Sometime in the late 60s, a wandering immigrant debarked a Russian fishing vessel and made his way to Northern California, where he started living in the woods in Hendy State Park outside Philo in Mendocino County.

 

Pitro Zalenko survived by hunting squirrels and wandering into the countryside gleaning fruit from unguarded orchards. He scrounged his clothing and other supplies from things tourists left behind while day tripping in the parkland redwoods. Much of what is known about him—according to the ancient newspaper clippings posted on a kiosk in the park—comes by way of a local woman who hiked daily in the park and stumbled upon the hermit, befriending him. 

 

He didn’t speak much English, but according to his neighbor, he was Jewish, possibly from Ukraine, and had fought Nazis in World War II. Post-war, he didn’t seem to be much of a fan of the Soviet Union, either, considering that he spent his days sleeping rough in a hollowed-out tree and living off scraps. 

 

Signs in the park point to to the “Hermit Hut,” which, if one isn’t informed beforehand, one might picture as a small cabin, a lean-to, or the remains of one or another. A lean-to would perhaps have been a massive structural improvement over the actual hut, which is a crawlspace into the bowels of an enormous half-decayed redwood tree that might have been in much better shape 40 or 50 years ago but which hardly would have provided more shelter from the seasonal rains, constant fog, and not inconsiderable cold of winter months. 

 

 

Pitro’s scant biography names the date of his death in 1981 and says his ashes were scattered in Hendy Woods; he was said to have lived there at least 18 years in the 60s and 70s, but there’s a hole in his life story between when he was known to dwell in the tree and when he was known to have died. What happened in between? Did he retire indoors? Was he there the whole time, but more hidden?

 

When I was a kid, hermits were a fixture of comic strips. They lived on mountaintops and dispensed wisdom to people who journeyed to find them, or built fires in caves and lived half in the dark, or survived as castaways, hermits by circumstance rather than vocation. 

 

I never thought much about what kind of choices would lead to hermitage. I may have idly considered it something like joining a monastery: Someone would leave their society and daily life behind because it was a calling, with similar divine inspiration and ascetic deprivation, only alone instead of within an ecclesiastical dormitory. 

 

What I didn’t consider is what pain might lead to such a choice. When a person strikes out and leaves home behind, perhaps they’re following the spirit of adventure, but perhaps they’re fleeing tragedy of their own or others’ making. Maybe they lost everything in a fire and there’s nothing to keep them put. Maybe they killed someone and can no longer walk free, choosing to condemn themselves outdoors instead of in prison. 

 

There’s also the political angle: Fully apprehending the unfairness, even evils, of society, someone untethered to living within those patriarchal bounds chooses to renounce them entirely. 

 

 

When I was a hermit, I was neither off the grid nor principled in my stance of fleeing everything. I was fleeing nothing except the thoughts in my own head. Having chosen—drop by drop, as it were—to devote my life to getting high, I lost my job, then my desire to turn to pursuing art full-time, then my will to pursue anything. I lost most of my friends, some temporarily and some forever. I called people and then didn’t show up. I didn’t call my family at all. 

 

I lived in an expensive apartment that wasn’t technically in a basement but that didn’t have any sunlight coming through the windows unless you were in the far back bedroom, which I avoided assiduously. The windows in the living room, where I spent most of my time, faced a passageway that led from the back yard, ostensibly mine to use, down past the trash cans to a gate on the street. These windows were dimly lit by the light coming from three floors above. As I grew more paranoid, I covered them by propping record albums against them, then draping them in fabric. 

 

The preponderance of my drug use was about fun, adventure, sociability, self-discovery. The richest experiences were also psychedelic, involving visions and what I called “making contact,” having vivid interplay between my conscious mind and beings or energies I perceived as outside of myself. These journeys are fun if they’re done with others, or if they’re occasional, but once exploring the farthest reaches of your mind or the universe becomes your job, it’s less fun than it is work, and there are fewer rewards.

 

I would go on mental adventures, or I would watch broadcast TV, which in the mid-2000s already hosted nothing but reality shows and reruns. I would go to sleep, or not. When I woke up, if it was morning, I’d groan and wonder how on earth I would manage to make it through another interminable day. 

 

For the first few decades of my life, I’ve had a recurring dream that ends with me running, away from something or toward something, trying to save someone or being chased—and running unstoppably toward or just over the edge of a cliff. The dream usually ended with a feeling of fear that ended with waking up. An uncle or someone at school told me that if you fall off a cliff and wake up, you’ll be OK, but if you die in the dream, you die in real life. 

 

The feeling of waking up relieved to be alive, the realization that the cliff wasn’t real, stopped toward the end of my using. The feeling once I reached the edge, my stomach dropping past my feet as they skidded on gravel toward the inexorable end, was no longer “No!” but “Ugh. Not again.”

 

 

I lived underground and inhabited the dark, even in daylight. The clock meant nothing to me aside from shop hours. I ventured out to the corner store for food, or ordered delivery. I bought cigarettes and beer and cans of soup at night, and, by the end, the only other drugs that were easy to purchase: canisters of nitrous oxide I inhaled from balloons. People who know of nitrous at all as a drug think of it as a silly party pastime, a few seconds or minutes of lightheadedness, but I had turned this psychotropic oxygen deprivation into a near-permanent state of delusional gloom. What had started as an unfortunate discovery that a hit of nitrous could give me a second wind had turned into a perpetual motion machine where I was always seeking a second wind even though the first one had long left the building. Other drugs involved interacting with people. I dwindled my brain into hermitage, and then fed it in place. 

 

 

People in recovery, particularly but not exclusively in the early stages, debate the nature of “choice.” From a rational angle, the angle that prescribes and responds to cognitive behavioral therapy as the remedy for recovery from drug use, all actions are choices, and every instance of consuming an intoxicant is done entirely under one’s own volition. 

 

When you’re immersed in it, however, using doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like what you have to do to stay alive. 

 

Recovery literature, and especially the best shares in 12-Step meetings from people who are well on their way to being healthy participants in their own lives, makes clear that what using accomplishes, for the drug addict, is blunting emotion. 

 

Getting high is a way to keep from feeling, even though it’s a way to construct a particular feeling. And when the “getting” no longer leads to a “high,” using is the only thing that temporarily makes life feel less like hell—even though you can be 100 percent aware that the using is also causing the descent. 

 

Like Homer Simpson said about alcohol, “It’s the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

 

 

This week I celebrated 15 years clean, 15 years without a drink or a drug. (I wrote more about the recovery process in my Easter newsletter, about Mr. Bunny’s birthday.)

 

I did the math, and I took my first hit of weed roughly 15 years before the day I quit, so I’ve now spent the same amount of time free from drugs as using them. 

 

Some recovering addicts say they’ll always be addicts, that there’s always a risk. I suppose that’s true; one could always decide using is a good idea, just once, just for a minute, just for a few days, or forever. I know more than once person who decided they could go back to just drinking wine and before you know it, they were full-time addicts again. One of them died of an overdose, pain pills mixed with wine. 

 

This is a useful phenomenon to remember. I personally don’t walk around with desperation locked in a flimsy jewelry box in my head. I’m not trying to judge anyone, but I’ve heard people with decades of recovery speak in meetings as if they’re perpetually on the brink of losing everything again, and that sounds exhausting. 

 

Abstinence works for me. It doesn’t work for everyone. Some people truly can reintroduce weed or beer into their lives and not suffer consequences. That’s not my path. I use the tool called “playing the tape,” and I think about what very typically happens after the first sip or hit or whatever, which is talking too much and feeling stupid, then getting anxious or angry or weepy, then having a horrendous hangover. Before even factoring in anything regrettable, the whole thing is a nuisance that’s so easily avoidable, I choose not to. 

 

And if I need to play the tape longer, I think about that basement, about the days when I was a hermit, about the lengths I went to alienate everyone, most of all myself. 

 

 

🍄🌳🌲🍂

 

I’m not a hermit anymore. I’m also not a career woman. I’ve made amends to people, recovered some relationships, let other ones go, by their choice or mine. One of the things I accomplished, through my long housing journey, was finding a place with so much natural light that it is impossible for me to avoid the day. I no longer want to. 

 

Thanks to those of you who have been with me on this whole long strange trip, and thanks to every last one of you for 15 years. 

 

1990: First drunk

1990: First weed trip

1994: First time trying speed

1995: First acid trip

1999: First time doing ecstasy and coke

2000: “Research chemicals,” nitrous, Burning Man

2003: Daily cocaine use

2004: First time trying to quit

2005: California witchcamp: First major social/spiritual experience without drugs

2005, fall: Checked into rehab

2006: Finished rehab

2007: Quit for real, checked into halfway house

June 1, 2007: Clean date, 15 years ago.

 

 

 

It shouldn’t be normal to assume a straight, traditional future for children and then impose it on them while they’re still kids! My advice is: Don’t talk to kids like this, and if you’re the parent, kudos for letting the other adult know they’re being ridiculous. 

 

 

The Searcher, by Tana French 

The first 6 of Irish-American novelist Tana French’s 8 books were a series of police procedurals helmed by various detectives in the Dublin Murder Squad. Unlike other crime series, the protagonists were not the same cops in every story, and not always the cops themselves. The Searcher is, so far, a standalone novel with a protagonist so complex and appealing I very much hope he reappears in future mysteries. The novel bears only a few, if important, similarities to the John Wayne cowboy movie The Searchers, but French said in interviews that her book, set in the Irish countryside, is her take on a Western. It also plays with tropes such as “a stranger comes to town,” “small towns with big secrets,” and “a cop or criminal leaves the trade and tries to lead a quiet life.” Our hero, Cal Hooper, has taken early retirement from the Chicago PD because he could no longer square what he thought policing was with the realities on the ground; the moral compass he thought he held so strongly no longer overlapped with CPD expectations. So, he buys a fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere in the Irish countryside, makes friends with his neighbors, and tells none of them he was a cop. This doesn’t keep the locals from profiling him as one, and soon enough, someone shows up wanting Cal to help them look for a missing teenager. Cal’s reluctance to get involved stems equally from his desire to lead a quiet life and his feeling that his personal understanding of right and wrong may not be reflected in the law and how it’s enforced—and that these latter things differ greatly. Being a mystery, The Searcher hinges on some twists and turns that, instead of launching the story in a different direction for thrills, deepen the characters and their relationship to the landscape that’s both comfortable and hardscrabble for most to the people who inhabit it. It’s not a heavy-handed book, but it is a book about moral philosophy and the definitions of home, family, and ambition. The lyrical descriptions of the mountainside, of Cal’s restoration of his near-abandoned home, the dialogue between neighbors that Cal frantically decodes for approval or caution—all of these led to me checking the page count in my e-book so I could see how close I was to the end. I wanted this book to be hundreds of pages longer, although the story ended exactly when it should have. 

 

Current reading: Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener

 

Nuala Bishari (SF Public Press)

I hadn’t realized until I read this eye-opening article that San Francisco’s “coordinated entry” program—the heuristic for deciding who in the homeless and at-risk population gets what available public or subsidized housing—is based on an algorithm. Sure, there has to be some way of prioritizing people who will suffer the most if they are turned out onto the street or if they continue to live there, but these decisions are mostly left to a computerized ranking of a survey questionnaire people fill out when they’re trying to find a place—not even to live, but a place in the housing pipeline. If your answers to questions about domestic abuse, chronic homelessness, or what city services you already use don’t fit the rubric devised to sort people into risk categories, you may have to start over again. Multiple-choice ranking of needs is a newly popular way to try to ensure “equity” so that individual case workers don’t wield unconscious biases when accepting or rejecting applications across different industries. It’s similar to new rules in banking about how to disburse loans, but just as relying on credit scores alone ignores the draining of generational wealth from communities of color, relying on “are you currently relying on the public health system” assumes that homeless Black people have the time or resources to pursue medical care outside the emergency room. Comments from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing sing the regular refrain about how they offer services to everyone who tries to get housed, but the fact that the shelter system is so inhumane and poorly run is a significant reason why so many people are seeking housing from the street rather than from inside the system. 

 

Jo Livingstone (Harper's Bazaar)

How is it that an astronomical phenomenon—the optical illusion that the planet Mercury is moving backwards in its orbit—became an astrological explanation for “communication problems” including hardware glitches and ill-advised text messages? Cultural critic Jo Livingstone pursues the origins of this deus ex machina, which was idly observed by Western astronomers who did not ascribe universal bad vibes to the planet’s orbit criss-crossing Earth’s. Mercury is retrograde for roughly one-quarter of each year, which is a lot of time to give up to such dramatic prescriptions as not signing contracts or traveling. Some friendly astrologers say that Mercury is signaling that it’s a good time to look backwards on past communication patterns. Livingstone doesn’t much look at Mercury—or Hermes—the mythological figure other than to say that he’s a messenger who’s become a celebrity. I personally think it’s useful to consider Hermes as an ally, as he is one of the few gods who can travel at will between the lands of the gods, humans, and the underworld, conducting messages as well as souls. He protects other messengers and travelers as well as thieves, salesmen, and poets. His staff bears the caduceus, so his talent as both notifier and psychopomp is related to the practice of medicine. As with other aspects of astrology, I find “belief” to be less relevant than metaphor. Are there elements of this framework of symbols that I can find useful in parsing my life and where I’d like it to go? Yes. Do I cancel plans because of star charts? I do not, but I also don’t argue with those who schedule their meetings around voids and transits. If people want to blame their phone dying on the fact that it died in this part of the calendar, that’s great. It’s like any other diagnosis: It can be useful just to have a reason for the problem, a name for what’s wrong. 

 

Eleni Balakrishnan (Mission Local)

SFPD is claiming that keeping track of how often police draw their weapons or apply holds to suspects is an onerous task that interrupts the job of policing. I saw someone on Twitter compare this statement with “the only reason COVID numbers are going up is that we’re testing more.” 

 

Thanks much to friend of the newsletter George K for your generous deposit in the pitcher on top of the piano in this brain tavern we all sit around and sing in. If you’re still employed and liquid and you’d like to support my writing, look up “Tarin Towers” on PayPal or Venmo, send me a gift certificate for a food delivery app, or check my Amazon Wishlist.

 

 

Notes and Errata: I accidentally numbered two issues “15,” so this one skips from 16 to 18. ALSO: A Quinceañera is a 15th birthday party in Latin America. ALSO ALSO: More about my trip to Philo with Elizabeth in the April 2 issue. More about recovery in the April 23 Mr. Bunny birthday issue. ALSO ALSO ALSO: The light was just wrong for me to get more comprehensive photos of either Hermit Hut, but I did my best. Most of the facts about his story are from my memory of the newspaper clipping, shored up by facts from Wikipedia mostly cribbed from this same source.

 

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THANKS FOR READING | MY SKYLIGHT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE BLINDS | HI, MOM

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