The Patron Saint of Tangle Blue

Trinity County is the poorest county in California, but I wouldn’t have guessed it based on my first drive down the main street of Weaverville. The streets are clean. The air is fresh. I see a few bums, but not the zombie legions that inhabit every nook and cranny they can conquer in Oakland and San Francisco. It takes a different, wiser, harder type of bum to make it through winter at the foot of the Trinity Alps. They’re almost what you’d call polite.

My friend Trevor and I are here doing side work for a friend of a friend, installing two mini-splits at an RV park. We’ll be here for a week, sleeping in the bunkhouse where we’re doing the work. It’s late Sunday afternoon. There’s a small grove of ornamental plums along the side of the building, their delicate white and pink flowers blooming into their full glory in the chill of early spring. My dad planted one in our front yard for Mother’s Day when I was young. We got foreclosed out of that house. The new owners tore down the white picket fence Dad built, and trimmed off the best climbing branches of the oak tree, but the plum still grows. There are ornamental plums all over Weaverville.

Three-Dollar Banquets

As far as we could tell, it wasn’t a one watering-hole town; it was at least a three watering-hole town. That night, we tried the closest one, a decent enough brewery with a better burger, of the sort that has sprouted up like mushrooms across the West Coast in the last decade. In Alameda, they build them inside warehouses at the old Navy base; in Weaverville, it’s an old logging building, or more likely was built to mimic one. We don’t go back. Trevor and I both like local color, and you can get basically the same IPA and burger—at basically the same brewery, with basically the same interior decor, right down to the chalkboard menu with “art” all over it—from one end of the state to the other.

It snows on Monday, but that doesn’t stop the job. We put up a tarp and get to work ripping open the bunkhouse’s wall so we can run new electrical to the units. After a long, wet day, we go to the smoke shop— operated by a Persian, an upgrade from the ones back in the Bay—and ask him where to get a drink. He recommends Tangle Blue, on the other side of town. We arrive. We order Coors Banquet. Three bucks a pop. Pool is 50 cents. There’s chess and an elk’s head mounted on the wall. We’d found what we would be doing every night after work.

When we walk up, Cloud is swinging what he calls his “attention-getter.”

Outside, smoking cigarettes, I strike up a conversation with a local about the previously unknown and, to me, incredible fact that the Forest Service can pull you over and give you tickets, which Trevor and I had witnessed a couple hundred feet down the road from their building on the edge of town. The main street through Weaverville does double duty as the highway. So, add the sheriffs, Highway Patrol, and apparently CalFire, and it’s a brave man who breaks 25 in town. We got pulled over on our first night in town for expired registration.

Trevor is smoking and having a different conversation with a character with long gray hair and beard with piercing blue eyes, in a bandana and a worn leather biker’s cut. The guy I’m talking to heads back inside, and I head toward Trevor and the biker. They seem to be near the end of their conversation, and about 30 seconds later, Trevor and I head back to his truck.

I don’t know it yet, but we both just had our first encounter with Cloud, the true sheriff of Weaverville.

Cloud’s story unfolds to us bit by bit, night by night, as the week goes by. Any other guy who told me a quarter of what Cloud did I’d have called a bullshitter. He grew up on an Apache rez in Arizona and ran away young. He turned up at a ranch owned by a John Wayne stunt double who taught actors how to be cowboys, which is where Cloud learned to shoot. He’s a convicted felon. He’s been an almost-every-night regular at Tangle Blue since it was called the Sawmill (a far superior name, by my estimation). He tells us, “There’s only ever been three fights here. All three times was when I wasn’t here.” He says the secret to growing good weed is just to use concentrated mango juice and water, like he does. His grandfather died at the age of 107, after being kicked by a mule.

I suppose it’s possible the whole bar was in on a grand joke to mess with the out-of-towners. Call me a fool if you like, but Cloud has me convinced.

Early the next morning, as tends to happen on jobs like this, we need to go to the hardware store because we forgot some things “like retards.” We decide we might as well get breakfast in town. Everybody in the diner looks north of 60, and it reminds me of a scene from Hell or High Water where Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham get harangued by an old battleaxe waitress.

The locally owned hardware store has a cashier who is apparently the only woman in town under 25. She’d be a six or so in the Bay, which makes her a Weaverville eight. Naturally, Trevor hits on her. She turns him down, apparently in such a way that every subsequent “we’re retarded” trip to the hardware store (this happens at a rate of about once per day initially and accelerates in the last few days of the job, when it’s going south), he decides to go to the Ace on the other side of town.

Materials and rejection acquired, we work until sundown and then head to the bar. A flirtatious bartender, certainly also a Weaverville eight, raises Trevor’s hopes, smokes a cigarette with us, then disappears for the rest of the week. Then our biker friend turns up, and Trevor turns to me and says, “You’ve got to meet Cloud.” My first reaction is skepticism of my need to meet a “Cloud,” which conjures images of geriatric hippies in my mind. It’s my only moment of doubt.

When we walk up, Cloud is swinging what he calls his “attention-getter.” It’s a marble wrapped in paracord on the end of about two feet of the same. He explains its ins and outs to us. Whenever someone at the bar is acting up, Cloud will hit them with it. “And I ask ‘em, are you awake yet? Are you paying attention?” He points out all the places on the body where it has the greatest effect. Collar bone, funny bone, knees, shins, all the little bones in the hand. He demonstrates for us (after a few Coors Banquets, on us), and I can vouch for its usefulness. The conversation moves outside for a smoke. “Everyone in my sphere is in my protective custody,” he explains to us during more demonstrations of “regulatin’,” as he calls it. Most of the rest of the night is taken up with stories of the application of this principle and his preferred tool for the job. “You don’t make it so he can’t go to work the next morning,” he says. “Unless they really need it.” Through all this, I think of Hell or High Water a second time, because Cloud sounds like an even more gravelly-voiced Jeff Bridges.

When it’s close to quitting time, not wanting to get pulled over again, Trevor asks Cloud where to look out for cops. With a precision and depth that would put military intelligence to shame, Cloud gives us a 15-minute brief. Sheriffs up on that hill by that church at this time of night for this long, and on the side of the grocery store across the way, and near the logging museum. CHP down this side street by this tree, and by the old Baptist clapboard church, and by the Chinese restaurant. Feds most active on our end of town. And on and on. I am in awe.

“And make sure you eat some peanuts,” Cloud tells us. “Peanut oil hides the alcohol. I’ve got to take you boys to Cloud School. You roll down your window and look that cop in the eye and give him a big friendly ‘Hello officer,’ and all he gets is a big cloud of peanut oil.” He acts this out several times with hand gestures (and much slurring) to make sure the lesson sinks in, then he laughs. “All that is my fault. I did their job for them so well they’re bored out of their skulls, and all they’ve got to do is pull people over.” Not quite sure what he means, we say our thank yous and goodnights. In three of the exact places he’d pointed out, we see sheriffs and CHP.

Wolf Dogs and Federal Time

Monday may have seen snow, but by Wednesday, it’s hot. From sun up to sundown we’re at work. We mount both condensers high up on the bunkhouse’s exterior walls so they don’t get covered in snow. This required quite a bit of sketchy ladder work that would make OSHA cry and piss their pants, especially on the southern wall, where one leg of the ladder rests on four wooden boards we scavenge from around the property, and both are held in place and prevented from sliding and falling down (with us and the condenser with it) by some providential cinder blocks we turn up. At lunchtime, I buy a picture of Stitch and Angel made with sparkly beads from the nice lady who runs the front desk for my girlfriend. She has dozens of these that she made hanging up for sale, and while I never got explicit confirmation, I am under the impression I am her first customer. That night, exhausted and ready for a drink or two or eight, we light up with smiles to see Cloud already sitting at the bar with two spare Coors Banquets.

“There’s only ever been three fights here. All three times was when I wasn’t here.”

As has become our pattern, we head outside for a smoke and more Cloud School. He expounds on his philosophy, which he sums up as “good to friends, violent to enemies.” We learn, almost as an afterthought, that he spent 35 years in the federal pen. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. Though it is the subject of much downtime speculation between Trevor and me ever since, we never learn what earned him that stretch, though we have our guesses. We get more details of Cloud’s regulatin’. When he first arrived in Weaverville, the main street was overrun with “methhead tweakers.” Cloud doesn’t like methhead tweakers, especially not when they spend their time harassing people and dirtying up the place. So Cloud would go regulatin’. This involved a steady campaign of 3 a.m. visits, with Cloud in a ghillie suit, night-vision goggles, with one of his wolf dogs at his side, until the tweakers learned manners. Trevor and I, filled with what could artfully be called frustrations with the state of law and order in the Bay Area that we have vocally expressed to him along with our own meager efforts, think this is fucking badass. Speaking personally, Cloud makes me feel like a bit of a coward. He also makes me want to be brave.

He steadily drops the “dog” from “wolf dog” as the night goes on, and frankly, if there’s anyone who I would believe actually raises wolves, it’s this man. He tells us a sad story about his “beautiful girl,” Swift Arrow, who had silvery white fur. Someone poisoned her. He tells us what he’d do to the person who did it if he ever found them.

He tells us the story of how he ended up in Weaverville. He came there “on a retreat,” looked around, and said “Yeah, this is it.” When I think of the Trinity Alps capped in snow and the green pines and the clear fresh air, and most of all the blooming plum trees, I understand.

He tells us many other stories I won’t write down.

The True Sheriff of Weaverville

Friday, the job starts to go badly. We have mystery problems. The units won’t turn on. We’ve worked our asses off running conduit, installing new electrical and refrigerant lines, and hoisting condensers and mounting head units. We have to go to the stupid Ace for the third time in a day, and get stared at by the old farts who work there and shake their heads at us, just to buy a multimeter because we’re both retards who left ours at home, but I’m the bigger retard because I’m the licensed HVAC tech. Trevor and I are both in doubt about whether we’ll get paid without proof of unit function, and we both really need the money. Our best diagnosis is that the bunkhouse’s electrical panel is old and isn’t up to the task. We worry we fried the control board in the units, which is basically the system’s brain. A real AC only needs about three parts. Newer ones, because of efficiency standards, communicating systems, and the ability to run the refrigeration cycle in reverse to enable heating mode, require what’s basically a finicky computer. Sensitive, overcomplicated, and expensive, and while not impossible to replace, certainly impossible to replace in Weaverville on our timetable.

We never get them to turn on, and the long drive home on Sunday is tense and silent. Trevor’s truck doesn’t have AC, so it’s also a hot one, even with the windows down. South of Redding on the I-5, both sides of the highway for miles and miles are marked by dozens of thick columns of oily black smoke that stretch to the heavens. Burn piles from the local farmers and ranchers. The pale trunk of a lonely willow and its silvery green leaves are outlined against the smoke of a distant burn. It feels like the whole Sacramento Valley is on fire.

Trevor gets a phone call from the property owner a few miles north of Corning. It’s only about 30 seconds, but it felt like 30 minutes, and I can’t glean much from Trevor’s responses. When he hangs up, Trevor tells me we’re getting paid after all. We pull over at a Chevron to smoke a cigarette in relief. Months later, we will find out that the property owner had an electrician come to the property, and our diagnosis of a bad panel was correct. We stand on some dead grass underneath a stunted and scraggly valley oak that doesn’t provide any shade in the late afternoon sun. As I take a drag on a Marlboro Red, I look down at the highlighter-yellow paracord of my attention-getter hanging on my keychain and swing it around.

On our last night in town, unplanned because we stayed an extra day to try to unfuck everything in a manic 12-hour troubleshooting session, we had gone to the bar to drink our troubles away. Cloud was there, beers in hand, and something else. He gave each of us a miniature attention-getter. We’ve graduated from Cloud School, and these are our diplomas. We’ve been inducted, initiated.

“Use them for good,” he instructed us. They don’t make them like Cloud anymore. They should. Maybe they do, and they’re just in places like Weaverville, laughing at all the fools.