful foraging. The homeless lady shouting obscenities or the one passed out and face down on the dock amid the heaviest foot traffic, I would prefer to forget. I have entirely too many memories of walking by homeless people.

Amy documents the intelligence of birds, having met her match with persistent blue jays in particular. Birds have the same primitive brains with a hippocampus that we do. Why is it surprising they have episodic memory? The bird and mammal cortexes evolved differently and have different architectures. Bird brains may be tiny but pack two to four times more neurons than mammal brains. A recent article said that crows could caw to four, something previously believed that only humans could do. But why do humans caw to four? The article left me hanging on that point.

Musings over the bird feeder did little for ER’s episodic memory, and even I could only withstand so much backyard observation. So, I surrendered Amy Tan for ER’s playlist. The songs we listened to on the trip fueled the time travel machine. John Cougar Mellencamp sang Hurts So Good, or is it John Cougar? When did he stop thinking that Mellencamp was nerdy and Cougar was pretentious? John Cougar always takes me back to delivering pizzas in subzero weather on the Southside of Chicago for Benny after I graduated from college with a degree in mathematics and physics. Little Pink Houses was the big hit then, and it was his best effort (IMHO).

Blue Oyster Cult sang Godzilla, reminding me of the 70s and high school. Still, no specific memory came to mind besides a quote from a scene in Austin Powers, where one Japanese man screams, “It’s Godzilla.” Another Japanese man corrects him by saying, “Due to copyright laws, it is not Godzilla; it only looks like Godzilla. The punchline of the joke is that the Godzilla in the scene is a plastic facsimile, not Godzilla.

I hadn’t heard the Blue Oyster Cult song Godzilla in a long time, so I enjoyed its replay. I even learned something new about it. One of the verses in the song is:

Rinji news o moshiagemasu
Rinji news o moshiagemasu
Godzil a ga Ginza hoomen e mukatte imasu
Daishkyu hinan shite kudasai
Daishkyu hinan shite kudasai

Translated from Japanese into English by Google gives:

I’ll give you some
I’ll give you some
My grandma is facing the Ginza face
Please give me a hug
Please give me a hug

Go figure. The translation makes no sense whatsoever. Is Grandma staring down the beast, ready to hug it if it chooses to attack? I don’t think she has the same skillset as Mothra. But oh no, there goes Tokyo. Go, go, Godzilla!

But then we wondered, what inspired BOC to pay tribute to Godzilla? Did they wake up one morning inspired by a late-night TV movie with Godzilla battling it out with Mothra and Rodan? Or did they realize that the Godzilla OnlyFans base was underserved?

Not all recollection results in pleasure. I can think of more than a few episodic memories that keep me humble (but I’m not sharing.) If you see me shudder for no particular reason, it was something stupid I did in the third grade.

Overlumping repeated experiences causes pain, too. Honestly, I’m sick of hearing so many overplayed songs from the past, no matter what episodic memories accompany them. I don’t hate the songs; I’m just sick of hearing them. The songs are not good enough to last a lifetime of replaying. Two songs in particular make me want to run from the room: Brown-eyed Girl and Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

We had a lot of time to think and listen, stuck in the gridlock of the 5, then the 405, then the 101. The 101 coming out of LA is the Ventura Highway. Ventura Highway is a song by America, a pretty presumptuous name for any band, let alone one from England. The song wasn’t on the playlist, but the music played in my head, making me time travel to the early 70s, listening to 45s on a turntable in a friend’s basement. Fifty years later, I have this to offer as the start of a rewrite for the undeserved tribute to the unglamorous Ventura Highway:

Ventura Highway, in the gridlocked lanes
Where the smog is thicker
The air is toxic from engine flames,
We’ve stopped again, oh no.

So much for the free wind blowin’ through my hair.

I might have an even nastier verse for the 101 outside San Luis Obispo, where the State Police gave me unwelcome feedback for my fast car. ER claims “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman is the saddest song ever, so I had her read the lyrics to me. Tracy’s protagonist can’t escape the same miserable lives her parents led. The fast car starts as a means of escape from her parent’s dismal lives and ends as a wish to get rid of her partner when he becomes no better than her deadbeat dad. “So take your fast car and keep on driving.”

The Paso Robles bar we bellied up to displayed a John Wayne placard on the wall: “Life is Tough—It’s tougher if you’re stupid.” The quote triggered a memory of the John Wayne movie The Green Berets. I inflicted ER with the movie’s title track, “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” which has eerie parallels to Fast Car. The Green Beret protagonist of the song goes off to die on duty, and his dying wish is for his son to follow in his footsteps. My advice to his kid is to get in that fast car and get the hell out of there. The movie “Green Berets” might be one of the saddest movies ever, but I am using a completely different meaning for the word “sad.” The movie was a propaganda piece for our moral mission in Vietnam. No, seriously.

A young couple band played “Wagon Wheel” in front of the bar to the mischief of 40ish women who were there to celebrate one of their 40th birthdays, if I am to judge by the reading of t-shirts. I propose mischief as the mass noun for partying 40-ish-year-old women. “Wagon Wheel” isn’t one I was familiar with, but it takes ER off to some faraway place and time. I have yet to learn to differentiate the many flavors of Southern music.

According to ER, I didn’t fit the general mold of the bar’s clientele. I lacked the necessary facial hair and didn’t have a glass eye. (Okay, I made that second part up.) Still, I’m afraid I have to disagree. I did fit into the bar, and I offer this as proof. When I pulled up the barstool, the burly guy next to me gave me a hard, welcoming slap to the knee that left me white-eyed. The stuffed boar’s head over John Wayne’s placard gave me a welcoming wink. The mounted cowboy boot next to the boar’s head would have approved but didn’t have a way to express its validation for me. I may get my wink when they mount the stuffed cowboy’s head instead of his boot.

We discovered that the couple to the right of us was on their first Tinder date. We empathetically shared a few tense moments while her date stepped out, wondering if he was ditching her or would return. This date was her sixth attempt at eternal bliss. Her success criteria is a partner who “Sees me, hears me, and validates me.” Those might all be the same thing if you think about it. Or I could be off base on this one. Perhaps she meant it more literally, excluding the blind, the deaf, and the psychopaths from her list of prospects. After five rejections, you shouldn’t be so picky. I would be off her list on all three counts. Not to worry, her date returned.

We met another affable, retired couple from Las Vegas while eating dinner at Paso Terra on the street front patio, splitting an order of paella. I ate the one carrot in the paella dish without sharing. It was the best carrot I’ve ever had. My attempt to order a side of one carrot failed. Sorry ER. The man introduced me to the concept of burning rubber. I was holding my hands over my groin thinking about the friction, but what he meant was spinning the wheels of your race car to generate as much smoke as possible before speeding off for a quarter-mile run. As thrilling as that is, it destroys the tires, so the trick is to buy cheap, one-use disposable tires, should I ever decide to burn my rubber. The conversation had several opportunities to go off the rails along differing political propensities, our new friends lamenting the lack of support for our veterans and taking issue with San Diego’s anti-yoga on-the-beach enforcement and AI technology. ER steered us back to neutral ground, pointing out examples of AI use with health benefits that human practitioners couldn’t provide and our new friend couldn’t refute.

Keeping worldview out of casual dinner conversations with strangers is generally a good idea, especially when their German Shepard is staring at you with bared teeth through the driver seat windshield of their truck. I think worldview is more closely related to semantic memory, which defines the interrelationship between things. In my memory meta-model (MMM), I think of semantic memory as the modeling diagrams I make for software, an ontology of the concepts the software will realize. Sadly, bubble diagrams don’t make for interesting dinner conversation.

Semantic memory is more than memorizing facts. A picnic bench at a viewpoint informed us of a new fact: the Chumash are the first people, which is probably news to many misinformed anthropologists. Those anthropologists will have to rewrite their semantic memories to accommodate this new worldview now that we know the cradle of humanity is in the Figueroa mountains just outside of Santa Barbara on the 154.

Armed with new bird and anthropological knowledge, we attempted to summit the 2,624-foot Cerro Alto Peak. We didn’t see many birds on the trail, the most memorable being the spotted towhee and a couple of vultures. The vultures were keeping a close eye on ER.

We did see quite a few people on the trail. None of them appeared to be Chumash, but how would I know? We jockeyed for position with a family of five up the mountain. Dad added a lot of unnecessary stress to the family’s hike by starting on the wrong trail, chastising his kids when they strayed, losing his glasses, and trying to motivate his three-year-old daughter, who would have preferred to play with the dirt. Dad needed to stop and smell the rose-colored flowers of the hummingbird sages. If he didn’t care for those, he could have chosen the chaparral peas, the silver puffs, the wooly Indian paintbrushes, the wooly blue curls, the scorpionweed, the pipestem clematis, the pink honeysuckle, the white globe lily, or the purple chinese houses. The mountainside was a pollinator’s paradise.

I was worried when the little three-year-old girl passed ER on the trail. (I’m teasing. The kid was riding on her dad’s back.) ER prevailed on the 120-floor ascent to her credit, though I was concerned that I might have to take ER to the ER. We picked a good day for the summit; cloud cover was limited to a fog bank that hung over Pismo Beach in the distance. We had 360-degree views, including Morro Rock, Pismo Beach, and a nearby summit with cell towers. I read that you could see to the Sierras on a perfect day, but haze obscured the view of the distant horizon. After the fact I read, you can see the “Nine Sisters,” volcanic plugs along a fault line. Morrow Rock is one. Looking at the trip pictures, I can see at least one other candidate, but not all of them.

After the hike, we started the long trek back. I took the long way home, driving through the heart of Los Padres National Forest, with impressive big-sky landscapes of layered hills and mountains. A stream-following road reminds me of Colorado. I’ve motorcycled this road before, but my brain forgot to store the video and instead categorized it in my semantic memory under spectacular. Why can’t that episodic memory play over and over in my head instead of the shuddering ones from the third grade? The one downside to the gorgeous scenery was the 30-minute stoplights on a two-lane highway with no crossroads.

And that brings me to the end of our time-traveling adventure. If you remember reading this, you have formed an episodic memory. If you remember the facts about goldfinches, the hippocampus, the hummingbird sage, or the Chumash, you have formed or augmented your semantic memory. And if the article is forgettable, it is not my fault. Your brain is working as designed.

Books referenced:
“Why We Remember” by Charan Ranganath
“The Backyard Bird Chronicles” by Amy Tan

Cartoon Images by ImageFX
All photos are originals

Adventure, Photography, Reviews, Writing

Remains of the Father’s Day

| thetembo
Reading Time: 9 minutes

Spoiler Alert: If you plan on reading “Remains of the Day,” you may want to save this for another day. 

It’s not my habit to use earbuds while I hike. It defeats the purpose. But I want to finish an audiobook, “The Remains of the Day.” So when my lens cap undoes its clasp and its tether detaches from the body of the camera, and falls to the ground, I don’t hear or notice it. 

I’m a quarter of a mile up the trail when I try to remove the no longer present lens cap from my unprotected lens. It was there when I started, but I could have dropped it anywhere between here and the car. Judging by the empty parking lot and walking on an out-and-back trail, I figure I have a better than 90% chance of finding it on the return trip to the car. There is no one else on this trail to take it. So I let it go, resolving to be mindful not to bang the camera around with its exposed lens and to recover the lens cap on the way back.

I’m not sure what prompted me to pick up the “Remains of the Day,” and I’m not even entirely sure why I continue to read it. The story is about a butler: not a man who works as a butler, but a man who IS a butler. It reads like a handbook for the craft of the butler narrated in the first person. Is there such a word as butlerness, the essence of the position? 

On the other hand, Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing is compelling. I unabashedly acknowledge it qualifies as craft. The cadence, tone, interactions, and meticulous descriptions of thoughts and perceptions are rich, unrelenting, and consistent throughout the book. But is it a story? I am starting to wonder. 

In his ongoing recollections, Mr. Stevens recounts several encounters with Ms. Kenton, who was part of his staff. She caused professional and, in the most subdued of ways, sexual tension between the two. The two servants never once reveal their first names to each other or even to the reader. When they overcome the sticking points in their professional relationship, they share some brief informality together in the evenings passing the time by sipping tea together in the kitchen. Still, he is uncomfortable with it and quickly dispenses with this inappropriate activity at the first opportunity to terminate it. Formality is the protocol of the butler, and the butler is never off duty, even when he is. 

Subdued might be an overstatement. The K-drama thirty-second love stare scene screams sexuality by comparison. In case you are unfamiliar with what that is, the love interests in the K-drama stare into each other’s eyes but never actually kiss, touch, or even exchange words, and later deny that such a moment occurred. When I watch these scenes, my Hollywood brain threatens to explode, demanding satisfaction, shouting at the two, “Shag each other rotten already!” 

The hike slogs on like the book. The trail is seriously overgrown, partly from the super bloom, but also, I suspect, because this trail is low use. It might be especially low use today because it is Father’s Day. All the more reason to hike it. The North and South Clevenger trails are on Route 78, about five miles east of the Wild Animal Park. The South Clevenger Trail is the drier of the two. Both take you up the side of the canyon walls to scenic vistas. The road, the orchards, and the isolated buildings that have claimed the ridgeline are never far from sight. But if you look in the right direction over the rugged terrain, you might think you are in the Nevada desert somewhere.

I use my hiking poles to push aside the overgrowth rather than using them to propel me up the seventy-five-story, two-mile climb. The temperature is in the mid-eighties, and today is one of the few days I’ve worn shorts all year. The starthistles prick at my exposed legs. A starthistle has a pretty yellow flower on a ball-shaped bulb with pointy spines resembling a party favor packaged in a miniaturized medieval mace. Blossoming deerweed with its tiny red and yellow pea flowers grows out over the trail closing in from both sides and sometimes from the top. I duck under overgrown bush mallow pushing through with my hat, hoping I don’t pick up any ticks. There is no relief. The trail is overgrown, brushing against my body and poking at my legs the entire trek.

As I listen to the audiobook, I wonder if the overgrown trail is a metaphor for the density and ponderousness of the book. Or perhaps it is the other way around. The butler, Mr. Stevens, is on a road trip to the English countryside, but his stops are brief interludes for deep dives into his memories of his lifetime of service. The pacing is deliberately slow, and what passes for action is off-camera, so to speak. Mr. Stevens stands just outside the doorway for however long he must in case his services are required, not specifically knowing what transpires within. A butler must be attentive precisely when it is demanded and invisible otherwise. (It sounds like the role of a father.)

The essence of the great butler is dignity. It doesn’t matter that his father is dying or that his master makes a horrible staffing decision or the world is crumbling around its feet with the onset of World War II. Mr. Stevens maintains his dignity, which for a man of servitude, is the opposite of what you or I construe as the execution of the concept. Dignity for a man of service is never giving in to one’s own thoughts and sentiments in the performance of duty. Dignity is staying faithful to your superiors. Dignity for anyone else is maintaining and defending one’s views and opinions in the face of inconvenience and adversity. One butler’s strength is another man’s weakness.

Speaking of adversity, with the heat and the elevation gain, I stop for a drink of water. I take a swig out of my water bottle but notice something floating inside. Upon closer inspection, it’s a drowned spider with its eight articulated legs folded into a point like a cephalopod. It looks a little fuzzy, too, like fungus has already started to attack and decompose it. It reminds me of a sci-fi movie with alien specimens floating in tanks of tarnished water deep in some Area 51 secret bunker or lab. I hope the water I just drank isn’t contaminated enough to kill me. Inside my head, there is not a lot of dignity going on. I share my thoughts with mother nature in a most undignified anti-butler way, “How the f**k did a spider get inside a sealed water bottle?”

I think of a spider on my bathroom sink a few days ago. When I turned on the light, I startled it. It dashed for the cover of my toothbrush but then changed its mind and tried to hide under the toothpaste. It was a speedy, dark brown spider. Usually, I try to catch and release (outside, of course), but this one was too quick, and I didn’t have a suitable container to trap it with. So I smashed the bugger and flushed him. The life of a spider is an uncertain thing. Is this a haunting? A punishment for my failure to set the spider free in the great outdoors? Is the collective spider community conspiring to exact its revenge? 

The hike is only four miles round trip, and even with the heat, I can endure a little thirst. So I press on to the high point and my turn-around point of the trail, marked by a massive white granite rock. As I ascend, Mr. Stevens has finally arrived at the last stop on his six-day trip. Only upon his arrival do we learn that the purpose of the trip is to visit Ms. Kenton, who left her employment some twenty years ago. He reconnects with her, responding with concern for some melancholy remarks she has made in her letter correspondences. Even in an outside-of-work informal context twenty years later, they continue to address one another formally. We discover that Ms. Kenton left the employ to get married and have a family. In the not-so-big-reveal, Ms. Kenton acknowledges at the bus stop just before her departure into eternity that she left because she had feelings for Mr. Kenton. Although Mr. Stevens expresses something like regret, it is clear that he is incapable of love. In his deep memory dives, his one moment of thought for her comes when he pauses outside her room, knowing that he made her cry. He described the paused moment as an eternity but stated it was probably only a few seconds. And then he continues on his way never to otherwise acknowledge the moment to fulfill his most essential duty of supplying the politically-important guests with brandy. 

When I reach the high point of the trail, I’m regretting the shorts, the lack of spider-free water, the heat, the overgrown path, and the missing lens cap. But I can’t complain about the canyon view or catching the tail end of the super bloom. All the late-flowering plants are still putting on a show—swathes of deerweed cover the trail and the sides of the mountains. The corkscrew California Centaury plants and the hairy yellow blossoms of Calochortus weedii poke through the stems of chaparral bushes. White inflorescences cover the chamise bushes like a dusting of snow. I shimmy between a crevice in the great white rock to swallow up the view of the orchard below and the hills beyond. It’s all about me—the anti-butler. 

Mr. Stevens has no I. Zen believes that the self is an illusion and Mr. Stevens intends to prove it. But the Zen master lives for compassion, not for service. The difference is profound. Mr. Stevens stands behind his master, no matter how poor their judgment. He passes on life’s moments of love and grief. Even when he visits Ms. Kenton because of concern for her happiness, the moment would have passed him by if Ms. Kenton did not insist on him escorting her to the bus stop. Compassion and duty are the oil and vinegar of one’s moral compass.

When the book concludes, I want to poke my eyes out with a fork. Nobody could be this tedious and dull. But fortunately, I still need my eyes to navigate my way back to the car. Tiny faded-blue butterflies dart past all the pollen opportunities, too impatient to pose for a picture. A cicada clasps to a stem. I see a tall spike of what I think are golden eardrops and the white-colored version of the ordinarily magenta canchalagua. Canchalagua is the flower with the corkscrew stamens I’ve featured several times on Insta. I even find my lens cap. I’m glad I keep my eyes after all. 

Is it a story? One of my writing books suggests that character-driven is the essence of the story. She complains about meandering and meaningless plot points wandering without an inner purpose. This book is the opposite. It is character-driven without a plot. And the protagonist doesn’t change.  

Only Ms. Kenton changes. She escapes from the prison of servitude to get married and start a family. Ms. Kenton says it took seven years for her to find love in her husband’s familiarity. She expressed moments of uncertainty in her correspondence but declares that they were fleeting, and she has overcome them. But the protagonist is the story. We spend all our time in Mr. Steven’s head, not Ms. Kenton’s. And he never deviates from his butler mindset.

Mr. Stevens offers a pretense of regret. But even his regret is short-sighted and for the wrong thing. He doesn’t regret the lost opportunity for love or a missed life. He regrets that he can no longer serve with the perfection he once commanded, making little but unnoticeable mistakes now and then as his career winds down. There is no change, but that is the genius of it. Mr. Stevens is so trapped that there is no escape. 

In a conversation Mr. Stevens has with a local at his final stop, the man describes the “remains of the day” as the time left in the day, the time after work people enjoy the most, an allegory for Mr. Stevens to live the rest of his life for himself. But remains are also a person’s body after they are dead. I don’t know if a pun was intended, but as far I can tell, Mr. Stevens is already a zombie. Even as he contemplates change, it is not change. He endeavors to learn to banter, insinuating that he is willing to tolerate informality, but only because it might please Mr. Faraday, his current master. There really is no hope for the guy.

As for the remains of my day, I can sometimes relate to the feeling of being invisible. Where are my Father’s Day texts? In the good old days, dads used to get ties. These days, a meme is going out of the way. Mom’s Day rates three in holidays, while Father’s Day rates twenty. But I will stick to the time left in the day definition rather than the zombie definition and aspire to use the remains of my day wisely. A hike was a good start.

Note: My texts came later in the evening, and my daughter spent the previous day working two hours in the backyard weeding the superbloom overgrowth. I was just trying to get into the spirit of the story.

Hiking Butler Art by Craiyon