Pretty Fly For A White Guy

Indiana Jane is in town for a few days, and I was telling her how backwards I used to sound. I demonstrated with this: "Ahh cain't see mah pahh cawze thares rahce in mah ahh (translation: I can't see my pie 'cause there's rice in my eye.)" Shortly after realizing that it rhymed, I mentioned that I could re-invent myself as a middle-aged white hip hop performer. My rap name would be "Old Cracker." Indiana Jane countered with the far superior "Stale Cracker."

Too Much To Do

Well, I'll never complain about being bored again. Mrs. Troubadour and I have been busy getting the doors open to our new business and remodeling an historic home. One night about a month ago we were in bed, exhausted, when I joked that we were wasting six hours every night just laying there unconscious. "We should adopt an infant," I said. Mrs. Troubadour really needs to pay attention to the subtle verbal clues I give when I'm trying to be funny. A few weeks later she adopted a puppy, and we have added "housebreaking a stubborn mutt" to our mile-long list of things to do.

Phase one of the remodel is complete, now we just need to paint most of the rooms and unpack most of the boxes. Our oldest daughter, The Professor, remarked via Skype that "Mom must be unpacking like a mad ass." Indiana Jane and The Professor will both be visiting next month, so hopefully they'll be able to sleep in the guest bedroom instead of on the living room sofa.

As for the business, even though I was sent on a month-long wild goose chase by a misinformed health department employee and the T.A.B.C. caused most of my remaining brown hairs to either join their gray brothers or abandon ship, I can now say it was worth it. Gourmage of Texas is now open, and although we haven't publicized the store yet, the word of mouth traffic has been positive and gratifying.

Gourmage is Mrs. Troubadour's invented word for gourmet fromage, and we have a wide range of cheeses from around the world, as well as a nice selection of hard to find wines, dark beer, French desserts, and hand made chocolates. The shelves are filled with organic and natural grocery items, the walls are adorned with reprints of vintage French and Italian advertising posters, and the air is often filled with the aroma of fresh baked baguettes and croissants. With the exception of the wine and dark beer we have personally tasted everything in the shop. Not a bad deal, and good work if you can get it.
Speaking of good work, we hired a sommelier, Sam Hovland, to personally taste and choose the wines we carry. The only criteria we gave him was that we wanted to be able to offer little known great wines at a reasonable price. We had our first tasting yesterday, and all agreed that Sam did a wonderful job.

Now all that's left to do is paint the house, landscape the yard, publicize the business, housebreak the puppy, lose ten pounds, finish recording my CD...

Kermit Was Right

It ain't easy bein' green.

Wind
I've been trolling the web for over a year trying to find an affordable wind turbine for the house we're building. One of the 1.5KW turbines I researched had an MSRP of $7500 and a 40 year break even point, if I installed it myself. The company selling this particular product recommended that the installers charge between $7500 and $20,000 for the install alone, based on degree of difficulty. This is a company that only cares about the green they can put in their pocket, and is apparently convinced that there are enough fools out there to help them rake it in. Let's hope they're wrong.

Pacwind sells the 3KW vertical axis wind turbine featured on Living With Ed for less than $5000, but has recently experienced some quality control and customer service issues. At least they are closer to having a product with a reasonable break even point.

What is a reasonable price for a 3KW wind turbine? I'm not convinced that any of them have more than $1000 invested in parts and labor, including the inverter needed to tie the system into the power grid. If you are a wind turbine manufacturer, and you put a 50% mark-up on your product, they will fly out the door, you'll get rich, and as a bonus will play a big part in saving the environment and weaning this country off of foreign oil. That doesn't seem like a bad deal.

Water
We're building in Hays county, Texas. Hays county recently outlawed gray water recovery systems, due to the large number of people installing them incorrectly and causing the run-off to discharge into the creeks and aquifers.

We are having a rainwater recovery system installed, instead of drilling a well. The costs will be the same, but the impact on the environment will be much less.

Solar
Way out of our league, for now. We'll build the house solar panel ready, and hope the rumors of a big price drop in the next few years actually happens.

Insulation
We're insulating our new home with a soy based foam. The foam, along with the aluminum roof, will cut our electricity costs dramatically, by a whopping 70%!

Gone Fishin'

I'll be moving in less than a month, and before that happens I'm going to try to go fishing with my friend Neil. We're talking about a deep sea charter out of Port Aransas, but may just settle on catching a few speckled trout in Galveston.

I haven't fished in years. I'm the type of person that goes a little nuts when I find something I like to do. The last time I fished on a regular basis was when I was living in the desert town of El Centro, California. El Centro is a farming community in the Imperial Valley, and although it is in fact in the middle of the desert, the valley is green because the farmers there are able to irrigate their crops by diverting water from the Colorado river. The irrigation canals were full of large mouth bass, and I fished the canals six days a week with my buddy Curtis. The one day each week that wasn't devoted to bass fishing found us about a hundred miles away on Mount Julian, fishing for rainbow trout on Lake Cuyamaca.

We went every Wednesday for about a year. We'd leave El Centro at five in the morning, and arrive at the marina on Lake Cuyamaca a few minutes before the ranger station opened at seven. On spring mornings there was usually a thick fog over the cool water; in the winter the park surrounding the lake was covered by a blanket of snow. Personal watercraft weren't allowed on the lake, so for twenty dollars we'd rent a small john boat with an ancient 5hp Evinrude from the rangers and head out.

They stocked the lake with rainbow trout on Tuesdays, by the time Curtis and I arrived the next day the trout were acclimated to their new surroundings and ready to eat. We'd catch our limit of five each by noon, turn the boat in, clean the fish (rainbow trout are ridiculously easy to clean), and settle in for a nice lunch at the marina restaurant. By one o'clock we were back on the road, headed to El Centro.

We were good fishing partners, both of us quiet anglers with little or no need for conversation once we were out on the water. Curtis was Chippewa, and had the reverent sensibility most Native Americans share when it comes to the outdoors. With peaceful surroundings and a silent nature, it's easy to get lost in your own thoughts; almost like being in a trance. One morning when we were out on the lake Curtis whispered my name (later he told me that he'd said my name five times before it registered); because of the whisper I had the presence of mind to move slowly. I looked at Curtis, and with the slightest nod of his head, he motioned toward the shore. I turned my head until I could follow his line of sight, and saw a mountain lion at the waters' edge, taking a cool drink. We stared at it for perhaps ten or twelve seconds, until the second sense possessed by most living things kicked in. It felt us looking at it, and briefly returned our gaze before turning on its haunches and bounding up to the top of the hill, disappearing over the rise, covering a distance of about thirty yards in just a few leaps and bounds.

Cherokee People

Indian Reservation
(C) John D. Loudermilk

They took the whole Cherokee nation,
Put us on this reservation,
Took away our ways of life,
The tomahawk and the bow and knife,
Took away our native tongue,
And taught their English to our young,
And all the beads we made by hand,
Are nowadays made in Japan,

Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe,
So proud to live, so proud to die,

They took the whole Indian nation,
Locked us on this reservation,
Though I wear a shirt and tie,
I'm still part redman deep inside,

Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe,
So proud to live, so proud to die,

But maybe someday when they learn,
Cherokee nation will return, will return, will return, will return, will return.

Like many East Texas boys, I've got a little Cherokee blood in me. Not enough, perhaps, to lay claim to being a "Native American", but enough to be very proud of that part of my heritage. I've always identified with the native people, and as a small child never wanted to play the part of the cowboy during our neighborhood make believe shoot-em-ups.

I had just turned eleven when Paul Revere and the Raiders made "Indian Reservation" a hit song. It resonated deep inside me, like many good songs do, but had the added element of connecting with me in a way no other song had connected before. It spoke to an ancient part of me, and at once I was proud and a little sad.

Dry Days

The little town we're moving to hasn't had any significant rainfall in six months. The creeks and rivers are drying up, but the Ashe Junipers (they're known as Mountain Cedars around here) are doing fine.

Many people have the mistaken belief that the Ashe Juniper is a foreign species, brought here between eighty and fifty years ago, depending on who you talk to. The truth is, they're a native species, mostly confined to box canyons until about a hundred years ago when European settlers first started trying to tame the Hill Country. Before this part of the world became populated year round, Mother Nature would unleash an occasional fire to keep them in check. When the towns and farms started popping up, we kept the fires in check, and the Ashe Junipers took over.

It's a touchy issue. One endangered species depends on the bark of the Ashe Juniper for survival, several others are being edged out of existence because of the Juniper's thirst. The trees are ideally suited to drought conditions, going dormant during dry spells and greedily sucking up every drop of precious water they can get during the wet season. They proliferate until the rest of the native plant life is squeezed out. The iconic Live Oak tree often falls victim to the dense population of Juniper.

Yesterday I heard about the owner of a chain of fast food restaurants. He told his realtor he wanted the worst thousand acres in the Texas Hill Country. The realtor delivered, and soon the fast food king was the proud owner of a Juniper forest. He immediately began clearing his acreage, and now has six natural springs on his property, the precious life-giving liquid bubbling up from the once parched earth.

We've got a few Junipers on our property, down by the creek. The previous owner cleared most of them already, leaving only the ones that were hardest to reach. We'll do a little more research before removing them.

Subterranean Homesick Bob

In the mid-eighties, when I was living in Austin, TX, Bob Dylan was on tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. They played at the Frank Irwin Center, and I was new to Austin and still without an adequate grasp of just how laid back the city is. I arrived two hours early for the concert, convinced that showing up later would doom me to having to park miles away from the venue.

I was the first one there, of course, and killed time by wandering around the perimeter of the building, wondering if I'd ever be famous enough to get a gig at a place that size. I rounded a corner and saw the opening for the underground bus barn. As I considered (and then rejected) the idea of walking into the building, a Buffalo Springfield bus pulled up beside me, the air brakes hissing as it came to a stop. I glanced around, but did not see anyone else nearby. When I turned my attention back to the bus the doors opened, and the first person off was Bob Dylan.

About twenty people materialized out of thin air, asking Bob for his autograph, some pestering him with questions, others professing their undying love and devotion. The best way to describe what happened next is to say that Bob just shrank, crawling into himself like a nervous turtle. He remained silent as he signed the scraps of paper thrust towards him, nodding his head to the noise of his fans, or maybe just keeping time to a song that only he could hear. I was not one of the autograph seekers. I merely observed, believing with the conviction of a babe in the woods that someday I would meet Bob on equal footing.

"Will," he'd say. "I really like your songs."

Later that night when Bob took the stage, he was a much more animated version of his previous self.

"Hey, how's everybody doin', (mumble, unintelligible) alright!"

Bob was excited, and plowed into his catalog with the fervor and energy of a child evangelist on a caffeine jag. He is notorious for changing the arrangements of his songs, and at one point in the evening, three quarters of the way through a tune that no one in the audience had so far recognized, it hit us; he was playing "Blowin' In The Wind."

You haven't lived until you've seen over twenty thousand people simultaneously fumbling for their lighters, anxious to add their personal ray of light to a song that changed their lives, and perhaps, the world.

Starting Over

We're in Wimberley for the next few days, meeting with builders, and it struck me that once the new place is built this will probably be the last time I start over. I've lived in so many different places, and finally found a spot that feels like home.

Minimalist by nature, out of the seventeen times that I've changed cities, I've given away most of my household goods on at least a dozen occasions. Most of the time I'd leave with nothing but my guitar, a few clothes shoved into a suitcase, and a couple of boxes of books, music (Lp's, tapes, Cd's), and song lyrics, and a handful of keepsakes. My wife, on the other hand, has saved damn near everything she's ever laid her sentimental hands on, from the time she was about six years old. I can already feel the first twinge of lower back pain.

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Three very cool things are just around the corner. At the moment I'm in a holding pattern, biding my time until the fun starts. My wife and I own property outside of Austin in the Texas Hill Country, and will be moving there soon to build our dream home. About that same time I will begin recording a new CD, and at the end of the year we're taking a family vacation in Vienna and Paris. It's like I'm a kid again, and Christmas is still so far away.

Christmas was sometimes a pretty tough holiday when I was a kid. My stepfather worked as a union electrician, and went on strike every two or three years. Santa never skipped our home, but I did notice that some years he was considerably less generous than others. Occasionally the season was pretty good.
One year, when I was about ten, my mom woke me up in the middle of the night.

"Wanna know what you got for Christmas?!"

I had already figured out the deal with Santa, and excitedly agreed to this rare privilege. Mom grew up poor, and on her best Christmas probably received less than her children did on our worst. This year Christmas was especially good, and Mom was so happy she just had to tell someone. We snuck out of the room I shared with two of my brothers, and Mom showed me some of the toys I was getting. I couldn't believe my luck. It was the best Christmas yet, gift-wise. Mom let me play quietly with one of the toys for a few minutes, then it was back to bed so that she could re wrap my presents and hide them until Christmas morning.

Mom was a kid when she had me. Married at eighteen and a new mother at nineteen, looking back I marvel at what a kid she was for most of my childhood. She was and is a great mom, but when I become impatient, and start focusing on the destination rather than the journey, I remember that I come by it honestly.

What Was I Thinking?

Someone once said that you need to be an introvert to write and an extrovert to perform. I suppose this means that singer/songwriters like myself suffer from (at best) a mild case of multiple personality disorder. I jest, but it sure feels that way sometimes.

Many of my contemporaries are very talented at working the room when they are off-stage, and in fact, consider themselves to be onstage from the time they enter the venue until the time that they leave. They'll walk from table to table, introducing themselves to complete strangers and thanking them for coming out to the show. They'll mention their website, gather email addresses and phone numbers, offer to autograph Cd's and pose for photos.

I can be as gregarious as the next person when I'm on stage. I'll tell stories between songs, joke with the audience, and on a good night give a performance smooth enough to convince almost anyone that what I'm doing is the easiest thing in the world. As soon as I exit the stage the introvert takes over and I feel exposed. My eyes hit the floor, and I shuffle off to a corner of the room to steal glances at the crowd while wondering if I've made a complete fool of myself. If anyone approaches me off-stage with a kind word I'll mumble a thank you and try to extricate myself from the conversation as soon as possible. I'm sure that on more than one occasion someone has mistaken my shyness for conceit.

There are many like me, other singer/songwriters, actors, you name it. Many people are in the entertainment industry because they want to be "rich and famous", but some of us are in it because we've found that one thing that helps the world make sense for us, and we can't imagine life without it. For me it has always been music.

I used to ride my bicycle to school in the first grade and make up two songs on the way there. I thought everyone did it. When I got a little older I realized that making up songs was something kind of special, and assumed that I would one day be a writer of some sort. It felt right. It felt good. I've spoken with actors who've had a similar experience the first time they got roped into doing a school play. From the moment they started pretending, it made sense to them. In a strange way it helped them to feel more connected with other people.

That's what music is for me. A way to connect with my fellow human beings. When I got out of the Navy I moved to Austin, TX with the intent of becoming a professional songwriter. I imagined that the way I would become established as a tunesmith was that other musicians would hear my songs, record them, and once word got around I could just stay home and write songs full-time. So I started booking a few gigs and waited for the other musicians to beat a path to my door. One night I was playing in a club across town and noticed a table full of people who looked vaguely familiar. I leaned over and asked them where I'd seen them before and they replied that they'd heard me earlier in the week at a club on Sixth Street.

"What brings y'all to this side of town?"

"You mentioned that you would be playing here, so we came out."

For most entertainers this would be a wonderful thing to hear. It freaked me out. For some reason it had never occurred to me that anyone would see me as an entertainer. I was a writer, looking for someone else to be the front man. I had a few more gigs booked for the upcoming weeks. After I honored my commitments I did not perform in public for the next six years. I only came out of my self-imposed exile because I missed making that human connection.

Sailing...

When I graduated high school I took a job working the graveyard shift while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I worked from ten at night until six in the morning. My friend Ray worked rotating shifts at a local refinery, and every five weeks would have an eight day break. Both of his parents were originally from the Cayman Islands, and Ray had the sea in his blood. Shortly after I started the night shift, Ray bought a
Cal 20 sailboat. I'd usually get home around seven am, crawl into bed, and hear the doorbell ring at about seven thirty. "Hey man, you wanna go sailing?"

He kept the boat in the marina at Pleasure Island, near Port Arthur, TX. There were many refineries on the way to the marina; we had to drive a gauntlet of toxicity to get there. We'd stop at the marina store so Ray could get a six pack of Heineken beer, it was the brew of choice back on Grand Cayman and Ray was all about giving me an authentic experience. Once, as a joke, I paid ten bucks each for a couple of yachting hats and Ray and I did our best to try to out Thurston Howell the Third each other.

Once aboard we'd crank up the Jimmy Buffett cassettes, and Ray would teach me how to sail.

"Hoist the mains'l! Hoist the jib! Helms alee! Prepare to come about!"

That's pretty much all of the sailing terms I remember. We'd glide out beyond the jetties into the Gulf of Mexico, and I remain as amazed now as I was back then that you could move that fast with the wind as your only engine. It was thrilling and peaceful all at the same time, and as I became aware of the sound of the wind shoving against the sails and whistling through the rigging the music faded into the background, and I felt the serenity of an honest man at the end of a long days work.

Ray and I tried to figure out how to sail and listen to Jimmy Buffett for a living, but we were too chicken to smuggle. Ray was a newlywed, and his wife had deep roots in the Golden Triangle area of Texas, so moving someplace where the water was blue enough and the sand white enough to make a living running charters was also out of the question. So we'd sail until the late afternoon, and I'd get back to my little apartment and catch about three hours of sleep before I made the drive into work. The next morning Ray would ring my doorbell, and off we'd go again.

It's A Small World After All...

I was a young man with girl problems. Overweight as a boy, I spent most of my formative years trying not to be noticed, and succeeded to the point that I might as well have been invisible. This was a great strategy around bullies, but did not work out so well when trying to attract the attention of the fairer sex. I had a crush on a young co-worker, and not a clue on how to talk to her. Soon she had a steady boyfriend, and all hope was lost. I felt very alone.

Around that time the local radio stations started playing a song called "You've Got A Lover" by Shake Russell. Wow! Here was someone else in the world that knew exactly how I felt. I was still bummed out about my situation, and too shy to do anything about it, but some of the sting was gone. I was not alone.

"You've got a lover, but it's not me,
He can't love you like I can,
There will be others yes I understand,
Will they love me, like you can."

Several years went by and I was introduced to Shake at a party. We eventually became friends and did a few shows and wrote a few songs together. I've never told him how his song helped me through that rough time in my life. Shake's a modest person, maybe even shyer than I ever was, and I don't want to embarrass him. Still, it would be nice if he knew.

That was an old school, pre-Internet connection. Now things are a bit easier. A few clicks of the mouse and you can go around the world a few times, courtesy of the links pages on some of your favorite websites. Six degrees of separation is now closer to three or four. Thanks to the Internet old friends have gotten in touch with me, I've heard great music that was inaccessible before, and made connections with good people whose path I may never have crossed otherwise. Today I received a nice greeting and a compliment from a Portuguese playwright with a generous spirit. Someday I hope to attend a play written by my new friend.

Nature's Pantry

I grew up in a small town near the Gulf of Mexico, one generation removed from the piney woods of east Texas. There were plenty of places to fish, pick dewberries and gather pecans; I still know of a few spots where I can accomplish all three activities without walking more than fifty feet. Almost everyone I grew up with shares a similar skill set and I'm willing to bet that so far, none of us has yet starved to death.

My wife, a Minnesota girl, has never been crabbing. This came up earlier today when we shelled out ten bucks for a pound of snow crab legs at the supermarket. It shamed me a little, reminding me of how far removed I've become from the food I eat. Degree of difficulty is no excuse. Comedians like to point out that fishing is barely a sport. Crabbing is easier. One of the first things I remember being able to out-smart were blue crabs, and as I think about it now I realize that besides being a great excuse to get outdoors, crabbing offers up a neat little life lesson, as the greed of the crab and the patience of the angler are both required to have a successful outing.


Chicken necks are the bait of choice for most recreational crabbers; we'd tie these to a piece of string and wait for it to twitch. Once we felt that little bit of pressure on the other end of the line, we'd slowly pull the string out of the water, until we could see the crab emerge from the murky depths below. The crab's appearance was our cue to stealthily move the net behind the crab, out of its field of vision so as not to spook it, and then into the ice chest it went. This method works because crabs are gluttonous little crustaceans, and will not let go of a tasty morsel until their beady insectile eyes register an imminent threat.

Of course, now it's a good idea to check water quality levels before availing yourself of nature's bounty. Around the time that I was putting my first organic garden to bed, one of my little brothers was fishing in the canal behind our house. One of the refineries discharged something into the water, and moments later every fish in the canal simultaneously floated belly up. "Well," my brother thought, "I guess I won't be fishing here anymore."

More Travelers' Tales

When I returned to Nashville, Tennessee from beautiful downtown Montreux, Switzerland, most of my co-workers at the Belle Carol Riverboat Company were already in Cincinnati, Ohio for the Tall Stacks Riverboat Festival. I caught a ride up to Ohio with the remainder of the crew, and for the next five days and nights we entertained visitors from all over the world with scenic brunch and dinner cruises along the Ohio River. While I had a great time at the festival, the best part was taking one of our two riverboats back to our home port.

It took four of us an additional five days to travel down the Ohio, then up the Cumberland back to Nashville. We navigated through several locks and saw parts of the country that only a very few ever get to lay eyes on. Many stretches of river were completely uninhabited, and on one night in particular our little riverboat was the only source of man-made light for miles and miles.

We were on the Captain Anne, the smaller of our two vessels. The Anne was a two deck paddle wheel driven boat, with a wooden ship's wheel for steering. There was a pilothouse on top of the second deck, and on the night we were the farthest from civilization, I climbed on top of the pilothouse roof and lay on my back to do some stargazing. I could see billions of lights, the dark velvet sky the perfect backdrop for stars that looked like diamonds. It was an ideal setting to contemplate where I was in life, and where I hoped to go. I had just returned from an amazing experience in Europe, with audiences that treated musicians like professionals, instead of unrealistic dreamers. While I knew that I might not have been able to have this experience if I had not moved to Nashville, it was obvious to me, and had been for a long time, that I was too far out of the mainstream to make it as a writer or as an artist in the country music capitol. I missed Texas, and knew that the music scene there was a much better fit for me.

A few days later, on a crisp October evening we pulled into our dock at Riverfront Park in downtown Nashville. It was something I'd done hundreds of times, and suddenly I felt as if I no longer belonged. I was going home to Texas.