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.

Born to Run

I’m on a work project with no time to write, so I am posting this oldie but goodie. Enjoy!

I have lots of photos of my father’s mother. Portraits of her as a child. Portraits of her as a young woman. Portraits of her with her twin babies. Then snapshots of her with family, with friends over the years. A full chronology of my grandmother’s life.

But I can count the photos of my grandfather on one hand and still have a finger left over. He wasn’t camera shy. He just didn’t stop for the camera. In the first photo he is a boy of ten. It’s 1890 and he is with his family before their very large Ohio farmhouse (I count nine windows and four doors on just the two sides I can see). It looks to be late winter and this yard is no doubt beautiful in summer with its overhang of leafy trees and long views, but here it is a mess of mud and melting snow, a hazard for the ruffled skirts and high heel boots of his sisters. Grandaddy is in knee-high leather boots and holding the harnesses of two yearling calves, an odd prop for a family photo, and amusing given the formality of the other family members. He looks like he was just passing through and the photo’s subjects stepped aside to make way for him, he stopping for a moment before moving on. He was always headstrong, so more likely he insisted on including two calves he was raising himself.John H. Berryman Family 1890The next photo is a good 20 years later. My grandparents lived in a big two-story Colonial on Glen Road in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. Granddaddy commuted across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan each day. In the photo his suit coat is off and tie is loosened. He is holding his baby boy in the air, gazing at him as if in sheer wonder. Or perhaps sheer fear, because these new twin boys were conceived bittersweetly three years after my grandparents’ darling daughters, one six and one six months, died of then-incurable disease, my grandmother deciding she would never again have children. Her own father had to intervene to persuade her that she could love other children, but that’s another story for another time. Granddaddy waited patiently, as was really his only choice, and now I have this photo of him cautiously holding this precious bundle of baby that was my father. Or uncle. I can’t tell.RF Berryman and Baby Ted BerrymanSometime during their Woodcliff Lake period he decided to invent a better kind of running shoe. He had been a track star at Oberlin College and held the “Big Six” record for the fastest two mile. Only fragments of the running shoe story remain. The soles were made from tires, or tire rubber. To prove their superiority he ran in them from Woodcliff Lake to Passaic (20 miles) or Lima, Ohio (625 miles), I forget which. That’s all I know. There is no photo commemorating his accomplishment. In fact, I have no other photo of him until about 40 years later.

Peg and Bob Berryman, Elizabeth and Waldo Berryman, r to lIn that photo he is an elder in his 80s, standing next to his brother and behind my grandmother who finally, after a life more nomadic and in all ways unsettled than she ever wanted, was sitting in the lap of luxury at her Leucadia, California home, the gleaming Pacific to one side and an endless panorama of rolling hills to the other. Granddaddy lived in that lap of luxury too, but it was luxury he did not want and did not take to with ease. The febility of old age frustrated his need to put one foot in front of the other toward some fanciful goal.

As a boy Granddaddy was a prodigy. I have it on numerous family authorities that he flew through high school in one year and graduated from Oberlin College in two years. He was  fluent in English, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin and Portuguese. As a recent graduate he accepted a one-year position to teach school in the Philippine Islands, where he became fluent in Tagalog. On coming back he went to work for a Wall Street Bank as an interpreter. A few years later he moved his family onto a commune called The School of Living in Suffern, New York, founded by the noted utopian, Ralph Borsodi. After a few years of that he scouted the Land of California, writing home that it was “a magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.” That impressed the family, and as soon as my dad was home from WWII, off they went.

They weren’t following history, though. California’s greatest population booms followed the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1930s thousands of Americans, left destitute by the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, went west in search of work. By that time my grandfather’s brother, Waldo Berryman was already moving his growing auto aftermarket company from Ohio to Palo Alto. He eventually moved it to Encinitas, California, though I don’t know if that was before or after my branch of the family moved there.

After WWII thousands more Americans moved to California after GIs had passed through there on their way to the Pacific Theater. They came home, grabbed their wives or sweethearts, and headed for the promised land of sunshine and opportunity. By the time my father was home from war the family’s bags were packed, furniture all shipped, and car gassed up and ready to head west and join Granddaddy in the Berryman family’s new-found home upon that “magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.”

In the last photo I have of my Grandaddy he is an old man walking, stooped and gnarled by Parkinson’s, but still, as he always was, moving forward and deep in thought.

I recently went hunting for photos of him online. Surely, with all he had done, there were photos of him in some college yearbook, newspaper, or historical archive. I know he was a track star in college, so I Googled “Robert Fulton Berryman” and “two mile,” his specialty.

Nothing.

I tried the search again with “R. F. Berryman” and bingo, I landed on the Oberlin College yearbook of 1905. (Thank you www.archive.org – you always come through!) I found the yearbook photo of the Oberlin track team. But…argh! The team members were not named in order of the photo. There was no, “Named, left to right.” In fact, there were more young men in the photo than names to the side. This wasn’t going to be easy. After studying each face, looking for my grandfather’s unmistakable upside-down pear shaped head, I settled on just one possibility. He had to be the confident looking young man sitting in the bottom row, second from right. Technically he’s seated in the second row, I suppose, but also technically his is the second head from bottom right.

R.F. Berryman Oberlin 1903 team

I still don’t know for sure if this is Robert Fulton Berryman, Oberlin Class of 1905. But I’m going to believe it is. Because he was almost certainly in the track team photo and no one else is a close match. Because the head shape, ears, and eyes match the photo I have from 1960. And because the only photos I have of this man I loved so dearly are blurred, dark, or from his back or side.

R.F. Berryman 1903 and 1960I take this from these few scattered facts or semi-facts: Robert Fulton Berryman always ran towards, never from. The whole world was that magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude. He raced through college and then ran (not literally, I must point out) to the Philippines to see the aftermath of the Spanish American War. He got an inheritance and so ran to Oklahoma to start a sheep ranch (fine occupation for an academic prodigy!). He ran from Wall Street to a commune, and from there to California. Whether he got comfortable in California and so decided not to explore further lands I don’t know. I do know that as I age, changing my life gets harder. I would like to move someplace completely different than coastal Southern California, but so many ties tether me here. After a while in one place it gets like that. But that’s another story for another time.

Grandaddy didn’t have time for cameras. But he had time for me. No camera can capture that.

Stories My Father Never Told Me

Aivazovsky_-_Strong_WindMine is not a family of storytellers. I don’t know what my father did in World War II. I don’t know if his heart skipped a beat the first time he saw his future wife, my mother. I don’t know if there was an instant he doubted he would live when his sailboat was torn to toothpicks in a hurricane a mile off the Florida coast. That was an event. But he never made it a story to pass on to his children. And so I don’t know why or how he made it to shore across a mile of stormy seas, only that he did.

It might sound funny to wonder why he survived. But plenty of people wouldn’t have made it. Even people with the swimming skills and physical strength to make it. You also need a powerful will to live and the courage to face what look like insurmountable odds. He was sailing solo, so there was no one else to help make the decision to ride out the storm with the ship or to brave the raging seas. There was no easier choice to just follow someone else’s lead. Decisions don’t come any harder than the ones he had to make in his life. This was only foreshadowing what was to come. Stormy SeasDid he quickly calculate his odds and swim for shore as soon as he saw the boat was foundering, or did he try to hold her together till there was no hope left, braving seas that were by that time dramatically worse to try and save the boat he had lovingly built by hand? Did he risk going down with the ship by groping frantically through rising waters in the below-deck cabin for one treasured belonging he couldn’t bear to leave behind? If he did, what was so valuable that he risked his life over retrieving it? And when he reached shore did he walk away unscathed, or were his nights haunted with nightmares of drowning? A sea of churning water stood between him and life on that…that what? I don’t even know if it was night or day. Either way, he lived to not tell about it.

As a child I one time skipped down barefoot onto a gnarl of fish hook cactus that lodged deep in the sole of my foot. My father came toward me to take it out and I warned him away with screams and tears. He laughed and asked if I intended to leave it there forever. Without an ounce of bravery, I had to think about it for a minute. If it had been me in that sinking boat, the smallest doubt of whether I could swim over raging seas and make it to land alive would have had me clutching to the last bit of floating debris of that boat like it was God Himself, and only He could save me from being swallowed by the sea. My fate would rest on how buoyant my bit of detritus was. I would use all my strength trying to make that shard of timber float, unable to trust my ability to survive a swim to shore.

Cast up by the Sea - Winslow HomerNo such complications for my father. All my life he whistled while he shaved, sang while he worked, and went about his business with good cheer. Each day was a new opportunity to enjoy life, and whatever stories his past held, that’s where they stayed. When I grew up and became interested in him as a person as well as a father, one day I asked how he had the sheer guts and strength to get up and go back to work shortly after breaking his back and being paralyzed (for life) at 35. All he said was, “I had to, I had a family to feed.” Those words were plenty to tell me what he was made of, but I wanted all the elements of plot. I wanted the how and the why, and the who, what, and whereAnd yet I didn’t have the guts to ask.

I wasn’t born yet when he fell off the roof of their new home and into a wheelbarrow, but I hurt to even think of all the crashing of bones and nerves and hearts and hopes and dreams that started when his body came freefalling onto the edge of that wheelbarrow spine-first. I wonder about the pain, how scared he must have been, how dashed his dreams, how fearful for his future, no less his pregnant wife’s and two young sons’.

In the hospital after his injury doctors tickled his feet. They poked his calves and pressed their fingers into his thighs. Nothing. No feeling. So they wouldn’t operate. They said it was no use. My grandmother stormed the hospital and they relented, slicing a 14-inch gash down his back. They poked around a bit, sewed him back up, and said, “Yep. He’ll never walk again.” He didn’t talk for a month. Then he dragged himself out of the hospital, stuffed his bodycasted self in the family Jeep with my mother and brothers, and said goodbye to their new home in Denver. They couldn’t think clearly there. They needed to re-gather their lives within the familiarity of the house they still owned in California, among loving family and concerned friends. For the next six months he taught himself to walk with a complex series of movements that began with swinging his hips and legs forward with the strength of his glutes. When his uncle, Pappy we called him, told him it was time to saw off his body cast and see what he had, that’s what he did. After fits and starts he began walking with two canes, then one, then finally none. Still with no feeling below his hips. But it was something. A miracle of the will.

After the injury he developed other strengths. His arms could hold all us children at once. His calm could make any problem, however seemingly tragic at first, suddenly approachable. His courage could hold the weight of all our worlds on his shoulders. But part of that courage came by refusing to consider himself in any way but like everybody else. He simply refused to treat himself as paralyzed, and damned if anyone else would dare. So if I asked even the most innocuous question about his injury, would opening up and talking about it, satisfying his cherished daughter’s curiosity, open a hole that let all that long-ago pain come rushing back? I wouldn’t risk it.

Harrrison - Ocean NocturneThat’s what I know. And I wouldn’t ask him for more. It wasn’t really lack of courage that stopped me from asking. I know that now. It was respect. Every day my father lived his life as a man with full use of his body would. He never gave in to physical limitations, never mind self-pity. He would not use handicap parking spaces. He coached and umpired Pony League baseball. He climbed on roofs and pounded them with sheets of shingles whenever that needed to be done, and I doubt he ever considered that irony.

He was a man of few words and was a firm believer that the value of a person’s life is in his deeds. That didn’t make him hard. Quite the opposite. He knew what a man is capable of. But he also knew how a man can suffer. Just seeing my father and what he did every day was enough to tell me the worth of the man. I didn’t need to know how he made it to shore to know he was strong. I didn’t need to know what he did in the war to know he was brave.

All this happened. And it affected our lives in unimaginable ways. In aggregate the consequences of that accident hurled our little family off orbit. He spent months at a time in the hospital because of internal injuries and infections and other complications. My mother tried to hold it all together, keeping house and feeding and caring for her three beloved children plus being a more intimate nurse to her husband than she could have ever dreamed of. But her struggles are a different story. The family is still trying to regain its balance now, a decade after he’s gone and well into his grandchildren’s adulthood. We’ll make it. In another generation the pain won’t even be a memory. But the family will be strong. Partly because he refused to let us be weak.

When he was late into his 70’s, on kidney dialysis for some kind of a record dozen years, his speech a little slurred from mini-strokes and body wasted by decades of the complications of paralysis, it finally occurred to me that he was not immortal. I asked him to write his life story. I wanted to know whatever stories he wished to share with me. He said he would, and so he spent his days at dialysis filling notebooks. His hands weakened and his handwriting deteriorated. We got him a dictation recorder, but he didn’t want to bother his fellow dialysees. So he went on with the notebooks, filling them with barely legible sentences and paragraphs and pages, pouring out his life with clearly apparent joy at what he had lived. He started with his grandparents, describing their lives, and four yellow-lined legal notebooks later he ended with his own early adulthood. That’s as far as he got before passing away on August 31, 1997, at 1:55 in the morning.

He never got to the part about the sailboat. But that’s alright. I know everything that’s important about my father.

Art - Winslow Homer - Sunset Fires

I Never Loved Her More

Snow came the night we reached Shenandoah in late December of 1968 after driving night and day from Southern California to make it while there was still time.

Two birds and holly.GIFIt lay shining on the fields in the light of a full moon, glistening on the trees, and falling softly before the headlights, whipped into small furies by the air displaced as we passed.

Uncle Charles and Aunt Ola were as excited as children that the first good snow arrived to greet us. Good luck, they said. It was late, nearly midnight when we arrived. My little sister Ellen was asleep in the back seat, sprawled out like a cat, limbs akimbo and face hidden in a bramble of long hair.

My father picked her up. Half awake, she put her arms around him and he carried her up the steps and across the wood slat porch. At the front door Uncle Charles reached out and took her into his own arms. She woke and hugged him tight while he cried, burying his face in her hair.

Ma lay in a hospital bed that dominated the living room from the middle like a hub, furniture pushed back to the walls and facing the bed as though on spokes. Her tiny body was shrouded by a thin white sheet and protected, in case she rolled over, by high rails on the bed’s sides. She hadn’t rolled over. She hadn’t even moved a finger.

Uncle Charles, my mother’s brother, had the ancient wood stove stoked up and pouring out heat so stifling that I could hardly breathe. Aunt Ola, mother’s sister, was general of the operation. She fussed over us, took our coats and pointed us to seats, all in the name of love, both of us and of order.

My mother had stood back until then, letting her siblings huddle around us first, embracing each of us in turn to erase the years of absence that had stood between us. That is her nature, to quietly observe and to talk only when there is something worth saying. Now she came to us, arms outstretched and smile wide. Winter birds.GIFShe had flown back several months before to be with her mother, the two of them caring for each other, the elderly mother and the daughter who had been recently ill. They had those few wonderful months together, taking walks as far as Naked Creek, sharing quiet meals, working side-by-side in the garden, before Ma had her stroke.

I don’t know if Ma knew we were there or not. She had the stroke a week before our arrival, had held out till then, but just couldn’t hold it off those final few days until we arrived. The stroke took her from us and put her in a coma. I gazed at her smooth face, pale and lineless, her white hair swept back and tucked behind her head.

She had worn a sun bonnet all her life, one of those pioneer woman types with full gathered cap, massive quilted brim, and short “skirt” in the back, all held on by a wide bow tied under her chin. That and a sun parasol kept her skin like a girl’s her whole life. She was so still now that I could not detect even her breathing. I leaned in and kissed her cheek. Uncle Charles put his hand on my arm; I turned and his thin arms encircled me next. We were not yet done with the greetings.Winter birds2.GIF

That night I slept above the living room, right about where I imagined my mother’s childhood bed had sat. The heat up there was just as unbearable as below, and I opened the window, pulling my light bed as close as I could to the cool air outside. Ellen and I watched a gentle snow fall, the fields sparkling in the moonlight. I breathed in the crisp night, so unlike the salt and dust I could taste in the air at home, near the Pacific Ocean in Southern California.

Sometime during the night lightning struck a nearby tree with a deafening roar. I bolted awake, my hair standing on end, the room shimmering with electricity. Ellen and I looked at each other with wide eyes. “Wow!,” we both said, California style, and crept to the window for some lightening gazing. There’s nothing like that in Southern California, and it was as good as a Disneyland ride.

The next day we explored the farm, my father, sister and I. We sifted through the old barn, gathering up the scythe and sickle, hay fork and cross-saw; examined the old worn wood, found a large draft horse harness with fat leather collar. In the house we marveled at the wood stove my grandmother still cooked on in 1969, and the flat iron she still heated on the stove to iron clothes. Bird cottage winter.GIFNot to mention the well-worn water pump that sat just outside the kitchen door, the outhouse just beyond the garden, the bedpans and washing basins that were still a part of daily life there.

My grandmother was never lured by the modern, never longed for the newest model washing machine or toaster. The only time I ever heard she wanted anything at all was after the first ride she took in an automobile. It belonged to Shenandoah’s physician, Dr. Shuler, who offered her a ride home from town one day. She came into the house grinning widely and said, “I’m going to get us one of those.”

Uncle Charles and Aunt Tessie, his wife, lived next door. Tessie loaned me magazines to read that winter, but my mother made me take them back when she saw that they were Hollywood gossip rags, Confidential, Screenland, Uncensored. I had never seen anything like them, much racier than the fan magazines you see today, full of lust and murder. Charles and Tessie lived in one of those upright old Virginia country houses whose only luxury was electricity, but theirs was furnished with the most salacious reading material of the day. The irony was not lost on me.Swifts.GIF

We settled into my grandmother’s house, my mother cooking on the wood stove, my father tidying up the farm, reading his newspapers and mumbling about the Vietnam War. He was a proud American and patriotic World War II vet, but was wholly outraged by this war. “Sending those boys to their deaths, and for what?”

Every day there were visitors, either neighbors bringing homey casseroles or family members coming to visit us and pay their respects to Ma. I loved every minute of it, wished we had kindly neighbors in California, wished we had more family there.

Ma and Pop, my grandparents, Florence and Tom Merica, were worried when their fourth daughter announced she was moving with her husband and baby to California. People didn’t leave Shenandoah, or not many did. Ma was especially worried. She and Ruth, my mother, had a special relationship. More than her other daughters, Ruth loved spending time with her mother, helping her in the kitchen or garden, going along when Ma went “a’visitin’.” Ma knew it would be many years before she saw her daughter again, and I know she grieved. Sure, we visited now and then. But not enough.Bird in snow.GIF

Now here we were and Ma didn’t even know. Or if she did, she could not communicate it. Occasionally I crept near and sat by her side, holding her hand. I was too self-conscious to talk to her, as Uncle Charles did, and did not feel intimate enough to stroke her hair and cheek, as my mother did.

I simply sat, awkwardly, until a closeness overcame me, a love for my grandmother who I barely knew, a longing for her to wake and turn to me with arms open to envelop me, making up for all those years away from her. After sitting with these feelings for a while, I could get up again and move on.

Ma’s brother, my Great Uncle Charlie, had a farm up at Number Two Furnace, just up the rise from Jollett Hollow. We drove over to his place one snowy afternoon to cut a nice Christmas tree, and were all delighted when he pulled out a full-sized sleigh and harnessed the big old work horse to it. A real sleigh, just like Santa had, even with bells around the horse’s collar. So there we went, dashing through the snow in our one-horse open sleigh, into the woods to find the perfect tree. Not Douglas fir, like we always got at home, but cedar, the traditional Christmas tree of Virginia.

The next few days were busy, what with Christmas around the corner. We shopped in Harrisonburg, and I spent a few days with my uncle Jesse’s family in Waynesboro. My Aunt Emily and I sat at her kitchen table and talked. I told her about the piglets at Great Uncle Charlie’s farm and she told me she would love to Bird with apples.GIFhave a lap pig, “They’re so cute. And smart.”

We went shopping and she gave me $5 to buy anything I wanted. I chose a yellow dress for Ellen. One afternoon, sitting in the kitchen, their son Tom came in with a friend. He looked to be a few years older than my 16. After introductions Tom nodded silently to me, then he and his friend disappeared into the back. “Well!,” I thought, “I came a long way to be here, I deserve better than that!” Years later we would be close friends.

When I returned my grandmother was yet there, quiet and still, breathing steadily, her face peaceful. My mother, Uncle Charles, and Aunt Ola took turns sitting by her side so Ma was never alone, though none knew if she was aware of the doting children who sat vigil. My mother took the evenings, pulling in a small bed to sleep beside her. That evening we gathered after dinner in the living room. Uncle Charles walked home, which was next door, just across the field. He stoked the fire again before leaving, as always.

Ola was gone, it was just the five of us. I pushed my chair near the thin-paned window to draw some of its chill, trying to offset the blasting heat. My father was on the couch reading a newspaper, my little sister on the floor playing. I looked up from my book and saw my mother standing over Ma’s bed, stroking her hair with tenderness.

Birds in holly.GIFShe spent her adult life in California, arriving with my father and their first baby, then a toddler, just after the end of World War II. We did not travel back to see her Shenandoah family as often as we would have liked. There were four children to raise, and cross-country travel was far more difficult then. My grandmother never learned to read or write, so intimate letters between the two were impossible. As for the phone, I don’t know why they did not talk more often, except that both tended to quietness.

And now my mother was like an angel at my grandmother’s bedside, her face as serene as Ma’s, radiating something so essential and chaste that it felt like an essence distilled to its truest form, that bond between child and mother, or spirit and body. Her hand lightly caressed Ma’s brow, slowly stroking her fine white hair back and to the side. It was the most simple expression of pure love I had ever seen, and I could not take my eyes from her. The room was quiet, only the occasional snap of sparks in the fire or rustle of paper. Robin in dogwood.GIFMa was as small as a girl, her form beneath the sheet barely more than a bas relief in cloth against the bed.

Mother brushed back a strand of Ma’s hair, tucking it behind her ear. She touched her brow, ran the back of her hand across her cheek. Then, her soft words, “She’s gone.” At that moment I had never loved my mother more.

Her Careless Naming of Human Property

Slaves

I’m venturing toe-deep into the subject of slavery. I cannot even begin to write eloquently about that atrocity; too many people have said it better than I ever could, and I don’t want to dive into it if I can’t do the subject — and my feelings about it — justice. So I will only write of this one, brief encounter I just had with historical slavery, and the visceral revulsion that came over me.

By simply being aware of the daily news you become aware of the vastness of modern slavery. Sex slavery, the bondage of smuggled illegal workers, child soldiers, and debtors’ slavery are all rampant problems worldwide. Not long ago I learned of more than 100 slaves who were held for a year inside a warehouse in Los Angeles, less than 60 miles from me, and forced to work as garment sewers. And only a month ago a woman of foreign royalty, living not ten miles from me, was deported for holding domestic slaves here.

Whipped backSlavery is illegal in every country in the world, but not so long ago it wasn’t. Emancipation was only 57 years old when my mother was born, and she remembers the community’s animosity for a woman known as “Granny,” because she had been a slaveholder. That community, by the way, was in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the South’s breadbasket, and the place burned to the ground by General Sheridan’s Northern troops during the Civil War. These small farmers, Mennonites, Methodists, and United Brethren, which included my mother’s family, opposed slavery, and some opposed all war as well.

But nothing about slavery has touched me as viscerally as this has. I just read the will of my fifth great grandmother and found that she was a slave owner, and it gave me the shivers. That will gives proof that there was slave ownership in my family, that it was this close to me — this close to being my generation’s responsibility.  If things had gone differently with the Civil War, those slaves might still be in bondage, five or six generations later. What would I do?

Elizabeth Newton Berryman, like her husband before her, was a slave owner, and in her will she writes of the distribution of her human property to her heirs in the same breath as the disposal of an “old silver tankard.”

She lists over 50 slaves, including, “Old Negro Jack and Grace and their ten Children.” For each of the bequests of slaves, she begins, “I give to my son,” then lists the slaves’ names, ending, “to him and his heirs and assigns, forever,” meaning that the son and his heirs will own those slaves and their children and their children’s children forever. A family eternally damned to live as possessions, like cows or pigs or old silver tankards. Buying-Slaves-Havana-Cuba-1837_jpg

She writes that two of her daughters do not receive any slaves, because, “my daughter Sarah Douglas has had her part of the negroes and my daughter Katharine Vowles has had her part of the Negroes.”

I can only hope that my ancestors were not cruel, though slavery itself is the ultimate cruelty, and so any leniency heaped on slavery is of scant solace. Even now I feel a ridiculous and hopelessly useless anger at the will’s careless naming of human property. This is the will; the bold is my addition:

In the Name of God Amen I Elizabeth Berryman of the County of Westmoreland being weak in body but of sound and disposing mind and memory do constitute and appoint this my last Will & testament in manner following. Whereas my husband Benjamin Berryman by his last Will authorized me to make distribution of all his slaves to his six sons or the survivors of them and whereas three of the said Sons viz Newton, John and Henry died before they came of age and was not possesst of any of their fathers estate and whereas William, James and Maximilian are the surviving sons I give all the slaves with their increase to be divided as follows, Advertisement of Slave Dealer, Charleston, South Carolina, 1835_jpgImprimis I give to my son William Berryman Old Negro Jack and Grace and their ten Children and bob which in his possession and Sall which I delivered to him as part of his fathers estate some years past but being a little Negro girl, that attended me I desired my son William to let her stay and wait on me which is now with me, as also I give him Rachel and Nel & Beck their Mother, to him and his heirs and assigns forever and allso my fathers Old Silver Tankard without a lid and also my fathers coat of arms. Af (&?) alsSlave houseo I give to my said son William Berryman all the lands I bought of Cossom Bennett in the County of Westmoreland which I have given him by a deed and do confirm to him his heirs and assigns forever.

Item I give to my son James Berryman, Negro George, Jack, Anthony, Ben, Aaron, Suke, Nace, Mary, Tim, Ned, Jude, Peg and her youngest Child Gerrat, Winney, and Bettey to him his heirs and assigns forever.

Item I give to my son Maximilian, fourteen Negroes which he has in his possession as also Salley, Lilla and Frank which are yet in my possession, to him his heirs and assigns forever.Slave Auction.GIF

Item my will and desire is that my stock and household stuff of what kind soever Tobacco Corn Money etc shall be equally divided between my three children that is to say William James and Katherine Vowles.

Item my son Benjamin Berryman had his part of his fathers estate before his death, Item my daughter Rose Taliaferro had her part of her fathers estate before his death.

Item my Daughter Frances Foot has her part since her fathers death according to his Will and gave a receipt for it.slave-ship-loading-plan

Item my daughter Sarah Douglas has had her part of the negroes and my daughter Katharine Vowles  has had her part of the Negroes, the reason of my giving son William Seventeen Negroes and my son James but sixteen is because some negroes that my son William is possest of are very Deficient for old Jack & Grace are almost past labour, and one negro fellow with One eye and one hand, and another cripled Lad of very little use, therefore I think the division I have made will make them equal according to quantity and quality.

Item I appoint my sons William and James Berryman executors to this my last will and testament.

In withness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this 14th day of June 1762 –
Elizabeth E Berrymen (her mark)Man and brother

Signed Sealed and delivered In presence of Gerrard Blackstone Causeen
Josias Causeen
Thomas Clark
William Staples
At a court held for Westmoreland County the 22d day of February 1763,

This last Will and Testament of Elizabeth Berryman decd was proved according to law by the Oaths of Josias Causeen and William Staples . Witnesses thereto and Ordered to be recorded and on the motion of said William Berryman One of the executors named in the said Will who made Oath according to law and together with Willoughby Newton his Security entered into and acknowledged Bond with Condition as the law directs Certificate is granted him for Obtaining a probate thereof in due form liberty being reserved to James Berryman the Other executor named in the said Will to join in the probate when he shall think fit -TesteAuction poster

Nothing could feel more foreign than owning another human being, and yet that chapter of our nation’s history was only 150 years ago, so near our time that the last group of Civil War veterans lived until the 1950s; so near our time that my own mother knew former slave owners.

It’s doubtful that, even without the Civil War, slavery would have lived into our time. But it’s not impossible. Look how unsanctioned slavery thrives still, a tragic disgrace.

What Do We “Really” Discover in Our Ancestors?

Why do we do it?

Why do we spend our time digging into the past, an exercise that is sure not to change the world in any meaningful way?

Journal Page, Francis Otto EgglestonWhy do we spend hours on end combing through dusty stacks or tussling with software that won’t bend to our will?

I know my answer. It’s simple. Because someone has to do it.

It’s because I have all of my birth family’s photos and memorabilia, and my siblings have hounded me for years to make copies for them, so I’m finally getting around to it.

But that’s not the real answer, is it? We both know it.

There’s a reason I’m the one who ended up with all the photos, after all. Because I have always been the one who has her nose stuck in old journals of my great-great grandfather or who sits picking through dog-earred photos of my un-labeled ancestral strangers that someone shoved in a box and forgot about long ago.

I go after my ancestors with bloodhound-like dedication.

It’s a way of grounding myself, of adding to my understanding of who I am. I want connection, I seek connection to the past “me’s.”

Peg Berryman autobio pg 1Because as much as I am an individual, I am also an amalgamation of all those who came before me.

That’s heredity. The simple idea that some of my traits – and maybe some of my most important traits – come from my birth family.

And so where did they come from?

A family line may pass down so much more than DNA-dependent traits.

A family passes down its way of looking at and living in the world. And if you’ve ever wondered why you do something a certain way, maybe it’s because of your great-great-grandfather.

At family get togethers my grandfather, always political and with a wry sense of humor, used to get the kids around him, and lead us in singing, “Vote the Democratic party in November, if you want to go to heaven when you die.” It still makes me laugh!

Through genealogical research I know now that he was raised by a staunch Democrat, who was in turn raised by another staunch Democrat.

There is a book I found called History of Allen County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens, published in 1906.

FOE sermonIn it I found a sketch about my great-grandfather saying, “Like his father, he is a Democrat, and has served as school director, justice of the peace, trustee, assessor and supervisor.”

Now I know that I come from at least four generations of staunch Democrats, and if I look hard enough maybe I can trace the propensity back further.

Family “traits” can take strange turns, too.

I heard a story one time about a family whose tradition it was to cut the Christmas ham in half before cooking it. That’s the way it was done and no one questioned why.

But a young member of the of the family asked. Her mother didn’t know, nor did her aunts, who all cut the ham thus so before baking as well.

So she asked her grandmother, and learned that as a young bride she had a small oven, and needed to cut the ham in two for it to fit.

These are the delightful stories we can uncover when we take interest in our forebears.

But does the information have any use to us? Probably not in proportion to the amount of work it takes to find it.Family Bible Letter to Clara Minerva Brown Eggleston

But that’s just talking in practicalities. It’s not “practical” to want to know more about yourself.

It’s not “practical” to spend your time digging through your past when you “should” be straightening a messy house or putting in a few extra hours at work.

That’s okay. I’m a self-diagnosed progonoplexic.

Progonoplexia is a condition marked by obsession with one’s ancestors.

It was coined to describe the modern Greek people’s preoccupation with their ancient past.

But heck, if those monuments and statues and writers and philosophers were mine, I’d be obsessed too. If one must be obsessed with anything, ancient Greece is one of the healthier choices I can think of.

I’m not sure I can say I’m “obsessed” with my past. But there is a great sense of satisfaction in discovering my forebears. Especially the ones of just two or three generations ago, near enough to have made a big difference in who I am.

F.O. Eggleston Poem in The Unitarian, September 1891.PNGYes, I am a staunch Democrat, like my father and grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather.

I also have a “tender heart” like my grandmother, or so says my mother.

I have courage, like my great uncle, who after shooting a grizzly bear in Alaska but being injured in the process and unable to make it back to camp, opened and slept inside the bear. (But I’ll go on record as saying I’m not that brave!)

And I am easily frustrated and distracted, like the great-grandfather who up and left his family and never returned. Again, the trait in me is diluted. I’m not that easily frustrated, but I’ve been told I don’t suffer fools.

My husband would say my genealogical pursuit is “internalizing,” which he equates with wheel-spinning. He thinks everyone should be externalizing, thinking and doing in the real world. But there’s room for both, and I do both.

What do we really discover in our ancestors? Ourselves. I know more about myself today than I did before starting my genealogical quest. And that has to be a good thing, right?

Right!