Travels With Chuckie

After reading the blog of Funnybone! aka Chuckie V. religiously, I decided to chronicle my brief foray into Funnybone!’s epic adventure. Funnybone! makes this writing stuff look easy. At the very least, he’s got thousands of hits on his web page, and we’ve got none here over at Meaninglessrecords.com, so this could be good for “business.”

This journal/blog thing is not as easy as it looks. Reading the Funnybone! Journal makes me think “that’s not the Chuck that I know,” but I’m quickly learning that writing about yourself is no small task, and it must be harder for a guy who’s on the trail all day with a little Blackberry-sized keyboard. As I re-read my own thoughts, they come out sounding pretentious, guarded or contrived. “That’s not really me,” I think. So I’ve decided to spill all this out in one sitting; apologies for the length, but if you’re reading Funnybone!’s diary, wordiness isn’t an issue with you anyway.

So Funnybone! is not the Chuck that I know, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s why my high school pal Chuck decided to become Chuckie V. triathlete, who later became Rubberchuckie and is now Funnybone!, a guy who walks and talks a lot. Or maybe he just changed his name because his fans stalk him (those are some screwed up people). So who is the man behind Funnybone!? I guess I actually don’t really know. All I have is a bunch of memories to inform and cloud a few days hanging out with the guy recently, so I’ll just tell my story and let you piece together the Funnybone! mystery. By the way, I’m done here identifying Chuck as Funnybone! It feels weird.

Chuck came to visit my place in Sierra Madre, CA (think Pasadena East) for some rest and recreation during his PCT thru hike. The plan was for me to pick him up somewhere above the San Gabriel reservoir on a Thursday evening. On Wednesday, I picked up Chuck in Azusa, a full 24 hours ahead of schedule, which didn’t surprise me because I figured he’d get a ride somewhere after Wrightwood and/or be forced to make fast time walking on the road a lot. Immediately upon arrival at my place, he was given a shower and some clean, rather large clothes, for which he was genuinely grateful. Suspect of his appetite, I informed him that he needed to go to Trader Joe’s ASAP so that I could continue to feed my family. He agreed, though a couple boxes of cereal somehow disappeared during his stay. Still, the damage was contained to a small area of the pantry.

The weekend was shaping up to be a stressful one. Normally, a visit from one friend is enough to keep my household busy and happy, but Chuck’s visit coincided with a visit from my wife Anne’s friend Loreta, which was quickly to be followed by a visit from Anne’s mom. The upside was that Loreta’s visit gave me a perfect excuse to keep Chuck and his odors out of our spare bed and safely quarantined in the “guest house” aka “mancave” behind our place. Besides, I knew that Chuck would be happy to sleep on any hard, flat surface that wasn’t dirt, and I was right. We even have a toilet back there—bonus time for a PCT hiker!

To top off Anne’s friend and the pending mother-in-law visit, my friend Jeff was also coming up, AND we had a stated “artistic” mission. As you no doubt know by now, Chuck and I started a band called Bunkum back in high school with fellow outcast Mike Tamony. We never learned to play instruments. But we learned to record sounds and make up silly songs about stuff that meant something to us at the time. We still do so. Later Jeff Nixon and Matt Lambert joined. Jeff’s friend Chris Hubbard played drums too, though he has been indisposed at unknown locations in Northern Nevada for several decades. But we try to get together to play music whenever possible, which is once a year lately. We’ve got enough material to put out another opus (the second one this decade—near record pace), and we’d like to do it soon before I have another kid and Chuck goes AWOL for 10 more years. So against all hope, we decided that this weekend of Chuck visiting from the primitive conditions of the PCT would be a perfect chance to squeeze a little more creativity out of ourselves and put this thing to bed.

Luckily, the first two days gave Chuck a chance to recoup from the PCT. Here’s one inside tidbit about Chuck: he’s a study in contradictions, as are all of us. For a guy who likes to walk and be out of doors all the time, he also seems to have a pretty high opinion of sitting on a chair in front of a computer that is hooked up the Internet. But after two days of that, he was ready for rock n roll, or at least for recording noises.

Jeff arrived dutifully and promptly before 9:00 am on Saturday. Jeff’s brother Kelly—a great fan of music and a great fan of beer—arrived shortly thereafter, to everyone’s surprise. But Kelly can actually play music, and the more talent in Bunkum, the better. Someone needs to know how to work these guitars and other musical stuff while the rest of us work on our press image and complex conceptual responsibilities that come with steering the Bunkum ship through threats of lawsuits and commercial success, both of which we have successfully avoided. Actually, Chuck has a natural talent for music. To hear Chuck and Kelly talk about scales and notes and stuff was pretty neat for me being in the band and all, but, whatever.

We got off to a good start, with an odd electronic ditty that will serve as our new theme song for this disc. Every major work needs an overture, and a Bunkum album is no exception. Then disaster began to loom as my family duties intruded our aesthetic nirvana. I was called in to rescue a pregnant and very tired Anne from a local kids’ fair, where our daughter was demanding to stand in the longest lines possible for every ride. I thus left Chuck and Jeff to hook up their instruments in completely unorthodox ways to a guitar amp (with the distortion button pushed!), which made some interesting sounds that I later recorded upon returning. I had also promised Anne to help her prepare for her mother’s birthday, so I had to duck out again for a couple hours. By the time I got back, Jeff and Chuck had made good use of their time and gone to Trader Joe’s for some food, but I could tell they weren’t too happy with my absences. But you know, we do it all for rock n roll, and sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. A new Bunkum album was not built in a day (though I’m sure one could be).

And greater good there was. After we ate, we were able to put everything together in a monster fit of creativity that lasted until 3:00 a.m. and saw us record no less than five new tunes. At the end of the night, we put down a song called “Walking Around with His Arms on the Ground” that could only come after prolonged periods of laughter and delirium. While hiking the next day, Chuck and I realized that the poles attached to our hands meant that we were actually walking around with our hands on the ground. Talk about divine revelations.

It was a great jam session. Everyone performed under pressure and had a good time. It’s pretty weird that we’d even think of doing this: one guy’s on the PCT, one guy lives in San Diego, and one guy just moved into a new place with a 2 year old and another child on the way. Not exactly the crew you would throw together in a room for 12 hours and say “Ok, now be creative. On the count of three….go!” But I firmly believe that most people have creative urges that go unnoticed, probably because they don’t even recognize them. It gives me great pleasure to think that for no reason in particular old friends get together once in awhile to make up songs that will never be heard by anyone. We take it seriously—way too seriously. But we all love these songs, and they’re great songs. I know because I write a lot of the words. A psychologist would probably say that we are wounded children living out misplaced narcissistic fantasies by eroticizing our creative product. If I didn’t know how little actual knowledge informed that last sentence, I would probably agree. But there is no doubt that we also just have a lot of fun, and fun is underrated by most psychologists and people over the age of 12.

The next morning we got up around 9:30 and stumbled about in a post-alcohol and sleep deprived trance. Chuck was stuck sleeping next to Kelly, whose loud snore is infamous. I felt sorry for him because I knew he was sleeping next to me the next night (Sunday), and I have the same problem. It was going to be a rough Monday for Chuck. We went out to breakfast and got a late start to prepping for the trail. I frantically packed (but forgot a couple of necessities like toilet paper), and, after a quick stop at Trader Joe’s, Jeff was kind enough to drive us over one hour out of his way up to the point where Highway 2 is closed, which was luckily right where the PCT crosses the road by Eagle’s Nest in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Then Chuck and I were off. Before long I realized that Chuck can get on my nerves—but only in civilization. On the trail we were perfectly compatible, which made me think of some of the other trips we’ve taken together, and I can’t remember having a major argument. That’s pretty rare for me because I can argue for the sake of argument. But for all Chuck’s quirks and idiosyncracies (believe me, there are plenty), when it comes to travel for pleasure and adventure, he’s all about having a good time and being reasonable. In fact, he’s gotten better with age. For instance, at some point over 20 years ago, Chuck was obsessed with running at least one mile a day. During a short bike touring trip we went on, he would put on his running shoes and do his one mile after riding all day. This time, it was me who was pushing to go further and “get more done.”

Because we got such a late start, we ended up hiking into the night. The weather on the western side of the mountain was warm, so it felt natural to just keep walking (going downhill helped). The problem was that we talked too much and forgot to fill up on water. Once in camp, plans for a camp-out bacchanal were scrapped as it was too late and we had enough fun over the weekend. The next morning we quickly packed up and got on our way, crossing immediately over Highway 2 again. The guide maps were totally wrong on water, and we crossed a decent stream only once, by which time I was sure death was imminent. If we had known that was the last water, we would have drank our supplies and treated another batch, but we started hiking right away again instead. Chuck assured me this was one of the first hot days, but as we made our way up and down through semi-desert to nearly sub-alpine areas, I had a hard time imagining all the snow Chuck had been complaining about for the last few days before reaching my house. I was amazed at the solitude and isolation that is available just 20 miles from L.A. [Note: Hikers of the caliber who attempt the PCT have grounds to complain about the population and sprawl of L.A., but I’m constantly amazed by the diversity of experience available here. Rivers, mountains, beaches all close by. Not the best of any, but pretty nice for proximity to one of the world’s largest cities and, IMHO, a true melting pot, free market experiment gone wild, and gone very wrong and very right at the same time. Neither Chuck nor I are from L.A. and probably neither of us even visited before the age of 20, which makes it all the more random and interesting that we would meet up here for outdoor adventure. Digression over.]

The day went by as any good hiking day does: minor adventures and drama (a rattlesnake, water shortage) to keep things interesting, but nothing of the magnitude to make me think “it sure was a stupid idea to come out to the middle of nowhere with this loon.” And this may be a minor point (putting it right up there with everything else in this tome), but hiking with Chuck, I was also surprised that for an ex-athlete, he wasn’t one of those hikers who demanded to be in front the whole way. I’ve been backpacking with people who jockey by on the trial and ask “what’s your heartrate.” Chuck stopped to notice scenery more than me. I soon suspected that the reason Chuck walked behind me so much was so that he could talk the whole time with the assurance of being heard. But I could be imagining things. However, it was ironic that Chuck the hiker probably looked at these two days as a chance to have some company on the trail, while I, the city dweller, was looking forward to being alone. But, as I said, we didn’t have any major issues, particularly for two guys who don’t see much of each other and just spent 12 hours crammed in a room together making “music.” The day went on, and we eventually got into that weird head space, hiking rhythm that can only be reached by a good solid day of walking.

22 years ago, when Chuck got out of high school, he rode his bike across the country. I’m a couple years younger, so I wasn’t doing that trip. But I did go with him for a couple days, between Auburn, CA and Sierraville. 22 years later we were doing the same thing. I was tagging along and getting a little vicarious thrill, free riding on Chuck’s meticulous planning and preparation. In those 22 years, Chuck has been around the world as an athlete. I’ve been around, well, around a lot of places as a student, debtor and tax payer. There was a time I thought I might get stuck in Boston for job reasons. A panic of the greater-than-mild variety ensued. I actually remember (and this part is true) riding the bus and seeing Chuck in “Rolling Stone” as Chuckie V. the triathlete. Wonder, dismay and maybe just a tinge of jealousy populated my brain as I thought “what am I doing in Boston on a bus?” As I recently told Chuck, a lot of people in New England have a “This car climbed Mt. Washington” bumper sticker; apparently, Mt. Washington is the highest mountain in New England. It might be impressive, I don’t know, because the thought of an area that brags about a high mountain that can be traversed by a car freaked me out enough to not want to visit.

And the sense of space on the East Coast bothered me. I don’t know what exactly it was, but everything is more crammed in there; even the horizon felt smaller. I have great memories of my time there, but I concluded that I’m a westerner at heart--and entirely by chance, in case I sound moralistic. There is something about California, the Sierra and the West that will always make me feel at home. I grew up at the foot of the Sierra, and my father fell timber there. I’ve hiked various parts of the PCT (by mistake not design) in Oregon, Tahoe and in the Carson Iceberg Wilderness (go there—or better yet, don’t—nobody else does). Maybe Chuck, who has been around the world but chooses to embark for the second time on this monstrous trip right up the spine of the West, recognizes the same thing. I like to think so.

Oops, digression number two. The day ended uneventfully, with me sprinting ahead the last couple miles to get water. Chuck and I shook hands just like 22 years prior, and he continued north alone again once more. Marc, a co-worker, picked me up at Mill Creek Summit right on time. For a moment I thought Marc might not show up, but I realized it didn’t make much difference because I had everything I needed to spend the night on my back, which was a comforting (if not comfortable) thought.

It was a great few days. Old friends making up meaningless songs, then going on a long walk for no reason. Life doesn’t get much better.