come up here
d. chambers
david@rockmonkey.net

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Quickly now. Climb up here. Into the trees. The trees that begin again after the tiny clearing marked by you. This small outpost of civilization. Climb up, leave the creek running, low and small. August depth, barely a creek at all. Only emerging to be a creek in the pools. The pools filled with fish. Fish trapped there by the low water of August.

Come over here. Look down off the bridge, but don’t lean on the rail. The rail doesn’t hold weight. The flood did that. It pushed rocks and water and trees against railings that were already starting to rot from years of humidity. The rail ready… almost… to let go.

Look down off the bridge into the pool you built. You stood knee deep in the cold water on the first truly hot day of the year pulling rocks from the creek and stacking them in a jagged line across the distance between the concrete pilings where the old bridge once stood. A bridge gone, perhaps before you were born. A bridge possibly made of the redwoods they felled. Washed away by the floods that came before. Maybe in ‘48 when they say the water would have covered your house, or in ’52 when Gerry swore that he could walk across the creek on the tops of all the trees and branches swept down, or in ’72 when Rich said the water came in the front door and flowed out the back door of the little cabin.

Look down at the pool. The pool formed naturally, then helped by your rudimentary dam was a playground for the fish. Gerry fed them and then Rich fed them and now you feed them. Cat food, fish food, dog food. Not fish, like wild brook trout, but tame almost pets. 30 pound brook trout and crawdads as big as your foot and sucker fish. As you scatter feed on the surface of the pool the fish swarm and make the water boil. Rich takes shots at the sucker fish. They keep the trout from flourishing. “They’re all bones” he says. “Not even worth trying”. He stands on the bridge with a pistol.

Come over here. Past the outbuilding filled with your leavings. Boxes and boxes of unsorted things. Letters from before. Crockery. Your things stacked in front of decades of others.

When you moved here you made three trips to the dump in Ben Lommand to rid yourself of tons and tons of the previous tenants. Pictures, children’s clothing, is that a trophy? No matter, it all went to the dump. You think back to that day. It was hot like this one. Maybe 100. The work was terrible dusty, musty horrible. You stopped at the Save-Mart in Felton bought yourself a sleeve of crackers, some cheese and a Guinness. The plowman’s lunch. Sort of. A reward for returning so many memories of someone you never knew to the earth. A reward which you enjoyed right there in the parking lot of the Save-Mart.

In the back of the outbuilding, a dust covered workbench. Once surely the site of many a project, now a den for the roof rats that use it as their base camp to ravage your house. There underneath that bench they plotted their attack. You felt that if you could only get back there, across the decades of collections, you might be able to find their plans, scratched out in the dirt in jaggedy script.

Come up here. Out of the relative cool of the hollow, out of the shy breezes of the water. Into the heat of August. Stay on the trail until the trail disappears. You built it halfway last winter. You lined it with stones. It was rhythmic rewarding work. With each stone you placed the trail grew by the length of that stone. You lined the trail with the stones that had prevented the trail from actually being a trail. Pulled from the center and moved to the sides. While you worked you thought of a song… what was that song? Some familiar something, from growing up in the humidity of the Midwest. Something that played on the radio as you rode around in the back of your mother’s Pontiac station wagon. What was it? No matter.

Come up here, off the trail past the place where you know the yellow jacket hive is. From the day when they set upon you and the dog. The day in the fall when they’re hungry, when they’re gathering the last food before the winter comes and they settle underground. The day when you happened to disturb the gathering of their food. They set upon you from all directions.

You learn later that yellow jackets are the only “bee” that can sting and sting and sting and sting. The only genus that doesn’t have to decide that it is worth dying to save the hive. The only one that can attack you with no retribution aside from your feeble attempts to swat them away. 12 of them got you as you came to the slow realization that the situation was dire. What’s that? Ow that hurts! Ow those are bees! Ow those are lots of bees! Run! And you ran, you ran down the hill back across the creek to the old house. Dragging the dog most of the way. Dragging the dog so that it probably felt like it had done something wrong.

Come up here. Past the dead lady’s cabin. Rose or Mary or some old-time name. The cabin that she lived in. The cabin, built safest for the floods, high up. The cabin that afforded a view of the creek below from her rickety perch. The cabin that she died in long before you came around here. Long before you even knew that people lived up here, past the reservoir. Long before you even left the humidity of the Midwest.

Her cabin is cluttered with long forgotten memories. Books that she loved. Stacks of them. An old easy chair. A stove slowly rusting its way back to the elements. A screened porch. Ashtrays and dishes. An old-time lawnmower with the spinning blades (what could she be mowing?). She, the last vestige of what life used to be like on the canyon, before people like you came here and turned a wonderful farming village down on the valley into a throbbing metropolis filled with pony-tailed jackasses wanting to show you spreadsheets and lists of things. Bullshit. Mary knew. She knew the time when she would drive up to Cooper’s and buy her produce and maybe down to Boulder Creek if she fancied a drink.

Come up here. Into the madrone. Into the hardwoods. This used to be covered with redwoods. Back, before. Then the loggers came through and took down the redwoods but the forest wouldn’t die. It snapped back with madrone and pine, it snapped back with spruce and Douglas firs, with big leaf maple and western red hemlock. The luxuriant growth of moss and fungi that cause the coastal forest just over the ridgeline to flourish are not here. Here is the high-desert. Brown and ready to burn. A tinder box. Hot and oppressive. One spark and this whole hillside would blaze to black, ready for nature to grow the forest again.

Come up here to where the trail ends. Walk on the soft spongy untrammeled ground. Into the loose, dry rocky soil. Into the quiet. Quiet that is never interrupted by the drone of the gravel plant, by the whoop of the mountain bikers; far back on to the northern acres.

Just east of here the forest would be a din. A clamoring cacophony of rock blasting and truck dragging. At the gravel plant they moved a mountain. They literally blew apart and dug asunder and dragged down a mountain. Turned it into driveways and parking lots and paths. Perhaps the paths that they the tourists walk on two miles north in the open space preserve. Perhaps the driveway that you park your truck on. They have stood up next to the mountain and brought it down with the edge of their hand. The trucks start at 5 am and don’t quit until late in the afternoon. They run with 50 feet between them, carting the mountain off to become something else. Perhaps it would teach the mountain a lesson: Produce a forest or become a driveway.

Halfway up the hill, the mountain, this 45 degree grade that climbs behind the house you head just a little east, there is a clearing. You can see all the way down the valley to the reservoir and the winery. You can see, on a clear day, all the way to the other side of the valley. You can see over the rooftops that used to be cherry trees that used to be floodplain. You can see over the valley that made New Yorkers get in wagons to come here. You can see why they came, even before the gold was discovered up north. This golden land where dreams could be made real.

You know why they came. Leaving the squalor of the bowery and the lower east side leaving the tenements and the dirty sidewalks; wishing to have something more. Immigrants of mixed background mixed heritage. Out to where the air was then clear and the weather as unlike they had seen since they left their own countries. The Basques and the Spaniards. The hard drinking hard working Irish and the pensive dedicated Chinese.

You can see the road. The road that was washed out when the flood came in February. The flood that washed down the canyon turning the August creek, the tiny trickle, into a rushing torrent that skipped the banks and crashed down the hollow. It took trees and boulders and rock and mud and turned into a flushing sluice that cleaned and cleared and destroyed everything in its path. The road that was covered with mud and gravel taller than you. Taller than your truck. As if the mountain ate the road. As if the road had never cut into its side, it healed it. The road was now under a gravel bank. Like a scab.

They cleared it with a road grater and a front loader. Clearing a path that you could drive your car through like a tunnel. It felled trees wider than you are tall. Bringing them down like they were matchsticks. You walked on the crushed moonscape that the flood left walking in Wellington boots to your knees. Surveying the damage. One night. Days of hard rain, but one night it let loose. Wishing to wash away what men had left. Sending it all down to the reservoir. The dam held strong. Tons of rock piled up to form a hill where there once was nothing. A hill that holds back the creek. The reservoir turned into a floating menagerie of everything that had once been on the edge of the creek. Trash cans, trees, tires, a chicken coop. All afloat in a gallery of lost processions. When the flood came the water washed into the spillway. The spillway that went from a concrete slab into a rushing flume of rock and branches and detritus.

Come up here. Up past the clearing and back into the woods. Past the last point that you would have considered gathering firewood. The last spot that you could have possibly carried wood back to the house. The trees, that had fallen and lay on the ground, waiting for you to cut them into 5 foot sections and load them up onto your shoulder. You dragged them down. Down to the house. There was good wood up here. Up here past the point, but you could never do it. You could consider carrying the hardwood 1000 yards, but beyond that was the limits of your ability. You built the crib for the cords to be stacked. Each one cut into 3 foot sections and then split with a sledge hammer and an iron wedge. Back breaking labor. But it was the only way to keep the house warm in the winter. The winter. You would have laughed at yourself to hear you describe 30 degrees as bone-chilling.

Come up here. To the top. To the highest point you can walk to. Where it is just between you and the sky. To the top of your hill, still towered over by neighboring hills. You stand having climbed through two years of your history, but somehow you have been transported back in time. A place that reminds you of Alaska, where you could look in all directions and not see a power line. Not see anything. Not see another person. Here, where there is nothing, but even here, there are the trees.

© David Chambers

 

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