A barrel of crude oil is 42 US gallons. About half of that barrel is refined into automotive fuel or what we call “gasoline” in the States and other English speakers call “petrol.” Note that this does not include diesel fuel. Last year Americans burned about 375 million gallons of gasoline per day, or a little more than one gallon per citizen per day. There are about 320 million citizens, and 375÷320 is 1.17, but we’ll round off to “one” for convenience. Still, that’s a staggering number. I can go anywhere from 32 to 40 miles on one gallon of petrol in my Honda and about half that distance in my VW camper.

What’s this got to do with Canada? Just that we import more oil from the Land of the Maple Leaf than from anywhere else. About half of Canada’s total production comes from the Alberta oil sands, some two million barrels of crude per day, and they ship about three million barrels per day to their southern neighbors. That’s right—about three of every four barrels of oil produced in Canada come to the United States. We import about nine million barrels per day total so Canada accounts for a third of our imports. The recent domestic production boom here in the States is pretty close to that, The Energy Information Administration says we are closing in on ten million barrels produced daily, the highest total in thirty years.

So when you burn gas in your car you can assume that half of it is American, half of it is foreign, and of that foreign half a third is Canadian, with half of that from the Athabasca. So, yeah, you are burning the oil sands whether you like it or not.

Like I said before I’ve no intention of getting on a soapbox. You can politicize this stuff all you want, I won’t. I want to know what it takes to live the life I do, the life we all live. We First-World Western Industrial Society People, that is. What we don’t grow, we mine. And oil is one of the things we mine. We dig big holes in the ground, yank the stuff out, and process the shit out of it. That’s something. That’s a hell of an undertaking and I want to appreciate it fully.

I like to spend my time outdoors and I love trees and mountains and birds and rocks and streams and all that stuff. And I burn a hell of a lot of gas getting to places that give me that. Not to mention I live in a rural area far from seaports and factories so everything has to be trucked over an extensive highway infrastructure and supported by a gigantic electric power grid.

I’ll leave you with a satellite photo of a portion of the Athabasca oil sands development (from NASA Earth Observatory “World of Change“)):

Follow the Rocky Mountains north into Canada and they trend westward into the eastern half of British Columbia. The neighboring province, Alberta, shares the range along its western boundary. Head east from there and you enter into a vast country of plains known as the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. It is bounded on the east and north by the Canadian Shield, ancient rocks a billion years old that underlie such places as Lake Hudson. In that enormous bowl between the high peaks to the west and the broad plateaus of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories you will find enormous reserves of fossil fuels. The most famous, or infamous if you are an environmentalist, are the oil sands found in the valley of the Athabasca River.

The Athabasca River originates in the glacier country of what is now Jasper National Park. It flows northeast for several hundred miles and empties into Lake Athabasca in Saskatchewan. That lake is drained by the Slave River into the Great Slave Lake and those waters ultimately find their way to the Arctic Ocean via the Mackenzie River. Athabasca is from the Cree language and supposedly describes the mixed willows and grasses of the delta country at the confluence with the Peace River. My late mother-in-law, the artist E.B. Rothwell, was inspired by this region’s native inhabitants and created a triptych of etchings called Athabasca I, II, and III which are similar in style to her Spiritus Loci series. That means “spirit of the place” and you can see something of that from the detail below (Athabasca III):

The name has always evoked a sense of mystery and adventure for me. It’s one of those places that sounds like a fantasy region, and in fact I thought it was until I got to know my mother-in-law better! She loved the lake and forest landscape of the Quetico-Superior country she grew up near and used it a lot in her work. All of her etchings of natural areas were inspired by real places and she especially loved the ones with poetic-sounding names. Check out Chiricahua, for example.

But this is a noir blog, is it not? I mean it says so in the title: “High Country Noir.” So what’s noir about Athabasca? I don’t see any fedoras or femmes fatale. What’s noir about anything, for that matter? How about the dark heart beating in the human breast? Don’t we all have one? And what could be darker than oil and our industrial society’s addiction to it? Our modern world runs on electricity and fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas power our generating stations and heat our homes and offices. Gasoline and diesel make our cars, trucks, ships, and planes go. Despite the advances in alternative fuels we are still utterly dependent on the hydrocarbons we extract from fossil plants.

Geologists talk about a time between 300 and 360 million years ago when our oxygen-enriched planet was awash in thick forests, many like the contemporary Amazonian rainforests. They named this period Carboniferous for the multitude of coal beds they found all over the globe which they discovered had similar origins. Coal is vegetation that’s been compressed by layers of sediment and then heated and metamorphosed by the tectonic energy of the earth. Petroleum—crude oil—forms similarly, but is primarily from marine organisms like algae and zooplankton. To find oil you look for ancient depositional features like sea beds and lake bottoms. The province of Alberta was under water in the Cretaceous period or about 150 million years ago. The sediments left behind by this inland ocean were buried, cooked, and shoved northeast by the growth of the Rocky Mountains. Petroleum formed under the ground and as it migrated towards the surface bacterial degradation created what oil folks call bitumen, a tarry, rock-like goop that got trapped in the local sandstones. Hence the current name of the resource, the Athabasca Oil Sands.

The amount of bitumen available in the Athabasca and nearby basins has been estimated to be equivalent to all the existing proven conventional crude oil reserves in the world. The numbers they use are 1.7 to 2.5 TRILLION barrels. Think about that. The current estimate of the entire world’s proven reserves is roughly 1.6 trillion barrels. Saudi Arabia sits on about 16% of that, just for perspective. A “proven reserve” is not the same thing as the total amount of oil but an estimate of what is economically viable and recoverable with existing technology. The Canadians only claim about 15% of the oil sands are commercially utilizable but that is still three-fourths of all the reserves in North America.

The total land area (140,000 sq. km or 54,000 sq. miles) under which these oil sands sit is about the size of Florida and occupies about 20% of the province of Alberta. Now that’s a big project. Only a tiny portion of that resource has been exploited so far but it’s clear that the demand for oil is not slowing down so we should expect more of Canada’s muskeg (peat bog) and taiga (boreal forest) country to be denuded in the never-ending search for new black gold. I’m not picking on our neighbors to the north. We are all part of this desperate hunger, this hopeless addiction to petroleum products. Whatever we do to our air, land, and water is on us—all of us. It is not my intention to preach or argue politics. I’m just interested in energy and resources and what it costs us economically and ecologically to live the way we do. If you are too, stick around, I’ll be posting more on the subject. Food for thought: Americans consume about 7 billion barrels of oil annually. That’s out of a worldwide total of around 32 billion.

Austin, Nevăda sits at 6600 feet elevation on the west slope of the Toiyabes. It is bisected by US 50. The first thing you see when coming in from the west is the Chevron and it was a busy place, filled with RVs and motorcycles. We topped off the tank and drove a short block into town and parked upslope from a bar and diner with a “Hippies Use Side Door” sign. We were pretty grungy after our campout and both of us sport long hair but we braved the front entrance nonetheless. The building was both Old West with its rickety wooden porch and New West with its jumbled pile of used appliances rusting slowly in the sun. The waitress was competent but uninterested and we feasted on excellent BLTs. I ordered the fries which were made from genuine thick-cut slices of potato, not the frozen reconstituted things so often substituted for this iconic American side dish. I also had a Ruby Mountain amber ale which was deliciously refreshing. Beer supply is a necessary limiting factor on camping trips—we’d had our last few the previous evening.

Back down the hill to the east we turned north on Nevada 305 and headed to Battle Mountain. Route 305 connects US 50 to I-80 via the valley of the Reese River. Large working cattle ranches dotted the landscape, solar panels replacing the windmills to pump groundwater. There’s not enough surface water to grow alfalfa but the wide green fields made it clear there was enough of it somewhere. Occasional cattle were seen, we figured most of them were still up in the high country. Stacks of hay were the only relief for a dozen miles on either side of the highway. Numerous east and west trending roads, most of them gravel, branched perpendicularly off the asphalt and headed into the hills. Mining is the chief industry of Nevada and they most likely led to gold, silver, and copper mines and processing facilities. I should say mining ranks second to tourism. Most folks spend their money in Las Vegas and Reno, but a small group of dedicated desert rats seek outdoor recreation in the 7th-largest state. We came to love the solitude and wide-open spaces, and saw enough other dust-coated vehicles laden with gear to know we weren’t alone.

Winnemucca is, by rural Nevada standards, a sprawling place and we picked the western edge of town for our lodgings. The showers were hot and the towels plentiful in the Best Western. We had a superb filet mignon in the Winnemucca Inn next door and retired to our king-sized bed to watch the Dodgers lose to the Mets in Game Five of the NLDS. The next day we topped off the tanks and checked the air in the tires (they were all at proper inflation despite banging around on rocky, rutted roads) and looked for US-95, the road to Boise. It took two trips back and forth on the interstate before we found the right exit and the circuitous path through the downtown area to connect. Our destination was Denio Junction, just south of the Oregon border. The countryside was broader and emptier than where we’d been, and when we connected with State Route 140 we were warned with a sign reading “No Services Next 150 Miles.”

140 took us across the northwest corner of the state and into southeastern Oregon. The further west we went the sparser and bleaker the landscape became. Now we were in the volcanic country of high plateaus and jagged ridges of blocky lava. We climbed the Doherty Slide which had 8% grades on the downslope and looked upon a moonscape, an alien, almost Martian scene of geologic turmoil and destruction. Immense fields of lava and volcanic ejecta buried hundreds of square miles some time in our distant past and the plucky desert plants that carved out their existence looked tired and forlorn. It was, literally, the middle of nowhere. The highway was surprisingly busy for such a remote and empty place. Don’t break down on 140 unless you have a lot of time. Fortunately our 1999 VW Eurovan was in tip-top shape after a summer of trips to the mechanic and we sailed along confidently, although mute in wonder and awe at the vast and lonely terrain.

Our final stop was Lakeview. This little town had a prosperous and lively feel to it. The few motels were mostly booked due to construction projects in the region and we were lucky to snag a room. We walked around both in the evening and next morning, enjoying the mix of old and new buildings. We had dinner at a Chinese place. Every town of any size in the American West has at least one Mexican and one Chinese restaurant. Lakeview is the county seat and it sports a modern library, always a good sign. The high elevation regions on either side are mostly Winema National Forest and the tall pines were a welcome sight. We drove home via Klamath Falls and US-97. After a week of arid climes we were surprised by the rainfall that pelted us most of the way, but it sure felt good. It seemed like a good soaking, but the vehicle was still filthy when we made it back to Yreka. Rain in the West is almost always an illusion, even heavy downpours disappear and dry up quickly. It’s the snowpack that makes life possible, and that’s been an iffy thing lately. Perhaps this winter we’ll finally get our regular allotment and not only will ski season be more fun but next summer and fall will be lusher and greener.

Thanks for reading!

We left Nevada Route 722 and took the Elkhorn Road (022) up and over a spur of the Shoshone Range and down into the Reese River Valley. Turning south we quickly came to a road sign listing San Juan and Washington Creeks (016) and we took that for about six miles to a primitive camp site in section 29 at the foot of the Toiyabe Range. It was a dusty and forbidding place, deep in a canyon, so mornings were cold until the sun could pop out from behind the high ridges. Afternoons were unusually hot but with the shadows forming early and the sun disappearing as well the evening temperatures dropped precipitously. All of us were constantly adding and shedding layers. The campsite was flat and luckily large enough for our party of eight. It had one table and an outhouse which proved to be handy as the thin, rocky soil wasn’t conducive to digging a latrine. We spent our days exploring the creeks and hiking up into the higher reaches. Several parties of deer hunters passed by each day, we encountered a couple on horseback in the high country and others passed the campsite in pickups and on ATVs, none looked successful. We saw little sign of their prey, I imagine the drought forced the poor creatures into even higher and more inaccessible spots. Signs of cattle were everywhere though we only bumped into a few cows on the trails. Their droppings were all over, some dry and flaky like cardboard after a few years in the arid climate. Others were fresh. A little bit of livestock goes a long way. The acreage they have to roam to get enough grass must be enormous.

The relatively sparse vegetation and numerous outcrops of jagged, weathered rock on the hillsides gave the place the feel of a ghost town. In those old mining camps nothing is rebuilt and everything eventually decays but slowly due to the lack of moisture. You don’t get a sense in these mountains that geologic activity is happening. It just seems like the landscape is there and that it will eventually erode and fade away. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Basin and Range is quite active and even youthful by geologic standards. There’s just something about the emptiness and lack of obvious activity that makes you think the place is static. Everything of course is dynamic, moving through time and space continuously and subject to the vagaries of entropy. The Basin and Range is no exception and when you add in the roiling and furious energies from the mantle, far beneath the crustal layer, and think in terms of eons and not mere human decades you suddenly see a chaotic, vibrant, and even violent terrain. In geology, “terrain” is the visible countryside with all its features. To include what’s underneath, what creates and shapes the terrain, you use the word “terrane.” The terrane becomes manifest in the terrain if you see with the eyes of a geologist.

Imagine a half-inflated balloon. Now smear chunky peanut butter on it, a nice uniform layer. Inflate the balloon fully. The crust of peanut butter, forced outward and upward by the exapnsion, cracks and splits and separates. The ranges are the strips of peanut butter, the gaps between them the basins. The outward spreading of the crust due to the mysterious tectonic forces in the mantle below created the basin-and-range topography. The mountains eroded to fill the basins but the orogenic processes continued (and continue to this day) and more material was uplifted to be eroded again. At the bases of the mountains you see evidence of erosion in the broad alluvial fans and outwashes. It’s hard to think in terms of mountain-building as these things happen on a time scale too big for our feeble mammalian brains which can handle perhaps a few human generations in either direction, but you have to do it to see the big picture. What you can actually see in country are faults where the big blocks of crust were thrust upward so they could later tilt and topple. And you can also see actual real-time evidence of magmatic heat in the form of thermal waters and hot springs. These pieces of the puzzle tell us that Nevada is a hot place, busy with subterranean rumblings and ready to rumble and shake and upthrust massive hunks of earth just like in earlier epochs.

We spent four nights at the campsite along the creek. Then half the party headed home and four of us spent an extra night retracing our route back to Nevada 722 and into an adjacent, parallel valley to the west, that of Smith Creek. Seven or eight miles north along the road beside Campbell Creek takes you to a hot springs area. Along the edge of the dry lake bed were several hot springs, one had been piped into a large circular cattle trough. Coming out of the pipe the water was too hot to touch, but the filled metal tank cooled to around 90 or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, good enough for a relaxing soak, but not quite hot enough for the therapeutic effects. We camped in the open country in the sparse desert grass that had magnificent vistas of the many ranges near us. One nice thing about the desert regions are the lack of annoying insects. Very few flies and no mosquitoes to pester us while hanging out. The cool fall weather played a part, too. A coyote wandered around while we stayed, mostly keeping his distance and acting like he couldn’t see us. He looked well-fed and had a rich, tawny coat and sported a thick, bushy tail. Ranchers aren’t keen on these characters but we thought he was beautiful. Flocks of horned larks buzzed about regularly and killdeer greeted us in the morning with their distinctive whistling calls. I saw a prairie falcon circle our camp in low ovals, spooking the little guys for a bit, but he cruised off in search of better hunting after few minutes.

After five days of camping we decided to hit the road and parted from our friends while a dust storm gathered over the playa. We cruised back north on 722 to Austin for lunch, and then hopped on Nevada 305 for the long drive along the Reese River to Battle Mountain, and thence on I-80 to Winnemucca. I’ll cover that part of the trip in my next post.

There’s a link on the Nevada Department of Transportation’s website you can click to request a state road map. Now I love paper maps, the digital versions just cannot compare, so naturally I ordered one before our trip to the Silver State. The map makes a point to include the breve accent mark over the first “a” in the name, namely “Nevăda.” That’s because Nevadans rhyme the second syllable with “bad”. It may originally be a Spanish word but it’s spoken with an American flavor. Much like Californians say “san-azzay” for San Jose and not “sahn-hoesay.” The word means “snowy” and thus we can see why the mountains that mark the western terminus of the Great Basin are called the Sierra Nevada. I’ve been through Nevada in the winter, and they get some snow, but it’s not the most appropriate descriptor. The state averages less than a foot of the stuff annually, and only eight inches or so of rainfall. Most of that falls on the high mountains, of which there are many. Had I been a Spanish explorer I would have called the place “desierto” or “malpaís” or something to indicate the unrelenting aridity and rugged topography. Maybe the conquistadors were stuck in a blizzard one winter and could think of nothing else.

Nevada lies wholly within the physiographic region known as the Basin and Range Province. Dozens of mountain ranges, mostly running in a north-south direction, cover the entire state. All are about a mile higher than the surrounding lands which are mostly broad, flat valleys, many of them dry lake beds. The plains, or basins, are from 4000 to 5000 feet above sea level. They tend to be no more than a few dozen miles wide but three of four times longer. Imagine a giant hand making scratches in the desert sand, pushing up long, thin peaks between the fingers and gouging troughs between them and you get some idea of the landscape. A drive eastward on I-80 from California does not give you the full picture as it follows, for the most part, the Humboldt River. However looking left and right from the car you can see numerous examples of the ranges and their corresponding basins. You do climb up out of Winnemucca and drop down only to climb again before Carlin and Elko, and then again after Wells before dropping and crossing the border into Utah. But to really experience the unique terrain you have to leave I-80 and take US-50 which bisects the state from the southern tip of Lake Tahoe in the west to Great Basin National Park on the eastern edge.

On our recent adventure we left I-80 at Fernley to pick up US-50 and we stopped in Fallon for gas. This is a good thing to do in Nevada. Always stop for gas and keep your water and other supplies well-stocked. People are generally friendly, and will help a driver in distress, but distances are vast and outposts of civilization few and far between. We headed east towards Austin but ventured off the highway near Eastgate to pick up Nevada Route 722. This well-maintained gravel road climbed the Desatoya Range at Carroll Summit, dropped into the basin, and then climbed the Shoshone Range at Railroad Pass before dropping into the Reese River Valley. The Reese is a big stream by Nevada standards and the Valley supports a surprising amount of cattle ranching. It runs north and empties into the Humboldt near Battle Mountain. The Humboldt, like all Great Basin watercourses, disappears into the sere landscape further west. Hydrologists call this an endorheic watershed, meaning one that has no outflow to external bodies like the Pacific Ocean.

Our destination was the Toiyabe Range on the eastern edge of the Valley. The mountains had an abrupt fault scarp on the west face, reminiscent of the west side of the Wasatch Range near Salt Lake City—which marks the eastern terminus of the Great Basin. The Toiyabes are mostly a pinyon-juniper woodland, with single-leaf pinyon pines (P. monophylla), Utah juniper (J. osteosperma), and mountain-mahogany (Cercocarpus ledifolia) the dominant evergreen species. The open areas are mostly waist-high sagebrush and their rich aroma fills the air. But we were there for the fall colors and the deciduous tree that produces those displays is the widespread Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides). In this country the aspens are found in riparian zones which as you can imagine are narrow bands in ravines, canyons, arroyos, gullies, and draws that contain the sparse watercourses. Willows and cottonwoods share the space, too, but they don’t have the same visual appeal. With its flat petioles the leaves of the aspen wiggle oddly in the slightest breeze and when an entire grove gets to trembling at once it’s quite a sight. With the onset of autumn the greens turn to yellows and deep, almost-red oranges and the displays are spectacular especially in the sea of olives, celadons, duns, greys, ochres, and earth-tones that most of the countryside sports.

East-coasters may not think much of fall colors in the West as they are spoiled by breathtaking swaths of maples, hickories, beeches, birches, ashes, and whatnot. Our region is not famed for autumnal richness, but that’s what makes these patches in the arid highlands so appealing—their scarcity. On our hikes up San Juan and Cottonwood Creeks we thought of the aspen groves as plentiful and enjoyed a marvelous palette. Alas, I was too busy staying hydrated in the surprising heat to bother with photographs. You’ll just have to go yourself and see. I do have a photo of the Toiyabes from the Smith Creek Valley just to the west:

That’s enough for today. I’ll cook up part II soon and continue our story.

Since my previous post about TCM’s Summer of Darkness film festival we managed to squeeze in a few more films noir. We had to watch The Killers again—that one is a classic of the genre. Who can argue with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner? William Conrad and Charles McGraw, who play the hit men of the title, give particularly menacing performances. After that it was Border Incident, 99 River Street, The Lady in the Lake, Out of the Past (my all-time fave!), Act of Violence, The Lady from Shanghai, They Live By Night, Shadow on the Wall, Marlowe, On Dangerous Ground, Cause for Alarm, No Questions Asked, Macao, Split Second, The Narrow Margin, His Kind of Woman, Angel Face, Brute Force, and Desperate.

Highlights? The Orson Welles-helmed The Lady from Shanghai is a bizarre, rambling epic with the maestro himself starring as an Irishman, complete with a begosh-and-begorrah accent. It showcases his wife at the time, the amazing and under-appreciated Rita Hayworth. Dazzling camera work is featured throughout and culminates in the unforgettable final scene in the funhouse hall of mirrors in San Francisco’s Playland-on-the-Beach. There’s a panoply of creepy minor characters and the goofy plot almost feels like an in-joke. Welles was a legendary show-off and rarely shot a sequence where he couldn’t wow you with his technical brilliance. This was a hard one to take your eyes off of!

The aforementioned Charles McGraw (who was also in Border Incident, Brute Force, and His Kind of Woman) brought his gravelly voice and seething machismo to the sensational The Narrow Margin which also starred the spectacular Marie Windsor. Most of the studio system starlets were dwarfed by the stacked and statuesque Windsor who could dish it out with the best of them. It’s a shame she never became a big star—her physicality would play well in today’s films but was a little too much for the cramped confines of the B-movie sets. The Narrow Margin is superbly paced and packs a lot into its 87 minutes. Imagine a modern movie under an hour-and-a-half in length!

Brute Force, another Burt Lancaster vehicle, is notable for its excellent villian, Captain Munsey, played by Hume Cronyn in a brilliant bit of against-type casting. The shootout/jailbreak climax is as dark and depressing as anything in noir. Other than Robert Mitchum no actor exemplifies “loser” or “chump” in the noir canon better than Lancaster. Being handsome, manly, and athletic does not insulate you from the ass-kicking ways of fate. With his perfect teeth, broad shoulders, and rolling dancer’s gait, he was that guy we were always shocked to see fall. (My favorite Burt role is as Yvonne de Carlo’s doomed lover in the terrific Criss Cross.) Mitchum, of course, was the quintessential noir leading man (with apologies to Humphrey Bogart). The hang-dog look, the mumbling, the I-don’t-give-a-shit vibe, and the languid, sleep-walking style all combined to make Mitchum movies (Macao, His Kind of Woman, Angel Face) unforgettable. Bogie was the ultimate tough guy and could only be taken down by a hail of bullets. Mitchum would lead himself into his own destruction, which is what noir is all about. He had a believable, everyman persona and we were never surprised when he came to his sad and lonely end.

Director Anthony Mann (Desperate and Border Incident) cut his teeth in the noir realm and later worked with actor James Stewart to make several excellent Westerns (The Far Country, Bend of the River, Winchester ’73) that are notable for their dark themes and sinister performances from their leading man. Stewart was a beloved actor and these roles not only enlarged his screen range but set the style for the grittier, harder-edged Westerns of later years.

Another treat was watching James Garner’s take on Raymond Chandler’s P.I. in Marlowe. It’s an overlooked and perhaps underrated film and is notable for an appearance by Bruce Lee. Garner, like Stewart, was not known for noir, being too likable and good-looking to really pull it off. Garner found his perfect niche not long after Marlowe with his TV show The Rockford Files, where he is regularly beat-up, ripped off, harassed by cops, and taken for a ride by mobsters. Despite the double-crosses, betrayals, and murders it’s too lighthearted to be called noir. Nonetheless Garner is one of the few actors who could make the lone private detective appealing as a person and not simply a vehicle to tell a story. And it would take a very brave director to send him down into the cesspool and kill him off! You need Mitchum or Lancaster for that.

As much as I love the movies of the film noir era I hesitate to say that they are “better” than today’s cinematic efforts. What they are is something distinctive and a product of a particular time. I am very attracted to the themes and to the style of storytelling. My mother, to whom I owe my love of this genre, always says “they don’t make ’em like they used to.” And that is certainly true. I would not, however, want anyone to attempt to re-create these movies, any more than I would want to hear someone trying to sing or play like Louis Armstrong. (I want artists and performers to be themselves and not some ersatz version of someone else.) I’m glad today’s movies are different than those made in Hollywood “back in the day.” I’m especially glad there is still an interest in these older works as evidenced by the popularity of noir festivals like Summer of Darkness.

TCM is running a film noir festival called Summer of Darkness every Friday in June and July. So far I’ve had the chance to see Gilda, The Killers, Born to Kill, Murder My Sweet, Mildred Pierce, The Gangster, Gun Crazy, and Tomorrow is Another Day. The movies run from 9:00 a.m. until midnight. From 5:00 p.m. on the inimitable Eddie Muller acts as a host and introduces each film and provides a little commentary at the end. I don’t do Netflix and I don’t DVR so if I want to watch I have to “pencil in” the showtimes and park myself in front of the TV. I don’t mind—I almost never go to the movies anymore so I think of these showings as my own personal movie theater schedule. The upside is that I can have a fat glass of bourbon in my hand the entire time!

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I like these films so much. I admit I really dig the suits. The men are always dressed to the nines, from shined brogues to creased fedoras, and part of me wishes I could go around like that. Those cats had some style! And speaking of style, I think it is the highly expressionistic look and feel of these movies that appeal to me. Also I appreciate the boundaries the film makers worked within. It’s rare that they exceed 90 minutes, for example, so the storytelling had to be brisk. Many were on strict budgets and schedules and so sets, lighting, locations and whatnot were limited and the directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, and designers had to work with a restricted palette of possibilities. The producers and studio heads had a huge impact on the final product, so much so that it’s hard to make a case for auteur theory. There was also the Hays Code (which was in effect until 1968, believe it or not) which forced the movie makers to subvert much of their content and to disguise controversial topics. All of these films are loaded with cinematic “sub-text” as taboo subjects and themes had to be inserted with clever workarounds and loaded dialogue rife with double meanings.

The back lots of the studios—B-movie territory—gave writers and directors a chance to play with darker stories and disreputable characters that would not have made the cut in the blockbusters and big productions. Doing things “on the cheap” meant a reliance on lighting and photography to create atmosphere and convey mood giving film noir, literally, its dark quality. Many of today’s crime dramas emphasize naturalism, which is perfectly fine, but it’s not the stylized melodrama of the “old classics.” I like the vivid contrasts of the black-and-white milieu and the over-the-top acting with its breakneck dialog. I mentioned my fondness for the way the men dressed but I would be remiss not to include the ladies. Today’s actresses are just as beautiful and talented as the glamour girls of that time, but the difference was just that—glamour. The studios played up the magical enchantment and allure of the untouchable screen goddesses. Think about the first time you see Rita Hayworth in Gilda, where she’s kneeling on the bed in her negligee and tosses her luscious locks back before looking into the camera. That’s the film noir femme ideal right there!

So far my favorite movie is Gun Crazy. There’s a frenetic edge to the thing that keeps your nerves jangling and the extraordinary performance of Peggy Cummins digs deep into your psyche. Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted at the time, was the uncredited screenwriter.

Friday evenings are usually my go out on the town and socialize time, but I may have to neglect camaraderie and pub crawling the next few weeks in favor of the small screen and the Summer of Darkness.

It came in the mail on Saturday:

Real property in the City of Yreka . . . Lot 9, according to the plat of “Souza Subdivision, Block 57” . . . all that portion beginning at a point on the Easterly line of said Lot 9 . . .

That is from Exhibit “A” attached to the Grant Deed that has been issued to us and recorded in the County of Siskiyou on the 29th of April. Officially we now own the house and property next door. No more dealing with banks! We gave them money and they went away. The deed has some great language on it, not just the surveyor’s argot (” . . . then South 17° 44′ East, 18.0 feet; thence South 72° 16′ West . . . “), but the legalese:

THE UNDERSIGNED GRANTOR(S) DECLARE(S) . . . FOR A VALUABLE CONSIDERATION, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged . . . hereby GRANT(s) to . . .

I’m assuming the “valuable consideration” is the heap o’cash we wired to them. The title insurance documents came on the same day as well. Those documents have errors in them, which I suppose I’ll have to deal with, but the deed looks correct and properly notarized. These things are rather underwhelming—just some typed pages, signatures, and stamps. I was hoping for parchment and lots of flourishes and maybe some crimped, embossed, or gilded portions. Alas, just routine bureaucratic stuff. I went back and looked at the deed to my current home and it is a little flashier but still pretty damn dull. I want a scroll with a wax seal in a calfskin pouch. Is that so much to ask?

I kept a log of the big events related to the sale, a chronology in case things got bizarre and we needed an attorney. We’ve coveted the property next door for years for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with privacy and security. We had a chance to buy it twenty years ago but could not afford it and we have regretted that missed opportunity many times. The last set of tenants were petty criminals and drug dealers and the noise, traffic, and general disregard for civilized living they brought to the neighborhood was intolerable and caused us much grief. The best thing they did, in the end, was trash the place and then abandon it. It was empty in January of last year and has been empty since. A month after that I spoke to the landlady and she told me they no longer owned the house, that it belonged to the bank. I immediately engaged a realtor and was determined not to miss this second chance. In January of this year foreclosure notices were posted on the property and a month after that a trustee sale took place on the courthouse steps. We could have bought the note right there and then but my agent advised me to wait, saying it would be better if the bank cleared up all the title issues and put it on the market as they would likely sell it for the same price as it was being auctioned for. There were no takers that day and ultimately the place was listed the following month.

We were told the bank would consider one offer at a time and our agent made sure our offer was first. Naturally that wasn’t enough—another offer came in that same day and the bank decided to take a look at both. Their solution was not to negotiate but to demand “last and final” offers from both potential buyers. After some anguish and a heart-to-heart with our agent we jacked up our offer by forty percent and waived all requirements, taking the property “as-is” as well as covering all the closing fees. It turned out to be just enough better than the other offer and we signed a purchase agreement a week later (on St. Patrick’s Day!). It got a little goofy after that as we did not get the copies of the agreement or the receipt for our earnest money for about a month. It seems there was a breakdown in communication and one party thought another party had taken care of it. Meanwhile we were on tenterhooks, but it all worked out. At one point the City had a complaint come across their desk about the state of the front yard and a letter to that effect landed in my mailbox. Not knowing the status of things I finally contacted the bank’s agent and she not only told me we were “in escrow” but got me the missing paperwork. That was a relief! In the meantime people kept coming by to check the place out as it was still listed “for sale.” One guy even tried to open a window and crawl in and seemed miffed when I caught him and told him to call the real estate company if he wanted to look inside. The name and phone number were prominently displayed on the sign but most of the people I talked to who were looking at the property had not bothered to call first. Go figure.

A little over a week after that we were signing the final documents. Two days later we got the keys and two days after that the deed came in the mail. Naturally everyone we know is interested. We’ve gotten lots of advice and suggestions about what to do and who to call and how to go about things. We even have people ready to move in! We’ve been rehearsing lines to use so we can deal with the flood of inquiries. Interestingly enough we had to state in our purchase agreement that we intended to occupy the home. The property was covered by the FreddieMac First Look Initiative which gives an exclusive buying window to owner-occupiers and excludes investors. The idea is to stabilize neighborhoods by discouraging absentee landlords and house-flippers. We also had to agree not to sell for a year after taking ownership. But that’s not what we want anyway. We intend to fix the place up to live in it as an extension of our current home. Some people, I like to say, want to live in a two thousand square foot house. I want to live in a twelve hundred and an eight hundred square foot house put together! Seriously, buying the little house next door more than anything protects our current investment in our home of twenty-six years. The increased space is one thing, but the privacy and separation from our neighbors is even more important. Lots of my friends live in the country and have tons of empty space between themselves and their fellow citizens. I like to think this gives us a little taste of that. I like living in town and being able to walk everywhere, but it is a trade-off. Now I can look out my office window as I type this and see nothing but my property! It’s a great feeling to be your own neighbor.

Eventually we will get the house fixed up and habitable. It is a real mess right now and needs a great deal of work. Time, money, and sweat are what’s needed, and it looks like we’ll have all three once the dust settles. I’m excited by the idea of having house guests who can stay in their own place and come and go as they please. I’m looking forward to converting the laundry room into a brewery. My wife has furniture and family materials from her parents home that will soon have a permanent place, not just a storage shed. The new place has a garage, something we’ve never had, which will be great for our lovingly restored twenty-seven year-old Toyota pickup. Nothing like starting up a vehicle on a winter morning and NOT having to scrape the windshield. We’ve even talked about making the new place our final spot when we get old and feeble and need a smaller living space (if the gods are willing and let us live that long). In short, there are many possibilities and we are in no hurry. Here’s a shot of the place from a few months ago:

We’ve cleaned up some of the mess, but you can see it has potential. It’s cute and has a little style. The roof is in good shape. Later this week we’ll get in the attic and the crawl space underneath and check out the bones. Whatever it is, whatever the condition, whatever the problems, we will deal with them. We’ve no timetable and no agenda. We are just happy that the waiting is over and we no longer have to worry about what’s next.

The Ghosts of Belfast is the American title of Northern Irish writer Stuart Neville‘s debut novel, The Twelve, which was first published in the UK in 2009. I picked up a copy when I attended NoirCon last fall. I got to meet Mr. Neville briefly and he signed my copy and posed for a picture. You can see my write-up of that here.

Northern Ireland is a peculiar place. Whether it is a province or a country is a matter of perspective. It lacks a national flag, for example. Its citizens are British, yet can claim an Irish passport. It is about the size of Connecticut and home to 1.8 million people, a third of whom live in the greater metropolitan area of its capital and largest city, Belfast. It has long been part of the British Empire and British citizens—primarily Scots—were transplanted to the Ulster province centuries ago in order to secure the land from its original Irish inhabitants. This of course sowed the seeds of future conflicts, the most recent being the decades-long reign of violence and terror known as The Troubles. The loyalists to the British crown, i.e. unionists, were pitted against Irish nationalists, i.e. republicans, in a split along both ethnic and religious lines. All conflicts have casualties and one of the biggest is Northern Irish identity. Some see themselves as British and subjects of the Queen. Others see themselves as displaced Irish, culturally if not actually part of the Republic of Ireland to the south. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 put an end to most of the fighting and began the process of establishing a new government with hopes of ending the sectarian divide.

Like all places attempting unity after a long struggle, blanket pardons and amnesties were offered to many former combatants. Jails were emptied and past sins legally forgiven. Men who were once criminals and terrorists walk the streets. The Ghosts of Belfast begins with one such character, Gerry Fegan. Released from the infamous Maze prison as a result of the peace treaty, Fegan’s former republican bosses keep him on the payroll as a reward for his past devotion to the cause. They now serve in Stormont, the Northern Irish assembly, and know that the Gerry Fegans of the world are anachronisms. The fragile politics of the new order means the old warriors have to be shown the door. Fegan is well aware of his obsolescence and has no intention of returning to the fold or serving the cause ever again. In fact he is so wracked with guilt that he buries himself in the bottle and makes himself generally useless. His former colleagues no longer respect him but still fear him as his reputation as a stone-cold killer was well-earned. A chance encounter with the mother of one of his victims sends Fegan off on a dark and twisted path of vengeance and, he hopes, redemption.

The first thing we learn about Fegan is that he is never alone. The ghosts of his victims—twelve in number—haunt both his dreams and his waking hours. He realizes he will never be at peace until he exorcises those demons and the only solution he comes up with is to kill those who ordered him to kill in the first place. The Ghosts of Belfast, then, is a serial killer novel. Generally I hate serial killer stories but this one is different. For one thing all of Fegan’s intended victims are not innocents. They are hard men like himself. In their own eyes they were soldiers, fighting the good fight. They don’t have the empathy for their victims that is Fegan’s burden. It’s that empathy that makes Fegan sympathetic. He is genuinely remorseful about his part in the past violence. Second, The Ghosts of Belfast is really about victims, not killers. The ghosts are there to remind us that The Troubles bloodied swaths of the population. The dead left behind loved ones, families, and friends. They are gone forever but the echoes of their passing haunt the living every day.

Neville paints a rich picture of the machinations required to keep a fledgling state from collapsing. As Gerry Fegan drops more bodies the book reads like a spy thriller as the panic creeps further up the food chain. What we find out is that peace is hard. The deals that have to be made to keep the settlement from falling apart open old wounds. The conflict at least made friend and foe easier to identify. Fegan’s twisted quest for atonement lays bare all the bullshit that the politicos use to patch things together. In the end Stormont survives the crisis but the old men who once held sway over the population with their guns and bombs have to face new realities and learn to serve the needs of an emerging generation.

The Ghosts of Belfast is a gripping read. Fast-paced and suspenseful, its three hundred-plus pages fly by. It helps a bit to know a little of the history but it’s not necessary as the tension and atmosphere of the story are sufficient to keep you hooked. Gerry Fegan is a cast-off, a man without a place, but his struggle to save his soul is universal. The world is big, bad, and crazy and all of us stumble around in the darkness trying to make sense of it. Like Fegan, we seek to be whole, much as the reconciliation process in Northern Ireland seeks to bring unity to a divided people.

Bret Easton Ellis was just twenty-one when his debut novel Less Than Zero was published in 1985. I picked it up for a buck at a library book sale in 1998 and got my first taste of his particular brand of noir. Just last week I picked up another effort from Mr. Ellis—Imperial Bedrooms—for two bucks at a thrift shop. Imperial Bedrooms was published in 2010 and is the sequel to Less Than Zero. Both book titles are references to the music of Elvis Costello. Ellis was tagged early on as a founding member of the so-called literary “Brat Pack” which included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney. It seems we can’t just read books—they have to be properly packaged and marketed or we won’t know what to think about them.

In Less Than Zero the protagonist and narrator Clay is back in LA after a semester of college back east. He wants to be a writer but no one takes him seriously. His classmates and childhood friends, like him, are from very wealthy families. None have to work and they spend their time partying. Most have ambitions to be in the movie business or the music industry. Clay drinks a lot and snorts coke and smokes weed but none of the drugs seem to affect him. He sees a shrink that his family pays for but the doctor is too self-absorbed to help him. His best friend Julian gets in trouble with a drug dealer named Rip and Clay tries to help but is unable to and instead leaves LA and goes back to school. Imperial Bedrooms takes place decades later. Clay, middle-aged, is a successful screenwriter living in New York. He comes back to LA to help cast a movie and reconnects with his old crowd. Julian is now a recovering addict but Rip, more evil than ever, is still around and Clay once again gets caught up in their struggle. This time the consequences are far greater.

Less Than Zero has a peculiar diary-like style. The prose is lean and generally brisk but emotionally flat. Clay, it seems, has a hard time feeling anything. And when he does, it comes in violent waves of self-pity that seem to confuse him even more. The stream-of-consciousness technique is used a lot and has a disturbing toneless quality to it. Clay is not simply detached from things—there’s a deep emptiness at his core. Much was made of the nihilism that pervades the book on its release. Somehow it was assumed that Less Than Zero was autobiographical, and Ellis was painted as a callous, spoiled rich kid who slapped together his journal entries into a gossipy Hollywood tell-all. I found the book to be, instead, carefully constructed and a sensitive and insightful portrayal of a man trapped in his own alienation and amorality. It’s a coming-of-age story for existentialists. Instead of growing and learning from the crises he faces Clay simply retreats further into his angst and loneliness.

Imperial Bedrooms is even darker as Clay discovers that despite his feelings of helplessness he is entirely capable of creating any life he wants. The realization of that power, instead of liberating him, sends him down a darker path of self-loathing and betrayal. In the first book Clay is mostly passive and watches things happen. In the second he is active, but the activity is entirely self-centered and he mostly feeds his appetites for drugs, sex, and violence. The two stories are cleverly connected by the opening of Imperial Bedrooms where an unnamed “author” has written a book about Clay and his friends and they go to see the movie. The characters in the first book get to react to their own story as it is quickly summarized by the author and the film. Invisibly the story-teller, who is at first not-Clay, re-emerges as Clay, and then the new story unfolds. It’s a bit of slick misdirection that both links the two novels and allows the second to stand on its own.

It’s a bleak, insular, and repellent world that Ellis has created, but like a highway wreck we still crane our necks and stare at the carnage. Like Albert Camus in The Stranger and Jim Thompson in The Killer Inside Me, Ellis is interested in what makes us do bad things. And more to the point, why we persist in having a moral code in the face of the universe’s indifference. Ellis has received his share of criticism for seeming to glorify debauchery and violence, but I think that misses the mark. I think he looks at the world and sees the depravity and wonders how we can stand by without reacting to it. By making that the central focus of his art it forces us to see it better and thus respond to it. He strikes me as a writer deeply concerned with human values and, in particular, how we let them slip away so easily as we chase more temporal pleasures.

I can’t say that Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms are fun books. Despite their brevity and the crisp, spare style they are not light reading. But they are both well-crafted and cut like a scalpel. You don’t feel the blade going in but the blood comes gushing out anyway. Ellis has kind of hypnotic power and you find yourself entranced by a bunch of people you hope you never have the misfortune to meet. I know I’m going to try a few more of his books.