Flood Preparation

This is my first real flood.

I had a tease in 2006, when the street had six inches of water,

  which turned into sixteen inches in my garage.  Somehow maybe, Carol lent them to me, I had hip-waders when I was interviewed for KPIX in

 my driveway.  All good fun.  That was probably 42 feet.

This is predicted to be bigger: maybe 44', possibly 46', worst case 48'.

But high enough, to try and save what I can, from the apartment below.

Maybe I was wrong with the Pergo for downstairs.

I was cocky (who, me?) and stated that it would NEVER flood again.

I've already figured that I will install cheap pine boards next time, which I

  can do myself.  With a proper paper-sealer under layer, the floor won't let

 cold air in.  But will yield to the force of the next flood.  Properly sealed on

 top, this should almost equal the Pergo effect.  I don't need durability,

  there's always the next flood, and Pergo was too intolerant of water.

It's past eight and I just moved my car already.

I watched out the front window, as strong streams were whooshing down the faux gutters along Hwy 116.  I thought, " twelve hours from now, these

  will certainly be torrents, possibly a foot deep in the driveway".

Carol and I discussed that it should be safe to wait until morning, but that was should, and she gets up a quarter a day before me.

I noticed that two of my "uphill" neighbors had already evacuated:

  the old doctor lady on the West side of D street and the family of 2-3

  across the street from her.  I also noticed that many people had parked

    up behind me already, strange cars, and we locals know everyone's car.

The driving rain is unrelenting.  The associated wind has knocked over a five-year Clematis vine, attached to lattice work held up by a 4" X 4" in the ground.  The 4" X 4" snapped in half.  A combination of water[weight], and wind [pressure], with a fulcrum point at ground level.  Next time, I'll trim them every year.

The most frantic local contingent are my finches and other small birds.

The wind/rain combo is far more inhibiting to x-ounce birds than to y-pound birds.

My finch guys are ravenous from early morning through enervating

 twilight-continued, pounding rain.

I even put out big-bird food this evening for those horrid pigeons,

   feeling sorry even for them.

 

Silent Films

Tuesday Senior’s Movie Night at Peter’s is always interesting and many times eye-opening, as it was tonight.  This was the first time in over a year that the Guerneville Senior Center book club showed a silent picture, Cecille B. DeMille’s and Gloria Swanson’s hit, titled, “Male and Female”.

We often think, these days, a hundred years on, about “silents” as two reelers, with a quick point or laugh and that’s it.  This was a two-hour film.  One in which I repetitively asked, isn’t that it?  And the others repetitively answered, “No, there’s more”.

At the time, 1916-18, the point at the beginning of the film was to depict normal life, sans war.  Then, Cecille B. DeMille depicted a fantasy version, after civilization had fallen apart, where there was little way to tell good from bad, rich from poor.

After watching the movie, which was great fun, I spoke to many who equated the movie to “Roma”, a candidate in this year’s Academy Awards.  Some thought it was great, an equal number thought it was unwatchable.  Many thought it was sexist.

We watch old movies every Tuesday Night [6pm] at Peter’s House in Monte Rio.

Some of my friends and neighbors must think it odd, strange, even a bit weird that I am so enamoured with 50-100-year-old movies; also with using the British spellings of words like enamoured; possibly also with using colons.  I think that I have been that way all my life.  It has been a dormant part of my life, but as that wears down, and I’m cutting connections to groups that require physical participation; I’m refocusing on activities that are more sedentary, like hosting a movie night.

Old movies satisfy my joy in researching topics, as I have found that for about fifteen years now, Hollywood is “remastering” some of the old movies, adding in bonus interviews and commentaries by directors, actors, and producers.  On the flip-side, if they aren’t worth tarting up a bit, then they simply sell the DVD for under $5 as a four-pack of the “greatest”.

The tie to the past is much more than a researching penchant though.  I have a strong bond with my parents, possibly because I was a slightly pre-war baby; more likely because they were both college-educated adults, who shared their lives, within cultural limits, completely with me.  A case in point, I was looking up the movie “Duel in the Sun”, 1946, as a candidate Academy Award winner, and saw Lillian Gish as a nominee for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.  I thought, why do I love that name Lillian Gish so much?  Looking further, I saw her linked to Richard Barthelmess, who was a famous actor, thirty years before.  Gish lived to be 100, but Barthelmess features in my mother’s memoirs, which were the stories she told me as a child.  There are three entries in her memoir: early memory of a famous movie star [co-starred with Lillian Gish in many D.W. Griffith’s block-busters]; second teen-age memory was of a barn-storming pilot who stopped by her Waterloo, Nebraska home, who looked a lot like Richard Barthelmess; third adult reflection was of her encounter with Richard Barthelmess, patching his parachute and getting a free ride in a biplane.  I can still visualize my teen-aged mother playing the piano/organ at the small playhouse where the town showed silent movies, bonding herself with the plots and characters, during the nineteen-twenties.

My father was more visceral. And is somewhat blank during the silent era.  His favorite early picture was, “It Happened one Night”.  In fact, he loved all the Frank Capra movies, which he passed down to both me and my sister.  Maybe that was because he was the more day-to-day wage earner during the depression, rather than focused on the future as my mother was.  Then again, he loved the escapist movies like “Gold Diggers of 1934”, but my mother loved the Hepburn movie, “Stage Door”.  My sister and I are lock-step on movies like: “Miracle on 34^th Street”, “It’s A Wonderful Life”, and any Laurel and Hardy movie.

As anyone over 65 will vehemently concur, movies have been degrading for years., they don’t make them like they used to.  And this is why I have started a movie night for seniors.  We show some new movies, but the average targeted age group is people who were teen-agers in the sixties.

All The King's Men

Almost Seventy years ago, the 1950 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Leading Actor (Broderick Crawford), Best Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge), all went to “All the King’s Men”, Robert Penn Warren’s 1946-47 award winning book about Huey Long in Louisiana in the thirties.

The similarities between Governor Willie Stark [starting with the name] and our current President were shockingly apparent as I watched the movie tonight after more than half a century.

The brilliant performance of Mercedes McCambridge stunned me.  But each of the well-cast characters achieved the goal of all actors with good direction.  That goal of demonstrating their downfall, in this case, of a character on the screen, within a few short hours.

This was a film about the Seven Deadly Sins: greed [money & power], lust [half a century ago, but everyone was sleeping with everyone else], envy [and still always wanting the other guy or gal], gluttony [Crawford was a pig while eating], wrath [everyone seemed to hate everyone else], sloth [laziness to know what is right to do, and then putting if off again and again], and pride [all of the characters maintain they are doing the right things, realizing that they are not].  These sins develop from almost religious goodness at the beginning, to downfalls and deaths by the end, two hours later, of everyone connected to Willie Stark.  There are no “good” endings.

If you’ve read this far, you might watch the movie.  I’d show it again anytime, but my next scheduled date is Tuesday, March 3^rd of 2020.

A coterie of sycophants surrounds all political leaders and that is most of what this movie is about.  Mercedes McCambridge is a combination of Ivanka, Hope, and Sarah – loyal, sleeping with him at times, jealous of all other women.  Willing to lie, cheat, steal, etc.  She degrades through the movie through alcohol, disappointment, and jealousy to become a bitter woman.

Broderick Crawford starts as an honest, tee-totaling young man, wanting justice so bad that he overcomes his poor background to achieve a Law Degree (with the help of his wife).  He learns from his first political race that graft is essential.  He also learns to drink.  He also adds to his concubinage half a dozen women, and the hint of a boy.  He sacrifices his wife, child, and friends to continue his power.  He is empty in the end.

The narrator (usually a good character in most novels), sells his soul to the devil.  It’s the Depression and there are no jobs.  Once in for a dime, he’s committed and is a key henchman up to the end.  He abandons his true love, letting her become one of the Stark many.

Min & Bill

Another fable with a moral tonight.  And just a gender switch on “High Noon”.

Marie Dressler was Oscar’s 1930 “Best Actress” for this role.  Like the “High Noon” plot with a target community, Marie gave her all for her adopted daughter; wound up winning a fight by gunshot to save the child from knowing the truth about her birth mother.

The unpretentious days of Hollywood

This was a transitional film to the talkies.

 It featured two of the ugliest Hollywood stars to receive Academy awards.

  Not only ugly, but coarse and guttural, but also the most human of any actors on the screen.  They got across pure human emotion.

Wallace Beery and Marie D. were common people in all their roles.  In this one, a commercial fisherman and a waterfront bar-owner.  The real mom comes back drunk and whorish after 14 years; Min sends her away, using her life’s savings.  Bill is an inept, but steady boyfriend.  The girl looks to be on a path to success, but the birth mom “wants her share”.

Marie D. looks mad and angry for the entire length of the movie, she's scary.

The only one smile on her face was at the end, when the police arrested her, for shooting the rotten true birth mother of her child; and protecting that child from knowing her true mother.  Marie had done her family good.

 

Wallace Beery was a moral compass in my youth, as was Gary Cooper in High Noon.  Beery kept me humble – common sense knowledge between right and wrong – earthiness.  He was in this picture to keep Min from going too far with her anger, and to save her when she’d ignored him and gone too far. 

 

A few years later Marie D. became famous by a film line that many in my generation remembered.  It was from Dinner at Eight, between her and Jean Harlow, who had just mentioned a (book?) she had read,

J.H. – “Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?"

M.D. - "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."

 

It also hasn’t passed my attention that the next year’s Best Actress was Helen Hayes with a similar plot line about complete sacrifice for a child.

 

High Noon

Walnut and oak burning in the fireplace on this rainy, rainy night.  What movie to watch tonight?  My new hobby is watching old, classic movies in the apartment downstairs with a projector, large screen, and surround sound.  I take the time to watch all the special bonus features in these remastered DVDs; usually interviews with the directors or writers.

Last night it was Gary Cooper’s “High Noon” released in 1952.

This was an anecdotal milestone for me, my “bar mitzvah”.  Bruce Rancadore and I decided we wanted to camp out for a week at my parent’s property up behind the planned Lexington Dam in the Santa Cruz mountains.  It was July, I had just turned 14.  We brought a lot of things, unfortunately not much of what we needed.  We had guns, .22’s, and explored what is still probably a wilderness area.  I had previously hunted up there with my father and his friends for deer and quail.

Parenting has changed since then.  There were no cell phones.  There was a family with a telephone four miles away.  We were on our own, a pair of kids for a week in the hills.

After three days of boredom, and a craving for junk food, we decided one morning to walk into town, Los Gatos.  As the road goes, we figured 10-11 miles.  But cross-country, we could halve that.

The planned dam had used imminent domain to clear every habitable domicile or structure that would eventually be under water.  We took a bee-line through underbrush, there being no path or road to follow.  It took us a few hours, but we arrived in Los Gatos, just in time for the first showing of “High Noon”.  Full of popcorn and Coca Cola, we wandered around for a while and then decided to see it again at 3 pm.

We weren’t anxious to go back to our camp site, and we toyed with the idea of calling home and admitting defeat.  But we gained courage from the movie plot line of, “a man has got to do what he’s got to do”, so we stuck it out and watched it a third time, letting out about 7 pm.

We started back in twilight, but the dam-site was low and surrounded by mountains.  It became quickly very dark.  Traversing underbrush in pitch blackness means lots of falls, mis-steps, and wrong ways.  We navigated by the sun in the morning.  By night, we were lost.  Our campsite was 3-4 miles up there in the hills somewhere.

The sounds of the night, dogs howling – “how far away?”  We became very scared, jumping at every sound.  We veered over to what we thought was the road, and we were right.  It took longer bur we knew we’d eventually get there.  It was past eleven, when we found our camp.  Crashed in our clothes.

Awoke the next morning, from head-to-toe itching from poison oak.

The poison oak got worse [In the next 66 years, I never got another case of Poison Oak, even though exposed many times].

We walked the four miles to the telephone and called home.  My parents would come the next day, Sunday, in the morning.

I was 14, developing my thoughts on maturity, roles I should play.  That movie helped to set me on some of the pathways I have followed like a respect for the law and governance.  Rebellious and leftist as I was in college, I became a Pershing’s Rifle guy in ROTC and loved it.  I enlisted in the Army, where others were complaining of toe-bone spurs.  Maybe I like the Grand Jury so much because of these morals.  I feel it is right to serve one’s community.