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July 1, 2011
No Beeping Zone
WINE COUNTRY, Northern California. - Thursday June 16 - I wish I could transport my cave wherever it is I go.
Best I can do today is huddle here in a quiet area behind our pleasant nor cal hotel. I'm trying to read the hundred years worth of books I've downloaded onto my Ipad before I turn 70, a year and a half from now; and I'm avoiding my wife's family who are spinning in a noisy female cyclone of activity preparing for the marriage of a niece. But every 90 seconds or so an electronic "beep" from somewhere nearby pierces my harmony and disrupts my train of thought.
I heard it earlier this morning from my bed near a window. I looked around briefly but couldn't locate it. First it beeped loud and seemed to come from one direction, then it beeped soft and seemed located somewhere else in the lawn.
This afternoon the line was crossed. All I wanted was some peace and quiet and to continue reading Moby Dick, Melville's dark novel about the limitations of the Christian view of what it means to be a human being.
My mood is especially cantankerous, more fed up with humanity (10 on a scale of 10) than normal (9 on a scale of 10) after the mind- numbing cross-country trip yesterday in a plane filled with chatty kathy's.
Again with the beep. In the modern world electronic beeps are constantly demanding attention, directing our actions; and one by one deleting another bit of our innate ability to decipher the universe with our own senses and intelligence. Rarely can we turn them off or control the volume. But some we can, like my 1987 car which has been silenced; and I'm working on the toaster oven.
So i stood like a man who forget what he was about to do in the middle of the nice area with big oaks and a hexagonal gazebo bathed in the annoying California sunlight, and at every beep I moved a little closer to the perceived location.
Baffling.
Another beep, another guess.
Finally i kicked something on the ground while taking one of the steps. There's no one around, besides this is California, everyone's oblivious anyway.
In the grass a small solar panel set in a round, plastic, saucer-sized disk beeped at my foot. Found it.
I tried to pick it up but it was stuck firmly into the ground. I spun it, lefty loosey, thinking it was screwed down like a landscape device. After a couple turns it came out: a green disk with a 3"x 3" solar panel attached to a 14-inch long smooth metal tube with a pointed end.
BEEP.
"Go ahead beep again, what ever you are, because in ten minutes you are going to be silenced."
Unarmed with my usual array of switchblades and screwdrivers, I threw the irritating piece of mysterious technology into the car and went to the hardware store a few blocks away for a #1 Phillips screwdriver.
It beeped the whole way.
The kid at the counter said it was probably a gopher stake meant to drive away gophers. I like gophers. so now my mission gained new meaning.
I was prepared to clip wires. I was prepared to throw it into a ditch.
In the car outside the hardware store, armed at last, I ripped the plastic packaging off my new $7 screwdriver like a surgeon about to crack open the chest of a gasping heart patient and unscrewed a single #6 x 3/8" round-head sheet-metal screw at the top of the stake which then fell free of the solar panel disk. Three wires led from the disk into the stake attached by a small electronic plug until I detached it.
Silence.
Success.
Smile.
Back at the hotel I reassembled the thing, wires now disconnected, and returned it to its place in the lawn.
Back on the high seas Ishmael and the crew of the Pequod had just killed the first whale of the trip and were in the process of peeling off the blubber like Melville is doing on another level peeling layers searching for an answer to just what is that inscrutable thing: "be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal...."
"Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it."
Melville has some good ones:
"Oh, (give me) time, strength, cash, patience."
"Better to sleep with a sober pagan than a drunken Christian."
"Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."
.......................
Damn, the women are back......
................................................
e pur si muove
Sunday June 19- Ironically, it turned out my selfish act of eco terrorism had an unintended beneficial consequence. The wedding vows were made yesterday on a balmy afternoon in the gazebo a few yards from the gopher stake, now silent and benign.
Ishmael, the Christian who appreciates his pagan friend Queequeg and his ways in the novel, would have found this totally secular wedding interesting. Not one speck of religion in the whole affair.
And yet they are married.
Posted by ronpaci at July 1, 2011 11:42 AM