Day 16: Nevada City–The Strappin’ Dudes!
I stayed a lot with Joel and Mike when I lived in Breckenridge. Later on we all took our cash and went out to LA to be pirates together on my wood sailboat for a couple months. All for one and one for all. I hadn’t seen them together since I’d moved. Mike got married and moved to Nevada City. Then Joel broke up with his Breck gal and moved there, too. Then Mike broke up with his gal and moved in with Joel. Back together! –Albeit in misery. But it was a boon for me. C’mon over!, they said. We wound our way through miles of gorgeous mountain roads that only got prettier as they got more remote until we rounded a bend and I just swung into a driveway. Did you say this was the place? I ask M. She says No. I look up. There’s a hippy in the drive of the trashed-out house. I lean out and hazard an explanation, “Uh, I’m looking for a place. This isn’t Joel’s, is it?” He smiles. “Joel’s inside. You’re here! Mike is on his way.” Another resting place after a hard day’s drive, another party on the way. We step inside over a big hole in the floor and look around. I see Joel squatting outside a sliding door, on the phone. Joel says Hey there! The place is trashed. A carpet strip is pulled up and upside down. Lucy steps on the nails in her bare feet. Mike pulls in the drive. “Hey, Strap!” Joel yells. It’s great to see them. The old gang! Mike is unloading his truck and we’re chatting. He says “It’s great to see you and your kids. I had a family once.” I haven’t seen such pain. It’s been six months. He’s his usual dry, witty self most of the time, though, playing with the kids. He looks the same, but puffier around the eyes.
It’s great to see Joel, too. While he squats there talking I see the same old Joel. He owns some rental property and knows the score and is quietly talking to a landlord on behalf of someone with an eviction hassle, from what I gather, calming the factions. He gets off the phone. Joel is a custom home carpentry foreman. Mike does windows for builders.
Friends stop over. People are having beer in the busted down ol’ house. Special plants are growing tall outside the back porch. “Yeah, I told that guy he could plant a few out back but, sheesh, not right here. Oh well.” There’s clothes on a ratty old clothesline, and busted down fencing around the yard.
Mike shows us his room. There are pics of his wife and kid on the wall. She ran off with a construction guy. He stands looking at a photo. I notice a dirty, dog-eared paperback copy of “The Philosophy of Aristotle” on his desk. Hmmm.
In the livingroom I get another surprise. There’s a beat-up bookcase jammed with bent-up books and paperbacks. They’re the classics of Western Religion, from the monks to the modern. Michael Fox, Meister Eckhart, all the Saints as far as I can tell. The Enneagram! Wow. I haven’t seen books like this since, well, my house! Amazing. Usually it seems like someone can only read this kind of thing with help, with fellow-travelers, in a school setting, with a teacher. But, no, Joel says he’s been reading before and after work. It looks like Mike is catching on, pitching in. Joel said “I figure anyone who hits 40 without getting some kind of wake up call is missing out.”
M & L dig into the garden alongside the house and bring in a big haul for dinner. We open some fine local brews and keep chatting and start cooking. We sit down to eatand Mike reaches out to hold hands around the table and say grace. Holy smokes. Our kids act up but we bless the food. What is going on in this party house? Maybe a little lifesaving it seems. Still, it seems like there hasn’t always been enough food around here. People are looking too thin and windblown.
Joel says there’s a wide range of independent people living around there: lefty hippies and righty militia-types. People seem to get along OK, he says. Why, there are 5 bookstores in town and it’s a small town. Sure enough, we check out town and it has plenty of amenities for being small and rural. Well-preserved, too. Hard to see how it has hosted the US’s 2nd biggest and oldest bike race, though.
