Mallory's Camera

Deep Springs, Ichabod’s unique, innovative and altogether amazing college was profiled on 60 Minutes:



I don’t watch network television myself. I learned about this only because John L_______ texted me shortly after midnight Sunday night, awakening me from a dream in which a band of Super Seekrit oracles, living in Oakland, California, were forecasting the future by analyzing stories in The Daily Mail.

(In John’s defense, he’d probably gotten so-o-oooo excited, he simply forgot about the New York/California time difference.)

###

What else?

The sun was out yesterday, and the temps were a lovely, low 70°-ish.

I tromped six miles or so along the railroad tracks that edge the eastern bank of the Hudson River:







It was quite the lovely day though when I looked across the river, I could see that roughly one-third of the trees along the west bank highlands were bare.

Those trees never had show autumn colors.

People who live north of me tell me that the leaves are turning color there, so I will take it as an article of faith that autumn leaf color changes are not yet a relic of the past.

###

Once home, I labored on the current Remunerative Project.

It’s hard to write because there’s simply no information out there on its topic—which happens to be the causes of the dizzying shifts in Ph.D. in Social Work salaries from state to state.

I am positing the salary differential is somehow correllated with the amounts that individual states spend on public welfare services. (The vast majority of public welfare services are bankrolled by the federal government, but states pitch in some of their own $$$$.)

The topic is complicated by the fact that there are two doctorate degrees associated with social work, and neither is what you would call a terminal degree. The MSW is the terminal degree, the one that’s necessary for licensing and certification.

There’s no earthly reason that I can understand why anyone in their right mind would pursue a Ph.D. in Social Work.

But—I must make a case for it.

Zzz-zzz-zzz-zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

###

You can still hear birds in the morning.

The calls of migrating flocks of geese.

Not cheerful little robins hunting for worms on your front lawn.

The California contingent in last night’s Family Zoom were muy concerned and sympathetic about what seems to be developing into a chronic insomnia. After a spirited discussion over the legal implications of using a federal mailing system, they volunteered to send me copious volumes of cannaboid products.

But I could drive over the border and get my own cannaboid products, I realized.

They’re legal in Massachusetts. They’re legal in New York. It’s just that they’re only so recently legal in New York that there’s no Dope R Us near me.

I’ve never been a big fan of THC, but ya do what ya gotta do.

It’s pretty awful being this exhausted all the time. Your consciousness constricts somehow. You’re only dimly aware that anything exists outside the periphery of your own psyche and soma.

I remember the feeling very well from the two years I spent working nights as a beginning nurse.

I did not enjoy it then, and I am not enjoying it now.



Not that insomnia has been totally without its perks.

At first, when I stopped being able to sleep, I followed all the advice for proper sleep hygiene. No electronic devices for a couple of hours before official sleepy time. No electronic devices when official sleepy time did not result in slumber. I exercised. I cut my caffeine intake down to one cup of coffee in the morning.

But after a couple of days, when none of it worked, I thought Fuck this, and began watching movies in the early hours of the morning. The Criterion Channel has out together a sampler of neonoirs; thus, I was able to become reacquainted with some of my very favorite movies from the late 70s and early 80s.

Chinatown: Still brilliant. Eerily prescient. Ichabod spent the first two years of college at Deep Springs, and to get to Deep Springs, you have to drive Route 395 through the Owens Valley, which is the place where Los Angeles steals its water from. A ghastly, arid, alkaline plain. A veritable moonscape. Every now and then, an underground spring turns quarter-mile patches fertile and green, the way it all once must have been. The effect is very strange.

Body Heat: A reimagining of Double Jeopardy. A bit dated—that’s mostly the fault of the over-the-top background music—but still loads of fun. Ted Danson’s assistant DA tapdancing in the moonlight. Kathleen Turner, giving sleazeball William Hurt the once over, and then remarking in her trademark throaty voice, “You aren’t too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” Mickey Rourke’s fast-talking firebug.

Cutter’s Way: This is a movie I’ve been trying to find again for many, many years. I don’t know how you’d describe it. Maybe, “What happened to the late 1970s when the 1960s had become a hangover.”

It takes place in Santa Barbara when Santa Barbara still felt like a small town. The neon signage of El Encanto appears at the end of the opening credits. (This was a hotel that I had actually written a short story about, recycling my obsession with H.G. Wells’ short story, The Door in the Wall: There is this bar that you go into once and where you have simply the most fabulous experience of your life; you always plan to go back, but the bar is a bit like the enchanted village of Brigadoon; it appears and disappears at random, and when it appears, you are simply too busy to step inside…)

The film’s plot is your typical California conspiracy theory. It’s incidental, but it does infuse the film with a necessary paranoia. The heart of the film is the shifting relationships between its three main characters: a physically and psychically scarred Vietnam vet; his luminous, ruined, alcoholic wife; and their housemate, a tarnished golden boy (played by my BF Jeff Bridges at the height of his physical perfection.)

This was one of Rikky’s favorite movies; he took me to see it when it first came out.

I was very, very happy to see it again. It is quite brilliant, and very few people have ever heard of it.



What else?

On Sunday, asakiyume and I met up at Samascott Orchards to pick cherries and blueberries, which was loads of fun although owing to me insomnia-addled brain, I can’t really describe the fun. We did take many pix, however:

Here’s asakiyume looking like a veritable cherry tree dryad:



And here’s me, looking—well. Addled.



The blueberries were not quite as photogenic as the cherries:



Picking is so much fun, that you invariably end up picking far more fruit than you can possibly use in the near present tense. Pitting cherries is incredibly labor-intensive. I will bake a cherry pie today and freeze the rest. And eat blueberries and yogurt for breakfast for the next week or so.

Also on today’s agenda is more incredibly boring Long Remunerative Project-hacking—hopefully, I can polish off the fucker today—and some gardening if it doesn’t rain.

Everywhere else in the U.S., it is freakishly hot and dry.

But here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley, we are drowning.

So. Was the lightening Turkey Day descent upon Deep Springs worth it?

I'm still not sure.

Ben made the interesting observation as we began our postprandial climb back over that lonesome mountain road that the place seemed – well –dilettantish.

"What do you mean?" I asked nervously.

"Well, take that milking barn for example. Now I grew up around dairy farms. I know milking barns. That place was set up for milking machines and a herd. Did you see those pumps on the ceiling? Did you see those troughs on the floor? Those pumps are designed to fit into machines to move milk out. Those troughs are for the cows to shit in –"

"Dad!" said Robin self-righteously. "You owe me a quarter."

"Ooops. Here, I'll offer you a buck prophylactically to cover all the things I'm going to say over the next eight hours driving."

"What if you say 'shit' more than three more times?"

"Robin!" I protest weakly.

"Well, you got to weigh the odds," said Ben. "You got to figure out your priorities. Is a sure buck now worth the possibility of more later?"

"Duh!" said Robin. "That's a no-brainer. You'll probably say 'fuck' too about twenty times. Unless Mom drives –"

"Mom does not drive over the Sierras at night," I said. I turned back to Ben. "Anyway, you were saying –"

"Well, they have four cows and they milk them by hand. And Max told us – that doesn't even begin to meet their consumption needs. It's as though at some recent point they got into this Rousseauean thing – let us be one with the milking! – and forgot they were supposed to be running a working ranch."

Huh. Ben was exactly right there. I also noticed that despite the embargo on girls and sex, many of the LA-based Springers had girlfriends up for the holiday and kept disappearing into dorm rooms with them – no doubt for an invigorating debate on the educational philosophies of founder L.L. Nunn. This, I take it, was fallout from last year's Vanity Fair piece which made Deep Springs sound like a homoerotic paradise.

Anyway, I was so sunk into deep, intractable melancholy as we began the ascent that I could barely keep up my end of the conversation even though it interested me. Maybe it was the desert. Maybe it was the Mark Twain bio. (Underneath the ego and the caustic sensibilities, Clemens was just another one of those sad romantics, forever grasping for martyrdom truly worthy of him.) Maybe it was a profound sense of loss – being a mother is such an odd relationship to have with someone, it's not as though you've exactly chosen to hang out with them, and Max and I are so different that maybe he would never have chosen to hang out with me. Had we ever really connected? I mean, I was a good mother to him, I gave him all the opportunities that nobody ever gave me. But let's say we were cast in Survivor together. Am I someone he would pick to make an alliance with? Probably not.

The other parents didn't worry about connecting, I noticed. They just hung out. Watched the football game. Ate the food that was delicious and could have supported an Eritrean village for a month. Bickered, joked, relaxed together. Let it be.

"Well, it's a good place for Max," I said. "He's seems to be thriving."

"That he does," Ben agreed.

Max and I had had one chance to talk, on the half mile walk down to the solar farm he'd set up, his pet project for the fall along with bee keeping, animal insemination and his two classes – a composition class he hated and a social history of poetry he loved.

"What classes are you going to take next semester?" I asked.

"I want to study Greek," he said. "And world mythologies. Anyway, here's the solar farm." And he spent about ten minutes explaining his set-up to me but being a mother, not an engineer, I didn't listen to a word.

"Is it odd having us here?" I asked.

He stopped and cocked his head. "It's odd having anyone here," he said finally. "It's not you in particular. It's just – so much energy goes into building the community. It's like the community is so strong that it's even hard to form one-on-one friendships. It's not weird leaving Deep Springs and seeing other people. But within the context of Deep Springs, it's strange to have people who aren't really in the community. Disruptive almost. I'm not explaining this right."

"Well, we don't live in the desert with you, Max," I said softly. "But we are a part of this community."

Back in the car, Ben was saying, "I'm trying to figure out what it is about Deep Springs that led directly to the Iraq war."

Paul Wolfowitz's name is one of many alumni names on a plaque alongside the mess hall. He had given generously; Deep Springs was grateful.

William Vollman's was not. But he was coming back to Deep Springs next fall to do a scholar in residency. I liked the thought that Max would get to hang out with William Vollman. Rescuing fourteen-year-old girls from Bangkok brothels – always cool.

The rest of the drive home was nightmarish. We cut off 395 on to a road that winded around Lake Isabella, aiming towards Bakersfield – but just outside Dust Bowl Central, a big flashing sign on the road informed us: Road Closed. So then we had to snake towards the central valley on a tiny little scratch on the map, Highway 155, which skirted the edge of Sequoia National forest in a series of hairpin turns and rollercoaster thousand foot climbs and plunges. Pitch black sky. No artificial lighting of any kind. We drove past an accident where a car had flipped on to its roof. Our brakes began burning asbestos. Eight hours turned into twelve. Finally, 155 deposited us in Delano where the smell of manure was putrid and thick. We lurched onward to Tulare and grabbed a motel room for the night.

Woke up the next morning and could still smell the manure. How do people live with that smell everywhere? Do you finally get to a point where you're able to filter it out if you live there long enough? I'll always remember Tulare as place where I finally converted to the cult of Starbucks because when you're up at 6 the next morning and the whole world smells like cow shit and you've got to get the hell out, you need strong, strong coffee. And if they're playing Charles Aznavour in the background while they're pouring it for you, that's a plus.

Max got the call last night – Deep Springs inviting him up for an interview. This is a Very Big Deal indeed as Deep Springs is the most interesting college in America.

The college administration is entirely run by students. They keep desert time. The student who called at 10 PM last night had just staggered back to the dorms after something to do with heifers. "After much deliberation, we have decided to invite you to the ranch. Do you have any questions?"

"Yeah," said Max. "One. Do you always say 'after much deliberation' or was I like a special case?"

Last night I dreamed about Deep Springs. In the dream, they had a facility in Berkeley – an old craftsman house tunneling into a cliffside with a hundred rooms. Robin and I were visiting. There was something to do with lost clothing, a cloak; I ended up wandering by myself through the rooms, and the artifacts kept getting weirder and weirder that farther I got from the front door, flowers in vases giving way to intricate sculptures of bone and mummified tissue. Finally I found my way to the back door. Outside was a meadow, supranaturally verdant, lined with palaces. The prototypical Jungian vision, I suppose.

In other news, I'm deep into my Xmas art projects. This year it's all about Photoshopped calendars and homemade raspberry chipotle chocolate truffles because, frankly, we don't have a pot to piss in. Annie called yesterday morning to follow up on her missing microphone that Max was supposed to pick up from Univision. The kid is smart but he doesn't have much common sense, thus is bad at simple tasks like getting receptionists to look under tables. "I'm sorry, Annie, he couldn't find it. I'll go myself tomorrow. Don't worry. We'll get it back to you. I promise."

"But how are you? Patty, I don't mind telling you, I've been very worried the last few times I've talked to you –"

"I'm not good, Annie. But I can't talk now. Good bye!" And the reason that I couldn't talk was because any time anyone asks the simple question, "How are you?" these days, I immediately start to cry. I have to physically restrain myself from crying in the store when potential customers do the rudimentary politeness thing. I'm very worried about finances. The store actually did not lose money last year – it broke even in Year 1, ahead of my projections. But the cash flow is always problematic, never more so than now when there is no Xmas rush. We're actually carrying a lot less debt than most new businesses. But there is no room for "Additional Information" on the credit card bills when you can't pony up the minimal payment.

Annie called back about fifteen minutes later. "Why are you torturing yourself? You have family. Let us help."

"No, Annie. No. Because – God forbid – but what if the store fails? I'd never be able to pay anyone back –"

"So you don't pay us back. So big deal. Patty, the important thing is that you don't have a tumor. You're healthy, right? Eating well, exercising."

"Oh, sure. I'm an exercise fanatic. But Annie, I feel like such a fucking failure –"

At this point other people would launch into the litany of all the ways I'm not a failure. But Annie knows me too well for that. "Oh, Patty. You had such a hideous childhood. Poor Lynnie tried but – isn't it odd that even now when she's dead the only epithet any of us ever use to describe us is 'Poor Lynnie?' David and Alicia escaped the horror, but you got double portions. You've been very noble and gallant. You broke the pattern. You did not pass it on. You've been a brilliant mother. Max is an extraordinary young man."

But that only made me cry harder. Why couldn't I have had someone in my corner who rooted for me as hard as I root for Max?