After an era of relative quiet compared to the so-called timber wars of the 1980s and ’90s, conflict over logging in the forests of parts of Northern California has returned.
A plan to log 100- to 150-year-old redwood trees across 320 acres of northwestern Sonoma County has generated fervent opposition from environmentalists and residents over the past year. Clearcutting of 5,760 fire-impacted acres in the Klamath National Forest kicked off in April, much of it on land previously designated as endangered species habitat.
The indigenous people of the area, the Karuk tribe, worked with local environmentalists to craft an alternative plan, but the Forest Service largely ignored it. The Karuk and the environmental groups have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to scuttle the logging. Last month, Karuk tribal members and local activists blocked the road leading to the logging in an effort to slow the logging operations pending a legal judgment.
During the last period of conflict 30 years ago, environmentalists curtailed some logging operations by setting aside talismanic stands of old-growth redwood trees in parks and preserves, and by pointing out that forests provide important habitat to numerous species, many of them endangered, including northern spotted owls, marbled murrelets and coho salmon.
California is home to some of the most prodigious forests on Earth, but the state’s lumber production has steadily declined since the 1950s. A similar trend also occurred in other western states. But now logging companies are coming back to pick over what remains.
“Companies have come in and gotten up to a 16 percent return per year on their timberland, but the forests are only physically capable of yielding about 1 percent per year over the long run,” says Richard Wilson, the former director of California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), which regulates timber harvests on the state’s private lands.
As a result, soil that once grew trees in the forest has washed into streams, choking vital fish habitat. The trees that remain—many third-, fourth- and sometimes even spindly fifth-growth replacement trees—hold back less floodwater, provide far less animal habitat and sequester far less carbon dioxide.
Even so, timber remains a major industry in California, particularly in northern counties like Humboldt, Shasta, Siskiyou and Mendocino, which account for about half the state’s timber harvest. Roughly 20 percent of that harvest currently occurs on public lands.
During Wilson’s tenure at Cal Fire (1991-1999), he sought to address the problem of over-harvesting by requiring that timber companies file 100-year management plans for sustaining the volume of timber in their forests, called “sustained yield plans.”
But the industry has used its political clout to undermine these regulations, he says, so much so that a large proportion of the state’s remaining timberlands continue to be degraded by companies like Sierra Pacific Industries, California’s largest timber company, which owns 1.8 million acres and relies heavily on clear-cutting.
“We’ve got the rules,” Wilson says. “It’s a question of enforcing them.”
These sorts of struggles are playing out across Northern California and will shape the long-term well-being of rural economies, the health of local ecosystems and the wellbeing of indigenous cultures.
The conifer-rich “Pacific temperate rainforest,” which extends up to Prince William Sound in Alaska, contains the largest mass of living and decaying material of any ecosystem in the world on a per-unit basis. That prompts many scientists and environmentalists to view their maintenance and restoration as crucial in the fight against global climate change.
Crown Jewel
The Marble Mountains are among the ecological jewels of Northern California’s national forest system and home to numerous old-growth conifer stands. In the 1990s, the U.S. Forest Service set aside many mature forest habitats as reserves for the benefit of old-growth-dependent species, such as the northern spotted owl, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
In 2014, a series of wildfires known as the Westside Fire Complex burned across 183,000 acres of the broader region, most of it in the Klamath National Forest. In response, the Forest Service has designed timber sales that include more than 5,700 acres of clearcuts, including fire-killed and living trees, many of them occurring in the mature forest reserves or on steep slopes above streams federally designated to promote the long-term survival of coho salmon.
The Forest Service often auctions off fire-impacted lands to timber companies for “salvage logging.” The Westside Plan is the largest post-fire timber sale in the recent history of northwestern California.
Klamath National Forest supervisor Patricia Grantham says that the standing dead trees in the forest pose a major long-term fire hazard. By aggressively logging these areas of the forest, her agency is supplying logs to local mills and biomass power plants, contributing to the long-term health of the forest and protecting local residents’ safety.
“When fire returns to the area in the future, it will be smaller and less severe because of the actions we’re taking on the landscape today,” Grantham says.
But environmentalists and tribal members regard the Westside Plan as a giveaway to the timber industry of historic proportions.
“The Westside [Plan] is absolutely the worst project I’ve ever seen in Pacific Northwest national forests,” says Kimberly Baker, of the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC). She has been monitoring timber sales on national forests for the past 18 years.
The Karuk tribe, EPIC and three other environmental groups have filed suit in federal court to challenge the project. Logging began in April, and it is unclear how much of the land will remain intact when the judge reaches a verdict. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also expressed skepticism regarding the Forest Service’s proposal, noting that dead trees “greatly improve” the quality of habitat for spotted owls and other creatures as the forest naturally recovers over time.
According to Fish and Wildlife’s estimate, the Westside Plan could lead to the deaths of 103 northern spotted owls—at least 1 percent of the species’ entire population.
Many of the slopes where the logging is occurring are among the most unstable in the Klamath National Forest. They also happen to be right above several of the Klamath’s most important salmon-bearing streams. By removing anchoring vegetation and carving a spider-web pattern of roads and log landings, the logging threatens to bury the streams with silt.
The Karuk tribe worked with environmental groups to develop an alternative plan that would rely on prescribed fires to regenerate the land over the long run. Logging would be confined to ridgelines, for the purpose of developing fuel breaks, such that some logs would still feed local mills. Much of the Klamath Forest is the Karuk’s aboriginal territory.
The Forest Service’s Grantham says she incorporated most of the Karuk’s input, but Karuk tribe natural resources adviser Craig Tucker says that simply isn’t true. “In reality, the Forest Service basically told us we can go pound sand,” he says, regarding the agency’s response to the Karuk management plan.
According to public records, the Forest Service has spent approximately $24 million developing the Westside logging plan and is auctioning most of the logs for a paltry $2.50 per truckload, thus generating only about $450,000 in revenue for the agency.
“The Karuk tribe’s been here for at least 10,000 years,” Tucker says. “The Forest Service has been here for about a hundred. Yet they don’t listen.”
Captain Obvious here: Jason Newsted is a metal icon. He replaced original Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and played on some of the group’s biggest records. That being said, don’t expect any metal riffs from Newsted’s newest project, the Chophouse Band. This is strictly an acoustic ensemble. Newsted generally stays out of the spotlight whenever possible, one of the few artifacts from the band online is a fan-shot video in which they perform Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Newsted and group are sitting down, singing their hearts out, getting the whole audience to sing along. It’s a great performance. AC
Thana Alexa performed at Kuumbwa last November as part of drummer Antonio Sanchez’s Migration, an ensemble built around her extraordinary ability to wield her voice like a horn player. She’s honed a similar concept in her Project, though she’s also an incisive interpreter of lyrics (she displays both skills on her impressive debut album Ode to Heroes). Raised in Croatia during her teenage years, she’s a rising force in New York City, where she’s collaborated with heavyweight improvisers like Donny McCaslin and Wallace Roney. Her band features an international cast of young Gotham talent, including Austrian drummer Peter Kronreif, pianist Eden Ladin and bassist Noam Wiesenberg, who both hail from Israel, and local-cat-made-good Ben Flocks, the resourceful saxophonist who grew up in the Santa Cruz area. ANDREW GILBERT
INFO: 7 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $25/adv, $30/door. 427-2227.
FRIDAY 9/9
INDIE-POP
HENRY CHADWICK
Local musician Henry Chadwick has been the subject of a lot press lately, including Rolling Stone, Time magazine, and a recent cover story from this very publication. It’s not hard to see why. His five song EP, Guest At Home, rocks pretty damn hard, and is insanely catchy. There’s a hint of ’60s psych-garage in the instrumentation, but the hooks are doused in Beatles. Really it’s just timeless rock ’n’ roll music. I can’t wait to see what he’s got up his sleeve next. He’ll be backed by his group Battlesnake. Openers Jackie Zealous just released the record Psychic Data. AC
In the sacred oral history of the Lakota Sioux, a holy woman once saved the tribe from starvation by leading them to a massive herd of buffalo, before transforming into a white buffalo calf. For many native tribes, the white buffalo represents the power of faith, a symbol of abundance and manifestation. Singer Jake Smith literally chose his stage name out of a hat, so it’s unlikely to hold the same significance for him. Despite this, his folksy country blues music couldn’t be more representative of the mixed cultural heritage of the American West. He looks the part, too, with his tousled beard, long gray hair and grisly face; his imposing figure bears a striking resemblance to actor Jeff Bridges. The White Buffalo has contributed heavily to the soundtrack for FX television show Sons of Anarchy, and will grace Santa Cruz with his roughhewn baritone and driving rock for two weekend nights. KATIE SMALL
INFO: 9 p.m. Moe’s Alley, 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz. $19/adv, $24/door on Friday, $22/adv, $27/door on Saturday. 479-1854.
SATURDAY 9/10
WORLD BEAT
ZULU SPEAR & SPECIAL FUN
Pioneering world beat band Zulu Spear was a staple of the 1980s West Coast dance scene. Hailing from the Bay Area by way of South Africa, the band blends Afrobeat and African roots music, rhythms, instruments and harmonies with electric instruments and a contemporary vibe. On Saturday, the newly reformed band partners with Santa Cruz legend Special Fun, a lively world beat dance band that frequently shared stages with Zulu Spear back in the day and made a lasting impression on the local world beat scene. CAT JOHNSON
In Mika Miko, the Clavin sisters produced some of the absolute weirdest, goofiest punk music ever committed to wax. In the band that followed, Bleached, they did a complete 180. The first record was a sunny pop album with no hint of punk. Their follow up—the much better Welcome the Worms—was a return to their punk roots. Sort of. It’s loud, skuzzy, scary, and catchy. But the songs don’t have the juvenile goofiness of their prior group, and that’s a good thing. Bleached has become a solid rock band with one foot in punk and one in beach-pop. AC
When was the last time you heard sea chanteys performed live? Maybe … never? Well, here’s your chance. Local contemporary Celtic and folk outfit Charmas brings this rarely performed music to Felton for an evening of sing-alongs, merrymaking, storytelling and perhaps a tear or two. The evening promises to be filled with beautiful music and gripping sea songs that serve as the oral histories of Celtic and enslaved African sailors. CJ
Apparently punk is alive and well in England. Legendary hardcore U.K. band Subhumans formed in Wiltshire in 1980 and have been faithfully producing “anarcho-punk” ever since. The original lineup parted ways in ’85, but reunited in the late ’90s for a European tour that spawned a rebirth of angsty genius. After the original split, lead singer Dick Lucas went on to form ska bands Citizen Fish and Culture Shock, and masterfully cultivated a dedicated fanbase between all three acts. These days Subhumans’ politically driven lyrics and gritty punk rock have taken on new significance for their diehard followers. KS
If your idea of folk music is Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sharing the stage, harmonizing beautifully, and plucking along quietly, then the Milk Carton Kids is just the kind of folk you’re looking for. The young duo plays acoustic guitars, and seem like they could have been plucked right out of a coffee shop in Greenwich Village on a lonely, stormy Tuesday night in the early ’60s. Their harmonies are haunting and gorgeous, and the music is dramatic in the most perfect way possible. The world is taking notice of this talented duo. AC
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $25/gen, $40/gold. 423-8209.
BLUES-ROCK
MORELAND & ARBUCKLE
Drawing from the blues, folk, country and punk, Moreland & Arbuckle is one of the standout (if somewhat underappreciated) U.S. blues-rock acts. With a gritty sound, a strong Midwestern work ethic—the band hails from Kansas—and a pedal-to-the-metal approach to performing, the band has grown from regional garage blues outfit to a nationally-known act that caught the attention of celebrated swamp blues record label Alligator Records. Also on the bill: Jackson, Mississippi-based singer-songwriter Jarekus Singleton, one of the emerging stars of the contemporary blues scene. CJ
Considered one of New Orleans’ finest brass bands, the Soul Rebels take traditional brass tradition to new levels by bringing in elements of hip-hop, rock and soul to create something fresh and contagious. Frequently collaborating with a range of artists, including Big Freedia, Kool and the Gang, Slick Rick and the String Cheese Incident, the rebels are currently touring with hip-hop legend Talib Kweli on what they’ve dubbed the Soul Rebels Sound System tour. Says drummer and founder Lumar Leblanc, “It’s an absolute honor and privilege to collaborate with the great Talib Kweli, an artist we’ve all looked up to and been true fans of for years.”
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $25/adv, $30/door. 423-1338. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 21 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.
“When we first started we had a lot of different people come in and out of the group,” recalls Travis Palmer. “We tried to get different piano players and bass players, and nobody really stuck. So we called ourselves the Once In A Whiles, ’cause every once in a while the band shows up.”
Travis Palmer and Stu Wilson are the most consistent members of the Once In A Whiles —Wilson plays violin and Palmer handles guitar and vocals. The friendship came from one of those rare serendipitous Craigslist match-ups. “Travis was playing at Hophead, which is closed now, and he was trying to get someone to add to what he was doing,” says Wilson. The pair has played a few memorable gigs at Hophead, including multiple occasions where they showed up during another band’s sound check: “[The owner] double-booked us more than once. Sometimes he’d split the bill or just give us gas money and tell us to go home … Maybe that’s why he’s out of business.”
Other memorable gigs include an impromptu show as the backing band at a stand-up comedy night, where a few classic rock covers evolved into a “comedic jam sesh.” While their usual set list features Django-Reinhardt-inspired jazz numbers, Palmer and Wilson draw from their varied musical backgrounds to make unique arrangements. Palmer is currently enrolled in Cabrillo’s music program with a focus on piano composition, while Wilson is a retired physicist, who says that the profession is intrinsically related to his passion: “With physics, I can visually imagine how things are connected, and with violin strings, physics come into play and you just start getting a feel for how it all makes sense. Einstein played violin!”
Travis Palmer and The Once In a Whiles play a fundraiser for Soroptimist International of Watsonville on Saturday.
Editor’s Note: The following piece of fiction was commissioned by GT and three other newspapers, with the only stipulation that it be set in Northern California. Vollmann conducted interviews with residents of Redding before writing it, and now plans to turn it into a novel. He says: “All the conversations in it come nearly or entirely verbatim from actual interviews. The novel will be called ‘A Table for Fortune.’ I hope to finish it in about 2018.”
At this time the young man named Matthew discovered a certain kind of sunshine unlike Sacramento’s, which is to say fiercer and more withering, one of time’s best weapons for degrading newsprint yellowish-orange and wrinkling people before their time; once upon a certain August which measured somewhere below far and gone in his ephemeral existence he had been hitchhiking south from Susanville and was set down in Redding where he waited five midday-girdling hours at an on-ramp whose dusty blackberry brambles were actually dripping with melted black sun-made jellies; but in the strange cool May of this current year as he hitchhiked north toward Redding the sunshine had shifted to an opposite otherness from Sacramento’s, being somehow greener in its goldenness and more wild, as if the mountains were tinting it.
The truth is that Matthew had sought sublethal sunshine in which to hide from his father, expecting most Reddingtonians to be lurking indoors in the fashion of Mohave, Calexico and Mexicali; he too would lurk, while perfecting his disappearance. On triple-digit days in Sacramento, the hardiest of the homeless trundle into thickets and culverts; those who remain sit stupefied, with heads hanging down, or else lie on the sidewalk, while flies crawl slowly over their faces. Richer souls shelter behind drawn curtain, listening to their air conditioners; and I for my part believe the city to be sustained by invisible armies of sweating, hollow-eyed air conditioner men. The sun clangs in everyone’s ears; even police veterans can get deafened . . .
So it should have been in Redding, but this wild green sunshine changed everything. And by “green” I do not mean what you might think this color should convey; it had nothing to do with the restful or menacing green glooms of Oregon. Venus flytraps and emeralds were as far away from it as palm fronds. Yes, it was green, but not exactly. It refreshed Matthew because there was nothing of him in it. No one in Redding would put a spoke in his wheel. The complementary consideration was nobody would help him, but as long as the green sunshine kept on, what could he need from this world?
In his boyhood there must have been something that made him want to go way out into America, to find out what our country was, but whether he had been enticed by the best golden loneliness or hounded by the loneliness that lives in our homes and gnaws misunderstood children, or perhaps heard something about faraway hills in a bedtime story, whatever had provoked the wish was lost. He himself was not lost, except to his parents, who troubled over him with loving bewilderment; nor did he feel in want of anything; thus as I begin writing this I myself cannot tell you what he was going to find on what Thomas Wolfe called the last voyage, the longest, the best—in other words, the only voyage, the one toward the grave. And so, hitching a ride, Matthew left behind all the other times of his life.
As they rolled north into Colusa, with the Sutter Buttes’ dusty blue knuckles over and behind the olive orchards, the driver was saying: You know, I grew up on a citrus farm in Southern California. I picked avocados for another farmer all summer, but we used a manlift. I think avocado trees get 40 to 60 feet at least. We’d have about four big bags in the cage. One flatbed truck with four bins of avocados in it, it took us all day to pick that! That gave me a real sense of accomplishment . . .
And so, hitching a ride, Matthew left behind all the other times of his life.
Right away, Matthew, who believed that anything he did could be undone, or done better, because it lay in his power to live any number of lives, began contemplating hiring on in an avocado orchard. First he’d grow sunburned, and then confident. Women might possibly love him.
The driver was saying: One year when prices spiked we were getting 50 cents an avocado wholesale. Wholesale! . . . by which time Mount Shasta was glowing double-nippled against the milky clouds.
And the driver said: The boss was a real good Christian guy who’d been in the Marine Corps, and he had a mental breakdown, had to take some time off. We were unloading avocados from a manlift when the hydraulic brakes failed. The thing picked up speed, crashed into a tree. He was super-understanding when we visited him in the mental hospital—
Just then they came into Red Bluff: red rock, long yellow grass, cool clouds. Green sunshine sped into their eyes, intoxicating their hearts. They were almost in Redding. Matthew kept grinning at the driver without knowing why. Beaming back at him, the driver said: A big tree can make more than 100 avocados but all at different times; it takes six years to grow an avocado; I’m talking about the Hass kind, which is what I know . . .
Redding offered half a dozen exits. The driver let him off in the old downtown, not far from City Hall. —I sure appreciate it, said Matthew, and they shook hands. He lifted his backpack. Opening the passenger door, he still expected to be sunblasted in his forehead, wrists and ears, breasting an upsurge of reflected sidewalk heat which would come dryly into his lungs. But Redding was like that. He looked back at the driver, who waved, then pulled away, bound for Eugene.
There stood Matthew in Redding, wondering what to do. First he felt anxious; then he began to get excited. His plan was to have no plan. He crossed the street and began walking in the most pleasing direction, saying to himself: I do not know where I am going. I do not know where I am going. —And he exulted in this. If not even he knew this, how could anyone ever find him?
Within 10 minutes he arrived at a bar whose midafternoon quietude compelled him through the window, so he walked straight in, and the tattooed barmaid raised her beautiful face like a sunflower following light. The counter shone clean and empty. He seated himself beside the only other customer, an old hospital engineer who had just seen a bald eagle carrying a trout in its mouth. The engineer smiled at him, then said: This area is loaded with historical stuff and beautiful visual stuff. All the clouds go up and the sun goes down and you get the best sunsets.
Accordingly, Matthew decided to watch the sunset. It is true that his impressionability sometimes made him foolish. But his foolishness might have been no worse than the way that old people so often visit a new place in order to project their brilliant pasts upon its mediocre indifference. He was drawn to the engineer because neither of them were afflicted with the chronic disease called irony.
The engineer told him: It’s been a hardscrabble life. See, my dad came up here; he was a Ford mechanic; you had to love nature to come here. So this basically was the turnaround for the railroad. This was as far north as it went. You wanted to go north from here . . . Before Shasta Dam was built, you used to have to come here by boat. This is 528 feet.
Wiry and aware, he exemplified strength in age. His name was Jacob. The tendons were corded on the backs of his workman’s hands. Matthew supposed that they were becoming friends. He asked: Where would you go if you wanted to see America?
The old man said: I’ve been to Montana; I’ve built factories in the Midwest, but I’ve never been to the Deep South . . .
And right away Matthew could imagine himself in the Deep South! There he would discover what to live for. Jacob already knew how to live his life, but that knowledge must be good only for him. Matthew must find his own way; that was why he had come to Redding.
Matthew’s beer was cold and clean. When he finished it, Jacob set his down and said: I think that this election’ll be fought out on television. Here’s why there’s delegates: Here’s my good friend who has money. But I live way up in French Gulch and can’t afford to get down here. But then it gets corrupted. Like all this campaigning in this state, winner take all, and the popular vote gets set aside. But I still think we live in the greatest country on earth.
As soon as he had rounded the corner he began to feel ashamed; he had probably disappointed the barmaid. But what if she had only meant to be kind to him? He did not go back.
And Matthew believed. Looking right in front of him, he could see how wonderful America was! Why shouldn’t it be the greatest? And he was out in it now; he would go farther and farther . . .
Laying a cell phone on the bar, the old engineer activated its screen and showed off a photograph of his daughter, who was a smiling, freckled brunette of about 25. —She’s hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, Jacob said. She loves snow camping. She’s hardcore. She and her boyfriend, they’ll go out more than thirty miles in the hills by themselves.
Matthew imagined being with Jacob’s daughter, or with any woman who would lead him into the mountains. He could not picture this angel very well; her hair altered from brown to blonde and back again. But she was holding his hand. And she knew the country—or, better yet, she didn’t, and they would explore it together. The more beer he drank, the more joyous he felt. One day he too might be happy and old, with his pockets full of eagle stories and a mountain or two in his backyard! Or else he would die in some woman’s arms.
And now the tattooed barmaid began to confide in him, saying: I told her, look, we need to get out of here. He shares custody with his ex . . . —Matthew felt lucky and grateful that she trusted him. Tenderly she set another beer before him; he had told her to pick out her favorite kind. —Once you get through altitude sickness you’ll be fine, the engineer explained. But you have to want to. You know what’s cool when you get up there? You can see the curvature of the earth. That makes you feel you’ve done something.
GRAND ‘CENTRAL’ William T. Vollmann won the 2005 National Book Award for fiction for his novel ‘Europe Central’. PHOTO: GREG RIDDEN
Matthew made up his mind to go high enough in life that he could see the earth curving down before him. He wondered if it were too late for him to become an astronaut.
Jacob was saying: We went for eleven days through the mountains. First we prepared. We buried whiskey caches, and we had fun, drinkin’ beer, cookin’ trout . . .
Matthew bought him another beer, and Jacob said: If I’d’ve known you’d be comin’, I’d’ve made a whole bunch of smoked albacore.
Will you be here tomorrow?
Sure.
I’ll come back then.
They fixed a time, and Matthew rushed out into the green sunlight to have more adventures. After the cool dimness of the bar, Redding enlarged itself all the more. He could see to the mountains. Here was Shasta County Superior Court on Yuba and West; and he stopped in the middle of the empty street, feeling as if he had found someplace where it would always be early on a summer morning. There was Placer and then Tehama; and right here stood Matthew, looking around him in hopes of learning where in America he should go.
In one of the bays behind the Greyhound station he met a bearded little man, almost elfin in profile, who had parted ways with several teeth. His face shone red and his pores were coarsened by hard living. The woman beside him looked tired and old. Their daughter was sixteen going on 46. They sat on the blacktop, waiting for something to happen. How this world could contain both them and Jacob was a question for moralists, sociologists and theologians, but not for Matthew, who wanted to make friends, which was why he gave the man ten dollars, and asked about his life.
The man said: Originally I’m from Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. My wife, she wanted to come back home. Now she wants to get back out of here. We came from Spokane. Everybody knows everything about everybody. Trying to rip everybody off . . . I got in trouble with the law. And then got out, found the manager of the money I had, and he never paid it, ripped me off . . .
His name was Roy. Matthew told his own name. They sat down on a bench away from the wife and daughter, and Roy began again to speak, perhaps because that strange May weather had opened the hearts of everyone, although the ten dollars could have had something to do with it. He lisped a little, on account of his missing teeth. He said: First time I been on the streets, I was seven years old. Got away from Washington, ran away to Fresno. You see, I decided to get in people’s cars and trucks and kept on goin’. Fresno was lot of killings. I started doin’ dope and went to heroin. Started doin’ it all. You name it, I done it.
Now, my wife, her Dad was the head of the Hell’s Angels and I been workin’ with him since I was about seven. I made him 180 grand in about six months. And I’m one he’s afraid of. I have no problem pullin’ a gun, pullin’ the trigger and laughin’ about it. I don’t care. I got no heart.
Matthew did not care if this was true or not. He just felt happy that Roy was telling him things. And Roy said: Some guy swung on me. I walked up and popped him. When I hit him, my hands turned illegal; they’re registered. I have killed but not on purpose. I killed the head leader of the Fresno State Bulldogs. They’re Bloods and that, or I call ’em, slobs. I been a Crip since I was seven. They’re makin’ us into so many new gangs. In Portland they got the Dragon Eyeballs. A bunch of fuckin’ niggers. Oh, you’re prejudiced. No I’m not. I’m a cracker. I’m fuckin’ white trash!
And Matthew, being Matthew, could not help but wonder whether he himself might enter upon this sort of life, warring and begging and hiding, free and angry or free and scared—or had Roy paid for nothing this price of becoming bitter and maimed?
He disliked the mean things that Roy said. But since he never stopped hoping for answers and had just today in this marvelous green sunshine realized what he cared about most of all, he said: Tell me what you think about America.
Sucks, said Roy, staring into his face. —Because we keep givin’ Iraq weapons and then they’re tryin’ to bomb us. And all these people who got money and they think they been better than us.
Right away, Matthew decided that America sucked. How then could he make America better? He would start by going to the best place, and learning what made it good. So he said: I’m hiding out. Where should I go?
Fresno. People are actually really, really nice. There’s this one lady who works out there, a Mexican lady; we call her Mama; she makes us fresh watermelon juice and won’t take no money for it . . .
Matthew thought to himself: Fresno sounds just like Redding. I think I’ll stay in Redding.
So what I wanna do, said Roy, is to be gettin’ out of here and findin’ something somehow to help us get to Fresno. I can get a one-bedroom apartment for 600. I was on SSI but I have a misdemeanor warrant. I got caught with thirteen days in the county jail. I have a problem with authority; I’m unextraditable.
And then what?
I wanna own some more land and be happy.
Should I do that, too?
Why fuckin’ not?
Up until now Matthew had supposed that his life would somehow make something, not a child but something else. It might be that he would improve the world, or even save it—but never bit by bit, as if he were some nine-to-fiver ageing for the sake of a paycheck from which he would save nothing but money. But maybe land, a woman and a child would be his destiny.
Trustingly he asked Ray: What’s the most beautiful kind of woman’
Smart. Looks, I don’t care about looks. I mean, I dated girls this big. I dated girls that big. This one here, I did 15 years in the slammer and she never left. She never wrote me but she was there when I got out. Plus, I got eight kids, and she don’t mind.
That’s good, said Matthew. Where can I find a woman?
Roy called over to his wife: Baby, where’s a good place to buy a bitch?
Off of Cypress, by the park.
When does what’s-her-name the black bitch show up there?
About 9:30, 10 o’clock.
Roy remarked evenly, with triumphant contempt: I know every Spokane ho in there. In Pullman I know ’em all cause they’re all mine. There was one nigger and I took every one of his prostitutes except one, and I didn’t take her because she’s fucking ugly.
Thanking him for his advice, Matthew walked on. Should he make a child, wander the Deep South or pick avocados? His eyes were on the bright green sunlight of Redding. Had he told anybody, your sunlight is green!, it might not have turned out especially well for Matthew, so he kept quiet as always, studying the people and trying to decide whether he should become one of them.
Against the outer wall of the Amtrak station lay a homeless man who explained: This place is my living room. —Gesturing at the tracks and the Greyhound station behind them, he said: There’s my TV.
Matthew leaned up against the wall beside him. He asked: Do you have a good life?
The man said: I’m from Alturas. That’s a really small town. If you’re on the main street after 10 o’clock at night the police are gonna take you in. Here, nobody bothers me because I keep it clean. I pick up after myself and others. And I’ve learned how to be happy. I’m happier here every day. I want to stay right here, all my life.
Matthew thanked him. He decided he believed him. Perhaps the man was Christ, or one of His relatives, in which case what Matthew should do was sit down right here and watch the tracks for half a century. But for some reason he found himself continuing on.
He walked up and down, then closed his eyes, pretending that something better or worse than Redding would appear when he opened them; that was a game he had often played, and until today the results had been consistently disappointing; just now he opened his eyes and was glad to still see Redding.
Now he had better find a room. Twenty minutes later he was watching the paling of the cloudy sky from the second floor deck of the Sunshine Motel where somebody in Room 29 was plinking on a ukulele and singing in imitation of Neil Young while a cool breeze came from the cottonwoods and the cars in the parking lot did nothing but sparkle. It was all new to Matthew.
He looked around his room and loved it. No one would find him here. He had paid the Gujarati desk clerk 32 dollars cash, no identification required. He lay down on the big double bed and decided to get a girlfriend and bring her straight here. He still wanted to make a child.
Locking his door, he descended to the street, found a restaurant and ordered a hamburger. The waitress was sweet; he felt happy just gazing shyly at her hands; so he asked whether she would like a drink. He never expected her to say yes, but she did, because this was Redding, where everyone was friendly, at least while the green sunshine lasted. He was drinking beer; she poured herself a shot of vodka and thanked him. Then she went to attend to her other customers while he returned to his hamburger—the best ever, of course.
Ten minutes later she was back at his table, so he bought her another drink. She told him about her marriage, her child and her vacation; he bought her shots and she kept giggling and saying: What are you trying to do to me?
Make you happy, he said. —And in truth that was all he wanted.
Then she brought her friend the barmaid who she said was amazing, and the two women stood drinking together sweetly, flirting with him, after which they offered him a free dessert. Matthew thanked them and said he was too full.
The waitress leaned her hip against his table, smiling, and now he could see the bright green sunlight rising up from her; she might have been the one he was meant for.
When he went up to pay, the barmaid took his hand. This too was ever so sweet. He almost felt as if she would have gone with him, which unnerved as much as flattered him. Which one should he make a child with? Feeling happy and embarrassed, he quickly walked away. As soon as he had rounded the corner he began to feel ashamed; he had probably disappointed the barmaid. But what if she had only meant to be kind to him? He did not go back.
It was dark now. He returned to the motel, then went into his room feeling happy. He thought about the homeless man whose television was the railroad tracks and everything beyond them. He might be the most fulfilled person on Earth. Why shouldn’t Matthew do the same? Opening the door, he took out a chair and sat awhile looking out across the world. The lovely shadows of the railing kept curving around on the bright deck and a man ran across the parking lot, while the smell of stale food rose up in the cool breeze, mosquitoes biting Matthew silently, and across the parking lot the jumbled white squares of the letters MOTEL supported a great yellow sun with orange neon rays shining out from it.
He realized that he had failed to watch the sunset. The old engineer in the bar had told him about Redding sunsets, and he had forgotten. Well, he would do that tomorrow night.
At 10 o’clock, Virginia, who was 63 but looked a hard, sexy 43, came knocking at the door of the adjacent room because some girl had stolen the vacuum cleaner; he promised that it wasn’t him and that he lacked any connection to that unknown girl. Virginia believed him. He asked her how the motel was, and she said: Oh, they’ve cleaned it up real good. We’re not even on the bad list no more.
She had been living in Room One for two years. Her son lived there also. He asked what she thought about America, and she said: What’s not to love? —Right away he realized that she was right; how could he not love his own country? He wanted everybody to be right. He would feel better believing in everything.
Virginia rushed off and he could see her sweeping the sidewalk down by the office. She wanted the place to look good for the Greyhound drivers who checked in at night and slept during the daytime.
Matthew wandered in and out of his room. It was 10:30; Virginia kept sweeping the sidewalk. Two doors down, the magnificent black woman who had been haunting the doorway upstairs now stood patiently facing the parking lot, half-smiling, with her arms folded across her big breasts.
Reminded by her of the prostitute who according to Roy’s wife would now be working “off of Cypress by the park,” he considered hunting for her, but decided that he liked Virginia better. Maybe when she had finished sweeping he would ask her if she wanted to travel the Deep South with him and buy land.
And Matthew stood listening to the world. To him it was all very wonderful.
Bill Piexoto got a little excited this past spring when he started spotting flowers budding on his apple trees.
After a stretch of warm, sunny weeks, the little flowers have given way to plump fruits almost ready to be picked. “This is pretty close to a normal year. It’s really early this year, maybe the earliest ever. Everything’s happening really fast,” says the 65-year-old Piexoto.
A “normal year” is just about the best anyone could have hoped for after a 2015 harvest that Piexoto says was the worst he’s seen in his 30 years of local apple farming—one in which his harvest was down 50 percent compared to previous years. Newly appointed Agricultural Commissioner Juan Hidalgo says it was the worst apple year he’s seen in his 11 years with the county ag department.
The county’s crop report, released last month, found that apple production fell by nearly 50 percent from the previous year, as GT reported last week, even as production of most berries—excepting the delicate olallieberry fruit—blossomed. And even though local apples climbed in value per pound, farmers’ overall sales still dropped 42 percent, thanks mostly to strange weather patterns.
“It was bad pretty much across the board,” Piexoto says. “Some varieties did worse than others.”
By just about any metric, it was the worst apple year in at least three decades. The county has crop reports on its website going back to the 1980s. And the dollar amount that apple growers raked in this year—$6.3 million—was the lowest amount on record for the county, even without adjusting for inflation.
To be fair, apples aren’t quite the cash crop they once were. Acres of apple orchards, which once filled the county, are down 61 percent compared to what they were in 1987, and that land has given way to more profitable berry farms.
This year’s fruit yield was historically low, too, compared to the county’s reports, as far back as they go. Growers harvested 9.4 tons of apples per acre. That was also more than 50 percent lower than the previous year, as well as the lowest on record. The last time that number dipped below 12 tons per acre was 21 years ago.
On top of that, there’s a growing fear among some farmers that the very bad years, which used to be anomalies, could turn into the new norm as weather patterns shift, and that such changes will make an already tough job even harder.
Hidalgo and probably every apple grower in the county seem to agree on the biggest culprit for the lousy harvest: 2015’s warm winter.
In order to thrive, apples need a few hundred “chilling hours” each winter—experts have found—when temperatures fall between 32 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit and when the plant goes dormant. Last year was unseasonably warm. After a scorching winter tricked many trees into blossoming early, their crops failed. Low cumulative rainfall over the years, starting in 2012, certainly didn’t do farmers any favors, either.
“A lot of people will ask, ‘Has the drought hurt the apple, or will the weather affect farming?’” says Rich Everett, who owns Everett Family Farm and Soquel Cider with his wife Laura Everett. “This past winter absolutely helped this year. The ground’s been pretty darn dry, and the aquifer’s pretty empty. How many more years can we go like this? I don’t know, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed for another wet winter.”
South County’s rich history of apple growing goes back more than 100 years and can still be seen in some businesses, like Watsonville’s Appleton Grill, whose name has served as a nod to local history since it opened three years ago. Martinelli’s, probably the world’s most-loved soft apple cider maker, is still headquartered in Watsonville. Even in the face of change, the company has committed itself to the local apple industry. Martinelli’s has been working with growers to rejuvenate local orchards—preserving established ones, as well as encouraging people to plant new ones.
While last year’s tough apple season hit all growers, not everyone suffered the same losses. As anyone who’s driven the length of our relatively small county knows, the weather can change quickly from one area to another. Those microclimates can create some noticeable differences, says Chris Mora of Melody Ranch, which seemed to fare a little better than some orchards.
“If you get really windy days, it could affect you because it could blow blossoms off the tree,” says Mora, seeking refuge from a hot sunny day at the downtown farmers market under the shade of a tent. His family’s orchard, tucked away on Green Valley Road, is sometimes spared, he says, from heavy gusts and more intense weather patterns. “Different areas have different [climatic] effects.”
This year at least, the harvest looks strong, across the board, and it’s coming in earlier, too. Nicole Todd, co-owner of Santa Cruz Cider Company, says she and her sister Natalie Henze suddenly have more apples than they know what to do with—a welcome change after getting just one eighth of their normal harvest in 2015 at a Corralitos orchard they help manage.
There are many factors playing into any given harvest, and farmers don’t know exactly how the year will take shape. But this past winter’s cold, rainy months amounted to a season most locals would have called “average” 10 years ago, and that’s a good thing for growers. A stretch of warm sunny days in the late spring helped as well. Everett says the fog that rolled through in August seems to have slowed the ripening process, hopefully making for a better crop. Farmers have already started picking their Gravenstein apples. In a couple weeks, Everett says, his workers will start picking Galas and Honeycrisps—followed by pippins, which are about four weeks away.
Bad years aside, most of the county’s shift away from apples in recent decades has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with dollars.
And though it could be tempting to lament the decline of a food that at one time symbolized South County, Everett says the market will always dictate what the farmers will grow because farming is a business. As berries have grown more profitable, more farmers have switched over. Berry growers pulled in a whopping $404 million in 2015 on 6,700 acres.
Farming, as a line of work, requires growers to keep a finger on the pulse of what customers want. Perhaps Brussels sprouts will be the next big thing, as sales jumped 30 percent this year, driven mainly by an increase in their value. It’s a change that Hidalgo attributes to a growing buzz about Brussels sprouts and cooking shows talking about more ways to prepare them.
Generally speaking, crops come and go, says Piexoto, who adds that he remembers when there were only 50 or 100 acres of berry land in the county.
“It’s a cycle. If you look at the history of apples in Watsonville, apples were huge at one time,” says Piexoto, who has a 14-acre property, most of it orchards for apples, along with a eucalyptus grove and a reservoir—plus a few houses, sheds, barns. “Things have changed over the years. Flowers were huge here for a while. And apples were huge, and head lettuce was huge, and right now berries are huge. You never know, but you gotta think someday something’s going to replace the berries. They used to grow hops around here. They don’t grow many hops here anymore.”
Still, Piexoto has no plans to switch out of apples, and neither does Everett, as apples are what they know and enjoy. Anyway, Everett says, tearing up trees and planting a different crop has a steep learning curve that requires, for instance, monumental investments in buying new equipment and finding or training a new crew.
“We’re always thinking about the long-term. We’re thinking about the future. When you plant an orchard, it’s generational,” he says. “Our trees are going to last 100 years, so it’s not only for us. It’s for the next generation.”
A decade ago, Brett Dennen emerged as a modern-day troubadour, a hybrid of Paul Simon and James Taylor, as sincere as he was clever with a turn of phrase. As soon as folks caught on to his ’70s folk-pop style, however, he branched outward, most notably on 2013’s Smoke and Mirrors, playing upbeat arena pop-rockers like “Wild Child.”
On his follow-up, Por Favor, released earlier this year, he’s back to intimate ’70s-type folk-rock songs that are subtle, breezy, and chock-full of a deep melancholy that’s miles from the feel-good choruses on Smoke and Mirrors. Dennen told me in a phone interview that Por Favor is his favorite record he’s recorded, but so far it hasn’t caught on like some of his others.
“It doesn’t really get played on the radio. I don’t know that people that aren’t my fans are ever going to hear it. I hope they do,” Dennen says, sounding exasperated. “I think in the long run, people are going to realize when they look at all my records, that this is a really special one. It’s a slow build.”
The wide-eyed, freckled-face singer-songwriter is in his mid-30s, but he looks like he only recently graduated from high school. He grew up in Oakdale before spending his college years in Santa Cruz, playing locals venues like the Ugly Mug before moving to Los Angeles less than a decade ago.
The thing that strikes me immediately about Por Favor is what a lonely record it is. The songs are either deeply introspective or observational, but they all come from a sad, quiet place of solitude.
That sense of isolation makes sense, considering that while working on the record he spent an extended period of time in a cabin in the woods with his dog, having almost no interaction with anyone.
“I went swimming in the lake every day,” he says. “There’d be a guy I’d always see swimming at the same time I would swim. He and I would talk. Other than that, I really wouldn’t talk to many people during the day.”
To promote the record, Dennen created a series of YouTube videos between one to two minutes in length apiece, explaining the motivation behind each song. His record label told him they wanted video content for promotion and this was what he felt willing to do.
The videos provide some insight, especially into the multiple levels he intended each song to work on. A song that’s about love is also about letting go. A song about growth is also about isolation. But mostly, the videos show how uncomfortable he is talking about the specifics of this personal record.
“It’s hard when someone’s sitting there with a camera saying, ‘what is this song about?’ And I have to somehow explain some of it without explaining all of it. I like it to be a mystery,” Dennen says. Still, he takes a stab at explaining the record to me. “The whole thing is bittersweet. Writing it was bittersweet. Recording it was bittersweet. Now talking to you on the phone about it is bittersweet,” he says.
The recording process of the record is likely what kept it from being an entirely dreary affair. He enlisted a band, went into a studio and spent a week recording it. Rather than go through the normal process of pre-production and recording demos, he simply taught the band each song and captured the first initial spontaneous performance.
On the one hand, Dennen is clearly crooning some of his saddest lyrics he’s ever written, but on the other the music feels fresh, and, dare I say, fun.
“This is my sad record,” he says, and quickly corrects himself. “This is as sad as I’m ever going to get. Internally I might be crying my eyes out, but I don’t want to bring people down. I want it to feel light.”
Perhaps part of what makes the record a tough listen for some listeners—and also his most artistically successful record to date—is the vagueness of his sadness. What exactly was he going through in lyrics like “Everyone knows I’m a happy man/But I haven’t been right/I sit all alone painting pictures/that don’t turn out how I like.”
Even Dennen doesn’t completely understand what was bothering him when he wrote the record. It brilliantly evokes this nameless sadness.
“I think I was working through a lot of different feelings. It’s like ‘who am I, what am I doing?’” Dennen says. “One day I think I know myself, and the next day I don’t have a clue who I am. Things are changing all around me. There’s a lot of suffering in the world. I’m trying to find my place in all of it.”
8 p.m., Sept. 14, Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $26. 423-8209.
Eleven years ago, Joe Ferrara was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He’d decided to get checked when two friends walked into his comic shop, Atlantis Fantasyworld on Cedar Street, within one week of each other and told him that they’d been diagnosed with the cancer. Both had felt completely healthy and hadn’t noticed any symptoms. One friend survived, the other didn’t.
Before he died, Ferrara’s friend came into the store one last time.
“He was angry. He was just so angry because he felt that his doctor let him down, that his doctor didn’t educate him, that if he’d gotten ahold of this early enough, he would have survived,” says Ferrara. “I saw this man so angry and so frustrated at the end of his life that I said ‘I don’t want to see this ever again.’”
That motivated him to get his own Prostate-Specific Antigen test (PSA)—a blood test that measures men’s levels of the antigen. They caught his prostate cancer early, he got surgery, and has lived free of cancer ever since. But the fact that he hadn’t even heard of a PSA at the time angered Ferrara, now 67, because he knew that other men of his generation were also in the dark—sometimes with fatal consequences.
A year ago, Ferrara sat down with Senior Vice President of Sales at Marvel Comics David Gabriel in San Diego and convinced him that just like Marvel’s pink covers for breast cancer awareness four years earlier, they needed something for prostate cancer.
Gabriel agreed. This month, Marvel will release five comic book covers in blue with a banner at the bottom from the American Cancer Society: Invincible Iron Man #13 and Captain America: Steve Rogers #6 will be in Ferrara’s store on Sept. 7—when members of the Santa Cruz Prostate Awareness Support Group will also be there with pamphlets and information—and a Mighty Thor #11 cover arrives on Sept. 21. All of the proceeds from the comic books will go to the awareness group.
“Our goal here is to save one life. I attribute my life to my two friends who came in and told me about it,” says Ferrara, now a member of the Santa Cruz Prostate Awareness Support Group and board member for the California Prostate Cancer Coalition. “I’m still here because of them.”
Ferrara wants men to be able to discuss their health with one another and stop subscribing to the antiquated idea that they shouldn’t “show any weakness,” he says.
“My generation was not counseled, we didn’t have open dialogue about this stuff,” says Ferrara. “Even so, now society still has this taboo about men. They don’t want to be perceived as not being the provider.”
Marvel Comics offer the opportunity to reach a younger demographic, says Ferrara, with the average comic book reader being between 25 and 35 years old.
Hopefully that will inspire young men to ask their fathers, uncles, and other relatives about their PSA, and for female readers to ask the men in their lives the same. Women, says Ferrara, are raised to be more open with their health concerns.
“Women as a rule at a young age are aware of mammograms and why they need them,” says Ferrara. “There’s a big gap between what women know about their health and what men know. Men think it’s like taking your car to the mechanic: the mechanics going to tell you what’s wrong with your car and they think the doctor says the same thing. But if you don’t ask specific questions, they’re not just going to put you on the rack and do the whole thing.”
In 2009, the U.S. Preventative Services task force came out saying women didn’t need to start getting biennial mammograms as early in life as other cancer organizations like the American College of Radiology and the Society of Breast Imaging were recommending, which was age 40.
The same task force released a recommendation in 2009 against routine PSA tests.
“Women’s reactions were that they got very angry because women knew the value of getting those mammogram screenings—my wife had a mammogram that caught an early breast cancer for her and she just finished six months of treatment,” says Ferrara. “Men’s reactions were ‘Oh thank God, one less thing to worry about.’”
While it’s true that a rising PSA level can mean different things to different men, says Ferrara, the point is to make all men start to ask the right questions: “It doesn’t mean you’re any less of a man if you inquire about your health,” he says.
Santa Cruz Prostate Awareness Support Group will be at Atlantis Fantasyworld for the release of the ‘Invincible Iron Man #13’ and ‘Captain America: Steve Rogers #6’ on Wednesday, Sept. 7. They will also be at Whole Foods on Soquel Avenue on Saturday, Sept. 10 to hand out information.
As a world-class open-water swimmer, Lynne Cox has dived into waters few of us can imagine. Her swim across the Bering Strait during the cold war became an unexpected symbol of peace. She was the first to swim the Straits of Magellan in Chile, and the first to swim around the Cape of Good Hope. She spent more than a mile dodging icebergs without a wetsuit in the waters of Antarctica.
So she knows a few things about challenges, but even she was caught off guard by the ones she faced in her new memoir, Swimming in The Sink: An Episode of the Heart. We had a conversation recently about why she chose to take readers on such a personal journey.
This book is different from your other books. In many ways, it’s more intimate. Was it hard to write?
This is the hardest book I’ve ever written. To write about the heart, you have to put everything out there.
There’s a strong theme of connection that guides the story. Why is that so important?
Being an athlete who pushed myself as far as I could go, I was able to tap into the connection between my mind and body, which allowed me to take on these really challenging swims. Yet I was so connected to my folks and making sure they were okay, and that was in the background all the while. As they became extremely ill, I lost that connection to myself. When my mom was at her sickest, I couldn’t swim because I couldn’t leave her alone for more than an hour, so what gave me happiness and relieved stress disappeared. Watching someone you love fight and fight, yet lose more and more is a very difficult process, and for me, it affected my heart. I had to learn how to reconnect again–to my mind, my body, my health, and life itself.
You had something called broken heart syndrome. What is that?
It’s also called Takotsubo syndrome, and though it can happen to men, most of the people it happens to are women between the ages of 58 and 75. It’s said to be caused by extreme physical and emotional stress. The heart becomes enlarged and doesn’t pump normally, and the symptoms can mimic a heart attack. For me, the things that piled up, my mom and dad dying, my dog dying, someone I cared about deciding to be with someone else, added up to loss, loss, and more loss. It was just too much. Luckily, with broken heart syndrome the heart can heal.
What’s the most important thing as a swimmer that you brought to your recovery?
The discipline, the regimen, the “I will.” I will take the medication at exactly the right time. I will do the mindfulness meditation training. I will give myself time to heal. I will do what my doctor says to because he’s an expert, but I will also listen to my friends because they’ve known me for decades. My friends helped me know I could recover.
Your friends play such an important role in this story. You remind us that we can create our own families.
Absolutely. I felt like people needed to know how much influence my friends had, with their kindness, their energy, their gestures. One of them is a tough Navy Seal who suffered from PTSD. He told me that the only thing not prescribed to him during rehab was love, and he saw how it helped me heal. We need to figure out how to integrate love into resiliency and recovery, because that makes all the difference.
How has your life changed since your recovery?
I left the place where my mom, dad, and dog had died. I’d lived there for decades, and my neighbors were like family, but I needed to be around new things and new people to write the next chapter. It changed my life course and I fell in love. It’s extraordinary to find someone at this point in life, where we have so much in common and enjoy just hanging out together. Being yourself around your best friend like that is wonderful.
Lynne Cox will read from and discuss her book at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 7 at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Free.
Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation, opening in October amid a swirl of controversy around its director, will draw attendees who certainly won’t decode the title’s reference. Parker’s story of the American avenger Nat Turner appropriates the title of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Civil War epic.
Birth of a Nation was cinema’s first blockbuster. Even in 1915, there were those who objected to Griffith’s vile racism, his use of a rape threat in a scene between an actor wearing blackface and a white Southern belle. If crowds mobbed this epic, there were also sizable public protests, and cities that banned it outright. Birth of a Nation celebrated the Ku Klux Klan. The film’s success legitimized those Christian conservative terrorists, who came to political ascendency in the 1920s.
And yet the audacity and technical mastery demonstrated by Griffith and his cameraman Billy Bitzer are thrilling. The collaborators pioneered the art of direction: pointing an audience’s attention to a single element in a crowded frame; winging them to several locations; giving them a sense of God’s-eye scope. It’s almost enough to overcome the stink of the material.
This shadow over Griffith may be the reason why the Sept. 5 centennial of Griffith’s ambitious follow-up, Intolerance (1916), seems so little marked. Here was a multi-planed story of four chapters in world history, demonstrating the ruin caused by the human inability to tolerate differences. This epic pioneered dozens of cinematic innovations, from false eyelashes to the crane shot. It was executed with a camera that was little more than a wooden box and filmed mostly in natural light.
“A Sun-Play of The Ages,” Griffith called this solar-powered masterpiece. It brackets the tales of Jesus’ Palestine, a 1916 labor rebellion, the fall of Babylon, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. It’s a mammoth epic, alive with sudden adroit surprises, such as the quite wrenching story of a self-sacrificing Babylonian woman warrior (Constance Talmadge). The vast canvas is held together by sequences of a mother (Lillian Gish) rocking her baby throughout the ages, as the Three Fates watch in the murk behind her. Griffith kept this massive project in his head, without a script. Intolerance was thought of as Griffith’s apology for the racism of Birth.
Actress Gish’s memoir argues against that point. In her view, Griffith had nothing to apologize for. She thought the “Intolerance” of the title referred to the intolerance of those who misunderstood Birth in 1915 as a racist film.
When celebrating epics mutilated by the businessmen, from Greed to The Magnificent Ambersons, historians remember Intolerance as a victim of the cutting room. Griffith had to slice his eight-hour film down to two-and-a-half hours. No wonder audiences of a century ago were sometimes confused.
Intolerance was not a blockbuster. Its $1.9 million cost bankrupted Griffith, a budget that included the price of the 300-foot Ishtar Gate set. This epic set is honored today in a small replica in a shopping center near the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s a few blocks away from the residential hotel where Griffith died, an early casualty of cinematic obsolescence.
Orson Welles said of Intolerance that “parts were dusty even at the time, parts of it would be fresh tomorrow.” Birth of a Nation 2016 has its own Victorian dust, including a final vision of an angel that would have surely choked up Griffith. Parker, nobly trying to reboot cinema from its racist roots, now has his own scandal regarding a date-rape case in his past. As a cineaste friend observes, “Same title: one racist, one rapist.”
If Intolerance is sometimes quaint, it reminds one of what cinema might do at its most ideal. Griffith’s hopes for the movies are still stirring: “We have gone beyond Babel, beyond words. We have found a universal language, a power that can make men brothers and end war forever.”
