Thursday 2nd July – Coming Down to ‘Frisco

I am disturbed by the thought of being in a bankrupt state.  I have discovered, in Montana, that guns can help you be friendly.  It is possible that this is not a universal truth, and there is no shortage of guns in California.  Suppose they take to the streets, up-rise against their Austrian (and, they suspect, Anglo-Greek) master (and, they suspect, mistress).  Will we be back in 1849, with '49ers' asserting their access to real value.  Will the Compromise of 1850 unravel, and California become a slave state.

Actually, as a side issue, the idea of Californian slaves and slave-masters is quite entertaining: California is basically Spanish; is there a basic relationship between "whatever" and "manãna"; would slavery in California result in nothing at all being done here?

 

I start the day 160 miles north of 'frisco, at Fort Bragg (not, by the way, the Fort Bragg).  I cannot persuade the fair Dulcinea to order us down CA1.  She is clearly overstressed by yesterday's adventures: "recalculating" she keeps saying, faux-calmly.

I insist, and almost immediately (that's about half-an-hour on this road) up pops "Queenie's Roadhouse Café' at Greenwood Beach, in Elk. (Some frustrated poet in Fish and Game has used Greenwood Beach to quote Chief Seattle ((can that be right?)) saying "Man does not weave thy web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself".  He must have been an original Californian, slave or otherwise.  I ponder this over a traditional American breakfast.

 

When I get within broadcast distance, I phone in to my controller.  He is expecting me.  He has arranged for this lady to look after me "up in the hills".  She is very lovely: he knows how to control me.  Up in the hills north of frisco, I get to scrub up. My controller knows how to calm a man: we take two large (actually, one was 'very') dogs up into the hills and commune with nature.  Dogs love just to be out in the air and smell (and, of course, pee and shit everywhere).  So do I.  My controller warns me about snakes, so I do not join the dogs in total freedom.

The lady is being coy, and turns up in the wrong town.  We have to go and get her.  The controller remains calm.  We go and pick her up, in Sausalita, and we eat there.  She is comfortably champagned, the food is very good. We, or at least I, am replete.

 

We go home and go to bed.  In the middle of the night, I have to do what beer drinkers do.   When I get back to bed, I somehow sense the breathing is different.  It actually wakens me up: there is a Bear in the room; one further test.  I start with the hopeful approach: I get up and open the door, and push him gently towards it.  He goes out.  I pass out.