How We Spent Labor Day

Posted on September 2, 2003 in Festivals Hiking The Orange

I wish I could say that I found a celebration where I could rub elbows with ordinary people and eat hot dogs while we listened to a working man as eloquent as William Pitt Rivers remind us of everything we owed to labor unions. But I didn’t. I spent it alone, with Lynn and the cats. I reflected a bit on the working people in my family who’d helped build the western railroads, aircraft, and ships. I thought about how I’d wimped out when a union tried to organize the last company I worked at and how I ended up on the black list all the same for attempting not to take sides (as an elderly Quaker suggested I do). I sold out my brother and sister workers by not declaring my support. I did it because I shared an office with the owner and the vice president of the company. I failed to speak because I was afraid that I couldn’t live without that crummy job as a computer operator.

Lynn told me that her sister was pregnant after many years of trying. I was happy for Jessie and sad that I had failed my wife all these years.

To put things like that out of my mind, I wrote and then went to hike the Valido Trail. We crept and choked up the trail, through the low chaparral until we reached Aliso Peak, a headland — not a mountain — that tops out at 683 feet. Below me was the affluent Orange Coast. Condos and private weekend estates, walled off or positioned along the edges of steep Valido Canyon. On the north side, a golf course covered the ground near the mouth of Aliso Canyon. I could see golfers on the greens where I was not welcome –because golf courses are for golfers who can afford the membership and the greens fees — and bathers running on Aliso Beach, oblivious to the pollution running out of the stream mouth. Maybe a few of the beach lovers actually had to worry about the next paycheck. Here and there, steep headlands blocked off private beaches. The wealthy of Orange County did not need to use the tainted public beach if they could afford to buy in the private reserves.

I could see hotels where weekenders from Los Angeles checked in and the piers where the public fished. Motorboats cut white borders about half a mile out. A biplane flew past advertising a sale at a clothing store. I could not check into the motels, ride in the motorboats, or afford to hire a biplane to drag the message I wanted the beach people to see which was “You’re being screwed!”

On the way down the trail, we ran into a mother with her daughter and her daughter’s friend. The friend boasted that her parents had gone to a fundraiser and met Arnold Schwartzenegger. “He’s not as arrogant as he used to be when he was younger,” said the girl, parroting the precise words her daddy had committed to her memory.

As we passed, I said to the mother “He’s not a lot of things that he used to be when he was younger.”

She laughed — I was surprised — and said “Yes, I know. I read an article about that stuff.”

Her daughter asked “About what?”

“Never you mind!” I said in a mock authoritarian voice.

The mother laughed. “Adult stuff,” she said. “Not for youngsters.”

Lynn and I went home, ate out of the refrigerator. I wrote some more. Now, after a shower to get the pollen out of my hair, I am back at the keyboard, typing. Uselessly? I don’t know.