The Way Things Were

The Way Things Were

Coming Home

I arrived from San Francisco to Coarsegold one of the many California gold rush towns that took root between 1848 and 1855, after having lived most of my life in the Bay Area. Coarsegold, originally, “Coarse-Gold Gulch” produced approximately 1.5 million dollars worth of gold during its day. Through the years, and as gold became more difficult to find, the prospectors turned to a more thriving industry of raising livestock and ranching. Very little has changed—almost one hundred and sixty years later, at least the locals would like to think so.

The lifespan of shoes are shortened living in the country. Having not grown up in Coarsegold, the mannerisms of the country life are foreign to me. And it has been years since I have lived under the warmth of the sun. No longer do I need to climb up and down the sparkly steep sidewalks of a city chronically hidden under a canopy of gray. Now I walk across gravel driveways—my high heels being gnawed away by stone teeth. My former San Francisco streets, like Montgomery, Sutter, and California, have been replaced with streets like Long Hollow, Corral, and Wild Stallion.

I’m not used to my new landscape. My car inflates dust clouds as it bounces across uneven dirt roads riddled with stones. A few miles north in elevation, tribes of Ponderosa Pines stretch like silent grandfathers towards the highest point of an aquamarine sky. I am jealous of their beauty. The mountains and sky encase me. I am a dot amongst the fragrant expansiveness: Peaks and valleys hold my memories. Life, as I know it, can never be experienced from a car. I am learning to be still. My survival is no longer dependent on having my time occupied. I point to the clumps of smoky-green mistletoe that drip from the heavy arms of the scrub oaks. What is used to provoke kissing I learn is actually a parasite. In the country, the lines at the local gas station snake out the door so the cashier can catch up with the customers. Squirrels dart from behind the brush and granite boulders, running along side the road and missing my wheels by a thumb’s length. My new neighbors include white egrets that walk ladylike amongst the tall grass beside the still pond. This is the year I discover blue herons. They travel by tiptoe, like thieves, along the unfenced acres of my backyard; they shift the landscape one frame at a time. I want to touch them. I cannot unlock our stares to make the first move. They put a spell on me, and so I write poems about them. Here, the evenings hang thick, hooked with the howling coyotes—their cries growing louder, perhaps to stage an injury and draw their prey closer. By morning, the Yosemite foothills are outlined in frost. The world here waits for the sun.

The Backside of Prayer

Hummingbirds tread air around me. I admire how they can hold their position in space. They watch me for little-bird seconds before sipping from the passionflower I’ve trained to climb up the back porch. Their microcosmic fluorescent bodies bend and transcend towards a grace I’ve only dreamed about, right before they dart behind a velvet curtain of air and disappear.

I’m struggling with what it means to be an urban cowgirl. Now that I live with you, I partake in your seasonal rituals. Dry pine needles stick to the bottom of my socks when I hang the laundry on the line to dry. We agree that clothes smell better with the sun and the wind on them. I remind myself of this by sniffing everything I pull off the line. Your real reason for using the clothesline is to save money.

Timing is everything when it comes to rituals. Even though the nights have grown cold, I am only allowed to bring out the down comforter on the top shelf of your closet on a certain day in November. I can never remember the actual day, and by October, I’m already asking you if we can make an allowance. You tell me to wait, so I put a hat on before going to bed and snuggle into the curve of your back. Your snoring keeps me up. I think I hear a bear at the window. I wake you, but you say, “There are no bears around here.” Still, I hear what sounds like something pawing at the screen to the sliding glass door of the bedroom. I hear the crack of leaves from the footsteps that I suspect are those of the wild animals that only come out at night. I fall asleep with my eyes open and afraid I’ll die in a frozen house.

There are other things I must learn if I want to live in the country, like cooking with your cast iron skillet. I clean the skillet without soap, evicting the water and thoroughly drying it before adding a coin-sized amount of olive oil to keep it well “seasoned.” In the years to come, I repeat this process—exactly the way you had showed me—a year before I moved into your house.

You are twelve years older than I. We are from different generations. People tell us that we make a handsome couple. It makes up for knowing that you’re not in love with me. I look to the patterns we’ve established, and how we’ve weaved them into our life. I use the patterns to predict whether or not we have couple longevity.

I heal from rituals and come to rely on them. With every ritual of yours I join, I wonder if I am closer in making you love me more. Is this even possible? Can rituals create a real bond between people? Does ritual strengthen what already exists between two people? Is your love reinforced through routine? I wonder if I have become unconscious to your ritual courtship. I could have been in the kitchen scrubbing a pot and staring at a cautious deer making its way across the property, or reading poetry to myself in the spare bedroom, where I memorized stanzas about how real love is spontaneous and passionate, while you were trying to court me. What I do know is there’s an unsatisfying hunger, an uncontrollable fire deep inside my belly. I wash out the ash, daily, with Gain detergent, and hang myself on the line to dry. I breathe in the sweet smells, which distract me from the ugliness I encounter in the world, and from the contrast of both the city and the country trying to live inside me.

I plan our dinners, sometimes days in advance. You say I focus too much on food as I rinse the dirt out from of a piece of celery cupped by its body. I say nothing as you tell me I should learn to skip meals once in a while, and how it would be healthy for me. I take the knife and slice the celery down the middle, cutting it in evenly sized pieces and add it to the stockpot for homemade soup. Through time, I learn to ignore your comments, your heart, and how it lives half open. I experiment with new meals and feed you homemade meatloaf with fresh sprigs of thyme cut from the garden. Later, I’ll serve you green tea—this is our peace offering, even if we’re not fighting. I beg you to build a fire, mostly so I can watch.

Your fires start with the sound of the axe splitting wood in the garage. Only a man who’s in love with me would build me a fire. I admire your wintered masculinity, the leather gloves you wear as you carry the bundles of split wood into the house, the focus of fire pressed deep into your eyes, the scent of cold ash that escapes from the open glass door of the wood stove, and the splinters that stick like lint to your sweatshirt. With every fire, you kneel before the wood stove with your back to me: I see the backside of prayer.

In my absurd secrecy, I tell myself to be content, but it will only work for a few years. In the early afternoons, I read my poems aloud to the ancient oak in the back yard—the one with the tree house you built ten years ago. It looks more like a plywood of playing cards, which has forced its branches to grow heavy and unusually low to the ground. Its barky tentacles will spend a lifespan watching its leaves fall, like torn, curled bits of a letter—traveling only inches before settling on the ground.

I will miss the country in ways I never thought possible. A year later, after I’ve left you and the house, I will grieve—thirty-five miles south in Fresno—as if there has been a death; it’s the death of myself. I think about the creek behind the bedroom where we used to sleep. Do you hear the colonies of frogs that inhabit the creek? Do their trance-like songs have the ability to reach your heart amongst your badly balled flannel sheets?

When Things Were Good

You initiate me into the domain of your heart using the natural world. I become intoxicated in this atmosphere from all the fresh air. The days go on, for what seem like forever as I play the piano at my computer keyboard, creating poetry that I let you read. In the graduate poetry workshop, I read my poems about love aloud. My colleagues say “the speaker” in poems appears to be in a strained, or in a sad relationship. Is that what I want to communicate? I am not supposed to talk when being critiqued in the poetry workshop, so I chew the inside of my cheek and stare down, going back and forth between my notebook and the design of simulated wood at the table where we sit. If these love poems were written using sight, then what’s blocking my line of vision? Maybe I should learn to speak. I move my palm away from my mouth, because the class just asked me if I have any questions about their comments. I tell them, no, and smile. It’s just easier this way.

I see hope in the sunrise this morning. We decide to take a drive. You want to show me what you’ve discovered since you’ve lived in the southern Sierra, eleven years prior to me. In secret, I pretend we’re married. No one can see my bare left hand from the road. We travel across forgotten backgrounds: A century-old barn with a broken back, a rusted plow next to Dough Boy pool, miles of barbwire fence, horses, cows, an angry dog that runs the length of a cyclone fence, and a sea of rolling hills impregnated with granite. Finally, we reach the whispering town of Ahwahnee.

Of the many indigenous people to the Yosemite Valley there were the Yosemite Miwoks, or Ahwahneechee, dwellers of Ahwahnee, who settled in the valley approximately 3,500 years ago. The name Ahwahnee means “valley that looks like a gaping mouth.” The creeks in the valley trickle, moving as silent as blood.

In 1848, James Marshall and John Sutter discovered gold along the banks of the American River. Soon, the Sierra Mountains and surrounding areas were overrun with prospectors in pursuit of unclaimed gold. Something had to be compromised. Much of the native landscape and ecosystem was impacted for a gamble at wealth. Eventually the Ahwahneechee, and their Chief Tenaya, were captured and relocated to the Fresno River Reservation. The rest of the Ahwahneechee dispersed throughout the Sierra, even as far as Nevada, becoming a displaced culture in the years that followed.

I sip the coffee you made for our drive. I stare out the window at the clumps of weed that shake their unkempt heads of hair as our truck brushes past. I swallow slowly, allowing the coffee to warm the back of my throat. I want to speak, maybe open my heart or listen to yours, but I say nothing and continue to look out the window. I think about how when a man loves a woman he will do anything to show his love, even groom her. I try to remember the last time you brushed my hair, probably after one of the long days of boating on the lake last summer. Winter is blindsided. I raise the tips of shoes to feel the heat that’s streaming at the floorboard inside the truck. I am content to just be with you right now. I want to preserve this feeling, but I know I can’t. I look at you and smile. You reach for my hand and smile back. Your strong, thick hand covers mine. I feel safe. I wonder if there’s a connection between safety and love. I remind myself that you take care of me, and how only this morning, you brought me a steamy cappuccino in bed. And with my eyes half shut, I smiled and inhaled the vapors of your woodsy good morning kiss with a swirl of sheets and quilts around me. Later, I’d write a poem about your persistence, the way you handed me a cappuccino, every morning, for years. Eventually, my cappuccino poem will be published in a local literary journal. When you read the poem in the journal you say nothing about what you think it means, instead, you say, “it’s nice.” I never tell you that the foam is a metaphor, or that below the surface, feelings of disconnection reside. Generosity from others can trigger one’s own isolation in love.

At the bend in the road we reach a white schoolhouse. I listen to you talk about the history of the town of Ahwahnee and its original schoolhouse. For a Nevadan, you know a lot about California history. You fascinate me with your stories. In the years to come, when we pass the same historical spots, you’ll repeat the stories as if you’re telling me for the first time.

I’m always listening, even when you think I’m not.

The Gertrude School, built in 1913, is one of California’s oldest one-room schoolhouses. Originally the schoolhouse provided an education for the children of the gold miners, who came to the tiny town of Gertrude along the Fresno River in search of gold. The school was named after the wife of a man who ran the Gertrude Mine in the area. Only one year after the schoolhouse was built, America would be launched into The First World War in Europe. Triggered by the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, Sophie Maria Josephine Albina Chotek, millions of deaths would follow in the efforts to modernize the world. My attention shifts back to Gertrude. Who was she? Her husband had to be in love with her if he named a school and a gold mine after her. It wasn’t uncommon for the early Californians to name cities or their ships after the women who had captured their hearts. Did the early men of California know their courtship would fall short of serving as examples to future generations? History is in everything. When did the art of love or courtship become distressed, antiqued? Where’s my voice?

The Gertrude School, built the same year the American silent film, How It Happened was released, consisting of one reel, and directed by William Duncan. It would be fourteen years later, in1927, before the voice would replace the titles, better known as the “talkies.” The first voice heard through the silver screen would be Al Jolson, in the groundbreaking movie, The Jazz Singer. I’ll never take a music history class in graduate school. Instead, I will attempt to decipher what love is and what love is not.

Miss Jeanie Nichols was the first teacher at Gertrude School. I wonder if Miss Nichols had read John Dewey’s article in 1901 about the importance of toys promoting the psychological needs of the child. What are the psychological needs of the adult, or a writer? A lover? Perhaps the adults, including Miss Nichols, were too busy in their leisure time reading Jack London’s book, The Valley of the Moon. Does the novel bring forth the voice we have not the courage to speak? If I am to distinguish the author’s words, it must begin, not with the eyes, but the ear. Before I can have a voice, I must learn to listen. What if I don’t like what I hear?

I need to break the silence. I open my door and hop out of the truck and trample the across weeds. I need to touch the schoolhouse. I am certain my voice will break the spell of solitude on the schoolhouse. “Hello, schoolhouse,” I sigh.

In 1914, a year after the schoolhouse opened, hundreds of thousands of people lined Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to watch the women, five to eight thousand of them, mostly wearing white, walk together in efforts to turn the world’s attention towards their cause: women’s rights. Alice Paul and Lacy Burns lead the organization and deliberately planned the event with Woodrow Wilson’s arrival, who was expecting to be met by crowds of people welcoming him for his inauguration as the United States President the following day.

I press my nose against the dusty screen and look inside the main room of the schoolhouse. I imagine the children facing forward with the war on their backs. I envision the rise and fall of Miss Nichols wrist at the blackboard—the simplicity of education scratched with chalk, until the schoolhouse closed in 1968. The soggy front steps have been used as a meeting place for the local artist chapter since 1979. I want to escape into the past, but I can’t, so I settle for feeling the cool wood against the palm of my hand. I am harmless and the schoolhouse knows it. Her frozen stare surrenders to those who visit and simply wonder. I think about the decades of hands that have touched the same spot. Her white petticoat is scratchy and worn, coming apart at the seams. I leave no imprint of my hand and after today, and no one will remember that I’ve stood in this spot, ever.

On our way home we stop at the Black Kid Memorial, a California historical marker to note where a famous bandit robbed several trains and wagons only a hundred yards ahead. Our last stop is Grub Gulch. Here, there used to be saloons, restaurants, and a grocery store. The entire town burned to the ground and nothing is left now but a flattened pulse of red mud. After spinning circles in four-wheel drive the truck climbs back onto the paved road.

The original town members of Grub Gulch were part of the pack who came in search of gold during the California Gold Rush. I think about the depressed wagons that traveled across the same roads we are on today. The original dirt paths are now covered with tar and asphalt, and rubber tires replaced the hoofs. A lot has changed from a hundred years ago, a year ago, even from last week. I see the world split open up and share its memories and catch the light like the center of a geode.