©Linda Watanabe McFerrin

NEW ORLEANS — PINOCCHIO zooms by on roller skates, thin, hairy legs protruding from green lederhosen. Three Elvises swivel past, hips rotating like long-playing records. A besequined, masked stranger raises his wine glass and blows me a kiss. Scandalous. Ridiculous. Crazy. Taboo. It’s Fat Tuesday – Mardi Gras, the most delightfully wicked time of the year and the last chance to be naughty before buckling into Lent’s iron girdle, the 40 days of abstinence and contrition that precede Easter. As a good Catholic girl, I remember Ash Wednesday: the dingy thumbprint on my forehead, the hard edge of the church pews. But it wasn’t until I could buy my own plane ticket that I greeted Lent in the proper manner—New Orleans’ style.

The roots of New Orleans Mardi Gras run deep. Its antecedents were most probably the ancient fertility rituals that heralded Spring. Beginning with French explorer Iberville, who on March 3, 1699, christened his campsite 60 miles south of present-day New Orleans “Point du Mardi Gras,” its most ardent champions have been French. The festival flourished in New Orleans under French rule and today the French Quarter is the best place to enjoy it. Nowadays in New Orleans, they celebrate Fat Tuesday for nearly two weeks.

A clever person will stay for two weeks in a French Quarter flat, attend elegant New Orleans soirees and wild Cajun wing-dings and sample the fabulous fare of world-class restaurants like Tujague’s, Mr. B’s and K-Paul’s. That person will indulge so fully and have such a gluttonous time that Fat Tuesday will really be fat and Lent a welcome reprieve. But even if you’re only able to drop in on the party for a few carefree days and don’t know a soul in the city, you can pack in the parades, party in the streets and chow down at some of those legendary palaces of provender.

When battalions of floats and their attendant throngs move through the city, streets close to autos, so it’s best to be traveling on foot. In the charming French Quarter, everything is within walking distance. Overhead, French doors open onto lacy wrought-iron second-, third-, and fourth-floor balconies. During Mardi Gras these are perfect vantage points for parade-viewing. If you’re part of the unruly mob in the street, you’ll want to position yourself beneath them. A shower of pearls and doubloons will be your reward. During Mardi Gras, “throws,” like ropes of plastic pearls and specially minted counterfeit coins, are as prized as the real thing, and it is a point of great pride to amass these favors. It makes one mindful of the buccaneers who must have once commanded the Quarter and their pirates’ ransoms of jewels and gold. What kind of performance deserves a “throw?” It can be anything from a simple plea, to a jig, to a long-dreamed desire, acted out.

There are also the usual French Quarter pleasures. Few people in the Quarter rise early, so make a beeline, first thing in the morning, for the Cafe du Monde to avoid the crowds that usually swarm it. There you’ll start your day with beignets—light puffs of fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar – and strong chicory coffee. This is addicting, so be sure to buy boxes of beignet mix and cans of coffee to take home. From the Cafe du Monde, it’s a short walk, riverside, to book onto a Mississippi riverboat tour. Maybe you’ll see a mink or a muskrat slipping into the cafe-au-lait-colored waters. Visit the antique stores along Royal Street to gawk at the silver or pick out a special bauble and buy it. Tour some of the landmark buildings like the Ursuline Convent or the home of writer, Frances Keyes Parkington.

At Jackson Square, if you’re craving a lift, you’ll find handcrafted marionettes, masks, outrageous hats and a line of horse-drawn carriages that will take you wherever you are planning to dine. Do not neglect the restaurants. The cuisine – Creole, Cajun and French – is superb, and the service is often unparalleled. In New Orleans the waiters are artists. Experienced, adept and theatrical, they’re worth watching. Wine will only heighten your appreciation, and you’ll quaff plenty of that to accompany gumbos, jambalayas and etouffes full of crayfish, prawns and hot andouille sausage. After this you will still have time to experience an evening on Bourbon Street, to stumble from one fine jazz club to the next, to muscle your way into Preservation Hall and listen to Dixieland jazz or into O’Brien’s to down a Hurricane or a whisky, neat. The next day you’ll know why they rise late in the Quarter.

Running through all of this, like filaments of purple, emerald and gold—the traditional Mardi Gras colors—are the parades. They take place evenings and weekends, and they have been an integral part of New Orleans Mardi Gras since 1837. Almost from the start, they were monopolized by secret carnival societies called “krewes,” each with a mythological namesake and the responsibility of presenting a themed parade. Today there are more than 50 krewes. Rex and the Knights of Comus are two of the oldest. Both debuted in 1872. Zulu, the black krewe, was unofficially formed in 1906. The first Zulu King, meant to mock the King of Carnival created by Rex, carried a banana stalk for a scepter and sported a can of lard for a crown. The politics of the black community changed, but Zulu survived, and in 1992, a strange circle was completed when Rex opened its membership to African Americans.

In addition to the formal, extravagant and well-regulated pomp of the krewes, with their celebrity kings and private Mardi Gras parties, there’s plenty of impromptu pageantry in the streets. Informal parades, costume competitions and confrontations with the bizzare abound.

Emotions run high during this festival, as they must have when the pirate Jean Lafitte held the port. At one party, our Cajun hostess, in a fight with her lover, turned all her guests into the street. A cold five minutes later we were back in her flat, her hysteria past, tears spangling her beautiful cheeks. After all, Mardi Gras is a passionate time, a time for wild innuendo, cheeky rejoinders and unexpected incidents. You will fall in and out of love with the objects of your fantasy. You may even end up, as I did, giving up Lent altogether and embracing Fat Tuesday.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Read more at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1995/02/05/TRAVEL2713.dtl

©Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Linda's gado-gado

We gathered the writers in advance of our departure to Indonesia at the James Presho House for a Balinese dinner; the menu: spring roll appetizers; gado-gado; nasi goreng; a meaty, kebab-like version of chicken satay; and ice cream with crystallized ginger. Nice try.

Here, in Ubud with the Wanderland gang, we’ve had one glorious multi-course meal after another—at Cafe Lotus, at Casa Luna, at Café des Artistes and more, but nothing compares to our farewell banquet for the writers in the hills above town.

After a night of celebration for which I gratefully acknowledge the exploratory quest and connections of Joanna and Heather, here is my recipe for a Balinese feast:

Chef Komang Adisubrata

A gorgeous, walled, private, hilltop residence in the Balinese style, with an open-air living room, wide lawn, views of the palm forests, rice fields and rushing Ayun River far below, and a totally modern and separate many-windowed kitchen building with its own views of the lush surround.

An attractive, generous, and extremely talented private chef by the name of Komang Adisubrata.

Ultra-fresh local ingredients like bitter gourd and  organic red rice.

An à la minute menu composed of the following dishes:

• Cassava Chips with Spicy Carrot Dip
• Bitter Gourd
• Pork with Palm Sugar
• Curried Tempeh
• Fresh Corn Fritters
• Fish Satay
• Balinese Style Fish Satay with Young Coconut
• Honey Grilled Chicken
• White Rice
• Organic Red Rice
• Beers, sodas, a delicious red wine.

A Balinese Feast

Scintillating dinner conversation peppered with provocative questions, confessional outbursts, outrageous opinions, marvelously embellished tales of old conquests, and rapacious repartee.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

©Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Me and the Diamond Python

So, here I am in Indonesia—Java and Bali—where novelist (That Paris Year) Joanna Biggar and I are leading a travel writing workshop in the hills above Ubud.

We’ve covered some interesting ground, literarily speaking, but the nut that we seem to be coming back to again and again—yes, yes, we are talking incessantly about “nut grafs” in the workshop—is why, exactly, are we all here … in Bali?

The answer from many of the writers we’re working with on this journey is that the impetus is the desire to discover something about a place, about a culture, even about ourselves, which leads me to a quote from a recent interview with friend and Snake Lake author, Jeff Greenwald, in Himal.

Jeff Greenwald

When asked, “As a writer are you more predisposed towards finding relatively ‘undiscovered’ places, people, things?” Jeff answers, ”I once read a funny comment by one of the Russian cosmonauts. ‘Every day, a new discovery’ was the motto for our mission,’ he said. ‘If we didn’t discover anything new in our experiments, we would discover what was for lunch!’ I feel the same way.”

As do I.

So, here are a few of the things I’ve discovered so far:

That you need an embassy pass get into the Bantar Gebang dump in Bekasi Jawa Barat, a few miles southeast of Jakarta, one of the largest dumpsites in the world … unless, of course, you are garbage.

That the ketchup in Indonesia is as tasty as the ketchup in Malaysia, where the condiment originates, and that it is quite spicy and as good on rice as it is on fries.

Sacred Macaque

That the incredibly cute macaques in the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Ubud are indeed provoked by the color red.

That there are lawyers in Bali.

That diamond pythons can leave their teeth in you when they bite.

That someone will always get a better price on the sarong, the bracelet, the necklace, the hand-carved coconut than you will.

That there are no mosquitoes until you think there are no mosquitoes and neglect the “OFF!”.

That a little imodium goes a long way.

That not ALL the dogs in Indonesia are rabid, although they appear to be VERY malnourished.

That the best coffee in the world is ground from red coffee cherry beans ingested, digested, and deposited on the forest floor by the tiny, bear-faced luwak, and that a quarter pound of this oddly ambrosial substance—which I had the pleasure of tasting—is really, really expensive. Yum!

Sayan Terrace

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

©Linda Watanabe McFerrin

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, my writing group was scheduled to give a reading from an anthology of travel tales at Get Lost Books* in San Francisco.  Here is the message that I sent to the group about that night’s scheduled meeting:

In the wake of this a.m.’s terrible news, we will meet tonight, as planned, at Get Lost Books in San Francisco —not to promote the anthology, but for the more important feature of our association—as an act of solidarity and courage. We are all stunned, but we want to respond to terrorism with action.

We will gather and discuss, with anyone who chooses to join us this evening, the blessings and dangers of travel, our personal freedom and anything else in this world worth defending. We don’t think we should allow acts of terrorism to shut us down. They should drive us to rally our strength and conviction.

We will gather in sorrow, in reverence, respect and in prayer for the travelers who lost their lives today. We will try to create a forum for the pain and outrage, for the mourning and for the concern. We are all horribly shaken by this, but we can’t shrink from the catastrophe.

Please join us, if you can.

In light,

Linda

The attack on the World Trade Center stopped us in our tracks … but we decided to show up for the event and invited the many who joined us to share their grief and horror and determination not to let terrorism throw us into isolation and fear and curtail our liberty. It was a profoundly comforting gathering, one that underscored the importance of community.

A little over a week later, several of us, keeping to our prior plans, flew to Italy for the same reasons we’d decided to meet at Get Lost Books. We were uncertain about our decision, but we discovered that the sense of community that heartens and strengthens knows no borders.

It was mid-September, 2001—only nine days after the inferno—and we were in Venice. Refusing to let terror hijack our lives, we’d flown to Italy. We sat, shaken and deeply stirred, in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, steps away from the tidal lap of the Adriatic, from Harry’s Bar—six American women marooned on a tear-threatened strand, not at all certain about our decisions. Should we have stayed home? We thought of Hemingway. We ordered Bellinis. Our waiter asked where we were from. “The United States,” we whispered.

All around us the piazza’s bandstands glittered like bejeweled half-shells cupping orchestras, jazz bands, string quartets—violins, woodwinds, brass— the music, plaintive, slipping into the moonlit night.

Our cocktails arrived and we raised our glasses. Then, unbelievably, the band changed its tune. Suddenly in our little corner of the enormous piazza—the center square of Venice, “La Serenissima”—“New York, New York” sailed out over the tables.

There was no longer a dry eye among us, but we were smiling too. And there were tears and smiles all around us. Completely vulnerable, profoundly touched, we had delivered ourselves into the hands of strangers … and these strangers had comforted us and taken us home.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

*Get Lost Books in San Francisco has since closed its doors.

For this and other stories about experiences traveling in the days surrounding 9/11, go to Tales Told From The Road.

The woman’s hands were huge.

Or so it seemed as I lay in my skimpy paper underpants, standard issue at the thermal spa center in Santa Cesarea Terme, a tiny town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, in Puglia, at the absolute tip of the high heel of the boot that is Italy. She was a bit of a dominatrix, my masseuse, and I liked this about her: the way she slapped me around. Sometimes one needs a good dressing down.

I was at the tail-end of a lengthy stay in Europe that had included living the high life with jet-setting pals (one actually used the phrase “economy class scum” albeit ironically, to describe a certain tribe of travelers to which I did not immediately claim membership) in London. I’d been wined and dined at glamorous private cocktail parties and escorted about the city to plays, restaurants and museums—all of this with a big black cast on my injured left wrist and hand—and though I was hanging out with a first-class crowd, I will confess here that I am, at heart, economy class scum, which means that I’ll do what I need to do to get a ticket to ride, including sitting, knees pressed to chest, in the cheapest seats in the house. I would do the same for any of Shakespeare’s plays, which I approach with similar jubilation and enthusiasm.  I’d stand for heaven’s sake. And I would stand on a plane, too, if it meant my flight dollars went further. I am actually one of those people designed with economy class in mind. I am five foot one and 435/455ths of an inch in height—unless I am wearing stiletto heels, which I almost never do—and I weigh, well … let’s just say I weigh less than one of the larger breeds of dogs.

When I sit in first class—which I’ve had the honor and discomfort of doing from time to time—I cannot bend my legs, as the edge of the large seats is closer to my ankles than my knees and my feet stick straight out … unless I wiggle forward in the seat and fill the open area between my spine and the seat back with huge numbers of those tiny, made-for-an-airplane-snooze pillows. Either way it’s an unpleasant ride and I’ve often thought of auctioning my seat off to some super-sized person miserably crammed into economy class accommodations.

I realize this is quite a preamble. All of this is simply to supply you with a little background information. I just want you to understand my state of mind as I lay there naked, but for those paper undies, at the mercy of my masseuse’s ham-sized mitts. I must admit I was worried. She was very rough and I am, even in my relative youth, quite decrepit.

Take that black cast for example: I’d broken my hand right before I left for Europe when I was attacked by a pit pull in Stockton, California, and forced to the ground. What was even more aggravating was that I’d had the area cast only a few years before when I shattered my wrist in Holland whilst on a bike on the dyke that circles the Isselmeer. What I like to call my bionic wrist, because of all of the metal in it, was having an unpleasant soft-tissue flashback due to the new injury. That was keeping me up nights and the black cast was cramping my style, both kinetically and cosmetically, though friends had assured me that they had mistaken it for a quirky and delightfully Goth fashion accessory. Have you ever heard of a bracelet that keeps you from taking a shower or limits the number of pieces of luggage (must-have camera, laptop, backpack, needlessly large pairs of shoes for various sports, clothes, heavy recreational reading) that you can comfortably carry?

I should reveal, as long as I’m on the subject and the masseuse still hovers above me, that I also have metal parts in my leg due to what I cavalierly claim was a fall from a barstool around one year ago. The injury is not yet completely healed. No matter, I still get around … so the high life continued in Italy: in Rome and in Puglia where we criss-crossed the length and breadth of the region while the feasts rolled past with clockwork precision and I, who am allergic to gluten, shellfish and caffeine and generally averse to the consumption of red meat, was finding it hard to keep these fine but afflictive substances out of my ridiculously finicky system.  So by the time the masseuse had me, I was exhibiting celiac-like symptoms: swollen throat, elbows broken out in a rash and an unpleasant feeling of bloat, in spite of what I felt was an assiduous attention to what went into my mouth and what came out of it (after all, it was a gathering of very clever writers).

So you see, not to whine, but I really needed the massage and a good dressing down, a contemplative slap on the buttocks as if to say, “Hey, aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? Shouldn’t you slow down and smell, rather than drink, all that coffee?”

And what better place to do this than on the massage tables of a therapeutic facility known far and wide for the treatment of various physical, rheumatological, cardiological, dermatalogical, gynaecological and rhynogeneous complaints? The place is a veritable clinic by the sea. It has that air of relapse and recovery for which, I’m sure, the great spas of the world were once celebrated—that is before spas became more cosmetic than curative. It even smelled deeply reparative, with its sulfur pools, mineral muds and the faint but pervasive odor of perspiration that mingled ever so subtly with the cleaner chemical notes.

The name of my masseuse was Celestina, I believe—a particularly good name for a woman with the hands to heal. Celestina covered me in mud, let me wallow in it for a while then threw me into a tub for a pommeling hydro-massage. I was nearly comatose by the time she retrieved me and ushered me into the quiet room where she planned to attack my every ache and pain. That’s when she presented me with the undies and arranged me face down on her table.

“Si chiamo che?” I had slurred incorrectly and indecipherably into the sheet as she vigorously assaulted my thighs. Did I mention that her massage table, like all of those at this facility, I imagine, did not have a hole for your face to poke through and that my neck had to twist in an ungodly fashion (old movie buffs, I am referring to The Exorcist)—a posture that I found hard to achieve—in order to be understood?

“Celestina,” she said. “Come si chiama lei?”

“Mio Linda,” I mangled, drooling into table and sheet, not the least bit embarrassed by the primitive manner whereby I was communicating. I was in paper underpants, wasn’t I?

“Lin?” she responded.

“No, Linda,” I slurped. “Ohhhh, that feels great.”

“Eh … piacere di conoscerla. Parla italiano, lei?” she inquired.

“No. Non parlo. I don’t speak, but I’m trying,” I slobbered.

Our conversation proceeded in a sloppy, halting way and I learned that Celestina had lived her entire life in the province of Lecce, in Salento, the southernmost portion of Puglia and that she did not speak French or Spanish or English or Japanese, none of which I can speak effectively either, though I sometimes pretend to. At least I think that’s what she said. I also think she told me that she had three children; that one son was a musician, one a garbage man or a member of the Mafia—I’m not sure which—and that her third and youngest child, a girl, was mentally impaired and living in an institution.

“Oh, che tristessa. Oh, what sad!” I said, commiserating and feeling an immediate bond.

“Si,” she responded punching me in the way that a good Italian chef will punch the air out of pizza dough.

“Anche mio. Me too,” I confessed and explained to her, in the slack-jawed pastiche of sounds that I have come to call pidgin spitalian, that my daughter, Marissa, had died shortly after she was born and that I have never gotten over it.

She was silent. The room filled with the sound of her breathing and mine. Then a small droplet bounced onto the bare skin between my shoulder blades. She wiped it away and her large, warm hands sank deeply into the trapezoid of muscle stretched tightly between my clavicles. “The world is sad,” I think she said.

Celestina was extremely attentive. When she came to my right ankle with its symmetrical scars, she asked tenderly, “Che fa?”

“Mucho injury,” I responded, switching for some reason to Spanglish as she proceeded to unknot those tendons.

What happened after that? She flipped me like a pancake and covered me in an oily substance, telling me my skin was “magnifico.”

“Shank you,” I drooled, by now totally punch-drunk and stupid.

It was hard getting dressed. I could barely button my shirt. I staggered out into the brilliant sunlight and sat, wrapped in a long-sleeved white shirt, hatted and sunglassed, as covered as I had moments before been exposed. Nancy, one of the writers, drifted by and we took a stroll together, finding a room filled with machines for the thermal treatment of ear and nose related diseases: adenoid hypertrophy, chronic pharyngitis, recurring pharynx-tonsillitis, allergy rhinitis, nasal polyposis, rhine-bronchial syndrome, chronic sinusitis, various forms of catarrh and much, much more. In the spa’s inhalations treatment department row upon row of flowing water contraptions, each with an empty chair in front of it, stood ready to bath the noses and throats of the afflicted. Of course neither Nancy nor I could fathom what the machines were for, though the various knobs and dials and the yellowing plastic tubes and masks suggested snot, mucus and sulfurous solutions—a combination quite unappealing on every possible level. We left shaking our heads.

Back outside, I took a seat again on the terrace, looking out over the sulfur pool and the Grottas Gattulia, Solfurea and Fetida, across the turquoise waters of the Adriatic toward that exquisite point where the sea meets the sky. There I waited in a peeled and polished kind of oblivion, like a patient in a chamber before a transfer, feeling old but transformed, turned inside out and ready for whatever was to come, totally intoxicated by Created by Linda            – 7 -the sense of physical ruin and spiritual repair. The other writers gathered and lounged, looking nearly as bleary as I. I wondered what miracles they had found in their separate rooms, what doors to the soul had been unlocked, what demons routed.

It was late when we left, the ride home long and debilitating in the gentlest of ways. The next day I would find bruises all over my thighs and sigh. Of course the sojourn in Puglia was not over; it would go on, as life tends to go on and on and on. But I would remember Celestina, I thought, and the ministrations of Santa Caesara Terme, and the way the sea on that strip of coast in Salento slapped at the rock hard until it formed beautiful coves and grottos. And I would remember those soft, hard, kind, brutal hands, and I would be left with longing.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Last Dance on San Bruno Mountain

by Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,
And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.
Which was the real–the butterfly or the man?
Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?
The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea
Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream.
The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city,
Was once the Prince of the East Hill.
So must rank and riches vanish.
You know it, still you toil and toil–what for?
–Li Po

The world around us is aquiver on the Summit Loop Trail, the dusty 3.1-mile footpath that climbs through the chaparral, coastal scrub, oak woodland, and riparian habitats that cover San Bruno Mountain. I’m told that winds up here often reach 30 miles an hour, just shy of gale force. At around 1,300 feet this spot on the ridgeline at the northern end of San Mateo County looks out over most of the hyper-developed bay-centered core of the Bay Area. My hiking companion and I gaze northeast to the chalk-colored crenellated sprawl of San Francisco and southwest to suburbia and the cemeteries of Colma. We can just make out the traffic along the roads and freeways that crisscross the landscape below, but we can’t hear it. “It’s so quiet up here,” I whisper. The leaves around us, shaking like minuscule flags, let loose a febrile rustle. The only other sounds are the whoosh of warm wind under my hat brim, the crunch of rock beneath our boots.

It might seem deserted, but it isn’t. San Bruno Mountain State and County Park is densely populated, not with humans but with a vast array of wildlife, including a number of rare and imperiled plant species. I come here for the butterflies, to check up on a habitat essential to their existence, though I don’t expect to see them flying around at this time of year, early fall. They should be well hidden as tightly wound pupae, sequestered beneath the carpet of vegetable litter that blankets the hillside, overwintering in dreamy diapause, dormant until spring. This is one of the last places on the planet where, if you know where and when to look and what to look for, you can see San Bruno elfin, Mission blue, and Callippe silverspot butterflies–all listed as endangered species, which is a terrible distinction as it is the last step before the end of the evolutionary road. The endangered bay checkerspot, too, once called the mountain home, but it has not been seen here in over a quarter century.

These are not large butterflies; they are small and discreet, certainly not flamboyant in the manner of monarchs and swallowtails, but still exquisite in color and design. Even so, it is not my intention to actually see them. I like that they are hidden, safe from harm in their pupal slumber. And, in any case, I have always been far more interested in the earlier, seemingly more durable stages of these insects’ development. The adults in their mature imago form have always been ghosts to me; their fleeting presence, while beautiful, signals little more than doom. They represent a dilemma, a dangerous beauty, the alluring specter of transience; they mean hope for their kind in the ever-unfolding drama of life, but for the individual butterfly, nothing but death.

As a child I saw them as something fragile that, once caught, rarely lasted. When I was six, a small girl in England in a country landscape that was rich in flora and fauna, I filled glass jars with the interesting little creatures that slithered and crawled in the fields around my home. I collected creepy things: snails, slugs, beetles, spiders, and beautifully colored, magnificently furred caterpillars that I liked to believe were patiently feeding on the blades of grass (in most cases a totally inappropriate food source) with which I had imprisoned them, unintentionally consigning them to an early death. Sometimes my captives were prettier and more active: ladybugs, honeybees, and the occasional unfortunate butterfly. The butterflies were quick to expire, their swift demise eventually reenacted by the other members of my glassed menagerie. Later, in the wild landscapes of northern Japan when I saw uniformed schoolchildren scouring the meadows with white butterfly nets, it would strike me that their enthusiasm was nothing more than a deadly innocence, the one perfect image of summer in a season that passed far too quickly, that was always too short.

I learned the facts about butterflies in high school: that they are members of the phylum Arthropoda; the class Insecta; the order Lepidoptera; and that in the course of their short lives they undergo metamorphosis through four stages–egg, larva, pupa, and adult. I remembered crying years before when one of the lovely caterpillars I’d gathered “died.” It turned brown, shapeless, and still as a corpse, nestled in the greenery with which I’d stuffed its jar. Saddened, I threw the whole mess out. It wasn’t until I saw a photograph years later of the next phase of a caterpillar’s life that I realized my once-wriggling prisoner had simply entered another phase of its existence, not its last . . . that is, until I threw it out in ignorance. I wept all over again.

Here on San Bruno Mountain the butterflies’ precarious hold on existence transcends the lives and deaths of the individual insects in each species. Parts of the mountain are currently protected, but the tenuousness of that preservation is written in the development encroaching from below. This 2,300-plus-acre patch of public land is surrounded by houses and subdivisions and has long been the focus of battles between developers and environmentalists. Inside the park another kind of intrusion threatens. Invasive species–eucalyptus, gorse, ivy, broom, fennel, cotoneaster, blackberry bramble–proliferate. The plants upon which the threatened butterflies feed compete with these hardy nonnatives for space.

On our slow ramble up and down the mountainside I contemplate all of this, and I feel a rising sense of pessimism. “If I were to write a butterfly song right now,” I say, “it would be a lament, maybe even a dirge.” I try to pick out the flora that constitutes the insects’ specialized food sources: violets, stonecrop, native plantain, perennial lupines. What I see most are the transplants: ivy, fennel, and blackberries, blackberries everywhere. These plants, like humans, are opportunistic. They muscle out the less flexible species, devouring the natives’ space.

That’s when I see them. One, two, three–they are careening on winds so rough that I think their tiny bodies should be torn apart. Their appearance seems almost impossible and absurd to me, what with the fierce gusts and the lateness of the season, though adult butterflies can actually live for months. “Look,” I say, my spirits lifting ridiculously even though I see the butterflies’ erratic dance on the gales as nothing more than a frenetic totentanz.

The smallest of the three finds a sunny resting spot on the rocky path a few feet ahead of us. It flattens its wings, which tremble only slightly as I sneak up to take a closer look. I believe I recognize the markings. It’s a checkerspot, but probably not the endangered bay checkerspot, which hasn’t been seen here on San Bruno Mountain since the early 1980s. It’s almost certainly the much more common cousin, the Chalcedon checkerspot. Still, for a moment, I feel the irrational joy again, to have found these persistent though delicate insects on this windswept hillside. And then the blast of sorrow that generally accompanies this joy–the realization that even as I observe it, the butterfly’s life is ending, that the things I cherish–this parkland, the imperiled plants and animals that inhabit it–are in constant and unassailable jeopardy.

I am too close. The butterfly reacts, takes flight, another flitting bit of nature, blindly celebrating the expendability of forms. It’s hard to resist that reckless dance and, for an instant only, I slip into its trance; and finally, blessedly, there is only this: the butterfly, the wind, the moment.

San Bruno Mountain Watch advocates for open space on the mountain and sponsors habitat restoration work parties every week. Learn more at mountainwatch.org, or call (415)467-6631.

I’m back in Palm Desert again. I love deserts largely because they never cease to amaze me. Yesterday, for example, it snowed … just northwest of Palm Springs. It hasn’t snowed here for ten years. The past couple of days I’ve been spending my time in the outdoor pools because even in the middle of winter it’s warm most of the time … mid-sixties to low seventies this time of year. I actually like the desert best when it’s being “desert-y,” although hiking Death Valley in the summertime (like Tim Cahill did some years back) might be a bit of a stretch. I can warm up just thinking about past visits, like this old date with the desert:

The heat is blistering here in the Colorado Desert. I’m told temperatures in late spring and summer can climb to 124 degrees during midday. The sun is pounding down on me, frying in freckles in spite of my SPF 48 block. It is midday, and all I can think about is a date. A bag of dates actually, or maybe an ice-cold date shake. And suddenly, there they are – quivering in an oasis of air conditioning – veritable mountains of Medjools (Royal Mediterranean Jewels), Deglet Noors, soft Blondes and sweet Brunettes. No, I am not hallucinating. On this sun-kissed strip of southern California desert I’ve found a kind of Eden, a world of year-round sunshine, succulent fruit and bubbling hot springs and spas; a place of simple pleasures, a center of plenty and peace.

It used to be a secret, one that belonged first to the ancestors of the Agua Calientes, a band of Cahuilla Indians who kept it for more than 1,000 years. In 1774, Juan Bautista de Anza‘s expedition, traveling through the area, caught a quick glimpse of its potential. But it wasn’t until 1853, when a government survey mapped Palm Springs and its natural hot mineral pools that the secret was finally out. Settlers followed – a few sickly souls in need of the regenerative power that the region naturally provides and a few hardy souls agriculturally savvy enough to know that 350 days a year of sun is a very good thing, as long as you also have water. But mainly the area drew visitors who came to loaf and lounge unmolested in the kind of seclusion that distinguishes deserts.

The heat is a natural gatekeeper, and word spread quickly that this sun- baked backyard, located a mere 110 miles southeast of Los Angeles and 140 miles northeast of San Diego, was the place for the world-weary to go to get away from it all. In the 1920s, silent film stars such as Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin referred to the place as their second home. By 1938, when the village of Palm Springs was incorporated, it had become world famous as the winter playground of Hollywood stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, though it still retained its tiny town charm. Today, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have replaced Gable and Lombard. Schwarzenegger and Shriver stand in for Tracy and Hepburn. Liberace is gone; Barry Manilow isn’t; and while Greta Garbo no longer slinks around in the shadows, Lily Tomlin might show up in the supermarket. These days the “Down Valley” towns of Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Desert Hot Springs, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta and Indio are included with Palm Springs in the uber-appellation of Palm Desert Resorts, but the cheek-to-jowl developments that make up this getaway destination still exert the same sleepy outback appeal.

I call it flatlining.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Excerpted from an article by Linda Watanabe McFerrin first published in the San Francisco Chronicle March 28, 2004

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/28/CMGQI5DIKR14.DTL#ixzz1A0VSU3Xh

The Queen (Marie Laveau) and I

Laissez les bons temps rouler! And we certainly did at Words and Music 2010 in New Orleans in spite of the fact that the theme was “The Literature of War and Collateral Damage,” or maybe because of it and because “When faced with disaster, the best medicine is laughter” … yes, that’s a direct quote from moi. Believe me, I’ve had experience with this, though the humor is always a dark hilarity and the laughter tends to sound more like a cackle.

I followed exactly that prescription when I returned to New Orleans for my first trip post-Katrina to participate in the festivities celebrating the winners of the 2010 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, a near twenty-year New Orleans literary tradition. The competition and the annual fete are hosted by the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, co-founded by Faulkner scholar W. Kenneth Holditch, attorney Joseph J. DeSalvo, Jr., and author Rosemary James, the woman with whom I credit the revivification of Dead Love. If it weren’t for a place on the shortlist of finalists in a prior year’s competition and Rosemary’s support, it’s very possible the novel, like my poor near-zombie protagonist Erin, would have been consigned to a premature burial.

You see, I had reasons dark and otherwise to be celebrating rather immodestly upon my return to the city.

I was staying on Canal and Bourbon Streets in the French Quarter at the Astor Crowne Plaza right around the corner from the Monteleone, a hotel full of fond personal memories, purported ghosts, and the ever-so-popular revolving Carousel Bar. Happily for the merchants and other businesses, between the conventions and conferences and weekend Saints-Seahawks home game showdown, the Quarter was mobbed. Nowhere was it noisier and noisome-er than Bourbon Street. The French Quarter is high ground, not holy ground, which gives it two reasons for its popularity, and Bourbon Street is one of those seamy tourist arteries—like Broadway in San Francisco—that serves up a crowd-pleasing cocktail of food, music, and liquor with a generous T&A garnish.

So it was packed and I don’t know about the other conferences and conventions but the heavy literary hitters were in town for ours: Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried), Simon Mawer (The Glass Room), and Rebecca Wells (Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) to name a few.

Even with all that talent shuffling around the only thing I could think of was to hightail it over to the Voodoo Museum for a look at Voudou New Orleans-style, which I did. And there, in those spooky attic-like rooms, the real adventure began—one that involved voudou historians and practitioners, graveyards, injuries, and wishes fulfilled. For that story, you’ll have to wait for the upcoming article.

We are pressed, our backs to the wall, in Balmy Alley, a bottleneck of a back street in San Francisco’s Mission District, as the dead drift by.

Skeletons on stilts, in bridal gowns, playing drums in steel bands—Los Muertos, The Dead—proceed in almost single-file procession through a cramped alleyway that feels like the birth canal to another world.

We are skeletons too. My husband Lowry and our friend Jeff are tall, gaunt, black-caped and spectral. The white markings on the chest of Lowry’s black shirt suggest a ribcage. Jeff’s black gloves are spidered with bones. Earlier in the evening, at a table in the window of a Yucatecan restaurant, I used grease crayons in white, black and red to hollow out eyes and noses and widen grins, painting our faces like skulls as passersby pointed and gawked.

Every year in the Mission, on the heels of Halloween, the Dia de Los Muertos Procession, part of a celebration that fuses Aztec beliefs in death and afterlife with the Christian Day of All Saints, sets forth from the corner of 24th and Bryant. This is, in many ways, the spiritual heart of San Francisco. Mission Dolores, where Franciscan fathers founded what is today California’s oldest intact mission, is a short walk away, and much of this area still retains its alluring blend of Old and New World ritual.

Over 10,000 people crowd the crossroads on the night of this supernatural juncture, and yet the scene is oddly subdued, laced with a potent mix of reverence and expectation. Around his neck, Jeff wears a photo of his brother. Many people carry photographs or remembrances of lost loved ones. In my heart I hold a picture of my mother who died a few months before. My votive candle, or velador, which I purchased at the little store adjacent to the Galeria del la Raza, is tall and sparkled with red. It has a picture of a heart painted upon it, and it says, “corazon,” the word for heart in Spanish. In preparation for this night, the shelves of the shop are populated with skeletons. There are white sugar skulls dressed in hot colors, devil and skull rattles made out of papier-mâché, and brightly-dyed mesh and oilcloth bags bearing images of Frida Kahlo, Anima Sola, La Catrina, the Virgen de Guadalupe and other popular icons. There are femur-trimmed picture frames, books about the Day of the Dead and row upon row of gorgeously embellished velas.

People flow into the intersection, greetings exchanged in murmurs. Lowry and I spot Kara, John, and their beautiful baby girl, Ruby who, it turns out, live just down the street. My black bag is filled with tiny votive candles. I hand one to Ruby. Kara helps light it. Little Ruby’s eyes widen as the first skeleton she has ever met hands her a gift. Fingers of incense rise up from the crowd and twirl away into the twilight. Then there is music, Aztec flutes and drums, and the procession sets off at a dreamy shuffle.

Up 25th we amble reflectively—mothers, fathers, children, pets—and then down 24th, the music, the smoke, the bruisy-blue warmth of an Indian summer eve massaging us into altered states. On the sidewalks around us—in the clubs, the taquerias, and all-night laundromats—the denizens of the Mission, many Hispanic, most just finishing or beginning dinner, watch the procession and smile. Our crowd stretches across the street. We feel powerful and anonymous, magically garbed as the dead. On the corners, the musicians stop to perform.

But it is in Balmy Alley as the parade nears its final destination and the crowd thins, by necessity, to a sly trickle that this otherworldly assembly comes truly alive. Pirates, babies, ingénues, clowns, old men, dancing girls, drummers and dogs shake, rattle and roll their clavicular way down the bemuralled aperture.  It is tight and close in the narrow passageway and warm and suffocatingly intimate, and I have never felt safer than, here, in this dimly lit funnel of a street surrounded, as I am, by the dead. We wait, let the circus push past, then follow it, burped back out into the open on 25th between Treat and Harrison Streets at the southern end of Garfield Park.

The park is aglow with candles and altars. The bands set up on the sidewalks around it. Creepily clad celebrants cavort at its corners. A big group gathers at an altar in front of a swing set wrapped in crepe paper and garlanded in flowers where papier-mâché skeletons sitting on swings are caught in eternal frolic. Amid velas and pictures and offerings and incense, people crouch, kneel and sit in aspects of meditation and prayer. I wander through the park adrift in the half-light, watch the young, the old, the living, the dead, circle, pause, and salute one another. The smoke of our candles, the light of our flames, the energy of our dreams and hopes and love flare up and out, and the darkness bears down to embrace us. The community of both worlds swings back and forth, back and forth, on the arc of a fearless affection. The dead never leave us; we leave them, not knowing how to entertain spirits, how to keep them at home in our lives. Tonight we remember; we make room for the dead. Tonight, they are among us.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

This article first appeared in the S.F. Chronicle Magazine ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Poet, travel writer and novelist Linda Watanabe McFerrin writes frequently about the dead. She is the author of Namako: Sea Cucumber and The Hand of Buddha. Her new novel is the supernatural thriller Dead Love.

I fell in love with the tallgrass prairie many years ago when I and a number of fortunate others were introduced to it by Francine Ringold, a poet and Tulsa resident truly generous with the treasures she shares. It was a warm autumn day and the grasses—big bluestem, little bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass, compassplant—surrounded us in breeze-tickled curtains of varying height. The heat; the slow, susurrating swish of the tallgrass; the occasional chirp of insect and bird; and the vaguely vegetable smell mesmerized us. I thought I could feel the pulse of oil far below me, feel the spirit of the fiery Plains Indians: Comanche, Apache, Pawnee, Wichita, Kiowa and the Osage. I was one with bramble and branch, with bison and brave. I experienced a sense of connectedness so profound that it seemed almost sacred.

I have always been entranced with nature. When I was a girl, my father, an outdoorsman, made it a point to take his children to national parks around the world. My mother was always the willing accomplice, standing aloof in her sunglasses and scarf, with her hamper of sandwiches and cold drinks, a stock of wet towels with which to clean dirty faces and hands at the ready as we tumbled and danced through the forests and streams that were our playground. I remember clover-filled meadows and long walls of blackberry bramble in England; bruise-colored mountains and towering pines in Montana; badlands in the Dakotas, deserts in California, crystal clear lakes in northern Japan. We put up tents in Glacier National Park, skipped rocks across rivers in Yellowstone, fashioned hats from giant fuki leaves in the parks in Akita, Japan.

When I grew older I blazed my own trail from one wild place to another. From the Okefenokee swamp to the plains of the Serengeti, from the 24,000 islands and skerries of the Stockholm Archipelago to Costa Rican rainforests, I traipsed and trekked in search of that same swept away magic of place, the arresting sense of wonder and connection that the natural world can engender. But it wasn’t until I was revisiting Tokyo, one of the cities of my youth, and hardly a place anyone would expect to connect with the natural world, that I understood exactly what I was feeling.

Tokyo today is a city of around 12,790,000 souls. It is one of the most populous urban environments on the planet, a maze of mainly high-rise residences and businesses through which trains and subways thread in an intricate and fast moving web. Three million people a day flow through Shinjuku Station alone and the various wards of the city—Shinjuku, Shibuya, Minato, Chiyoda, and so on—teem with traffic of every kind. In spite of this, in spite of the constant hustle and din, it’s a city of unusual peace.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Excerpt: Read the entire essay in the summer issue of  Mia Magazine.

Photo: Linda Watanabe McFerrin