The Last Phone Booth

About three blocks from my bungalow, there is a pole at waist-high level that supports an old-fashioned half-sized booth. It used to house a telephone. It doesn’t have a bi-fold door to it. It’s more like the ones that used to sit along a wall at the train station or airport. I’ve been wondering why this thing is still standing. There is no phone in it. The phone book holder is empty.

This telephone booth, that is not a telephone booth, is opposite the town post office and in the parking lot of a very busy liquor store. I’ve been thinking I should decorate it for the Holidays.

Several years ago, a local playwright wrote a three-act musical called, “The Last Phone Booth in Willits.” The range of plots around this idea included questions from “How was anyone going to call home if there weren’t enough phone booths?” “How did anyone make their drug deal if they couldn’t meet in the phone booth?” “Where was Superman going to change to save us?” to “Who in the world would trust their lives to a cell phone when it wasn’t attached to a wall and a continuous wire?”

My town is a rural town. We have been slow to pick up the fast-pace of city ideas and those of the millennials. We are getting there, but we are very hesitant to take on new technology without any good reason to do it.

Most people want to keep and have kept their land lines. Little did many know that they weren’t doing just that when the local AT&T promised that everyone could. AT&T said it would be better if we bundled our services together and gave discounts if we bought our TV, internet, and telephone services through them. What AT&T did, however, was make land lines into digital phones that were dependent on the tower installed on the hill near town. Many people don’t have hard-wired land lines anymore, although they thought that they did.

Many of us were happy when DSL service got to our area a few years ago. The DSL line was buried alongside the highway. Between the DSL line (one of them) and the tower (one of them) those of us in Willits were pleased to be experiencing what many in the rest of the country have experienced for years, faster service, sortuv.

But, then came the fires. No one could have predicted that the conflagration would come at us from so many different directions at the same time, or that they would melt into each other and grow faster than any fireman had ever seen in this county. This observation came despite the devastating fires we have had for the past two years. This year, though, no one could have foretold that the rapid response of well-trained fire fighters would not be enough to save whole mountainsides, entire vineyards, or neighborhoods. Because of the fires in Santa Rosa which is a more affluent and higher-populated area, many of the firefighting divisions were there. Besides, how fast can a fire go across mountains?

Faster than any of us thought. In some places, families made it out in their pjs and slippers. Some didn’t make it out at all. Some were burned in their cars. Others scrambled ahead of the fire only to meet another line of flames and have to backtrack across charred land hoping that no active fire would burn across it again.

And that special AT&T tower which brought us all our cell phone communication, it melted. They fixed it. The fire backtracked and melted it again. Right next to it stands a CB radio set-up with its tall tower and a cement building. It also houses the antenna for our small-town radio station. In the beginning of the fire, that radio station informed us as to what was happening where and who needed to evacuate. There are or were so many people in the hills and in the way of the fire, the usual emergency protocol was not able to be set into motion. No reverse 911 calls could be made. No information could be obtained through the internet either because the DSL line had melted. It wasn’t buried deep enough. They fixed it and the fire backtracked and melted it again.

As a precaution to the town of Willits, PG&E shut off the natural gas lines. I agree that was something that should have be done. There was, however, no way to give us a heads-up that this action was needed or was going to be done. We just didn’t have natural gas, so there was no heat or cooking or hot water. A week later, it finally dawned on me that that action should have alerted me to the fact that Willits was in more danger than I knew. The large pieces of ash falling in my yard should have given me another clue. I didn’t really think, at the time, that this ash could have had an ember still burning. I look around my town now and see so much potential vegetation that could have gone up in flames and shudder. We didn’t have a real clue. Visual details are now showing how near we came to being wiped out. If the wind hadn’t turned from its northwest direction and headed south east, we would all be toast. Destruction came very close.

In this emergency, one thing became clear to many of us. Technology is a fragile thing. Cell phones and internet are just two of those advanced techy privileges we purchase and depend on and have been told are the way to go into the next century. What I know is that CBs and radio announcers brought us through this event. Knowing how to use a Coleman stove or warm water in the sun in a gallon milk carton sitting on top of aluminum foil is the stuff that makes survivors. And if that phone booth at the corner of Main and East Valley Road had been in working order, my family in the bay area would have heard a lot sooner from me. Like I said, I’m thinking of decorating it for the Holidays as a tribute to what was once and which we might regret isn’t anymore.

Evacuation? Willits, October 9, 2017

White flakes fall from the sky, inviting a sense of wonder. Looking more closely, I see these would-be snow crystals are more like torn pieces of paper. I shudder as one lands on my hand. They are ash from the fires burning too close to my town, to the haven of my home.

 I can feel a rising tightness squeeze my stomach. I swallow the sour bile, gurgling at the base of my esophagus. 

 With a deep breath, I try to keep myself practical and start to pack because there could be an evacuation. Instead, I am drawn to sew small gift bags out of Japanese silk someone has given me. I find myself raking out the dead fruit beneath the trees alongside my driveway, then collecting them in a pile before dumping into the compost bin.

 My hands shake. I can't seem to make any decision about what I want to take with me. I vacillate between grabbing my purse and personal/business folders for myself and my mom or packing mementoes and valuables as if I will never see my home again. If I proceed with choosing items I want with me forever then I face the possible devastating reality about leaving my home. So many have lost everything already! How do I know I may not be one of them?

With fear hounding my heart, I fall into a well-practiced pattern of self-soothing behavior by putting things in my mouth: a peanut, bite of Apple, chocolate square, water, coffee, tea. I can at least be proud I’m not chewing my fingernails to their quicks as I did when I was a youngster. I’m not stuffing a cigarette into my mouth as I did when I was a young adult, or sneaking a drink like when I was a teenager or pouring milk over my straight shot of bourbon when I was a divorcee.

The fires have come on us fast. So rapidly, in fact, there is a level of energetic hysteria vibrating through the streets. Motor homes and RVs, trailers and campers, are parked behind their matching trucks and sit in parking lots. We are readying ourselves for a mass exodus that no one really wants. Our lives are on hold, freezing our fear of impending doom into tears or anger or restlessness. We are here, ‘ready alert’ until there is no more danger and we can ‘stand down.’ When that will happen, we have no clue. The firefighters, over 400 strong, are stretched across four counties and 14 or more fires rapidly merging their mighty flames into blackening destruction across world-renown vineyards and gardens, ranches and towns.

 I pack all day and turn to see so much of myself still on the walls. The newly-made couch pillows that are color-coded to satisfy a Feng Shui design, my re-arranged art hangings of my many friends and late husband who will create no more.

Mementoes and keep sakes, family heirlooms and thrift store buys. Everything that says ‘me’ right now. There is no time for my son to come pick them up. The legacy of our family could be lost just as many others have had theirs go up in flames or destroyed recently by flooding, hurricanes, and earthquakes.

 Maybe we're supposed to give up our past thoughts, identities, and prejudices, our dreams and burdens, and step forward into something new. A new attitude, a new regime, a new way of civilization. I want to cling to all of my past, but there is no room in the car.

 So, I wait to see what is my future, a little perplexed at my choices: the training manuals for Reiki classes, the three ring binders with all the details to finish writing The Sacred Bundle Series, warm clothes, the new propane camp stove, bag of my mom's bills and investments, mine too, water, a knitting project. A few pictures, my computer, and the special suitcases with sacred items for prayer and ceremony sit by the door to grab on my way out. 

 I feel as if I’m standing on a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow, waiting for the cosmos to decide if I’m either to cross into a new life or return to my old one with a different perspective.

The Chicken Lesson

Separating the bones from the meat of a grilled chicken after I’d eaten my fill, I thought of a student of mine. In fact, I always think of her as I do this project and prepare to make a soup or bone broth.

She was/is Vietnamese and had survived during the war with her family, eating what they could find and trading goods for clean water and grain, etc. She always told her history matter-of-factly, with little emotion. It was mostly memories of silly stories, and her quick laughter stood often as punctuation marks.

Being short did not make her weak or subservient. When her father had encouraged her to run away, she already had a plan and went directly to a French nunnery in the country side. Her mind was a quick one too. She learned French and English and math. How she came to America I don’t recall, but she had determined that she would never be poor again.

When we met, she was 40ish, stylish, had her own company with five employees. She had taught herself to be a head hunter and matched high-powered people into high powered jobs. Her take-home pay was never below $40,000/month.

When she stayed with my late husband and I, she was taking her Second-Degree Reiki class. She was thrilled to be out of the city and experiencing our Northern California mountain home with its solar electricity and well water. She loved the quiet. Laying on the deck considering the night sky gave her a thrill. She admitted she slept more soundly with us than she had in months.

After I thought I’d completed the task of deboning the chicken and saving the meat, she smiled when she asked if she could help finish the job. After 10 minutes, she had found another two cups of chicken meat. I have never seen such stripped ribs, neck, and back bones. “That is what it took to survive,” she said simply, then added, “That and patience.”

In the middle of all the catastrophes these days, her remembered words are growing more and more meaningful.

I have to travel once every four to six weeks, through the Bay Area traffic along any one of five options: #880, #1, #20, #580, or #680. I need to go from Willits to Pacific Grove where my 98-year-old mother sleeps in her hospital bed in a skilled nursing facility.

These highways used to have a pattern. I could navigate and miss the bumper to bumper cars between 10AM and 1PM during the week. This is no longer a truth. Traffic is horrendous for this rural driver. I must settle into patience and awareness if I am to survive this challenge.

Bombs are not dropping on me nor are guerrilla troops taking pot shots at me. I have enough food and can get clean water. There is a cloud sometimes that lives to the left or the right of my vision. The cloud is fear and worry that some decision at some level of government or some dark patch in my karma will change my current comfort level.

I make myself put that away and concentrate every day, every moment of every day, on what is (not what could be but isn’t) right now.

Salvaging edible food from a partially-eaten chicken carcass tonight took my attention. The concentration gave me a memory of a woman who had survived by her wits and determination. Whether she suffered from a painful trigger of a memory or PTSD from her childhood trauma, I never saw it. I saw her as I think she wanted to be seen and how she saw herself, simply as a survivor.

May we all see ourselves in that light with a quick laugh and the determination to make the best of what we have.