Just Another Day in New Idria
“You Can’t Get Away from It All.” That is how a writer from the San Jose Mercury assessed the self-made bedlam of my family in 1998, when she profiled us in a story she wrote about the orange contamination flowing from the defunct ghost town called the New Idria Mining District — the Mad Hatter’s Hell that we’ve embraced for 33 years.
We think it’s fun.
That was when I first met Tracie Cone, who, of course, later became the publisher of The Pinnacle weekly, and many of you know the rest of that tale. Trace is now a star reporter for the Associated Press, her fabulous stories syndicated worldwide. But for the five years she graced our intellects while she was here, she put an excruciatingly honest spotlight on this county.
The county is now bereft of any real news coverage… save an occasional scratch uploaded here on this public forum.
Tracie slapped it on the snout when she said you can’t get away from it all. I certainly cannot. We live almost two hours from the nearest town, Hollister, and I guess that’s why people who get lost and end up in Idria think they have the right to behave like lawless bastards from Deadwood in the 1870s. There is never an iron skillet big enough or handy enough when you desperately need one to form fit the dense skull of an interloping lowland lowbrow.
Here was my typical day today: I get bit by ticks THREE times, which makes four bites in two days. There is always a prevailing plague, and ticks are top of this week’s food chain. I probably have every disease in the world. Woke up at unDogly hour of 8 am today, a putrid hour, because I had to get to work pulling those ticks off me. They were embedded on my ass and my stretch-marked jugs. Where else?
As I am flicking juvenile ticks into the roiling orange brew beneath the Bridge, a moronically impractical white sedan pulls into my driveway.
Chet Bain, an absentee land partner we have not seen in 10 years, pours out of his car at 9 am and waddles over my footbridge… and did you know I have never ever seen that guy sober? Never. Not for the 40 years I have known him when he started hanging around my brother, Oliver. So I have no baseline for this walking liability, I don’t know what normal is for him. I give him cake and coffee to get his mouth to move correctly — to no avail. He is unintelligible. He babbles relentlessly about our family’s lack of last will and testaments, all the while clutching a PLASTIC DOGGIE POOP SACK for dear life.
You think I am making this crap up? Indeed, Chet drove four hours to the most remote wilderness in the state and then follows his dog around on a ludicrous leash AND SCOOPS UP THE POOR DOG’S SCAT as if they were living in a gated condo in Sunnyvale.
He drops plastic poop sack on my floor. I asked him if the poop sack belonged to him. He denied knowing the sack or ever having relations with it. I advise him to pick up shit sack and store it with the rest of his poop collection. He suddenly becomes very hurt and offended as though I just ridiculed his life’s work. I tell him that he has to leave because I have a meticulous suicide planned. Mercifully, Chet weaves up to top level of the ranch in his car and tells Okie, our foreman, what a cruel, inhospitable bitch I am. Okie pretends he is deaf so as not to deal with asshole Chet, and keeps working in the rock yard. Chet, drunker by the second, tries to maneuver his car out of driveway and smashes it into our ranch truck.
Oliver thinks this is all quite amusing. I do not.
Oliver and Okie go to town in afternoon. Chet, reeling and stumbling, comes to my door at 6 pm and says…. yeah, you guessed it, “Can someone pull my car out of the canyon, I kinda went over cliff.” I say, “Terribly sorry, but all the trucks are out of commission, someone plowed into them, Oliver won’t get back til 11 pm, hunker down for the night.” Okie and I had made bets as to when Chet would total his car on his visit, and I won because I said by twilight, and Okie thought that not the worst moron could manage to do that until at least 8 pm, accounting for the amount of booze a human is capable of putting down one’s gullet.
So Okie owes me five bucks.
On that note, I leave you with a lovely short film of the hummingbird party on my front porch, captured by Cyndi Dies Ackermann: (Click on link below!)
