CHAPTER 20: 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.

In the back of the Chool Bus, Jack was processing the visit with cousin Janice and her happy brood. They all seemed untroubled by conventional notions of personal hygiene and the welcoming comfort of a well tended home. The small children’s filthy clothing and matted hair blended perfectly with the chickens, goats, rabbits, and llama roaming around the smallish fenced-in piece of wilderness their bungalow was nestled in. But it was the pervasive omnipresence of outdoor cobwebs and rotting apples that puzzled Jack the most. He remembers his cousin in her younger years to be very tidy and neatly put together. This change of milieu was confusing, and profoundly so as Jack was still thinking about it as the gang rolled into the next destination…four plus hours along the pacific coast Highway 101…Eureka, California.

According to the original plan, after some exploring, the gang would spend the night in this coastal town. But it was not to be as Jack’s psychic antenna was humming on red-alert after a chance encounter with a recently-enlightened privateer in the Lost Coast Brewery and Cafe.

The fellow went by an oddly pirate nom de plume, Klint Lockwood. He was presently trying to decide whether to change the name since he had nearly flipped his personal philosophy on its head. Where his buccaneer’s personality was nicely represented in the alias, he didn’t want to direct his followers to use a different email address with the change. So, Klint Lockwood he remained, but his story had changed in a radical way that triggered Jack’s suspicious nature.  

Jack sat down at the Lost Coast bar and ordered up a pint. After paying the bartender, a fella sitting on the stool next to him introduced himself. It was Klint and after some customary polite exchanges, Jack found himself mesmerized by this crusty raconteur’s tale.

“Salt life doesn’t just dry your skin…it scours your soul,” said Klint.

“I used to think of myself as the ultimate entrepreneur. I wasn’t just a pirate with a bitchin’ handle, high-speed skiff, and a GPS jammer…i was a market disruptor. In my world…the world of the “black flag” and the gray market…everything was a transaction. You either used the means of acquisition, or you were subject to them.” He explained how his piracy was the purest form of the every man for himself ethos developed gazing at gleaming skyscrapers from the slums. “I didn’t worry about the damage incurred to my gear or skiff from the raids, “it was just part of the process… variable line items to be subtracted from my personal bottom line.” This was where Jack’s sixth sense began to tingle, but he was starting to loosen up. He ordered a second pint and listened intently to Klint’s story. 

“Then my skiff hit a submerged reef off the coast of Pinar del Río. The storm didn’t care about my bottom line. It just ripped the hull open like a tin can, swallowing my crates of recently acquired electronics and copper tubing like the mother of all Megaldons. Eventually, i washed up on a stretch of white sand, coughing up diesel and brine, clutching a blue flotation boat cushion.”

Jack wasn’t familiar with the psycho-social makeup of the Pinar del Rio natives, so he inquired, “what did you encounter? How did the locals receive you?” said Jack.

“I expected the locals to strip me. I expected the police to ransom me. That’s how the world works, right? A zero-sum game. If you have, i lack…if i take, you lose.”

Jack gave Klint a quizzical look, arching one eyebrow.

“Instead, i was found by a group of campesinos. They didn’t ask for a passport or credit card. They put me on a wooden cart, took me to a community hall, and fed me black beans and rice. As i healed, i watched them. They didn’t work for a “boss” sitting in an air-conditioned office, they worked the land because their neighbors needed to eat.

“It’s amazing these agrarian communities continue to thrive given all the current agroecological planners have done to ‘modernize,’ food production,” Said Jack. “Lemmie guess…there’s no oil, or rare earth minerals located near Pinar del Rio?” The brew was failing to take the edge off his ever growing unease.

Jack hit the red-alert stage when Klint started talking about his conversion epiphany.

“It hit me while i was helping an old man repair a tractor owned by no one in particular. I was looking at the machine, thinking about how much it might be worth on eBay. The old man just smiled and handed me a wrench and said, ‘The tool belongs to the hand that uses it, campañero, And the harvest belongs to the hunger that needs it.’”

Well, need with one hand, pound sand with the other and see which one breaks first, thought Jack. He was growing deeply suspicious of this fella’s Road to Damascus cock-n-bull story.

Klint was, by now, monologuing, apparently not noticing if Jack was paying attention or not. “I used to think freedom was the power to take whatever i wanted, and get away with the theft. I was wrong. True freedom is the rejection of self-entitled acquisition as a primary survival strategy. I was a ghost on the water, haunting a world of greed. Now, i want to be a man among people, rooted in an equitable world where the only thing we hoard is the sun on our backs and the common wealth of Nature’s abundant bounty.

That did it, Jack couldn’t take any more of this suspiciously inexplicable humanitarian enlightenment. He finished his pint and excused himself. Once back at the bus, the gang compared notes to find out all of them had similar impressions. Not to mention the sand… it was everywhere, on the sidewalks, on the 24 hour fitness floor, on Jacks barstool, in the restrooms, EVERYWHERE! A testament to impermanence, erosion, decay, death.

They all agreed…time to hit the road. Just a little over three hours to Redding where Professor T’s niece and her family had settled after her husbands discharge from the Navy. Plenty of room and her kids loved “Uncle Mork.” There was a pool, a hot tub, and “no freaking cobwebs.” Once the Chool Bus rolled past city limits, Jack felt that they had avoided a potential land-pirate raid.

NEXT WEEK:
The Forks make their way from Redding to San Jose for focus group interviews. Then off to Salinas and Moneray to soak in the Steinbeck vibes on Cannery Row.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links