The Official Rodes Fishburne Hub

Amazon Exclusive: “How to Tune in the Universe” by Rodes Fishburne

When I was 23-years-old I worked as a fly-fishing guide in southwestern Alaska. I lived alone in a remote tent camp on the edge of a river called the Nushagak (nush-a-gack). It was 100 miles by floatplane to the nearest town, otherwise known as electricity.

Which made the tent I lived in all the more important. It was large, with a wooden platform, steel ribs, and a tough, white vinyl tent covering. In one corner was a little cot. And in another a cook stove. And in another a little library, which contained two things: a copy of War and Peace, and an old Playboy magazine.

One night at 2 a.m. the tent started shaking violently. A wicked storm had descended onto my little nirvana from a place appropriately named “Cold Bay.” I learned later that at its peak, the storm’s winds reached 75 mph. But at that moment my main concern was that the tent was going to be ripped from its foundation, Wizard of Oz-style.

I grabbed the steel ribs and used my weight to anchor the tent. I was holding down the fort, literally. Every couple of minutes another super-gust would come along and the tent would swell up as if inhaling while contemplating where to launch itself into the dark wet night sky. Then another wave of wind and rain would snap the tent and send me rocking, like a side of beef, as I hung from the tent’s frame.

After awhile I started talking to the storm, trying to sooth her, “C’mon sweetheart, it’s really late and we’re both tired, and wouldn’t it be better if we talked about this in the morning?”

THWWAAAAAAAP… came the hissed response.

Two hours later I collapsed into bed. The storm had quieted for a moment, my arms were numb, and the only sound was of big rain drops stinging the tent. I called the lodge on the two-way radio. Any guide living in a remote tent camp was instructed to call the lodge twice a day. “Do it alive or dead,” the head guide had told me when the floatplane had dropped me off.

The storm had hit the lodge as well, throwing one of the float planes onto the dock and breaking off a wing.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said into the two-way radio.

“You should be sorry,” said the voice on the other end, “because that was the plane that was coming to get you. We’ll try to get out there in the next couple of days.”

I thought I’d be on my own for three or four days. Being alone for a few days was no big deal. Not getting supplies from the lodge made it more challenging, but self-reliance was part of the job. It turned out I would be on my own for 21 days. I read War and Peace twice. Strangely, I only read the Playboy once…

A lot of strange and interesting things happened to me during that time. Here’s one of them.

I had a little walkman radio, and one cassette tape: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Greatest Hits.” Even now, during a quiet moment in traffic I sometimes hear the opening guitar riff of “Fortunate Son” in my head. Other than the cassette tape, I could pick up one radio station, from Dillingham, Alaska, where the local DJ said things like, “Steve Pickering has a back-hoe with a broken piston he’d be willing to trade for a used snow mobile. Come around his garage tonight, but beware the pet wolf.”

One night, as I was falling asleep in my cot with the headphones on, listening to the melody that was the classified ad radio hour, my head, very gently, touched the steel ribs of the tent.

“BZZZWRRPPP”

In an instant my little radio was flooded with sounds, and foreign voices, and lively music like I’d never heard before. It was as if I had tuned into frequencies from another planet.

And then I realized the language was Russian… I was picking up a Russian radio station!

By accidentally touching the steel frame with my metal headphones I had unintentionally turned the tent’s entire steel structure into the Nushagak river’s largest radio antenna. I moved the little tuning dial on the radio and my ears feasted on rock-n-roll, opera, salsa, oldies, coming from stations as far away as Chicago, New York City, and Miami.

I was so excited I jumped out of bed, quickly realizing that in order for the radio to pick up these frequencies I had to be touching the metal frame of the tent with the headphones. Which meant that to go make a cup of hot tea I had to trace the pattern of the tent’s steel ribs with my head, or risk losing contact with the outside world.

In an instant I’d been transformed from a starving man to a starving man standing in front of a banquet of delicious… sounds. I could listen to the BBC, to sports scores, and to a marathon Rolling Stone session. As I lay very still in my bed, listening to the outside world, it felt like my little existence was on the receiving end of a magician’s encore.

At 1 a.m. I moved the tuner knob on the radio and heard a high-pitched voice say “I’m Truman Capote.” For the next 60 minutes he told of how he’d thrown the greatest party of the 20th century, the Black and White Ball, in New York City in 1966. And although Capote was long dead, there was some kind of crazy symmetry about a young writer, who had literally found himself up Shit’s Creek, pressing his head against the tent in order to hear another writer tell his story into the ether.

Years later I would write a novel, Going to See the Elephant where the main character, Slater Brown, discovers a way to learn the secret stories of San Francisco. And now that you know this story, you know the story behind the story of how Slater Brown, and you too, can tune in the universe. –Rodes Fishburne

To buy a copy of this book on Amazon.com click here

Here’s a story I wrote for the New Yorker, which they just put online:

Bullwinkle’s Revenge

Last March, Rob Forbes was driving from San Francisco to his weekend house in Glen Ellen, California, when he spotted a trailer pulled over on the side of Route 121. According to stencilled letters on the side of the rig, it was selling “Antler Lighting.” Forbes, the founder of Design Within Reach, the contemporary home-decor chain, is a man with a philosophic approach to design (“People know me for making connections that aren’t obvious”) and a penchant for sourcing unusual products (“My best find this year is a pair of vintage green Oaxacan candlesticks”). He pulled over. He recalled recently, “I thought, What is this guy doing selling antlers in a place where most people would be ashamed to kill a deer?”

The man selling antler lamps—white-tail deer chandeliers, elk wall sconces—was Spud Fulford, a resident of West Nine Mile Creek, Montana, who travels four to five times a year to Northern California to sell his wares. “I do pretty good in areas where people have built mountain homes and are looking to decorate,” he said.

What caught Forbes’s eye was a single moose-antler lamp, with two brass light-bulb fixtures, for three-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars. “Every once in awhile I’ll see something natural and say, ‘That’s just incredibly beautiful design,’” he said. “It’s not gilded, or painted white, or wrapped in glass and ceramic. It’s just a piece of pure nature and you can’t do better.” Forbes asked if he could buy the moose antler by itself, without the light bulb fixtures.

Fulford explained that he wasn’t in the antler-selling business; he was in the antler-lamp-selling business. So Forbes asked where he got his moose antlers, on account of their being some of the best design objects he’d ever seen, superior to anything Eames or Gehry created. (“They have a decorative baroque character—they are Nature’s Big Bling,” he later wrote.) Fulford, impressed by the intensity of this moose appreciation, put Forbes in contact with his antler broker. “At this point I didn’t know what I was going to do with moose antlers,” Forbes recalled, “but I knew I had to track them down.”

In June, Forbes flew to Helena, Montana to see the antler broker, Roy Rasmussen. Each shed, barn and stall on Rasmussen’s property was crammed with different varieties of antler: elk, white tail, mule deer, moose, the occasional red deer. “All combined, we probably have seven or eight tons of antlers,” Rasmussen said. “We’ve got ten thousand pounds of just elk antlers.” As for moose, Rasmussen explained, they don’t have antlers; they have paddles. And, because moose shed their paddles in December and January, they can be plucked from the ground by entrepreneurial pickers who comb the countryside after snow melt. The pickers then funnel their finds to brokers like Rasmussen, who sells them from five to twenty dollars per pound, depending on the quality of the paddle. Forbes recalled, “As we were talking, Roy was picking up the moose paddles and throwing them around to separate them and I kept saying ‘Be careful,’ and finally he says, ‘You do realize that moose fight with these things?’”

After selecting seventy-seven pounds of the most aesthetically pleasing specimens, Forbes hosed them off and shipped them back to San Francisco. “I totally scored,” he said. “It felt great.” The moose paddles sat in a closet for several months, waiting for inspiriation to strike. In mid-August, it did. Forbes recalled, “I opened a newspaper and it was filled with all this moose stuff about Sarah Palin and I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’”

Forbes, an Obama supporter, decided to donate his private stash of moose paddles for a one-of-a-kind Democratic fund-raiser. He posted photos of the moose paddles on his design Web site under the headline, “Support Moose and Obama—Quickly,” for prices ranging from fifty-two dollars to three-hundred-and-eight dollars. “Our Moose and Caribou cousins have received national media attention in the run-up to the election,” the Web site read. “Their position has been exaggerated and sometimes even deliberately mischaracterized (though I would not want to imply that Moose are a monolithic voting bloc), so we are re-purposing the Moose this election year.” The goal was to send all proceeds—not just profits—to the Obama campaign. “Your Moose paddle will hopefully serve as a reminder that a person like Obama did get elected despite all that he (and we) have been through,” Forbes wrote. “Spud might not know that his work is serving a political cause, but Bullwinkle would be proud.” Soon orders poured in from California, Florida, Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York. Forbes shed all his paddles—in the amount of eighteen-hundred-and-eight dollars—in two days.

Original story can be found here:

You can find the essay I wrote about fatherhood for Oprah’s magazine below. It was published in the July 2008 issue.

First paragraph:

“A couple of weeks ago, at three in the morning, I woke up to find my wife in bed with another man. She likes tall men, he was short. She likes broad shoulders, his were narrow. I don’t think I’m offending the parties involved when I say that at 37 pounds he was literally a bit of a lightweight. If it came right down to it, and it might, I was pretty sure I could take him…”

Click here to read the entire article on Oprah’s site.

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There, I’ve said it.

Very few other people in the world have the patience, discipline, and flat out strangeness to sit alone for hours at a time in order to live in their heads.

Do you realize there’s an entire category of people in the world who have never lived in their heads? Even for a moment? These are called politicians and they are doing the best they can. continue reading…