A few weeks ago we went to Roaring Camp near Santa Cruz to ride the narrow-gauge steam train up the “mountain”.
The train line abuts the Henry Cowell redwoods – I strongly recommend that you visit those as well (though the photos I took were all terrible, for some reason).
note: I don’t remember when I originally posted this on my site, but it was lost in a transition somewhere along the way, so here it is again
I promised some time ago to tell you about the fabulous flying jeep trick. This occurred in Indonesia, on New Year’s Day, 1982. I was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz, and had gone to Semarang, a city on the eastern tip of Java, to visit my dad and stepmother for Christmas. My flight from Jakarta back to San Francisco was in the morning of January 2nd.
Java is a long island, and Jakarta is near its western coast. There are tons of commuter airline flights between Semarang and Jakarta; getting on one usually involved about as much formality (or reservation) as getting on a bus. We hadn’t known, however, that at New Year’s everyone in Java gets up and goes somewhere else. So the Semarang airport was absolute chaos, every flight was jam-packed, and there was no way I would get on a flight in time to connect to my flight out of Jakarta.
The only solution was to drive, and fast. We borrowed my stepmom’s company jeep and driver, and set off as soon as we could. For the first hours, the driver did the driving. The road was a narrow two-lane, dense with cars and trucks. I was astonished by the fact that there was very little open space along the highway – it was lined with houses for most of its length, as if it were a very long city street.
Sometime around midnight, my dad took over the driving. I sat in the front passenger seat, staring out the windscreen. I had almost fallen asleep when I noticed headlights coming straight toward us, which seemed a bit odd. We were in the correct (left) lane; the oncoming truck was in the same lane. And didn’t look like stopping. It was trying to pass another truck, so the right lane was also occupied. My dad wrenched the wheel hard left. I had a confused sensation of being shaken around like a bean in a can, then felt a huge, dull impact. I sat there for a few minutes, dazed. When I looked out the side window, all I could see was moonlight on water. I couldn’t figure out how we were floating on the lake or whatever it was.
I was even more surprised when a little Javanese man came up to my door, apparently walking on water. He opened the door and urged me to get out. I first had to unwrap my leg from the gearshift. I hesitated to step down, not knowing how deep it was. When I finally did, I sank six inches into mud, and the water came up to my knees. We were in a rice paddy.
The three of us assembled across the road, at a little restaurant which had long since closed for the night. We were all dazed, but unhurt except the driver’s toe that the toolbox had fallen on. We eventually pieced together what had happened. Where my dad had veered off the road was a ditch, then a six foot tall dike, to keep the water in the rice fields. We had careened into the ditch and up the dike, and then flew off the top of the dike into the paddy. We later learned that we had landed so hard, the chassis of the jeep had bent in the middle.
About half an hour later, while we were drinking Cokes and staring into space, another large truck came along and tilted gently into the ditch. Again, no one was hurt. We ambled over to look at the situation. The truck was lying directly on top of our tire tracks. Had he got there first, we would have run into him, and been smashed to flinders.
So there we sat at the restaurant, marvelling at our good fortune, and I still had a flight to catch. It was also foreign tourist season, and if I didn’t get this flight, I wouldn’t be able to get a seat for many days, and would miss classes back at college. Therefore, to the great astonishment of the restaurant owners, we insisted on finding some other form of transport to get us the rest of the way to Jakarta, right away. Someone was found who was willing to use his van as a taxi, and on we went. We drove straight to the airport to check in; I didn’t even change out of the mud-stained jeans I was wearing.
By the time I got on the plane, I hadn’t slept in over 24 hours, and was in a state of confusion and shock. I was seated next to a Canadian family on their way home from an exotic vacation. They probably got a little more exoticism than they bargained for; I was dirty, dishevelled, and babbled at them throughout the flight. And still didn’t sleep.
I flew into the tail of one of the worst storms the San Francisco Bay Area had ever seen. My grandfather and his wife, who lived in Sunnyvale, came to pick me up, complaining about how much trouble it was to drive in this weather. I sat in the back seat with my Aunt Rosie, out on a visit from Texas, and quietly told her how close I’d come to death, while my step-grandma bitched on in the front seat.
The next day I took a shuttle bus over the hill to Santa Cruz. There was severe storm damage all along the way. I got to the university and into my dorm room, only to find that there was no water or electricity. Within six hours, the university decided they couldn’t take care of us til things were in better repair, so we should all go home.
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Another from the series of portraits done for me by Shawn Northcutt, this one looks even more like it comes from a fashion shoot – in this case, for the lovely clothing of FabIndia (one of my favorite places in the world to shop).
I suspect Indian traditional styles may be the oldest national costumes still in daily use by a wide spectrum of their native cultures, perhaps because they look good on almost every body type. And are very, very comfortable, especially (of course) in hot weather.
Traditionally, you buy your own material and have it tailored to fit you, but I rarely have time on my trips to India to do that these days. A great alternative is Fabindia, which makes fantastic ready-to-wear clothing in a huge variety of fabrics, mostly based on traditional styles (seen here: silk kurta, churidar, and scarf).
Are you feeling terrible about the state of the world? Do you become numb or depressed as shock after shock unreels before your horrified gaze, 24 hours a day, on multiple live “news” channels? Have you been feeling that way since, oh, at least December (or November, if you voted for Romney)?
It doesn’t matter what this week’s specific disaster is: you don’t need to know about it in the lurid detail that the TV news is so pantingly eager to provide.
Yes, it’s terrible, but things just as terrible happen all over the world, every day – many of them preventable or directly man-made, which (to my mind) makes them worse tragedies. But the fact that the news operations you watch can get camera crews to a particular scene, and that the suffering people at that scene look more or less like you, and speak the same language as you, makes it seem far more personal, overwhelming, and tragic. The news crews milk that for all it’s worth.
Remember that the “news” is not the product – your attention is. The aim of most TV news channels and newspapers is to hold your attention so that they can sell it to advertisers. Audience share, ratings – that’s all jargon for getting you to watch as long as they can, so that they have more advertising slots to sell.
So they pile on the drama. A real-life event becomes just one more reality show, in which your natural empathetic reaction to others’ suffering is played upon, over and over and over. That empathy, too, is served up to keep attention glued to the tube: “Tell me, ma’am, how did you feel when you saw it happening?”
The solution is simple: turn it off. Unless you or someone you love is in the path of the hurricane or the building with the shooter, you are likely not affected. You can read the facts in a newspaper (preferably a non-hysterical one; personally, I recommend The Economist). If you want to express your empathy, do it in a useful way: donate what you can to a reputable charity that is actually doing something to help.
Then go about your day. Your feeling terrible about the state of the world is not helping the situation, and it’s certainly not helping you. But it sure keeps those advertising dollars flowing in.
