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joe's bio |
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Alta
and Miro |
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The town sits on a shelf of land overlooking a
treacherous coast. The prevailing winds, westerlies, whip foam from the breakers rolling
in off the Pacific to dash against dark rocks that jut out of the water like shark fins.
For the sailors manning the dog hole schooners fetching lumber south to rebuild the badly
shaken, burned city of San Francisco in the first years after the earthquake, the striking
rocks were merely a navigational hazard. Only later, after the hardy mariners were long
gone, replaced by harried urbanites seeking a romantic weekend getaway, did some poetic
soul compare the rocks to the faded black sails of lateen-rigged pirate ships that
might've foundered in the shallows. |
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Fog was another hazard. Most days the coast is
shrouded in the eerie white breath of the sea. The flimsy light, diffuse, resembles the
light of dreams. Logging rigs with their headlamps on high beam, the only things moving
along the highway in the early hours, crawl through the mist like creeping somnambulists
with candles. Even if the sky does chance to be blue, the sun, blocked by the eastern
hills, doesn't make an appearance till mid morning, about the same hour Alta and Miro used
to arrive. |
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Nobody ever saw one of these lovers without
seeing the other. Neither did anybody actually ever see them arrive. They would just be
there, Miro with his battered guitar and Alta with her frizzy hair, resting on the porch
of the defunct bar, waiting for the store next door to open. Miro might be strumming the
guitar, coaxing unusual chords from the strings while Alta lilted formless melodies in her
high, ethereal voice. They sounded like Tibetan elevator music, the kind of stuff you
might hear while being tugged to the top of a high-rise luxury hotel in Lhasa. Sometimes
Miro sang a lugubrious accompaniment to his mate's trilling. The effect was uncanny, the
vaguely Himalayan atmosphere of the music suddenly transformed into the endless keening at
an Irish luau. |
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At some point Alta and Miro became part of the
town's folklore. Of course, that didn't take much. It really isn't much of a town. The
houses are little more than termite bait resting on gopher mounds, rickety props for the
nasturtiums slowly devouring the walls. Not a single floor is level, and the cracked
windows are repaired with duct tape. The houses could've been shrugged off the shoulders
of the hills, brushed aside like large chips of dandruff. And added to the luster of the
primitive songs the duet crooned was their curious beer diet, their mysterious abode and
Pedro's dead Ford. |
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The owner of the store, afraid of misplacing
his keys, always left the back door unlocked. When he finally rubbed enough sleep out of
his eyes to amble up the rear steps and switch on the lights, Miro would sling the guitar
over his back. Soon as the front door swung open, he and Alta headed inside for the cooler
and picked up two six-packs of beer. |
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Absent-minded as he may be, the owner is sure
his cash register never rang up anything for them besides bottled beer. On sunny days, the
blissful couple would walk hand-in-hand, six-packs cradled in their free arms, down the
steep path to Shoe Beach. Another piece of local folklore, this sheltered curve of shore
gets its name from the enigmatic fact that it seems to be the repository for all footwear
lost within a five-mile radius of its fine, white sand. There they would sit, watching the
swells, motionless save for the elbow-bending necessary to bring a bottle to the lips, so
still curious sandpipers skittered by for a closer look. |
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Like statues with one mechanical part,
says Pedro, who frequents Shoe Beach during big minus tides to collect mussels from the
outlying rocks. He offered them several pounds of shellfish from a bumper harvest once,
but they politely declined, telling him they were on a beer diet. According to Pedro, they
were convinced their spiritual health and trim figures were the result of the strict
regimen they followed. Maybe you can live on love alone, muses Pedro, if you
water it with plenty of beer. |
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Once one six-pack was polished off, Alta and
Miro climbed the trail back into town, deposited the empties at the store and began the
trek with the other six-pack up the county road twisting into the wooded ridges to the
east. On rainy days they skipped the trip to the beach and carried two six-packs up the
hill. Their destination was a mystery. Each time a passing motorist gave them a lift, the
tandem asked to be let off in a different place. They waved good-bye and disappeared into
the forest, not to be seen again till the next morning, when they would be back on the
porch of the bar, spooking the barn swallows with their music. |
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Pedro almost discovered their lair one night.
He was out bushwhacking through the forest in search of a runaway colt when he heard
singing. He followed his ears, sure the silvery quavers were Alta's. As he got closer, he
realized that the song was in Spanish. But it was very poor Spanish, or some obscure
dialect, and all Pedro could understand was that the lyrics were about a knight named
Gerineldo and some princess who shouldn't have been kissing and embracing him quite so
ardently. |
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He never did find the colt. It returned to the
pasture on its own the next day. And he never tracked down the music. Like the elusive pot
of gold at the end of a rainbow, by the time Pedro approached the place where it ought to
be, the song had already moved elsewhere. |
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A few weeks later he gave the inseparable pair
the gutted Ford in his driveway. He attached a tow bar to the sedan's chassis and hauled
the junker to the county road, to the top of the hill, about four miles from the sea. Now
Alta and Miro could tool into town for beer cool as you please, like knights themselves,
with that tow bar sticking out in front like a lance. Then anyone with a trailer hitch
could lug them back up to the starting place. |
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As luck would have it, the very first morning
the Ford rolled into town a state trooper was idling in front of the store. He watched the
clunker speed past the stop sign at the junction of the county road and the highway, glide
the hundred yards uphill and peter out of momentum. |
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The Ford had neither plates nor registration,
its driver neither a license nor a domicile. These facts were duly noted in the officer's
ticket book, along with the obvious failure to obey. While the trooper was
merrily scribbling, Miro lifted the hood to show him the empty engine compartment. All
those rules and regulations, didn't they only apply to motorized vehicles? The
trooper's grunt indicated that Miro could find out the answer to that one in court. |
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It was a drizzly morning. Alta and Miro sat
necking in the back seat of their much-cited chariot till the store opened, then followed
the long arm of the law inside. The owner heard Miro mumble something about life becoming
way too civilized and complicated as the trooper drove off with his bag of frosted jelly
doughnuts. |
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That was the last day Alta and Miro were ever
seen in town, beginning the long trudge up the hill with their six packs one last time.
Strangely, they weren't missed till the first real storm of winter, when Pedro finally got
the store owner off his back by hauling the Ford carcass back to its resting place in his
driveway. You'd think their absence would've been quickly noted in such a sleepy town, and
that folks starved for gossip might've gone on talking about them for years, though it
must be admitted that much more is happening there these days, particularly on weekends,
now that it's been discovered as an ideal romantic hideaway. |
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Yeah, says Pedro, swiveling on his
vinyl stool to stare out the window of the reopened, revamped bar as we conjure Alta and
Miro out of the swirling wisps of fog, in their own way those two dusty lovebirds were
museum pieces, real pioneers. |
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