July 4th: Selling the Sizzle Is At Stake

Sales fizzled again last year here at the Clear Creek Ranch fireworks stand. The new pre-purchase screening protocol I imposed may be to blame. Between the written and oral tests, plus the background and liability insurance checks, the compulsory safety video, and the implantation of GPS satellite tracking devices, it is a good two days before a patriotic pyromaniac can even get close to an M-80 around here.
Still, it seems a small price to pay to be able to blow something up to celebrate our declaration of independence from England, AND support a worthy cause (me) at the same time.
Perhaps the test was too hard. Some examples: How many future U.S. presidents signed the declaration? Name the signers whose faces currently appear on our paper currency. Who REALLY wrote the declaration, Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine? How many years did the revolutionary war last? What Indians can we thank for distracting the British and keeping the war from lasting even longer?
And the essay question: Just how independent are we? The majority in both the U.S.A. and England speak English, (although I DO require subtitles and a glossary when viewing British films or American hip-hop videos). Both countries have red, white and blue flags and both enjoy ongoing political intrigues around the world.
The Brits once burned Washington D.C. to the ground, yet we bailed them out of TWO world wars, AND took over several of their botched diplomatic operations in the Middle East, including the deadly and unsolvable Gordian knot that is Arab/Israeli politics.
They gave us Russell Brand and Eddie Izzard. We MUST do something about that exchange rate.
Their dysfunctional royal family is OUR dysfunctional royal family. A royal ex-wife does American television info-mercials for weight loss schemes. The media keeps us better informed on the comings and goings of the royal grandkids than we are of our own.
Independent or not, July 4th is a day for making loud noises and exploding things. Too bad the founding fathers didn't take into account how tinder box dry things are this time of year. If only they signed their petition during the rainy season! But then they were NOT "safe and sane," they were revolutionaries.
As parched as things are right now, one stray bottle rocket and there goes the neighborhood, up in smoke. The same is true in the towns near Clear Creek Ranch. Chock full of picturesque 125 year old Victorians, aka expensive stacks of kindling. Yet each year, fundraisers in town flog explosives in the name of charity AND patriotism. It is hard to argue against, and hard to understand at the same time.
Which is why, here at the ranch fireworks stand, we only sell to folks with working VCRs. Our fireworks displays are on VHS or DVD only. No need to huddle outside in the dark, nursing that holiday sunburn and being eaten alive by mosquitoes, on the off chance of seeing the neighborhood in flames.
Just slip into something red, white and blue and douse the house lights. We've compiled a two hour assortment of the best fireworks displays ever taped "off the air." Replay that quintuple starburst with the cherry bomb punctuation as many times as you want and fast-forward through the commercials.
And if you really want to be patriotic, splurge on the largest big-screen, flat screen, high definition TV you can find. Because if there are two things that make America great, they are blowing up things and throwing money around. And when you can combine the two, well, that is revolutionary. Or is it revolting?
Perhaps this 4th is the day to find out.

How NOT to Change a Lightbulb

"That light is burned out in the cellar again," my wife announced brightly.
"And which cellar would that be?" I asked. "Our root cellar -- home to grotesque semi-comatose vegetable species not normally found in nature? Or our wine cellar -- final resting place to several vintages of home-bottled Chateau de Clear Creek wine in various shades of murky brown or gray (the contents, not the glass)?The glass is dark green to obscure the floating chunks. Or our brick-lined combination mildew farm/frog grotto -- the one with the seasonally-submerged chandelier?"
"You aren't going to start singing 'Sump-where Under The Rainbow' again, are you? That always scares the cats."
By the way, we have only one cellar, but it has served all the above-mentioned purposes over the years. I hand-dug it during my "Voluntary Simplicity" phase. (Voluntary Stupidity, perhaps?) Its sole function is as a reliable gauge for the level of the local water table. Just check the high water marks, when the light isn't burned out or submerged.
"Let's convert the cellar to a darkroom," I said.
"What's to convert?" my wife said dimly. "With the bulb burned out, it's as dark as it gets in there."
"I mean a photography darkroom. I can develop prints documenting the quaint aspects our rustic lifestyle."
"Tell me, Prints Charming, how much will this cost?"
I gave her a dollars-and-cents answer, but forgot to include the sense, ie the emotional wear-and-tear factor. She agreed, but thought it was an elaborate way to avoid changing a light bulb.
I had a new focus in life and couldn't wait to see what developed. There were things to buy and plans to make. I pictured a pleasant pastime zooming into a new career. Perhaps I could produce a slick coffee table book of poignant black-and-white photographs.
My wife reminded me of my tendency to flit from one project to next, rarely completing any of them.
"You could write an autobiography," she said. "Call it 'The Great Gadfly."
"I prefer the lens-name F-stop FitzDrummond." Literary critics are everywhere.
I did not buy a point-and-shoot, automatic-everything camera. They are fine for tourist snapshots, but not for the epic volume I had in mind. And there is something macho about owning a telephoto lens so big it needs straps and a tripod to support it.
I took a crash course in photography: shutter speeds, diaphragms, lenses, aperture settings, emulsions, chemistry, physics, light meters, enlargers, tripod etiquette, and more. And acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of cheese names, as in "say cheese," "edam and weep," etc., depending on the mood required.
Soon I was a vision in my photographer's vest, festooned with film cans, spare lenses, camera straps, pouches, filters, and more straps.
But no one told me about the Rule of Thumb. Mine is always there in the foreground of every print, out of focus, somewhere between the lens and the subject. Giving new meaning to the term camera obscura.
As my wife had predicted, F-stop FitzDrummond's darkroom soon reverted to its more primitive nature -- home to stalagmite and stalactite wannabees. (No, I do not know which is which).
And at the risk of being charged with Polonius assault, I've finally learned a lesson from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Neither a burrower nor a lenser be."
Or for you Latin lovers, "Caveat Snaptor."

(Note: this was composed in my pre-digital daze.)

Clear Creek Blues

This is the first year I will appear on stage at the Clear Creek Ranch Blues Festival as a performer. My internet harmonica lessons are going well, although musician friends warn me there is a difference between "virtual" and "reality" when it comes to live audiences.
I am sure my new "blues guy" wardrobe will more than offset my musical shortcomings. I've studied the sartorial content on old blues album covers and I have the "look" down. Somewhere between Lightnin' Hopkins, the Blues Brothers, and the Harmoni-Cats.
The harmonica is part of my genetic heritage. The diatonic harmonica (aka the harp) was developed to accompany Bavarian folk tunes, and while my ancestors aren't 100% German, genetically I am only a few steins short of an Oktoberfest pitcher when it comes to qualifying.
I have a custom-built twelve pocket vest to hold a complete set of harps in every key. The vest doesn't really go with the lederhosen, but my little tyrolean hat, when worn with wrap-around shades, comes close to duplicating the "blues guy" look in those grainy old photos from the Mississippi delta or Chicago or where ever.
I am working on my stage name. Blues musicians have nicknames that describe a physical attribute, like Slim, Fats, Shakey, or Big Mama. When my wife caught my act, just as I caught my moustache in the harmonica and almost tore my own lip off, she suggested Howlin' Tone-Deaf White Boy. I like it.
This wasn't my first altercation with a harmonica. In high school, during folksinging's 1960's heyday, I got one hooked on my braces for a week. Didn't need one of those goofy bent-coathanger things around my neck to simultaneously strum my guitar, toot my harmonica and bleat an excellent imitation of Bob Dylan. Peanut butter sandwiches, however, were a big problem.
Anyway, the internet music lessons are going great -- although my teacher can't actually hear my efforts. But I've learned all about tremolo, bending notes, and more than necessary about scales. Yesterday I discovered that vibrato is not just a marital aid, it has its place right there on stage as well.
My harmonicas work no matter which direction the hot air is flowing -- out or in. Here is some harp terminology for you. "Out" is called blowing, but "in," I learned, is not called sucking. The proper gerund is "drawing."
I once relegated the harmonica to the musical backwater next to the kazoos, but I now think it has more in common, tonally, with gargling next to a microphone, and/or amplifier feedback.
My harmonicas are certainly more portable than the average tuba or piano. Many is the time I've sidled up to a street corner jam session, whipped out one (or more) of my ten-holed Hohners, and literally stopped the show. One stunned musician asked to see my concealed musical instrument permit. He looked awfully serious.
On another occasion, a street musician asked if I could define "perfect pitch". "No," I shrugged. By way of an answer, my interrogator grabbed the harmonica from my hand, and in a single fluid motion lobbed it across four lanes of traffic where it landed dead center in a trash can.
Instead of becoming angry and saying something like, "Hey man, that draws!", I stayed positive. He did have impressive technique. I emptied nine of my vest pockets before I hit a ringer myself. My dark glasses may have been a handicap.
Which way is Chicago, anyway? Tell 'em "Tone-Deaf" is coming to their town. Or better yet, don't. Let me surprise them.

Have a Berry Nice Day

Nature can be very wasteful. Take blackberries for example. We've got about an acre of them growing in a thick tangle downhill from our spring here at Clear Creek Ranch. In season they produce thousands, perhaps millions of juicy, sweet, blue-black berry clusters.
When we first purchased our property we didn't know what to do with such a bonanza, but the local wildlife did. The deer browsed as high as they could reach on the outer edges of the patch. When those canes were bare, they moved on to easier pickings -- in our erstwhile rose garden.
The sweetest berries, of course, were in the impenetrable interior of the patch, where each cluster was protected by a phalanx of bloodthirsty thorns. Having torn myself to shreds in a futile quest after these succulent beauties, I forfeited all future rights to the airborne division: the neighborhood birds.
The ease with which they feasted upon their bounty irked me. Some perched on the very thorns that still bore traces of my shirt threads and dried blood. And the feathered freeloaders were so reckless and wasteful. A single peck at each berry cluster and then on to the next. Most of the fruit rotted where it hung. Things had to change.
That autumn I rented a brush clearing machine and mowed a a maze-like series of intersecting rows through the patch so I'd have access to the next summer's crop. To thwart the deer, who would have treated these new rows like additional aisles at the open air grocery store, I mowed a single entrance to the maze and secured it with an eight foot high wire gate.
This system worked great, as long as I remembered to close the gate. Soon we were feasting on bucketsful of the luscious berries. But even a steady diet of caviar and champagne gets old, I am told. (I've never had a first hand opportunity to research this, but I will consider any offers in this direction.)
Our berry-lust was sated long before the bushes quit producing, so we hunted for new outlets for our harvest. Unfortunately, the few neighbors who would admit to eating anything that didn't start out with hooves, fur, and/or feathers were already inundated with their own berry crops.
"How about a roadside stand," my wife suggested.
I told her of my bitter disappointment as a youthful lemonade entrepreneur on a lightly-traveled cul-de-sac somewhere deep within a bland tract development in outer-suburbia. My only sale had been to the neighborhood mailman. And even those sales figures were artifically inflated. (Mom, if you're reading, I've never mentioned this, but I saw you hand him that dime when he dropped off our mail just before he stopped at my stand).
Still, we had bushels of berries rotting on our screen porch and one of our neighbors had an abandoned vegetable stand out by the county road. It was a ramshackle affair, with sagging roof and peeling paint and had belonged to someone named Chuck, because "Chuck's" was scrawled in large free-hand letters on both sides. According to my neighbor, weekend traffic on the road was brisk, and chockful of rich foreigners from the city.
That weekend I carted my berries to the stand, hand painted my own addendum to Chuck's magnificent work: "berry's." I know that's the wrong spelling. But a dyslexic haze shrouded my brain as soon as I picked up the paintbrush. In addition to the Y' where the IE should have been, the first R was flipped backwards so its little leg pointed to the left. I adjusted my overalls, settled down with my crossword puzzle and nibbled on berries while I waited for my public to discover me.
Several hours later, when most of the berries were gone, they did. By then my hands, lips, and shirtfront were stained blue with berry juice. A carload of little kids stared at me like I was the tattooed carnival man. Their mother asked if I had restroom facilities for her squirming urchins. I pointed a blue finger toward the the bushes behind the shed, and even offered my crossword puzzle if she was in need of paper products.
"Give me a map back to civilization, you blue-faced yahoo!" she screeched. I extracted a waterlogged map from my truck glove box and she flipped me a $10 bill, not waiting for change.
Slight variations on this scenario repeated themselves throughout the day. A little "idea light" twinkled in my brain.
The roadside stand is now fruitless, but fruitful, despite an irate visit from the local chapter of the Apostrophe Abuse Council. Chuck's Berry's now houses a road map vending machine and two pay toilets. Business is brisk, and I don't even have to be there.
The outhouse, of course, is known as the Johnny B Goode.

The Last Ninja Beekeeper

Our strawberry patch doubles in size every year. What was once a manageable 10' x 10' square, is now threatening to overrun the east end of our garden. This is fine with me -- there is nothing like a bowlful of freshly-picked, juicy strawberries to start off the day.
The only problem is that "the yield" is way down. Healthy plants cover five times as much ground as when we started, but only produce twice as many berries. The latent cost-accountant inside me was worried. My know-it-all neighbor agreed.
"Looks like you'll have to pollinate them flowers yourself," he said with a suggestive leer. He paused long enough for my active imagination to envision a pre-dawn raid by the SWAT team from the unnatural-acts-to-the-plants division of the Department of Agriculture.
"Or," he continued, "you could get yourself some bees."
I knew that most beekeepers move their hives around to take advantage of a variety of blossoms and I knew my neighbor had some hives on his place. But I also knew my neighbor's ironclad reluctance to lend anything to a fellow neighbor, especially one in need. Clearly a case of the hives and the hive-nots.
At the time I wasn't in a position to make a major investment in hives, smokers, and other equipment. Luckily, the local phone book listed a Apiarian Society and I gave them a call.
"How many do you need?" the friendly voice asked.
"I don't know."
"Fair enough. The Society is having a demonstration this afternoon. Buzz on by and we'll talk about it."
How many bees would it take to pollinate a 10' x 50' berry patch? I'd seen bees in the garden before and they only spent a few seconds at any one flower. Each plant was about a foot apart, so I had 500 plants. If each plant had ten flowers, that was 5,000 flowers that needed pollinating.
When I allowed for travel time between flowers, nectar breaks, lunch hours and hallway gossip, I came up with an estimated 5,000 bee-minutes worth of work. My strawberry patch offered one bee about two weeks of steady employment, or if they preferred to work in teams (I didn't know) a two-bee team might finish in a week.
"There has got to be a Shakespeare pun in here somewhere," I droned as I dressed for the meeting, "Two bees or not two bees . . ."
I'd seen pictures of beekeepers before: pith helmet, veil, white coveralls, and gloves. I didn't have these things, and the lack reminded me of Thoreau's words, "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."
I wasn't setting myself up in the bee business, I just wanted to employ a few of them part-time. I threw together my own outfit from things in the closet -- trying to make a fashion statement. White was too bland. Black was better, more mysterious. The bees would keep their distance, I thought. I donned my black sweatsuit, tightened the hood drawstrings around my chin, strapped on my safety goggles, grabbed a match box to hold my bees, and headed for the door.
"Bruce Lee film retrospective in town?" my wife laughed.
Five seconds after I arrived at the Apiarian Society I sensed that few successful ninjas keep bees. It was a stinging sensation. Agitated bees hurled themselves at my goggles until their numbers blinded me. I fell to the floor under the weight of thousands of bees as they attacked my flailing arms. It seemed like forever before I was rescued in a billowing cloud of smoke that calmed my assailants.
When I came to and the swelling went down enough for me to hear someone else over the sound of my own screams, I was told that bees tend to sting dark objects. Reminds them of bears and other honey-stealers in the wild.
Which is why pollinating time at the Clear Creek Ranch strawberry patch will be calculated in knee-minutes and not bee-minutes. I bought an artist's brush and I'm working my way up and down the rows hunkered over on my knees, pollinating one tingling flower at a time.

The Batroom is Outside

One evening my wife mentioned that the bats weren't flying around our yard eating insects like they once did; and wouldn't it be nice if I built a bat house like the one she had clipped out of a magazine.
When I agreed without argument, she eyed me suspiciously.
Naturally, my first order of business was to fire off a mail order for more power tools. As a veteran home handyman, I knew if I had the right tool for the job, anything was possible. I also found it a lot easier to hand that "right tool" to the repairman when he arrived to un-do my initial handiwork.
A week later, the entire contents of several pages of the Sears tool catalog appeared on my doorstep. Now I was prepared to handle anything that required cutting, drilling, nailing, smoothing, or shaping wood. In theory, anyway, and providing nobody at the power company accidentally unplugged the frayed extension cord that serves our rural neighborhood.
I was adjusting the bright red suspenders that supported my new fifty pound tool belt when a booklet that came with the tools caught my eye: "What Every Novice Handyman Should Know." Well I was no novice, but I picked it up, hoping there was a chapter entitled "Overcoming Spousal Power Tool Resistance." There wasn't. The book's author kept harping on things like planning, safety precautions, and reading directions. Well, I didn't want to waste time on stuff like that!
I drove my sports car to the lumberyard to get some wood for my project. A burly lumberjack-type employee was lounging near a pile of sawdust when I arrived. He smiled at me and I noticed that he had about as many teeth left as he had fingers. Seven or eight of each, I think. I didn't want to stare, even though he was taking a good long look at my new suspenders and tool belt.
"I need some wood," I said forcefully.
"Can you be a little more specific, Chief?"
"Not really. Just wood. I need some regular wood."
"That's different from the unleaded kind, right?"
"Look, I'm building a bat house . . ."
"Quite a project, a bath house. Sure you don't mean a bath room?"
"No, no, a bat house for flying bats. You know . . ." And I began flapping my arms and baring my teeth, presumably looking like a 150 pound bat wearing a plaid shirt and fifty pound tool belt.
"You know sir," he said as he backed away, "I just spotted a whole stack of regular wood over there."
I must have made a bat impression on him.
The construction itself went smoothly, if I ignore the times when some stray parts were accidentally glued or nailed to the workbench.
A bat house is kind of like a bird house, except there is no door and no floor. The floor is the door. The bats fly in the open bottom and fall asleep while they hang upside down by their rear claws.
I painted the bat abode to match our house and proudly mounted the thing up above our front door and under the eaves. It was a neighborhood conversation piece. Soon everyone was pointing at it and whispering to each other.
The thing I liked about the project was that it was simple. For example, bats don't need indoor plumbing. With the open floor arrangement they use a primitive gravity flow system for eliminating wastes: everything drops straight down. The porch, however, is quite a mess most mornings.
My wife insists that the instructions warned about that.
"Why won't men ever use directions?" she asked.
"But I did use them," I insisted.
And I did, several times . . . to wipe glue off my hands and to mop up paint spills.

The Just-A-Minute Men

When homegrown terrorists gave militia-types a bad name a few years ago, we almost disbanded the neighborhood militia out here at Clear Creek Ranch. But with all this Osama drama, we may reactivate -- the discussion process anyway. Decisions are never easy or unanimous with our group. We are always tightly wound-up, but never tightly banded together.
How could we be? These are the same guys that make up our road association. You remember that story (or have lived your own version): the pavers versus the non-pavers, and the payers versus the non-payers, and splinter groups demanding speed bumps, curbs, and armed crossing guards. The neighborhood divided itself into separate seething camps of hostility.
Anyway, a few of us who get along and can read have been studying internet sites that predict natural disasters for California during the next few years: earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, volcanic activity, pandemic bad hair days, not to mention all this Osama/anthrax/global warming stuff. Any cataclysmic event will send waves of ravenous refugees fleeing to the hills. Our hills, not theirs.
As if we weren't recent urban transplants ourselves. And hardly superior. No discernible superfluous IQ points clutter up our meetings. Take the simple matter of naming our militia unit. The rag-tag dress of our motley crew ranged from a jogging outfit tie-dyed in camouflage earth tones, to a lure-bristling fly-fisherman, to some sort of 21st Century electronic virtual reality-viking warlord.
Given this uniform lack of uniformity, I suggested "Clear Creek Irregulars." Which, I admit, sounds like we are in dire need of oat bran infusions. It certainly sparked a number of tasteless (but very funny) jokes about troop movements.
Everyone present had other, "better" names in mind, and the debate dragged on for hours. Nothing takes just a minute for these minutemen. It was a hopeless twelve-way deadlock tie, each name got one vote. So we moved onto the next order of business: maneuvers.
Most of our maneuvering consists of parallel parking all our SUVs along one side of my neighbor's driveway for a demonstration of his homemade cannon. It lobs bowling balls about 50 yards with reasonable accuracy, accompanied by a great deal of noise. Other than recoiling ten feet with each shot, the cannon is not highly mobile, being a tube mounted on a truck axle with two flat tires.
So unless we can persuade Osama to hide in the crater the bowling balls have formed, we may have to fall back on our armored division -- an ancient backhoe -- or our air force -- a small squadron (squab-dron?) of homing pigeon/bombers.
Our first line of defense calls for chainsawing down trees to disable easy access to our private road. The member living out nearest the country road is the logical choice to head up that project, but he only has a dinky electric chainsaw and his extension cord wouldn't quite reach. We fell to bickering about whether or not to appropriate the funds to buy him a longer cord. He was lobbying for a portable generator too, in case "they" cut our power.
Of course that "they" is PG&E, and right now they have their own band of slow-motion tree trimmers prowling around in those generic-looking "Utility Tree Service" trucks.
Is another conspiracy afoot? Can the black heliocopters be far behind? Our militia will be scouring the Web for clues.