Gone, Not Forgotten

In 1834, Richard Henry Dana sailed south from Boston around Cape Horn and up the long Pacific coast to California. Upon seeing the vast emptiness of our coastal land he wrote in his diary, “What brought us into such a place, we could not conceive.” No trees, “not even a shrub,” in fact nothing “except the stalks of the mustard plant.” A “desolate looking place,” he wrote.

Perhaps the long months at sea had cowled his vision. When I look on our landscape in spring, I see hills and fields dappled in hues of green from deep moss to light-catching chartreuse, a many-colored coat that quivers under the infinite and achingly blue sky. It is

Redmond Granville, Spring in Southern California

our coastal sage scrub, alive and kicking, its deep roots siphoning spring’s water to quench its thirst and pack away against summer drought, turning leaves these vivid hues and nourishing nascent buds that will soon burst into bright bloom. Velvet-leafed California sage, feathery buckwheat, puffy deerweed, tall toyon, spiky goldenbush, ghostly white sage, ashy purple sage, and dozens of others create this rich palette.

These are accented by open fields that wear a dazzling sheath of brightest yellow, Dana’s wild mustard, brought here, legend has it, as seeds lodged in the hooves of cattle, or scattered by Spaniards along the trail called El Camino Real to help them keep the path. In spring the blooming mustard cascades down hillsides, stretches over fields, undulates in rippling waves under the breeze. Look closely and you can see meadowlarks swaying at the ends of willowy stems, heads thrown back to call out their complex and melodic song, or blackbirds flashing a blaze of red wing as they flit from stalk to stalk. Splashes of blue

Redmond Granville, Blue Flowers

lupine and golden poppy are the dazzling jewels that trick out Mother Nature’s outfit. And if you’re lucky, you chance upon an elfin patch of delicate shooting stars, faces down, stamens thrust forward, and pale lavender petals streaming back like the tail of a comet. Above, billowing clouds, white as fields of cotton, cast patched shadows that pass over the vivid landscape like a whispered secret, then blow away. How can you call such a place dull?

I had a friend once who came here from New York. She said, “To love California you have to love brown.” I can understand the scornful judgment she must have felt after living in a place where trees and shrubs and vines and grasses grow in lush abundance. California can seem barren after such extravagance. My view, though, is that to love California, you must be unafraid of the vastness here. Job said, “Speak to the earth, and it will teach you.” Whether we learn is up to us. Standing at the edge of the ocean, the portal to the stars, the door to the far horizon, how small we are and how boundless is nature. Some people climb

Redmond Granville, Afternoon

to the tops of mountains to behold the majestic view. Here, especially before suburbia spread its pervasive tentacles, we need only to top the nearest small rise to see into the far distance, past the green velvety hills. The first time I drove across Florida, I was near panic for the claustrophobia I felt. The roads are straight and flat, and trees crowd to the very edge of the asphalt. You can’t get your perspective. You can’t place where you are in the landscape. You are hemmed in, flying blind. I could hardly wait to reach home, where I could once more see to the curvature of the earth.

After being on the southern California coast for a few months, Dana did begrudgingly admit that “there was a grandeur in everything around,” with hills that “ran off into the interior as far as the eye could reach.” He added, though, that “the only thing which diminishes its beauty is, that the hills have no large trees upon them.” He believed he was “at the ends of the earth; on a coast almost solitary; in a country where there is neither law nor gospel.” Let him and his kind go home then! It only means fewer people and more wide open spaces for us.

From the time that Dana visited California until the 1950’s, more than 100 years later, not much had changed. Towns had sprung up along the coast, but past that thin strip of humanity, the hills and valleys remained essentially as empty as they were in the earliest times. Emptier, in fact, after extermination of the Native Americans who were wiped out by the Spanish. But that is a different chapter.

Redmond Granville, Malibu Coast

By the mid-1950’s, Coastal North San Diego County had sprouted a series of pleasant villages strung along the sandstone bluffs that rise like sentinels above the Pacific Ocean. The towns were not old by most standards, but already well-worn by the sun and salt air. At a distance they all looked alike, hanging onto the bleached coastal hillsides like memories of lost love, sweetly faded with time. Up close, they still looked alike, little houses and little shops, beige as sand, square as boxes, unadorned by the gables and porticos and acreage that marked wealthier communities like Rancho Santa Fe. Languid under the gauzy haze of summer mornings, calm as churches, the sleepy villages were as if a dreamland that existed separate from the rest of the world. No hustle or bustle disturbed the peace of those places. For most, to live here was a choice made for the sake of beauty. Beauty and ease. Beautiful sparkling ocean, whose rhythmic swells sighed like the breath of Neptune; beautiful golden hills billowing to the distant horizon; beautiful sunny, warm skies that made living easy. In those years this was paradise, a secret kept by its inhabitants, who were here by a wholly gratuitous grace.

There are philosophers who have spent entire lifetimes arguing whether beauty exists outside of human experience or rests only in our eyes. St. Augustine, history’s great confessor, asked “What is it that allures us and delights us in the things that we love? Unless there was grace and beauty in them they could not possibly draw us to them.” He opted on the side of objective beauty. I don’t know if beauty exists outside our experience of it, but I do know that our little Elysium by the sea was made so by the wonder and reverence which was inspired in those of us who lived here.

One of the smallest villages along the coast was Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where tacky bungalows were anchored like barnacles to the bumpy hillside streets, some of them still unpaved 40 years after the town’s founding. Weed-filled empty lots stood as reminders that no one was rushing to build in this remote outpost nearly an hour from the nearest city, where there were no industries to draw skilled workers or resorts to seduce luxury tourists. We lived by

William Wendt, Seaside Cottages

a different kind of ambition, one that cherished the hedonism of simplicity over material wealth, and self-direction over prestige. Nearly everyone made their livings in support of the community – keeping shop, educating children, building or repairing houses, tending health, keeping peace – and so were in service to each other, engaged in the good of all.

A comforting harmony lay over the town like a soft blanket. The local newspaper, the Coast Dispatch, carried front-page stories about Little League games, or someone finding a litter of lost kittens. Kids dug pits in the dirt of empty lots and tunneled dens in the thick lemonade berry bushes, dividing into factions to launch harmless attacks on each other. Teens built giant bonfires on the beach on warm summer nights, dancing to the music of the stars. Parents sent their children to the Cub Scouts, Brownies, Blue Birds, Little League, and 4-H. I’m sure that inside their homes there was as much drama and disease as anywhere else, but the spirit of the place was a soothing balm upon the bruises of life.

My own family came here after rejecting the institutions of the East. My grandfather, ex-scholar, ex-Wall Street interpreter, ex-inventor. My grandmother, ex-lady, whose preference had always been to live in New York City. They brought my father, ex-Air Force by way of World War II; my mother, dark-eyed country girl; and my father’s brother, ex-Manhattan musician. They brought few skills that were easily transferrable to this frontier, though, and so decided they would build houses. My grandfather, still the scholar, went to the library in San Diego and discovered the ancient art of adobe, and so that is what they did: they built adobe houses, learning their trade from an encyclopedia. They made adobe bricks on-site from the ubiquitous clay soil and straw, stacking them one on another until a house emerged, the way a painting emerges from the dashed strokes of an artist. They

Wendt, Coastal Cottage

bought an old ranch with a dilapidated house that was unfit for my mother, young brothers, and grandmother, who stayed at the Sturdivant apartments on the bluff next to the Self Realization Fellowship in Encinitas while my father and grandfather made the ranch house habitable (this was before I was born). My grandmother and uncle never did live there, preferring to live in town. We all spent lazy Sundays together.

Cardiff was the closest town to our ranch, just over the hill that separated us from the ocean. There was no road up the hill, which meant we had to drive three miles around it to reach Cardiff, skirting the edge of the placid San Elijo Lagoon that swept up the coastal plain from the shore like a shimmering scarf. The lagoon bustled with a busy community of seabirds. The snowy egret, standing still as a held breath, stately as a lord, until raising his head plume in showy display, like a mad composer. Fulgent mallards whose luminous

Jesse Powell, Carmel River Lagoon

feathers seem to change from green to blue to purple as they catch different angles of the light. Rare California least terns, whose black caps enshroud their eyes like an executioner’s mask, darting and plunging for the small fish they feast on. Busy stilts, funny backwards-kneed yellow legs bending and stretching, bending and stretching, as they patrol the shallow water in search of juicy snails or insects. Watchful hawks, soaring high overhead on the currents of the wind until they sight some prey below. Then they fold their wings into their bomb-shaped bodies and drop into a death dive that sends rabbits and squirrels scurrying for cover. Voluptuous white pelicans that dip and turn in synchronicity, beaks up, beaks down, a shimmering chorus line to match anything on Broadway. And of course, the mud hen, the most blundering bird, all thumbs, who lands on his head as often as on his belly, the way ducks ought to. In spring the swallows arrived to build their mud nests into the sandstone cliffs, and in later years, onto the San Elijo overpass of Interstate 5. They came in vast colonies, and crowds of them flittered in hectic flight all summer over the estuary, feeding on whatever insect dared to brave such dangerous airspace.  Years later the avian community was joined by a trio of gay flamingos that arrived mysteriously from unknown parts. The San Diego Zoo claimed they weren’t missing any of the stilted pink oddities, yet no one could think of any other way they could have gotten there.

In heavy rains, water drained off the many hills that stretched along Escondido Creek and fed into the lagoon, swelling its volume until it spilled over, obliterating any sign of the road that ran along its edge, our only link to town. My father drove then by faith alone, knowing from having traveled that route for years where the asphalt should be beneath the water. Like the skipper of some awkward motorboat he navigated through water that

San Elijo Lagoon in flood, from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, by Wehtahnah Tucker and Gus Bujkovsky, courtesy Doug White

sometimes reached above the chassis, scattering dumbfounded mud hens before us, a wake veeing out behind us. Less daring drivers didn’t brave those high seas, and instead turned back to the long drive through Rancho Santa Fe and down to Del Mar to reach the coast highway to Cardiff, a 10-mile detour. In later years engineers would raise the road, but in those days, into the early 1970’s, driving San Elijo Road could be treacherous. For reasons I don’t understand, fog was denser back then, too. When it lay particularly heavy over the lagoon, one of my brothers would get out and walk the unmarked road so my father could find his way behind without tumbling the car into the water below.

Cardiff proper began at the northwest side of the lagoon, where the remains of a kelp factory from before World War I could still be seen on a steep bluff above the ocean, its dark bulkhead bent and broken like Jeremiah weeping for his own demise. At the estuary’s outlet to the sea, the bones of old pilings protruded from the surf where a pier once ran 300 feet into the Pacific. Once there was a perpetual motion machine at the end of the pier, designed to harness energy from the waves, but a storm wiped out the machine and the pier in 1915, just a year after they were erected. Wind energy would have to wait nearly another century before becoming viable.

The Cullen Building was the center of town, an imposing two-story former hotel that now held the small country grocery store where we did most of our shopping, the Cardiff Mercantile. As in other small towns where everyone knew each other, customers took what they wanted on credit and paid at the beginning of each month, a form of trust that has been all but exterminated today, replaced by the anonymity of leech-like credit card companies. Cardiff also had a library, barber, grammar school, dentist, doctor, and post office. Town dwellers had their mail delivered, but we lived too far out, and so had a post office box, which I still remember: Route 2, Box 2605-A.

The school held a festival once each year called the Native Fair, an event put on in the parking lot and featuring games, prizes, a bake sale, and talent competition. One year a friend recruited me to sing a duet for the contest. We practiced “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” after school at her house for weeks, and on the day of the event stood before the small and polite audience and did our native best to squeak out the tune, which was written for voices far better than ours. We didn’t win, and the experience taught me that I had no talent as a singer and no stomach for performing.

Like other small towns along the coast, Cardiff was built abreast of the railroad tracks and Highway 101, both of which ran from San Diego to the Canadian border. Once there was a railway station, but after a few years they realized that nothing much happened in this place. Few people got on or off here, and the few who did could as easily go to the Encinitas station a mile and a half to the north. Nor was there much reason to pull off the highway to visit Cardiff’s town center. There was a Richfield gas station at the corner of Chesterfield and San Elijo, built in 1920. At Christmastime they handed out pretty pamphlets of Christmas songs, and my sister and I sang them all season in the back seat as my father drove.

But the only restaurants and souvenir store were down along a strip of highway at the beach south of town, where there was a seashell shop, Elmer’s Rocket gas station, the Sea Barn café, Evan’s motel, George’s restaurant, and the rowdy Beacon Inn Hotel, where a mostly out-of-town clientele went for the 3 D’s – dining, drinking, and dancing. Cardiff’s teens liked to hang out at the South Cardiff Lodge, which was converted from Elmer’s gas station. As an adolescent, I used to go to the Sea Barn with my father, who was good friends with the owners, whose names I have long forgotten. Sometimes I picked a basket of mulberries and they would bake us a pie while we ate lunch, then bring out two warm and steaming slices topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Joaquin Sorolla, Children in the Sea

And then there was the beach, that irresistible boundary between land and sea, a coexisting of opposites, a place for physical and emotional regeneration, and shelter against the anxieties of civilization. We go to the beach because it soothes our souls. It calms our anxieties. We enter the water and are born again, like sinners who are given a second chance to feel the presence of the Divine. We let the waves wash away our gloom, or loneliness, or discouragement. We lie in the sand and let the sun purify us, baking out weariness, reviving our spirits and our potency. We walk the tideline and feel the dual power of land and sea charge our blood and bones with energy.

It wasn’t always so. In ancient times, the ocean was feared, portrayed in the Bible as a remnant of primordial creation, chaotic and dangerous, outside the Garden of Eden, and inhabited by the terrible monster, Leviathan. Vikings built their ships with fierce heads and open jaws at bow and stern, there to ward off evil spirits. Renaissance artists characterized the sea as raging, incomprehensible, ready to suck in those who ventured too close, as into some liquid hell.

Not until the 18th Century was the seashore seen in a more positive light, when the Romantics reinvented the ocean as a symbol of eternity, and the beach as a place for leisure, health, and socializing. William Wordsworth wrote, “The gentleness of heaven is on the sea,” and people went out to take a look. Cautiously they ventured out to picnic on the beach, take in the invigorating salt air, even dip beyond the tideline into the sprawling surf. And they never looked back. Now the idea of the seashore has been completely rehabilitated. We flock to the coast both to play and to live, crowding each other into smaller and smaller spaces for the sake of proximity to the sea. Forty percent of the US population lives on the coastline. By 2020 another 10 million people will shoehorn their way in, which begs the question, at what point does suffocating density cancel out the received grace of living by the sea?

Richard Henry Dana would be shocked to see how many people choose to live on this coastline, at this “desolate-looking place.” Some of us are here because we refuse to give up on it, despite the invading hoards that have descended upon us since the boomtimes of the 1970’s. We think ourselves special, pioneers of a place that was once paradise. We look askance at the newcomers, anyone who has been here fewer than 50 years. But time’s march is inevitable, and we are helpless to the changes it wroughts. My brother escaped to the mountains. My sister left for even farther mountains. And me? I don’t know if I’m cut out for life inland. I once lived in Chicago for several seasons. When it was time to return here my husband and I decided to drive cross-country instead of fly. I swear to you that when we reached the top of the Rocky Mountains and passed over the Continental Divide, I could smell the familiar scent of salt air. I was coming home.

Berryman Ranch house, circa 1965

I don’t live in Cardiff anymore. I grew up believing that it was necessary to leave home, to have a career. Cardiff was too small a place for my wide eyes. Even now, I can’t go back; I am not that forgiving. But I am still on the coast, and in the spring I can still find fields of brilliant yellow. I can still gaze far to the distant mountains. And I can still dip my feet into the healing waters of the Pacific and be regenerated. Thomas Wolfe reminded us that we can’t go home again. Yet for me, the little ranch on the outskirts of Cardiff where I grew up will forever be the truest home I have ever known.

A Separate World More Glorious

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past, 
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow, 
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe, 
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight: 
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er 
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, 
Which I new pay as if not paid before. 
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end. — William Shakespeare

A mile and three quarters from the Pacific Ocean, one and a half from the reedy backwaters of the San Elijo Lagoon, and a mile from the nearest neighbor, the house I grew up in sat perched on a small rise in a narrow valley beneath two columns of ragged and chaparral-covered hills. Carved by time, worn by wind and rain, lacerated by the earth’s tremblings, the hills were a raw and aching frame to the soft meadow that draped the valley floor, a reminder that Earth is in eternal transition, rising up and being torn down in both gentle and violent ways, providing neither sure footing or constancy, though we have the illusion of both.

Our house and barn in the years before we bought it, still two-story

On the far side of the valley, a stream bed wound its way along the base of the hills like a skirt’s lace hem, tricked out with a border of sumac and elderberry that danced in the wind and sparkled in the sun. In the spring the stream ran with the rains before drying into a sandy, fern-banked path where I adventured lazily all summer, poking sticks in holes, kneeling to inspect animal footprints, crouching into caves the water had carved into its banks, always in solitary pursuit of something to stir my natural curiosity: the mangled carcass of a coyote’s last meal; the rusting husk of an old Model T Ford with an enormous pack rat nest spilling from the passenger window; a vibrant patch of poppies rising like spring from the streambank; the queer waxy coating that distinguishes ripe elderberries; or a lone and weary long-lost shoe poking through the streambed, telling me that in my aloneness there I was still bound to the world.

My grandfather had been the first to come here from the East, scouting what were then the wide-open spaces of California with an eye to moving the family to a new frontier. When he saw these hills and valley, he wrote home that it was “a magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.” His eloquence was not wasted. From the top of the hill opposite our house, the place we called “the mesa,” a tapestry of sinuous peaks and valleys fanned out to the luminous Cuyamaca Mountains on the far horizon, a distance of around 40 miles. Dappled by the shadows of billowy white clouds, and reflecting blazes of light from their sandstone bluffs and granite outcroppings, the hills undulate like waves in a vast gray-green sea. A magnificent panorama, indeed. In the opposite direction, back across the valley, our house, only a quarter mile from the mesa, appeared insignificant on the land, temporary at best, an ephemeral presence that might be gone the next time you looked, like a speck of dust that settles briefly on a velvet coat before the wind whisks it away.

My brother Gary in front of our house

When my grandfather first found the house it wasn’t much to look at, a neglected board and batten box of five small rooms since some previous owner had cut down the second story, presumably, according to legend, because it was haunted by the ghost of an old sea captain who slipped a noose around his neck and swung as the last breath was choked out of him. Later my father would amend the house with an adobe offshoot tacked on one end, a massive living room with terra cotta floors and a large brick fireplace where we did most of our living.

A dirt lane wound from the house down through the valley until petering out a mile later at San Elijo Road, our connecting link to town. This was where the valley opened to broad fields where old man Wiegand grazed his cattle, and beyond that, to the marsh’s meandering streams and green pools where I sometimes fished for the puny bluegill that swam there. Looking north back up the valley from San Elijo, dusty fields of pale green lima beans stretched up to the base of the wild hills to the west. These valleys used to be cloaked in wide drifts of lima beans planted by German immigrants who came in the 1880s to scratch a meager living from the dry earth. Now this was one of the only remaining planted fields as those original farmers aged past utility and their children grew and broke off from farm life like ripe seed pods on the wind. One by one the fields were given back to their feral ways, the lima beans displaced by fast-growing intruders like tumbleweed, wild mustard, sweet fennel, and thistle. One day houses would replace those fields and a five-lane highway would overlay our lane, but in those early days it alone led to our secluded ranch house, ending at the rail fence my father built to define the point where that brazen sage- and buckwheat-filled landscape was allowed to advance no further. It was always a struggle to keep the wildness at bay; to hold back those primitive urgings of nature from our front door: the dust and stickers and ravings.

Coming up the lane, as you rounded the last field and reached our land, you caught the first glimpse of our house in the distance, crouching as it did beneath the looming 60-foot tall trunks of a eucalyptus tree behind the house. On windy nights we listened from our beds to the groaning of those trunks as their fibers stretched and popped within the wood, all of us silently wondering when a trunk or enormous branch would snap and crash down on the roof, crushing the house and us beneath as easily as I crush a dry leaf in my hand. This wind-borne disquiet was in contrast to more peaceful nights when we listened to what my mother called “my owl” hooting softly in the branches or the hushed rustle of leaves stirred by a gentle breeze. Lying in bed, waiting for sleep, the eucalyptus steered our spirits toward either anxiety or comfort in those last few minutes of the day, so directing the nature of our dreams.

My brother Ted and our dog That’un in front of the pepper tree

In front of the house was a rotund pepper tree, its thickset trunk rising extravagantly from the loamy earth into a veil of willowy leaves cascading so near the ground that it formed a curtain against the imposing sunlit fields beyond. At its back, furthest from the house, a curving line of virgin-white Natal lilies erupted in spring to meet the bowing branches and complete two walls of a cool and cozy room that I imagined for myself. Above, there was a wooden platform nailed securely in the crook of two branches where my older brothers played, imagining themselves inside a ship, a fort, a castle, a rocketship, a pirate’s den, or a teepee, all in their turn. My little sister, too, used to climb high into the tree, even though barely more than a toddler. The dogs, her constant companions, would follow her right up the trunk and into the branches. At the base of the tree an old, beat-up, one-legged swing set that my father hauled back from the dump one day was attached to the trunk, and I spent many hours in aimless and daydreamy contentment beneath the dome of leaves, swaying back and forth in the leather seat he fashioned for me. Nearest the house, the pepper tree’s branches arched over the roof, and on windy days the sweeping of the leaves across the tarpaper deck fashioned a tender tune that filled the living room below with its gentle rhythms. Occasionally my father climbed onto the roof to cut back branches that got too near the chimney; I still remember the pungent scent of the cuttings as he tossed them down for me to gather up. In summer pink pepper berries ripened and fell in bunches that carpeted the ground in a dappled sheath that crackled underfoot with every step. Sometimes I picked a cluster of peppercorns from the tree and peeled back the hulls to taste their sweet-peppery seed, or I gathered a handful for my mother to use in her cooking, though she seldom did.

A dozen yards beyond the pepper tree and as different from it as silk to canvas was a dense thicket of prickly pear, Opuntia littoralis, a cactus species native to Southern California’s coastal sage scrub. True to its name, the prickly pear was covered in sprays of sharp spines bursting from thick paddle-shaped pads. The prickly pear patch was home to any number of wrens, quail, rabbits, squirrels, garter snakes, and lizards who were safe within that fortress from the coyotes that preyed on them. In summer the cactus produced dozens of bright crimson fruits covered in sharp, barely visible hairs. You could remove them by dipping the fruit in boiling water or searing it over an open flame. The fruit’s flesh is ruby red, its taste similar to an extra-sweet melon. Mexican families used to knock on our door and ask if they could harvest the fruit and pads of the cactus, called nopales, which they ate fried.

To the south of the prickly pear was a small flattened hill where our barn stood, an enormous structure of unpainted, deteriorating wood where my grandfather lived in a small apartment he built into one side.

The barn before my father and grandfather bought the ranch and fixed it up

The other, larger part of the barn sheltered his lone cow and various unused farm tools, as well as hordes of field mice and brown bats. The central part of the barn, with gabled roof, hay loft, and a large wagon door, supported smaller “wings” on either side, their sloped roofs falling away from the main barn. It was no doubt once the pride of the ranch, but was old and falling down, as was the tall silo, by the time our family arrived. As a child, I used to walk up the hill to visit my grandfather there, and I remember how he taught and drilled me in Spanish, perhaps anticipating that one day our neighbors to the south would retake California. When he wasn’t teaching me, he played with me, taking my arms and swinging me back and forth beneath his legs, calling out, “high ho the derry-o!”

My grandfather raised laying hens. I loved gathering the yellow, peeping chicks around me.

He ate his dinners with us, and on Sunday nights he joined us to watch College Bowl, a TV show where teams of the brightest students a college could muster competed with each other to answer questions like “What was the name of the Secretary of State responsible for the 1899 ‘Open Door’ policy toward China?” Or “Take the number of tales in The Arabian Nights, add the number of gables in Hawthorne’s famous house, divide by the number of characters in The Fourposter, and give me the answer,” or “What Shakespeare line follows ‘The quality of mercy is not strained?” My scholarly grandfather sat intently in a straight-backed chair directly in front of the television, shouting out the answers as fast as he could, which was often faster than the TV contestants. The rest of us sat mutely on the couch and watched him as much as we watched the show, the questions and answers being far over the heads of any of us.

Just outside the rail fence that surrounded our house was a wide and fertile meadow that reflected the subtle seasons of Southern California. Frost-covered in the early mornings of winter days, the meadow turned to brilliant green with dots of blue lupine and golden poppy as watery and delirious as a Monet garden all through spring, then dried to textured waves the color of wheat and honey, like a Van Gogh countryside, in summer and fall. I liked nothing better on warm spring days than to lie in the cool grass, gazing first at the dream-like sky above me, as brilliantly blue as a peacock’s chest, then turning to peer at eye-level into the miniature world beneath and within the grass, where ladybugs, bees, beetles, ants, stinkbugs, flies, and caterpillars marched and hopped with business-like intent after emerging from their cold-blooded winter lethargy to be warmed by the sun, and so feel the urges of hunger, sex, web-weaving, nest-building, cocoon-shedding, or egg-hatching. I watched as ants crawled to the end of a stork’s bill seed pod and then would balance on their four hind legs and wave their two front legs wildly, twisting this way and that, searching for the way forward, which wasn’t there, and so turn resolutely and hurry off back from where they came to find another forward route. Beneath them, shiny black stinkbugs, the low-riders of the meadow, would wander randomly over pebbles and debris in search of food, heads down and tails up, their antennae gyrating to no discernable rhythm. When disturbed, the stink bug throws his tail as high as he can and shoots an unpleasant scent as a warning to all on-comers; my father, though, always said he liked the smell; it reminded him of kicking up the decomposing leaves of a forest floor. Once summer arrived, there would be no more idle lazing in the meadow. Not because of the sun’s heat, which was considerable, but because all the lush grasses and flowers turned dry, the stork’s bill coiling into spirals to more efficiently burrow into the soil, an animal’s fur, or my clothes; the grasses developing horned burs to do the same. After a walk through the summer meadow it could take half an hour to coax all the hitchhiking seed pods from my clothes, and still not get them all.

Behind the house, a small field slanted up to the hills on the west side of the valley. This was where the town of Cardiff came to an abrupt halt, just over the ridge, which was traversed by Crest Drive. Those houses had paved streets. They had mail delivery. They had quick access to a grocery store, doctors, a fire station, neighbors who visited, and children all up and down the streets who could play at each other’s houses or in the quiet streets themselves. Our house, only a quarter mile distant, was part of a separate world, one that was more glorious, if more challenging.

Fire was a constant threat down in our valley, where the chaparral came practically to our front door and was as combustible as gunpowder. In California, fire has its own season, fall, when the brush is at its driest, parched by summer drought and autumn’s fierce, dry Santa Ana winds, and when any errant spark, no matter how insignificant, can set the world aflame. Fires were often left to burn through chaparral and grasslands where backcountry houses were few and far between, turning highly flammable terpene-laden manzanita and greasewood, sage and scrub oak into enormous torches. As the flames swept through, they left dark swathes of scorched earth and the charred and ghostly skeletons of trees and brush. The land is resilient, though; by late winter green shoots were breaking through the ashen crust, and by spring the once-barren and black slopes were blanketed in vivid green grass and an explosion of wildflowers, the charred remains of shrubs like chamise and manzanita resprouting buds from deep within their subterranean stumps. We were lucky. In the 60 and more years our family lived in that remote house, fire never came closer than a mile or so. Still, the knowledge that it could sweep through the valley at any time and evaporate the safe womb of my childhood impressed in me an undercurrent of unnamed dread. I was not an anxious child, but I was watchful.

The Santa Ana winds came each October and blew intermittently until February. Hot, dry, and strong enough to blow trees from their moorings, these so-called “devil winds” siphoned moisture from every living thing, reducing leaves to curled, scorched tinder for the inevitable fires, blowing dust from the dirt lane and tilled fields into a brown cloud that infiltrated your eyes, your teeth, your hair, and every minute crevasse or opening of the house, where it came to rest in thick layers on our tables, floors, inside cupboards and our beds.

My sister Ellen on her horse, Banner

The horse in his corral turned his back to the onslaught, skittish, his haunches quivering, his head hung low and mane and tail whipping into knotted tangles. At night we sat indoors and listened to a beastly cacophony of the wind bellowing and whistling, branches breaking from the eucalyptus and hammering onto the house, the dogs with their heads thrown back, howling into the spirited darkness. Still, for all their devilry, there were things I liked about the winds, as they brought warmth to the cool days of fall and winter. As a teen, I went to the beach on those days, where the off-shore blow snapped shape into the waves, the better for surfing, and blew a salty spray backwards from their peaks, where it caught the light and sparkled like iridescent wings in the sun.

The water which allowed us to live in this dry place issued from an old well in back of the house. A creaky, aluminum-bladed windmill spun in the wind at the top of a rickety wood tower, powering a pump that drew water up by way of a piston to a redwood tank on a high platform. With no electrical pump to encourage pressure from tank to house, the water ran by force of gravity alone, and turning on a faucet inside produced a thin stream of water that would fill a sink if you waited long enough. A narrow wooden walkway circled the water tank about a dozen feet from the ground. When I was six or seven, I used to climb the shaky ladder and edge my way around the meager platform, pressed against the tank, feeling the coolness of the water within on my back and the warm sun on my face, shuffling my feet forward a few inches at a time, goading myself to a bravery I didn’t feel so high up. When a year or so older, I sometimes challenged myself to climb the dry and splintered windmill, but never summoned the courage to reach the platform at the very top. Occasionally my father had to be lowered on a rope into the well, or climb to the top of the windmill to fix some problem, sending me into fits of anxiety for his safety.

Just beyond the well were two apricot trees which produced the most extravagant fruit I have ever tasted, orangey-pink, tantalizingly sweet, and as juicy as a peach. The tree was already old when my family moved to the ranch, and by the time I reached five or six it had run its course and begun a slow descent to dust, its limbs bare and crumbling. Just south of the apricot, growing from a sandstone bank, the mulberry tree was equally mythical. Its deep purple fruit grew as long as my finger, and in summer I climbed into the tree with my grandmother’s old colander to pluck the juicy berries, their blood red juice staining my hands and arms like I had been fending off the attack of a wild puma. The leafy heights of that tree gave me a charming place to wile away a summer afternoon, away from the hot sun and cooled by the breezes that fanned through the broad leaves.

My mother, sister, and I visiting old Mrs. Lux

I would often pick enough for my mother to bake a pie, or to take to our neighbor, old Mrs. Lux, a mile down the lane. My mother and I walked there a couple of times a month to visit, mother carrying the baby on her hip. When I got a little older, I filled pint baskets with mulberries and my father would drive me down the lane to the paved road, where he would set up a little table for me under the shade of the Lux’s big walnut tree to sell mulberries to passing cars. In those days, I might see two cars an hour passing by on their way from Rancho Santa Fe or Olivenhain to Cardiff by the Sea.

Now our ranch is gone, and in its place is being built a blight of a dozen or so million-dollar homes. The pepper tree is gone. So is the big eucalyptus that stood behind the house, and the grove of eucalyptus my grandfather planted on the north side of our property. The barn is gone, and the windmill, and finally, the house. Our lane is paved, though it still carries our family name, Berryman Canyon Road. There is a tennis club where our south-side property line met the lima bean fields, and an art museum and historical center too. A five-lane road, El Camino Real, runs through the valley, stop lights punctuating its length as side streets emerge from new housing developments that were built on the mesa and beyond.

Sweet memories are all that remain of that enchanted place and time. Some days, when the tender wildflowers bloom or the winds bristle, or when the summer air is thin and dry, a warm nostalgia fills my chest with, not memories, but a precious essence that feels like home.