Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was a devotee of the whirlwind.

She loved catching sight of dust devils, especially when we passed one on I-5: both of us at speed and usually at a tangent. Sometimes we’ d drive through one several times as it danced to and fro across the highway, pelting us with tumbleweeds and terminally astonished bugs. She’d be be yelling and applauding with glee, while I fought the wheel and tried to see where we were going.

Tornadoes and hurricanes fascinated her, in that terrified  fashion that roller coasters inspire. She watched satellite footage of eye storms on the Weather Channel, “swearing a prayer”, as Shakespeare said, in reverent fright. A day’s drive across the fine state of Missouri one summer had her white and shaking, but staring with a sort of gleeful terror at the occasional funnel cloud in the distance. And the rare winter waterspouts off our own California coast just enthralled her, even when they waltzed inland and bit holes in coastal towns.

Her favourite ever video online was of dust devils on Mars.

However, she hated metaphoric whirlwinds. A large portion of our household budget and energy was spent on maintaining a NO WHIRLWIND zone in our house. She needed clear air to work in, both physically and emotionally; the barometers on the wall above her desk took care of potential sudden drops in air pressure, and her own iron will kept the rest away. Kage didn’t answer phones; didn’t read most of her own mail; had a strictly guarded short list of correspondents. She once showed me a picture of the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre, and said disapprovingly, “This is what happens when you open the door without checking!”

Kage always figured I could decipher her metaphors without much instruction …

Me, I’ve been living in a pretty vigorous whirlwind the last few weeks. Deadlines, slogging though writing that will not cooperate, dealing with a sudden squall of paperwork – I just got a letter from the Los Angeles County Tax Board, informing me I need a business license to legitimate whatever the hell they think it is that Dr. Zeus, Inc. does … That’s what I get for putting a cleverly comic reference in the license registration for a software program.

And, of course, Domestic Storm Kitten is raging through the household. Every day, Ashby has gotten a little braver, plumper, more energetic – and somewhat crazier. She eats, sleeps and runs Madcat through the house. These pastimes sometimes segue into one another, such as racing sideways into the dog’s dish and then falling in his water bowl to get a drink. The Corgi tries valiantly to herd her, but Ashby just stands up and bounces butterfly paws off his nose, then VTOLs right over his head.

Right now, as we go through the acclimatization process, Kitten Watch is a 24-hour deal; I get the night watch, as I am the one up late enough to collect her into my bed when she gives out. Ashby pats my face with her amazing snow shoe paws, like tiny soft alien hands; purrs directly into my ear, sprawls with the abandon only babies have.  Several things have led us to believe she is part Maine Coon cat – her huge paws, her absurdly long and furry tail, her extravagantly feathered and tufted ears. Her most un-feline amiability, and her tendency to chirp like a ground squirrel rather than meow. And when she’s asleep, it really shows: she is made of dandelion fluff and champagne bubbles right now, but she is looooong. Gonna be a beefy bed cat, I suspect.

The Corgi is in for a surprise if that happens. Life is increasingly interesting round here. Fifteen pounds of flying kitty is going to make a hell of a whirlwind.

Kage Baker had a most admirable and exemplary work ethic. When she had to accomplish something, she just worked at it steadily until it was done. It often required working through meal times, breaks, sleeping … anything else at all. She would talk in her sleep about the project; more than once she sleep walked as well, announcing at 3 AM: “Okay, time to go back to work!”

I don’t believe that it’s true that sleepwalkers will have heart failure if you wake them suddenly. I threw a lot of pillows and shoes at Kage for this kind of thing, and she never skipped a beat.

But even Kage, whose work ethic was as a gate of steel and a tower of adamant, would vouchsafe that some things must be indulged just for sheer aesthetics. Among these things is kittening: introducing a new baby cat to one’s house and household.

We brought home a new kitten today. Her name is Ashby. She is an orange tabby, so she is rather rare: only about 25% of orange tabbies are female. It’s not as rare as a male calico (due to fatal recessives, males calicos are essentially 0% of the feline population) but orange tabby girl kittens are infrequent. But we have one, and the day has been spent in introducing her to the household and laughing helplessly at her antics.

She has tufted lynx ears and show-shoe paws. Her nose and toes are pink; her eyes are  golden, with an emerald green ring round her pupils. As she’s only 4 months old, it’s still uncertain what her eyes will do. Her tail is longer than her body and extraordinarily fluffy – looks like a squirrel’s tail, only orange and with stripes. She is calm, unafraid, cuddly and at present prefers to run sideways wherever she goes.

The Little Black Cat (now advanced to elder, with the recent demise of her own sister) is somewhat horrified. I think the skitter factor is too much for her just yet; when Ashby learns to locomote in a less eccentric fashion, things will doubtless cool down. The Corgi, on the other hand, fell instantly in love with her. He follows her around, bathes her and tries to herd her; she pats at him and ambushes him. It took Ashby about a half hour to discover that even a cat as small as herself can achieve enough altitude to ambush a Corgi … unless he licks her fur off, I think we have a good friendship there.

Harry is watching her for the perfect opportunity to scare the kapok out of her little head. She’s already unnerved by his talking and whistling; it won’t take long to convince her that he is NOT prey, but a more-or-less friendly demon. We’re hoping he’ll teach her to meow – he does it much better than the Little Black Cat.

We pitiful humans are her helpless minions, of course. She’s been here for 6 hours or so, and she hasn’t stopped purring yet. We’re all doomed …

So my work ethic has gone out the window today, knocked off by a paw smaller than my pinky fingertip. Not even Kage could resist kittens.

Now, excuse me, Dear Readers. There’s a kitten to indulge.

Kage Baker’s favourite part of being a writer was the actual writing. She enjoyed the physical process – blank paper and a new pen always inspired her, and she had a vast collection of notebooks bought, filled and stored away. In her late 20’s, she learned how to use a computer and the entire process ascended to new heights of fun. Colours, fonts, italics and bolds and Cyrilic and runic and probably alien alphabets – Kage loved it.

Best of all were the cut and paste functions, and the ability to rewrite as easily as pressing a button. True, Kage would occasionally delete enormous sections by accident, or number her pages in Arabic, or unintentionally underline every word in a document, but the ease in composition more than compensated.  And, aside from her initial hysteria, those were easy to repair. Once she became convinced that I yes, really could reverse whatever damn weird thing she’d done, she wasn’t even upset when it happened. Just impatient for me to pull her narrative back into the same dimension that she lived in …

Although it was the writing  itself that pleased her most, there were any number of little perks of being a writer that really tickled her. Good reviews – in fact, any favourable mention of her name in the trades and zines and critical sites – filled her with glee. New contracts and royalty checks, too: she’d dance around the living room, chanting triumphant lays while the parrot sang back-up in English-cadenced gibberish. Passes at Conventions, with her name carefully scripted; copies of her books in the Dealer’s Room. Her name and newest title listed in Locus. Gardner Dozois – live forever, gracious lord! – calling to invite her to contribute to a collection, or inform her he’d chosen one of her stories for the Year’s Best. People sending her chocolate.

All those little things that meant she was a REAL, HONEST-TO-GOD, PROFESSIONAL WRITER never, ever lost their lustre for Kage.

They still thrill me. And mentions of Kage continue, largely because Linn and I are always happy to involve Kage’s legacy in new publications. So here’s a more-or-less current report on what’s happening with Kage’s work right now.

In The Company of Thieves now has an official publishing date of November 15th, and is available on both Tachyon’s site and Amazon for pre-order. And there is already a lovely mention of it on Stefan Raets grand review blog, Far Beyond Reality (farbeyondreality.com).  Thanks, Stefan!

Nell Gwynne On Land & At Sea is still available on Subterranean and at Amazon – Nell Gwynne I AND II, Best of Kage Baker and Where The Golden Apples Grow are also all now available from Subterranean as e-books.

Nell Gwynne On Land & At Sea has 4 stars on Amazon – which amazed me. I presume it also has at least some good reviews, but I can’t bring myself to look – turns out I don’t have the guts to brave Amazon reviews, any more than Kage did. So, Dear Readers, if there are nastygrams on there for me – please, oh please, don’t tell me!

Jeff and Anne VanderMeer, lovely people that they are, are putting out The Time Traveler’s Almanac sometime in the future – I don’t have a date yet. But it appears that when it prints, it will have 2 of Kage’s stories in it: “Noble Mold” and “A Night On The Barbary Coast”. The VanderMeer’s collections are always works of art, and I’ve no doubt this will be delightful. It will be enormous – 500,000 pages, 100 stories, elephants caparisoned with jewels (maybe) – and will be published by Tor.

I am not the sort of person to dance with glee; I tend to rejoice quietly. But I am dizzy with delight over all this, Dear Readers. Her name is still spoken; her stories are still wanted. It does feel a little – to me, anyway – as if I am a self-important ubasti getting way above herself here. But, you know, Kage doesn’t need her undies washed clean in the Nile much. She does need these stories remembered and reprinted and reborn.

And she needs as many of them as I can manage born for the first time, too.

Kage Baker really enjoyed nothing as much as writing. She found it to be a constant pleasure, a sure-fire, never-disappointing delight.

It was her refuge when the world around her grew too weary, too noisy, too hard to handle. Of course, we spent a lot of time and determination making sure the world would find it very difficult to get close enough to bother her – specifically so she wouldn’t be ambushed when she was writing. But there nothing I could do to protect her from herself.

When Kage wanted to write, her will was as iron – no, iron was Jello next to Kage’s will. However, that applied that to everything she did. Consequently, she constituted, in her single self, occasional demonstrations of the immovable object versus the irresistible force. She would want to write – but there might also be a new book; a video game or a movie that demanded she play it; a rumour of a little-remembered adobe bar on a back road somewhere between King City and Morro Bay.

The gravitational force of any of them applied the pull of a black hole to the mass of a neutron star. And what happens then? Well, no one is quite sure, as no one has yet managed to observe it. But among the possible results is that every thing involved goes sideways … that’s certainly what happened with Kage. The shortest distance between two points was anything but a straight line, with her.

When we still lived in Los Angeles, we often ended up on our way to Catalina Island when this happened. Kage would pack all her hoarded quarters, accumulated in expectation of eventually ending up in Avalon’s pin ball arcades. I’d pack whatever new books I had been saving.  We kept a bank account on the island, which could not be tapped except in person, to make sure we could afford a room and some food when Kage’s will imploded and blew us into the West.

Or we’d drive away inland on some little road, seeking new Vista Points (which are everywhere) and restaurants (which, sadly, are not). Sometimes we’d drive to an exceedingly peculiar restaurant just North of Cambria, where there was a rough wooden statue in the front, that looked like an Enforcer. I’ve no idea what the place was named; we called it Budu’s Deli. The time spent coming and going would give Kage’s head time to fizzle out.

Once Kage just had to see where James Dean had died: the fabled intersection of highways 41 and 46. So early one morning we went North to Paso Robles and then turned right on 46. We drove on to the intersection with the 41, intending to hit the 5 eventually and make a Great Circle home … and it would have worked, too, had we not had the shit scared out of us in the very intersection where the unfortunately named Donald Turnipseed had hit and killed James Dean in his speeding Spider.

That’s where, just as the sun rose, a truck full of hay and pumpkins blew through the stop sign and nearly T-boned us. We braked, spun, and ended up facing back the way we’d come, screaming in harmony. The hay truck trundled on, oblivious; we returned to the safety of the coastal lands, with a brief and very necessary stop at the first Ladies’ Room we found.

But it sure did succeed in distracting Kage. Neither the urge to write nor the urge to procrastinate survived that one; we were blown sideways and almost off the face of the Earth. So we went to Morro Bay and ate fried prawns and drank beer to recuperate.

Life sure was exciting with Kage …

I am myself simultaneously bored and driven today – which I have learned is evidently a common condition among writers. Mind you, I am working. I just don’t want to be, and the back of my mind is clicking constantly through the channels of things that might be more interesting.

Yestreday I spent on The Great Kitten Hunt – which was a success, and wee Ashby will be coming home on Tuesday. But I also sent Linn The Patient Agent a copy of a new completed story. I’ve written bits and pieces on two other ideas, and I finally have an opening line for a story about twin operatives, the Esselene people, and blue squirrels.

Today, however, it is just too hot. The stories are all lying on their backs with their tongues hanging out and won’t play with me. All my new books lack fascination. There is no flash nor sizzle in the air.

That kitten cannot get here soon enough. I am certain that I will be driven inexorably to compose as soon as Ashby is climbing up my leg. Kittens stir the local milieu to unpredictable quantum foam, just like Kage did.

That’s precisely the chaos I need right now.

Kage Baker collected many weird occurrences just for sheer amusement’s sake. Sometimes a story would arise from one, or at least a scene. One strange event – a lost riverboat dug up out of a cornfield beside the Missouri – led to an entire novel. But mostly, it was just for the giggles. As I have previously observed,  the end of summer  usually proves to be the richest trove.

You can always count on the Silly Season. There was a niggling unease in the back of my mind that one day I would reach the end of Kage’s notes – and where could I go to find the kind of observations and speculations she produced so readily? As I have discovered, I need not have worried. Not only are there plenty of Kage’s ideas to mine, but the Internet, my own browsing and the wonderful things sent to me by you, Dear Readers, have reliably filled up my WTF file.

One of my favourites lately has been the Great Honolulu Molasses Spill. It appears there is a pipeline across the Harbor at Honolulu, carrying Hawaii’s version of black gold: molasses. Which makes sense, recalling how much of the islands are under sugar cane … but I had certainly never thought about it. One doesn’t associate molasses, that delightful dark sweetener the English call treacle, with tropical paradises. But I guess someone ought to think about that, since the pipeline broke a few days and a flood of the stuff spilled into Honolulu Bay:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-molasses-honolulu-20130911,0,4316341.story

Luckily (sort of) for humans, it all went into the sea. Unluckily, the stuff is suffocating marine plants and fish are dying of sugar poisoning. And being suffocated in turn by drowning in molasses. And being snacked upon by sharks drawn to the many sticky, dead victims … no one has yet figured out how to clean it up. (Oil-eating bacteria turn up their organelles at molasses.) In fact, many of the Port Authorities had no idea the pipe system was there, or that molasses existed on Oahu. Even though it’s made from Pure Cane Sugar from Hawaii …

Then there is unexpected beauty from unusual science. Someone decided to do some research on fire, its origins, activities and effects. Sort of an oldie but a goodie. Among the results of their experimentation is this exquisite photo:

It’s a blown out candle. Or a phoenix. Or a fire horse, as a kelpie is a water horse.  Or, if you are immune to unexpected beauty from the lab, it’s light refracting through liquid wax. Me, I think it’s Kage’s soul …

Fitting to the Silly Season, the Ignoble Awards were awarded last night, as well. (Slick segue, huh?) If you are unaware of them, Dear Readers, they are annual prizes given out to those members of the scientific community whose very real and terribly earnest experiments make people laugh. Like “Fire: How Does It Work?” might have, had its results not been lovelier than they were laughable.

However, this year’s winners do include a query into how beer goggles work. Also, a study of dung beetles navigating by the Milky Way, an in-plane terrorist trap straight out of the Acme Company, a study of how long it takes the human digestion to dispose of an entire shrew (swallowed whole, of course), and an amazing set of surgical procedures designed to facilitate the re-attachment of a penis that has been severed, flung out the window, and eaten by a duck. You can see the results here:  www.improbable.com/ig/winners/

Keep in mind that these are not jokes, Dear Readers. They were all serious experiments and studies, for which someone paid real grant and budget money.

Some delightfully weird things are not, of course, the result of research. They are gifts of pure chance, presenting themselves from out the constantly widening gyre of possibility and mystery which is that part of the world we cannot see – which is most of it, actually. My most recent favourite is this:

They are gears, obviously. Seen through an electron microscope, also obviously, from the characteristic Ancel Adams  palette and lighting. What makes them unspeakably cool fodder for the Silly Season is that these are part of the hips of a bug. These gears – the first ever found as a duly evolved part of a living organism – connect the two rearmost legs of the plant hopper to one another: to make sure they both flex at the same time, so the plant hopper can hop in a straight line instead of spinning out in a tangent.

Gears! Like the tiniest watch gears in the Universe! And they’re living tissue in a little bitty insect, just so the buggers can hop in a straight line and suck precious bodily fluids out of your roses.

See why the Silly Season is so important to a writer during these long hot days of waning Summer? It’s when you’re most likely to discover that blown out candles shed rainbows, or somewhere there are living gears. You just can’t make this stuff up. But this time of year, you sure can try.

Kage Baker didn’t like to commemorate death dates. Birthdays, anniversaries, the peak day of some notable person’s accomplishment: yes indeed, observed with pomp and circumstance and some appropriate cocktail.

But not death dates. Not for friends, not for family, not for national or global memorials. She thought about them; but she didn’t feel a loss needed or deserved to be remembered. And I must admit, it’s not exactly jolly to recall losing someone you love – the exception being Halloween and All Saints, when we honoured the beloved dead with candy, ceremonial meals, and cookies frosted to look like skeletons and zombies.

On September 11th … we flew the flag. Kage lit candles daily; if she added a special prayer for the victims of the World Trade Center destruction, that was her business. We never forgot. We both remembered the day clearly. But we had both passed the need for public mourning. Some things hurt enough that you don’t need to bring out sack cloth and ashes; professional mourners can go unused. Because you never actually stop grieving.

I was taking Kage to her day job when we saw the first footage of the plane impacts – we had stopped at our favourite indie coffee house, the Black Pearl, to fortify ourselves for the day. And as we were paying, the endless loop of the first plane ramming into the first tower ran over and over on the telly on the back counter.

We drove off stunned. Before I made it home, the second tower was similarly rammed by the second plane. Within the hour, the third plane hit the Pentagon. Then the towers began their devastating collapse. And then the fourth plane was retaken from the high jackers by the passengers, and crashed in a field as the crew and passengers fought (successfully and heroically)  to prevent the high jackers from accomplishing  their ends.

Everything after that on that beautiful September morning was just endless loops of whatever film the news agencies and television networks could get their hands on: the zombie survivors, grey with ash from head to foot, staggering out of the zone of destruction. The appalling jumpers, who chose to chance a miracle in exchange for a last breath of clean air and a death less horrible than being burned alive. The refugees pouring on foot across the bridges, determined to find their ways home on foot if they had to. The spreading flames, the growing pile of bodies, debris and … pieces.

The endless echoing void on the other ends of our phone lines, as we -along with 300 million other Americans – tried to find out if our loved ones in New York were all right. We crashed the phone lines all on our own.

No wonder Kage never wanted to see or hear any of that again.

Not wanting to see it again, though, doesn’t mean we forgot, nor that I do so now. It’s just that my available space to store such images (and remain sane) has been filled. My quota of sorrow has been met.  That doesn’t mean, I know, that life will stop handing me sorrows: I found that out 3 1/2 years ago. But I don’t go out of my way to watch the film anymore.

In my mind, after all, the towers are still falling, and the sky is filled with burning clouds.

        Requietus in pace

Kage Baker simply adored sightseeing. She was a born tourist: always drawn irresistibly to new horizons; and being a sharp-eyed observer she saw the details, and they all enthralled her.

That was the charm of driving places, for her. Mind you, we were compelled to drive a lot of places – doing historical recreations is a hobby that tends to take you out to  where the grass is wild and buildings are few. And since Kage preferred to avoid flying whenever possible, we tended to go to conventions within driving distance – which was defined as how far we could get before my eyes crossed and shut. But it all made for an endless and close-up panorama for Kage to watch.

I must admit, I like it myself. I can’t rubberneck as much as a passenger could (unless I want to end up in a ditch) but even what passes before a driver’s more static viewpoint is fascinating. If you pay attention, you can be constantly entertained and never, ever risk highway hypnosis.

Wednesday’s trip North was first of all blessed with delightful weather. I’m accustomed to racing along I-5 just ahead of dehydration or heat stroke: but due to the weirdness of the weather this summer, it was hottest in LA and the temperature dropped steadily as  I drove. I could feel myself ceasing to wrinkle and concentrate my sugars, and slowly draw back from the edge of raisinhood.

And the Central Valley is beautiful as the harvest season approaches! There are already fields where corn and sorghum and sugar cane have been cut, leaving shards as sharp as broken glass in the ground – but most of them are still fields of green waves, 8 feet tall. Every vineyard beside the road has towers of boxes ready to fill, and red, amber and green grapes shine in the sun. The almond and apricot groves have bright little fruits thick on every branch. The cotton is only just now blooming, but it will explode into drifts of snowy white any day now. The pomegranate trees are studded with dusty garnets, the pistachios with tourmalines and rose quartz.

And the fields given over to stock feed run a spectrum  of colour, from  emerald through olive to gold. The first walls of finished bales are going up, as bright as brass in the sun. They stack them long and wide at the bases, then taper up to what looks like a sloped roof – from the distance, approaching at speed, they look like gold-roofed buildings. Every field of forage boasts a magnificent mead-hall, another Heorot, gilded eaves and all; though I saw neither monster nor monster-slayer …

But near Firebaugh, I did pass a field newly-harvested of its cantaloupes. Only the  culls remained: twisted vines, groping roots, discarded melons like denuded skulls. It looked like the aftermath of a battle, all bones and shattered heads. A little ways further on, someone’s luggage or cargo had leaped off their vehicle and gone feral in the center island. After several quick glances at 70-mumble miles per hour, I was able to determine that what was scattered all over the dry grass was shirts. Large, white, dress shirts. With button cuffs.

I was wondering, as it all fell behind, if the shirts would creep slowly toward the cantaloupes. Not fast,but steadily through the darkening days of September and October. And as the end of October approached, maybe some dark night they’d reach that field of battered melons, and every long-armed shirt could take and set a dried white skull between its collar points …and then, I guess, it would be party time along the dark road to Firebaugh. Though maybe not so much fun for benighted travellers …

That’s how Kage would tell it. That’s what she’d have made of a field of left-over cantaloups and a bale of white shirts lost on the median. Until my nerve broke and I screamed, “Oh, screw you!” and we raced as fast as ever we  could to some place where the lights were still lit and we could remind ourselves we were grownups.

Ah, sight-seeing. Never better than through Kage’s eyes.

Kage Baker loved Northern California. We travelled there for years, working Renaissance Faires and doing research for Kage’s writing. We snatched days and weekends to explore fascinating unexplained names on old maps; we went hunting movie sites, trying to match the landscapes in front of us with the glamourized versions of the silver screen. And when we fled Los Angeles, after the Rodney King riots and Mamma’s death, it was to the North we fled.

She called it the Summer Country, for the smooth golden hills that framed it, for the oaks that shadowed every crest and valley. She yearned to drive just a little farther into the those hills, to see what lived in the heart of the distance. We got a little ways into them, too, over the many years; until her longing for the sea took over, and we made our last move, to Pismo Beach.

Kage never went South again. She said her heart faltered when  she passed Point Concepcion. If the weather was inclement when we visited our sisters down there, she’d insist on heading home. When we did conventions, she never left the artificial life support of the hotel. And if it was too hot, she insisted on hiding out in movie theatres – air conditioning, you know, and unlimited supplies of iced Coca Cola. I saw a lot of odd movies I would otherwise have missed, doing that … Dune. The Shadow. The Triplets of Belleville,

While I’m happy being back in Los Angeles, the summers have changed down here, and the heat is killing me. Maybe literally …

Our elder kitty, Cat Madam, claimed me for her own human when I moved down – she and I have been sharing the descent into senescence the last 3 years. I am now 60 – she was 17, which is 84 in cat years, so she was definitely the older of us two. She had arthritis, delicate digestion, congestive heart failure and the temperament of a failing empress.  We had similar problems; swelling feet, upset stomachs, general crankiness; all exacerbated  by the heat. I must say, she carried the whole thing off with more elegance than I. Kept her figure. Still had a dulcet miaow.

But earlier this week, Cat Madam died. Her heart, though proud and fierce, was worn out. The very next day, with still more hot days growing over the horizon like malignantly enchanted thorns, I fled North. Kimberly helped me pack, found my sunhat, filled my water bottle and all but pushed me out the front door.

I think she was afraid I’d go like Cat Madam.

It was like leaving a war zone, driving out of L.A. The enemy was the heat.  The temperature was reaching for 100 when I got on the I-5 near Glendale; when I passed Magic Mountain, it was 104. But by the time I was cresting the Grapevine, it was obvious I had driven out from under the Umbrella of Death by Poaching: the temperature was down to 84, and continued to fall. Several hours later, I drove into Santa Rosa on a lovely 69-degree  evening.

My host and hostess, the saintly Skolds, gracefully accepted the red-eyed refugee I was. Thank you, Steve and Carol! Their daughter, my good friend Neassa, invited me to meet her for lunch today – Neassa works at the Luther Burbank House and Garden, the historic home of that good gardener and as close to an enchanted garden as I have ever seen. We walked – Walked! Without even a sun hat! – a block or so down to a charming little restaurant, and had a delightfully eccentric and delicious lunch: a bunless hamburger: not a beef patty, a bunless burger  with everything, mounded all around it. Turkey chili with avocados in it. Grilled cheese sarnies with stealth tomatoes hidden in the center.

While we were eating, chatting with Carol and another lovely lady from Burbank’s Magic Garden, I became aware of a strange motion in my peripheral vision. It took me a moment to find it – what looked like a tiny maelstrom, whirling in a spoon. After a few seconds, I realized I was seeing the blades of the fan above our table – slightly blurred, a little distorted, appearing to shiver as their reflection spun in the bowl of my spoon.

I wish I could tell Kage about it. I wish I could tell her how the long rides up and down the I-5 reconnect me to her voice, how the solitude  in the speeding car restores me. I wish I could tell her the things, the amazing things I see everywhere. I wish I could say, I know what lies beyond the Summer Country, Kage.

Infinity. Eternity. Or maybe just the eye of a god with a migraine. But it’s real; it dances and it turns and it spins, weightless,  in the bowl of my spoon.

Kage Baker was not keen on wild animals. She wasn’t keen on domestic ones, either, but Fate arranged it such that she was more constantly exposed to feral beasties. Either way, she didn’t have that World of Disney fondness for our four-footed neighbors – though she respected animals that behaved with dignity and were useful. Rather the same way she felt about people …

We grew up in the Hollywood Hills and edges of Griffith Park. If you don’t know Los Angeles, the Hollywood Hills are a fairly… uncitied … place. While people have flattened some of the hilltops into places that will harbour huge expensive houses, a lot more of the Hills are narrow, twisty roads running between nearly vertical lots – one side uphill, one side downhill. The houses cling like moss to a boulder; between them are numerous empty little lots full of haunted copses of trees and tangles of dead branches and abandoned Model A’s.

The Hills are also full of coyotes, bobcats, deer, pumas, skunks, opossums, squirrels both arboreal and ground, raccoons, snakes and unnecessarily large bugs. They all use the barely paved streets as game trails; the hillsides come right down to the tarmac, often in little landslides full of strange tracks and chunks of golden granite. No curbs. Sidewalks are for sissies.

Griffith Park is very slightly separated from the rest of the Santa Monica Mountains by a gorge full of freeway, and Lake Hollywood. It’s the 11th largest urban park in the United States. It is maintained in a lovely patchwork of tiny bits of human space: picnic areas, softball fields, a magnificent carousel. In between these mown and lighted areas is just – the Hills. You can drive a few places, but mostly the hillsides are thick with wild oats, bunch grass, spurge laurel, live oaks, eucalyptus … plants that will grow wild and huge, and can get by on no water for nine months out of twelve. You can clamber around all day and never see a human being or a paved path. Animals, though, you will encounter.

I remember one afternoon, hiking around aimlessly with a Great Dane named Thora.  She was meant as security. Halfway up a hillside, the dog flung herself into the tall grass, whining. I was holding the leash and perforce went flat in the grass, too. And then deer began to, apparently, rain down out of the sky … they came leaping over the crest of the hill above us, in beautiful arcs and arabesques, maybe planting one delicate hoof between me and Kage and then bounding away downhill.

There must have been 2 or 3 dozen of them. Not one hit us. Near the end of the rain of deer, Thesta realized they weren’t much bigger than she was, and wanted to follow them: it took both Kage and I to convince her to stay. She was baying in frustration as the last of the deer leaped away into the live oaks. And there we sat, covered in wild oats and dust, holding a howling Great Dane between us, victims of a drive-by deering.

As Kage would have Lord Ermenwyr exclaim many years later, her only comment was: “I! Hate! Nature!”

On the way home, we encountered a tarantula out for a walk along Woodrow Wilson Drive. Kage was not thrilled.

Why has this long-ago scene of antic weirdness been haunting me lately? I have no idea. It was such a long time ago, when two high schoolers could wander the Hills safely, with nothing but a dog to keep them safe. Mind you, Thora was as large as a mule deer, but that doesn’t explain how we never encountered anything more dangerous than a perambulating tarantula or puma tracks in the soft golden dust of a landslide.

Bookish little idiots that we were, I’ll never know why were not snapped up and eaten by some predator. Maybe we were protected, as the deer were, by wandering in uninhabited areas and running very fast. Or maybe whatever god had lit the wild fire in Kage’s brain kept her safe until she could start writing all that down. In the meantime, he let her wander in strange places and see strange things.

I assume I came along as a job lot. And someone has always been needed to hold the dog, drive the car, nudge the tarantula out of the way …

And remember stuff. Even if I haven’t figured out why, yet.

Kage Baker, as I have often noted, liked heat. She flourished in the hot, dry excesses of Southern California, where she lived most of her life. Occasional stints in oak savannah and coastal flatlands added a bit of variety to her chosen weather, but still maintained the triple-digit heat of late summer. And she loved it.

Oh, as a child she cursed the September heat with the rest of us. We were all sent through the labyrinth of Catholic school; it meant wool uniforms replaced shorts and T-shirts as soon as Labor Day was past. Tartan skirts in wool; long sleeved cardigans in wool; knee high socks with cables. In wool. And that was when the heat would, reliably as the tide, hit triple digits. Returning to school was like being shrouded and buried alive.

But as a grownup – when she traded the navy blue and tartan for silk pajamas – she loved it. The end of summer, when the heat soared – Kage would don her white silks, pin her hair up her head in a Gordian knot, adjust the standing lamp to breathe coolth on the back of her neck and write. She was as happy as a salamander in the caldera of a volcano.

I like heat, within logical limits. But the dry desert breath of California really is different, and more easily survived, than the exotic, panting steams of Louisiana and Texas and Missouri. I can breathe in California; the hot air is fine and silky and dry, scented with dry golden grass and fire. At least, it used to be that way in Los Angeles …

Nowadays, we get some sort of mutant semi-storm mass called “the monsoonal flow”. It’s a dry storm – no rain, except on the edges of the deserts and mountains, but literal tons of heavy wet air. They fill up the basin like an untended bath tub, driving the heat into triple digits in the day. And the alien atmosphere is damp and clinging and impossible to breathe – right now, at 8:38, it is 75 degrees and we have 70% humidity. You can’t even sweat successfully.

There are two main strategies for survival, since no native Angelenos know how to breathe in humid air.

1)  You can lock up your house and rely on the air conditioning: if you have a modern enough dwelling, you’ve got a hermetically sealed house with life support. You can live behind the airlocks of your doors, drawing shades over the windows where the panes of glass radiate heat like the walls of a kiln.

Or 2) you can set up fans in every room, to circulate what cool air you may be able to coax from old window A/C units and swamp coolers. At night, you open all the doors and windows and let the fans suck in the cooler night air, and it’s really not too bad. Usually it’s decent enough to sleep by 10 PM or so.

I live in the second model. The house is a snug little stucco just under a century old. It holds warmth in the winter, and cool in the summer – but it has no A/C, and eventually every summer we are adhering to the “open windows after dark” rule. But because the house is so old, not all the doorways are a regulation width. When one of these loses a screen, we need to have it custom made. And until it gets replaced, the door is open …

Such is the door in my room, which opens on a little porch. Trees overhang the arch of the roof, and it funnels in the evening breezes just beautifully. I can sit and type and be bathed in cool air … it’s delightful. However. Do you know what come in open doors besides cool air?

Skunks, that’s what. I’ve gotten used to the moths and crickets, and a candle does for the bitier bugs. Neighborhood cats keep their distance, because the Corgi is a paranoid about his territory, and the little black cat won’t tolerate trespassers, either. The raccoons prefer to skulk around the trash, and the possums don’t have the mental capacity to manage the stairs. But the skunks …

They’re not attacking, look you. They just have no fear nor sense of boundaries. And the babies are just at that curious kitten stage, where all the word is interesting. They’re also prone to hysteria …

Anyway, one came wandering into my room tonight. I heard little paws in the fallen wintergreen leaves, and glanced down to greet the little black cat. But she had suddenly acquired a lovely snow-white strip between her little black ears … a  small skunk came nosing into my room. And it’s a small room – seated at my desk, I am only about a yard from the door. Or the skunk, depending on the object of your closest attention.

I stood up.

“You are not supposed to be in here,” I said sternly (the first thing that came into my head). I backed up, herding the fascinated Corgi with me and so into the living room; where I told poor Kimberly that a skunk had just walked into my room.

When the tip-toeing mob that we comprised came back to search, my little visitor was gone. We looked in the likely places – well, what constitutes likely places in my room: under the parrot cage. Behind the giant Tupper that hold my sewing supplies. Under the desk. As I sleep in a captain’s bed, there is no under the bed: the bed frame is full of drawers. But we checked under the hems of the feather mattress and comforters.

Blessedly, no skunk. My schoolmistress admonition must have worked. But I had to close my door for the night, which is very sad in the current heat. Tomorrow, I’ll install a baby gate. Those don’t work too well on babies (who have thumbs and primate ancestors), but they work fine on skunks.

Kage would have insisted on a moat and iron bars, most likely. But, while I don’t have her fortitude for heat, I can handle skunks. I think.