Author Archives: Stacey

Fernando’s grief

The lack of money was starting to get to Fernando. He’d asked me several times when he was going to get paid. He seemed worried, agitated.
Photos by Stacey Warde

By Stacey Warde

Fernando came out to the field and asked if there was any work. I told him to take it easy. Nothing to do today, I said. Mañana!

He left, appearing content, though his money and food were in low supply and his mother was sick in a hospital in Mexico. He returned less than an hour later.

“Mi Madre!” he began, wailing, letting loose the saddest string of Spanish words I’d ever heard, though technically I didn’t understand them.

The message, however, was clear: His mother was dead.

He’d received the message on his cell phone minutes earlier. He began to sob, I put my arm around his neck, and he embraced me. Tears fell for a moment. Then he told me he still wanted to work the next day, and sadly turned away to walk back to his humble trailer beside the packing house.

Fernando lived on the farm where we leased acreage to grow blueberries. He kept his little trailer neat and tidy and grew beautiful roses and kept a vegetable garden with peppers, corn and tomatillos. He was friendly and occasionally we’d drink a beer together after work.

He told me that roses were grown and harvested in his hometown where he’d grown up. He hadn’t been back home in years.

He kept his little trailer neat and tidy and grew beautiful roses and kept a vegetable garden with peppers, corn and tomatillos.

He was a seasonal worker who had come out to ask if we had any labor as we were setting up the field the year before. We put him to work whenever we could. He was a steady, even worker, although sometimes he’d get it wrong and have to do it over again.

As we worked in the field the following morning, Fernando’s cell phone rang and he began an animated conversation in Spanish. I can’t be sure but I think he was trying to explain to a sibling why he couldn’t attend his mother’s funeral.

With no green card or car, he could not risk leaving the U.S. for fear that he might never be allowed to come back. Unable to travel, he is the only child who won’t be at his mother’s memorial. He’s stuck with me working on the farm.

“Maybe Decembré,” he said when I asked him later if he planned to go home.

“December!” That’s almost a year from now, I told him.

“No denaro.” With no money or car or legal papers, he’s isolated, unable to travel or go places. His sister lives a few strides up the dirt road in a home with a family of her own. They haven’t been around the last few days, on an out-of-town venture.

I’m guessing she’s with other family—in L.A. or Mexico, I’m not sure. Her husband, who was already in Mexico and about to return home, is staying on a few days to assist the in-laws, according to Fernando, who has borne his grief mostly alone.

I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m beginning to understand him more as we both use signs, signals and spanglish to converse.

The lack of money was starting to get to Fernando. He’d asked me several times when he was going to get paid. He seemed worried, agitated.

“No denaro, no comida!” he exclaimed.

“You’ve got no food, Fernando?”

“No!”

I’ll do what I can, I responded. I don’t make the payments. I’ll let the boss know right away, I told him, which I did.

I brought him some comida, tamales and pintos the next day. I bought them with my last bit of denaro, about $10 in cash, which I had until my own payday. I understood his frustration and hoped he wasn’t making a fool of me. How could he not have any food?

I’m a sucker for hard cases. I figured it was better to err on the side of foolishness than see a grown man go hungry. So I brought him food.

He watches me as I explain how to move the bags so we don’t trip over the spaghetti tubing that feeds the plants.

When his phone rang, we were moving about 500 heavy, water-laden, soil-filled, 5-gallon grow bags into place, a task that wouldn’t have been necessary had Fernando set them up the way I had shown him from the start.

This has happened before, where I’ve demonstrated how to perform a task, explaining verbally and showing physically how to do it, and he continues to do it another way.

He watched me as I explained how to move the bags so we don’t trip over the spaghetti tubing that feeds the plants.

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t understand me. “Fernando,” I said, “move the bags closer to where the tubes come out of the drip line so people and dogs won’t trip over them and break them. OK?”

I pretended to catch my foot on the loop to demonstrate accidental tripping. “OK?” I asked. “No tripping.”

I moved the heavy bag so that it protected the connectors, preventing the loops from catching people’s legs and feet. He nodded OK, indicating he understood. He went after it, slowly moving the bags into place.

He missed a bag. I didn’t get on him about it. I could move it later. But I’m amazed at how quickly he lets one go. Maybe it’s sloppiness, a failure to notice, a failure to care—or grief. I can’t be sure.

I had broken two connections the day before. Working alone, I tripped over the tubing and broke the connectors, which snapped right off.

I held a can of spray paint under my arm; I was marking the broken connections. When I bent over to pick up the loose spaghetti tubing I’d just broken, I managed to blast the paint into my face and eye.

My head already hurt and my eyes felt sore in the light, like a hangover, from the moment I’d awakened that morning. A friend told me it was a reaction to the radical pressure changes in advance of several storm systems about to slam into California’s southern coastline.

Each time I bent over, my head would ache and pound. I’d already adjusted 200 plants and felt terrible. The paint blast to the face put me over the top and I threw the can as far as I could in a fit of anger.

I was mad at Fernando for not doing what I’d asked him to do in the first place, and mad at myself for not watching him more closely. I was mad for not paying attention to how I was holding the spray can, and mad for doing work that wasn’t necessary, for picking up after Fernando with a splitting headache.

“It’s like watching a child,” the boss said once.

My newest neighbor, recently relocated to California and had at one time managed his father’s vineyards, said: “I hate to sound prejudiced or anything but sometimes I think they do it because it’s job security.”

You mean the workers purposely do things the wrong way so they’ll have work?

“Yeah,” he said, without hesitating, “I think they’re a lot smarter than we give them credit. They pretend not to understand and that way they can keep working.”

If that’s true, I said, they should be laughing at us stupid gringos.

“They are,” he said.

Fernando wasn’t laughing. When he hung up the phone, I heard a loud snapping sound, as though one of the bags had been suddenly pulled apart.

I turned and saw the top half of the heavy bag torn in two places where his hands had just tried to pick it up. He stood over the bag, back hunched over, arms hanging at his sides. He seemed frustrated, angry, defeated.

Until that point there hadn’t been any mishaps moving the bags, even though Fernando had continued to try lifting them instead of sliding them over the way I had shown him.

I stood up and walked over to him. “Are you OK, Fernando?”

He nodded his head, “Yes.” His eyes were red with grief and fury.

I watched as he continued to move the bags, he was listless and unhappy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to go home. He needed the work as much—maybe more—than I did. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice.

Black women should rule

Stacey Abrams, a Democrat from Georgia, is the first black female nominee in U.S. history to run for governor for a major party. She lost the 2018 midterm election amid claims of voter suppression.

by Dell Franklin

Nobody has had it tougher than black women in this country, and nobody is tougher.

In 1969, in New Orleans, as a 25-year-old, I got hired off the street as ship’s storekeeper on the Delta Queen Riverboat—the last sternwheeler to ply the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers as a passenger-carrying vessel. I was the only white face to hold a job other than the officers and two engineers. Porters, deck hands, bartenders, waiters, the kitchen crew and maids were all black, and were the backbone of the majestic Queen of the river.

The maids all seemed in their forties, and when I ran into any of them in my comings and goings they always smiled and said, “Hi, mistah sto’keepah, how y’all doing today?” And I always answered, “Just fine, ma’am. How are you?” As time went on, they seemed to find humor in my bearded sloppy appearance, and giggled in a fond motherly way, nodding, making eye contact, and I found them sensuous and earthy and felt a natural nurturing from them, a comfort that put me at ease and allowed me to actually like myself at such a discontented time in my life. They looked at me like I was somebody of value, and counted.

There were five of them, all from Memphis, and when we docked in Memphis for a layover their grown sons and daughters picked them up and toted their suitcases; and the ship’s chef, who was also from Memphis, told me about all the maids who came onto the Queen had grown up down in Mississippi sharecropping cotton and later moved to Memphis to do domestic work while at the same time raising their children. Some times as single mothers.

At night the crew dining room became the place to listen to music and visit, and the maids always sat at a table together and endured the wise cracks from cocky porters, and once, a lady named Dolores slapped one in the face so hard the sound reverberated throughout the cramped dining room. And that was that. These same churchgoing ladies, who sent most of their paychecks home but dressed up to go to lunch when we hit New Orleans, were nobody to mess with.

A waiter named Davis, a former Pullman porter in his fifties who’d played baseball in the Negro Leagues and was still as spry as a 25-year-old, and knew how to dress, put me under his wing as a sort of mentor, properly dressed me, and took me to a blues club in Memphis where he promised to show me the “real blues,” something I knew nothing about, being the typical whitey raised on pablum rock ‘n roll in Los Angeles.

Black women have emerged as the bedrock of the Democratic Party, and the single last hope for this country

Three of the maids and three of the waiters came along and we brought in our own bottles and sat at a long table in a dim, packed blues club and listened to the grating shiver of guitars, the groaning of a harmonica, the constant beat of drums, the deep rasp of a singer, the melding of down-home blues from the Delta, the saddest music I’ve ever listened to, and I’d never seen people so happy partying to it. Dolores forced me to get out on the floor and dance with all these black folks who made me feel lame and awkward as they moved about so easily to the music.

“Don’t y’all be shy now, mistah sto’keepah, jes’ follow mah lead, chile.”

She got me to dance. She got me moving and into the swing of things, forgetting my self-consciousness, without saying a word, but merely nodding and smiling and encouraging me, and at one point I said, “Dolores, I’ve never seen people have so much fun dancing to such sad music, it’s all about heartbreak and betrayal and suffering and misery….” She lifted her face and looked me in the eye and said, “Baby, us black folks jes’ got to celebrate our bad times or they kill us.”

This statement could be an anthem to most black women in this country, and now, in the year 2019, they have emerged, to me, as the bedrock of the Democratic Party, and the single last hope for this country. The bad times that have nearly killed all of them have also made them ten times tougher than the old pasty-faced, saggy jowled white Republicans disgracing themselves and the country in the Senate and House of Representatives.

Bad times that nearly killed them have made them ten times tougher than a droopy billionaire like the vacant cipher who owns Starbucks, or the young techie nerds and super macho blowhards coming up out of the white suburbs and those icky prep schools and Ivy League colleges that have produced smug stooges like our latest entry onto the Supreme Court.

Out of this ongoing morass came the likes of Oprah, Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Stacey Abrams, Maxine Waters, to name a few; and only a fool would want to tangle with any of them on an intellectual level, or a common sense level. These spirited women are spawn of a world where black mothers, in many cases, were saddled with men humiliated by the system that offered them little compared to the white man and beat them down further when they were rejected for the color of their skin and only the color of their skin. Crappy schools that offered them little but crappy jobs, crappy wages, or no jobs, especially during the worst of times.

In most cases, the women held everything together. They raised their children in blighted projects and gave them the only thing that enabled them to survive—food, clothing, love, warmth, encouragement, and hope. They were treated as chattel, destined to drudge work for the lowest wages, and as distilleries of reproduction. In movies, they were doting nannies or servile maids humored by wealthy white people. They were seen as background objects, never in the forefront, always in support, and surely never groomed for greatness, unless they were entertainers or athletes.

Not now. Now there is burgeoning pride among these gals, led by the likes of powerful black women who have been through it all, are tougher than anybody in this country, know how to talk to people eloquently on a human level, literally shimmer with pride at who they are and what they’ve accomplished; and behind them, in a massive show of genuine black pride are all the black women in this country who have come so far and have these dynamic leaders to look up to and follow.

Give me Kamala Harris on this ticket any day, and she’ll carry whomever else is on it. It’s time.

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif. Visit his website: dellfranklin.com

Trump’s appalling policy

Separating children from asylum-seeking parents

by Stacey Warde

When news first broke about the U.S. government losing 1,475 immigrant children, I made a cursory search to determine the story’s veracity.

Satisfied that initial reports were true, I fired off an angry letter to Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein.

“Please do the right thing…and pressure those who are responsible to reunite the missing children with their parents immediately.”

Then, Dave Congalton, host of KVEC’s Hometown Radio Show, asked me to come on the air to discuss the issue (to listen, click on this KVEC link).

After looking more thoroughly into the matter, I realized that my letter and response, a hazard in today’s volatile news environment, were not quite fully informed.

Turns out, more worry and focused attention would be better spent on the children our government is separating from their parents on the grounds that they’re trying to enter the U.S. illegally.

It’s an appalling fact, even if the children and their parents are illegal. But the truth of the matter is that most of the immigrants crossing the border are fleeing widespread violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They’re seeking asylum not a cover for illegal entry, as claimed by the Trump Administration.

In April, a government official told Congress that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a wing of the Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for underaged undocumented immigrants (mostly seeking asylum), had “lost track” of 1,500 children.

The ensuing uproar (including my letter) demanded that the responsible government officials find them and ensure their well being by reuniting them with family.

Since 2014, when there was an unusual influx of these undocumented minors without parents or guardians, the government, under recent legislation, began classifying them as “unaccompanied,” placing them into the care of ORR.

Under federal law, these children must be placed into the care of a parent or guardian as quickly as possible, or kept in a detention center.

Apparently, the government’s failure to reach these caregivers made it seem the children had slipped through the system. Also, some advocates argue parents and family of these children don’t want the government to know their whereabouts.

Compounding the issue, on May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in an attempt to discourage illegal border crossings, also took aim at those seeking asylum: “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law.”

White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly then told NPR’s John Burnett that “the children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long. “

Since, there have been troubling reports of parents being separated from their children, who are then reclassified as “unaccompanied,” and placed into detention centers, where there have been numerous complaints of child abuse, including rape and beatings.

Additionally, the ORR’s Scott Lloyd, a pro-life attorney, appears to be flaunting federal law, reportedly refusing medical care to minors seeking abortion after being raped, and holding detainees longer than is legal.

The Trump Administration argues that these minors are the children of “criminals,” and therefore should be separated, placed in confinement while their parents are sent to  detention facilities or prisons, where they will eventually be deported.

During my conversation with Congalton, a listener asked why I wasn’t petitioning the Mexican government for all this illegal immigration. Mexico was coddling the immigrants, encouraging more criminals to enter the U.S. illegally.

“I’m not a citizen of Mexico,” I told him, and my complaint has more to do with how the U.S. is treating children looking for a safe place to go. Mexico has shown more humanity than the U.S. in the matter.

Advocates say these refugees are not criminals, they’re not breaking the law, but are seeking asylum from gang and street violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

The Trump Administration claims it’s separating children from their parents to discourage this flood of immigrants seeking safe haven in the U.S.

Meanwhile, child advocates like attorney Megan Stuart, writing in Rewire.News, argues: “We need to think twice about asking any government, especially one that proudly equates immigrants with gang members and calls them “animals,” for more scrutiny, more monitoring, and more targeting of kids and their communities.”

Also, “We don’t expect or want local jails or prisons to track folks once they are released to loved ones.”

The Trump Administration, she says, is turning this into an immigration crisis, claiming that these children are being placed with families to escape scrutiny, thus enter illegally.

Finally, false reports, as expected in a Trumpian world, will continue to circulate the interweb regarding the status of these children, their reason for coming here and the so-called criminality of their parents. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. He can be reached by email: roguewarde@gmail.com Twitter: @roguewarde.

 

Wading through “news” overload

Where do we find truth when inundated with bots and falsehoods?

by Stacey Warde

The way we get information about our world today has changed radically since 1984 when I first entered the news business as a reporter. No one then could have imagined the daily flood of “news” (and “fake “news”) that overwhelms us today.

News was distributed mostly through newspapers, TV and radio, and was handled by people trained to gather and report their findings in trusted outlets.

Today, with the pervasiveness of the web, and access to endless data provided by both human and automated sources (also known as “bots”), we’re inundated with more news and information than we can possibly handle, some trustworthy, some not.

News will always be hard to define but we seem to have a hunger for it in the US, where, it is argued, a free press keeps the government in check, helps to inform the citizenry and sheds light on whether the republic is in good working order. News can also serve as a launching point for discussion, the public forum, where a variety of opinions and views can be shared.

Once, the newspaper’s editorial/opinion pages served as a safe forum for these discussions. Now, on the internet, where a majority (some 67 percent) of Americans get their news, it’s hard to find a safe forum, unless it’s moderated.

As a young journalist in 1984, my idea of news was, as a mentor once told me, information essential for a community to function.

A reporter’s job was to find and report the facts about subjects vital to that community, and to report them “without fear or favor.” Facts were not hard to find. With a little leg work and care, a reporter could paint a fairly accurate picture of the way things were—or were not—working in the community.

News was considered by most to be reliable data and information gathered, verified, organized and written by qualified journalists, able to give honest, accurate accounts of an event, industry, idea, person or issue that was deemed important for the community to know.

Truth in reporting, especially in government reporting, mattered most. A common and popular refrain from editors was: “Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!”

If a journalist got it wrong and reported what today might be called “fake news,” he or she risked losing their credibility—and their job—as reporters. A false or misleading news report usually meant termination, and a new career. Truth mattered.

Today, in the blogosphere, it’s easy to clutter the information highway with lies and falsehoods, or what lately we refer to as “fake news.”

Fake news existed long before President Trump made it part of the American vernacular. Fake news was anything that slipped into the news page unverified or weakly sourced, or proved false and misleading. Corrections were made.

Journalists are still duped into reporting stories that come from questionable sources or they unwittingly pass on as “news” public relations ploys and marketing gimmicks. Other times, business/ad managers may try to bully or con journalists into promoting as “news” a potential advertising client’s business or services.

Overall, though, journalists still fight hard to give honest reporting and take pride in being considered trustworthy, reliable, credible sources of news and information.

Nonetheless, we find an insurmountable amount of questionable data in circulation today, mostly from the internet. Today, there are bots and hackers not just biased, sloppy journalists who muddy the waters, spreading false information.

A recent Pew Research Center study found that some two-thirds of links tweeted to popular websites are posted by automated Twitter accounts or bots, not humans. Some of the data proves worthy, other data is misleading. That makes finding reliable information more difficult than ever.

Still, we turn daily to the internet or our favorite news outlets to get the latest word on developments in the state and world. We’re drawn to the heroes and villains of the day’s biggest “news” events. We shudder at the most recent catastrophes and natural disasters.

We have plenty of outlets to choose from but usually go with the few that are most familiar. Often, they give views that reflect our personal biases rather than provide helpful or useful information about our world.

The Pew Research Center claims that 45 percent of adults in the U.S. get news from Facebook, where they are more likely to find sources that confirm their personal biases rather than provide vetted and fully sourced and truthful information that may or may not suit their views.

Social media have increasingly become the go-to source for news and information but also create bubbles where we see only what we want to see.

News is both a commodity and a resource. We sell it, buy it, and need it to get through the day for some reason. Yet, it’s become a Herculean task in today’s information ecosystem to distinguish fact from fiction, to know fake from real.

All of it is colored by the people (or bots) who spin it, and the notion of what constitutes “news” seems to get cloudier by the day.

Before the internet, reporters and editors were the information highway’s “gatekeepers.” They decided what got covered and how it got played. They kept the public discourse mostly civil and opened their pages to readers who knew how to put up a decent argument. It wasn’t a perfect public forum but it seemed to work.

That’s not to say propaganda (or fake news—read “disinformation”) didn’t proliferate, there was plenty of it, but it seemed easier to spot. In today’s partisan push to dominate the news and control the spin on events, and with the inundation of baseless information coming from who-knows-where, it appears that most news is propaganda and most propaganda is news.

You really have to work hard to get good information.

The internet was supposed to level the playing field and give citizen journalists the same power to dispense news and information as traditional or professional editors and reporters, who were often criticized for having limited or elitist views and unfairly dominating the public forum.

With the rise of citizen journalists—essentially anyone with a cellphone—and web-based news, all voices would have a platform from which to share their experiences and stories and observations, bypassing the gatekeepers, who seemed interested only in controlling and restricting access.

Gatekeepers would become unnecessary, eventually obsolete, a noisy hindrance to the free flow of useful (and worthless) data that virtually anyone can “publish” or post on social media, the new drivers and platforms for today’s news and information.

Today’s public forum, controlled mostly through social media outlets, seems to have devolved into a bot-driven wasteland of disinformation and propaganda.

The gatekeepers have given way to algorithms, bots and charlatans, whose purpose is to offer up the most clicks or views to questionable, unreliable or worthless data and websites. The internet was supposed to level the playing field and give everyone a voice, as well as provide easy access to useful information and public forums. What it did was eliminate the quaint beauty of civil discourse that gatekeepers attempted to provide.

Gatekeepers—reporters and editors—I would argue, whose role is perhaps outmoded in today’s information free-for-all, kept public discourse on a mostly healthy, dignified and lively trajectory. They determined whose voices got to be heard and avoided the spread of drivel that so often gets mistaken as news or information today.

Good editors and reporters knew their communities better than anyone, knew where the dead bodies were, kept close watch on the movers and shakers, the crooks and cons, and could put a spotlight on virtually any one of them. Editors had power because “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” especially when it comes to maintaining healthful and well-informed communities.

Some critics complained that this was too limiting and elitist; others saw this as a necessary guarantee against chicanery, provincialism, ignorance and animalistic bullying. Both views were correct.

Today, consumers of news must be more wary than ever before, they must be their own gatekeepers, sorting the good from the bad, trusting their instincts to know the difference between fact and fiction, between fake and real.

It’s a daunting but not impossible task. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. He can be reached at roguewarde@gmail.com.

 

RIP: Smoker Jim Ruddell

‘Us smokers, we’re a different breed, we’re like a circle of crusty old women with recipes everybody wants, but we don’t give up nothing.‘ —Smoker Jim Ruddell

While attending a burial at sea for my uncle, I got the sad notice from a friend that Jim Ruddell had died.

“Smoker Jim Ruddell,” the notice said, “got his angel wings, Friday Feb. 16 at 6:40 a.m., surrounded by family. His passing was peaceful.”

Jim fought valiantly, as he was wont to do, for nearly six months while recovering in the hospital from medical complications. It was an up- and downhill battle but he never gave up.

It’s “sad to have him leave us,” the note continued, “he will be greatly missed by everyone from family to community. He was a larger-than-life presence wherever he went…and I’m sure he will continue wherever he goes. Peace, love, and our deepest sympathies to the Ruddell family.”

Jim, whose tiny corner Smokehouse in Cayucos has made a huge impact on the community and beyond, garnering kudos from publications like Sunset Magazine, was a big supporter of The Rogue Voice, and advertised with us from the beginning.

A staunch conservative, he seldom winced at our liberal bent on issues and was always ready with a sound defense of his own political views, which were so different from our own. But he never got into nasty debates with us as is the tendency among so many in today’s divisive political atmosphere. He was a gentleman and a true friend.

“I don’t always like what you guys say or print but I support your right to publish what you want,” he’d often say as he handed us payment for his advertisement.

He was a real patriot, defending the First Amendment, and believing that we all, liberal and conservative, have a stake in making our communities a better place to live. He gave generously, and became a father figure to many who worked for and with him.

He leaves a giant hole in the community and we will miss him, but he also leaves us a legacy of giving, and making the world a better place.

Jim had his share of struggles but, like so many of us, he kept battling, keeping his eye on the greater good for his family and community. He was a true warrior.

In 2006, we featured Jim as a “Rogue of the Month” in our magazine. We are grateful and better off for having known him. Below, is Dell Franklin’s interview with Jim, which ran in the December, 2006, edition.

—Stacey Warde

 

A rogue for the ages

By Dell Franklin

There used to be smokehouses up and down the coast, on every pier in every little beach burg from San Diego to San Francisco and points north. Weathered shacks similar in size to tiny bait shops, manned by fish-smelly, aproned, be-capped, grimy faced eccentrics, an obscure breed dishing out smoked salmon, yellowtail, albacore, oysters, and sometimes pork or poultry and a little jerky.

Jim Ruddell, who learned the rudiments of smoking from his Louisiana father and uncles, grew up and lived in the Santa Monica area for 30 years, working as an auto mechanic. He was driving home from work on the freeway shortly after the verdict of the Rodney King trial precipitated the L.A. riots. He looked around and realized he was the ONLY car on the freeway. Gunshots rang out and crackled like a Vietnam firefight. All around him the city seemed to be burning. He felt as if he were driving through Dante’s Inferno. He’d been meaning to get out of L.A. for years, but now he had an epiphany: “I’m gettin’ the hell outta here!” When he arrived home to his wife Kathy and two-day-old daughter, he said: “We’re outta here.”

It took him more than a year to make contacts among friends and relatives on the Central Coast. He had a full-time job at Toyota, running the maintenance department. People came up to him with mechanically plagued cars, expecting the worst, to get gouged. It was not pleasant work, even for a sunny extrovert like Jim Ruddell, who never liked wearing a uniform and name tag.

Ruddell’s Smokehouse is smaller than a rich man’s bathroom.

“It’s like going to the dentist to these people,” he says. “I always tried to be understanding and helpful and honest and give them the best deal I could. I’m a people person, somebody who wants to make you feel good. Not being able to do that made this a pretty high-stress job: Everybody in a hurry to get their cars fixed and get out; everybody in the garage in a hurry to get your car fixed and get started on a new one. A rat race. I was fed up with it. I had this dream: Go up to the Central Coast, where there weren’t many people, take at least a 50-percent pay loss at the same job, and in the meantime start up a smokehouse.”

“But the odds aren’t good, are they?” I asked. “Starting an obsolete business, pretty much, and being…an anachronism…”

“A dinosaur. I started out by taking an old used pizza oven and turning it into a smoker in the backyard of our home in Morro Bay. My wife thought I was nuts. But I started smoking in the backyard for a few friends. I smoked turkeys for them. Every year about this time I do a turkey smoke. Believe it or not, smoking a turkey is a lot healthier than barbecuing; there’s no carcinogens.”

Ruddell kept working at the car dealership in San Luis Obispo at less than half of what he made down south, and then he built a new smoker in a pole barn on the ranch of a friend in Cayucos. He got to some serious smoking.

He had an old pickup. Without a business license, he found little spots along the highways all over San Luis Obispo County, from Highway 1 to Nacimiento Road out by Chimney Rock to Old Creek Road. He pulled over in spots and put out his sign: “SMOKED FISH.”

“I hung out on Highway 1 a mile north of Cayucos for almost nine months. The cops would stop and hassle me about a license, and finally I’d move on. I started doing it on weekends and then during the week, and twice I had to go back to work at the dealership to keep the money coming in.”

Was it crazy, giving up a career to sell smoked fish out in the middle of nowhere? You bet.

But Ruddell’s a rogue, who doesn’t listen to reason. Like most rogues, he’s inclined to fight the odds and go against the grain. He believes in his dream and is not afraid to follow it, or fail.

Ruddell, who partied and raised hell with the best of them, and does not regret any of it, but is now off the booze, opened his tiny smokehouse in Cayucos in the fall of 2001, about 10 yards from the sea wall and a block from the old pier.

He loves his new milieu. People aren’t going to the dentist when they come into his shop these days. They can have a good time hanging out, listening to jam sessions outside his store on Sundays, and he can watch with pride and gratification as his customers eat his smoked products. He’s got his own music going during the week—‘60s and ‘70s stuff—and he’s looking at the beach, soaking up the funky atmosphere. No uniform, just shorts, a T-shirt, and a ballcap. And he’s his own boss.

“What about the booze? Why’d you quit?”

“I was always a drinker, but I never had the freedom to drink like I did when I got my own place. You couldn’t drink at my past jobs, and I didn’t want to, but here I was, alone, with all this freedom, and it got out of hand. I was beginning to feel like a wreck, the hangovers were killing me, and I felt bad about what I was doing to myself. I was jeopardizing my business, my marriage, family, and realized I was needing a drink instead of wanting one. I was headed for disaster, and so I went to AA and I go every morning and I’m much happier. Everybody’s happier. It worked out.”

Ruddell says he owns the only HACCP inspected (hazard analysis of critical control points) retail smokehouse in the state. How’s business? He ships his smoked products all over the country. When I visited him, he was getting ready to ship some to Washington, D.C. He’s on the internet (www.smokerjim.com). He’s been written about in the New York Times, which is probably why East Coast tourists traveling up and down the Big Sur coastline stop off at his place for a sample of something unique at the last outpost.

Ruddell’s Smokehouse is smaller than a rich man’s bathroom and Donald Trump’s clothes closet. He’s got a deli case, upright, bathtub-sized smoker, stove, cutting board, some equipment stuffed in back, and his dream—that’s it. But he’s thriving, and in the summer he cranks.

The nearest smokehouse?

“I think they do some smoking on the Avila Beach pier, and there’s a smokehouse somewhere around Santa Barbara, and there’s one at Moss Landing, north of Monterey. Us smokers, and I know most of them, we’re a different breed, we’re like a circle of crusty old women with recipes everybody wants, but we don’t give up nothing.”

Not that he’s got to worry. He’s got the secret, and nobody’s going to open a smokehouse anywhere around here in the distant future, and nobody’s about to make a smoker out of an old discarded pizza oven, much less a pole barn. §

 Dell Franklin is a writer who lives in Cayucos, Calif. He can be reached through his website:dellfranklin.com.

Abelard and Héloise

A medieval ‘love’ saga and modern-day sexual harassment

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The tomb of Abelard and Héloise. Alexandre Lenoir, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

by Lisa Bitel

Suddenly, popular media is saturated with stories of powerful men outed by women for behavior in the workplace. These alleged harassers seem to assume that power in the workplace grants them sexual access to anyone.

In medieval Europe, most people assumed the same thing, although they didn’t call it “harassment.”

As a historian of gender in the European Middle Ages, I am all too familiar with well-documented cases of sexual harassment, abuse and rape. Such behavior was not considered unlawful or wrong in the medieval period unless one powerful man harassed a woman who belonged to another powerful man.

One famous 12th-century saga involved a young philosopher, Abelard, and his teenage student Héloise. The story has many similarities with news of modern-day aggressors, with one major exception: None of today’s harassers has suffered medieval punishment.

The case of Abelard and Héloise

Abelard and his pupil Héloise. Edmund Leighton, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1115, Abelard was the star of the budding university scene in medieval Paris. Famous for his quick mind and infallible memory, Abelard supposedly never lost an argument. One day he encountered Héloise, who also studied classics and philosophy (rare for a medieval girl). Abelard later wrote of that first glance, “In looks she did not rank lowest while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme.”

Knowing himself to be handsome and brilliant, Abelard stalked the girl and persuaded her uncle, Fulbert, a church official and Héloise’s guardian, to hire him as her personal tutor. Fulbert was delighted to employ the famous Abelard. Fulbert gave Abelard room and board, so that he might tutor Héloise day and night.

Abelard taught Héloise more than philosophy. “My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages,” he admitted. “To avert suspicion I sometimes struck her.” Eventually, as he wrote, their “desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love devised something new, we welcomed it.”

The affair became the subject of student ballads sung in the streets of Paris.

The wages of sin

Abelard was alarmed at the gossip and sent Héloise off to her old convent school outside of town. Their affair remained torrid, though, and he visited when he could. They once had sex in a corner of the refectory where nuns took their meals.

Their troubles became worse when Héloise became pregnant. Abelard sent her away—this time to his sister in Brittany—where Héloise gave birth to their son Astrolabe, whom she left behind when returning to Paris.

‘Les Amours d’Héloïse et d’Abeilard’ (1819), by Jean Vignaud via Wikimedia Commons.

When Uncle Fulbert learned of Astrolabe’s birth he “went almost out of his mind,” as Abelard put it, even though Abelard reminded him that “since the beginning of the human race women had brought the noblest men to ruin.” Eventually, to appease Fulbert, Abelard agreed to marry Héloise, but only if Fulbert would keep it secret. Héloise objected but submitted.

As things were, the stalking and beating of Héloise posed no danger to Abelard’s reputation nor did fathering an illegitimate son. News of a marriage, though, would ruin him – for only celibate churchmen could find permanent employment as teachers.

Fulbert, however, spread word of the marriage. Héloise and her uncle argued fiercely until Abelard once more hid Héloise in a convent. Against her wishes, he made her wear nun’s clothing.

Uncle Fulbert believed that Abelard had abandoned Héloise. One terrible night, Abelard awoke to find himself under attack by a gang of ruffians who took shocking vengeance for Fulbert. As Abelard put it starkly, “They cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.”

A eunuch, like a married man, was barred from high church offices and teaching positions. Abélard became a monk and Héloise an unwilling nun.

Whose calamity?

We know this sad story from Abelard’s “History of My Troubles” (“Historia Calamitatum”) written about 15 years after his marriage to Héloise. By then, she had become an abbess in charge of a small community of nuns at The Paraclete – a monastery founded by Abelard and named after one of his famous philosophical arguments. The two began to exchange letters in the 1130s. Héloise had never been happy in the convent. She wrote to her husband:

“The pleasures of lovers which we have shared have been too sweet … wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep.”

Abelard suggested that she give all her love to Christ instead. He sent her handy tips for running a monastery. He refused to visit, though.

“My agony is less for the mutilation of my body than for the damage to my reputation.”

His career was paramount; her grief, less so. “His” reputation, “his” calamity. What about “hers”?

Bad love

Something about the history of Abelard and Héloise endured the centuries until 18th- and 19th-century intellectuals embraced the tale of these star-crossed lovers. Several poets and artists depicted Héloise unhappily entering the convent or dreaming of lost love. Parisians erected an ornate monument to the couple in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where today’s lovers still leave fresh roses.

Angelica Kauffman, via Wikimedia Commons

However, despite the discovery of more letters exchanged between Abelard and Héloise, today’s medievalist scholars tend to accept Abelard’s version of the relationship – that Héloise was complicit.

Abelard said Héloise loved him. But did the teenage girl actually consent to sex with the teacher who beat her? Did she agree to have the child? Did she prefer “love to wedlock and freedom to chains,” as Abelard claimed?

We know from her letters to him that she resisted the convent.

“Of all the wretched women, I am the most wretched,” Héloise complained, long after the affair.

Romancing harassment

No one has labeled Abelard a rapist, the seducer of a minor or a sexual harasser. His philosophical works remain crucial to the history of Christian theology and philosophy. Héloise is celebrated mostly for being a female intellectual in a period when there were few.

Such historical “romances” still play out in gender relations today, particularly in the university. A recent survey of graduate students and professors, for example, revealed the extent to which male professors prey on young minds and bodies under their guidance.

And, like Héloise, many such victims still find it hard to voice resistance, although they no longer cower in the cloister. Instead of writing letters to their harassers or singing ballads in the streets, they reveal their secrets in digital media – too often anonymously.

The Conversation“Plus ça change,” or “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing,” as Abelard might say. One thing we have learned since the Middle Ages is that sexual harassment is a destructive crime, no matter how romantic the backstory. §

Lisa Bitel is professor of History & Religion at the University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Food safety and security

The not-so-super Cayucos Supermarket

SLO County Environmental Health Services shuttered the Cayucos Supermarket late December because of significant code violations, including a rodent infestation.

by Stacey Warde

A county health inspector shuttered the Cayucos Supermarket in late December because of a number of “significant code violations,” including an infestation of mice and rats.

An official from SLO county’s environmental health services, according to the Tribune, investigated a complaint from a customer and found signs of “bite marks,” “droppings,” and “contaminated surfaces” throughout the store. The inspector gave the owner a few days to clean up the mess.

When the official returned, however, he found nothing had been done to fix the problem and new evidence of rodent activity in the store. So he ordered the place closed, leaving Cayucos without a local grocery. For how long, we don’t know.

Days before the closure, we visited the store and detected a strong and repugnant odor of urine. It’s not the first time we’ve noticed foul odors in the market. At times, the place has smelled of rotting carcass. Not the best environment in which to make food purchases.

Once, as noted in “Obsolesence and doing business,” we observed the owner spraying the fresh produce section with a can of RAID. We since limited our purchases to packaged items like beer, thinking we’d be safe. It goes without saying, wipe off your cans and bottles before drinking.

We’re not the only patrons who have noticed the decrepit conditions of the Cayucos Supermarket, which has been in operation since 1960 and doesn’t appear to have had any upgrades since. The cold storage units are run down, inefficient and often leak water onto the floors. The odors, we’ve been told, are caused by clogged drainage traps.

As the community adjusts to the closure, other long-term issues and complaints about the market have surfaced.

Corrie S. from Fresno, for example, had this to say in her one-star Yelp review: “So smelly. I couldn’t even stay long enough to buy food. Needs a total overhaul. The produce had flies around it. The shelves were dusty. I would rather travel to the next town to buy food.”

Overall, reviews of the market seem positive but it’s worth noting that they speak more of the warm staff and the sandwiches sold in the back deli than about the quality of the food or the appearance and cleanliness of the place.

We know also that locals love the market for its convenience, selection, reasonable prices and helpful and familiar staff. They love the deli, a separate business located in the back of the store, which offers unique home-style sausages in addition to delicious sandwiches.

Yet, in light of all the good that can be said about the market, we’d like to suggest that the shutdown demonstrates a failure of responsibility to provide food that is safe and secure to our visitors and local community.

Food safety and security are fundamental—as a basic human right—and paramount to the health of any community, large or small. We have a right, as enumerated by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, as well as by San Luis Obispo County’s Environmental Health Services, to food that is free from disease, contamination and sabotage.

Additionally, the closure runs the risk of creating a food desert for a community that already struggles to make sure all of its citizens are adequately and safely fed. The Cayucos Community Church serves weekly many familiar friends and faces with donated food.

The senior center also provides food items for those who are unable to afford groceries.

The closure is one more block in the stream of healthy food options to consumers who receive assistance or who are unable to drive to neighboring communities to shop for groceries.

As a purveyor of “healthy food,” however, our market failed to deliver. It did not meet the basic requirement of providing safe, wholesome, fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and other food items to visiting and local buyers.

The closure also affects employees who now find themselves without a job. We lament their loss and hope they will not be long without work.

We have no idea if or when the store will reopen. The owner must sanitize the entire market and seal all the openings through which rodents might find their way. That seems like a vast undertaking, given the condition of the building and the store’s outdated storage. We wish them luck, and hope that, if they do reopen, they will be more mindful of the safety and security of the food they sell.

Meanwhile, BizBuySell.com has the place listed for sale at $3 million. Perhaps we can lure a buyer who values providing a safe, clean and healthy food environment to the local community and the many travelers who pass through here. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. Daniella Magnano contributed to this article. She runs Spumoni Egg Farm where she keeps chickens and delivers fresh, healthy eggs to friends and people in need in the community.