LOOKING BACK

My dad was much better at remembering the good times than my mother. To listen to my mother you would’ve thought that her life had been one long strand of misery and deprivation. But I don’t remember any of that. And the old photographs I am looking at today do not bear that out. I am leafing through snapshots taken in those days after the war in the years before and just after my mom and dad were married. I see the playful poses….my mother jumping on his shoulders, the two of them mugging for the camera. They are enjoying the outdoors….skiing, hanging out at the beach, riding on a boat. They are almost always with close friends, laughing at parties, drinks in hand. There are even happy times with me as a small child. I can tell from the photos that I was loved.

My dad almost always remembered the fun stuff. The childhood pranks. The oddball characters that he hung out with. He could always come up with a funny story or two about those early days on the streets of San Francisco. But my mother would dwell upon things she lost somewhere along the line. There was a bitterness and despair that was so deep I cannot fathom it, because as far as I can tell we grew up in a great environment. We were all healthy, happy kids. We were mercifully bereft of any great tragedies or terrifying events. We were well cared for and well thought of. We made it through high school and beyond. We married, had kids, developed senses of humor and independence, and became good citizens. Yet somehow life let my mother down in a big way.

There came a time when she could no longer stand my dad and only communicated with him through shouts and gripes. She let the television set turn her once quick mind into mush. She let the long life of a subservient housewife beat her down. But my father was not without fault in all of this. Long ago he shackled her independence, kept a tight rein on the purse strings, determined directions, and made too many important decisions on his own. Some time in the late 1960s, the two of them set off on different paths though still bound together by marriage. My dad chose to live in the moment and let the cards fall wherever they would fall. My mother elected to chain herself to a past that became more disagreeable the more she thought about it.

I am not sure what happened way back when. Perhaps nothing at all but the fabrications of a woman somehow disappointed by life. A woman who wanted something other than an obligatory postwar marriage, a house in the suburbs, and three odd and willful children. But the early photographic proof remains that there was once some happiness and joy that through time become cracked and stained with age. There are stories in these pieces at paper that I can never unlock.

UNDER ORION'S BELT

As we drove into the Carrizo Plain from the south end, past the oil rigs and pump jacks in Maricopa, I could see that this was not going to be the verdant spring visit I had anticipated.  The land looked beat up and tired.  Soda Lake was dry.  The lumpy hills of the Temblor Range were devoid of vegetation.  And the washboarded road was playing havoc with our little camper/van.  Nevertheless we pushed on. And I became entranced once again with the sheer size and austere distances we were traversing.  And here and there I could see bursts of color.  A splash of goldfields in the chaparral.  A small bunch of roadside poppies.  A lupine or two.  These were the plants that were somehow hearty enough to reach full bloom.

 But our ultimate goal was to get a campsite in the KCL Campground, get settled in, and come up with a new strategy for exploring the Carrizo.  The campground in question has only about ten sites, and even fewer trees.  Questionable water (high in nitrates).  And a resident pair of Great Horned Owls who dwell in the large eucalyptus there.  As fate would have it, all the sites were taken.  Including a group site full of boy scouts from Santa Margarita. 

 In all the times I have camped here I have never seen a ranger of any type (it is managed by the Bureau of Land Management) nor are there any fees charged so, as unobtrusively as possible, we parked our van over to one corner of the camp and no one seemed to notice or to care.  In fact, the resident campers were downright friendly.  Across the way, Ren was traveling with her 16-year old cat, pretty much living out of her car.  She looked to be in her late 40s perhaps, in sloppy t-shirt and cargo pants.  Probably a real looker at one time but now missing four of her front teeth, and quick to tell us about her family’s ups and downs. 

 Next to us were two women who looked like researchers.  They had vials and killing jars and other various paraphernalia, and after talking to one of them, Sara, turned out they were, indeed, researchers trying to re-introduce important pollinators back into the valley.  Meanwhile, on the far side of the camp, live music was emanating from a campsite with two young men and two young women.  Fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar.  Bluegrass music and songs that laid down a quiet soundtrack to the afternoon.

 Ren was having trouble putting up her tent so one of the bluegrass boys came over to help.  Sara went to loan her a mallet.  Meanwhile, a pair of campers who came in late, asked us if they could set up behind our van and, of course, we said yes.  Later on I loaned them a table so they wouldn’t have to cook on the ground.  A Scout leader who had locked his keys in his car was appreciative when we gave him a wire coat hanger. Throughout the camp there seemed to be a real feeling of camaraderie and appreciation for where and who we were. 

 As the sun disappeared over the dark hills to the west, the hooting of the owls provided an impromptu chorus for the bluegrass players.  Campfires popped up all around us, and I had visions of the migrant camps in The Grapes of Wrath.  And when darkness took over, Orion rose into the center of the sky as if to watch over us and protect us all.  The Carrizo Plain no longer seemed austere and foreboding.  Our little campground was a beacon of goodwill and good feelings against the cold April night.  A small group of human beings huddled under a living canopy, pinpoints of light and life in a vast and seemingly endless landscape.  Under  Orion’s belt, we were caught up in the mystique and the magic of this raw and beautiful plain

Revisiting the Field

 

This morning I discovered where I was on Christmas Day of 1967.  I’ve been digitizing old slides, plowing through the memories, and there it was.  A picture of a bathtub in the Los Altos Hills dated 12/25/67.  The tub was on its side, having served dutifully as a cattle trough for many years, I am sure.  Beside it was an old wooden gate.  There were brown hillsides and a few oaks. And far in the background, I could see vestiges of the San Francisco Bay and the megalopolis surrounding it.  I have no other recollections of that afternoon but I bet I can reconstruct it pretty well.

That morning I would have spent with my family down in the flatlands of Mountain View, happily opening presents and sharing that all too rare feeling of togetherness.  My parents were no doubt worrying about the lengthening of my hair.  And my proclivity for wearing an old Army field jacket everywhere.  Little did they know that only a week before, I had dropped acid for the first time. Had spent the night in a crash pad in Santa Cruz with close friends, listening to Jefferson Airplane on headphones and being overwhelmed with color and sound. Feeling an overwhelming peace with the world, even as the spector of Vietnam lurked on the fringes.

But this was Christmas morning and I wasn’t high...yet.  And I cannot, for the life of me, remember any of the presents I may have gotten that morning.  But I’m sure we prolonged the process because it was that one time of the year that we were truly family.  We would have cleaned up all the wrapping paper, deciding which ribbons to keep.  Gone off and made inventory of our newly opened gifts.  And I might have stuck around until lunch time.  But at some point, one of my friends must have called me and said, “hey, we’re going up to the Field today.  Come join us!”

The Field was a large chunk of open space in the Los Altos Hills, a piece of land that had probably been a

sprawling ranch at one time but now seemed abandoned save for one big water tank at its crest.  The rest was quintessential California terrain.  Rolling land with dead gray grass, dotted with gnarled and twisted live oaks, bay laurel and chaparral.  We had “discovered” it about a year earlier while driving around the back roads getting stoned.  No one ever seemed to go there.  The land was open and inviting.  So we just called it “the Field” and began making regular pilgrimages there.  It was especially inviting in the spring when the grasses were a verdant green, and the mustard was blooming amid the apricot orchards.

More than likely on that Christmas afternoon, Phil and his sister Nina would have come by.  Or maybe my old buddy Stan.  Or any of about half a dozen co-conspirators who would whisk me away to our haven in the hills, smoking weed all the way as we climbed the winding roads beyond Foothill College and into the eucalyptus-tinged air of the coast range.  I am sure Nina would have been with me.  I was madly in love with her at the time.  She was my hippie ideal.  Skinny to a fault.  Long brown hair combed down straight.  Sharp features and deep, brown eyes.  Dark Italian skin to match my Greek-bred melanin. Short skirts.  All done up in paisley and beads.  Full of clever asides and laughter.

Our little group would have turned off the paved road onto a short, dirt drive ending at a locked aluminum gate and, to the right, a small opening in the neglected barbed wire fence.  From there it was a short walk uphill, toward the water tank, where we could all sit and smoke and look out over slate gray water of the bay, the winding sloughs, and the industrial onslaught that was usurping the shoreline.  We were likely bundled up against the December chill, but feeling the warmth of our companionship, the unspoken bonds, the outright laughter, and the blessing of many years spent together, nurtured by the same little community at the base of the hills.

Eventually the time would come to get up, lightheaded and silent, and walk back down the hillside toward the vehicle or vehicles that had brought us to this secret place.  And I think that was when I saw the old bath tub, lying on its side, rust stained and forgotten.  But a fitting memento to this place where the Ohlone once roamed, where the Spanish created a sprawling land grant that was eventually taken from them, and parceled out into farms and ranches overlooking the Valley of the Heart’s Delight below.  And now this precious little bit of acreage that was somehow spared the incursion of the wealthy.  The rambling ranchers and sprawling “starter castles” now hovering over what was soon to become the Silicon Valley.

But that Christmas Day was such a pivotal moment for all of us.  An exclamation point on the Summer of Love.  The lead-in to a year filled with intense highs and lows.  Assassinations. The fear of Selective Service.  Nixon as president. The joy of outdoor concerts, zoned-out camping trips, great bands at the Fillmore.  And toward the end, the dissolution of my romance.  The heart ache of once again being alone and having to navigate a world in confusion.  And a future that seemed both hopeless and hearkening.

 

*Afterthought:  “The Field” has long since been subdivided and filled with high-end homes, but a portion of it still remains as Byrne Park.