Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was born on June 10. In 1952. Today she would have been 59. Now, that’s fantasy for you. No one ever expects to get that old or imagines what it will feel like – at least, no one who remembers her 10th birthday. Or her 16th. Or her 21st.

Kage remembered them all. She was so patently the same person she had been on all those previous birthdays, she stared through all the anniversaries of her 5th decade as if they were Carnivale masks. And behind whatever glitter, feathers and beads she chose that year, the same assessing black eyes looked out. The 5-year old who examined the world, took it apart in analysis and re-assembled it to suit her better.

Kage spent her entire life re-making the world to what she thought it should be. I suppose most people try to do that – she succeeded. In a small radius; through her books and stories and her utter refusal to live her life any way but her own. She re-designed the world around her to a more interesting, brighter, more comfortable place; a world full of exotica and eldritch wonders and adventure, where the word “boring” referred only to the gophers in the garden and shipworms.

Aside from staggering through the last year bleeding from the emotional sucking chest wound her death left in me, I miss that corruscating world in which Kage lived. I crave adventure, I crave the other universes that intersected ours on a daily basis; I miss Ermenwyr and Mendoza and The Watchful Person and the Fog King and the dozens of other people who lived in Kage’s world. I’m trying to assuage that hunger by writing about them and sharing them with you, Dear Readers – but now I finally understand why Kage rather wistfully commented that she wished someone would tell her the stories …

Her birthday last year – man, she was full of energy! She’d been diagnosed and come to terms with it; we were assaulting the gates of the medical industry trying to get someone to schedule her surgery and therapies. We had plans! She was writing, we’d found Santa Rosa plums, and we went to her favourite restaurant in Cambria – the venerable Brambles Dinner House.  Kage had Bramble martinis – fresh blackberries in Sapphire gin. It was a wonderful evening.

I gave her a Netbook for her birthday – her Buke, that fit in her purse and which she considered vital equipment for her upcoming hospital stays. She loved it; she spent her birthday evening building a custom slide show for her screen saver, and we set up our own Harrynet domestic network (named for our parrot) for all the computers we suddenly had … it have her a giggle every time she turned it on, and the Buke informed her that Harry was up and running. Which he usually was, all around the back of her chair, swinging from her braid and squeaking.

She sparkled so. Birthdays with Kage always ran on into the closest weekend; she said we’d gotten too old to do all our celebrating in one day, so festivities were extended as far as we could take them.

Last year, I was at some convention or other on her birthday. I celebrated it privately, still gobsmacked with her loss and running all over the continent on her postmortem business. This year – I dunno. Writing, certainly; probably a movie. Maybe dinner at Damon’s, the best steak in L.A. and a demented tropical ambiance; I’ll go over to the wall-wide aquarium and give the lion fish, drifting by like a beaded Handbag from Hell,  her regards. I’ll drink one of the horrid mai tais she loved, and wear the umbrella in my hair like an orchid.

Happy Birthday, kiddo. Birthdays don’t matter to you anymore, but it pleases me to mark your entry into the world. The sky was still ringing with the echo of your arrival when I stumbled into the world in your wake a year and 3 weeks later. I’m working now to see to it that your name lasts a while yet longer here. And if any of the crap they told us as kids is real, then you’re immortal now.

But I miss you. Tell your God for me that He’s a selfish bugger, and I do not forgive Him for taking you.

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Post Scriptum: the Word Press site just had a major meltdown. All the fancy fonts and design flourishes are gone, and we’re down to html code and plain straight-line frames. I must assume God didn’t care for my remarks … I don’t care. I meant what I said, and I stand by it! Send your solar flares, God! Blow winds and crack your cheeks! I survived losing Kage, and I will survive whatever you do to my writing – Kage taught me how.

Kage Baker was intimately, personally familiar with the concept of herd immunity. She also knew that, statistically, someone in the herd will catch none of whatever plagues are going around – someone else will catch all of them. The majority of the herd will catch proportions falling somewhere on the bell-curve between superhero health and just shy of dead …

In our family, she was that last one. Growing up, like her own heroine Mendoza, as one of a swarming knot of children, some disease was always running up and down the age spectrum. And Kage’s childhood was before the advent of all those splendid vaccines that now prevent the common childhood ailments that laid us low. We were probably the last generation in America to routinely come down with measles, chicken pox or mumps.

In Chez Baker, there was a mini-epidemic of all of these when Kage was around 7. Family legend has it that there were at least two strains of measles coming up from one end and chicken pox from the other – but however they spread, they all met in Kage. Simultaneously. Years later, a doctor found the markers for rheumatic fever in her blood and asked her when she had caught that; Kage had no idea (Momma said she hadn’t), but it was probably that Plague Year. She spent most of it covered in various spots, and could have been suffering from half a dozen fevers no one ever had time to identify.

She missed the mumps, but they nailed her in her 20’s. She caught mumps at least twice. Yeah, I know, it’s rare; but so was Kage. She managed. I never showed any symptoms at all, not as a child nor when Kage was afflicted as a young woman; I am apparently immune. Measles almost did for me, but I never did get the mumps. I escaped the worst of all the plagues. Evidently, I’m the other end of that bell curve.

I never have quite escaped the fervid atmosphere of the herd, though. Neither did Kage. We spent 30-odd years doing outdoor theatre in enormous casts, romantically inadequate shelter and dubious hygiene – what we called “Faire crud” worked its way through people’s lungs every winter and spring (Kage caught it all, of course.) And of course the various next-generation households have continued to produce small children – always something special and pestilential for the dear Aunties! And that situation was compounded geometrically when sister Kimberly took up teaching kindergarteners.

Now I live with Kimberly. My robust immune system is not what it was; 50-odd years of blithely careless life has left some dents and cracks in my cellular armour. School in Los Angeles doesn’t get out for 11 more days; not only is Kimberly wading daily through a knee-deep tide of small kids, my brother-in-law teaches high schoolers and nephew Michael is in college … they bring home diseases no one has even named yet.The next two generations have ganged up to send me evil pathogens. It’s the Revenge of the Herd.

My stomach hurts, my head is stopped up, my joints ache. I’m cold all the time. I can’t get comfortable even in my feather bed. My eyelashes itch.

I am sure Kage is smugly amused somewhere. Ha, she is snarking, so all those years I was just being  self-indulgently  fragile, was I? It is to laugh! Blow your nose and get back to work!

Well, I’m writing, aren’t I? Despite being terminally ill with a host of 1st-grade viruses, arthritis of the epiglottis and probably leprosy, I’m writing. When I’m done here, I will take a nap and then return to Mars. Feeling very sorry for myself, I do assure you, but – you know how it is. Nothing matters but the work.

As long as the Kleenex and ginger ale hold out, anyway.

Kage Baker, as must be pretty obvious by now, really liked free-range strangeness. She was a connoisseuse, a collector, a delighted vector for tales of High Weirdness. Like gossip, she was happy enough just to hear of it and not necessarily spread it – but she wanted to know; and, if it was harmless, she liked to be the one to pass it on.

Kage loved being the messenger. She was ordinarily quite shy, but she’d leap into conversations like a gazelle on speed to be the bearer of unusual news. When we attended the 2009 World Fantasy Awards, she took a genuine delight in being able to tell people she was, yes, actually sick! I’m sure several folks were taken aback at the cheerful way in which she imparted her cancer – please bear in mind, if she took you by surprise with that information, that 1) she thought she was going to survive; and 2) it was such a tidbit of news!

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. Storytellers gotta tell people stuff.

She collected tales of weirdness avidly. She would always look over at me as we settled in to some hour-long special on demon Laotian catfish, and observe virtuously  that you just never knew what tidbit might lead to a story … which was true; but the deeper truth was, she just loved that shit.

The radio show Coast To Coast AM (now hosted by George Noory, but originally with the redoubtable Al Bell) was one of her favourites – before the Internet really got going, it could be found late at night on public access cable television in Pismo Beach. Which was weird in itself, ’cause it was a radio show … The only visual display was closed captioning of the dialogue running across the telly screen, but it was – fascinatingly!- often interrupted by static, scraps of other broadcasts, and weird beeping noises. It suffered inexplicable failures of transmission often, and Kage would be in hysterics of laughter, wondering if it was incompetent engineers or sinister government agencies? We got a lot of alien news from good old Coast To Coast. It’s main charm was the unflappable calm of Mssrs. Bell and Noory, no matter how excited their guests became.

Another interesting source was Blogsquatcher podcasts on Blog Talk Radio. Kage loved the combination of personal gossip (Sasquatch hunters are a quarrelsome lot), bad research and the occasional gem of actual scholarship. Those gems rarely had anything to do with cryptid hominoids, but we learned a lot about game cameras, UV and IR light, ultrasound, and trespassing laws.

Kage drew her personal line at purveyors of total nonsense. The Weekly World News was always one of my favourite brainless reads (Bat Boy Joins The Boy Scouts! Titanic’s Captain Found In Coma On Abandoned Whaling Vessel! Housewife Grows Man-sized Parsnip!) but she scorned its over-ripe journalism. On the other hand, the various “reality” shows on supposedly-respectable stations like The Learning Channel and History were always on her top 10 list; cryptids, legendary beasts, ghosts, strange lands and dubious islands … that was what she liked.

Her research into the murkier aspects of phenomenology was constant. My especial field was actual science – I read dozens of magazines, journals, abstracts and aggregate sites, looking for interesting leads on solar prominences, poisonous phosphorescent fungi, anti-matter, neuron regeneration, prostheses, apoptosis, telomeres, crackpots, rumpots, and How are you, Mr. Wilson?

There was a giant solar flare yestreday; it should hit is in a day or two – maybe on Kage’s birthday! – and who knows what will happen? I will hope for low-latitude aurorae, and pray it’s not the 1859 Incident Redux. Attempts are being made to breed the last few of some of the Galapagos tortoises – aside from the general hilarity (tortoises are determined but not graceful lovers) there is hope for information on why lady chelonions not only do not experience menopause, but seem to get more fertile as they age. Giant jellyfish are swarming round Japan – why? Aside from the obvious, I mean – proximity to abyssal deeps and excess radiation – why?

So much to wonder at; so much to discuss. I am most fortunate that I have you, Dear Readers, to bounce some of these trace signals off of and debate them.  For instance, an exploration of modern camping gear (thinking of you, Mike R.) has just shown me how my intrepid Martian living in a survival tent is getting her drinking water …

Always read the weird news. It’s where the treasures are.

Kage Baker liked conspiracy theories. She didn’t believe in them – not many, anyway – she just liked them. The way she liked Warner Brothers cartoons, and Jack In The Box commercials; the way she liked funny video shows.  They were amusing and inadvertent and improvisational, and most of the time they were weird as hell. It was Kage’s theory that no one actually had the organization to commit most of them, but composing them was an art – not a skill – and so could be indulged in by the logic-handicapped to hilarious result.

And there were always such marvelous plot ideas in conspiracy theories!

Caveat: I, myself, do not subscribe to any conspiracy theories, for much the same reasons Kage did not. I think any competent conspiracy is undetectable; if I can find out about it, it’s probably nonsense. But this is just my theory, you see – so if I stomp on some favourite of yours, Dear Readers, in this blog, please forgive me. I have no certain knowledge of any of these, only the rumours of their existence: and so I don’t believe in any of them.

There are hundreds of conspiracy theories available for your shopping pleasure on the Internet, though. They may the third most proliferated posting on the Interwebs, right behind porn and funny cats. Just like porn and cats, there is no accounting for tastes in conspiracy theories: there are enough of them out there, though, to both enthrall and amuse anyone. You may be wildly entertained by the theory that Pripyat (near Chernobyl) is thick with mutated voles and earthworms, but skeptical of their reality – even while the detailed news of the Taos Hum fulfills your deepest fears about government manipulation of electromagnetic forces.

Area 51 is a constant fave rave listing, even while it becomes clearer and clearer that what happens there is just top-secret military engineering. Kage always said she didn’t know what was funnier – the fact that intelligent people were willing to believe the Feds were churning out flying saucers (the same Feds that can’t successfully build earthen berms around New Orleans); or that the Air Force thought they could hide a top secret site by simply insisting that what was right in front of our noses was not there. But if you search through the links (there are always links) you can find an immense web of such conspiracy sites and theories. Apparently there are hidden bases everywhere under the American Southwest. The Federal Transportation Administration evidently does its best work 100 feet under the Mojave.

Another of Kage’s favourites  was the theory that the rulers of most First World Countries were mind-bending reptiloids. She liked this one because of its contrast with the old stories of lizard men under Los Angeles – mostly because she never met anyone who saw a connection or believed both ideas. (But she thought George W. Bush, Prince Philip and William Buckley were especially poorly disguised.) She preferred the Los Angeles Lizard Colony, herself, and in fact wrote it into the Company series. Although the story where the operatives encounter the Lizard Men has yet to be written … hidden rivers under the Wilshire Corridor are involved, and I assure you: they are real.

Almost everyone is willing to believe something horrid about the Free Masons. Or the Catholic Church. Or the Federal Government. Kage felt the days of conspiracies by the Masons or the Vatican were either long past or yet to come again: neither of them had the energy to get up to much shenanigans in the present. She didn’t worry too much about the Feds, either – she said the track record we could see was piss poor, and she didn’t believe those people could conspire their way into a paper bag. Apple was a lot more likely to be back-engineering alien technology than the Pentagon.

Kage liked all the theories around Bigfoot sightings: that they were “thought entities” unleashed by Native American curses, or drove flying saucers, or were remnant Gigantopethecine apes, or remnant Neanderthals, or remnant hippies. And there is a fervent belief in each and all of those, and more besides. She liked the aliens, too, that evidently spend their nights cruising up and down American highways, and all the astonishingly clumsy government agencies that run around trying to clean up after them.

Today I found a serious alert about mutant animals arising in Japan – it’s starting with an earless rabbit, evidently, and Godzilla cannot be far behind. Also, that strain of e. Coli that was due to cucumbers, then not; then salad greens, then not; then bean sprouts, then not – it’s been deliberately designed as a bio weapon by persons unknown (but who evidently don’t like the Germans or the Spanish). And Canadian deer are being trained to attack hikers by First Nation activists. And a red-white-and blue striped building has been located on Mars using Google, and NASA is hiding the proof (but not the Google picture …).

I found all these just in one day. And I wasn’t even looking, which is what reminded me of Kage and brought the topic to mind. There is such a wealth of confabulation out there! And the chance that some of it, any of it might be true – that was what endlessly fascinated Kage. You just never know …

There are (badly) camouflaged metal plates on the side of Mount Hollywood, you know. Painted in rather garish greens and browns. People say they used to hide missiles launchers, for That Day when the next war started. But the missiles were removed in the 70’s. So why are there still silos locked on the mountainside? Why are motion-activated cameras still monitoring up there? Why, if you stray too far past the Hollywood Sign, do hidden loudspeakers advise you to remove your ass from the hill as soon as possible?

Hmmm?

Map Under Los Angeles

Kage Baker had a particular fondness for WWII soldiers (Daddy was one). And she had a particular horror of that war as well.

I’m not sure why. Neither was she. But footage of the European Theatre, in particular, upset her – which is doubly peculiar, considering that Daddy fought elsewhere: Egypt, India, Burma. He was a paratrooper, and jumped into a lot of dense green jungles. He was also a sniper, and fought a lot of one-on-one battles in those same dense green jungles, hunting men whose only traces were rustling and footprints in the mud. An incautious voice, a flash of metal, some radio static – those were the targets. Sometimes you found a body afterwards; more often, you didn’t.

It was another sniper who ended his war, shooting him in the belly as he swung across an Asian sky on his way down to Burma. When they got him to medical care, he was put on an experimental program, using a new drug just developed for wound treatment: penicillin.  Just the thing for a guy packed out of a wet jungle with a gut wound. It’s probably the main reason Kage was even born, because it’s the only reason he came home on his feet instead of in a box.

He brought home souvenirs. There was the Ghurka knife (Anne cut her wedding cake with it); the gold ring he got as a bonus for being part of Winston Churchill’s honour guard one afternoon in Cairo (it was Momma’s wedding ring eventually); the second navel two inches below his original. But it was the pictures of Europe – where he never saw any danger – that haunted Kage.

Mind you, when we were small, that footage seemed to run day and night on television. Walter Cronkite and The 20th Century: she and I watched it avidly, deeply confused but fascinated, and we both came to the same conclusion: the war was still going on. Europe was a black and white grainy battleground, where shelter was one wall and half a chimney; where it was always overcast and bombs fell out of the clouds; where, despite the heroic allies storming up the beaches on D-Day, there was always one more smoking village full of Germans and dead men.

We were disabused of this notion at some point during grammar school. I’m not sure when or quite how, because the TV show Combat! aired from 1962 to 1967, and it was always watched in our household. But gradually, the difference between epic fiction and recent history was established. Kage could stand the films a little better then, knowing it was, yes, actually over and we had won.

Of course, about that time, we started getting weekly current events handouts in class, full of the latest news from Vietnam. Anyone else remember that glossy black and white, The Outlook? But that was a different war, and we were old enough to know it. The men who went, and came back, and came back changed, and  never came back at all – they were our men, the men we grew up to live with as women. You see those men in a different light from your impossibly-young father in a snapshot, or Tom Hanks crawling up a French beach.

In the meantime – meaning the rest of our lives after the 60’s – Kage just avoided WWII footage as much as she could.

As for the History Channel – dubbed by our nephew Michael as the Hitler Channel – we just checked the listings carefully and left it alone a lot of the time. As Kage said, “I may have thought WWII was still going on when I was 6 – but these bozos wish it still was!” Too much for her. Ancient aliens, dinosaurs, Area 51, the deliciously lurid lives of the de Medicis and Tudors – yep, all fine. But not D-Day. Not France under the Germans. Not the Blitz, nor the fall of Berlin, nor the death of Dresden.

I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, or Saving Private Ryan, or Das Boot, or The Big Red One, or Patton … I could now, of course – there are lots of classics among those movies, and the topic only bothers me as much as any war film should – but … I remember when I thought Combat! was a documentary. I remember thinking Walter Cronkite was a live war correspondent. I remember Kage inexplicably crying every D-Day, when the tottering old soldiers made their way back to that beach where they saved the world.

I thank them all. I honour them. I will always remember them. But, like Kage,  I can’t watch it anymore.

Kage Baker was a morning person. Despite a fondness for sleeping in on weekends – and who gets through grammar and high school without developing that? – she was by nature a solar and diurnal person.

When she was little, she was often up at dawn. Momma  would come downstairs to find Kage already watching cartoons, a bowl of cereal in front of her and often one of the babies drinking a bottle in her lap. Even when we were teenagers, she was like that: once Kage had paid off the sleep debts of the school year, she would rise with the sun. Summer days were not to be wasted. She’d usually roust me as well, and we’d be out on the golden hills or racing down Hollywood Boulevard by 7 or 8 AM.

I’m much more nocturnal, but who needs sleep when it’s summer? Summer mornings, for me, are the coastal fog burning off in iridescent streamers, and the pavement on the Walk of Stars shining wet from merchants’ hoses, and the inexplicable fragrance of plums everywhere. Startling late deer  and early quail in the empty places above the Hollywood Bowl, and sometimes finding terrifying cat tracks as big as my hands in the golden dust.

There are pumas in the Hollywood Hills. There are humans, too, and things that used to be or never quite managed to make it to human. Kage carried rocks in her pockets in case of attack by wild felids, stray mutants or cranky druggies – though in order to protect us, she’d have had to aim 6 feet to one side of the attacking monsters. Or maybe at me. She had the worst aim in the world. That was all right, though, because I carried my Swiss Army knife in my pockets. We were confident nothing could harm us.

We were a pair of nincompoops, of course, but we were actually pretty safe. The late 60’s and early 70’s really were a more innocent time, and large stretches of the Hills were untenanted by anything more dangerous than a rattlesnake. Besides – despite our armaments, what we really had going for us at 15 and 16 was that we were fast: we could both run like the mule deer we scared up out of the ceanothus thickets. Screaming like banshees in unearthly harmony. I know, because that’s what we did a few times when we encountered snakes or dogs or skunks …

I never seemed to sleep back then, but it didn’t matter. I might have caught an hour or two before dawn, or I could always doze off in the oak tree above Momma’s studio later. Those mornings were for adventuring. Come afternoon, we would chase the shadows back up into the Hollywood Bowl and pant in the green shelter there. Eventually we’d coax someone to come get us in the car, and end up back on the roof outside Kage’s tower windows: where we would talk half the night away, and then I would watch the stars turn overhead when Kage fell asleep at last.

Next morning we’d do it again. But maybe we’d end up in the cool haven of the Ivar Branch Library. I would read science fiction, and Kage would pore over plates of N.C. Wyeth pirate illustrations …

This morning was a morning like those, and a warm wind has been blowing shining drifts of cloud across the sky all day. The entire world smells of barbecues and fruit. I saw the sun rise – which I never, ever like to do – because I simply did not sleep last night. I finally dozed off when the front lawn was golden with the new sun; and I’ve mostly napped until now, when the back yard is getting its westerly sunbath.  I can’t run through a day on no sleep like I used to: hell, I can barely stagger to the bathroom.

But there’s a few hours of light left. Mockingbirds are singing outside my open porch door – though one of them, a youngster, is learning Harry the parrot’s favourite come-hither whistle … It’ll be hamburgers for dinner, and we have some sort of interesting peach-nectarine hybrid for dessert. I’ll manage. I’ll sleep. Eventually.

I’d rather have been dancing on the hills. But if I can just sleep a little and dream of it, I think I can survive.

Kage Baker flat out loved robots. They fascinated her, to the point where she would argue over points of classical science fiction robot lore – she thought Asimov’s Three Laws were dreadful, and immoral to enforce against thinking beings. She maintained that they were impossible to maintain, any way; that any actually sentient artificial intelligence would break those imposed restrictions sooner or later, or sacrifice their own self-awareness.

Dr. Susan Calvin was her favourite fictional robotocist.

When she was little, Kage saved up cereal box tops to get a walking robot. He was keen – had a pull-cord with a weight on it, so that when you pulled it out and over the edge of the tabler, he would toddle across the table-top  as it wound up again. Sort of a square-built dude of painted tin.

What she always wanted was a Rock ’em Sock ’em Robot set. These were The Original!!! Battling!!! Robots!!! – red and blue tin bruisers who would batter away at one another until one of their head shot up on a long spindly neck, signifying defeat. She never got a set, as I recall, but she loved them. Nowadays they’re made of plastic, but when we were small they were good honest tin you could cut your hand open on.

See Them Knock Their Blocks Off!

Kage was tremendously fond of painted tin toys in general.

She liked Robby the Robot as well. He made his film debut in Forbidden Planet, which I adored – though Kage could barely stand to watch it, as the Id monsters  scared her badly. But Robby is a classic fellow, much cooler than Will Robinson’s half-witted nanny bot from Lost in Space.  And he was a very good toy, too:     She especially liked the Tik-Tok Man of Oz. His lambent emerald eyes in the much-neglected film Return to Oz (Buena Vista, 1985) contributed a lot to her affection for him. But the transient and yet enduring nature of his personality – dependent as it was on the running down of his key, which he could not wind himself – fascinated her.

Kage’s favourite all time robot, though, was probably Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Marvin’s muttered despair, occasional sparked into active malice by the unfairness of life, just cracked her up. The fact that, as a BBC prop on the television series, he looked about as realistic as a shoe box covered in aluminum foil, just added to his charm:  But the BBC, after all, were the authenticity-fanatics who built the Daleks out of traffic pylons and kitchen utensils …

With this fondness for robots, Kage was taken at once with the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity; especially as their three-month life expectancy stretched into improbable and heroic years. She had a permanent link to their public sites on her computer, and pored for hours over their exploits and photographs. As for so many of us, they had real personalities for her. She agonized when they got stuck, she cheered when they kept winning free to roll on and on over the Martian landscape.

Spirit was her favourite of the two. It may have been the fact that it seemed to encounter more trouble on its Ever Ready Bunny way, or maybe it just sent back pictures Kage liked better – I know she was endlessly drawn to Spirit’s film of dust devils in Gusev Crater. She would watch it over and over, eyes rapt and dreaming as the dust storm moved like a living thing across the stony landscape. That one clip symbolized every romantic vision of space travel for Kage: the real face of another planet.

Spirit has now reached the end of its mission, and its plucky little life as well. I’m glad Kage didn’t know about it. It would have been  the death of a friend for her, and she’d have mourned it sincerely. For myself … I’m sad it’s sitting there stuck in the sand, in the shadow of the Columbia Hills; which are themselves named for others who gave their lives to the endeavour of space exploration. But it did a bang-up job. And one of the things Kage commented on with deep satisfaction in her last week was that Spirit and Endeavor were still going strong.

In the meantime, Spirit looks out at this:That’s the last panoramic Spirit sent. The peak with the pale summit is named Von Braun, one of the first real rocketeers. I have hopes that someday, even if the sands bury Spirit, that peak will let us know where it is, mark its resting place so we can dig it out. I’d like to see that gallant little machine as the centrepice of a planetary park, preserved  by the New Martians – who are us.

Kage Baker, as I have noted before, did not drive. She thus had a passenger’s viewpoint of the DMV and traffic enforcement; although, as a passenger utterly dependent on other people having cars, she had a pretty jaundiced view of them … but it was my job to keep them in line and deal with their occasional madnesses.

She would have hated today.

I presently live in a nice, quiet little neighborhood where every week we do a totally unnecessary do-si-do from one side of the street to the other with parked cars: on Thursday, one may not park on the west side of the street, but on Friday it’s the east side.  This is ostensibly so the city, in its hygienic wisdom, can sweep the streets. What actually happens is that a street sweeper comes down the street and crushes all the leaves into the curb – then blows the fragments into driveways behind it. The leaves never actually go away, but are just processed into smaller and smaller bits until a rain washes them all into the sewers.

What this do accomplish, though, is to give Parking Enforcement a twice-weekly chance to tickets cars. There are usually one or two unwary visitors or late-sleeping residents who get caught every week. Those of us accustomed to the pattern point and laugh.

However, they also evidently run the plates even on the folks legally parked. Why not? Who knows what you may find? When they ran mine, the system coughed up an utterly spurious record of 6 unpaid parking tickets. And so they towed my car away.

I was alerted to this when my nephew opened the front door to show the frantically barking Corgi that no one was there – and found the helpful informative card informing us my car was under arrest. The Corgi had the good grace not to say “I told you so!”

Anyway – I have spent the day hithering and yonning through the East side of Los Angeles, locating and ransoming my PT Cruiser. I have dealt with many different contractors to and employees of the great City of Los Angeles; every one of them was evidently operating in a different dimension, and had a different interpretation of what I needed to do to get my car returned. It all cost more money and took more time; L.A. seems to be operating in a string theory universe, with 7 or 8 tiny invisible pocket dimensions. And that’s where they keep the impounded cars …

I am assured, by the amiable but unrelenting folks who checked the records finally, that I can petition the City for a return of the several hundred dollar’s worth of fees I paid today: after all, the record was in error! They admitted that. They even apologized. But rules are rules, and they couldn’t release my car unless I paid up what I did not actually owe, what they even agreed I didn’t owe.  I’ll get it back later. Probably. Maybe.

It’s sure obvious why all the clerks in the DMV and Traffic Enforcement offices are behind bullet-proof glass …

But I was victorious. My dear tricked out pirate Cruiser did not have to spend the weekend behind the Lacy Street Animal Shelter (it’s an impound yard for everybody down there), at the mercy of chrome thieves and gas siphoners. It is safely and legally parked under the camphor trees again, though it still shows the ghostly white reminder of the chalked prisoner numbers on its windshield. It needs a bath.

Thus, because of domestic disasters, I got nothing done today on any kind of writing. Something will come of it, though, I am sure; that was one of the oldest, strangest and loveliest parts of Los Angeles I went wandering in today. My soul is full of brick pavements, and enormous jacaranda trees like purple fog banks, and magnolias with blossoms as big as a child’s head and filling the air with the scent of lemon pie. Kage loved the old parts of the city, and I was reminded of all that during my quest today.

So I guess it was worth the journey. Especially since I got the car back.

Kage Baker was fascinated with cryptids. Those are things – usually animals, sometimes people or plants – who are mythical: but who very well might be real. There are a respectable number of beasties presumed to be totally legendary, who have eventually turned out to be quite real, alive and in the best of health.

One of the most famous is the coelocanth. This is a big, nasty-tasting fish loudly presumed to have died out some time before the dinosaurs – but which was found alive and well in the Indian Ocean in 1938. It is the exemplar of the living fossil. Kage was especially fond of it because we learned the story in grade school, and she was wildly intrigued. And to make it even more interesting, a second population of the fish was found only a few years ago off the Sumatra coast: so these fellows have not only not been extinct, they have been doing very well indeed over the years.

Lots of small beasties are misplaced, misidentified and then found again: small plants and fungi, little birds distinguishable from other little birds only by the curve of their beaks, frogs and newts and salamanders confined in small, weird ecosystems like lost caves and the cups of bromeliad flowers … it’s easy to see how that happens. When you are a tiny frog who lives its life inside a big flower 200 feet up a tree in an Amazon jungle, small wonder you don’t make the cover of National Geographic very often! Kage was nonetheless interested in these critters, because any lost-then-found animal was an obvious Company project.

Also, she just liked cryptids. The idea that someone once saw an animal so odd that it’s been assumed to a product of bad wine for 1,000 years – until it gets shipped to a biologist in London – just amused the hell out of her. And a lot of the animals so described, traduced and then re-discovered have been good-sized animals, too; things that had no business being overlooked in a local bromeliad … Okapi. Gorillas. Kouprey. Pink dolphins, giant squid and komodo dragons. All of them were fairly recently promoted from legends to live animals.

Kage was pleased to see large new mammals and birds being found, but she didn’t like lizards. She wasn’t fond of reptiles anyway, and komodos quite repulsed her. Monitor lizards (which is what they are) do not have much in the way of warm fuzzy vibes, and komodos are especially voracious and dispassionate predators. They still eat quite a few Indonesians natives  and tourists visiting their rocky island home; especially since the Indonesian Islamic governments have been discouraging the fishermen from sacrificing goats to them – turns out sacrificing goats to the local monitor lizards can have real, practical uses in the modern world …

It’s been a good couple of years for monitor lizards, though. Several quite large species have been found and described for the first time. One of them is even rather gaudy, being bright  pink; indigenous to the Galapagos, it was somehow overlooked by Charles Darwin on his famous trip, and not found until 2009. (Kage, when she learned of it, was amused – although she said that she thought the world had enough big lizards, and if we had to have another, couldn’t we have traded the salt-water crocodile for it?) In 2010, a fruit-eating monitor lizard was found in the Phillippines – very unusual, most monitor lizards being carnivorous. Both these creatures were literally human-sized, and yet no one had known they were there until the last two years.

It’s conceivable that only the locals knew about the frugiverous monitor lizard; despite being 5 to 6 feet long, it also lives in the tops of trees. Still – a lizard the size of a man, that lives in the trees? You’d think someone would have remarked on that. And while the Galapagos Islands are indeed very isolated, it’s still amazing that a 4-foot long, bright pink lizard went unnoticed until the end of the 20th century.

On the other hand, no one was entirely sure that Pygmies existed until the 19th century – and they are human beings, who hunt and trade with other people. Small wonder we missed the gorillas; small wonder we continued to miss the 125,000 lowland gorillas only found in the Congo in 2008.

They all went on to Kage’s lists, her roster of the found, re-discovered or never-before-seen. I’m still keeping the lists, because it’s such a marvelous roster of life. And it’s always fun to assign an Operative to the diverse projects, too. Obviously, Nefer had a hand with the Vietnamese forest ox – but who got to wrangle the big pink iguana?

I haven’t decided yet.

Kage Baker loved the month of June. It was her birthday month, which was a big, big draw, of course. It was also the month school let out for the summer, which was a rhythm so instilled in her during grammar and high school that she never stopped counting the seasons by it.

June was plum season, especially for the Santa Rosa plums that were her favourites. It was apricot and nectarine season, too, and when we were kids trees of all those fruits bloomed in Momma’s garden. In the many little stone-faced terraces (there was no natural flat ground on that lot in the Hollywood Hills) the plums and apricots grew huge and pendent during the heat of June; the single nectarine never bore much, but it had amazing neon-flamingo-showgirl pink blossoms, that made up for the paucity of fruit. It looked like a hallucination amid the drabber eucalyptus anyway.

When we were kids … the classic weather patterns of California prevailed. May had been a gentle, warming month; hills still green with the wild oats, except where they were purple and orange and yellow with lupine and poppies and mustard. June was the warm grey time – low granite skies and fog every morning, that thinned to opalescent afternoons full of hazy sunlight. June was like living in a soap bubble. Kage loved that warm, dim weather; the more so since we knew that July was right around the corner, and the Great Cosmic Magnifying Glass would shortly begin to roast the city like an ant hill.

This May was rather weird – the climate is changing (yes, it is) and the weather is more varied around here than it used to be. The month gave us enormous winds, some utterly unnatural rain, and slid back and forth between hot and cold like a 4-year old on a slide whistle. The young mulberry tree in the front of the house is now leaning at a permanent angle, and the squirrels that hunt for the berries keep falling out …

Now it’s June, and the temperature hasn’t quite managed to make it to 70 degrees today. It’s freaking raining in Northern California, and all the palantiri web cams I check every morning up and down the coast showed fog and mist and damp roads. From Catalina Island, the mainland is invisible beyond a wall of fog; at Pismo Beach, the sea vanishes into it a mile offshore. The Channel is covered with mist, and who knows what is cruising out there?

Kage would have liked this, though. It’s unusual weather, but when you get into your 50’s (as we did and have) you begin to realize you’ve seen most things before. This is not the first time this weather pattern has occurred. If we get really lucky, the summer will heat up abruptly during July and August, and bring us thunder storms – high hot grey skies that smell of fireworks; warm rain to go dance in come the afternoons, and lightning in the perspiring nights. I’ve seen it before. Kage loved those times.

On the other hand, if this is a symptom of a new weather pattern – who knows what it might bring? It’s in the last few years that we have see new kinds of clouds over California, mammatus clouds that bring terrifying amounts of lightning – it might be normal now. Last week there were honest-to-God tornadoes in northeast California. Waterspouts are becoming common.  Kage was very interested to see what it might produce, this new pattern – maybe a longer season for plums, or more frequent storms, or St. Elmo’s Fire in the tops of the coastal redwoods …

Summer is coming on, now that June is born. Surprises are rolling in off the Pacific. Days of wonder, man.

Sudden Update: at this moment it is snowing in Tahoe. And a tornado has just been sighted outside of Sacramento.  I am keeping an eye out for fish …