I struck camp for California in July 1984 fully provisioned with a Missouri arsenal of whistlers, squealers and rockets. Toys that go bang. The west coast was a long haul, punctuated by interview assignments and campsite layovers to pound out the resulting stories, portable typewriter on picnic tables; farm equipment dealers, their businesses and their communities.

Describing this employment once for a friend, a recent Laotian immigrant, his only question was, "Who'd you have to kill to get that job?"

$300 a profile. No mileage. And no competition. Whether or not my subjects made retailable reading - more than a third didn't - they were uniformly bright people living in interesting places.

I drove my traveling office, motor home - a 20 year old VW bug - directly to a state park in Santa Cruz, a town I'd inhabited 8 years before; also the scene of John Steinbeck's Hooverville in "The Grapes of Wrath". Fifty dollars this side of tapped flat, I needed a general delivery destination for my writing income before I could consider an apartment rental.

Two days without sleep and I might have suggested the children circling my tent jump off the cliff, or swim out beyond the breakers, but no. I gave them a small bag of fireworks, instead, 18 months into the worst California drought in memory. I slithered out as the Fire Dept trucks roared in, the words, "Who gave those kids firecrackers!" echoing all the way into the coast foothills.

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© Bill Whitehouse, 2006.
Last updated: 2006-07-19 2:40 pm.