UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO [1995]
I knew that taping up Ikaia’s broken toe was just going to be the opening act as far as the different ways the boys could find to fuck themselves up on the ranch. The army has certain ways to do things for a reason, but in spite of their training, the vets—once they dropped back into civilian mode—seemed to approach every job by just throwing their bodies at it. Why spend the time to figure out what tool was called for when they could just try and strong-arm every situation until something broke? Ikaia was lucky that it was just his toe. I guess I was lucky it was just his toe. It turned out the rest of him was working just fine.
I’ll admit that I was a little concerned about what might happen if someone had a real emergency at Girassol. I know that Zongo and Charlie thought it was cool not to clear out the road leading into the property. They felt that whatever needed to be moved outside of their little fantasy world could be taken out by Charlie on the chopper. That’s a great idea, but what if it was Charlie that fucked himself up? I certainly didn’t know how to fly that thing, and neither did the rest of them. I finally talked Ikaia into clearing a path west along the Garcia to the old Pomo Indian roundhouse which had its own road out to Mountain View.
There wasn’t much going on at the roundhouse by the time we were around, but I learned from some old timers in town that back in the day, the Pomos used the area to celebrate their Ghost Dance which called to the spirits for the disappearance of all the non-native people from the land. I guess that didn’t work too well. I can’t help thinking sometimes that everyone would have been better off if it had.
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