bombs

The Chool Bus (ch21)

CHAPTER 21: The Forks interview folks in Redding, Sacramento, and San Francisco before taking some time in Monterey with the Steinbeck vibes on Cannery Row.

The gang enjoyed some pizza and a couple beers with Professor T’s relatives in Redding before getting a good night’s sleep ahead of the next grueling leg of the tour. Sacramento, and San Francisco would challenge Billie with their traffic. She learned a thing or two about urban congestion in Portland and the lessons stuck…they were no longer having to apologize for late arrivals. Of course smoothing things over would be much easier if Professor T could take his diplomatic approach up a notch or two, but it’s all in the rearview as Billie was getting real good at choosing alternate routes offered by Siri’s drunk sister now programmed with Rosanne Barr’s salty voice.

“Are you blind AND deaf?”
Roseanne barked at Billie whenever she missed a turn.

***

It took a full day to finish at State University in Sacrimento, then it was off to one of the most storied, cosmopolitan cities in the US. The interviews were to take place at the University of California, Berkley, and this was an eye-opener for the flatlanders riding in the Chool Bus…oh yeah. See, weather in the Bay area is famously mild, a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by the nation’s many…many unfortunates living out of cars, vans, and motor homes.

Buck Wellstone could hardly get his jaw off the floor as the Chool Bus past block after block of hovels lining the sidewalks. Vacant lots filled with RVs and tents…small cohorts of unhoused individuals tightly clustered in pungent slapdash micro-communities. It’s a bit much for a Big Sky Texas cowboy to take in.

The mix of folks appearing for the interviews was as diverse as the city itself, and once the final round was complete, the gang was more than happy to be moving on. Not out of any fear or loathing for an overwhelming presence of the nation’s down and out, rather the unsettling juxtaposition of some of the best and brightest cohabitating a mere’s security door from the nation’s doomed, not simply there because Mother Nature’s wrath is less prominent, no…it’s San Francisco…one of the world’s most celebrated cities.

At the end of the day in Berkley, Billie met some of what she considered the most interesting people she had yet to encounter in all her years on the high plains. One was preparing an IPO for his artificial intelligence development company, another impressed Billie with wisdom beyond years, and nearly penniless. She and her rescue dog had been living in one of those tent cities for the past several months. Not sure what to do next, but inclined to hop a cargo freighter to Viet Nam. Clear-eyed about the downsides of life in a communist country, but at the same time, done with the zero-sum, social darwinist hunger games of capitalism.

“Why Viet Nam?” said Billie.

“Not one hundred percent sure,” said her new companion. “I’ve always felt we Americans should try to do something…anything to help folks in South East Asia recover from the devastation the American war did to their land. So, i signed up with an international NGO to help the locals plant a billion trees.

“Trees?” said Billie.

“Yes, even though there’s no way for us to mitigate the human losses, we certainly can help to repair damage to nature’s oxygen-generating forests and urban greenspace. So… we’ll see. Right now looking to get myself and my dog, Buddy, vaccinated for the stay, however long it may end up being.”

Billie smiled, “That sounds like a worthy adventure.”

Billie’s new companion continued: “Proud to be an American, land of liberty within the confines of total freedom and absolute justice.” She went on. “And so, if total freedom ends in anarchy and absolute justice to tyranny, i choose a little of both…liberty. I plan to give way to contrition with mine, and not just for the people of Southeast Asia, but to the land we shredded with our bombs and weaponized herbicides.”

***

Later, on the road to Salinas, Professor T was reacquainting himself with John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row characters and settings as the gang agreed to spend the next day in Monterey soaking in the atmosphere, trying to overlook the touristy vibe and really get emersed in the world created by this great American storyteller.

For one, Professor T, contemplating the tent enclaves in Berkley’s vacant lots, couldn’t ignore a sense of deja vu. How there must be similar stories in there. On Cannery Row the nation’s doomed found ways to thrive through interconnection and mutual support. Necessity giving folks on the waterfront row and in the Bay Area canvas-roof enclaves license to give in to the better angels of human nature. Prostitutes, drifters, iconoclasts, and rebels forming surrogate families protecting inhabitants from the devastating isolation of the modern world.

***

Presently, Professor T turned his thoughts to the brewing storm waiting for him back home in Kansas. His anger was beginning to temper a bit. He thought about the lessons taken from the pages of Cannery Row. Could he beat back the legal attack with angry defiance? Should he put his back into a fight against the natural flow of the universe, or could he defuse Abagail’s attack with acceptance? Regardless of the outcome, could he just simply let things be? He would find out soon enough as he was summoned to appear in court back home because Abigail’s attorneys had filed a suit to collect damages.

The Zoom conference outburst had not helped his case at the University. He was written up for “chronic low performance,” a bureaucratic prelude to being subject to an unfavorable post-tenure review, one step closer to being dismissed. Scheizer & Bok will use this bit of unfortunate news in their case for damages.

“You have ARRIVED, dummy!” Roseanne Barr’s voice barked as Billie steered the Chool Bus into the Salinas RV park where the gang would spend the night.

NEXT WEEK:
The Forks head south (SoCal) venturing close to LA via Santa Barbara and Moorpark, then, a taste of the Bakersfield sound at the Merle Haggard Museum.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links

This Land: Connecticut

LISTEN: If you want to understand the United States of America, and you’re in a hurry, you could do worse than look at Connecticut. It’s a real grab bag of a place. It’s got all the shiny things and all the sharp, rusty things America keeps in its pockets. It’s a place of beautiful, brilliant minds, some of which are put to work making new and interesting ways to blow people to pieces.

C’EST LA: They had a war there, once. The Pequot War. This was long before the powdered wigs and the Declaration of Independence. It was just plain, old-fashioned barn-burner. And then, not so long ago, a young man walked into a school called Sandy Hook and did something so awful it’s hard to write words about it. Between those two points, you will find a long and profitable history of making tools for the unfortunate vocation of killing people and breaking things.

A man named David Bushnell built a submarine there called the Turtle. This was way back. It was supposed to sneak up on British ships and make them go away forever. It didn’t work so well, but we’ve been perfecting the idea ever since. Now Connecticut is home to companies with names that sound like comic book villains. Raytheon. Pratt & Whitney. Lockheed Martin. They make clever things that fly very fast and then explode. Busy, busy, busy. And the money rolls in.

But here’s the thing about people: they are messy, unpredictable creatures. For every looper building a bomb, there’s another sitting in a quiet room, trying to write a letter that might save the world.

Connecticut had one of the best letter-writers of all time. His name was Sam Clemens, but he called himself Mark Twain. He lived in a big, beautiful, goofy house in Hartford. He had a mustache. He saw all the greed and the violence and the hucksterism, and he thought it was the saddest and funniest thing in the world. He used free speech like a fire hose. He pointed it at hypocrisy and cruelty and tried to wash some of the filth away.

And not far from him lived a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe. She wrote a letter about owning other human beings. It made a lot of powerful people very, very angry. That’s how you know a letter is doing its job. She was using her brain and a bottle of ink to fight against loopers using whips and chains.

It’s enough to give you an existential whiplash…?

And get this: back in the day, the political party of Democrats in Connecticut thought the Civil War was a bad idea. They weren’t too bothered about the whole slavery business. Now, of course, that same party in that same state plants signs in every lawn about diversity and inclusion. The names on the jerseys have stayed the same, but the players, and the rules of the game, have gone topsy-turvy. It’s all very confusing. It’s a good reason to spark up some of Snoop Dogg’s doobois.

So what’s next for the little state with the big contradictions? Now we’ve taught the machines to think, or at least to write book reports and make up pictures. We’re feeding all of our nonsense into these things, all of our history, and our hatreds, and our love poems. What will the thinking machines make of Connecticut? Maybe they’ll tell us to keep building the bombs, only to do it more efficiently. Or maybe they’ll read Mark Twain and decide the whole human experiment is a joke. A bad one.

I imagine old Sam Clemens would have a thing or two to say about it. He’d look at the internet, where everyone has a megaphone and no one has an editor, and he’d probably light a cigar, pour himself a whiskey, and rack the billiards. He might have watched that movie, Idiocracy, and said, “They got it mostly right, but it should have been sadder.” He knew the score. He knew that human genius was a beautiful and dangerous thing, like a bottle of nitroglycerin. You could use it to help prevent a heart attack, or you could use it to blow up the world.

C’EST LA: We have the angels of our better nature, and we have the howling monkeys who want to burn it all down. They both live in Connecticut. They both live in us. Words are nice. Books are nice. But they might not be enough to keep the monkeys from the matches.

We’ll have to do better. We’ll just have to be kinder. And that’s all we have to say about that.

Next Stop: Jersey, Baybay!

Onward through the fog… RH

You got your swords…
You got your ploughshares…
Visit Hartford…
They’ve got it all there…
Commune with ghosts…
Converse with brilliant minds…
All await you in Connecticut!

This Land: Kentucky

Alright, alright, alright! Ronnie and Rocinante started this tour from the great state of Kansas, and in the stompin’ rock-n-roll salad days, Kansas was famous for springtime tornadoes. Well, times change, people change, and apparently weather patterns change as well. For instance, here in the Southeastern states, the approach of March and April 2025 subjected Ronnie and Rocinante to three, count ’em, three white knuckle evenings where one eye was on the online tornado trackers and the other on streaming movies. Two of those evenings featured sirens screaming, “take cover people, a funnel has been spotted!!”

Now, being a lifelong Kansas native, Ronnie’s habit is to hightail it outdoors to look for the funnel. But all three of these incidents happened at night, and those are no fun at all. So, there they were, watching for danger funnels on the radar trackers while Ronnie formulated a plan for what to do if the damn thing rolled over them. Once, they had a nearby ditch to duck into, but the other two times, just Cracker Barrel which is closed after 10:00pm. So Ronnie’s idea was to wrap himself in a substantially padded sleeping bag, strap into the passenger seat and ride it out with Rocinante. The good news? They didn’t have to resort to drastic measures on any of these evenings, but the most recent incident did scare Ronnie a bit, and the psychic reverberations are chronicled in the below dream dispatch (embellishments taken by artistic license)..

Buckle up, Buttercup, because we’re driving headfirst into the swirling, screaming maw of a river-riding tornado, a meteorological monstrosity tracing the muddy spine of the Mississippi and Ohio, a psychedelic serpent of wind and chaos, as the Mississippi, usually a languid giant, began to froth. From the trembling neon of Beale Street, a tornado, not of wind, but of memory and distorted reality, spun to life. It didn’t roar, it whispered, a chorus of forgotten river songs, bourbon-soaked laments, and the echoes of civil war battles all the way from the blues-soaked delta of Memphis to the bourbon-soaked hills of Louisville.

It started, as these things often do, with a whisper, a low growl in the humid air above Beale Street, a pregnant pause in the rhythm of the blues. Then, BOOM, a swirling vortex of fury ripped through the neon haze, sucking up stray guitar licks and the lingering scent of barbecue like a cosmic vacuum cleaner. We’re talking a twister with a goddamn attitude, folks, a hell-bent hurricane on a pilgrimage to the heart of bluegrass country.

Upriver it raged, a furious finger pointing towards Kentucky, leaving behind a trail of bewildered catfish and flattened riverboats. The swirling vortex first caught the echoes of Elvis’s ghostly hip swivels, then twisted north, past the slumbering cotton fields. The air shimmered, and we saw a young Jennifer Lawrence, not on a red carpet, but atop a wild-eyed pony, her laughter echoing across the rolling hills of her childhood farm. “Those horses,” she whispered, her voice a phantom breeze, “they knew the secrets of the land, secrets the river whispered too.” The tornado, momentarily calmed, seemed to nod, then resumed its watery ascent.

Next, the phantom funnel roared past Churchill Downs, where the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, fueled by a lifetime of Wild Turkey and mescaline, materialized in a puff of ganja smoke. He was ranting about the “equine gentry,” their manicured hooves and bloodline arrogance, as the tornado ripped the fancy hats off the heads of bewildered spectators. “Fear and Loathing in Tornado Alley,” he’d scream, his banshee voice lost in the wind, “a goddamn vortex of pure, unadulterated madness!”

The tempest continued its journey, a whirling dervish of destruction, passing over Louisville, where the spirit of Muhammad Ali, light as a butterfly and stinging like a bee, rose to meet it. He was projected into a snowy black & white television screen reliving a defiant response to the military draft, his voice echoing through the storm, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home to drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” The audio glitched, he continued through the white noise, “I got no quarrel with them Viet Cong!” he said. The tornado, momentarily stunned by his sheer force of personality, seemed to hesitate, then roared on, a begrudging respect in its howl.

Further up the Ohio, the ghost of Abe Lincoln, his lanky frame emerging from the mist, pointed a spectral finger towards his “sinking spring” childhood home. “Even the land weeps,” he intoned, his voice deep and resonant, “when the balance is disturbed.” The tornado, perhaps sensing a kindred spirit in the rail-splitter’s melancholic wisdom, seemed to soften its destructive touch, leaving the old homestead relatively unscathed.

Then, the storm reached the heart of bluegrass country, where Chris Stapleton, his voice a whiskey-soaked lament, stood defiant against the swirling chaos, his trademark cowboy hat firmly planted on his head. “They told me my style was too raw, too real,” he growled, a plume of smoke curling from a phantom stem, “but the wind knows the truth.” The tornado, impressed by his gritty authenticity, seemed to bow in deference, whipping his long hair into a frenzy.

Dwight Yoakam, his voice echoing the Bakersfield sound, tipped his hat to the storm, a knowing grin on his face. “Even the Bluegrass wind respects the Bakersfield Sound,” he drawled, his voice cutting through the roar. The tornado, perhaps drawn to the twang of his soul, seemed to sway in time with the rhythm.

Finally, as the storm reached its crescendo, a spectral banjo echoed through the chaos. Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, materialized, a red clan robed image straight from the Coen Brothers’ movie, his eyes glowing with an otherworldly light. He plucked a haunting melody, a lament for the ravaged land, and the tornado, as if listening to a divine command, began to dissipate, its fury spent, leaving behind a trail of eerie calm and the lingering echo of the high, lonesome sound.

And so, the river-riding tornado, a psychedelic fever dream of wind and chaos, faded into the Kentucky hills, leaving behind a trail of twisted jangled nerves, tall tales, and the lingering scent of bourbon and bluegrass. Nothing like a good existential scare to bring out the vivid dreams.