Sunday, May 2, 2004

[I wrote this bit of memoir in 1993, when my youngest son had graduated high school and was packing to leave home. A version of it appeared that year in an issue of the Chico News & Review newsweekly.] CIRCLES At 9 o'clock one January morning in 1971 I put out my thumb on eastbound Wilshire Boulevard and never thought seriously about what I was doing until I washed my face in the restroom of a last-chance Texaco on the outskirts of Albuquerque. While I wandered I was surely accompanied by any number of guardian angels. There's an awful lot of Nothing out there; scary stuff happens in the middle of it. When she was 18 my mother somehow made her way alone from the rural Midwest and its perceived limitations to the limitless possibility California seemed to offer in 1950. Twenty years later, also 18, I reversed the process, hoping to exchange the anonymity and confusion that my Los Angeles had been for the welcoming familiarity of a green Midwestern dream. My "land of lost content" had evolved out of a dozen lengthy childhood stays with Iowa relatives. It meant snowed-in winters playing canasta or wa-hoo with my aunts and grandmother, summers cutting corn out of the soybean rows and carrying water to my uncles and grandfather where they labored in distant quarter-sections. It was climatic melodrama--the terror of the electrical storm, the tension of tornado weather, the hailstones of despair. Mom has rarely remarked on her journey--something about selling magazine subscriptions door to door, losing her footlocker in a Denver hotel when she couldn't pay the bill. Nor has she heard my own travelogue. What was for me adventure--first steps toward a mythology of self--was for her the loss of her only child, a time of anguish and worry. She just doesn't want to know. My journey lasted five days. It might have lasted only three, but I used a day to take in the Grand Canyon and another to accept a free hotel room in St. Louis--far out of my way, but the prospect of a shower and a night's sleep was irresistible. Bless the desperate woman who picked me up on the Oklahoma Turnpike; she was headed for Chicago and offered me the ride and room if I would comfort her fussing infant while she drove. I'd left Los Angeles, California, under clear skies with seven dollars and fifty cents. I arrived in Estherville, Iowa, during winter's first serious blizzard with five dollars still in my pocket. The kindness of strangers--how little I understood how much depended on it. I remember every face, but names for only three--Ken Bernard and Dave Boley, skiers from Santa Rosa who took me from Victorville, California, to that New Mexico Texaco (and who showed me the Grand Canyon on the way), and Valentine somebody, the trucker on his way to Minneapolis who picked me up in St. Joseph, Missouri, just as the first snow began to fall. The morning after I reached Estherville I was learning social skills pouring coffee for county cops at the Majestic Cafe. Then came the rooming house, the cat, the stint at the junior college, followed by marriage, children, and the inevitable rest. I never managed to find the Iowa of my childhood. By the time I got there every relative had been dragged off the land in the first stages of that tragic diaspora of small farmers. Uncles had jobs in feed stores. Aunts did clerical work in small-town chambers of commerce. Grandparents passed away too soon. After the divorce I moved with my children to Chico, in Northern California. It seemed to me in 1977 that if you put Los Angeles and a small midwestern farming town in a bag and shook it around awhile Chico was what would fall out. For 15 years it was the perfect place for my boys to grow up. That we live in circles is a truism for which I am all too often the proof. Now that my youngest child prepares to go out on his own it seems as if the years that went before were only a dream. Like my sons, who approach the world of adulthood fresh and curious--like, in fact, my mother as she is drawn into the terra incognita of old age--I enter again at the borders of Nowhere, navigating by instinct, hoping for the best. 3:57:35 PM    comment []

[I wrote this shortly after moving to a rented cabin on private land surrounded by the Plumas National Forest, east and south of Quincy, California, and a thousand or so feet above it.] A SOCIETY OF TREES (1994) No one here on the mountain can remember a summer quite like this. The weather is cooling some now, but every day for six weeks the temperature climbed over 95 degrees. In the parched forests to the southeast and -west the fires of summer burn. Late afternoons the wind gathers force and roars through the canyon, filling it with smoke from distant blazes. Eerie afternoon light turns everything unexpected shades of orange. Today's winds are fierce but they have shifted direction, clearing the haze. The A-frame's roofing tin shudders and creaks. Trees wash the air: black oaks flutter and tremble among the swaying conifers like fawning protegees, Gilbert and Sullivan to the evergreens' Puccini. *** Intermittently through the summer, and despite the general ban, we are privileged to hear the song of the chain saw. We rented our 20 acres In the Plumas National Forest last May expecting as much. Each day logging trucks converge on local mills with the corpora delicti. On distant slopes the greening rectangles of clearcuts past appear to recover. One hopes. The current killing fields are out of sight. Recently I coaxed my aging but able Volkswagen over the ruts and gullies and up the steep, stony grades of nearby logging roads. In doing so I startled a variety of wildlife--coyotes, ground squirrels, a distant bear. I came within yards of smacking a bobcat standing in the road around a sharp turn. Again and again I was stunned to stumble on great acreages of logged-over mayhem, grayed ruins of slash and debris not visible from the blacktop. There are curious loopholes in our anticlearcut laws. *** When you hike the woods around here, the warm scents, the susurrations of the moving foliage enchant you. Then you encounter a stump, and farther on another, and then another. Each measures three or four or five feet across. Then you realize you stand among juveniles: none of the trees around you have diameters greater than 18 inches. You think, Here is a community without elders, a society of orphans. The grandfathers have been disappeared. *** Mornings starting around 6 or 7 the chain saws echo back from somewhere down the hollow. They drone and whine in weird two- and three-part harmonies at random intervals until midday, an unseen trio of gargantuan mechanical bugs. The falling trees go crack-ack-ack. They hit the distant ground with soft concussing thuds. *** We live on a south facing slope at 4500 feet elevation. A picture window in the main room reveals the southern vista as far as Pilot's Peak and Bull Nose Mountain (or Blue Nose Mountain; depends on your map). The yard slopes down and away. The first 50 yards or so have been cleared, possibly as a fire safety precaution, but mostly to ensure a year-round supply of sunlight to our solar panels. Where the forest starts, at the back of this clearing, the trees seem ranged by height--squat infant firs up front, then a few slender oaks, and finally older and variously taller firs and cedars and pines. Mornings, when I sit with my feet on the sill and drink my tea, I gaze with diminishing content on this tender assemblage. Probably this is cabin fever, but it is becoming hard to shake the feeling that the view, in truth, is theirs. The trees stare in, as if my family were figures in a diorama at a museum of unnatural history. They're watching even now. So patient. So green. 10:44:53 AM    comment []