Leonard Nash is a freelance writer from Hollywood, Florida. "A Feast for Curtis" originally appeared in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Nash's work has also appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, Potpourri, Seattle Review, South Dakota Review, and the anthology Irrepressible Appetites (Rock Press, 2003). Many of his published works appear on his website, www.LeonardNash.com.
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Northern California is passionate in November, tentative and foggy, rainy and temperamental, making it best to avoid mountain roads after dark. So on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, when I found myself in Leggett around sunset, I decided to stay at the Eel River Redwoods Hostel rather than push on toward Fort Bragg, in search of a traditional motel. The hostel resembled a low-rent summer camp, complete with log cabins and hiking trails scattered over its four or five rustic acres. There was a small office up front, attached to a roadside liquor bar. How bad could it be? One night, have a drink, cook a simple meal, get some sleep, take a hot shower, and get the heck out of there at sunrise. Three days later, I didn't want to leave.
In the morning, I decided to take a break from the road and write some poetry in the hammock tied between two redwood trees beside the deck. Truth is, I was kind of tired. I'd been on the road for six weeks since Boca Raton. During this, my post-graduate school trip, I'd photographed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, eavesdropped on lunch counter conversations at the Rexall in Grand Island, Nebraska, and spent a week with friends in Salt Lake City, playing tennis, hiking in the Wasatch Mountains, and drinking good wine from the state-run liquor store. In Port Angeles, Washington I'd purchased halogen headlights at Wal-Mart and visited Raymond Carver's grave. And in Seaside, Oregon I'd wandered the antique mall, sifting through dusty Fanta bottles and Planet of the Apes trading cards, walked along the mysterious Pacific Ocean shore, and sent postcards back to Florida. I had nothing to complain about, but I was a little road weary nonetheless.
So after I wrote (and slept) for about two hours, I rolled out of the hammock and went into the communal cabin, where I bumped into Curtis, this fifty-something African-American man who handled repairs and maintenance, kept the fireplace going, and supervised the guests, while Gene, the owner of the outfit, a semi-retired business writer, huddled in his little apartment behind the office, about a hundred yards away.
Curtis had short salt and pepper hair and described himself as an "old hippie." Most of the "old hippies" I've met have full-time jobs, houses in the suburbs, and drive SUVs, but I took his word for it. Curtis stood beside me in the kitchen, putting together a bologna sandwich on white bread with French's mustard. I was scooping a can of Safeway albacore tuna into a bowl of boiled ramen noodles.
At the indoor picnic bench beside the kitchen, Curtis swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then pointed to a poster on the wall of the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree, not far from the hostel. "Me and my ex-wife, we conceived our eldest child in that tree, in the backseat of our 1965 Ford."
I'd heard his story the night before, when a group of us were having dinner together, but then Curtis added that he hadn't seen his ex-wife or his three daughters in years. "It's been a while now," he said with less amusement in his gravelly voice. Whenever Curtis laughed, or tried to, his bittersweet joviality lapsed into a vicious smoker's cough, which he blamed on a "touch of emphysema."
"Most of the houses around here don't have floors," Curtis stated, referring to Humboldt County's infamous cannabis industry. "They're the ones the government goes after." Curtis said he had recently retired from the county waterworks department, said he owned 180 acres somewhere north and east of Leggett, and that he planned to build a house out there someday to replace his travel trailer, but near as I could tell, he lived full-time at the hostel, in a ten by ten cabin containing a bed, a small table, and a lot of clothes scattered about. Like the rest of us, Curtis had to trudge through the midnight cold to reach the drafty building that housed the men's and women's bathrooms. Outside, his avocado green Dodge van was parked alongside my red Subaru and a fellow hosteller's white Karman Ghia.
That evening a fresh crop of hostellers arrived, toting backpacks and suitcases and bedrolls. Some arrived by car, others by bicycle or on foot. By now, I was a seasoned veteran of the Eel River Redwoods Hostel, settled into my favorite spot on the large corduroy sofa near the fireplace, reading Mark Halliday's, Tasker Street, a collection of imagistic poetry that I'd bought in a small bookshop in Arcata. Among the new guests were two young women from Massachusetts, Carrie and Allison. Allison had spiked blonde hair, many earrings, and a gold loop through her left nostril. Carrie had longer, bushy hair, less jewelry, and fewer outward signs of rebellion.
During dinner with the evening's nine or ten guests, including a number of Australians and Brits and Germans, the beige rotary wall phone near the picnic bench rang. I was closest to it, so I reached up and answered. It was Gene, calling to announce that the liquor bar was serving free tomato soup and two for one drinks. Curtis put down his microwaved hot dog and scribbled a notice on the chalkboard for the benefit of a long-distance couple (the guy was from Oakland and the young woman was from somewhere in Michigan) who had gone down to the sauna. Curtis said that Gene would be upset if nobody showed up, especially after he'd paid Leon the bartender to drive in from Laytonville.
Nursing various degrees of hangovers, we gathered in the kitchen the next morning and made pancakes from the complimentary stash of Bisquick, an unofficial hostelling tradition. Then we completed our assigned chores, another hostelling tradition. Some took out the trash, or washed dishes, or swept leaves from the deck. Carrie and Allison and I vacuumed the living room carpet and swept the kitchen and dining room, after which Curtis invited the three of us for a little outing.
Carrie rode with Curtis in his van, and I followed with rebellious Allison, and her many earrings, in my car. Several miles to the south, the four of us hiked down to Curtis' "Old Swimming Hole," a secluded offshoot of the Eel River. The slick underbrush was wet with the heavy humidity that keeps Northern California so green, and in the eerie silence, save for the occasional hum of truck tires along the 101 freeway, I felt like we were all connected somehow to the Curtis of today, this sickly man in search of companionship, and the young boy he once was, healthy and shirtless and lean, taking turns with his childhood pals, leaping headfirst from the ragged cliffs.
Curtis lit the cigarette he'd been carrying over his ear and shoved his lighter back into his jeans pocket. "I'm a little thirsty, " he said.
So in Laytonville, a few miles south of Leggett, we stopped at the Crossroads, where Curtis treated us to two rounds of Budweiser and a bag of popcorn. The bartender, a forty-something fellow with a fu manchu and a ponytail, told a mesmerized Carrie and Allison about how he'd done three years for such and such. "It really doesn't matter," as he put it. From what I'd heard, much of Humboldt County's population had lost their driver's license or been arrested for possession or some infraction or other. "People up here have to fend for themselves," he added, "but it's a decent place to suffer. I used to live in Chicago. That's a bad place to suffer."
After Curtis settled our tab, we walked over to Nobody's Business, the little gift shop next door, where Curtis insisted on buying each of the girls a pair of five-dollar silver earrings. It looked like the start of something untoward, but they seemed okay with it.
"What would you like?" Curtis said. I had just opened a greeting card with a colorful drawing of barnyard animals sitting around a dinner table, like a scene out of George Orwell's Animal Farm. "I am wealthy in my friends," read the inside inscription.
"It's a nice card, but what do I need it for?" I said.
"I want you to have it," Curtis said, his wallet and the earrings in hand, as he took the card from me.
"I don't think Curtis wants us to leave, " I said to Carrie and Allison back at the hostel. I'd have stayed for Thanksgiving, but I had plans with my friend Steve in San Francisco, and the girls were visiting someone they knew in L.A.
"I've got an idea," Allison announced. And minutes later, we squeezed into the Subaru and drove down to the Leggett Market and Deli, where we bought Linguini, pasta sauce, romaine lettuce, fresh carrots, scallions, three varieties of bell peppers, a bottle of Newman's Own Balsamic Vinaigrette, ground beef for meatballs, a loaf of French bread, and two bottles of cheap red wine.
Fortunately, we knew better than to try baking a turkey, but even so, we spent the last three hours of daylight chopping and dicing and stirring. I was the king of ramen noodles, and Carrie and Allison, they were no gourmet chefs either, but we did okay, despite the dull serrated knives, the warped pots and pans we found under the sink, and a trip back to the store for grated parmesan. The young woman from Michigan, whose relationship with her long-distance boyfriend was "tentative," as she put it, helped us with the meatballs and the salad, working in various abandoned seasonings from the pantry.
And that night, Curtis sat on a folding chair at the head of the picnic bench, his plate on his lap, tipping backwards like a kid in school, feasting on our impromptu holiday dinner, a wine glass held high. For the benefit of the evening's new guests, he pointed to the poster of the drive-thru tree, stapled to the wall between the window and telephone, and retold his story, momentarily pleased with himself, momentarily at ease with his place in this world, smiling like a man who was home for the holidays after many years at sea.
But the story doesn't quite end there, because two years later I flew to California with my mom to visit family in Agoura Hills and to take another drive along the Pacific coast. After nights in San Luis Obispo, San Simeon, Monterey, Petaluma, and Fort Bragg, we were heading toward Avenue of the Giants, but when we passed Nobody's Business gift shop, and signs for the region's drive-thru tree attractions, I announced that I had to stop at the hostel. I doubted if Curtis would remember me, given all the guests who come and go throughout the years, but I was curious to see him again.
Eventually I will learn to leave well enough alone.
It was about two o'clock, so we had about three more hours of daylight-which was fortunate, because on that cold January afternoon, the Eel River Redwoods Hostel was no more. Gene's office and the liquor bar were boarded up and the signage was gone, replaced by a few no-nonsense TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED placards bolted to the front gate. The cabins, barely visible through the trees and brush, appeared dark and empty.
Today, whenever I see my greeting card of the barnyard animals Scotch-taped to my refrigerator, I wonder where Curtis is living, now that the hostel is gone, and I wonder how that "touch of emphysema" is treating him, but the news probably isn't good, so I leave it alone.
Instead, I pretend that he's still holding court from his post at the picnic bench in the communal cabin, supervising hostellers as they complete their mealtime chores, sharing his tales of lovemaking in the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree, hiking down to the "Old Swimming Hole" with another round of travelers, hoping that someday his daughters will come home and visit for the holidays-lifting a glass of Merlot, toasting new friends like it's nobody's business.
Copyright 2003
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