A Land Without Bars

Needing assurance it was still in business, I pushed the Forest Club door open, took a stool and called for a cold can of Coors. 

Good choice, this, I told myself. 

Last time here I sat with Phil Baldwin years before he died. A nod to the mirror, a silent toast to Phil. Any Forest Club visit(s) prior to that would have been a decade or more back. 

Here in 2023 the old bar is really no different. On this cool March afternoon the joint is dark, fragrant, perfect. A few touches of color and the familiar amber glow from mirrored stacks of liquor bottles, hardly changed from the Forest Club of 50 years back. Or perhaps 100, Prohibition aside. 

On this day I sat there alone (Definition: In poor company) and did a quick mental inventory of all the other bars still operating in Ukiah. 

It took me 10 minutes. I came up with Zero. 

Yeah, you can order a drink at The Office at the south end of Mill Street, or at the downtown brew pub or even at Miss Saigon’s restaurant way up North State. That’s if you enjoy drinking in clean well-lit rooms with six-year olds crawling around and yelling. 

Is it possible Ukiah, a city of some 16,000, is today home to just a single old-fashioned bar? Are we on Jupiter? 

Are we marooned on some island? Is there another city across the fertile plains that beats us? Somewhere without a darkened lounge where adults can gather privately to dribble alcohol down their throats? 

We’d need inspect the most remote dry deserts of Nevada, out among the tribes of Mormon, to find our equal. That, or prowl through Amish country and a 19th century lifestyle that declines coffee, automobiles, Bud Lite and other modern enjoyments, for us to uncover the privation Ukiah endures, and is probably proud of. 

Town & Country Club: Dark and empty more than a decade. Water Trough: Arson and bulldozers. Palace Hotel: Crumbled bricks and memories. Dozens more, now gone, where locals once came together to drink the gods’ nectar, watch sports and tell lies. No more. 

And the local youth? In the face of declining birth rates we’ve shut down critical venues for young men and women to rub against each other in semi-darkened rooms where, with some alcohol and a bit of luck, they might find themselves in one another’s arms come 2 a.m. Or tomorrow morning. 

From such encounters come relationships, extended couplings, even marriages and children. This is how society is saved from having no kids to attend its schools, perform entry level work and keep our Social Security tanks filled. With a few pesky sexually transmitted diseases along the way. 

Seriously: What are young people doing with their reproductive organs these days? Harvesting them for cash to buy another iPhone? 

When we were young we staggered out of the Drifters Club and drove blind to some apartment to rip each other’s clothes off with our teeth. Today the bars are gone, no one drives drunk, and opportunities to squirm around on mattresses with one another are near extinct. 

Lacking common turf to perform sacred mating ritual dances, where does all that sap, sweat and precious bodily fluid wind up? Those awkward dancing calisthenics, lubricated by Tequila Sunrises, Harvey Wallbangers and shots of Jack allowed millworkers and beauticians to impersonate Olivia Newton-John and Mick Jagger for a few hours on a Friday night. 

Now we’re grownups with nowhere to go to dodge wives, children and other responsibilities, so we’re jumping off bridges and eating fentanyl. 

The reality is that at 5 o’clock and the end of another dreary day there is nowhere for employees to gather, laugh and grumble. There’s no Russell’s Place for millworkers to wash sawdust down dry throats with frosty mugs of beer, nor a Samoa Club for lawyers to gargle off the sour taste of a day in court with ice-cold dry Martinis. 

The long march of civilization has gone off-track and onto the shores of some remote island. Can we make wine from coconuts? 

Cat & Mouse

We have a basement in our house in North Carolina with an exterior door next to the driveway. We also have a batch of feral cats living about. 

One day I went to the basement on some errand or other, left the door wide open and fiddled amidst the furnace and some pipes. Then I left, closing the door behind. 

Two days later wife Trophy asked me about the meowing. “What meowing?” I said. She’d been hearing cats the last day or two, and it sounds like they’re under the house. 

So she went out, opened the basement door and a furry black cannonball of a cat shot past her and into the bushes. 

Next day she was out fussing in the backyard planting some stuff, picking up other stuff, when the furry black cat emerged from tall grass. 

The cat came over and dropped a dead mouse at her feet, then turned and trotted away. 

(TWK gets credit for this weekly column, although it’s Tom Hine who gets the blame. They live in Ukiah and the Carolinas.)