-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

August 24, 2013

The signs on the Great River Road Trail say, “Bicycles Only.” Which explains the charity bike event I saw, bike after empty bike headed east toward Alton. Technology has figured out a way for bike owners to stand in Alton and electronically . . . Oh, okay, there were people on the bikes, mostly teenagers, all doing good for their community. I just hugged the right shoulder and tried not to get run over. Continue reading →

August 22, 2013 

A night mare—she had insomnia, the poor horse—whinnied, “Quantum physics theory suggests that life is an illusion. It is our senses and emotions that tell us we see and feel when in fact we are spinning electrons, a sort of cosmic merry-go-round. There is no pound of love, no ounce of hate, yet we know them by using our senses, know when we “feel” and “see” them. No two people or horses ever report an event the same, in spite of the fact that both of them were witnesses.” Horses make horse sense.

Across the river in West Alton, Missouri is a coal-fired power plant with an enormous white-painted chimney, over a hundred feet high. One can see a moon-shaped plume of smoke rising from it daily. According to a local scientist, the plume consists of nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and a bunch of other oxides, the fallout of which is particularly hard on the lungs of people with emphysema and asthma. According to a local biker dude, the cloud, “reminds me of weed smoke, man!”

If the day is cloudy and grey, the giant white plume rises and merges into the gloom and assumes its color—coal power plant as chameleon. If it is a sunny day with white puffy clouds, the puffy clouds of the power plant, alien as they are, fit right into the sky scene. The wind rolls the dice and sends the plume in various directions. “Lucy in the Sky With Amerin’s—do-do-do-doo.” Continue reading →

August 20, 2013

Southbound, on Route 101, 10:30 p.m. The sky is black, a sliver of moon having sunk below the coastal mountains of the artists’ colony of Cambria. Dave and I, on our way from San Francisco to his town of Atascadero, have just driven past Gilroy, the garlic capital of the country, the smell of the fields pungent and, well, garlicky. We had just passed through a thick veil of fog that misted the car’s windshield, like slow rain, past Soledad Prison, Charlie Baird Manson’s house, lit like a napalm strike so Charley and friends/fiends can’t step out for a smoke, and now the night is dark matter, the unending mountains casting shadows.

We stop at a rest stop and park facing south.  The air is cool and breezy. Dave goes into the restroom; I stay by the car.

Standing next to me at the rear of their pickup, is a lesbian couple. They had dropped their daughter off to college in San Francisco and were on a break from driving all night to PalmDesert. They have an open cooler in the truck bed and are enjoying beverages. And they are making “ooh” noises and staring north at the sky.

I turn and look up and shout, “Holy shit!” Continue reading →

August 19, 2013 

I said to a friend (she observed that I had the knack of meeting widowers on my walks), that the chronicles will never talk about women; women don’t stop and talk—unless they’re with a man. Certainly, a woman wouldn’t invite a strange man into her house. So, of course, today I write about women. Gentle readers, anybody who says women aren’t better than men? is a man.

Three types of women walk or bike the Great River Road trail: tweens and teenagers, thirty-forty something’s and seniors. Guess who: stops and talks to a six-foot-one, tattooed, shave-headed, one hundred ninety-five pound man; says hello and perhaps says something about the weather; is scared of the above described male of the species.  A. tweens and teenage girls. B. Seniors. C. 30-something’s.

The other day, a comely teen passed me on her bike, slowed down and started gabbing away with me.  I let it go on for a few minutes then I said, “You don’t know me.” “Oh,” she replied, “you’re just like my dad.” She meant “kind.”  I am kind, but she didn’t know that. Teenage girls talk to me all the time. I shoo them away. Someone is out there who won’t shoo them away. Parents, beware. Continue reading →

August 17, 2013

Had I taken my usual five mile walk yesterday, the following would not have happened. But I walked seven miles instead, adding thirty minutes (and leading to me saving a soft-shelled turtle from certain death on a country road), and thus arrived at and climbed Stroke Hill at a different time. Halfway up the hill, on the east side, a man was shoveling dirt from the bed of his pickup truck and filling in spaces along his newly asphalted driveway. He turned and saw me: “You do this near about every day. You must have the legs and lungs of a mountain climber.” “I didn’t know people were watching me,” I said. We shook hands and he commented on my tattoos. “You hunt artifacts?” Yes.

A voice across the road said, “You’re interested in Indians? Come with me.” I turned and saw a short man, in his early 80s, decked out in a Car Talk tee shirt and blue shorts. His skin was pale as porcelain. He waved me over, turned and walked briskly toward his house, and I followed. “I’m Gene.” “Bob.” Continue reading →

August 15, 2013

Archaeologists have discovered a series of petroglyphs in southern Nevada that date to 14,500 BC. This trumps the previous U.S. record of 7,000 BC. Glyphs as an art form date back 175,000 years, including the cave artwork in France, now compared with the Old Masters of history. Some rock art consists of handprints, made not by etching but by masticating colorful plants and spitting the material around the hand.

Why? Why do we record ourselves and events? We started talking and gesturing a million years ago, the handshake evolving to say, “I’m unarmed,” or “I won’t hurt you.” The beginning is so fascinating, far more so than our current “Kill, or exploit the planet” attitude, where the few control the many and art has evolved from the most important expression of Man to near extinction.

If we don’t have, make, venerate, celebrate and contemplate art, we will become extinct. Nature will breathe easier. Great anthropologists like Louis Leaky are warning of this: humans, in spite of their big brains, evolved to a single species because we surrender to our baser instincts for self destruction.

Art is the salve, the highest instinct, pursuit, philosophical voyage of discovery, of Man.

August 13, 2013

Author’s alert: There will be a tree frog in this anecdote, at the halfway point.

But I digress. . .

Have you ever examined your own posterior? Have you stood in front of a mirror, turned backwards and strained to get a look? Checked the undies? The bare bottom? The tiny “dark eye?” Come on, admit it. And if you haven’t perhaps you will after reading this. One can never be too careful.

I walked my usual route today, west for a mile and half to Piasa Creek, back east to Stanka Lane and up Stroke Hill. On the western portion of the hike, some cars honked at me—more than a few. It is true, I have beautiful legs—many, many hundreds of women can attest to this—and this may have been the reason for the honking. I turned back east and the honking continued. I was feeling, well, mighty perty.

Enter the tree frog. It was on the north side of the Great River Road path, on the return route. I stopped in mid-path and admired it, extending my hands palms up to get circulation going in my injured left hand. Without hesitation, the frog leapt three feet in the air, onto my right palm and then, perhaps sensing it had been impulsive, peed on my hand, then it leaped across to the other side of the path. This should be an Olympic event, and I shall be contacting the IOC to propose it: the frog-man-jump.

But I digress. . .

I reached Stanka Lane and turned left. There are three modest river rat shacks along the left side of the road. Four small children, two boys and two girls, were chasing a cat around their yard. They saw me and waved and their mother murmured something to them, probably about stranger danger. I had passed them and was about thirty feet away when on of the boys yelled, “I see your butt!” And the children and the mother laughed.

I no longer felt perty, but I kept on going and disappeared around the bend. And promptly stopped and felt my rear end, only to discover that the shorts had completely split open at the seam. Yes, I wore Fruit of the Looms underneath, but still: “I see your butt.”  I had two miles to go, and I wasn’t going to clinch my rear for that length. So I walked proudly, coolly; perhaps people would think I had invented a new trend, the next big thing after shorts hanging to your knees.

If I only had looked at my butt in the mirror beforehand.

One can never be too careful, gentle reader.

August 10, 2013

I have a roommate, a solitary catbird. For two months she has spent the night perched atop the left porch support. At first I thought she had a nest there. But no. Something may have happened to the babies and the male left. There she rests, her grey-white body folded into a round shape conforming to the curvature of the aluminum platform, head facing the door.

If I open the door, she flies off and always skips the next night. If I open the curtain on the door, she stares at me, this sister of the mockingbird. She makes me sad, though I can’t think why. “The catbird seat,” coined by legendary baseball announcer Red Barber, means sitting pretty. But my catbird sister seems lonely. I relate. With all the woods around me, why is she perched there?

Last night I turned off all the lights and watched her in darkness. She didn’t move a muscle in ten minutes.

Always at six in the morning, she is gone. At sundown, I watch for her.

August 8, 2013

The Great River Road path is now lined with waist-high stalked weeds with fuzzy tops (actual scientific name; Latin genus: weedus fuzztelacularbun; source: Wikipedia). I was walking west when a patch of weeds on my left began to take on a life of its own, flailing and funneling, and out staggered a squirrel, the entire right side of its body stripped of fur and a red claw stripe stretching from neck to tail. It stood on the asphalt in front of me, dazed, shaking its head. Then came a striped feral cat, its mouth stuffed with fur, which I inferred came from the squirrel.

The cat growled at me and gave me the evil eye. Fortunately, Scout the Cat and I play Evil Eye nightly. “Why Don’t Cats Eat Their Masters on Nights of the Full Moon.” Ray Bradbury might have written such a book. I’m somewhat feral myself, having been raised by coyotes outside of Mt. Vernon, Illinois, in 1948.  The cat finally spit up the mother of all fur balls and climbed up the side of the bluff.

Meanwhile, the half-naked squirrel quietly walked—walked—to a tree on the bluff side of the path and climbed to safety, me averting my eyes for modesty’s sake, focusing on the waist-high weeds with fuzzy tops.

I saved a squirrel. I pissed off a cat. And then I hiked up Stroke Hill, bored, for nothing else happened.