I plowed on.
The cautious (sane) part of me whispered, told me to turn around, go back! back! but I pressed ever east, across the dusty washboard trail, searching the skies for the Drinkin’ Gourd, wishing I’d bought new tires when I was still within a day’s drive of Costco, wishing I had a map and wishing I’d never left the warmth and safety of Taylor’s Tavern back in the bustling burg of Redwood Valley.
The rough, rugged road was not my biggest worry, not with the notorious Cliffs of Road B yawning to my right, inches from the passenger side door, urging me, taunting me to pull over onto a wide turnout / berm that didn’t exist. I hate heights and here I am driving a tightrope across foreign country, searching for the Lost Land of the Legend They Call Caboose. The road is about six feet wide, except where there’s room to pull over and vomit and swear you’ll never again renew your driver’s license.
I gritted my teeth, sank my fingernails back into the steering wheel and just in time spotted a maroon-colored Dodge pickup barreling at me at three, maybe four miles per hour. I pulled over to shake my fist, sweat and throw up again.
The good news? My wife wasn’t along because I’d have been forced to let her drive. Trophy at the wheel: forever auditioning for the Special Olympics’ Destruction Derby finals. Better I’m stabbed to death with the engine dipstick.
The event is an annual Caboose celebration in honor of an ancient yellow railroad car riding high atop the tallest mountain west of the Alleghenies, from which you could see Lake Mendocino if they’d only cut a few hundred acres of trees down.
It’s put on by Jonathan Middlebrook, Darca Nicholson and Nick the Dog. Everyone knew everyone else, but I don’t know many beyond Jonathan, Darca and Nick the Dog.
Most attendees are my age or worse; it looked like dozens of retirement home victims seated in a half-circle of folding chairs. I recognized several from the time I’d spent at Woodstock a few years ago.
The food was the best I’ve ever had at a potluck and I’ve been to scores of ‘em. Some of the dishes scored high-end restaurant comparisons, and the music was first rate, but I would have enjoyed myself a whole lot more if I hadn’t been worrying about the drive down Black Bart Trail / Road B to get back to civilization.
The sun was sinking when I set out. I checked my canteen and hardtack supply. If I’d waited another half hour I could have been among the long parade of cars heading back toward 101 trailing the taillights of the car up ahead. The odds of my following a string of vehicles careening over a cliffside edge were probably less than 50-50 but with my luck I’d have bounced and rolled right into Lake Mendocino and I don’t know how to swim.
My unanswered question is this: Why would anyone who has driven to the Caboose neighborhood and survived ever want to do it again? How and why do people commute? It would be easier for me to make the daily drive to and from Kelseyville.
If I had a house up where the Caboose is mounted I’d be homeless.
Art Grows Up
Back in the 1970s I fell in with a haphazard batch of locals who for reasons having nothing to do with reality, thought of themselves as artists. Worse yet, avant garde artists and as such were both delusional and prone to even greater excesses, like Performance Art and poetry.
They gave themselves artsy-ish names like Polyester Nation, Anna Banana and Nicky Vanzetti, led by the rather buffoonish Buster Cleveland.
Their works ranged from xerox copies of artworks cut into pieces and rearranged into xeroxed copies of bad artworks, or rubber stamps with clever slogans like “IGNORE THIS” or “DANGER: ART.” It was all rather childish and when practiced by ostensible adults (some were 40-plus years old!) it was both tiresome and stupid.
On the sidelines observing these self-indulgent amateurs but never involved with their silly pretensions, was a young woman named Polly Palecek, quietly producing art of her own.
But who knew about Polly, given the noisy accolades the Dada morons were awarding one another at the same time? So the years passed and they grew up or grew embarrassed, and their collected works wound up in the landfill east of Ukiah.
Polly carried on, and for clear evidence of her talent and dedication, not nearly enough of her works are presently on display right now at Ukiah’s downtown Corner Gallery. Polly’s paintings, and samples from other local artists, will remain until the end of October.
You already missed the grand opening. Don’t miss the whole show.
(Tom Hine has been writing under the TWK byline since the earliest ‘80s. He says if you don’t know what Dada Art is, consider yourself lucky.)
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