[MD] The World's First Internet

[John Carl]

"It was their attitude--plain-spoken, he thought.
   *Plains* spoken.  They were speaking in the language of the Plains.  This
was the pure Plains American dialect he was listening to.  It wasn't just
Indian.  It was white too.  It was a kind of Midwestern and Western accent
you hear in Woody Guthrie songes and cowboy movies.  When Henry Fonda
appears in the Grapes of Wrath or Cary Cooper or John Wayne or Gene Autry or
Roy Rogers or William S. Boyd appear in any of a hundred different Westerns,
this is how they talk, not like some fancy college professor, but
*Plains*spoken, laconic, understated, very little tonal change, no
change of
expression.  Yet there was a warmth beneath the surface that you couldn't
point to the source of."

You Know Who from You Know What


We are of a place. Our organisms experience an environment.  The ten
thousand things arise and confirm us, without a doubt.

Bioregionalism simply asserts this truth and advocates a concomitant
reality.  That is, Reality oughta match the Truth.  Since we are of a place,
our authentic being requires an authentic place.  And Virtual Reality isn't
an authentic place.  Moving from region to region in service of a career
dedicated to the system isn't dwelling in an authentic place.  It's too
temporary to care for properly.  Care takes some time.

My place, my environment, is somewhat unusual - not only my town but most
especially my house.  The town is the remnant of an old mining town, now
defunct called North San Juan.  I live in North San Juan, I have found  my
place.

I mentioned before I came here for somewhat idealistic reasons.  Factors
including... 1) It was cheap.  "The Ridge" as its known in the bigger
twin-towns, Nevada City/Grass Valley, across the river canyon from me, has
always been historically a backwater.  It was where the real weirdos, drug
dealers, hippies and various redneck lunatics fled from society.  So with a
bad reputation, property values stayed cheap for a long, long time.  Takes
half an hour to get just to Grass Valley and then the highest paying jobs
are 40 minutes further down HWY 49 to the Big Valley.

2) Gary Snyder lives here.  He gave me the idea of Bioregionalism, seemed
fitting to copy his choice as well as his philosophy.

3)   Weirdos, drug dealers, hippies and various redneck lunatics fleeing
from society are  My Kind of People.  So... it was really a slam dunk.

Since my house is pretty strange, teetering on the brink of falling off a
cliff, lots of normal rules don't seem to apply.  Like the county comes out
to do their standardized inspections and they walk away shuddering, refusing
to go to all the trouble just to categorize the existing violations.  This
was a house built before there was such a thing as a county building
department.  On either side of it, less than 20 feet separates two other
houses owned by two completely different families and the thought of
"setback" is ridiculous.  Not to mention, did I mention that the back half
of my house is dangling on very shaky pins, over a cliff about 120 feet to
the bottom?  Just jury-rigged into the side of a hill by some part-time
carpenter who got the house from the family of the miner that built it?  On
wooden piers with the  dread "earth to wood contact" (shudder shudder)
 And here's the way the septic system works... at one time, there was a
cesspool with concrete cover that had some kind of drainage system that
doesn't really drain, but who knows?  Since then, two enormous trees have
grown up on the edge of this cliff, just outside my bathroom.  Between my
and my neighbor's house.  There is a pine that is about ten feet away from
the bank and growing on enormous bent roots, that I go to sleep thinking
about on very windy nights, and an oak tree whose roots anchor one section
of my bedroom, for that is the part of my house dangling over the edge, and
the very room I'm writing this right now, and whose limbs reach so far and
so wide that one half of my house is covered by the overstructure of this
tree, even as I'm sure the back half is supported by the understructure.

And anybody gazing at it and seeing the tenuousness of the whole "dangling
off a cliff" thing, and then hearing the explanation of how my stupid,
lazy-ass, miner-installed cesspool of a septic system is just a big hole in
the ground between these two trees is how they got so big and how they
stopped the erosion started by the greedy miners looking for gold and how my
shit is feeding my life... they pretty much throw up their hands and go
away.

Which is pretty much how I like it .  When I drop down the side of that
cliff that my bedroom dangles over, I drop down into another world.  It
feels pretty much like MY world, in that not that many people go there or
know about it.  It is what was left over after the greedy miners blew away
the hillside to get to the riverbeds of gold.  Down there the gold is gone,
but the riverbeds remain.  And trails going for miles, some cleared by the
one or two claimants who figured out the rules with BLM land, others cleared
by use.. users being me, bears, deer and some few others.  It's a lonely
place yet close to the sound of a big Harley going by on HWY 49.  Peppered
with caves which were the drainage holes emptying into the canyon of the
middle fork on the other side of the ridge.  All they had to do was follow
the bedrock river bottoms of old, and they found lots, I mean lots of gold.


My gold is my wandering intellect which finds it's deeper self when I'm by
myself, somewhat free to wander those ancient riverbottoms, hopping from
rock to rock.  There is a lichen universe on undisturbed rock that blossoms
through the seasons in ways I can't even begin to describe.    But thoughts
which flow at those times of lichen contemplation seem to be the richest.
 The place where my environment titillates my organism like no other.

It was such a time I was wandering and thinking about a relatively new thing
in town I'd heard about called, the internet.  This organization, NCCN-
Nevada County Community Network, was trying to get users to sign up.  It was
a non-profit organization that had community in its name and I was
interested in Community with a captital "C", I had been for quite a while.
 Community Network sounded intriguing.  So, I broke my ankle.

It sounds like a simple solution on how to get time off from work, but it
really wasn't all that simple.  I needed some help.  For instance, I don't
think I could have caused myself the pain of dropping 12 feet to the
concrete floor below, slightly overweight and with my nailbags on, on
purpose.  But there was flowing through my mind as I topped the last rung of
the ladder, an overwhelming wish to have some time to pursue this new
internet thingy, and a decided ambivalence to just keep building houses in
the steps of my dad and his dad and on and on...  try something new and
intellectually challenging.  I'd taken one course in basic computers at
Sierra College, and I'd found programming basic to be a fascinating
occupation which earned me accolades even from the teacher.  So maybe I
should do something different... is all going through my mind as the bottom
of the ladder slips out from under me and puts me in crutches for the next
six to eight weeks.  Some little oomph must have gotten through to my foot
to make it happen.  I know I couldn't have done it alone.

So I took the web classes, which were attended by three other people, and
learned everything I could about this thing called html and the www and the
internet and waited patiently while the community tried to get its network
in order.  In the meantime, the place I was taking the classes couldn't get
the thing to work properly where we were.  It was much more complicated tho,
than mere technical issues.  I had no idea at the time, but what was
happening was that there was a huge dissension in the community networking
meetings over censorship.  The place I was taking the classes was a room
available at a catholic school.  The catholic hierarchy decreed that
 certain content must be banned.  One of the high-falutin' nerds in charge
of networking had strong principles on openness... but I had no idea of that
at the time, I learned all about that story years later after working for
both the community network, and the commercial enterprise that the
dissaffected nerd started in competition with the community network... and
how did yours truly end up working for both?

Well thats a  long story, as they say, but you should be used to those by
now, from me, and thus fairly warned...

You see, I had one slight advantage in this brave new world.  I was
bilingual.  That is, I spoke apple fairly fluently.  There were more than a
few nerdy types in the woods, all speaking PC fluently, but Apple had
launched this campaign in the education market which meant free computers
for teachers, which meant, when those teachers wanted to get on the
internet, they needed a techie that spoke Mac.  The reason I spoke fluent
mac was because I married into a mac-fluent family.  Well I'd also always
liked apple, the flamboyant way apple went out and sought to be different.
 They seemed like a quality-oriented company, even though they made a lot of
stupid decisions.  Throwing away the company that became AOL being but one
shining example of this.  But then you could say forseeing the need for
something like AOL was in itself indicative of a company culture dedicated
to Quality.   You win some, you lose some.

 My father in law had invested heavily in Macintoshes to try and keep up
with the times in his Mountain View color separations service bureau.
Ultimately, a losing proposition for him as the desktop publishing
revolution wiped out the capital advantages of a million dollar Crossfield
scanner and made Colour Separations Company a thing of the past (yeah,
"colour" cuz he was British and had fled from Uganda to California when Idi
Amin took that country into darkness.)  Anyway, all these Macintosh
computers and thousand dollar programs like Photoshop, complete with
tutorials and stuff came in real handy in the newfangled web biz, and yours
truly, while hampered somewhat with being primarily a mac user, found it
beneficial in a market where desktop publishing software was really and
truly coming into its own.

That was one half of the equation, the other half was the wild imagination
of a limping wanderer, meandering through the diggins and coming up with
ideas.  My entre into the entire realm came through the interface of a
character called "Cal".  As in "Nevada County Cal, supposedly a miner with
an internet connection.  A miner left over from the 49er days who could now
interact with the world. I felt like I just dovetailed with this character,
and started writing about and for him.

The upshot was I got invited to be part of the web team, contributing a
monthly column in a web format.  And got to sit in on many technical issues
where I sure learned a lot.

But the main reason I was there, writing for Cal led me to researching the
local library and digging through old historical society articles from the
50's.  Written when many of the old timers were still alive from the heydays
of mining.  Right away, my first creative insight was to do some research
into an intriguing bit of local history that came to my attention from some
signs on HWY 20, just out of Penn Valley, California Historical Markers
saying, World's First Long Distance Phone Line.

The way that came about was the need for control of the sources of water for
all those diggins - shutting the water off wasn't like opening and closing a
valve.  There were tremendous amounts of water needing control.  It all came
from ditches, flumes, reservoirs and rivers miles and miles away.  Of
course, they could have run telegraph lines, but telegraphs required
operators fluent in morse and those were expensive and in demand and
probably a buncha prima donnas sitting on their butts all day with not much
to do.  It made a lot more sense to use the newfangled invention of the
telephone which any mining foreman could use and explain, "close the flume
gates".  So over two hundred miles of copper wire was soldered together,
with bluestone batteries and fires lit under the solder joints to keep the
lines from breaking in the winter.  Quite a feat of engineering, really, but
the payoff was that a miner sitting on a lonely Sierra peak could get on the
horn back to headquarters in North San Juan where there was also a telegraph
office going over the hill to Carson City, and thence all the way across the
country.  Transcontinental communication had come to the land.  The company
they formed they called "the Ridge Telephone Company" and no doubt they
would have expanded service, but somebody made the decision to go with the
Edison Phone.  When Edison lost his patent fight with Alexander Graham Bell,
they sorta lost any chance of maintaining their service contract.

But while it lasted, there was a building in North San Juan, where the
telephone and the telegraph, two differing communication protocols, came
together which is the technical definition of an Internet.  And
functionally, it really was a breakthrough in telecommunications foretelling
a new world order right at the door.  It was the world's first internet.
 That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

All this made for a pretty compelling storyline for my Cal character.  But
if that wasn't enough, the story continues...

 In 1874 a big rain came, and a coffer dam broke.  The phone lines sure came
in handy warning the downstream miners of a flood headed their way, but the
farmers down in Marysville didn't get the word till they found their homes
and farms flooded with the mining detritus and upset as they were, they
complained to the Federal courts where a certain Judge Sawyer took their
complaints and handed down the first environmental regulation in the history
of the world.  He decided that in the US, you have to consider what lies
downstream of your industrial operations.  A new-fangled idea which the
miners hated and combatted with spotters watching for Feds from Marysville
and Sacramento coming to inspect the workings, spotters who found a new use
for the telephone network in warning the bosses when the environmentalist
whackos were coming. But all to no avail.  The momentum for hydraulic mining
 ran out and the town of North San Juan went from around 10,000 to 129 where
it's stayed now for years.  We very carefully make sure an old person dies
before we have any babies.

At least, that's the story you'll get from Toki's, the local restaurant
across the street from the local bar.

And me, trying out this newfangled internet as a career option offered a lot
of promise.  Pretty soon, the dot com explosion was the talk of the land and
early adopters like me and Al Gore got to go around bragging about our early
adoption.  Yay us.    But the real hope of the internet as I saw it was not
the magic of hooking up machines to communicate with each other or even the
delivery of mass quantities of free porn.   To me,  the possibility is here
in a new kind of mining.  The real gold is out there and it's in the minds
and imaginations of people -   Weirdos, hippies, redneck revolutionaries and
misfits of all stripes who  could be gathered and refined, if only we had a
way to wash away the overburden.  Sorta like dmb's function, but less labor
intensive.  I'm sure we'll come up with something someday.


"What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category,
Quality, and show how things become enormously more coherent--*fabulously* more
coherent-- when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary
empirical reality of the world....

.... but showing that, of course, was a very big job...."