Raw Cut | Rudi Krausmann | Travel Diary 5/9

Later in the morning, after M had waken up and we had paid our bill we only had to pay one dollar to travel by local bus to Seattle City. Through the window we saw an industrial landscape flanked to the right and left by cars, a technical monotony only occasionally broken by a single individual, black or white, but wearing the same blue jeans and overalls with a baseball cap, going alone or with a dog for a stroll. It was a Sunday but only to cross the highway for some of the pedestrians seemed to be a problem. In the bus itself, more than 50 percent of the passengers were black, of which only the women were dressed colourfully and looked reasonably cheerful. Of the whites, nearly all of them looked unhappy, certainly they wore a gloomy, dispirited expression. And yet, these Americans, compared to Europe, seemed much freer in their movements and gestures. If the mind was preoccupied or trapped, it certainly was not the body.
The inner city had the typical modern look, with skyscrapers, boutiques and coffeebars, elegant but soulless. Not having a clue where to go we headed towards the harbour and market. Finally we ended up in a French-style bistro, overlooking a magnificent bay. As we entered the bistro, a black women around fifty with angry bloodshot eyes wearing a torn dress extended her thin arm at us and shouted:
"Change please."
While we were looking for some coins in our pockets she was holding her hand in front of our faces and repeated:
"Change please."
After having put a nickel in the palm of her hand she said softly:
"Thank you, Sir," already approaching the next tourist.
In the few hours we spent in this area we visited also the fishmarket and looked into the art and craft shops. The newspaper sellers gave such a lively display that the visitors just stood there to watch them and forgot to buy the paper. On every corner there was something going on, every salesman or sales woman put on a show for the customers, like on a fair. The black people were the most colourful but also the poorest. The shouts of 'change please' was heard as often as the prizes offering goods. All that was engulfed in a splendid bay. Oscar Wilde during his famous or infamous tour across the United States had said that America was the most vital and the most vulgar country in the world. Today one could say that it is the richest and the poorest country in the world.
Next morning we were driving in a hired Chevrolet on highway M 5 in direction Portland. But the landscape near the highway had little to offer. We were longing for a natural countryside and the closest to it was a Cafe hidden behind pine trees at a road intersection. There we ordered a vegetable soup with bread and butter. A rather tasteless, weak coffee, was complementary. The cups of coffees are continuously refilled before they are empty.
"Would you like some more coffee," is the most used question in eating places across the USA it seemed to me. It is usually accompanied by a broad, spontaneous smile of whoever is serving.
"Here you have to smile and you have to be happy." I said to M.
"Not a bad philosophy."
"What if the smile is empty?"
"What do you mean?"
"If the smile is automatic the happiness would be unreal."
"Perhaps it is not connected?"
"We have plenty of time to find out." I said. "Do you know that there is a song with the title 'Immer nur lächeln' (always keep smiling), it comes from an operetta by Franz Lehàr called 'Im Land des Lächelns' (in the country of smiles). But this country is not the USA but Japan.
"It must be a different kind of smile," M replied.
The same evening we arrived at Westport, a fishing village on the coast. After checking into a motel we were lucky to find a Cafe which served cod and chips as its speciality. The only other place that seemed to be open, and that at eight o'clock in the evening, was the supermarket. We sat after dinner on some rocks at the edge of the sea gazing at the dark horizon. A heavy storm a few days ago kept the fishermen waiting for the waves to calm down. They were walking around nervously in their yellow rubber overcoats or standing in groups discussing the weather. Some decided to go out next morning, although the waves still looked dangerous.
"Where can one have a drink in Westport?" I asked one of them "There is always one bar open."
"Where?"
"At Bob's down the road, where there is a little red light. If I had some money, I would come with you." The other fishermen laughed. Nevertheless, ten minutes later we were sitting on stools in Bob's bar, which looked like a museum of pop art. Bob himself had himself installed by a huge photograph hanging above the bar, dressed in a cowboy suit with a blond woman in bridal dress beside him. Meanwhile he had grown a full beard and was wearing a baseball cap with the inscription 'Life is too short to dance with ugly women'.
"Is that photo for real?" I asked.
"Everything is for real in my bar," replied Bob and roared with laughter. He had the habit of laughing more or less after every sentence he spoke.
"And where is the bride now?" said M.
"She was here but did not last long," replied Bob and burst out again in laughter. "What do you want?"
"What have you got?"
"Everything that god has created," said Bob, and added: "I am the happiest person of the United States, did you know that? And I tell you something else. Although I come from Texas, it is I who keep Westport alive. Without me, everything would be dead here."
"A scotch on ice and a lemonade," I ordered. Bob kept on talking, perhaps because we were the only customers at this time. He told us that he can talk on any subject under the sun, even on politics of which he knows little except that the States are always there if money is needed.
"What about communism?"
"You know what the Russian fishermen long for when they come to Westport? Early Morning Whisky and Playboy Magazine." He roared with laughter.
Leaving he told us that his bar is always open when it is open and shut when it is shut. As we crossed the floor, a group of young women, already fairly drunk, entered the bar. Bob took off his baseball cap and replaced it by a Texas sombrero. Next morning we drove south, enjoying still American pancakes in the Fisherman's Cafe for one dollar each before we left. With horror we saw the devastation caused by logging along the coast. Ironically these hills dotted with treetrunks take on the appearance of a lyrical landscape, not unlike the abstract paintings of the Australian painter Fred Williams, which had been shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Perhaps from the proceeds of logging, some of the rich of Portland had built themselves attractive weekend houses on the coast using imported timber. While we had lunch on the road we glanced at them and then moved on to Seaside arriving in the late afternoon. As M decided to have a rest in the motel I went for a stroll along the beach. A storm had swept ashore all kinds of debris from the natural and man made world, leaving behind occasionally objects looking like surreal sculptures. Spread on the grey sand they made the beach look like an open air museum which the children enjoyed. No doubt the local council would get rid of it as soon as possible. Walking back to the motel on the main street, I saw a bookshop displaying in its window only one book with the title:

'The Power of Empty Space.'

The shop, called 'Turnaround Books and Espresso Bar' was well stocked with American classical and contemporary literature. As I browsed through the books an elderly lady was leisurely talking to the shop assistant about Karl Marx.
"Why did they hang communism on to him?" she said in a deep, husky voice from smoking.
"To explain that is far too complicated," replied the shop assistant, perhaps trying to terminate the conversation. If this was a literary Cafe, it certainly had the disadvantage of not offering any chairs not to mention coffee. The only stool was occupied by the elderly lady being at the moment interested in Marx. I should have told her that some Marxists claim that Marx was not a Marxist Instead I looked at the book 'The Power of Empty Spaces' and found the pages empty of any kind of writing. The book was a kind of literary nihilism or hoax and had become a bestseller. I regretted having to leave, 'Turnaround books and Espresso Bar' without having exchanged a word with anyone. Fortunately I had purchased a pocket edition of Albert Camus' 'Lyrical and Critical Essays'.When I opened it in the motel another storm was approaching from the Atlantic ocean. On the bookcover was a quotation by Camus.

'In order to be happy one has to be in despair.'

Seaside, at this time of the year at least, offered no distractions or entertainments. During the day one could walk on the beach and in the evening have drinks or dinner at the Seaside Hotel overlooking the ocean. As we had to stay longer than intended due to flooded roads we spent most of the time reading in the motel room. Once we saw a television program with Robert Bly. The poet discussed with a few Texans the problem or lack of the father figure in the United States. With a dry humour he admitted of having let his father into his life only by the time he was 46 years of age. In his arguments he used simple, down to earth language, contrary to his writings. There must be many sides to Robert Bly.
We left Seaside without regret and admired en route to Newport the coastline whose seascape becomes more powerful, almost grandiose. It reaches its peak in Cape Foul Weather where Captain Cook, after his voyage in the Pacific Islands had seen land for the first time. Here, marked by a cottage unfortunately now full of maritime bric-à-brac, the history of Oregon, supposedly began.
During the monotony of driving on the highway I started to think about Franz Kafka who had written a book about America without ever having been there. For him Europe was a country of impossible possibilities and America a country of possible impossibilities. If Kafka had arrived in New York, as an immigrant, let's say, I could not imagine what would have happened to him there. Would he have been helpless or hopeless?
"There is Kafka," I exclaimed as we drove into the main street in Newport. We saw the most ugly, utilitarian architecture imaginable, consisting of petrol stations, hamburger shops, pizza huts, motels, second hand car dealers, etc. One glance made one despair visually, there was not the slightest sign of beauty. Yet the place was full of smiling Americans. Is that the American paradox?
"Let's drive somewhere else," I said to M.
"Where else, there is nowhere else."
"Let's go to the next town."
"There is not going to be any difference. Don't look what man made, look at nature."
"I see what I see, it does not matter who made it."
"That will make you unhappy. There is a sign, 'To Sylvia Beach Hotel' let's try that. "
"Sylvia Beach used to run a bookshop in Paris called 'Shakespeare & Co'. Do you think it is the same one?"
"Don't be silly, turn off."
The Sylvia Beach Hotel was a modest, renovated colonial building but had an old-fashioned charm about it. And it faced the ocean. When we asked at the reception about the prize, they told us it depended which author we had in mind. Every room was named after a contemporary writer or modern classic. The rooms were furnished according to the taste of the writers and in the style of the period they had lived. At present only the Melville, Jane Austin and Hemingway room were still vacant. They cost between 80-90 dollars including breakfast.
"Nothing cheaper?" I asked. We certainly could not afford to sleep in their rooms.
"Wait a minute," said the receptionist, a student who wanted to become a writer. "Our cheapest rooms are the Gertrude Stein and the Oscar Wilde one. Gertrude Stein is still occupied, but I think the gentlemen who slept in Oscar Wilde's room has checked out. But it only contains a small double bed."
"How much?"
"Fifty dollars with breakfast."
We took it without even looking at it first. It was all pink and not much larger than an ordinary bathroom. The view went to a crumbling wall of a neighbouring building. It had one rocking chair and on a small round table the complete works of Oscar Wilde in two volumes. On the wall hung old photographs in black and white of productions of Wilde's plays like 'An Ideal Husband,' 'Lady Wyndemere's Fan,' 'The Importance of Being Earnest' etc. And beside the window a framed aphorism of Wilde:

'The view is altogether immaterial
except to the innkeeper, who of course
charges it in the bill. A gentleman never
looks out of the window.'

On the door hung another quotation by Wilde:

'America is a land of unmatched vitality and
vulgarity, a people who care not at all about
values except their own and who, when they
make up their mind love and hate with a
passionate zest.'

The Sylvia Beach Hotel had a large guest room and a library attached to it. The clientele existed mainly of spinsters and retired couples who whispered their opinions to each other of their favourite authors and whose room, by luck, they momentarily occupied. This evening we attended a playreading by the Dramatic Society of Newport in the library and then went for a stroll in the neighbourhood.
In the morning I saw an elderly lady in the corridor deciphering a name with a magnifying glass which was written on a business card and attached to the outside of a door. Her hand was shaking.
"Whose room is that?" I inquired.
"Agatha Christie's," she whispered.
"Are you occupying it?"
"Oh no, but I wish I were as she is my favourite writer. Hers is the most expensive room in the hotel but unfortunately nearly impossible to rent. You would have to book in advance for years if you want to get it. I managed to book it for two days next year by sheer chance. What a thrill it will be to read her books in it."
The stay at the Sylvia Beach Hotel was a good change from the boring motel rooms we had encountered so far. A bit 'crazy' but in the States one needs something really different from the everyday atmosphere. To make up for the financial loss we stayed at the cheapest motel in Orford, our next overnight stop en route to San Francisco.The double room cost only 25 dollars but it was so depressing that one had to leave it from time to time to recover from it. The man managing it, a white haired bearded fellow wearing a baseball cap did not even look at you when he handed over the keys. His customers were not worth looking at, so it seemed. He was watching a sports program on television while he gave his instructions. If there was a place to eat he did not know. Although there was the sea close by, the town, if you could call it that, had turned its back on it. Mostly trucks were passing through the main street and they did not bother stopping. To walk through town nearly made you suspicious. As a joke I called Orford Oxford. For dinner we had hamburgers and drank Coca-Cola. The shop was just preparing to close as we entered. It was ten to eight. The waitress who was also the cook gave us a big smile.
"You just made it," she said. "We are closing in five minutes."
"Then we better go somewhere else."
"There is no somewhere else. Don't worry, you can still get your hamburgers and eat them too."
"In five minutes?"
"I give you an extra five."
"But we have nothing to do except to eat dinner." I said.
"Oh well," she answered and opened up her broad smile as if she lived in the best of possible worlds.
"Do you like it here?" M asked.
"Yea, not too bad, quiet, gives one plenty of time to watch television." Watching television had high priority in Orford but the one we had in our motel room had broken down. We sat there before the screen, staring into its greyness, too depressed to do anything else.
"I wonder if Oscar Wilde came through here," I said to M. "What would he have said about this place?"
"It's just like Oxford." She laughed.

We were so anxious to get out of Orford that we left next morning before dawn. We even could not sleep and spent most of the night reading in bed. M was looking forward to seeing the hundred of years old gum trees of Oregon, the old growth as it is called. And by chance we discovered an attractive youth hostel situated on a small hill overlooking the sea. Not far from the hostel was a super souvenir shop called 'Trees of Mysteries', which had an Indian Museum attached to it. These Red Indians had produced the most original and aesthetic artifacts related to fishing and hunting. Most items had become museum pieces, not for sale, except some rings with semiprecious stones and handwoven blankets. It astonished me that these Indians were such good craftsmen, as they had always been portrayed to me as ferocious warriors. How ugly the Cuckoo clocks and the varnished tables made of redwood were in comparison to these products of the Indians. They must have had delicate souls like the Aboriginals of Australia.
A Mexican woman who managed a mini-market nearby pushed me into a corner and whispered to me.
"They (she pointed to some white customers standing in the far end of her shop) are ruining the forests by logging. As a consequence also the fish industry suffered because of soil erosion. I can't say that loud, otherwise I loose my customers. Please tell it to the world." I nodded to her in agreement but knew very well that I could do nothing about it. Holding two plastic shopping bags I left her shop while she encouragingly waved her arm showing a fist. The young people in the hostel were also very concerned about the destruction of the environment in this area. In the evening we watched a video manifesting that even the old growth had been logged up to 95 percent. But most of the local population plus the politicians were deaf and blind to the problem.
Later we all played 'Trivial Pursuit' until late into the Oregon night. It was also a way to improve one's knowledge of contemporary American history. For instance: Frank Sinatra had given Ava Gardner a black poodle for her birthday. It was called Mafia.
After having stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel and the Youth Hostel, we decided to avoid motels as much as possible. It was M who came up with an idea. She had the address of a Buddhist Centre about 200 km from the coastal highway, hidden in the hills. The Lama, a Tibetan monk who had been on a lecture tour in Australia with his American wife had given her the address and invited her to stay.
"I am prepared to stay there if I don't have to pray," I said.
"You don't have to do anything."
"Well, lets turn off, I am sick of the highway."
We drove on a dirt road for several hours until we came to a petrol station and a grocery store. The place was so isolated that the children could afford to play on the road, oblivious of the traffic.
A few hundred yards, hidden behind magnificent tall pine trees, was the Buddhist Centre. It offered, so M said, courses in meditation which were supposed to help you to get from a materialistic state of mind into an enlightened one. Unfortunately the Lama was, with his wife, on a retreat from this retreat. The ex husband of his wife was running the place meanwhile. For a reasonable fee we were allowed to sleep in the room of the Lama. As the Centre had once belonged to a millionaire who had become a monk in Tibet it was extremely well built from the local woods. The bathroom was set in black marble and the door handles in imitation gold. Perhaps they were made of real gold? I wondered where the Lama would want to retreat to from here.
"Why does the Lama have to retreat?" I asked M.
"In order to renew himself."
"And where would he do that?"
"Probably in Tibet, it's hard to do in the West."
"Would the Russian authorities allow him to return there?"
"I don't know. I am going to have a bath now. Aren't we fortunate to occupy the quarters of the Lama and his wife? This is very generous of them."
While M was having a bath, I fished out a book from the shelf called 'Dalai Lama Maozedung' and started reading. It described the flight of the Dalai Lama from the communists and was illustrated with photographs. It made compelling reading and I stuck to it till dinner? There were only two disciples in the Buddhist Centre at the moment. A twenty year old brunette from New York who said that she had lost her direction in life due to a domineering mother and a young man from Texas who wanted to become a Buddhist.
M went with them into the big hall for meditation exercises accompanied with gongs and drums. It was conducted by the ex husband of the Lama's wife, whose name was Joe. He was actually a trained engineer but had worked for a big multinational cooperation. This did not satisfy him. Then he tried his hand in the real estate business. In this job he got really depressed. Luckily he met Jane, who became his wife, and is now married to the Lama.
She had opened a new world for him, an inner world. It is hard to get in touch with the inner world, he told us over dinner, but it is possible if you persevere and use the meditation techniques of the Lama. Jane had changed his attitudes, the false attitudes of a false society.
"I was the product of a society which had all the wrong values." He nearly shouted over the dinner table. "Everything I did and said and ate and drank, was wrong, even my dreams were wrong." When Jane left him for the Lama, who had so much more to give her spiritually he did not return to the society he came from but stayed on at the Centre as a bookkeeper. "This centre is going to expand, in summer the valley will be covered with tents inhabited by hundreds of people who are seeking wisdom and happiness."
Last year, as they were building a water-reservoir up the hill they were striking trouble. How to transport all the heavy pipes up the steep hill into a narrow gorge where the spring was. As usual the Lama had a solution to everything. He advised to use two bicycles and it worked like a miracle. The Lama was not only a spiritual but also a practical man. "I too," said Joe, "am no longer only an engineer but an enlightened man, due to the influence of the Lama. The loss of my wife to him was a small prize to pay."
Whatever the case, we had to move on, back onto the road. In these remote areas we crossed into California without noticing it.
"And what are we going to in California?" said M.
"I have a few things in mind, first we visit the writer's colony in Bolina, then see a poet in Watsonville who had been in Sydney and finally drive down to Big Sur to see what is left there of Henry Miller, before returning the car in San Francisco."
We were pleased to get off the highway again. The winding coast road to Bolina was spectacular but Bolina itself had faded, to say the least. Before one turn off to Bolina there is a lagoon inhabited by small ibises, a rather poetical introduction to the place. The sign post to Bolina has been removed so the tourists would miss it but once one gets there one wonder why. This late afternoon at least Bolina had the aura of a ghost town. As we walked down the street we saw a man standing with expressionless eyes in front of a Cafe dressed entirely from a newspaper. He looked as if he was waiting for nothing, belonging whether to this world or another one. Was he drugged or unable to care or not to care? On some steps in front of a baker shop two bearded men were sitting and talking at leisure, while on the opposite side an elderly lady in a colourful dress took a white poodle for a walk. We decided to have a pancake and coffee where we saw again the man in the newspaper suit reading the morning papers. This image I shall never forget.
Finally it was the attendant of the petrol station with whom we made some contact.
"Where do you come from?" he asked.
"Down Under."
"What's that?"
"Australia."
"Wine, women and song," he whistled.
"You got it all wrong," I said, "Australia lies in the Southern Hemisphere, it has kangaroos, emus and koala bears."
"Who cares?"
"How is the job?"
"Not bad, I am one of the few people in this forsaken place who at least earns some money."
"Where are the writers who are supposed to live here?" I asked.
"Oh these strange birds, most of them are hiding or have gone south of the border." He grinned and waved to us with his baseball cap as we drove off.
Our next destination was Watsonville near Santa Cruz. To get there we drove through San Francisco via the Golden Bridge. The setting of this city is unique and even the outskirts have an old worldly charm about it, and we felt like getting out of the car and strolling in the streets. The centre has elegant shops and hotels and it is a pity that so many beggars are roaming the streets or squat in front foot down a main street, screaming and holding his fist into the air. But nobody seemed to take any notice and it would take time to get used to a city where the rich and the poor, beauty and ugliness exist close together.
This time we only passed through San Francisco knowing that we would investigate it more closely on our return journey.
It was easy to find our way into San Francisco but difficult to find the way out unless one is an expert in reading the signs of the highways. Heading for Santa Cruz we actually arrived at the airport of San Francisco. Once in the wrong lane one has to stick to it to the bitter end, and then to start afresh. The labyrinth of the highways creates many destinations but perhaps no destiny. In California one gets the feeling that technology has replaced god and the aim of life is no longer to find him or communicate with him but to keep on moving, keep on driving, no matter where it gets you. In other words, technology creates no philosophy, and ultimately no humanity. Don't read the lips, but read the signs.
When we finally arrived in Santa Cruz we instinctively stopped down town, in the old area. It had been worst hit during the 89 earthquakes. Some ruins had already been removed and temporarily been replaced by tents like the Santa Cruz bookshop whose choice of books was still impressive. Some areas were no longer save to visit by the public and the times when one could have a drink in the oldest hotel, The George, were gone forever. Instead, one could look at the cracks in the wall.
"Mother earth had hit the spot where life in Santa Cruz was most enjoyable.The god's are no longer on our side," a student told us who was sitting in an outside cafe facing the ruins. As he glanced up from his book of essays about French structuralist philosophers he looked rather disillusioned. And since The George is gone, there is no more place where sensitive and intelligent people can get drunk, another citizen of Santa Cruz told us later.
At this moment we had no desire to get drunk or absorb some new French literary theory but we did want to get into contact with Anita W., a poet whom we had met in Australia and who lived in Watsonville. As her phone was not answered, we drove on to Watsonville, and booked into a motel. It was from there that we got through to her and when she heard of our arrival she was with us like a shot. Drinking Margaritas in the bar made Anita talk about her fishing trips with her brother in the Northern Atlantic.
"The lobsters they had caught from the bottom of the sea were worth pots of gold," she said. It was in the lonely nights in her cabin that she started to write, Anita invited us to stay at her house and arranged a dinner party where we met other poets from Santa Cruz, all of them sensitive souls who taught in colleges during the week and wrote their poems at night, or on weekends. In America there was no money in poetry, yet, according to Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive and philosopher, 'money was a kind of poetry.' In the afternoon we all sat in the sun on Anita's terrace and watched the birds which sat in the tops of the eucalyptus trees. We talked about everything under the sun or listened to jazz.
"Your house is the most peaceful place," I said to Anita. She laughed. "Can't you see the crack in the wall?"
"Where?"
"In the room you slept last night, it was caused by the earthquake."
"How was it?"
"For me it was terrifying, I walked around the house like a drunken zombie. But a friend from the east coast, who was visiting, got a lot of fun out of it. She hoped the whole American civilisation, which she had always hated, would be destroyed by it. While the earthquake lasted, she had the best time of her life."
"Why don't you read us a poem?" I said to Anita.
"Which one?"
"Anyone."

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