THE MILL RUN COLUMNS

 

Mill Run: “Bore”

By Moritz Thomsen

[No clipping, written in notebook]

Los Molinos Sun

 

Someone’s definition of a bore, that covers about 60% of the territory, is: a person who, when you ask him how he is, tells you. A good proportion of the remaining 40% of the bore population consists of war veterans who somehow stopped living when they shed their uniforms and who are, years later, still reliving in their minds what apparently were the only significant periods of their lives.

 

I can remember growing up in the years after the first world war, and knowing certain friends of the family who, in my childish brain, possessed only one characteristic. Joe knew Rickenbacker; Bob was gassed at Belleau Wood; Harry was stationed in Paris. These single facts described them completely; I don’t remember they ever talked about anything else.

 

With this introduction I now propose to enter the ranks and bore you with a few of my own war mementos. After all, Eisenhower, Churchill, and just about anyone else you’d care to mention had done it and I certainly don’t want to be left out.

 

If any single action of mine still lives in the memories of anyone in my bombardment group, if I am still remembered at all, I am in all probability that fellow that was sent out one day to bomb the railroad station in Berlin and missed entire city by 7 miles. Behind me were 60 B-17s manned with 60 bombardiers who dropped their bombs when they saw my bombs leave the plane. Intelligence reported later that we made a 16-acre crater in one the best brussel sprouts fields in the Reich, and I have always been secretly convinced that this action, more than any other, brought about an early victory in Europe. When the U.S. Air Force began concentrating on the elimination of German agriculture, my reasoning goes, when we became so strong that we could spare planes and risk lives from the destruction of military and industrial targets, the Krauts must have realized that the jig was up; at any rate, they surrendered soon after. Well, within a year, anyway.

 

This mission made me locally famous, but one we went on about a month later is the mission that in it contained a five minute period that is my own most important five minutes, and if you want to get right down to it, it is the most important five minutes for about 5,000 other people who don’t even know it. This was the one and only chance I ever got to play at being God.

 

That day because all of our primary targets were covered with clouds we were released from our definite objective. At the time we received this message we were touring around in Germany about 200 miles north of Berlin, flying through cloudless skies. We turned around and headed home for England and my pilot, who was a colonel bucking for general, immediately spotted a little town out on the horizon and told me to bomb it. As usual we were trailed by 60 bombers.

 

It was a little medieval town of about 10,000 people, a perfectly round town with red tile roofs and a cathedral in its exact center from which the streets radiated out like the spokes of a wheel. The name of the town was New Kalen, and it was a farm town, and through the bombsight even from 10 miles off you could see the windows shining in the sun and the carts parked in the streets.

 

Destroying that town was simply inconceivable, but I went through all the motions, crouching over the bombsight and twiddling knobs and pushing buttons. And at the last minute I called the colonel on the intercom and said that out past the town about 3 miles I could see a military airfield and was going to bomb it instead.

 

I imagine we were at least 50 miles from any airfield at the moment, but it sounded very military and tactical and the colonel said O.K. That is the true story behind the headlines of how within a period of 30 days our particular group was enabled to once more deal a death blow to the German brussels sprout industry. I imagine these two missions didn’t cost the U.S. taxpayers much over 50,000,000 dollars—apiece, that is.

 

“Mill Run”

Los Molinos Sun

Thursday, May 12, 1960

By M.T. [Moritz Thomsen]

“Friends”

 

One of my best friends made a special trip out to the ranch the other day, a round trip of about 12 miles at a cost of at least a dollar, just to tell me something disparaging and libelous that Jack Wood had reportedly said to someone else about me. There was just enough meanness in what was theoretically said so that hearing it suddenly without expecting it was like being slapped across the face, and there was just enough truth in it so that I don’t quite have the guts to report it here.

            It wasn’t until a couple of hours after this special trip that I realized what an overpowering sense of joy had possessed my friend as he watched my face go react to this unexpected attack from an unexpected quarter. His eyes flashed and glittered with excitement; his face was almost as red as mine; and unless I’m badly mistaken he was even panting slightly. I don’t remember when I’ve ever seen him so happy unless it was about a month ago while he was telling me that his daddy thought my column was stupid. I must have shrugged my shoulders; at least I didn’t collapse, and a look of uncertainty appeared in his face. “Slim thinks it stinks, too,” he said. Still no reaction, and he began to panic. He sat there in his car, revving his motor nervously, trying to figure out how to get on top of the situation. “Cheez,” he said finally in a tone of disgust, “why don’t you get a haircut?”

            Not all of us are fortunate to have a full-blown, 100 percent, guaranteed sadist for a friend. Sadists are sort of out of style these days; they just don’t hardly make a good old fashioned sadist any more like Kraft-Ebbing used to interview back in the dying days of the Victorian era. If you ever meet one, cultivate and cherish him. He will be an education, illuminating and pointing up the dark side of human nature like nothing else.

            Because the truth is, as Freud pointed out, that you learn about human motivations and studying the so-called abnormal. Everyone contains everything; we differ only in degree.

            What I learned, for instance, is that there are three distinct pleasures involved in the small town habit of tearing down your neighbor. There is the primary pleasure which comes from saying the thing in the first place, that swelling of the ego that comes from judging someone. By pushing someone down a little you automatically end up a little higher than you were. An illustration of this can be found in the south, where an entire race has found it necessary to push down another entire race. The amazing thing is that the ones who are pushing the hardest, who hate the negro the most, are the poorest, most squalid and ignorant, the ones who come the closest to the negro in the way they live. “We man not be much,” they seem to be saying, “but at least we’re better off than a nigruh. We got white skin.”

            The second pleasure belongs to the one who passes along the calumny, the one who in your most vulnerable moment comes up with, “You know what so-and-so said about you? He said you were so stupid that you made a half-wit look like a Ph.D. by comparison.” What most of us don’t realize is that 90 percent of everything mean we say about someone is immediately reported to them; the temptation is simply too great.

            The pleasure, the greatest one of all, belongs to the party who was maligned. His tongue no longer held in check by loyalty or feelings of friendliness, he is now free to seek his revenge. At this moment, for instance, I am peeking over the fence at Jack Wood just waiting for him to hit a prune tree with his disk or do something stupid. You can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as he does the world is going to hear about it.

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“Silence”

 

For almost everyone there is something terrifying about standing in front of another person and being unable to think of something to say. Probably because we carry in us the same blood as the swarming monkeys who go swinging through the tropical forests incessantly chattering to one another we are under this compulsion to leave no silence between us. Judging by the letters that teenagers direct to counselors which you can read in the papers and magazines, next to the question of how many times you have to go out with a boy before the violent necking can properly begin, the problem of what to say to one another is their biggest headache.

 

And it is something that never leaves you. I know an increasing number of people who as they grow in both years and wisdom have completely eliminated parties from their lives simply because the dread the possibility that they will have to meet some stranger and stand there, both of them staring balefully into each other’s faces futilely trying to find the proper noises to make. After about three minutes like this, believe me, the tension becomes almost unbearable.

 

This is the nightmare of every woman who ever gave a dinner party, that that moment will arrive right in the middle of the roast beef when the guests sitting around the table who, a moment before had all been talking at once, will suddenly find themselves plunged into a tomb-like silence. I have seen hostesses do the most ridiculous things in order to break up one of those endless stillnesses. It’s a stillness like nothing else in the world, a shrieking kind.

 

My own personal experience with a shattering silence took place in Arizona a few years ago as I was driving through the Navajo country playing the role of the great white uranium prospector. I hadn’t seen a human being for about three days let alone talk to one, and I felt like I’d just been released from solitary confinement when I topped a little hill and almost ran over an old man who was hitchhiking up the road.

 

I stopped for him and we rode together for almost an hour from one desolate spot in an endless waste of desert to another spot just as desolate, and in that time he didn’t say a word. He must have been 80 years old, and he was dressed in rags, and his clothes were permeated with the smell of smoke as though he had crouched over thousands of little sagebrush fires trying to keep warm.

 

A very odd thing happened in the last half hour of our journey together, after the shock of discovering that he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to me had worn off. A sort of terrible accusing communication began to take place between us. He was old [copy cuts off] away from his farm land into the sand dunes. It was a silent conversation loaded with guilt, and it involved this worthless country through which we were driving, and it involved the rags he was wearing and his hopeless, degrading poverty.

 

I tried to sign a separate peace with that old Indian; I flashed him psychic flashes of friendship and sympathy, but I don’t know that I got through to him. In fact I’m half convinced that I didn’t because when finally he motioned for me to stop, and as he was climbing out of the car, I got a very strong final message that went something like this: “Go home, pale-face Gringo. Sell that foolish little toy of a Geiger counter, and be a farmer again like you’re supposed to.”

 

And I did, and I’ve been in trouble ever since. The way I see it he gave me the Indian sign, and I’m living under the curse of the Navajos. I could tell that old boy things about poverty now that would make his braids stand right straight up.

 

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 

“Sportsmen 1”

 

About a month ago I wrote a column about sportsmen which I must admit in all modesty was just about the greatest little piece of prose to come out of this century. Mr. Earl Murphy, the publisher of the Los Molinos Sun, read it with a growing pallor, looked at me with his great sad Irish eyes, and shook his head. “Good jumped-up heavens, young man,” he moaned. “We can’t run this. You can’t say this about sportsmen.”

            I began to pout. “It’s just a personal opinion,” I ventured.

            Mr. Murphy shuddered and tore the typewritten sheets into little squares. We watched them as they drifted to the floor. “Better rewrite it, my boy. Better leave out those somewhat derogatory remarks.”

            “O.K., dad,” I said. “I’ll rewrite it without saying what I really think. I will merely illustrate it.”

••••

In the field of sports the one fact more than any other which makes any particular game exciting is the degree to which the opponents are evenly matched. The spectator, for instance, to a football game enjoys that game in proportion to the degree of uncertainty as to its outcome. Unless, of course, he is afflicted with certain sadistic tendencies.

            If I may be permitted a digressive personal opinion, Mr. Murphy, watching a football game is about as exciting as watching two old women shell peas, and in fact the only game I ever really enjoyed ended up 286—0. I did more than just watch this one; I was a participant on the losing side, but it was a game of epic grandeur, a sort of morality play with the heavenly hosts completely vanquishing the forces of evil—or vice versa.

            But in the normal spectator at the ideal game the excitement steadily mounts to the last second when, even after the gun has sounded, good old number 67, Poltowski, crashes through the line and changes the score. Hooray!

            How does the hunter, the sportsman, come out when judged by these elemental standards? Is there any element of equality in his outdoor expedition, a sharing of risk, any chance at all, for instance, that the deer will shatter his legs with a lead slug or leave him in some undiscovered thicket slowly to bleed his life away? There have been cases, of course, where the deer did shoot the hunter, but usually the aim is careless, and the sportsman unfortunately recovers. I doubt if these exceptions show up on the statistical graphs.

            Or birds. The only thing they can aim at a hunter is aimed in panic and even if they score a bullseye it is seldom if ever fatal. Just messy.

            I wonder how many sportsmen there would be if they had a 50-50 chance with the hunted, or even to be more reasonable, say a 90 percent chance of coming back alive. I’ll wager the woods would be deserted and quietly peaceful as in a day in 1491. I can speak with some authority on this, remembering the sheer horror that reigned in our bomber group overseas during the war when we were flying over Germany. The statistics told us that on each mission 3 percent of us would be blown out of the sky. My, but the chaplains and psychiatrists were busy in those days.

            The Sacramento Bee ran a story about a hunter who jumped off a log onto the back of a sleeping three-point buck. In the first moments of confusion the hunter dropped his gun and had to face an enraged animal with only his hunting knife. They fought together for 30 minutes or so, the deer charging and goring with his antlers and the hunter slashing away with his knife. The words “hunter” and “hunted” suddenly became meaningless. It was a good fair game played for the maximum stakes.

            I think it was his friends who hauled the man off to the hospital and dressed out the buck for him, and I hope while he was there they fed him great juicy chunks of venison. He earned them.

            Now there’s my idea of a real he-man sportsman, but I can’t help wondering if he’s going out again next year.

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 

“Sportsmen  2”

 

That terrible time of the year is coming up now when the farmer is under daily pressure to turn his land over to the sportsman for dalliance. An endless stream of cars will soon be pouring through the ranch gates loaded to the springs with heavy-lidded, pig-eyed brothers from the city, little gangster types with 5 o’clock shadows, dirty plaid shirts, and moving about in the center of an aura of whiskey fumes. They have one thing in common, one unifying lust—to kill something.

            It is dangerous and foolish to generalize, but disregarding a few exceptions, I feel safe in offering a personal opinion: Sportsmen are the scum of the earth.

            Within the recent past and in this area:

1.         A wild sow near Manton was shot and her litter left to die, and

2.         A doe on the river bottom was shot and her fawn found later starved to death.

One of my sportsman neighbors told me how he had caught a washtub full of frogs one night out of Champlain Slough. “We got everything,” he said, his idiot face glowing with sportsman ecstasy. “There wasn’t a frog left when we got through.”

            One thing he forgot to do before he cut their legs off was to kill them. It took some of them a week to die.

            I asked young Frank Anonymous how he’d done the opening day of dove season. “Cool, daddy-o,” he told me. “I used 4 boxes of shells and got 2 doves, 1 woodpecker, 5 prune trees, and an old washing machine.” Now my theory is that anyone over 10 years old who can look into the beady little eyes of a woodpecker and then blast him into death is lacking some component of humanity.

            “And what’s your theory?” I asked my friend, Lloyd, yesterday, tirelessly gathering facts and opinions for my readers.

            “The sportsman,” Lloyd told me, standing up straight and reading from notes he had prepared in anticipation of the question. “The sportsman is insecure. He sees a look in his wife’s face, he is nagged by secret doubts; he has been brought to a point where he has to prove to himself and perhaps to others that he is a man. Disregard the obvious Freudian symbolism which is too obscene to discuss in the columns of a family newspaper and think of the sportsman as a man driven by his own inadequacies to perform the rite of the hunter, the provider, or think of him as—”

            “O.K., Lloyd,” I interrupted. “You can sit down now. The column for this week is already too long.”

            So he did.

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“Tapdancing bird”

 

Moritz Thomsen

Notebook in possession of

Rashani Rea

No date, 1959 or 1960

Not included with “Mill Run” clippings

 

Ah, the little things in life.

 

At 5:15 each morning for the last month I have been awakened to the patter of little feet, the sound of marching, the quick pure footwork of ‘der Sylphides”—in fact the whole repertoire of sounds and rhythms that can be made by feet. This entire performance is produced and directed by one neurotic little bird who has selected my tarpaper roof as his parade ground. Being inside the house listening to him as he makes his circles and figure 8s is like being inside a drum; every little footstep is amplified about 300 percent. By the time he gets ready for his finale, the death scene from “Three Penny Opera,” the whole house is humming and vibrating with the very pulse of life.

            Now I am of the school who believes that there is probably nothing more idiotic in life than 20,000 lousy birds crowded together in the branches outside your window, all of them hooting, whistling, screeching, and proclaiming the obvious. The obvious is that it is 5:15 a.m. and that the sun is coming up, and that it’s time to crawl out of the sack and start digging out the hog pens. This situation is brutally apparent and it is highly irritating for these little birdbrains with their missionary zeal to be peering in the windows and telling you the same obvious thing over and over.

            But my dancing bird is another story. Here’s a bird who thinks for himself. I have never seen this friend of mine except in imagination, but I know exactly how he looks; he is a scruffy wizened little drab, undersized, near-sighted and probably afflicted with chronic hepatitis, but he has the biggest, most magnificent feet in the whole state, great shiny butter-colored feet that glisten in the early morning sunshine as though they had been freshly enameled.

            And my bird, poor obsessed little creature, madly in love with these glistening, yellow claws, simply can’t tear his eyes away from the intricate dance steps that he performs each morning on my roof. He doesn’t sing, whistle, or hoot, but he croaks. Once about every 3 minutes a day an ecstatic croak erupts from deep within him. It is a croak of pure joy and it sounds like a stepped-on toad.

            Now actually in my whole day probably nothing happens that is more casual and unimportant than this heel-and-toe artist soft shoeing around on the roof. And yet I get a pleasure out of this event way out of proportion to its significance. Practically everything else that goes on around me is anti-climax. I lie in bed each morning in the semi-darkness, laughing, giggling, slapping my legs and yelling “Ole” and “Encore” to my dancer.

            I wanted to write an inspiring article celebrating the little things in life. The big things in life, like love, money, sex, nuclear fission, friendship, and the North wind, it seems to me, are all highly overrated, are all about equally compounded of pleasure and pain and to get involved with them is to risk getting your back broke. I wanted to make a nice long list of all the little things in life that are made up of nothing but sheer pleasure, starting with my dancing bird, then moving on to those first life-giving cups of coffee, and going on from there.

            But I have been sitting here now for 3 hours, sifting the brain, and nothing comes to mind. Carrying these notes to a logical conclusion would seem to indicate that unless you have a tap dancing bird performing on your roof each morning, you have nothing and might as well put a bullet through your head. This may not be a bad idea, but it’s not exactly what I started out to say.

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“TV”

 

Now that we are full into fall with darkness coming even before the chores are done, there isn’t much to do with the evenings except look at Television. The wiser alternative would be to go to bed, but there is something uncivilized about retiring at 5:30 p.m., a sort of surrender to the forces of nature. It’s bad enough being a farmer without being a sod-bustering one and a complete victim to the revolutions of the earth. The house is wired for electricity; there are lights, toasters, washing machines, phonographs, and T.V. scattered around and I intend to enjoy them if it kills me.

            For the last couple of weeks, with a feeling of complete moral degradation, I have been knuckling under to T.V. It has been a real capitulation, brought about by the annual agricultural crisis, the one this year being a combination of lousy corn and lousy hog prices. Reality being a little too thick, heroin and alcohol too expensive, and no good dependable source of marijuana available, I have turned to channel 12 for solace.

            I have been going right down the line with the television boys beginning with the children’s programs, the 30-year-old animated cartoons, to the bitter end, to the late show or the late late show. If I have guests I pour them a cup of coffee, sit them in a corner, and ignore them. I have turned my mind into a great blotter which sops up hour after hour the fruits of our national technological genius. There is something magnificent about Tagg asking Annie Oakley for another Wonder Bread sandwich, and you don’t know why until you realize that it is helping him to grow 12 different ways—up, down, sideways, upside down, inside out, slantways. A truly educational medium. Until I turned on my T.V. set, for instance, I had never had a clear idea of the mechanics of a headache, how those little hammers and bolts of lightning kept working in your head until you coated your stomach with acid flare-ups, to make you feel like happy days are here again.

            Being a hog man, I had reconciled myself to the fact that I would drift through life in the center of a cloud of hog doo-doo fumes. But it’s not true, I have recently discovered. There are roll-on deodorants on the market that won’t stain even my sheerest nylons, and that will absolutely paralyze the olfactory nerves of anyone who wanders within 10 feet of me. Or I can use that new soap which is 45% whipped cream, shaped like a rowboat, makes pink suds, and coats you with a thin layer of grease that good, self-respecting odor-producing bacteria wouldn’t be found dead in. Apparently this new product is so efficient that even if you only bathe every forty days you can still stand in front of a big piece of glass or something and have some guy throw horse shoes, tennis balls, golf balls, or rocks at you and you just keep smiling your little idiot smile because, man, you’re protected.

            Life is so simple, really. You coat your body with a film of ST-37, coat your teeth with a film of Gardol, put a little film of Jab on your ingrown toenails, coat your stomach and the 19 miles of your intestines with a film of good dependable acid neutralizer, get the old bile dripping through those old fatty particles, take an Ex Lax or two for regularity, and you’ve only got one thing to worry about.

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “Vulgarity”

 

Once in a short story writing class our teacher, recoiling against a particularly ribald contribution from one of the students, gave us a lecture on vulgarity in writing. She was a middle-aged spinster, and, I’ve always thought, a little thin-blooded and over-refined, even though at the time she was one of the top women writers. Occasionally she was compared with Edith Wharton and even, by critics who didn’t know better, with Willa Cather.

            She told us this true story, blushing violently as she did so, as an example of material which went far beyond the bounds of good taste, material which was unsuitable for commitment to print. The reason I remember it so well is that out of a class of 30 who sat there primly agreeing with her, I was the only one who laughed. The great whooping HO HO ho of laughter made me feel awfully foolish later, and in a way isolated me from both the teacher and the class for the rest of that year. I was the only westerner there, the only savage, and had been regarded with a certain measure of suspicion anyway.

            A fat, middle-aged man, she told us, had gone to the Radio City Music Hall, to see the movie there. He was pretty seriously overweight, the kind of a man who puffs and blows from the most ordinary exertion, and since he had just eaten lunch and his clothes were tight and restricting, he loosened them as best he could when he settled down in the comfortable darkness of the theater. One of the things he did was loosen the zipper on his pants so that his poor old pendulous gut could expand in a more comfortable freedom.

            Sometime later he was startled out of his reverie of adventure and romance when he noticed a woman advancing up the aisle looking for a seat. He swung up ponderously to his feet to let her by, zipping his pants as she sidestepped by him—and you guessed it, zipping not only his pants but a great chunk of her dress as well.

            I guess no one could describe the next 10 minutes, the screams of murder and police, the tugging and groanings and pullings of that poor old man, or how in the largest theater in the world the attention of thousands of people suddenly shifted from the silver screen to that sweating, struggling pair, wedded together in a relationship like something out of Dante’s Inferno. The divorce took place much later in the manager’s office after they had done a prison lock step up the aisle and through the foyer. It was accomplished with a pair of scissors, when a piece of dress from the woman’s behind was removed.

            What reminded me of the story was wondering what constituted vulgarity. My sister told me another story last week, a story that for quite different reasons seemed to come much closer to a true vulgarity. It was told to her by an old retired gentleman who in the first years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency acted as his press secretary. He swears it is true, she said.

            It seems that the president of Haiti was invited to America for a state visit. The was in the year when civil rights for negroes was beginning to become our most pressing domestic issue, and Roosevelt called his staff together and with great firmness insisted that the Haitian party be treated with the most sensitive courtesy.

            “I want no incidents of any kind,” the president said.

            And there weren’t.

            For five days things went off in a flawless manner. There were state dinners, visits from dignitaries, and all the usual courtesies due a VIP. The morning of the Haitian president’s departure arrived. He left on a train for New York, and everyone, including the Marine band, was there to see him off. He stood on the observation platform waving, smiling, and shaking hands, and then, as the train slowly began moving out of the station, the band master raised his baton and the Marine band, 100 strong, blared out a march version of “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “War”

Check appearance in smokebox site

Hand written in notebook, in possession of Rashani Rea

No Date; no clipping from Los Molinos Sun

 

Going to war is the ultimate experience for the youngster. It has everything, and the beauty of war is, as any young man knows, that he as an individual is immortal; it is always the other guy who gets blown to hell.

            Basically, the glamour and romance of war, the brass buttons and the medals, the enraptured look of the mother or the sweetheart, hinge on that basic question of the individual’s manhood. War is, in the young kid’s mind, the test of his courage, and his masculinity. We have so arranged our world that about every once every twenty years all our healthy young men get this wonderful opportunity to prove their manhood. So far we have constructed no satisfactory substitute. The art of fisticuffs, for instance, that most obvious technique for proving manhood, appeals in large part only to the psychotic element in our society. Boxing doesn’t prove that a man is a man, only that he is an animal and a mentally disturbed one at that.

            On the basis of one major war every twenty years—and discounting our Korean “police action” as a trifling event which produced a piddling 25,000 dead American soldiers—the obvious conclusion is that the twenty years are up. More and more often people comment, between yawns or between a discussion of TV and the baseball scores, about the inevitability of everyone aiming hydrogen missiles at everyone else and pushing the buttons. There is apparently so much logic, so much basic good sense in this solution for ending the Cold War tensions, that the subject of war is actually a little boring. “Oh, man,” your friend says, swigging a cold beer, “this next one’s going to be a lulu. We’re all going to be killed. Turn up the TV, will you? I didn’t catch that last speech of Palladin’s.” No one, apparently, is personally involved in the “next one,” which threatens to eliminate the human species.

            The attitude of the public toward war is like that old Peter Arno cartoon, which shows a party of celebrating people in an airplane. The airplane is just about to crash head-on into the side of a mountain, and one of the women is saying, “My God, we’re out of gin.”

            In the event that any of my readers are in their teens and just itching for a nice war to start so that they can be courageous and masculine war heroes, let me assure them that if war will prove anything, it is the opposite, and that if you are subjected to enough terror you will come apart at the seams like everyone else. There may be some satisfaction in realizing that your whole platoon went psycho after 12 days of combat and you didn’t go psycho until the 13th day, but let me assure you, this victory is a hollow one, especially if you end up in a straitjacket, and upon investigation it will probably come out that the reason you didn’t go psycho until the 13th day was because you were punching a typewriter in the general’s office 50 miles behind the lines.

 

 

 

 

 

Mill Run

By M.T. [Moritz Thomsen]

Los Molinos Sun

July 14, 1960

 

In the Hollywood version of combat that moment when the fliers are gathered together in the ready room and told what target they will destroy is always a moment of high drama. We used to watch these movies overseas and almost die laughing, filled at the same time as we watched with a sense of profound disgust. Van Johnson and a host of other curly-headed, bright-eyed, wiggly-hipped 4Fs commanded by Spencer Tracy used to emerge from these briefings, having just been sentenced to certain death, and do everything but stick small waving flags in their ears. In the background a chorus of 3,000 joined with a couple of symphony orchestras and swung into a rising crescendo of “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” Hooray!

            In actuality, our briefing sessions were dramatic but also sort of sordid. All of us, for instance, had a superstitious dread of changing the clothes which had brought us back from our first combat experience. I wore the same shirt for 27 missions without daring to tempt fate and have it cleaned. By that time it was so black and stiff with the accumulated sweat of several hundred hours of increasing terror that it used to crack when I struggled into it. All of us had these blackened and disintegrating shards of clothing, and the rabbit-foot talisman that was going to save our lives. Gathering together in one small quonset hut was a breath-taking experience, since we smelled like a medium-sized herd of constipated goats.

            In the front of the ready room, hidden from view by a curtain when we entered, was a map of Europe covering the whole wall. Our day’s mission had already been outlined on this map with a strip of red ribbon showing our routes in and out, and at the target a cute little paper bomb was pinned to our primary objective. At the proper dramatic moment, just as the commanding colonel was saying, “Men, your objective today is______,” the curtain was snatched away by a second lieutenant in intelligence, who had apparently in his youth dabbled in amateur theatricals. But we never heard the name of the target since at that moment the colonel’s voice was drowned in our groans and cries of lamentations.

            Berlin was the target we dreaded. We hated them all, but Berlin was the one that froze the blood. The first sight of that red ribbon as it aimed its brave cellophane way into the heart of Germany was enough to set up a sort of violent repudiation which simply swept and convulsed your whole body. Immediately after every briefing when our target was Berlin the toilets were mobbed with the combat crews whose systems, in a terrible revolt of sickness and fear, turned themselves inside out in spasms of diarrhea and vomiting.

            For a couple of months it seemed we did nothing but bomb Berlin. And every time we visited that dying pile of rubble the Germans had moved in another thousand flak guns. When we came in behind other groups the air above the city was visible 30 miles away, a solid island of black smoke at 30,000 feet, so thick you could climb out of the plane and walk on it.

            I actually can’t remember much about being over the city; there are entire 15 and 20 minute periods that are gone out of my life, periods when the brain shut up shop and I existed on a crazy level of doing what had been drilled into me to do quite unconsciously.

            One morning our group had its turn at leading the Eighth Air Force over Berlin, and since I was sitting in the nose of the first plane, for the tenth of a second that it lasted I was the only allied soldier in the world flying through German air. What a revoltin’ development that was.

            I remember approaching Berlin that time and seeing far out ahead of us hundreds of fighter planes flashing in the sun above the city, waiting for us. They were P-38s, American planes, but I didn’t know it for another five minutes. That five minutes was a time of total certainty, when it was so obvious that we were all going to be killed. It seemed only sensible to remember the events of life as it drew to its close and make some sort of a peace treaty with the powers of heaven. But it didn’t happen that way. The body, in times of total fear, takes over and insulates the intellect against the present. One by one, my senses disappeared; it was like a ghost walking through a house and slowly snapping off the lights. By the time we were dropping bombs I was no longer even there; I don’t know where I was, but I know I wasn’t there. Leading the Eighth Air Force that day was a little mindless, gibbering idiot with my name, but with none of my attributes.

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“Watermelons”

 

I tried to demonstrate last week that in the public’s mind any self-respecting Mongolian idiot could raise hogs with the expectation of making enough money in a year or so to retire for life to the isle of Capri. At the other end of the agricultural spectrum we find the grower of the watermelon. This is such an art, apparently, to hear some people talk, so complex, that a twenty year apprenticeship could scarcely be sufficient to ground one in the fundamentals.

            This watermelon public is a minority public, but a dedicated one. It lives under rocks, I think, most of the year, appearing only at harvest time, when they show up on the edges of the melon fields. They don’t want to just eat melons; they want to talk about them too. They can look at a truck-load of melons and tell you which field they came out of; they know the price of melons in Turlock on Firebaugh. They are real fanatics. I know for a fact that there are certain people in Vina who wouldn’t dream of buying a watermelon from Scott unless it came out of Slim’s field.

            Not only does this minority public attribute certain magical abilities, a devilish knowledge of spells and charms, to the watermelon grower, but it tends to deify any man who claims a knowledge of melons. You can really gain status with this group if you can tell the difference between an over-ripe and a broken-heart.

            “Come on up to the store with me and help me pick out a watermelon,” the novice asks the expert, reverently, and a new life-long friendship is born. And three hour later they will come back with a great bulging, scabby beast of a melon which, like as not, is green as a gourd, and about as tasty.

            Have you ever noticed one of these experts around a pile of melons? They are under a compulsion to pat each one as though they were playing bongo drums. There is a certain religious beauty in their concentration. They cock their heads, roll the eyes back so that only the whites show, and start slapping. One melon goes “pong”; one goes “ping”; one goes “poing”; one goes “gunk”. The “Gunk” one momentarily startles the expert from his trance. He slaps it again and shakes his head mournfully.

            My own personal opinion is that the melon that goes “gunk” is every bit as good as the one that goes “poing.” The best melon in the world would taste to me as though it has just been poured through a horse, and I have never been able to understand why, with the bounty of all creation at hand, the flavor of peaches and strawberries, of pineapples and cherries, anyone could pretend to enjoy the insipidity of a watermelon anyway.

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“Waves”

 

“I like Bob Ramsey,” one of the young fellows on our watermelon chain-gang announced a while ago, sort of a propos of nothing.

            “Why?” I asked him in surprise, not because liking Bob Ramsey is so amazing, but simply curious to know of Bob’s sterling qualities had touched my young friend’s sensibilities.

            “Because he waves at me,” he said.

            This really stopped me, and when I didn’t say anything he suddenly became defensive, almost hostile. “Oh, you lousy Vina farmers,” he went on, dropping the biggest watermelon in the field so that he could more freely wave his arms. “I’ve lived in Vina all my life, worked for every farmer around here, and most of them won’t even see you on the street.”

            “Listen, young rat-face, catch the melons, and stop screaming at me,” I told him. So he dropped the next two on purpose just to show me who was boss, and the conversation ended. Melons were worth about $30 a ton that day, and I figured out later that little tete-a-tete had cost me about 97 cents.

            But it also had its consolations, because I realized then that if waving at people in cars makes one popular then I am probably the most popular kid in Tehama County.

            I wave at everybody.

            The trouble is that all cars look pretty much the same to me as do pick-ups, and on the highway the situation is completely confusing. Slim drives a red pick-up, so I wave at red pick-ups. Bob Hoskins drives a country car; I wave at all country cars. Knute Anderson has a pick-up with wrap-around rear windows. I don’t take any chances. Wrap-around rear windows get the wave. Wycoff drives a police car, and I gravely salute all police cars, hoping a little uneasily that I won’t be arrested for attempted bribery or driving with one hand.

            For three months last winter I waved at all light green Ford pick-ups until I realized that theoretically I was waving at myself.

            I learned about the pleasures of being waved at about four years ago while driving through Utah. I didn’t know a soul within 600 miles and it was lonely, but I was driving a very old beat-up muddy Jeep, and apparently everyone in Utah knew someone with a very old beat-up muddy Jeep, because I had a triumphal tour. It was as though I had just liberated Salt Lake from the gentiles. There was even a smidgen of ticker tape in Ogden unless my imagination was running wild at that point.

            Since then I’ve played it safe. I wave at gas trucks, meat-wagons, Fords, Chevies, everything but Cadillacs. No one I know owns a Cadillac, and if farm prices don’t come up a little it looks like I never will.

            And everyone waves back except Mrs. Hardy Carter and Marshall Boggs. I forgive Mrs. Carter because each time I pass her she is gripping the wheel like death, and from the distraught expression on her face I can tell she is expecting momentarily to plunge off the road. But as for you, Boggs, I can’t understand it. I told you I’d pay.

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“Publishers’ dinner”

 

By M.T. [Moritz Thomsen]

 

Just in case anyone saw me at the Fireside Inn the other evening I want to explain about that right now. I was at that table for nine over in the far corner, remember, the one where the waitress kept coming over and asking us to lower our voices, the table where the waitress kept saying, “you’ll have to leave if you can’t act like ladies and gentlemen”?

            The way it all began was innocent enough. Mr. Murphy, the publisher of the Sun, insisted that I join him at dinner with a group of newspaper publishers for one of their more or less regular meetings. Ever since I saw Ben Hecht’s “Front Page” with Lee Tracey back in 1933 I have realized, of course, that newspapermen were an eccentric lot, brash, uninhibited, vocal, and guided by none of the bourgeois conceptions of respectability.

            I went then, not expecting to enjoy myself particularly, nor to fit into the group, but like an interested person will watch a brain operation, to enlarge the foundation of my experience, however unpleasant the experience might prove to be.

            Well, one nice thing about newspapermen, they don’t waste time in idle chitchat. Before our chair seats were even warm someone had asked someone else that most profound of all questions, “Why hath God put us on this earth?” The whole evening exploded into a chaos of the deepest philosophic investigation.

            Everyone wanted to talk; nobody wanted to listen. It was a night straight out of Turgenev or Dostoyevski, let me tell you. Within three minutes, with everyone yelling at once, it became apparent, even to the members of the press, that some sort of order would have to be maintained.

            A chairman was appointed, but unfortunately he was completely ignored, and in fact right after the soup course, spent most of his time in the bar.

            What gave the evening its surrealistic overtones was the fact that all the publishers were in complete agreement on almost everything, mainly that each of them wanted to leave the world in a little better shape than they had found it. Why they were all screaming like that escapes me.

            Those of you who were there may remember a strange hiatus about midway through the murky meal. Thinking of it now reminds me of the eye of the cyclone, that unreal time as the center of the storm moves over you and momentarily the sound and the fury dies.

            You may remember that just about then a woman near the end of the table began screaming at me. I believe she was one of the party. What she said, as well as I can recall was, “Hey, you, you stupid-looking jerk, you haven’t opened your stupid mouth all night; what are your ideas, if any, about all this?”

            What I said, and I certainly didn’t mean to precipitate a crisis, simply was that Hitler and Stalin both wanted, in their own ways, to leave the world a little better than they found it, and that unless the newspapermen could be a little more explicit I found the conversation meaningless.

            The cyclone moved on.

            I want to deny those rumors about that grey-haired gentleman and me fighting out on the gravel; they are completely false.

            Later, to be completely honest, I did invite that woman to step outside and wrestle, but I smiled when I said it, and I guess she thought I wasn’t serious. Lucky for me, come to think of it; she’d have beaten me to a pulp.

            Well, I had my experience, and what I learned was this: Newspaper publishers, without exception, have much nicer wives than they deserve.

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “Fanatics”

 

A longshoreman in San Francisco named Eric Hoffer wrote a book a few years ago called The True Believer which concerns itself, I believe, with the fanatic who comes to power and is able through his power to force his beliefs on the society which he rules. Unfortunately, I haven’t read the book yet; I loaned it to a friend in Vina last year before reading it, never got it back, and am now forced to make everything up about it as I go along.

            According to this guy, Hoffer, the world is crawling with fanatics, and luckily for us, most of them haven’t got the power to do anything about it. A fanatic, Hoffer says, is a person with an idea which greatly simplifies reality.

            There’s a man over in Paskenta, for instance, who mimeographed his philosophy and left a great stack of copies in the Poultry Producer’s office for the public to read. He had everything figured out. Why, this gentleman asked, are we all tense, miserable, nasty, hateful, and sick? The same reason why chickens in cages are tense, miserable, nasty, hateful and sick. They are loaded up with positive or negative ions (I don’t remember which) that can’t be discharged. Wearing shoes is what put us in the present jack-pot. To feel abundantly healthy again all we have to do is walk around bare-footed for 30 minutes a day on good old damp mother earth. This is a modern version of the Antaeus-Hercules legend. Remember?

            Up until a year ago there was a man in Vina who lived on figs, nuts, and chocolate bars and who believed, if my sources can be trusted, that marriage was an unnatural condition if its consummation took place more than once every seven years. He had been divorced, I believe, some time back—about the time he began to figure things out for himself.

            I have been sitting here trying to think of more fanatic examples, and suddenly I realized that the whole Los Molinos-Vina area is simply lousy with screw-balls, with people who blame all the troubles in the world on Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman, with people who claim it hasn’t rained because the jet winds which trigger our weather at the north pole are being deflected by all those airplanes stationed in Alaska, with people who blame the atomic tests in the Southern Pacific or in Siberia on either too much rain or not enough.

            I know people who swear by blackstrap molasses and yogurt, friends with fantastic cures for constipation, old codgers who think the world is going to hell because—I’m not sure about this argument—because either 1. a majority of the citizenry still believes in God or 2. young men no longer protect their heads from the harmful rays of the sun.

            Is it like this everyplace? I hope not; I hope our area is sort of a headquarters, sort of a last refuge for eccentrics and screw-balls. Someday the country is going to need new ideas, and if we can get all the fanatics together in Tehama County they’re going to be a lot easier to find.

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “Farmers laugh”

 

 

The easiest way to make a farmer laugh, I have discovered, is to tell him how disaster, large or small, has struck home to one of his neighbors. Since I know scarcely anyone who isn’t a farmer it is perhaps unwise to generalize, to the extent of saying that farmers are any more malicious than any other group, but from where I sit it often seems that way.

            An old Frenchman, whose name I can’t spell, said that there was an element of pleasure in the misfortunes of even our best friends. I’ll bet if that old boy had met a few Tehama County farmers he would have made his little aphorism a lot stronger.

In another part of the paper a there is a report on Dalton Young and how one of his men threw a sack of wrenches and bearings into his corn harvester. I have been listening to this particular story now for the last 3 weeks, accompanied in the telling by giggles, hee-haws, snorts, and slaps on the backs of farmers about to collapse with the sheer joyous humor of the whole thing. In fact the story has been told so much, so often, that I blush for the Sun, which apparently still considers that it is telling its readers something new.

            Harvester men, especially, fall over backwards when they hear the story, and I don’t even go into Vina any more because there is a harvester man there who stops me on the street, the tears already streaming from his eyes, and gasps, “Tell me again how they threw the bag of bearings into Young’s harvester.”

            Remember the wind in September that blew over half the prune trees in the county? Well, it’s an ill wind, etc., and a lot of farmers who didn’t have prunes were walking around feeling good that day.

            But these disasters, the floods that wipe out whole areas and kill whole herds of livestock, the winds that destroy thousands of trees, are not really laughing matters. They simply generate a nice feeling of satisfaction in the farmer, a sense of invulnerability, the feeling, perhaps of the person at a funeral who gloats to himself, “There you are, and here I am.”

            It is always nice to know that the bean crop failed in New York State, or that the milo dried out in Texas, but you don’t laugh about it. If I want to make a farmer laugh I tell him about how 27 lambs streamed into my house during the last storm and spent the afternoon in the living room, or about that boar I borrowed from Knudt Anderson that broke up 12 gates the other night looking for companionship.

            There is a lot that could be said on the subject, but suddenly it has become a little frightening so I think I’ll stop with just one humorous little reference to the cranberry farmers of our nation, who suddenly find themselves with hundreds of tons of cranberry sauce 10 days from Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“Hog shit I”

No date; handwritten in notebook

 

A couple my devoted readers who are also apparently confirmed Freudians have been pointing out to me whenever we meet that they have deduced certain of my abnormal traits. “You say such nasty things,” one of them told me the other day. “Why can’t you write about nice things? Why are you always mentioning hog manure? You seen quite obsessed with it, as though it were continually on your mind.”

            Now, anyone who has spent over an hour on my ranch, especially since the recent rains, and comes away without being obsessed with hog manure, in fact positively scarred for life from the full horror of the experience, is in my opinion the abnormal one. Yes, I’m obsessed with hog manure all right. Not only is it continually on my mind, but on any part of me you’d care to mention. At the moment it’s knee-deep on the high ground. The low spots are as yet unplumbed.

            This grotesque development, this slowly creeping envelopment in hog by-products, is a direct consequence of my own naïve tendency to believe what I read in the farm publications. About five years ago Farm Journal, Farm Quarterly, and all the rest of them began pushing the raising of hogs on concrete slabs. Every month they ran another big article on the advantages of confinement, how much cheaper, quicker, and easier it was. There were big color pictures of fat faced smiling farmers lolling around in the shade counting their money while the hogs got fat. The hogs in the pictures were so sleek and shiny that you had to squint to keep from being blinded by the splendor of the scene. There wasn’t a solitary speck of dirt in the pens. Under each picture was some insane caption like this: “Now hog farmer Jones feeds 1,600 hogs and it only take him 3 minutes a month.”

            These articles as the poured from the presses went into every phase of confinement feeding, except one. They forgot to mention that a mature hog, in a year’s time, will produce 5 tons of waste products. This figure is from a government bulletin and I’m not prepared to argue with it, though my own feeling is that it is immoderately conservative. On certain depressing days I am prepared to swear that one of my normal swaggering, nasty little hogs, after having swung into high gear and full production, can manufacture about a ton an hour, day in and day out.

            I read the articles and studied the pictures, sort of substituting my own smiling face for farmer Jones’, and it all sounded so great that I finally called Mr. Starnes in Gerber and asked him to start hauling Ready-mix.

            Five years later the farm magazines have finally begun running articles on the disposal of what I have been talking about. The biggest problem in confinement feeding of hogs, they point out, is the problem of manure disposal. As though I didn’t know. The full page color pictures show how it is done. The same smiling farmers, pushing buttons on enormous electrical panels, set into motion $50,000 worth of gears, paddles, belts, augers, and endless chains and the stuff is whisked away to a 15 acre lake which you can see in the distance. Upon it in a bright red dinghy especially hauled in for the picture sit his happy, smiling children fishing for crappies. At least I feel it reasonable to assume that’s what they’re fishing for.

            In the meantime, back at the ranch.

            A couple of years ago, when the full horror of my situation began breaking in on me, I started digging pits in front of all my pens, which would, I hoped, hold a week’s supply. They were dug in a sort of wild desperation, and as it turned out they held about a 20-minute supply. They still sit there, full to overflowing, a monument to my unwarranted optimism.

Last week a very dignified elderly woman drove onto the ranch. She got out of her car and walked toward me. Between us was the pit. My vocal chords must have been paralyzed, because I simply stood there, hypnotized, as she stepped into it and, with great dignity, like a proud warship with all flags flying, began slowly to sink from sight.

That was one depth that got plumbed, and in case anyone is interested in how deep the manure pit is in front of the farrowing house, I can tell them with some degree of precision that it is about belly-button high on someone’s average-sized grandmother.

            And I can tell you one other thing. Somewhere in this immediate area, there is a sweet white-haired old lady in a rocking chair, and she is rocking and thinking, rocking and thinking. She is thinking about that day. I’m not the only one around here who is obsessed with hog manure.

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “Hog shit II”

 

 

No date, clipping

 

On the very same day that sweet old lady marched bravely into my manure pit a couple of other gruesome events took place on the premises that I might as well report now and get it over with. When the history of this ranch comes to be written that Tuesday will probably be known as “ladies day,” because contrary to the usual custom, all serious casualties that day were females.

            The entire day, thought about now in retrospect, takes on the trappings of a low-grade slapstick comedy. Mack Sennett should have been there with his cameraman. My visitors had the whole book thrown at them, and they were hit by everything but custard pies.

            By 6 that evening, what with the rain, Champlin Slough had raised about 12 feet and I was, I thought, since I lived on one side of the slough and the rest of the world on the other, safely isolated from mankind.

            In the afternoon, shortly after I had turned the hose on that old lady and sent her home, two high school boys and the publisher of the Sun, in three distinct attempts at crossing the slough, had met with disaster. The trouble some people will go through to interrupt one of my naps is unbelievable, but there is also something unbelievable about waking from three different naps to see newspaper publishers and small boys floating past your house flailing their arms and churning up white water.

            Well, in the interest of truth, I’d better confess that this is a slight exaggeration. Actually, Larry Martin is the only one who went completely under, and he didn’t really float past the house waving his arms. The reason he didn’t float past the house was because he got caught in some cottonwood branches from a tree that had fallen across the slough and this sort of checked him momentum.

           Anyway, by 6 it was dark and the slough had cut me off from this mad activity, and the horrors of that day, I thought, were over and done with. I changed into dry clothes, put the artificial resuscitator back in the closet and cooked dinner.

            At 6:15 I noticed the flare of matches over in the hog pen and heard short bursts of what sounded like laughter. My big mistake at 6:15 was to go on eating and hope that whoever was in the hog pen and found it amusing would go away.

            Because it wasn’t laughter that I heard, it was short screams of terror and cries for help from a couple of confused females.

            What had happened while I was cooking dinner was that fate, in one of its more sadistic moods, had arranged that two girls, southbound on 99-E, should run out of gas by my mailbox. In the darkness the ranch looked just like any other ranch; all they could see was the peaceful old lane wandering down to a peaceful old barn.

            It probably is impossible to reconstruct their emotions as they strolled down that lane to find themselves, with each step, going a little deeper into mud and whatnot. If emotions are hard to reconstruct, however, it was comparatively easy to reconstruct their trail the next morning, especially after those 10 hungry sows began following them around for a handout, and the girls started running so suddenly that their shoes came off.

            There were naked footprints plastered all over the yard and their trail looked like one of those eight-cushion shots in a championship billiard game, as they veered around sows and bounced off fences.

            At one point, in order to escape from the 10 sows, they had leaped a fence and landed in a pen with 60 fat hogs. I’ll wager there were some fancy yips going on about then.

            Well, by the time I got over there, about 6:45, complete exhaustion had sort of quieted them down. A few soothing words and they climbed down off the hog house roof as pretty as you please. They got the gas and have not been heard from since.

            What I can’t understand is the last look they gave me before driving off, a look of sheer outrage and animal hatred. You’d think I had invited them in to tour the hog lot.

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “I want out”

 

Last Friday afternoon during the first wet hours of the last storm that finally began soaking our fields, I was a witness to one of those unsung, mostly unnoticed dramas which serve to illustrate the essential invincibility of the human spirit. It was a truly inspiring and emotional experience. The alcoholic who abjures his spirits, and the dope addict who breaks with his vice illustrate these same qualities of strength and recuperation, but in a less dramatic form. The transformation I witnessed, that change in a man from an abject, whipped creature to a soul triumphant, shaking his fists at heaven, took scarcely five minutes.

            On second thought, this story may not prove that man may be destroyed but never beaten, but more cynically, that farmers are insane.

            As though that needed proving.

            A farmer friend of mine that I run into a couple times a week visited the ranch Friday afternoon, and we waded, hip-deep through what we refer delicately on the hog ranch as mud, to the house and made some coffee. For the last year we have been carrying on agricultural conversations very much like the ones I have with Knudt Anderson, sad defeated investigations into the bleak outlook for farm commodities. The big difference is, though, that my friend’s thinking is almost formulaic. He suffers from a verbal tic whenever the future is discussed. “I want out out out,” he invariably cries when the spring planting is mentioned.

            As far as my friend has been concerned for a year there will be no spring planting, no more ridiculous efforts, defeated before they begin, to wrest a profit from the soil.

            We sat at the table drinking coffee while my friend listlessly thumbed through the latest copy of the Farm Journal.

            “Did you read the article in there about solid planted corn?” I asked him. “It might be worth a try.”

            “Nuts,” my friend said. “I just want out out out.” He speaks these words very fast with the timbre of his voice rising to an hysterical pitch until it sounds sad, like a bird cry.

            We sat there drinking coffee and watching the rain, and finally my friend said in a very bored voice, “Here’s that article you mentioned.” He read it.

           Now what the article is about is some experiments Illinois where corn was planted like grain, 200 pounds to the acre. Two crops were raised in one season, and the corn was cut at eight weeks when about five feet high for silage. According to the article it is possible to harvest 60 tons of silage or the equivalent of around 18 tons of alfalfa hay per acre in feeding value. Considering hay at $25 dollars a ton this means a gross per acre $450.

            I watched my friend read this article and all of a sudden I heard a curious little sound; it was the gears turning in his head. “Say, this fascinating, isn’t it?” he said, the blood beginning to flush into his face, new life coursing through his veins. He grabbed a pencil and began covering the table with figures. His hands had begun to tremble slightly.

            I retired for a moment to make another pot of coffee, and my friend’s voice followed me. He wasn’t talking to me; he was simply thinking out loud. “Now, I sort of visualize this as a feeding operation,” he said. “Let’s see now. On 100 acres, 6 cows and calves to the acre,” scribble scribble scribble. “Say a net of $400 an acre, that’s $40,000 an acre, and you take that money and put in 400 acres and the next year net $180,000.”

            He studied the article again, snorted with disgust and wrote more figures on the table. “They didn’t ever fertilize,” he said. “We’ll pour 600 pounds of nitrogen per acre on that field and double our yields. No, let’s be conservative. Say we only net $75,000 the first year…”

            The transformation was complete. My friend was a farmer again, and I’ll bet he wont’ be screaming “I want out out out” for another 10 months.

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

“Monkeys”

 

“Mill Run” by M.T. [Moritz Thomsen]

Los Molinos Sun, Thursday, April 14, 1960

 

Dear Mr. Editor:

One of the funniest stories I ever read was about the scientist who wanted to prove the law of averages. He had studied a statistic that if you put a monkey at a typewriter and he typed long enough, eventually he would write something that made sense. A visitor to his laboratory is shown into a special room, where, at a long table, a whole row of monkeys, about 30 of them, each before his own typewriter and each wearing a green eye-shade, is busily pecking away. One of them is typing the complete works of Dickens. Another, as they watch behind his back, finishes the last sentence of The Pillar of Wisdom, put a new sheet into the machine, and begins to type Crime and Punishment, Chapter One. And so on down the line. Each monkey is typing without error one of the classics.

            Until I began writing for your rag I had always believed that this story was purely imaginative, a piece of sheer fantasy. But lately I am becoming more and more convinced that the author of that story must have personally known some newspaper editor who actually employed a monkey or a wild ape to be used in an emergency at the typesetting machine. I now feel that I know who this editor is.

            There is only one thing I resent about this wild ape of yours, sir. Why do you only let him out of his cage when it is time to set up my contribution to your paper? I am, for instance, competing against two other columnists—the mysterious Dairyville Farmer’s Wife and Mr. Dave Minch. I jealously study this copy and with increasing rancor note that their sentences are reproduced with all the clarity of a mountain stream, while my copy comes out so muddied and transformed that I often have to refer to my own original notes to see what it is I was trying to say.

            For example, if I were to write down that uproariously funny joke—Who was that lady I saw you with last night? That was no lady, that was my wife—the chances are that the next time I read it in your paper it would look something like this:

            SQUEAK SQUAWK LONDON AP. I seen you. You were lazy last night. BAI GEE BALI HI BALI HA HA HA I wasn’t being lazy; I lost my knife. SQUAWK SQUAWK.

            Now, having a wild ape who can come even this close to reproducing the written word is a rare and wonderful thing, and I’m not for a moment suggesting that you substitute a live human being. I am only requesting, sir, an even break with the other contributors to your sheet. Would it not be possible to turn your creature loose on the Farmer’s Wife and on Mr. Minch’s column, too? I believe that this would be the democratic way and that I could more fairly compete if we were all reduced to meaninglessness together.

 

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “Music”

 

Los Molinos Sun

July 28, 1960

 

About 20 years ago, back in the days of the 78 rpm phonograph record, RCA Victor decided, in the interest of culture and increased dividends, to start pushing classical music. In its advertising campaign which kicked off this large scale entry into the realm of spiritual values and which was also calculated to shame the American public into buying good music, it listed the 10 greatest masterpieces and asked, “How many of these records do you have in YOUR home?”

 

Now, after 20 years, it is almost impossible to remember this dogmatic and monumental list in its entirety, but the very idea that someone could with godlike certitude enlighten us on such matters was so breathtaking at the time that most of the titles, surprisingly, still fester in the brain. Here are some of RCA Victor’s nominees for immortality: Finlandia and Valse Triste by Sibelius, Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, a six-minute excerpt from the last act of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—a four-hour opera from which Victor had extracted the really significant moments—Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz, The Stars and Stripes Forever by old what’s-his-name, and I’m jiggered if I can remember the rest of them, but they all came up to this same electrifying standard.

 

According to the advertising campaign, this well-rounded and exciting selection was the foundation, the very guts, of a record library. All you had to do was add a red-labeled record every month or so and within a year you would positively stink with culture and refinement and your home would be headquarters for the intelligentsia.

 

I have been pondering the author of this list for 20 years, and there still remain only two possibilities. It came either from the inventory department, who discovered with horror that they were calamitously overloaded with unsold albums with the above titles, or it was invented by someone who hated classical music and had decided to so flood the American public with the banal and sleep-provoking that they would turn once more and forever to Glenn Miller, Ted Fiorito, Guy Lombardo, and such ilk.

 

It must be impossible to imagine a list more beautifully calculated to reinforce an uninformed public’s conviction that classical music is from Yawnsville and better ignored in one’s private life than this list unless possibly they had included To a Wild Rose or In a Monastery Garden rendered on the Mormon Tabernacle Organ with the choir humming softly in the background.

 

This list, I think, set good music back at least 50 years. It was about the time of its publication that radio stations one by one all over the nation began eliminating classical music from their programming. Now with the exception of three of four radio stations operating on the brink of disaster in a couple of places (New York and the Bay area) where large numbers of thoughtful, civilized, and music-loving people congregate there isn’t a radio station in the nation that has the guts or the imagination to play anything more stimulating than a symphonic version of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.”

 

The only exception that I know of is a Los Angeles radio station sponsored by an admirable airline company that plays symphonies and quartets for truck drivers from 1 a.m. until 5 a.m. This underground effort will no doubt in time have far-reaching effects in the upgrading of American taste, although as yet, I’ve never heard a truck driver stumping for Ravel over that savage little beast called Elvis.

 

Local stations are perfect examples of what happens when radio stations pimp to the public taste; or what they think is the public taste. From the time they go on the air we are regaled with a steady regurgitation of hillbilly music for us farmer rubes, and then from 7 a.m. until they close and lock the doors at midnight they vomit into our ears hour after hour of endlessly repeated selections from the list of the top 50 pop tunes. Why they aim exclusively for the teenage market and mentality is something I have never figured out. The possibility that the local stations, and all the other radio stations, are owned by Russians dedicated to the task of softening American brains to the point of imbecility is a little far-fetched; so far, however, it is the only logical explanation.

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “Pasteurized prunes”

 

 

Dear Mrs. George Lindauer:

Thanks very much for the package of pasteurized prunes and the copy of a speech which you and a Mrs. John Mohler delivered this summer, apparently, judging from its content, to a pack of advertising men who make their livings trying to make the public prune-conscious.

            Unfortunately, your gifts raised more questions than they solved, and since this is a prune area I think it might be interesting to get these questions out in the open.

            Now, about that speech, Mrs. Lindauer, let’s get that one out of the way first. I have been trying to visualize the mechanics of it, and since there were two of you involved, it would appear on the surface to be completely impossible.

            Did you take turns delivering this speech, a sentence at a time, or were you both talking at once like a bunch of women at a bridge table? Did one of you talk while the other one danced? Or was one of you, perhaps, skipping back and forth across the stage dipping into a gunny-sack full of pasteurized prunes and flinging them by the handful into the faces of the advertising men? Glamorizing prunes seems impossibly difficult without some farmer’s wife antagonizing these people who, after all, you are paying to transmit to the public a portion of their hysterical enthusiasm.

            From the tone of the speech I rather lean to the idea that one of you spoke and the other one simply stood there glaring at the audience. However it was handled, I’m sure you will admit that it must have been a sordid and demoralizing spectacle, one which could not under any circumstances advance the interests of the prune industry.

            The package of prunes was delicious. I ate most of them yesterday driving back to the ranch from our pleasant visit, took a good dose of Pepto-Bismol this morning, and think everything will be fine in a day or two. It was my own fault, and I’m not blaming you a bit.

            But I do want to comment on what I feel is an unfortunate name for this new product. The word “pasteurized” has tremendous implications in the public’s mind with the killing of germs, and as I devoured your package of goodies there was a whole area of horror in the back of my mind as I considered what I had been eating all my life until this moment.

            UNpasteurized prunes? Heaven forbid. I think the prune people stuck their necks out too far this time. As far as I’m concerned, anyway, if I can’t find a pasteurized prune, the basic laws of hygiene will drive me right back to my good old canned peaches and applesauce.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mill Run

By Moritz Thomsen

Los Molinos Sun

No date

 “Pitfalls”

 

(Notebook version)

The hog business has many pitfalls and many disagreeable features which are discussed at length in the farm magazines, but I have never seen any mention in any publication of what is really the most disagreeable, the most hard to cope with feature of them all. The particular cross that the hog man must bear was one I thought quite unique to the business until I became involved with Slim in a field of watermelons and found that the same conditions prevailed.

I am speaking of the casual, uninvited visitor to your ranch who tells you how to run your business. Everyone, absolutely everyone has at some time or another owned an old sow. If they haven’t owned one they used to spend the summer with Uncle Ernie who did. There is something depraved, something blood-curdling about the depth of detail which my guests can dredge up from their childhood past about grandpaw’s sow named Rosie or that little gilt at Aunt Jenny’s who farrowed 17 pigs under the peach tree. What a curious relationship must have existed that the details remain so fresh.

            Now the terrible thing about this is that owning or knowing that old sow has turned my visitors into swine experts. They shake their heads in disapproval and tell me how to get straightened out. I have been advised to feed my sows mashed potatoes, lye, coal, pink beans, and Ivory soap. One guy insisted that I cut all the tails off my baby pigs, came back a week later, found that I hadn’t, and drove off in a dander; I haven’t seen him since. Perfect strangers will drive into the ranch and just about die laughing because the baby pigs are sleeping under heat lamps or because I’m not feeding them cottage cheese like cousin Lem did back in ’07.

            A while back one of the temporary mosquito abatement men would drive in 4 or 5 times a week in his little Jeep. I thought at first he was looking for mosquito larvae, but it turned out he was looking for sick pigs. I think it was some sort of an insane obsession; the sad truth is that he could almost always find one either sick or dead, and his reactions day after day were identical. First he would hunt me down wherever I was, approach me with a dead march step, face grey, eyes averted, tell me what was happening on the ranch, and then announce that I had cholera. I used to hide in the grain bin when I saw him coming, and then he quit or got transferred or went back to Napa.

            One of my off the ranch experts is a truck driver who has breakfast at the J & J. What we have in common is an awareness of the downward trend in the hog market, though our reactions are not exactly identical. I swear he sits at the counter swilling gallon upon gallon of coffee waiting for me to come in so that he can greet me with, “Boy, hogs just ain’t worth nothin’ today, are they?” and as he says it, over his face spreads a grin of such diabolic glee that makes my blood run cold. Wonder what I ever did to him?

 

 

(Published version)

Any fool knows how to raise hogs. A few ears of corn, some table scraps, a nice mud hole, and man, you’re in business. I thought for a while this knowledge was instinctual or at the least absorbed at the mother’s breast. Science, however, tell us this is impossible.

            Today we will discuss the worst feature of the hog business. It is not the smell, the problem of disease or nutrition; it is not being eaten alive by a sow with litter. No, I am speaking of the casual uninvited visitor to your ranch who tells you what you are doing wrong. Compared with this problem, being eaten alive by a sow with litter is like a two-week vacation with pay.

            Everyone who comes on the ranch, absolutely everyone has at some time or another owned an old sow. If they haven’t owned one they used to spend the summer with Uncle Ernie who did. There is something depraved, something truly unnatural about the depth of detail which my guests can dredge up from the childhood past about grandpaw’s sow named Rosie or that little gilt at Aunt Jenny’s who farrowed 17 pigs under the peach tree. What a curious, heart-rending relationship must have existed that the details remain so fresh. And why did they always have 17 pigs? What, I keep asking myself