CLICK BELOW: to send BEN a little love on the road.

Download AIMAIM Remote
Send me an Instant Message
Send me an Email
Add Remote to Your Page
Download AOL Instant Messenger



CLICK HERE: to send comments, info, hate mail, little bits o' love?

Check out the all NEW Sacklunch.com Reading List Featuring Books We've been reading lately.


SEARCH THE SACK.


Ben Marcus' Road To Nowhere (a.k.a. Alaska Journal) Click Here.

 
Click here to ADD SACKLUNCH to your AvantGo Channel List!
And read it on your PALM, WINDOWS CE, or WAP enabled device.


Try AOL FREE! 500 Hours


See the ugly logo above? Sign up for AOL and we get $15. Come on, support the cause. Do it now.



Latest Update: February 14, 2001

VALENTINE'S DAY, 10:28 AM ROOM 222 OF THE ECONO LODGE, CRESCENT CITY

It's a nice winter day outside. The sun is out, the sky is blue, the ocean is blue. Why am in my hotel room?

Just had an IM session with Mr. Sacklunch and agreed to write a story about fishing with Greg Noll.

I wrote one about fishing the Klamath with him this summer that ran in H20 Magazine, but I don't know if anyone saw it.

So, I'll write it again.

That's all going to start later today, I think. A little while ago I got Laura Noll on the phone. She told me Greg is working on his boat in Brookings, Oregon and then is going to head for the Klamath later. I'm going to try to catch up with him this afternoon.

Laura said the Smith is just about perfect right now, which means I made the right choice yesterday when I drove north instead of south from the Sea Ranch. I spent two nights and a day with Alex and Brooke Johnson and their family. They rented a nice house on the Sea Ranch with a view and a Jacuzzi and so I mooched off them for a day. I was hoping to go fishing on the Gualala, but the weather was horrendous and the rivers were all muddy.

I drove up Sunday night and it was raining and hailing like crazy, so bad I couldn't see out of my windshield at one point. It snowed hard in the local hills, and on the news we saw that Highway 17 to Santa Cruz was closed because of snow. Winter finally showed up, with a vengeance.

Spent Monday lollygagging around the house on the Sea Ranch. We drove up to Point Arena and checked the surf and the rivers, then had lunch in Gualala with a friend of Alex's. The Gualala River was semi-full and muddy, so fishing was out of the question.

I've been coming to the Gualala since I was a kid, first with mon and dad on road and whale-watching trips up the coast, then later to ride motorcycles with mom and Michael on the logging roads. I really like the Gualala area. Never caught a fish in the river, but what else is new?

Gualala used to be just the Gualala Hotel and a food store, but it's being developed and populated and has lost some of the old magic. Still a nice place, just more people around.

Gualala was an expedition when I was a kid and a semi-exotic place. Now that I'm old and jaded, some of that magic is gone, but I appreciate it in other ways. Just on the other side of Point Arena, the Garcia River Valley is about the nicest patch of coastal pastureland I've ever seen. And after driving to Alaska I've seen a lot. I could live in the Garcia River Valley, back in the hills, a nice house with a view, some horses, access to the river, etc.

No problem.

Alex and Brooke packed up the kids and left the Sea Ranch on Tuesday morning, driving south.

I had options. Eric Nelson and Curt Myers want me to help them put together their next Mavericks video. I agreed to help out of lack of anything better to do.


A Cresent City Beach.

I was going to head that way, but drove north instead, waiting for inspiration. Yesterday was a perfect Northern California winter day. The storm was gone, the air was clear, the sky was blue and the sun was blazing. The only unclear thing were all the rivers, which were full and muddy, but starting to clear.

Just before Point Arena there is a big-wave spot called Saunder's Reef. Evan and Doc and others have surfed the place, despite the fact that it emanates with the theme from Jaws.

On one attempt, Evan and Doc were getting ready to paddle out when some local blokes came by and told them a little story. The day before, one of their dads was fishing around the reef in a little aluminum boat when he was buzzed by a Great White Shark that was bigger than the boat. Scared the shit out of the guy's dad, and they recommended Evan and Doc not go out.


Pelican Bay. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

They didn't.

I drove north past all the old familiar places: Point Arena, the Garcia River, Alder Creek, the Navarro River, all the places I went with my parents when I was a kid. I stopped in a place called Elk and got coffee and a smoked salmon bagel and it felt like Alaska again: me scruffy and eating bad food and drinking too much coffee. Went through Mendocino and then on through Westport, some of it looking like Big Sur.

I like driving places when there's no one around. Makes me feel special.

Past Westport the road goes inland toward 101. I remember driving this at night on the first day of my Alaska trip, listening to a good radio station from somewhere. Yesterday I got that same radio station. I think it's in Gualala. They play great music, kind of like KPIG, but better.

I also fired up my sketchy CD player. The Jimi Hendrix BBC sessions CD was in the slot, so I listened to that. Either the disc is faulty or the player or both, because every once in a while the thing would go hay wire and start skip skip skipping and jump jump jumping and every once in a while there would be a pretty rocking variation on a Hendrix guitar solo. Had to be there, I guess.

As I started going inland from the coast to 101 I stopped for a minute to decide what I was going to do. Crescent City was three hours north, and Greg didn't really know I was coming. I was thinking about turning back and staying at the KOA campground near Point Arena and just fishing the local rivers.

But then I got to thinking about a little prank I'm planning for the near future and it got me laughing, thinking that Greg would appreciate it and might be an accomplice. I also have some big-wave video of Mavericks and the Cortes Bank he might want to see, although he doesn't seem to be all that interested in surfing these days. So I pushed on.

There was a fair bit of snow at the top of this inland route and as I got to the other side, I stopped on a bridge over a river and got a little flash of the Cassiar Highway. This river was either the Eel or a tributary of the Eel, and it was already clear along the edges.

There was a Cassiar-like traffic delay along Highway 101, too. I must have stopped for at least half and hour as a road-crew worked on a landslide.

It's always a letdown going from the Coastal Soul Route to Highway 101. It bugged me as a kid and it bugs me now. Highway 101 is head-on traffic and no ocean and the Eel River, which has always struck me as on of the most fishless rivers in California. It looks good, but I just don't think there are any fish in it.

At some point I stopped at a cafÚ and bought some sugar snacks. Like everywhere else in the Pacific Northwest, they were selling singing fish. I'd already bought a singing bass and a singing lobster, but I couldn't resist the singing Great White Shark, which plays the Jaws theme and sings Mack the Knife. Don't know who I'll give it to. Maybe I'll keep it.


Dun-duh. . . dun-duh. . . dun duh.

I drove and drove and drove, detouring through Ferndale a little bit and talking to some cows. I was going to find the mouth of the Eel but it was too far off so I pushed on.

At some point I called Greg and Laura and left a message I was coming. In Eureka I found a Kinkos and plugged in the laptop to check e-mail. The only surprise was an analysis of Water on the Brain from some dingaling broad at Final Draft. I had entered the 213-page script in their Big Break Screenwriter's competition, which included professional ñcoverageî of every entered script.

I didn't win, and this was my coverage.

EXPRESS.COM PRESENTS THE FINAL DRAFT INTERNATIONAL SCREENWRITING COMPETITION ***********

TITLE: "WATER ON THE BRAIN"

WRITTEN BY: BEN MARCUS

ENTRY # 1924 ANALYST: JODY R.

PREMISE: THIS IS A 213 PAGE SCRIPT which details, among others, the adventures of two young surfers, Gary "Bong" Ross, an Australian, and the Hawaiian Clark Bigley, as they "make the scene" along the California coast. We experience their hallucinations, their sexual encounters, their music connections and their California experience, i.e. San Francisco, Hearst Castle, etc. "Water on the Brain" culminates with the character Chris Wilson wiping out on a big wave and hallucinating that he's swimming with mermaids. As he's on the absolute brink of drowning, he pulls out, surfaces, and is met on the shore by the parachuting girl of his heart, Sky.

COMMENTS: A caution to the writer: today's film market has little, if any, room for a script that would end up as a film nearly four hours long. The script is presented in a professional script format, heavily detailed with music suggestions and stage directions -- but those are usually decided by the director; however, clearly a dedicated work by the author.

E=Excellent / VG=VeryGood / G=Good / F=Fair / P=Poor

Premise: F

Structure: F

Dialogue: G

Characters: G

B/O Potential: F

Dumb broad. She didn't get it at all, although she is right, it does need a rewrite.

Pushed on from Eureka into a nice, winter, northern California evening. I just like the northlands in winter. I like the cold, I like the deep, blue sky, I like the ocean and the sunsets. I like the way it looked and the way it feels. I like it all. No wonder I went so nutty in Southern California. I'm a north guy.

I pulled into Crescent City around 7:00 and got a plan. Instead of rolling up to Greg's and bugging him, I got a $30 hotel room, logged on for awhile and then went to the local bijou, intending to see part of Traffic and all of Hannibal. I ended up seeing all of Traffic and the last few minutes of Hannibal.

Drugs and cannibalism. Great.

Then I came back to the hotel room and started outlining a murder mystery I want to try to write.

Working title now is: Sometimes It's Hard to Be a Woman.

It's about three women who meet on the Internet playing cribbage. They chat and chat and chat and decide they all hate their husbands and their lives. One of them, inspired by Hitchcock's ñTwo Strangers on a Trainî suggests they all kill each other's husbands. There's no way to connect the three, they don't even know each other. Perfect crime and they all will be set free and set for life.

That's the basic idea. I'm just outlining it.

So now it's 11:09 and I'm watching a Chuck Norris movie and typing this.

I'm going to work on that murder mystery outline for a while, then drive around a nice winter day, maybe jump in the briny or drive out to the Klamath to find Greg.

Hopefully I'll be fishing with Da Bull tonight or tomorrow, and maybe I'll catch a fish.



THE NEXT JOURNEY
February 14, 2001


PREVIOUS ENTRIES
November 19, 2000
November 18, 2000
November 15, 2000
November 14, 2000
November 14, 2000
November 12-13, 2000
November 11, 2000
November 9, 2000
November 8, 2000
November 4-6, 2000
November 3, 2000
November 1, 2000
October 31, 2000
October 29, 2000
October 27, 2000
October 26, 2000
October 25, 2000
October 22, 2000
October 22, 2000
October 21, 2000
October 19, 2000
October 17, 2000
October 16, 2000
October 16, 2000
October 14, 2000
October 12, 2000
October 11, 2000
October 10, 2000
October 10, 2000
October 9, 2000
October 8, 2000
October 7, 2000
October 6, 2000
October 6, 2000
October 5, 2000
October 4, 2000
October 3, 2000
October 2, 2000
October 1, 2000
September 30, 2000
September 29, 2000
September 28, 2000
September 27, 2000
September 25, 2000
September 24, 2000
September 23, 2000
September 22, 2000
September 21, 2000
September 21, 2000
September 20, 2000
September 19, 2000
September 19, 2000
September 18, 2000
September 17, 2000
September 16, 2000
September 15, 2000
September 15, 2000
September 14, 2000
September 13, 2000
September 12, 2000
September 10, 2000
September 10, 2000
September 8, 2000

September 8, 2000

PHOTOS
October 1, 2000
October 1, 2000
September 27, 2000

 

[an error occurred while processing this directive]