The more things change the more they stay the same.

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Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Backpacker

Backpacking is the journey from trailhead to lake. Yes, the destination could be any body of fresh water, but I don't want to complicate things. Besides, as a backpacker do you go for a line or a point on a map?

The backpacker must labor. Backpacking must be at least in part gruelling. Monotonous switchbacks are not absolutely necessary, but they are a fundamental metaphor for the experience of the trail. The trail is hot and dusty; the lake is wet and cool.

A vacation is a microcosm, or so you wish. The backpacker imagines that at the end of labor is sweetness. The trail is the arena of this imagination. It traverses uncertain terrain and arrives at the promised kingdom.

Vistas, like certain other fussed-over unveilings, must be conserved. To have a vista of the lake the whole way is obscene. Just as there must be labor, there must be blindness. You must travel under the sparse cover of millions of unremarkable trees. Continuing down the dreary viewless path proves your faith.

Not to worry. The backpacker gets a reward. You will round a bend to a revelation. That's what a vista is, no matter how many postcards you've seen. The revelation consists of three things: a lake, conifer trees, and vertical relief. You may be able to dissect these elements, but consciousness plays no part here. You will gasp. Make no mistake: this reveals no more nature than pupil dialation tests. Yet you will be equally helpless. The backpacker looks about in wonder: such a clear jewel of a lake, such bright stone, such green trees! Such a dramatic landscape!

If all the elements are in place, the felicity of the revelation is certain. The backpacker ogles rocks. The landscape beams right through you, undigestable. The backpacker often carries freeze-dried food, but doesn't have to carry Sublime Concentrate. The backpacker already inhales it through the eyes. It may be swarming with people, but we've yet to find a stronger dose than Yosemite Valley. Just look at it, and tell me it exists.

At small gaps in the trees where towers of exposed rock are visible, the backpacker stops and gapes, and exclaims. A seemly trail may tease discreetly.

Ideally, the backpacker is alone on the lake. The backpacker may smile at other backpackers, but backpackers want to avoid each other. More specifically, backpackers want to avoid seeing each other. The backpacker must imagine solitude at the lake. The backpacker is unique to the backpacker, and wants to be unique to the lake. Visible backpackers ruin it.

Sometimes, the backpacker's sense of obscenity transfers from the other backpackers to the lake. In this case, the lake is referred to as a popular spot. The backpacker seeks out less popular spots.

The Final Solution

It doesn't matter that the political motives are not immediately discernable in the plaza redesign. In Ashland, politics and The Homeless Problem are inseperable. To say that the plaza redesign is at heart an attempt to reorganize the homeless population is not jumping to a conclusion or going out on a limb. Before knowing anything, it's a reasonable assumption.

This is true because the reactives whom this assumption is a reaction to carry the same assumption: everything is about the homeless. When the Oak Knoll fire happend, the man who allegedly started it could not simply be homeless, but a part of a larger problem. The psyche of this town is such that before he was even named, the problem was waiting for him to become evidence. For the same reason, the problems of downtown businesses are not the problems of downtown businesses. Businesses are persecuted by the homeless, so business owners say, who in turn are persecuted by the bleeding hearts who defend the homeless. It's rather cozy, really--a warm blanket of infinite scapegoats.

Behind the words "plaza redesign" a whole unspoken rhetoric stands ready. The plaza is a problem because the homeless hang out there. Their presence scares off tourists, and therefore reduces the money they spend in the surrounding shops. The plaza must be made somehow unappealing to the homeless. It must be cleaned of the stain.

Imagine what kind of plaza would dissuade homeless from loitering. (The rows of metal spikes that keep birds off come to mind, personally.) Find one of those St. Vincent de Paul donation boxes put up recently downtown, and read it. Imagine, if you can, the mechanism by which the presence of or donations to these boxes could reduce panhandling downtown. If you're feeling particularly brave, try to imagine what the mastermind behind these boxes imagines panhandling to be.

On both sides of this divisive and all-subsuming issue, it appears, we await a solution. The business owners wait for the law to push the problem away, and the bleeding hearts wait for reform to address "the root of the problem" (that elusive thing to which one can always eliptically refer). Whether it's a beautiful moment of guilt-dissolving healing, or a righteous sweeping away of "the bad element" we seek, something golden awaits us at the end of our labors.

The root of the problem is the ground on which we stand. Or at the very least, on which we shop for organic produce. Not that this is the end of history, but were Capitalism to dissolve, we wouldn't have to win the aesthetic purity of downtown Ashland to lubricate the flow of tourist dollars. However, those are only the particulars of the problem. Contrary to our utopian hopes, there's always someone to agonize over.

Spelunky

There is no saving. There is no level the same as any other, but neither is there a level much different from any other. Level by level you go down as far as you can into the cave, until you die.

It's easy to die in this world composed of limited elements lifted from Indiana Jones. There are snakes (you hate those), homocidal Oriental musclemen, rolling balls of stone twice your size released when you steal a golden idol, bats, spiders, animated skeletons, and most lethal of all (because easy to forget), arrow traps.

To replenish your life, there are damsels. From the corners of this infinitely rearranged maze, these blondes scream "HELP!" They go limp when you carry them in your arms, and sometimes limper when you throw them into the paths of arrows to disarm traps or at creatures to bludgeon them to death with her body. If dead they are excellent body shields, if alive, they are cashed in for longevity at the maze's exit. She walks through the doorway, and you gain a heart: You can now be hit once more before dying. Where they go is unknown. When you go follow through that same door, you enter another, deeper maze.

So long as you live you may acquire money. On the surface this is your only desire. Your greed for gold coins, idols, and gems is as insatiable as it is casual. It is, seemingly, your reason for exploring. You use your ingenuity to access the riches scattered throughout the caves. When you die, none of this capital is preserved.

When you die, the path you have forged through the cave is not a path at all, because you can't retrace your steps. Nothing you did matters any more. Yet you continue to spelunk, the reborn you. What carries over between your numerous deaths at the bottom of each new but very similar cave? You learn better how to navigate these caves, to go further down into the world that never translates.

While it becomes a familiar background, you nonetheless attune yourself to the sonic quality of the caves. Unlike the caves themselves, their sound repeats. Each iteration is a perfect reproduction of the previous. What you attune to is the difference when the cave's patience with your presence is running out. Sound slows down, distorts. At first this is not alarming, or even noticable, because the cave's sound is defined by an eery bending of square waves. After the first time you die from a haunting of a cave ghost, the ambiguity turns over: The mundane bending sounds like it might be the end of your days. You develop an anxious ear. The familiar repetition is ever on the brink of an intimation of doom. You begin to really listen.

The Forest in the Garden

Ought to be a whole hierarchy of smaller chairs scattered throughout the bamboo garden, running the gamut from toddler-sized to ant-sized. I've ruined the illusion of scale of course, though I doubt it was very convincing. The chairs don't quite look like the kind you sit in. The irrigation gadget, if you can see it, might give it away, or the size of the lion statue, which may somehow look the size that it is. People worry about including scale references in photos in a technical or scientific context, but there are so many clues that to truly confuse the eye an extraordinary level of control over the scene is necessary. It works best when there's hardly a scene at all. The bamboo, conrete patio "stones," chairs, lion statue, soil, cement wall, fallen leaves, and irrigation lines provide a thicket of contextualizing scale data.

I rarely speak in that kind of "ought," don't generally look at something and imagine the way I wish it were. I'm not a visionary. One needs visionaries, but they can be exasperating company, never stopping to see or accept anything, always moving themselves into the scene to fix it. A visionary rejects knowledge. My silly little dream of what I want this cafe patio to be replaces what inspired it, the two undersized chairs. Of course, dreams of what could be are hardly the only things to swoop in to mediate experience. It's not that the visionary gives up the object (whatever that is) but gives up thinking, delays it. He is constantly dreaming up ways to improve the world and persuing those ways, so that he need never arrive. The thinker, on the other hand, is constantly keeping action at bay through contemplation, adjusting his understanding of the world to it. The world will happily never meet the visionary's expectations, and the thinker's understanding will happily never meet the world. Both are deeply entrenched. Neither ever reach anything because their criteria are broken, but then if they did reach something, then what? There would be nothing left to do or understand whatever the hell I'm going on about.

The Hotel

I used to take the elevator up to the top floor, but the last time I did one of the hotel staff finally did something about it. He was very apologetic. His first sentence began with a conciliatory "I know". I don't remember what else he said. That he can't have non-guests up here, probably. Which led us into the elevator together, trying to make small talk. He kept apologizing, and I kept saying I didn't hold it against him, or mind much. Every time I go up I know I'm not supposed to be there. That's why I go. The view is wonderfully removed from the street. It is relaxing, or I think so until I'm up there, fidgeting. If it weren't illicit, I doubt I would go.

I haven't been since that run-in with him happened. Maybe there's a camera, or one of the guests was particularly uppity and told him. Or maybe he just noticed me, clearly out of place, entering the elevator. Anyway, I no longer want to take the risk.

The southern side of the building is very warm, when the sun is out. That side is perpendicular to the main drag, and my route to the grocery store goes along there. It's a half-block of quiet heat. The whole building is painted a very bright beige, which looks yellow at some times of the day. The rest of the time it looks awful. Brutal. Without discrimination--as if every detail has been ignored. The sunlight reflects off of this nearly white surface, creating a kind of solar oven near where it intersects with the sidewalk. If the wind is coming from the north, the massive edifice blocks it. In spring I can here receive an early summer. Then I get to the corner of both the building and the street, and everything floods back: wind, traffic, tourists, cold.

Abe's Haunting

At the front of Lithia Park, at the foot of the stairs leading up to the Shakespeare Festival, atop a granite boulder, there once was an undersize statue of Abraham Lincoln. If years were seconds, it would've been studied by particle physicists. It was there and it was not. Even now, it isn't quite not there.

Its trouble may have been that it was too easy a target, symbolically. Lincoln is old enough that for many high school students he falls into the category of "old white guys in history textbooks". The statue was nothing but a banal symbol of the authority of adults. Thus for certain teenagers it was the perfect material with which to articulate their aspirational difference from The Man. The statue's destruction was, in other words, a prank. Lighten up, man.

First came off its head. Or should I say his? There was something of an uncanny valley about this thing. It was a replica of the Lincoln Memorial, but rather than towering, superhuman, above us, it was slightly smaller than life-size. Like an inverse chicken, it went on being motionless with its head chopped off. I thought it was funny at the time. Precisely the attitude that, fortified with alcohol and testosterone, probably lead to dear Stumpy.

More amusing still (for the same juvenile reasons) was the impotence of authorities' response. He lost his head, so a new one was put on. It was undignified, really--you could tell he wasn't all there because his head was of a different color than the rest of him. He was all white marble, but his head was whiter. This act was repeated, and then repeated again, like a grotesque game of musical heads. This may have gone on for a whole year. I have no idea where all the heads came from, or, indeed, where they all ended up. Sitting in someone's basement, perhaps, is a pile of polished Lincoln heads.

At some point whoever was in charge of poor Abraham gave up. That, or the pranksters escalated their theft. The whole statue disappeared. Nothing has changed since then. The boulder has not been removed; the statue has not been replaced. At the top of the rock a decayed square of white statue remains is still bolted in place. Now a decade since, it was never smoothed off. Stubbornly, the wound was left. I can't help but think there's something petulant about this: the city wearing the statue's absence on their sleeve.

Wall

Around here old houses were built sometime in the 20th century. It’s a big deal. Whole ‘historic districts’ have been demarcated with little signs on top of the street signs like the ‘scenic road’ signs on the highway. The landlord of a house I looked at recently pointed out all the little things she had done to keep the house’s appearance ‘period,’ which in this case was the 1930s. She had torn up the linoleum floors and scraped off the white paint to reveal the wood planks underneath. The house had to be excavated from underneath what these days is midcentury detritus. As far as houses are concerned, the 1930s are more hip than the 1960s.

Our house, in this older-is-better logic, suffers under more recent fashion atrocities. It was built in 1908, and when my parents moved in, in the 1970s, there was a wraparound porch, and a large central wood stove. The more recent additions, back then, were the thick brown carpets, the hallway that connected the main house to a smaller cottage, and several electric heaters mounted around the house.

In the winter I remember living from heater to heater. Whatever we were doing it was always next to the stove or a heater. The stove gave me two childhood fascinations: the stove was all cast iron, so it was possible to place a cylindrical magnet on the side and watch it roll all the way down without leaving the stove’s surface. When the stove was hot, spit became mesmerizing. One droplet from my lips would sizzle violently and move itself at random across the stove’s flat surface, disappearing after a few seconds.

These things are tinged with nostalgia because at some point in my childhood my parents decided to remodel. They had fallen into a sizable chunk of cash, and apparently had been building up fantasies of what the house could be. The porch--where once my brother and I had run around in Superman costumes getting splinters in our feet--moved inside. The living room, as a result, became enormous, and was lined with huge windows. The brown carpets and smallish windows had made the house dark, and now it was seething with sunlight. The carpets were taken away, and pale wood floors were installed. The basement was turned into living space, the awkwardest that ever was: a bedroom without a door, attached to an office. If we’re stuck with positive adjectives, our house had gone from cozy to spacious. If on the other hand we’ve only negative, then from cramped and dark to empty and blinding. We still like to say that it was built in 1908.

This house has gone the opposite route, for far more expense. Instead of remodeled it has been restored. It received the most elaborate paint job in town a few years ago. It’s eye-popping and ostentatious in easter-egg shades of purple, aqua, and gold. Behind a black iron fence it looks to be an untouchable, pristine relic. I have never seen anyone enter or exit it. This could be because the entrance is an alley away from prying eyes. Public and private has been defined rigidly here: Two sides of the house are to be seen, two are not.

This year that paradigm has been finalized. The most solidly build privacy fence I’ve ever seen has been constructed on the private side. It’s made of thick, well-stained wood and iron slats. The alley along which it is built is one I walk several times a week (it’s my route to the library). When it was being built I saw the trench in which it is now anchored. It was three feet deep. This fence is more like a wall, and it isn’t going anywhere.