Reason

The Chool Bus (ch19)

CHAPTER 19: The White-Knuckle Storm Crawl Continues… Tales of Ghosts and Mass Sociogenic Hysteria in Coquille.

At forty miles per hour, the trip from Florence to Coos Bay took every bit of two. For Professor T, the disappearance of what little sunlight was leaking through the bloated clouds resembled a gray leviathan slowly swallowing the sky. The colors bled out, leaving behind a dark and angry deluge of cold, suffocating water. Professor T hoped Billie wasn’t feeling something similar… an overwhelming sensation of being waterboarded by Posiden.

As par usual, Buck was playing a reassuring role in the passenger seat…his low-key southern gentleman’s confidence bolstering Billie’s stoic resolve. Of course, they had no choice as darkness was near total and the lonely forty-eight mile stretch was mostly devoid of pull-over spaces.

They HAD to soldier on.

Contributing to Professor T’s claustrophobic dread was a combination of Buck and Billie’s hushed tones and Jack’s untroubled snoring. It was disconcerting for Mork T as he could not imagine how anyone would be able to sleep through the pounding of drops the size of small water balloons, peppered by the occasional flash-bulb appearance of Zeus’ shocking bolts, and the delayed crashing of the Olympic bowling alley. Professor Thompson felt as if he had survived a staredown with the abyss in the two-plus hours it took to cover fifty miles… not to mention the hairy beast he could have sworn he saw lumbering through the lightning flashes as darkness was closing in.

As Billie guided the Chool Bus through Mother Nature’s extreme water hazard, she kept her eyes peeled for the sudden appearance of animals, vehicles, debris, or God forbid, people in the road. And though this may have been the most intense rain dump she’d ever had the chance to conquer, she was confident in the advice her grandfather gave for inclement weather.

“Never mind the posted speed limit… keep your wheels on the road, and keep your speed within the bounds of ‘reason and prudence.’” This advice served to earn Billie the gang’s trust as a calm, vigilant, responsible, True Blue Chool Bus pilot.

By the time the gang finally rolled into Coos Bay, the downpour had settled into a gentle, steady shower. The drops pattered on the roof most of the night and the soothing ambience served to lull all into a deep, dreamless slide into comatosity. When the morning sun finally made an appearance in Coos Bay, the gang took some time in the twenty-four-hour fitness center where they had parked for the night. Once all had their morning necessaries completed, some light breakfast food, some coffee, back on the road ventured the Forks.

It was a clear sunny day when the bus rolled into Coquille. First stop? The home of Jack’s cousin, Janice. She and her sizable extended family were happy to welcome the Forks to their quaint little Oregon town. After introductions and some familial catch-up, Janice, tipped off by anecdotes of the gang’s time in Seattle, was reminded of the local Pho restaurant…all agreed…lunch at the Coquille Pho House.

Now, many consider this signature Vietnamese dish more than a nutritious, delicious meal, but also medicine. And with this medicinal dish, there is a process. First, the host brings each diner a plate with juicy wedged limes, a handful of fresh bean sprouts, a few sprigs of fragrant basil, and for those who believe their meal should have an opportunity to bite back, several slices of fresh jalapeno peppers.

Once the bowls arrive, diners prepare their medicinal Pho (oxtail soup) to their personal tastes. The proprietor furnishes accompanying spices at every table, hoisin sauce (seasoned soybean paste), chili sauce, Sriracha, fish oil, sugar, etc… you can gauge each diners’ capsaicin tolerance by the color of the oxtail broth. If it’s red it’s hot baybay. Now that the accompanying spices, herbs, and citrus had been added, one engages in a graceful ballet which involves chopsticks, and soup spoons. Swimming in the broth, noodles, and vegetable additions, depending on the order, will be your choice of meat: brisket, shrimp, beef tendon, tripe, mystery meat balls, etc.. Some like to enjoy the medicinal qualities of the hot broth, soaking in the healing steam, draining half of it before digging into the noodles and meat. These folks generally consume the whole bowl, noodles, broth, herbs, peppers, citrus and all. Others go right for the solids, sometimes leaving half a bowl of the healing liquid unconsumed. Professor T always shakes his head when he sees so much medicine wasted.

***

Back at Janice’s secluded house deep in the woods, the gang sat on lawnchairs in the warm June sun among romping children, goats, and pecking chickens. The conversations were easy and breezy. At some point, Janice’s brother, Jason, was chatting with Professor T about a land deal he was trying to secure. It was a plot in the wilderness that was rumored to be haunted by the tortured spirits of a recently demolished insane asylum. Now, Janice’s brother doesn’t believe in ghosts. In fact, he hosted a “paranormal activity debunker” podcast for a time… till he got board with it and decided to get a job in the sawmill as it paid a whole lot steadier. His real motive was triggered by another rumor, that gold could be found on the plot. He said it would take some digging and due diligence to determine the reality of that rumor.

As for the hauntings, all Jason could muster was a grunt of incredulity, trailing off to a smirking chuckle. “Seriously?” Jason sounded somewhat defensive. “I’ve interviewed dozens of folks convinced of spectral hauntings. After a while it gets predictable and boring. Do you remember the Scooby Doo cartoons? Of the ghost stories i investigated, way too many of them resembled stock characters and plots from that wildly entertaining Saturday morning diversion. Some corrupt opportunist or even local official is responsible for one of several outrages: environmental damage, estate dispute, businesses gone bust, almost always the motivation is financial. Some desperate grasping inspires an elaborate ruse involving a haunting of some kind. In the end, they either get away with their caper by way of mass sociogenic hysteria, or they make a mistake and get busted.”

“Too bad we don’t have more of those precocious, inquisitive kids looking for mysteries to crack,” said Janice.

“Good luck with the site survey… i’d love to help pan for gold nuggets,” Billie was on autopilot, she was making sounds in order not to look bored.

Professor T was taking it all in. He considered Jason’s cock-sure outlook regarding mysterious phenomena a little too certain. In other words, Professor T was skeptical about Jason’t iron-clad skepticism. But turning his thoughts to Abigail Weiser’s inexplicable attack on his workplace integrity gave him pause. He was starting to wonder if he could accurately gauge the veracity of anybody’s fantastic story at face value. It seemed he was waking up to the depth of people’s public facing masks. He was starting to understand how the onion-like layers of personality can run deep and pungent.

Regardless, open-minded or not, Professor T considered the paranormal rumors about as real as Scooby Doo himself.

NEXT WEEK:
The gang lands in Eureka, NorCal, a beach town crawling with under-employed pirates giving the gang the heebie-jeebies, pushing them on to Redding.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links

Audiovision: The Cyrus Delusion

People love stories! Coherent frameworks for making sense of the often-unintelligible chaos of existence. If a truly good story is unavailable, a vapid stinker will do. And this desperate embrace of the easily digestible is what we might call the Deification by Default… the human brain settling for any compelling fiction, no matter how empty.

And the believers… they congregate in concrete echo-chambers, modern-day amphitheaters for a new kind of spectacle. Their gaze is fixed on an angry face projected onto a giant, 16k screen, a digital idol spitting vitriol like a croaking raven or territorial baboon.

They see our guy up there. And what a Guy. He is not merely human… he is a creature of pure, unadulterated id, a walking monument to the most cherished American religion… Getting Away With It. He is a living testament of the belief that consequences are for them. That rules are for suckers, despite the fact that he’s been tried and convicted of transgressions that would usher lesser mortals into country club prisons. And so on. The universe, in its indifference, allows such animals to prosper. This particular specimen has been fined millions for frauds so brazen, so loud and brassy, they transcend mere criminality and achieve a perverse kind of art. He’s the zero-sum game personified, a playa whose existence dictates that for him to win, others must lose. He is a babbling font of perpetual-grievance, forever the victim, endlessly fueling his sad tale of victimhood and defiance. He can’t even stand up straight, a physical manifestation of his moral scoliosis. He is covered in a fine orange paste, a desperate veneer masking the gray, clammy, countenance of a moldering corpse.

And the people… the God-fearing, the church-going, the hands-praying people, look at this babbling, orange vessel, and astonishingly proclaim: “Yes. Him. He is our champion.” Not so much admiration as an act of religious conviction… a leap of, what Mr. Bierce’s sarcastic dictionary might define as: “FAITH, n. The acceptance without evidence in the words of one who speaks without knowledge of things inexplicable.” It is the suspension of critical thought in favor of comforting delusion, the embrace of narrative that fills a void, regardless of its factual basis or internal consistency.

The human brain is funny about credulity. It needs reasons, rationalizations, even if they’re entirely bogus. The brain conjures prestige labels to slap onto zircon-encrusted baubles in order to justify worship. So, in this desperate search for legitimacy, the people dug up a relic from the annals of biblical history. They found Cyrus the Great. Cyrus! The Persian! And they told themselves, with remarkably straight faces, that this tangerine-hued Nero… was the new Cyrus. They called him a “flawed vessel,” which is precisely what you call a boat that has already sunk to the bottom of the sea.

Very well: “VIRTUE, n. In a king, that quality which keeps his subjects from sharpening their knives.” It is not necessarily about moral uprightness or inherent goodness, but about the practical efficacy of governance, the ability to maintain order and loyalty through action, not just rhetoric.

Cyrus II was a profoundly practical man, a shrewd statesman and a brilliant conqueror. His actions were dictated by strategic advantage and pragmatic necessity. Tolerance? It was not a deeply held philosophical conviction but a calculated policy. He observed the Jews moping by the river, exiled and dispossessed. Click-click-click went the imperial abacus, weighing the costs and benefits. He permitted them to return home. He didn’t smash idols or persecute local religions. Why? Because it was simply cheaper than cleaning up the inevitable riots and rebellions that religious intolerance would provoke. Mercy? A merciful conqueror, in Cyrus’s view, was one who spent less on garrisoning ruins, who avoided the costly and protracted business of subjugating a rebellious populace. Generosity? A king who hoards all the gold for himself, who starves his populace and his armies, soon finds his head in a basket, a grim lesson in the economics of power. Cyrus understood math, the cold, hard logic of imperial administration.

And now, our guy. The Cyrus of the Golden Commode, a man whose reign is marked by ostentation and vulgarity rather than strategic brilliance.

On Tolerance: Cyrus the Great managed a vast, multi-ethnic empire, understanding that stability required a degree of accommodation. Our modern Cyrus, however, manages a cable-news cycle, a perpetual loop of manufactured outrage. His entire machine runs on intolerance, a relentless jihad against phantom gremlins labeled “wokeness,” creating divisions rather than bridging them.
On Inclusivity: Cyrus the Great let diverse peoples in on the grift of empire, integrating them into its functional framework. Our Cyrus, conversely, wages a cultural war on letters… specifically D, E, and I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)… and openly dreams of an America built solely of pale, northern European peoples. He welcomes an imagined homogeneity while demonizing actual diversity.
On Compassion: Where Cyrus the Great understood the practical value of a measured mercy, our guy’s philosophy can be succinctly summarized as: “Fuck the doomed.” There is no pretense of empathy, no concern for the less fortunate, only a brutal, unvarnished disdain.
On Wisdom: Cyrus the Great was a strategic genius, a master of statecraft. Our guy’s intellectual prowess, by his own proud admission, extends to being able to identify the difference between a camel and an elephant.
On Fortitude: Cyrus the Great was a formidable warrior and empire-builder. Our guy’s most celebrated display of “fortitude” was his aggressive and ultimately successful war against the Vietnam draft.
On Generosity: Cyrus the Great understood the strategic importance of a king’s generosity. Our guy’s much-vaunted “generosity” extended to giving billions to Argentina… a country, not coincidentally, where many unhappy Germans went for a long vacation in 1945 and conveniently forgot to go home. Astonishing Coincidence?

So, what is this comparison, this desperate attempt to link a modern figure with an ancient legend? It is not history… it is a pet-rock fad, a shabby attempt to pass off an empty metaphor as genuine good, to assign a false provenance to something entirely unworthy. It is a magical story for magic junkies, a comforting fable for those who have abandoned the pesky demands of reality for the soothing embrace of fantasy. It gives us a new definition, a diagnosis of a collective delusion… sound familiar?

Now, back to our Bierce-esque sarcastic dictionary: “CYRUS-COMPLEX, n. The political hallucination wherein one mistakes a bankrupt casino boss for a Persian philosopher-king.” It is the fond, almost childlike belief that a man who cannot manage a golf score without cheating can, in fact, be trusted with an empire… a testament to a complete divorce from logical reasoning. It is a bedtime story for those who, having consciously abandoned reason and critical thought, must now shop for their saviors not in the marketplace of ideas, but in the remainder bin of historical analogies, grasping at any discarded narrative, no matter how ill-fitting or absurd.

It is all very, very silly. And so on. The endless, circular dance of self-deception continues, with profound and often tragic consequences for the bewildered animals who crave a story, any story, to light their way.

And… there it is… warts and all.

I got a black bomb…
It’s tickin’ away…
Gonna take it out…
…on the Blue Highway!

This Land: Vermont

So… after a brief hiatus from the HSoB tour (Dry Tortugas, baybay), Ronnie and Rocinante pointed the grill due North landing them in historic and spooky (see below) Burlington, Vermont. Now, because Mother Nature has a wicked sense of humor, the first night in this northeastern woodland was accompanied by the infamous “heat dome“. That’s right, temps in the 90s, not cooling down till the wee hours. Of course, Ronnie remains humble, and Rocinante snickers beneath her breath as she’s not bothered by the varieties of biological temperature sensitivities. Ronnie expects the dome to move on soon, and he’s finding the Burlington library facilities among the best yet encountered. In fact, there is only one library in which he has experience that compares with Burlington, in Topeka, KS.

Now when Ronnie thinks of Vermont, his brain immediately goes to Senator Bernie Sanders. And why not? The man, with his rumpled suits and his waving arms, and the voice of gravel mixed with moral indignation, is practically a walking, talking, quintessentially American ideal. He’s the guy who reminds you of what Grandma told you about doing the right thing, even if nobody else is. He’s a fearless avatar, this Sanders, straight outta Vermont. And Vermont, well, it’s got this weird, similar history: secular, sure, but with a moral compass that points due north; revolutionary, absolutely, but grounded in a kind of unvarnished pragmatism that’d make a brick wall seem flighty.

But hold your horses, loopers, because even the best of us, even Vermont, has got some unsightly warts. And these aren’t just little pimples, these are the kind of warts that make you wince.

First off, let’s talk about the Native Americans. The Algonquian-speaking Abenaki and the Iroquoian-speaking Mohawks. They were here, for ten thousand years or more, minding their own business, probably inventing things we still don’t understand. Then the Europeans showed up. And now? Poof. All but extinct within the territory. This, my friends, is not a testament to good neighborly relations. This smells of something far nastier, a militant exercise of racist policies, right down to the bone marrow. And get this: Vermont, with a population that barely scrapes a million souls, is one of the least diverse places you’ll ever lay eyes on. But, and here’s where the whiplash comes in, Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery. The first! They even had safe houses along the Underground Railroad, helping people escape the horrors of coerced servitude. Now, put that next to zero federally recognized tribal associations or reservations. It’s enough to make a progressive-minded person feel like they’ve just been spun around in a washing machine. Vertigo, indeed.

And then there’s the whole women’s suffrage thing. Vermont was ahead of the curve, letting women vote in town elections back in 1880, decades before it was a national thing. Good for them, right? Pat on the back, Vermont! But wait, there’s more. In 1931, this enlightened state became the 29th to pass a eugenics law. Eugenics! Sounds like something out of a bad science fiction novel, doesn’t it? They sterilized people in institutions, people they’d decided were “degenerate” or “unfit.” They said they had permission, but documented abuses, folks, documented abuses. Two-thirds of these procedures were on women, and wouldn’t you know it, poor, unwed mothers were prime targets. There’s a debate about the exact numbers, but most happened between ’31 and ’41, though some went on as late as 1970. So, yeah, light and darkness, yin and yang, the whole cosmic shebang. Vermont embodies it all.

This, loopers, is why Ronnie, with his pragmatic Kanorado heart, loves the place. It’s got guts. It’s got flaws. It’s got character. To understand it better, we gotta dig into the dirt a little.

Let’s talk about Ethan Allen. A farmer with dirt under his fingernails, a writer with some philosophical thoughts rattling around in his head, a military man, and a politician. He’s the guy who practically invented Vermont, and he’s famous for snatching Fort Ticonderoga during the Revolutionary War. He was a land speculator, got into some scrapes with the law, and next thing you know, he’s leading the Green Mountain Boys, who basically ran New York settlers out of town with a campaign of intimidation. Then he gets himself captured by the British, tossed on some Royal Navy ships, and eventually swapped in a prisoner exchange… what a life.

And this Allen fellow, he wrote a book, a controversial little number called “Reason.” He was no Christian, he said, but wasn’t sure he was a Deist either. He just wanted good sense and truth to flourish. He believed that if folks just used their brains, they’d get rid of superstition and have a better understanding of God and their obligations to each other. Sound familiar? It should.

Because from the very beginning, a beacon for human dignity, you’ve got Bernie Sanders, a modern analog to Allen. He stands for something. Yet, Vermont itself remains this sparsely populated, homogenous woodland, a place that could confound even the wisest of philosophical thinkers.

And what about Vermont’s cultural output? Well, you got Phish. A jam band. From Burlington. Known for their musical improvisation and their fan base. The East Coast’s Grateful Dead, essentially. Make of that what you will.

Feeling dizzy yet? Hold on to your hats. In the 21st century, Vermont decided to double down on its progressivism. In 2000, it was the first state to introduce civil unions. Then, in 2009, it was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and get this, they did it without being forced by a court. They just did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. And on January 22, 2018, Vermont became the first state to legalize recreational cannabis through legislative action. The ninth state for medical marijuana. And who signed these laws? A Republican Governor!

So, there you have it. Vermont. A place of contradictions, a place of pioneers, a place that sometimes gets it spectacularly right and sometimes gets it spectacularly wrong… c’est la!

And now, Ronnie, not ready to leave this place, is planning to attend some of the local “ghost tours,” cos you know, that’s one of the driving motivations of the HSoB tour. For example: Lake Champlain, bordering Burlington, Vermont, is steeped in maritime history, shrouded in tales of shipwrecks and ghosts including, but not limited to the schooner Sarah Ellen, lost in 1860, has been linked to a legend known as the Champlain Witch. The steamboat Water Witch sank in 1866 during a gale after being converted to a schooner, is another ghostly story of tragedy on the lake. This one has the captain’s youngest child lost to the depths.

Lake Champlain has claimed over 300 shipwrecks, many of these sacred zones are considered inhabited by spirits of those sleeping there. Some of these are included in Vermont’s Underwater Historic Preserve System made accessible to certified summer divers. And some of these divers have reported spooky experiences, including cold waves and strange noises near the wrecks.

Don’t worry, Ronnie won’t dive… hell, he didn’t even go snorkeling at Dry Tortugas. Something about taking off the glasses stops all thoughts of exploring the murky depths. Without the glasses, he feels like a slightly less animated Mr. Magoo.

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

It may be micro…
More trees than Glasgow…
Green Mountain country…
It’s where the syrup grows…
It’s Lake Champlain…
And its ship wreck ghosts…
All part of American Ideal!

Loopcircus