To bring all of you up to date. Since my bike problems and the trek back to the Great Basin in a U haul truck, I turned around the next week in my car and drove back to Fresno, via the same route I had intended on my bike to Fresno; via Yosemite and spent about 10 days in Fresno with my sister Kathy. I was reminded of the first time I drove this same route in a car which was 1970, after my first year of college, when I still had a full head of hair and could 'wipe a comb across my head,' when I drove Kathy and my then young (4year old) niece and someone Kathy knew back to Fresno. We took my mother's Blue Lincoln Continental which had a 462 cubic inch engine that put out 400 plus horses, in a car that weighed about 2.5 tons. It had an in-dash eight track tape player and Kathy vividly recalls listening to Tommy by the Who several times. In addition I know that I had some Buffalo Springfield, Leonard Cohen, the Who's Live at Leeds and probably Blind faith and of course my favorite Neil Young. This is the same music I still listen to, and although on this trip I didn't have Tommy, I did have Who's Next, Live at Leeds, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen , Neil Young and most of Bob Dylan's early records on CD's. It brought back memories of that trip. Suffice it to say, on the straight stretches of road, in the blue Lincoln, I probably easily drove over 100 MPH. Today, I know, that getting arrested at anything over 100 mph is go to jail, do not pass go, speed, but that was an easier age. Years ago, someone I know was arrested in Nevada at way over 100 mph and the Sheriff as he lead him off to Jail and the Justice of the peace said to him, “Son you are going to make a sizable contribution to the welfare of the people of Winnemucca.” I stayed in Fresno, that trip for about a week helping Kathy and her first husband, Andy, install a watering system for their home in the country near Fresno. For some reason I don't recall, I drove home via Reno and I-80.
Last summer (2009) when the government to try and help save the auto industry in this country, and to stimulate the economy instigated the Cash for Clunker's program, I decided, actually on the last day of the program existing, that I was spending to much money on upkeep on my then ancient 535I BMW. I tend to drive cars till they are completely broken and motorcycles until they wear out or at least one time, when I total them in a crash. I knew what kind of car I wanted to get. In the late 1970's I had a Mercedes 300CD diesel which was the most maintenance free car I have ever owned. I didn't want to shell out what a new Mercedes diesel costs, but I had read a fair amount about the Volkswagen TDI and one of the local dealer's was still accepting cars under Cash for Clunkers and had a new 2010 TDI they had just received over that weekend. I wanted a 6 speed manual transmission and the one they had was a Salsa Red, and so armed with the maximum government stipend under that program, I picked up a cute little Turbo Diesel TDI. Its a pocket rocket, front wheel drive and I have averaged city/highway driving almost 42 miles per gallon. Thank you, all of the Tax payers in this country and the foreigners that buy Treasury Bills!
So on my drive toward Fresno, I wanted to see what kind of mileage I could get with just a long highway trip. I have tracked my mileage on this car since I first got it, online on a website called www. fuelly.com and I also joined the TDI club online for driving tips, etc. There are people on this website that actually brew their own fuel from wood chips, etc and who routinely pick up old frying oil from cholesterol gulch type cafes. I also picked up this neat little gadget called a scan gauge the works on any car made after 1998 and plugs into the OBD port, that by Federal law, is located under the dash. From the TDI club I received some codes, the scan gauge is programmable, for turbo boost, actual water temp, vs the fake gauge on the car and I even programmed some obscure gauges for air/fuel mixture, and engine load. On about six gauges can be viewed at one time, but you can scroll through them. On Fuelly.com you have to name your car, I have never before named either my car on any of my bikes, but for this website I came up with a name for both. The car is Benny Profane, and my current bike is Pig Bodine. I would be very surprised if any of my reader's recognize either of those names, but they are both, characters from the book V by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon, to say the very least, is a very acquired taste and I have read all of his book's several times. V is still my favorite Pynchon book. Someday, I will devote a whole essay to Pynchon, but suffice it to say that very little is known about Pynchon, compared to him, the late J.D. Salinger was a social gadfly. The only picture of him ever released is his graduate picture from either his high school or Cornell in the mid 1950's. He is in his late 70's roughly the same age as Philip Roth.
Suffice it to say, that although I had planned on driving virtually the whole way to Fresno on one tank of diesel, I ended up topping up in Tonopah, it took a little over 9 gallons, because I needed a break from driving. On the stretch of road from SLC to Tonopah, NV I averaged almost 44 miles per gallon, at slightly more than the posted highway speed. Just as I hit the Nevada-California border near Benton Station, I saw three of Tom Gorey's wild horses and as I looked up at Boundary Peak, the highest peak in Nevada at 13,143, which is about 385 feet less than Utah's own Kings Peak, I felt slightly cheated. With all the beautiful names for different ranges in Nevada, why couldn't they come up with a name other than Boundary Peak for this, their highest peak.
The traffic in Yosemite was not that bad and I ended up driving from Salt Lake City to my sister Kathy's house in Fresno, 715 miles portal to portal, in 11.5 hours of driving time. I turn off my GPS when I stop for fuel, etc and I also turned it off when I got a speeding ticket near Coarsegold about 45 or so miles from Fresno. I had crested a hill and was in 6th gear on the down slope, when you don't have your foot on the pedal, the car doesn't use any fuel, the car started to creep up in speed and by the time my valentine went off, it was too late. I was doing about 10 over the speed limit and as of yet, I haven't got the ticket to see how much it will cost me. All of you have heard the famous comedy routine of who's on first. I have thought several times about trying a variation of this routine involving the Rock Group the Who. In it, the policeman would ask me why I was speeding and I would say Who, he would then say, no why were you speeding and I would say “Magic Bus!” . It would finally come out that I was driving too fast because I was listening to the Who and on the ticket it would be written that I was driving under the influence of the Who. Then when I went to court, the Judge, who would be about my same age, would nod his head, say he completely understood and would dismiss the ticket. Of course, while this was slightly funny to me, in reality, I would of course not try it and I didn't even remember it until after he had completed the ticket and I had left the scene. It' is my first speeding ticket since they set up a road block for me between Silverton and Ouray in Colorado in 1992. But that's a story for another time.
I have visited Kathy over the years on every BMW Motorcycle I have owned. After she moved in to the house she still lives in I visited in 1979 on my first BMW bike an R90-S. I had just finished taking a ten day off shore sailing course around the channel Islands near Santa Barbara and spent a day or two with Kathy and her second Husband Bill and at the time their young daughter Alison and her sister Erika. Just before I got to Fresno, as I was riding along highway 99, a small portion of a recap tire on a truck in front of me came flying back, I swerved and almost missed it completely, but it ended up hitting me on my right shoulder. It hurt and when I took off my shirt later that night, I was black and blue. If the recap had hit me full on in the center of my chest, I am sure I would have gone down on highway 99.
Kathy is a noted Criminal and Labor Law attorney in Fresno, and she also does a fair amount of Appeal work as well. She has served as President of the Fresno Bar and has been editor several times of the local bar newsletter. Several times a year a various bar functions she will be featured as part of the evening playing improvisational jazz piano. She has my Mothers Steinway in her house and I always try and sit near the piano for a few minutes, it always brings back lots of memories. When I was about two and a half, Kathy carried me piggy back almost to the top of Black Mountain. We have always gotten a long well and I enjoy her company a lot. She also writes very funny articles for this newsletter on her travels all over the world. She has been to China, I was going out of habit to say Red China, about three times in the last year and a half. She also is an avid hiker and has gone on Sierra club outings all over the world.
Several times over the last two decades, when she has had very complex cases, and I haven't been as busy as I like to be doing other things, I have gone down to Fresno to assist her in the discovery phase of some of these cases. Have Intellect will Travel. It has always been very easy for me to read things with a good deal of comprehension, and retention, and to figure out how different parts of the puzzle of documents fit together. At age five I took apart my first electric train, just to see how it worked! The first case I worked on in late 1992 was a Federal Criminal Fraud and Conspiracy case involving a defunct Savings and Loan. This was after the Savings and loan Crisis of the late 1980's and was a result of the ill fated Garn St. Germain act and the deregulation of the Savings and Loan Industry. It always takes several years for criminal cases to come to fruition and there is usually years of discovery, etc. There was actually a Savings and Loan in California that invested all of their deposits in franchise locations of Wendy's restaurants! In the case that Kathy had, there were thousands of pages of documents, and I read through the bulk of them and sort of laid out a time line of who said and did what to whom, at any given point in time. I also let her know what documents I thought the Prosecution would probably use when it came to trial. I actually found the work to be very intellectually challenging. (Part of me would have loved to have been a historian and to have perused firsthand through historical documents.) I was also familiar with such terms as core deposit intangible and my favorite term of all disintermedation , which is the flow of money from low to higher interest rates. I have joked with her that if you can understand all of the different characters in the Iliad or the Odyssey and have read Bleak House, or War and Peace, or have completely read Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, then understanding how A relates to B, is not that daunting. Back in 2000, I actually went down for the trial part of a case and got to watch Kathy in Federal court. This case involved phony lease deals which defrauded both some lending institutions and some investors. Not only was I very impressed watching her, it made me realize how much court, in the best sense of the word, is high drama, and like a great actor or actress, you don't see the hours and hours of preparation, only, so to speak, the performance that takes place in front of the other players in the court room. Kathy spends a great deal of time in both Federal and State Courts. She also, so to speak, rides the circuit of courts in the small towns dotted along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley.
So from time to time, I have gone down for this or that case. Most of the cases I have read for her over the years have been Federal Criminal cases involving fraud of one kind or another. Last summer (2009) I went down on another Fraud case having to do with a couple who were using fake trusts, which they had formed based on the advice of a third party entity that went all over the United States selling this tax avoidance scheme at seminars for Doctor's and other high income professionals. These trusts were formed at great expense, to get out of paying income taxes, etc. In addition to the trusts, the couple and the entity they purchased them through, came at if from a particular political view as well and it was interesting reading all this wacko stuff about “Straw Men” and how our currency is somehow illegal, and meaningless, because of this or that, that didn't happen when the United States went off the Gold Standard during the early 1930's. There were even echoes of William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold Speech.” Also they tried to pay the amount of taxes assessed by the IRS, after ignoring deficiency notices for years, with phony credit vehicles. There was also an undercurrent of antisemitism, complete with strange theories about the founding and ownership of the Federal Reserve and even a reference or two to that strange and completely discredited document the Protocols of Zion.
I won't go into any details on this current case, its a Capital Case and this will be an additional appeal on what is referred to as Habeas Issues, but suffice it to say that the transcript of the trial itself, is about 7,500 pages and there are literally 10 boxes of documents. Based on the work I did, we know what we don't know, or what information that had previously been available or called for, that has not made it to Kathy for this additional appeal to the Supreme Court of California. So for about 8.5 to 9 hours per day, I would peruse these records and work on indexes that tell you where this or that is located, both in the boxes and the digital record of documents.
In discovery, all documents are stamped either literally or in the case of PDP document's by electronic stamp with a number referred to as its bates number. I told Kathy years ago that I thought that Bates sounded like a good name for some obscure Civil War general that General Grant despised and in the case I looked at in Fresno this year, I learned about what is called a Batson Wheeler Motion. After reading about this motion, I decided that Batson Wheeler sound like a British historian of obscure WWI battles in France. Instead, just like our Miranda Warning, the naming of these motions, come from the names of real people who were involved in real litigation with sometimes their life at stake. We all make and laugh at Lawyer jokes, but on the Trial and Appellant level the law is about as serious as life gets, and it also on that level at least to me, it; the law is, as intellectually challenging and profound as anything having to do with ideas, and high reason can be.
On Monday the 18th of October, we drove up to San Francisco for a seminar on current trends in Capital Cases. It started at 9:00 am, so it meant that we had to leave Fresno for the drive up about 4:00 am and suffice it to say that we hit Bay area traffic at the worst possible time going up and coming back. Kathy was very funny describing the different pockets of traffic and we did indeed hit the belly of the beast, The only things close to colliding in Livermore was traffic, but we made it with about forty-five minutes to spare. On the return trip at one point it took one hour to go six miles because of a massive accident. On the way home, in additional to listening to a bay area Jazz station, we recited different poems of T.S. Eliot, who was idolized by my Mother when we were growing up and I can remember reciting the Hollow Men at Ensign School in about the 3rd or 4th grade and I knew the line about “ Mistah Kurtz-- he dead,” from Eliot, many years before I actually read Heart of Darkness. There are also parts of Little Gidding that were recited by all of the siblings at the graveside service when my mother Louise died in 1982.
On the return trip, after again fueling up in Tonopah, I turned off of highway 6 onto highway 376 for the 108 mile jog up to Highway 50. I had been on this remote road once before many years ago on a bike and I wanted a change from highway 6 back to Ely. This to me is a strange place for a golf course, and the only town is something called Carver's Round Mountain. At the junction with Highway 50 there was a sign about the cave drawings in Toiyabe cave and I would like to visit the cave sometime. Going home this way added about 70 or so more miles on the return trip, compared to the trip down, and when I filled the car up the next day after returning home I had averaged over 46 miles per gallon on the whole trip. That is actually pretty close to what I probably would have averaged on my motorcycle.. The pass through Yosemite, over Tioga closed a day or two after I drove through it for the season and hopefully will be open by Memorial day next year and my planned motorcycle trip to the 49er rally in Mariposa.
*The opening line from Burnt Norton, the first section from the Four Quartet's of T.S. Eliot
