Nothing=Something

One of the wineries I shoot for is located in Paso Robles, I live in San Francisco.  I love the drive to and from Paso….down 101, through San Jose, dropping down into the Salinas Valley.  From there it’s a straight shot on the valley floor flanked by two mountain ranges. Stunning really and if I were a good writer I’d go into a beautiful piece of prose right now about the history, the climate, topography etc. of that area.

I’d say the names of the towns like Gonzales, Soledad, King City (it’s not really a city). I’d talk about the farms and farm workers…..and rows and rows and rows of different crops.  I’d point out the billboard that has a picture of Martin Luther King on it with the tagline “Martin Luther King was a Republican”

Instead read Steinbeck.

I’m always intrigued by what lies off the road.  The historical markers, the little towns, the road that winds off into the distance.

One trip back to SF I decide to take the exit to San Ardo.  Don’t know one iota about San Ardo.

I take the exit, drive across the Salinas River into San Ardo.  I see an old guy standing near what appears to be an old gas station.  I drive to the end of town and turn around.  I haven’t seen another human so I drive back and pull into the old gas station and get out.  I try the door. It’s locked.  I’m sort of trying to see inside but there’s a lot of things on the window that blocks the view.

Someone is ambling across the street coming towards me.

It’s the old guy.

He reaches me finally and says “Whatcha looking for?”

I say, “I don’t know”

He says “Well, I’m not going to open up for you then”

“I don’t know what you got. I can’t see inside”

“What do you want?”

We’re at an impasse here so I say “Do you have water for sale?”

“Yep”

And he fishes into his pocket for the keys and in we go.

Old inside, of course; he’s got a pretty random assortment of stuff. What’s startlingly though is running around all four walls are shelves and shelves of baseball hats.  Hundreds and hundreds of them and each different.

So I do what I do best.  I ask questions.

815 hats if I remember but there are a couple thousand in storage

It all started innocently like all these things do by someone giving him a baseball hat and him putting it on a shelf.  And someone gives another, and another and so on.
One of the hats was given by a famous SF 49’er..a football player.

But I’ve done it.  He’s talking and it appears like he likes to talk and we’re going to be there awhile.

I steer the conversation to one wall of the store/old gas station/hat museum/place.  There’s a counter with maybe seven or so stools.  What’s that I want to know.  He’s says it’s a bar but it’s not open right now..only when people start to get off work does he open it. And no, he won’t open if for me right now.

We finally get done talking.  I didn’t get any water, I purchased fruit juice instead.

After I tell Annie my story of San Ardo she remarks “Once again Paul, you go looking for nothing and you find something”

I’ve logged the San Ardo Old Gas Station Store Hat Museum Bar into the memory bank.  Gotta have a drink here somehow.

My daughter finishes school in Santa Barbara and I drive down to collect her and her things. Load up in my car and load up her car and start to drive back.

I time things so we are driving by San Ardo around quitting time.  I make sure that Taylor follows me when I exit the highway.

Drive right up to it.  Two trucks sit outside.

We walk in.  The hat guy is behind the bar.  Two old guys are sitting there as well.

We sit down and I say “We’d like a couple beers”

The hat guy starts in again.

“I don’t sell beer here”

I look at the man next to me.  He’s got a Coors Light in his hand, the man at the end has a Coors Light too.

I point and say “Ok, give me what they have then”

“Is she old enough to drink”?

“Sure is, she’s my daughter”

I don’t drink Coors Light but I'm thinking that’s all he’s got so I don’t push it and take what he’s giving.

We start in on our beers and I tell him how we’re driving back home etc etc.

The man sitting next to me pulls out his wallet…now this is right out the blue mind you and takes out a laminated card and hands it to me.

“This is who I am”

I take it but can’t read it because I didn’t bring in my glasses from the car.  The hat guy who we now know is named Marcel gives me his 1970’s style huge pair of glasses.

The card says he’s a Native American and belongs to the Salinan Tribe.

John’s his name but no he doesn’t have a casino.

The man at end of the bar is Happy.  He’s 88, Marcel and John are younger.  We know this because they’re teasing Happy that he’s the oldest of the bunch.

Happy says it’s time for him to go and climbs down.  From his stool to the door is maybe twenty feet. Happy starts to walk…well, walk is not the right word.  I don’t think we have a word in the English language for this but he is moving across the floor an inch, maybe 2 inches at a time.  I swear it takes him five minutes to go 20 feet.

He reaches the door and I’m afraid he won’t be strong enough to open it and I’m twitching trying to decide if I should get up and help him.  But no, a man doesn’t do that to another man unless you know for sure he needs help.

He makes it out and eventually I see the door open to a truck and he climbs in somehow and drives off.

I ask Marcel about San Ardo….ok, I’ve done it.

He disappears and comes back with boxes of newspaper clippings, flags from the war, medals, and lord knows what else in them..

He’s a talker like I said………..

And once again I go look for nothing and find something.

Courier Bags

Late 2008 I’m starting to think about how to concisely carry some sketch books as I travel through Ecuador. I also wanted to be able to put a Leica M in with the books.

As a kid I did quite a bit of leather work making this and that with my guide through it being the OG Al Stohlman.  So I measured up the largest sketchbook I wanted to pack with me in Ecuador and made a bag to fit it, a couple other sketchbooks, Micron pens of course and the Leica.  I didn’t want a big bag, but a right sized bag.

I used a technique of soaking the leather in water and bending it into the shape I wanted.  When it dries it keeps that shape pretty well. 

For a fastening system I again turned back to my childhood.  Probably my most favorite book of all time is Ellsworth Jaeger’s “Wildwood Wisdom”.  This was a book that came to me through the mail as I belonged to a outdoor book club as a kid.  I have read, re-read and re-read Wildwood Wisdom countless times.  Written in 1945, it’s a collection of how the Native Americans and early frontier people did things..made birchbark boiling containers, anti-snow blindness goggles, tanning a deer skin, preserving fish over a smoky fire and thousands of other similar things.

I remembered one page devoted to leather buttons so I pull down my book and look it up..it turned out to be the perfect way to keep the bag closed.

The bag has been with me ever since….being field tested so to speak.  It’s flopped around in the back of pickups bouncing over crappy roads in Ecuador, used as a pillow in Portugal, a lunch sack in Spain. And last month...crazy wind blown hikes in the Conemarra in Ireland. It’s been with me on trips on Bart over to Berkeley and back, to bars in San Francisco, to Pho restaurants in the Mission.  It’s been rained on, sat on and spilled on and just now it’s getting a real nice patina.  There’s a history in it’s softness and sheen….it’s my history.

And as I went about my way, I would get stopped by people….they want to know where I got the bag and when I told them I had made it, they would have a look of dejection as they knew they couldn’t run to their local bespoke store and buy one for themselves.

But one time I was going to meet my daughter for lunch in the Mission District.  I bike over there and start to lock up my bike…there’s a couple guys standing outside of a newfashioned barber shop. One of them says that I need a haircut (this is right before leaving for Ireland).  I laugh and tell them my "I’m going to Ireland for a haircut" routine.  He spots my bag and asks where I got the bag…but this time he’s not satisfied with my answer of it’s a one of kind thing ….he begs me to make him one…just like the one I had slung over my shoulder….begs me.  Says he’s a barber at this shop and bring it him when I get it done.

And so I start to think about maybe making the bags for a wider audience.  My way, one at a time, each a bit different…a curve here sharper, a bigger there fastener.  I want my fingerprints all over each of them.

I am calling them Courier Bags…for taking your stuff around the world with you.  Not everything, just the important stuff.

See the new ones here  Paul Kirchner Studios

Google says there's an Al Stohlman museum

Sean-nós

First of all go here and read this link.

I'm a frequenter at the link's mothersite.....No Depression, which is a music site devoted to Americana.

I read the entry on the music of Ireland and filed it away in my head until we decided to go to Ireland to see what we would see.  I wanted to make the Connemara one of the places we hiked and hoped to happen upon some music in the small towns of the area.

I have a firm rule when traveling for pleasure and that’s to go in the off season.  When my girlfriend and I decided to go to Ireland in December we got nothing but “it’s their rainiest month of the year. Why are you going then?”

We go then because 95% of the time we went into a pub outside the big cities in Ireland we were the only non locals in the place.

We had spent the day hiking in the mountains of Connemara with winds of biblical proportions and got to Clifden around 4.  We park the car and start to walk around looking for a good cup of hot Americano…maybe 4 or 5 minutes.. and go by a pub.  My girlfriend spots a couple of people playing inside and I say “let’s go in for a pint”.

Inside, it’s all old men and women.  The two players are a young man who we later find out grew up down the road aways in Cleggan along with his wife from Sweden, and an older guy on squeeze box we later find out is brother of the owner of the pub.  The young couple live in Sweden now but his wife tells us he misses the Irish music scene so much that they come back here whenever they can.

The scene quickly takes upon a surreal almost film-like quality of people coming off their bar stools to sing a verse or two, us interacting with everybody in the place once they find out we’re from San Francisco….you can feel the energy starting to build.  The young guy puts down his guitar and picks up his banjo, the owner of the bar comes around and picks up the guitar and sits down, an old guy pulls out a flute from his pocket and sits down and the music really takes off.  Thomas, the old guy sitting next to me is doing a running commentary in my ear on the history and significance of the songs.  One woman gets up and sings a cappella….she holds her Guinness in her hand, eyes closed…Thomas is telling me (I think, his accent is difficult for me to pick up) how important this song is to the Irish people….Damn, it was sending shivers up my spine.

They start to do a song with a nice beat and I get up to dance.  Everybody’s jaws drop, fingers are pointing.  Afterward the oldest of the old comes over slapping my back and yelling “That was fantastic!”  They want to know where I learned that.  I tell them my mother who grew up way back yonder in the hills of Kentucky taught me that. Kevin, the squeezebox player says “You dance in Shadow style...at least I think he said Shadow….he says that’s the very old style of dancing.  After getting back to the US and rereading the No Depression thread I realize he was saying "Sean-nós" or "Old Style"

A couple songs later, Kevin says I should dance to the next number…Old guys are trying to kiss my girlfriend, the crowd even gets her to sing a song…she settles on “This Land is Your Land”.  We buy a round of pints for the band, Thomas the whole time is still doing a running commentary in my ear.  At one point he sort of whispers “Do you know what this is?  It’s a session, fucker”.  For some reason he’s been calling me a fucker the whole time. “You’re lucky to be here”…I tell him the reason we came to Ireland was for the music…and to meet him.  He likes this.

By the end of the evening, we’ve met and made friends with each and everybody in the place.  I’m smitten…with the land that we hiked, with the pubs and the music within and especially with the very warm and gentle people.

Off for a Haircut

I have a mini tradition going on.  It's not really much of a tradition or really that special either but I like to get a haircut in foreign countries.  This started on a trip to Ecuador back in 2009 and while staying in the little fishing village of Puerto Lopez I decided to go to the open market and pick a barber from the many available there.
I chose Peluqueria Junior.  Three bucks included the works.

Last year in Portugal I had the hair cut in a beautiful old shop in Porto.  The old red barber chairs had been made down the coast in Lisboa.  I think it was 9 euro.  Turned out to be a bit shorter than I anticipated but I was having difficulty with the Portuguese language.

Later this week I'm off to Ireland.  On purpose I haven't had a haircut in probably 9 months so I can have the full experience of going from shaggy to short.  I'm looking for a country barber somewhere, no city barber this time.