Tales from the Christensen Cruiser

I’m going to do something a bit different with this post. I’m going to do what I’ll call an aside. Asides are going to be tangential trips to the trip in the truck – mental or physical. It may be a mechanical aside, in which case motorheads might read it and nobody else. It might be musings on any subject that strikes my fancy. There’s a lot of time to think on the road, so there may be a few of these – and you can take it or leave it…

Sittin’ in the Albequrque airport waiting for the cattle call for my flight to California. The truck is in safe in drydock in Robbie’s driveway. I am travelling with my typical backpack with my travelling stuff; laptop, various electrical components, (chargers, cameras, thumbdrives, etc,etc,etc.) I also have a yellow plastic bag with a very ill-fitting wetsuit in it that I bought at some yardsale a couple of years ago. Its been living in Missie’s cottage in Rockport these past couple of years. I am bringing it because I need it for my trip. I am flying back because the water system at the ranch is screwed up once again and I have to go fix it if it isn’t fixed before I get there. I really didn’t want to leave Santa Fe right now, but there is another reason to go, and that is a memorial for my friend David Henderson, who killed himself several weeks ago. There is to be a paddle out in San Francisco before the party and I want to be in the water for that. I spent some time with David in the water back in the days of our youth. Carmel Beach in the winter.

It would seem that I am supposed to be there. I know I want to be there. It’s a horrible reason to get together, but the boys are showing up from all over the country and it will be good to see them. A lot of these guys are like brothers to me – we were very close for that brief time we were all going to Stevenson school in the early seventies. As it was a boarding school, these guys were family, and we did some stuff together. We spent a lot of time in the forest wandering the trails late at night, smoking pot, tripping on acid, you know, the early seventies. We got away with a lot, though we lost several classmates through the attrition of their being busted for one thing or another. I know that I got away with a lot more at RLS than I ever would have at home, but it was a different time.

David was like our crews’ Neal Cassidy. As he said, “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re just taking up space”, and he certainly did, sometimes to his detriment. I swam to Guatamala with him, as well as a couple of the other guys who are coming to the memorial, but there is an illustration of who David was in that swim across the Yucamacinta River. Several of us had already swum across and Kirk Funston was halfway across and stopped and started to panic, meanwhile floating down the river to god knew where. Of all of us, it was David who yelled at him “Put your head down and swim!”, twice or three times and Kirk did put his head down and swim and made it across.

On that same trip to Mexico, we were camping near Bonampak and there was rumored to be a very cool waterfall in the jungle. One of the Lacandon Indians was going to take us there, but he didn’t show up, so some other guy came to lead us to the waterfall. Another guy we have lost, Frank Moffett, was on this walk as well, and someone had showed him how to get fresh water by chopping down this certain type of plant in the jungle. So Frank takes a swing at this vine and immediately gets swarmed by a whole lot of insects of some sort – most amusing. Anyway. It became obvious that our new guide had no idea where the waterfall was – we walked and walked. We eventually came to a place where there was a pool that was twenty or thirty feet across. Having come that far very early in the morning David and I jumped in and swam across. We were the only two that got in the water. So we get to the other side and clamor up the other bank and walked a few yards and there was this huge lake – just huge. So we dove in and swam in what I can only call a Tarzan movie – just beautiful; vines coming down to the water all around it and god knows what swimming around in this thing, but I probably wouldn’t have been there or gotten that totally amazing experience had I not been with David.

When we managed to get surfing to be our sport in high school, there was a time in the middle of the winter when it was huge out, I don’t remember how big, but huge for Carmel. At the time, David used a belly board and fins and he was the only guy crazy enough to make it out that day. It was knarly getting out at Carmel on a good day, but if it was big it could take a half hour or more with all the rips and stuff. This was in the days before leashes, so I did a lot more swimming and paddling than actual surfing. So David goes out and in the time it took him to get out it got worse and worse out – ten to fifteen feet and now closing out. I remember all of us thinking how crazy it was to be out, but with David, it just sort of made sense. We all stood on the beach waiting for him to make his move, knowing he would just get hammered, all of us most amused waiting for the spectacle. He did get hammered and got the washing machine treatment, which Carmel was known for, but he made it back in in one piece.

I remember riding with him one night in that old Benz he had stashed in the forest one night and as he would come up to a stop sign he would turn his lights off to see if anyone was coming the other direction so he could run the stop sign. I, of course, wondered whether there was another guy like Dave coming the other way – maybe Kingery or something. Fortunately Bobby didn’t have a car stashed in the forest.

More recently, just a few months ago, Dave did some painting on a house I was working on at the ranch. He came to talk about the job and I was in the middle of stringing some overhead wires to the top of the biggest hay barn. It was a very tall ladder, so I was going up carefully. Dave looked at me and said “you don’t go up ladders much, do ya?” Matter of fact, I do, but he just charged up the ladder and started ripping and tearing at the tree the wires needed to go through. Just the same as always, he had gumption, something my mom noticed when Dave and some other pals helped my parents move in the seventies. He was the guy running as he worked – just a force of nature, no matter what fuel was involved at the time, and it was no different forty years later.

The main thing that I want to say about David is that there are few people in this world that I would want at my side in a hairy situation more than David. In the moment, he was the best – what I would call a good man in a storm. If a situation was dicey or dangerous, he was a guy you would want with you. I’ll miss him.

So my plane lands in San Jose and I get to the ranch after dark and start to diagnose the problem by flashlight. The water line is over a half mile long, is old, and very finicky. I can’t find any answers so hit the hay and get back to it at daybreak. I have Jose show me what he had repaired and I think I have the solution. The line goes across a ravine at one point. It’s probably thirty to forty feet across and way the heck up in the air. The repair was a little klunky and as the whole system works by gravity, it needs to flow smoothly.

So feeling fairly smug for figuring it out so quickly, I head back down to the house, get my “popout” surfboard that my dad and I made when I was fourteen or so and strapped it onto the car with a pad for a chaise lounge and some rope, throw the wetsuit into the car and head out for San Francisco and the memorial. The paddle out is supposed to start at 2:30, and of course I am running late. I thought that I had plenty of time and decided to take the brand-new Bay bridge. Traffic. The new bridge was just as congested as the old one, so I am barely moving and getting all stressed out that I am going to be late, when it occurs to me that if David was going to the same sort of thing he probably would be doing exactly what I am, so I just relaxed in to it and got there a half hour late – just when everyone else was getting ready to get in to the water. Perfect timing, actually.

I had never participated in a paddle out before, and it was wonderful. A bunch of us paddled out from Chrissy Field, near the Golden Gate and got in a big circle and held hands while words were spoken and flowers were put in the water. Everyone then threw as much water as they could in the air to release him and help him on his way.

We then reconvened nearby and continued with the memorial, where I got to catch up with some friends and meet some new ones. David’s brother spoke, as well as a few others, but the most amazing part for me was when David’s son Eddie got up and told a few stories about his dad – just great stories, and well delivered – a chip off the old block. Then he got his guitar and sang a song he had written for his dad. It was a beautiful song. How he did that I don’t know. Then he followed that with a rousing rendition of El Paso by Marty Robbins, and at the end of each verse, at the perfect place, the whole room joined in and sang along. It was awesome.  Here’s a link to slideshow of the memorial and the songs Eddie sang if you’re interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No_JsoODXGs&feature=youtu.be

After the memorial I headed over to Berkeley to hang with the Haas brothers, Eric, Marco, and Gregory, who all went to RLS, and Gordon Maus who was a classmate as well, and his wife Quinty, who I had just met at the memorial. We hung out and had a great time, and the next day Eric, Gordon, Quinty and I headed down to the ranch, where I gave them the cooks tour of the place. Hanging with Gordon was as easy and comfortable as it was years ago – the sign of a good friend. When we first heard news of David’s passing, Gordon had called me – a rare occurance, and said about what he had done, “It’s a long-term solution to a short-term problem” a totally Gordon statement. None of us could understand why David did what he did, but none of us were in his shoes either. For me, I do know that I am doing my best to make this ride last as long as I can – this life is precious. Sometimes losing someone, or having a close call of some sort helps one to see that a bit more clearly. The whole thing with David, horrible as it is, brought a few of us much closer.

I guess that one of the things I am realizing is that none of us change a whole heck of a lot as time goes on, there are just more layers added. Fine tuning I guess.  During one late night conversation with Robbie in Santa Fe, he said “Our foibles get more refined as we get older”. Kinda true. Another thing I realized hanging out with some of these guys is why they are so important to me. What I came up with is that I got to know these guys and they me, when we were not fully formed adults. We were all just beginning to figure out who we were as individuals, but without all the layers of age, we got to know the crux of the person. So we know each other on a pretty deep level.

After they left, I got back to the work on the water system, feeling all smug that I knew just what to do to make it right. Well, as you may have already surmised, it didn’t go smoothly. It took me eight days to get the system working properly, and involved much more than you probably want to know. I got it licked though, with a lot of help. To get it running smoothly, there were a few added tees and couplings, and some new supports across the ravine, that I designed and built. It eventually became clear that there were some major air locks in the line, and after several tweaks to the system and a lot of burping of lines it was once again working  just fine. Just to get an idea of the project, here’s a photo of me on the very long ladder in the ravine, leaning on the wire rope suspending the pipe.

I am sure if David was around, he would have been racing up that ladder as well…