Busted and Surprised

The sight of flashing red and blue lights in the rear view mirror creates a sinking horrible feeling. Especially when you're being pulled over for the infraction of driving over the lines of a turn lane. The Englewood policeman was young enough to be my son and kept admonishing me to "drive carefully." I think he repeated it three times. A trip to the Englewood court, a brightly lit space where large windows overlook the light rail station at Englewood, with soft-rock favorites playing in the background was my next stop. When I arrived, three women were reviewing an Avon catalog and they smiled when I came in.

I was given three choices. Pay the fine, take the points, Pay the fine, take reduced points, Pay the fine, take a defensive driving class and no points. I chose the latter.

The class was held in the Englewood Library's Andersen Room (ironic, I used to be an Anderson) and signs at the entrance pointed a group of 30 vehicular felons to where they were going to spend the next 4 hours. I've been in classes like this before, like the time someone put a joke Brillo pad condom in Marvin's mailbox at work, and someone took offense to it and the whole staff had to sit through sexual harassment awareness training. Good thing the offended person wasn't at work the day I gave Susan Quintana an anatomically correct male cupcake from Bakery La Sensual for her birthday and a totally inappropriate birthday card that had to be unfolded to truly appreciate. They made me and Susan sit on opposites sides of the room due to our giggling, but I digress. Every one of these type classes are designed to create awareness of infractions by implementing guilt and horror to defer before mentioned negative activities. In short, they make you feel bad.

Darold Sloan doesn't operate that way. Sloan is the designer of the course entitled, "Develop a Defensive Driving Attitude by Thinking about Driving." Part of Martha's Mountain, Inc. Sloan teaches classes in both defensive driving and alcohol awareness. Sloan, a long-time local police officer and former police chief in Grand Junction, uses newspaper clippings, personal experience and one video clip to get his message across about driving safely and the consequences therein. He makes clear, up front, that listening to whining stories about the policeman said or how you've been wronged will only waste time. However, he does ask for people's experiences with situations that he covers in class.

"Anyone been T-boned? How about lose a tire while driving? What about tailgating? Ever had someone do that to you?" he asks.

He continues with tips on how to control speeding (cruise control), how long to wait before entering an intersection from a stoplight (3 seconds), driving in bad weather (slow down, way down), and which lane to drive in (right) and deadly driving hazards (everything that's not nailed down or has more than 2 legs). Moving steadily through the subjects and allowing for breaks at healthy intervals, Sloan covers a lot of material with humor and humility. Of all the traffic transgressions, he's the first to admit that he's done what he says not to do.

Right before the last segment on drinking and driving, he hands out the diplomas. For anyone who leaves, they're about to miss the best part. Sloan covers the well-worn table that tells how drunk you are after x-amount of drinks. He deconstructs a traffic accident where a young mother was killed and how the coroner determined what the blood alcohol level was of the drunk driver. Then he plays the video...only three minutes long.

The video is a news broadcast from 1996 from a Grand Junction TV station documenting the apology and humiliation of the Chief of Police who was pulled over for drunk driving. That police chief? Darold Sloan. The video shows Sloan, younger, humiliated and contrite as he apologizes to the police officers and citizens for his slip, a slip that destroyed his career and through his own calculation cost him $2,000,000 in lost wages and retirement. Housed in the Gunnison County jail for 2 days, he plead guilty and watched his career end. Dismissed from the department, he was unable to get a job and found doors closed to him due to his DUI conviction. Now sober 11 years, he briefly discusses his path from drunk to sober, crediting his wife for her ultimatum that put him in rehab.

"I got lucky; rehab stuck with me." he admits.

Still feeling the effects of the DUI conviction, Sloan teaches several times a week, repeating the same information to other groups of people who choose class over points, but his closing discussion has everyone's attention, whether you're angry or indifferent about being in class.

Ending the evening, he thanks everyone who attended. His demeanor is that of an honest man, the kind that has been humbled and has figured out it's the most honest way to live life and have people listen to you. He politely asks that you fill out an evaluation form to help improve the program for future crazy drivers. As people filed out of the library and into the parking lot, people got in their cars and most began to adjust their mirrors as Sloan instructed, and one participant mentioned she was worried about backing out, a point Sloan makes about a person's vulnerability to accidents when you back out of a parking place. Talk about effective teaching.

As I pulled into traffic on Hampden, making sure to wait three seconds before entering the intersection, I could hear in my head Sloan's parting words to the class:

"See you in the right lane!"

Chinatown

I don't know what I was expecting in Chinatown.

A lot of red, maybe. And many many places to eat.

What I experienced was a small area that is thick with people, sights, sounds and color.

The people: Many different cultures come together in this small Oriental island in the city.

I heard many different dialects of Asian language, none that my ears could discern, but I knew approximately where they were from.

I was surprised to hear so much French. Frenchman whose children carried the same D300 camera as me, sans the strap.

German, which I recognize from living there for a few years, languages spoken by Norse looking men with their strapping wives, picking through the $1.88 t-shirts.

Italian. Lots of Italian. I asked a tall, well dressed Caucasian lady who was standing next to the cable car stop sign how much the cable car cost, and she became shy, shook her head and hurried back to her husband. So much for assuming who to talk to. What you think someone should be speaking is startling when they use a completely different language.

It's a little disconcerting.

I noticed that few people who live in the area made any sort of eye contact. No one looked at me, or spoke until I went into an apothecary and rummaged through the shelves of endless boxes printed in Chinese with few English words. The lady behind the counter seemed surprised that I knew I was buying Curing Pills, a downward-bearing Qi patent that works for upset stomachs of all kinds.

In Denver, a box of Curing PIlls will set you back $10. In Chinatown; $1.75. I bought 8 boxes, all they had.

Iconic figures such as Buddha and Shiva can be purchased for a couple dollars, yours in jade or brass. The one thing I noticed is that the shops all sell the same thing. The farther into Chinatown you go, the cheaper the price.

Depending on what street you're on will dictate what products you'll find.

Some streets deal mainly in merchandise and trinkets, another street fruits and fresh vegetables, a couple streets away harbor fish markets and windows filled with chicken feet or geese hung from a chain the form a bouquet of dead birds.

The streets are separated by the ever present hills of San Francisco and the loud incessant noise of the trolley gears under the street.

What I heard in Chinatown was endless hawkers and the little old man with the diatribe on poster board that wished everyone who walked by a "Happy Day!!" His signs catalog problems with China/US relations as well as his experiences with the San Francisco police who he believes treated him poorly. The term in Oriental Medicine for his dichotomy of philosophy and actions is "shen disturbed."

San Franciscans use their horns a lot while driving, few fingers were seen, but in Chinatown, the have no compunction about yelling at the consumers who come through their village and get in their way.

That little old lady couldn't have been more than 4 feet tall and Scott bumped her accidently and pushed her into me, and I got a thorough tongue lashing which I couldn't interpret. Personal and familial inventories cross the linguistic understandings of all cultures. According to her, I was clearly born under the sign of an ass. A large one at that.

Kyle Bisio shared with me that he didn't like Chinatown. He thought it all looked the same, stores offered the same stuff, people were rude and there were a lot of them, and the place smelled of dead fish, urine and incense. Very observant, that Kyle Bisio.

I did find myself being drawn back to Chinatown a couple times. The movement, architecture, prices and candied ginger brought me back to just watch the show.

I wondered why the panhandlers up on Van Ness didn't come down here to this teaming section of town, crammed with color, laundry hanging from fire escapes as in an old 50's movie, and ask for alms where the pickin's were good. They'd been accompanied by the songs in 5-note octave being played by old men wearing silly hats and serious expressions, who could teach them a thing or two about street performance.

The silly-hat men's simple wooden collection boxes had ample proof of their effectiveness.

Chinatown will remain a special place for me. I liked it better than I liked San Francisco overall. I suppose I'll have to go back some time and see if I can rectify my tempestuous relationship with SF, but I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Friends who were on the trip and are now home post their thoughts on Facebook, the posts express the joy of going somewhere new, but as Dawn says, she's glad to be back in "simple Denver."

Amen.

Spaulding Wooden Boat Center

Freda lay in darkness.

Waiting and wanting in a watery grave, the sleeping beauty, like so many ladies, was neglected and forgotten. Classically beautiful and vibrant in her day, her fairy tale ending was waiting on the distant horizon.

Freda, a 32-foot gaff sloop built in 1885 was rescued by the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center in Sausalito, Calif., and now sits in the middle of the large wooden building.

Nicknamed the Matriarch of San Francisco Bay, she's not sitting in water, she's in a kind of dry-dock, a place where boats sit out of water for repairs and improvements. Her keel and frame are visible, held together by a series of vice grips that mold the ship's shape into her old, swift self.

Spaulding facilitates a way of shipbuilding long lost in the world of metal and steel. It houses resources to complete repairs on wooden boats, and contains a school dedicated to the preservation of ship-making and the painstaking details and investment of time and energy.

The Arques School of Traditional Boatbuilding is housed next to Freda’s dry-dock berth, and students apprentice up to 10-15 years to ensure their knowledge and skills will float. The wood frame building sits over shallow water and smells mostly of varnish and wood, mixed with sounds of hammers and chisel. The bright natural light spills in through the high windows and the place is as calm as a sea with no wind.

The atmosphere is timeless and transformative.

Other boats wait their turn in the yard, for repair to their hulls, refurbishing or refitting.

Steve Howking of Sausalito, works quietly under cloudy northern California skies, his appearance as worn as the wooden ships he repairs. Scraping the hull of an anonymous barnacle clad hulk, Howking enjoys repairing the damage that occurs when beauty is traded for time. With traditional tools, Howking digs to find good wood, and as a regular employee of Spaulding, this is a daily occurrence for him.

The Spaulding Wooden Boat Center is a main fixture on the Sausalito waterfront near the marina and just west of the Bay Model. Started in 1951 by boat-lover and concert violinist Myron Spaulding, this non-profit is dedicated to the preservation of ladies like Freda, in whatever shape they may dock.

Classes that teach the community about sailing, woodworking and history are offered on a regular basis to kids and adults, giving land-lubbers an opportunity to get their feet wet in the world of boats. Students of Spaulding get to create projects not within the sterile white walls of an anonymous classroom, but carve and create within the shadows of Spaulding’s maritime history.

Always in need of money for restoration projects, donors can buy one of Freda’s pepperwood frames for $1200 or donate to any other program keeping maritime history afloat.

In a few years, Freda will be ready to go.

For now, she's getting the care she needs after her owner let her founder and sink. Freda’s individual frames carry a plaque noting the name of the sea-loving patron who made that frame possible and the cards line up from bow to stern. Freda continues to bring attention to Spaulding and no doubt she is Spaulding’s masthead.

In this age of fast boats that jet by her berth, she brings awareness of the days of wooden nails and handmade sails. Her plight brought craftsman and cortege together for a rescue and she is in turn raising the skills of students and masters alike.

For Freda, she is now in safe harbor, far from high seas and swells. Soon she'll be back out there, sleek, beautiful and cared for.

Godspeed, Freda.

Lit votives twinkle inside Old St Mary's Church in San Francisco's Chinatown. Built in 1854, the 1906 earthquake damaged it as well as a destruction by a fire in the 1960's. Some of the restoration involved painting over some of the gilt and murals. The old-world atmosphere in this ancient church in this modern city transports church-goers into a spiritual realm of Catholicism and mysticism.

Loud cable cars defy the hills outside the old cathedral which is now a parish church inside Chinatown's boundaries. It contains brightly colored stained glass windows, marble statues and a large granite altar. Large dark wooden pews elicit a calm presence and lilies grace the altar in preparation for Easter Sunday, the next day. Odd to find such a Catholic presence inside the gateways of Chinatown, a community filled with oriental tradition and beliefs.

Outside standing tall above the chapel is a clock-tower that has a carving that says: "Son Observe the Time and Fly from Evil".

San Francisco

When you see a small portion of something, you don't get the whole picture. Simple enough.

San Francisco was a whirlwind kind of trip, not in that way where whirlwind implies fun and sun. Whirlwind in that within a few square blocks, everything changes. Drugs, crime, mental illness are all distant concepts until you try to walk down a gray canyon of concrete with several thousand dollars of camera equipment. It becomes more about avoiding becoming a story or statistic, just another person in the gray canyon, battered and broke.

For Rent signs are like tombstones that mark the graveyard of businesses buried by the economy and chased out by the walking, incoherent dead. The real public servants are the stationary icons that provide commentary on the world around them. San Franciscans have probably heard it all before, but to the newcomers, it's an distraction from the snippets of inane phone conversations spoken by the "suits". The lady in the wheelchair on the corner of Market and whatever who has her broken foot on the neck of San Fran:

"You're walking across the street wrong!!!"

"Hey stupid, it's your fault!!"

"What the hell is wrong with you??"

"Hey! Fucking tourists!! Go home!"

For this service, you're expected to drop a coin in the cup, as a sort of acknowledgment of their status and wisdom. Truly, value for money. Go home? Hmmm.

Our hotel on Cathedral Hill is an old hotel that spent good money on updating the lobby, probably because they figured that once you rented the room with the torn sheer curtains and stained carpet, you're so tired, you'll take anything. The dirty windows look out over an assortment of businesses and views. Tommy's on Geary with their neon sign that says "Hot Corned Beef Cocktails." Actually, it should read "Hot Corned Beef" and underneath it, "Cocktails." I think they alternate days so as not to confuse the canyon public. On Wednesdays, both signs are lit up. Probably to let the guy who walks around having a conversation with his wife on his cell phone that it's Wednesday, even though he doesn't have a cell phone or a bluetooth device.

"Honey! If you're married to me, you need to be a psychologist! I may have to divorce you for this!"

The one advantage to our pay for Internet hotel is the close proximity to a variety of foods. Gabe and I found the Wing Lum Chinese restaurant a few blocks from our Shangri-La on Van Ness, and though it's many blocks from Chinatown, the food is great. The difference with this little restaurant with its makeshift Koi tank, red lacquer paintings, aloe plants, a Christmas-land music box and bowl full of stacked oranges and limes is that here, the owners smile at you and greet you. Father into Chinatown, it was a different story. If you want good food and really cheap. Go to Wing Lum. Tell them the lady with the all the cameras sent you.

Anything you want to eat is there in those blocks surrounding Cathedral Hill, named for it's many churches that adorn the hilltop, as if to say, "Hey! See us?" Oddly enough, you can walk into these churches without being accosted by anyone. We were warned to stay away from the area near Cathedral Hill called "Tenderloin." I must not be a very good journalist; I complied.

I'm not saying SF is bad. I've lived in places like this before. Seattle is much like San Fran, but I was homeless in Seattle for a while after my grandmother's husband made us leave their 4,000 square foot, 3 floor, 6 bedroom house because my then 2-year old daughter was making too much noise. I remember my grandmother telling me in her yellow, high ceiling, linoleum floored kitchen that I needed to leave; I was her granddaughter, but he was her husband. She handed me $100 and told me to pack. I left, stepped onto a bus to downtown Seattle and stepped off the bus into homelessness. Lucky for me, the YMCA had rooms for $6 a night, but you couldn't leave your stuff in the rooms, you had to pack them around till the evening when you could go back and get a room. The two of us lived off donut holes from Winchell's and leftover burgers abandoned by cleaner looking patrons at the McDonalds at 2nd and Pine. But that's all I have to say about that.

I've been in the places like Cathedral Hill and it's OK to be there. Youthful enthusiasm meant all the writers and photographers got good stuff, and had a good time; for them it's a new world. For me, I would have liked a hotel away from the canyon and closer to the water, but I got to the point where I could walk through the streets and regained some of my skills at street survival. Like riding a bike, I guess.

San Fran wasn't all bad. The light will make you a better photographer. I can shoot Colorado and New Mexico Sun, Northern California clouds are a lesson all in their own. The architecture is beautiful, although I was afraid to look up much, the streets are crowded with people who tell you to get the hell out of the way.

My response? "Sir, this is hell."

You can walk almost anywhere without a problem. Well, problem is relative. Those hills are big, and the bigger ones have little steps to allow for more control while walking at a 20-degree angle. The view from the top is great, but I guess I'm used to views a little higher than 200 feet above sea level. Ten thousand feet, now that's a view.

Transportation is easy to use, but renting a car for one day let me get my bearings and a chance to drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, a compromise on my goal to walk the bridge. My one indulgence was a $5 ride on a cable car on the last day as I headed back to the hotel to pack for my Frontier flight home. It was fun, especially because you can put your camera at f22, shutter speed at 125, stick your feet straight out and take a picture of cars as they go by. Your feet are in focus, the distance is in future, and the cars are blurry. Good times. It made me wonder as I sat on the cable car photographing my feet as cars drove by if San Fran had started to get to me just a little bit. Hmmm. Perhaps the people on the cable car wondered about me, not seeing the whole picture. Photographer? Journalist? Mother of three?

Maybe I didn't get a chance to see the whole picture on San Fran. Cathedral Hill just wasn't high enough, I guess.

A Letter to a Teacher About an Assignment

Hi-

I'm just whining here, just for the briefest of moments.

I've signed up four social doc classes and am about written out in terms of Greg Lopez. You can only say the guy is a Jedi master of words only so many times. Or maybe take the Star Trek approach: "Captain Lopez, the Klingons are attacking! Quick! Write something that will dispel our angry ignorance with phasers of unity and sympathy!" Or how about the Sex and the City approach: When I realized Mr Write (get it?) was right there, but until he would commit to writing more than 1000 words at a time, I couldn't pencil in our future." Or the Matrix approach. Neo-Lopez: "What you read may be real but what you must realize is there is no assignment."

Sorry. Post SocDoc Syndrome. From 0 to punchy in 5 days.

I'll get back to work, but it'll stink. Like a pile of dog crap in the noon-day sun.

:)

Barbara

Being nasty in Monterey

Traveling makes people tired. Weekday rooms are inevitably quieter than weekend rooms.

Saturday night saw the last crit, with a game concocted to have a little fun with Kenn. He's taken to saying "Afghanistan Banana Stand" instead of using the customary colorful parlance for describing a photographer's skill. We decided that every time he said "ABS" we would take a drink of our bottled beverages and slam them down on the table. Unfortunately, he only said it once, and didn't get the joke. Kenn, on the other side of the fence. We were by far as loud as the group twice the size last year. Dominic filled in where 10 other people were missing. You could also hear him 10 rooms away and knew you were heading in the right direction towards the conference room. Like a lighthouse of sound.

The room next door had been quiet all week until the party-goers showed up and made noise until after 2 a.m. The parking space in front of our room was taken by a behemoth truck, so I ended up parking in front of their room. The noise continued, the usual good time sounds of loud voices, laughter and ego. I'm an early riser and after missing a few hours sleep and a few of Kenn's crits, my nice-o-meter was registering two stops under. Drew was the perpetrator. Around 9 a.m., the plan began to unfold. Standing in the room, pushing the lock button twice makes the horn honk. The first round consisted of 4 honks in a row, a mobile alarm clock that aimed straight at their $99 a night room. Several other single honks over the next 20 minutes produced an angry person who kept opening the door looking for the offender. Door closes, and Drew pushes the lock button twice again. Door opens. Door shuts. Drew decided to go out for a smoke, cigarette in one hand, remote in the other. One of Drew's many talents is his poker face. Honk. Door opens. Drew's just standing there, smoking. Innocent. Remote in his pocket. Smoking. Door closes. Honk. Lady comes out and asks, "Do you know who's honking? They woke us up!."