In years past I was lucky enough to work with some great writers in a number of crazy places around the world. I participated not as a writer, but as a character in their stories. I was usually cast as something like the fishing equivalent of Hollywood’s “Capt. Ron,” or the village idiot.
I pestered them about writing on their level, and they humored me by instructing me to submit stories from whatever frontier I was bumbling through over the years. We kicked around the idea of a me writing a series called, “Dispatches From the Frontier,” but it never materialized. A couple of dispatches were printed in Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal, but that’s about it.
I’m on my way to a fisheries conference and board meeting in South Florida. What you are reading now feels to me like a Dispatch From the Frontier because in the months since the pandemic reared its ugly head the US mainland has looked to be as crazy a place as any of those others we used to go to.
If you start with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and work backwards through the entire age of COVID-19 — through protests and riots in various mainland cities, fights in airline terminals and shootings strewn all about the country — collectively it gave me pause before leaving sleepy Pu’uanahulu to go all the way to the east coast to talk about fish.
Was the crazy imagery on TV hyperbole, or was it real? That was the question. Since I had a couple of stops on the way to Florida and back, it presented a good opportunity to find out.
First stop; Portland, Oregon. Checking into the hotel after midnight, things were going well until a cockroach trotted by. The clerk screamed, and completely lost the plot. I stepped on the cockroach and tried to keep things moving toward my slumber. The clerk called her mom to make sure she was nearby, then put her on hold. She was so flustered that she gave me free breakfast and free beer and anything else I wanted for free. She was all upset and undone. I figured if one cockroach got me all that free stuff, then next trip I’d bring more and get my room comped.
National media imagery had depicted Portland as “ground zero” for national unrest. When Trump sent federal troops to Portland and they commenced to pick up “adversarial personnel” from unmarked cars and interrogate them in secret hideaways, I was shocked. I had experienced this in Venezuela, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it happening in the USA.
The next day, I asked to be shown the section of town where all of this went down. My daughter was guide as by now, she has been living there for a few years.
She worked with attorneys, and their offices were located adjacent to the courthouse, where most of the ire of the “protesters” was projected. Adjacent was the Federal building, headquarters for the jackboots. Tawny had been unable to get to work on a number of days, so she knew the area fairly well.
With no unrest in sight in my visit, the number of buildings boarded up seemed proportional to the size of the city during pandemic. I reflected on the shops boarded up on Alii Drive. There were a fair number of “unsheltered individuals” in the downtown area of Portland, but it did not look much worse than Honokohau Harbor, the Old Airport, and the Kailua Pier at times. Don’t take these analogies to mean things looked good.
Hindsight, however, is 20/20. What I did not see, my daughter had lived with her own eyes. She was ready to move on to a new chapter and a new location. Me too.
Next stop: Orange County, California. Blonde surfer kids ignored bike lanes, careening across lanes on motorized bicycles. People of every size, shape and hue were out exercising and en-joying the sun. Everyone seemed to have three dogs.
Spanish style architecture and street names remind you of a shared history with Mexico, but there was no sign of the troubles on the border, which was not far. From just driving through, life seemed to be pretty “normal” in a decidedly Southern California style.
if you did not read the L.A. Times or watch the news on TV, Orange County seemed to be living the same peaceful beach lifestyle it had been living prior to the pandemic. If you did pay attention to the media, you got the impression that California was hanging up a poster promoting all things PC with a steel spike and a sledge when a tack and a thumb would do. The news came from Los Angeles, not San Clemente, so obviously I was seeing only one side.
I did not have a local guide to show me the underbelly of the area, as I was visiting elderly family. So, I just enjoyed their company and the Mexican food while watching the news. L.A. newscasters cut to video from Miami where Jerry Springer like brawls were erupting in airport departure terminals. No one seemed to know why.
Miami was my next stop, so I started to form a plan on how to navigate my arrival and get to my destination with no pilikia. I passed through DFW without a hitch, caught the plane to Miami and upon landing, it looked like the run was clean. Miami, however, had different ideas.
All of us on the plane were told to stay in our seats. Two armed sheriffs and two FBI types boarded the plane and strode to the back. Heads turned aft, moms pushed babies low.
The lawmen found their marks and two people were escorted off the plane rapidly. Soon, we were allowed off, relieved, at least for the moment.
The sheriffs and plain clothespin were in the gangway with the two suspects — and more armed sheriffs provided backup. It was obvious they were waiting to intercept someone else at the jetway door.
I made like a tree and leaved. If I could just make it through the terminal to an uber without getting caught in a brawl, I’d be okay.
TO BE CONTINUED
