Hullo Chris,
Last night, I found a bottle of the Los Alamos Malbec on the shelf in a Marina Del Rey liquor store with an incredible wine library. I remember paying almost thirty dollars for that bottle in Union Street on the Woodward Avenue in midtown Detroit. I saw it marked 14.95, half the restaurant price. Alas, as I am awaiting my first income from the new job in Los Angeles, I am unlikely to splurge on a bottle of wine, even at the cherry picking price of $ 14.95. Luckily, in my suitcase, I had a bottle of Big House Red from Bonny Doon to share with the threesome who were my housemates last night. I had returned that bottle purchased in Lansing, Michigan to the California coast. By the way, are you at home, or are you in the fields of Buenos Aires? I'm in LA for a business intelligence position, an opportunity I couldn't turn down, even though common sense told me to ignore the siren song of the golden west.
This morning, I awoke in a flat in Marina Del Rey, and I drove out Lincoln to the edge of Santa Monica, and then down to the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. The sea absorbs all rivers, to paraphrase the song, including the waste streams discharged despite laws and technologies designed to keep the burgoo on shore. I am a minor scholar of a poet named Kenneth Rexroth, a midwestern poet who made his cross-country journey to California in the early part of the 20th Century.
Rexroth knew the Los Angelean Pacific before the crushing, bustling boom of LA's upsurge encouraged residents to think of the Pacific as a sewer. He passed almost twenty years ago, and he is buried in a highland close to Santa Barbara, as I have heard told, overlooking the sullied Pacific. A great number of Rexroth's poems rage against the mistakes on industrialism that added poisons into a complex web of life. Rexroth called it deep ecology, which is so much more than the food chain we discover in elementary school. When attempting to show this diversity combined with infinite connections, Rexroth evoked the images of Shiva's beads. In one bead, all beads in Shiva's necklace were reflected, and this reflection produced an infinity of beads.
According to local legend, a band of men named freedivers swam minutes beneath the Pacific on a single lungfull of air; when a freediver wished to prove mastery of his craft, he or she captured a fish with his bare hands and raised it to the surface for lunch. I see this a sign of a lost sea treasury; can a freediver now find a fish in the five or so minutes he has before his need for oxygen calls him back to surface?
I was talking to a new friend who had surfed the Pacific from the time of her teen years. A relative of hers had ascended to notice in the surfing world. Unfortunately, he contracted spinal menigitis, a disease he still struggles against today. It doesn't keep him from surfing, although he blames the fecal sewage suspended in the breaking waves for his disease. I guess a committed surfer is going to catch the morning surf just as the holy man in India is sure to immerse himself in the holy Ganges. I understand Imperial Beach has a similar problem, the town where "John from Cincinnati" is based. The sewage of Tijuana is not handled well by the treatment systems in place, and the mess finds it way to the last American beach going south. Great amounts of American money and international cooperation between the United States and Mexico has not resolved the problem.
There is progress. I understand that south of Big Sur, a ecological group has purchased the boats of trawler fishermen in Morro Bay. With the seabed unscrapped by dragnets, Morro Bay has a chance to recover its biodiversity. This is similar to a law off the coast of the Texas gulf. You can catch Red Fish, but you can catch them only with rod and reel, making it a sportsfishing pursuit. I believe this is the result of industrialist Perry Richardson Bass efforts, one of his legacies. He passed away in June 2006. Similarly, in Detroit, Peter W. Stroh left a legacy by helping to establish the Greater Detroit American Heritage River Initiative, which is buying up land and islands to be set aside for conservation. It's hard to brew a good beer without pristine river water.
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William Juntunen
989-906-3324
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