Jambalaya

Oct. 4, 2007

Dear Pat,

On my last visit to Northern California I discovered my favorite club had turned into an upscale restaurant. I peeked in the Jambalaya's window but couldn't bear to go inside.

Now the Jambalaya has new owners who've brought music and the life back in. Hallelujah.

Fred Neighbor and Joyce Hough fronted rock and reggae bands that regularly played the Jambalaya 25 years ago. Fred and Joyce were there again last Friday night playing George Jones and Merle Haggard songs in a band called the Country Pretenders. They have always filled the dance floor.

Despite the shiny new decor, ghosts inhabit the Jambalaya. Mort drew cracked cartoons at the bar. Morey thought of bartending as a dance and sounded like an American Richard Burton when he read his poetry. They died many years ago. In the past few weeks the Jambalaya held memorials for Chloe, whose demons strangled her musicianship, and for Jack Hitt, a bookstore owner who valued beneficence more than profit. Jack told me about Lao Tsu.

While DC and 20,000 other practitioners of the dental arts exchanged information at a convention in San Francisco, I went to Humboldt County to see my friend Julie and once again bathe in the power and beauty of the North Coast.

Julie and her partner Lynn live on a cliff above Trinidad Harbor in the house Julie's parents owned. A picture window occupies the most of the western wall. Fishing boats usually fill the harbor, but they were down the coast a way in Eureka awaiting the start of crab season. Ancient mammoth rocks buttress the harbor. Local poet Jerry Martien wrote that the rocks here were once like we were, part of the continent.

Now they send Julie and Lynn a new postcard every minute.

After a walk at sunset on the beach we dined on grilled salmon, broccoli, artichoke salad and potatoes, pinot noir and homemade ice cream with raspberries. Django Reinhardt played on the stereo. It's a Sunset magazine life but real. The cliff is failing and the neighbors complain that Julie's trees are blocking their view.

Julie is a former teacher and marriage and family therapist who also used to be the mayor of nearby Arcata and a county supervisor. Then she took $1,000 and started a consignment store that sells art created in Humboldt County. She had three of those stores scattered around the county when she sold them earlier this year. Her life is always under construction.

Now she is leading workshops exploring ideas about love and forgiveness. So far forgiveness is the more interesting, she says. Nobody seems to know what it is.

The Dell'Arte Company, the activist theater group in nearby Blue Lake, is intrigued enough to base a production on the workshops.

People and organizations in Humboldt County do what Julie and Dell'Arte do, riffing off each other's lives and ideas like jazz musicians, making and doing the unexpected.

An Arcata company called Fire and Light turns most of the glass recycled in the county into colorful translucent dishes sold around the country. DC and I buy them from a store near us in Paducah, Ky.

The title poem of Jerry Martien's book "The Rocks Along the Coast" knows the lure of this place. The last lines read:

"I washed up here in time to see where they had been

know where to listen now in heavy weather

through an age of petrified nerve I hear it

hear it wail

feel it shake & pound the shore

they do not move

they are there forever

I remember

hear us singing

see us dancing on the

edge of the world again"

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.