More Madonna, Less Jesus

The Last Ferron Concert

March 25, 2009 at 3:06 am | Posted in Day to Day | Leave a comment

I spent Sunday at church. For morning I soaked at Kiva. If you haven’t been for a while, the sauna is fixed and very nicely hot. The redwood tub is restored, not replaced as I had feared. The lawn is beautiful and by 10:30 this time of year, in full sun. There’s a new policy for Friday nights: Men have to be accompanied by a woman. Women’s mornings are still Sundays and Wednesdays.

In the afternoon I meditated and sang with a friend in a room of my house which until recently I rented. I decided to rent the apartment for a little less money, and keep the use of The Garden Room to myself.

In the evening I met a friend for dinner at the Saturn, and then we walked to Kuumbwa for the Ferron concert. I don’t know if it will be the last concert. She wouldn’t say. But she did say that she can’t be doing this forever. She admitted that she promised us she’d be tap dancing to “Ain’t Life a Brook” when she is 80, but now, maybe not. “It’s time for young people to come up and sing my songs.”

Only Ferron would tap dance to Ain’t Life a Brook. It is such a perfect song I had to parody it to get out from under its power.

I don’t know if there is an artist in your life like Ferron is in mine. My first lesbian lover played her music for me. “You haven’t heard of Ferron? You have to listen to this. She’s a lesbian, and sings about her lovers.” It’s hard to imagine now, a world where lesbians could not sing about their lovers in public. I know. Chris Williamson and Holly Near. I know. But I don’t LIKE THEM. They are minor talents at best. Ferron made a record in the early 1980s and even Rolling Stone said she was as good as Dylan. At that time, we only had “Testimony,” on scratchy cassette tapes. It sounded a lot like this:

We didn’t care. I listened to it again and again, as I learned about love and loss. Ferron has written hymns, especially “Testimony” which is how she closes her shows. She wrote that song when she was only twenty years old. There were two Ferron albums in the early 1980s. Her later records are good too, but by that time, we had both grown up, and once she got over the shock of being sober, she recorded songs like “Catus” and “Girl on a Road” that were just as good as the early ones, if not better.

The Santa Cruz favorite:

As I sat for the last time in the Kummbwa singing our hymn with her, surrounded by women of my town, I remembered that her songs formed me, as music does when we were young. Those songs sang me into a woman who wields her strength, a woman who bears pain, and a woman who can depend on her muse to melt them together.

Listen, there are waters
Hidden from us
In the maze we find them still
We’ll take you to them
You take your young ones
May they take their own in turn
But by your lives be you spirit
And by your hearts be you women
And by your eyes be you open
And by your hands be you whole
(“Testimony” by Ferron)

Lighting Water on Fire, and More Fun in the Panoche

March 14, 2009 at 7:47 pm | Posted in Day to Day | 5 Comments

(Please read the first post, “Ghost Town Chemistry,” about my trip to the Panoche.)

We spent the entire day at New Idria, so that meant we got to spend two nights at Mercey Hot Springs (map).

Mercey Hot Springs was the perfect place for the members of this class to stay, which is great because it is the ONLY public accommodation in the Panoche. Mercey is a remote resort that is both ancient and modern, with nooks and crannies to explore in history, off-the-grid engineering, entrepreneurship, water cures, and abortion secrets of the 1920s.

First, I want to mention coincidentally that the book I brought with me on this trip was Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson. Over and over again during the trip, “mercury” in its various forms came up in conversations. And every time it did, I remembered a scene from the book, which describes Isaac Newton’s alchemy lab. Newton is a character in the book who is like the eccentric college roommate who does drug and chemistry experiments simultaneously. Here: “Read Inside The Book” and you’ll see what I mean. (Seach for “breathing apparatus”.)

Now, about “Mercey.” There is no argument how to pronounce it, but how do you spell it? According to the owner, “Mercey” was spelled that way so that the name of the spring could be trademarked. CalTrans has promised to change the roadsigns, but I bet they have other things to spend their money on.

The Mercey website links to two good stories about itself. “Off the grid spa” is an accurate review of what to expect there. Yes, bring your own meals, flipflops, flashlight, and fill the tank up before you leave town, because you can’t buy anything in the Panoche but cold beer and a sandwich at the Panoche Inn.

The other story describes the resort pretty much as I experienced it, outlines the history of the springs, and how in this corner of California, there is not only no commerce, there’s no infrastructure at all. So Larry Ronneberg and Grazyna Aust are resurrecting this resort from the past, and bringing it into the twenty-first century with wind, solar, and veggie-oil generators, connected to the rest of the world via satellite internet.

Sometime in the 1950s, people stopped drinking the water at hot springs resorts. But for centuries at hot springs the world over visitors didn’t only soak, they took the waters fresh, and brought it home as medicine. In the 1920s and 30s, Mercey water was bottled and sold by a pharmacy, and Larry told us he had been sent seven bottles like the one in the photo that had been found in Los Angeles. They had been buried in the backyard of a house that had been built in the 1970s. Why had they done that? We’ll never know. I drank some Mercey water, it was a little salty. Felt great afterward.

The spring is named after a French sheep farmer named Merci, and the area has long been grazing land for cattle and sheep. (We saw bison on the way to New Idria.) The shepherds knew that when ewes grazed too near the hot springs, they aborted their lambs, so the area was avoided. It follows then, that perhaps there is truth to the story that during the resort’s heyday in the 1920s and 30s, rich girls from LA were driven to Mercey in limos to take the waters and thereby end their pregnancies. Yet another corner of women’s history that is impossible to document.

The bottling house is now the resort office, and where you register to stay in a cabin, rent an camping space, or pay the $5 day fee for wi-fi or birding. Inside are pretty little painted windows, from the 1940s, they say. In the photo, you can see the flag that Sandy brings on his field trips. It’s the official county flag of Santa Cruz county.

Take a look at the photos on the Mercey website to get a picture of what the resort once looked like, and how it looks now. The best time to visit is in the winter and spring, when the hills are green.

In the last year, I’ve been to both Orr and Wilbur. They are each fine in their individual way. What I like about Mercey is how close it is to Santa Cruz, free wi-fi in my tent, the complete lack of a New Age, and its cheapness. You can make it even more cheap for me by mentioning my name if you stay there. You’ll get a discount, and so will I. Make Mercey Hot Springs your facebook friend, and save even more.

What with the tour of New Idria and all, we didn’t have nearly enough time to loaf around at the spa. But Sunday morning, we got a tour of the water and power system, and a preview of how the resort will evolve, as Larry and Grazyna bring it back to life as a green, well-powered place to spend the weekend doing very little.

Now that I’m home, looking through my photos, I see that they probably aren’t of interest to my hundreds of regular readers: the structures Larry is building for the 10kW solar array; trenches; conduit; and the inside of his cable closet, with the power inverters, the batteries, the satellite uplink, the voice-over-IP gear. Those are just things that you’ll have to see for yourself when you go. By the time you get there, he’ll probably have the yurt village set up. So I’ll just close with one last story.

As you approach Mercey from the road, you’ll notice a white thing made of pipes. It is not a musical instrument. They are stand pipes that contain the Mercey’s water as it emerges from the well.

The natural water pressure from the well fills these pipes, whence the water then flows “uphill” to the pool just beyond those Tamarisk trees. This is a common irrigation technique in farming. What is not common to freshwater wells, however, is that the water that emerges from the Mercey well contains dissolved methane. Oh, we asked so many questions about this!

Larry patiently explained every detail. I’ll try to spare you everything I know: as surface water flows down hundreds of feet through the earth in the geologically unique Panoche, it eventually reaches those areas close to bottom of the fractured crust plates, where material from the mantle heats it, and the hot water is forced upwards again, sometimes passing through layers of organic material from seabeds millions of years old. The ancient organics contain carbon and hydrogen, which become methane gas when the water flows upward through it, putting the methane into solution. When the hot water comes to the surface, the methane floats free, like bubbles in champagne. Except, unlike the carbon-dioxide in Veuve, methane can catch on fire. So Larry has devised a way to pull the methane out of the hot water in his spring before it fills the swimming pool. That’s what these pipes do.

And every so often, that methane can be burned off. Like, when you have a class of curious history geeks visiting.

I volunteered to light the match.