Month: August 2020

I’ve been writing these posts – lockdown, post-lockdown, personal lockdown – in part to keep in touch with friends, in part to create a record, in part to process my thoughts during difficult times. My abilities to process and sort are presently challenged almost to the point of paralysis. I want to hear from all my friends and relatives in California, now and every fifteen minutes until the fires are gone. There are devastating flames in communities I have held dear for a lifetime. I am thousands of miles away, isolated with a leg I can’t yet walk on, and connected tenuously through Facebook and email to friends I cannot receive assurances from on demand.

I just watched the morning briefing on the fires in Santa Cruz County’s San Lorenzo Valley, and am flooded with admiration. And am fighting profound feelings of helplessness. I can only imagine how much more profound those feelings must be when the material aspects of your life are in danger of incineration.

“Don’t try to take things into your own hands,” the people who gave the briefing said repeatedly. “Every rescue we have to undertake removes personnel from the front lines. We know your urge to help is well-intentioned – to assist your family, your neighbors, your community – but in this instance you need to step back, and wait.”

A friend whose home may be in harm’s way posted photos some brave soul took of the fires in Bonny Doon. They are devastating, especially when one superimposes those charred, burning images with the green summer-filled pictures in your mind. That not every photo was of a solid wall of conflagration, that they included a single firefighter spraying down a fence, was oddly heartening. But the image that brought tears was of what had been someone’s lovingly constructed patio, stones beautifully set with perfect care, a stone fire pit still in place – all surrounded by ash.

Big Basin, I hear, is destroyed. Surely not all the great trees — redwoods are hearty resisters of flame — but the structures that identified it as a park are gone. The redwoods will begin to rejuvenate as soon as they can reach moisture. We will not see the park we knew, again, but something wondrous will soon begin to rise. It is the way of forests. The people whose stewardship our enjoyment of the place depends upon will minister in trailers and prefabs for a few years, then slowly the facilities will catch up with the trees. And we who knew it pre-fire will share our photos and our memories until reality surpasses them. The last great fire to devastate the area was 110 years ago. My mother and her family where hiking and picking berries as soon as ten years later.

But a human community can be more fragile, less inclined to grow back so spontaneously. Human roots are different – they can be moved. There will be insurance claims, financing, emotional destruction, huge adjustments to be decided upon. And even if no more homes are lost, this week marks the end of something for those directly affected. It is the same uncertainty as accompanies the pandemic, come closer still. Even these thousands of miles away, I feel changed by the fires, more fragile, less willing to trust the material world.

In the midst of these unknowables, I still hear humor (which floods my heart with joy) and courage. I hear people just dealing with what must be done, open to the future and hoping for the best. There is some relief in natural disaster when compared to war or oppression. The pain it inflicts is beyond our capacities to prevent, but the response it engenders can embody the best that human nature has to offer. Barriers drop, hands reach out, communities are restored.

It is also natural for the human personality to want definitive endings. Movies and books and plays end with a satisfying emotional or intellectual charge, even with the plot is not completely resolved. The human experience needs punctuation, resting tones, and pauses for us even to begin to understand it. The most difficult times are those that leave too many open questions stacked on top of one another. We live in difficult times, and need to learn to blend helpfulness with waiting. That is not an easy thing to do.

Big Basin State Park in California. San Lorenzo Valley. The redwoods.

Open my mother’s photo album, there will be dozens of black and white photos of picnics and hikes among old-growth redwoods, edges ragged in the style of the day. A few pages deeper, the photos are in faded, bluish color of me and my friends with our proudly fashioned hiking sticks, or of hands outstretched with offerings of oats to not-very-timid deer. When I lived in Santa Cruz County as a young man, guests were always offered a few hours, at least, in Big Basin. It is one of my favorite spots, anywhere – a lush haven, a forest retreat, a living link with an unimaginably distant past.

Fires are burning now, up and down the San Lorenzo Valley. The houses of many friends are in danger. The fires have consumed me. I check for news far more often than it can be reported. It is a disaster for tens of thousands, and a heartbreak for thousands more whose loving memories are rooted in those mountains.

My mother’s memories included regular trips to the Park. Her father would hitch the horse to their buggy, and they would set off on a full day’s journey – five kids, a few neighbors, and supplies for a week’s stay. They reserved cottages, met up with friends from other areas, hiked, waded in ponds, and picked huckleberries. My grandmother brought her portable oven to put over a campfire so she could turn the berries into berry pie. Later, when the family was able to afford an automobile, jaunts became shorter and more frequent, but even as my grandparents grew frail, they continued to make day trips to the splendid wood.

Sometime in my infancy, my journeys blended with theirs. I don’t recall my earliest times there, but I know that by the age of seven I had memorized the official map of hiking trails – Waddell Creek, Redwood Loop, Sempervirens Trail – and every visit was planned for the walks I would coax my relatives into conquering. Sometimes we’d rent cottages, sometimes we’d leave just before dawn and hike until a half hour before sunset. The smells, textures, the presence of the trees, were wonderful, the hot sun, the tangled roots, the fungi, rotting wood, small wildlife, and flowing waters were my beloved teachers.

The day when the morning news on the car radio was obsessed with Marylin Monroe’s passing – Norma Jean – we were on our way to Big Basin. Green mosses, huge ferns, and the smell of laurel acted as counterpoint to a strangely personal grief that sprung not from the death of an icon, rather more from the sadness of her life. Of her victimhood. Yes, we knew, even then. Even at that age.

Looking back, it seems that every other summer week was punctuated by a trip to Big Basin or further south, into San Lorenzo Valley. My mother discovered an excursion railway called Roaring Camp, just shy of Felton, and was convinced by the charming conductor with the white mustache to buy a couple of thousand shares of stock. They had big dreams – a frontier village at the depot end, and a climb up Bear Mountain where a nineteenth century style resort hotel would await, all traditions of that picturesque era firmly in place. It captured my love of history and histrionics, and I encouraged the investment.

Friends of the family had weekend cottages in Boulder Creek, Brackney, Felton, and Brookdale. We were frequently invited. My uncle bought a lot near Bear Creek and intended to build a cottage there, but found out too late that the lots were zoned by the association for proper houses, not cottages. He was a master carpenter whose intention it was to build himself, and his regular job only allowed time for a cottage. Still, we’d go to his empty lot for picnics several times a summer, just for the air. That is where he taught me how to safely scale a muddy incline.

In my senior year of college I traveled north from Tucson with friends to audition for American Conservatory’s summer program. Somehow, we met up with other students and I convinced them to spend a day hiking the redwoods. Grounded in musical theatre, the grove rang with their renditions of show tunes. After college I lived for an off-season in a vacation hut near Felton, and later in a former vacation lodge in neighboring Mount Herman. All during my dozen or so years in the area, there were friends and activities to draw me into the redwoods. They capture you, make you promise to return.

About ten years ago, two of my dearest friends sold their townhouse in foggy Aptos and bought a rather typical split-level in chaparral-surrounded Ben Lomond. They turned the bland house into a California classic, and coaxed a lush garden to grow on the sandhill of their backyard. I was there when they moved in, and they have been gracious in their hospitality ever since. I can explore the shapes and feelings of their home in my mind, like the house I grew up in; thick with good memories.

This morning I woke to a post that my Ben Lomond friends had been evacuated. The twenty thousand acres ablaze yesterday had turned into forty thousand overnight.

Memories on hold, I pray for rain, no wind, and skilled firefighters.

Today something changed. Maybe because the leg is healing after the surgery to mend my left Achilli’s tendon, it is able to find a more comfortable position, and other parts of the body have adjusted into positions that allow me to write without screaming every five minutes. Maybe I am screamingly bored, cannot read the news or scroll down Facebook anymore, and those intolerances have necessarily pushed me beyond a barrier. 

I have slept enough in the past three weeks to satisfy my needs for the next year. There is nothing wrong with me that wouldn’t be made better by a brisk walk. Walking from room to room on crutches (but only when I have to) has actually seemed like exercise. 

Am I complaining? A little. Yet, I’m only three weeks into this. I have friends who have been through far worse for far longer as partial payment for a new knee. For instance. I never appreciated what they endured, what patience it takes, what stability of character. What support from others.

A few days ago, I think – time slides around like Jell-o on a warm plate, even more so than during lockdown – I discovered a site that offers free, public domain, audio books. You know, all the greats of English and American literature. This was good, for reading has been even more impossible than writing, and for all the same reasons. I’d never read A Tale of Two Cities, so I chose that as a project. I got through most of Book Two by yesterday, but so far today cannot face it again. Too much like the news, only darker. All windows are grimy, most of the players are desperate, the ruling class is cluelessly self-involved and heedlessly cruel, the poor too many and terribly ground down, the finely drawn characters often repellant. Okay, almost exactly like the news. I’m taking a break.

I’ve tried writing before during this recuperation. First failures reference the aforementioned physical discomforts. Even as those became, at least in my imagination, surmountable, an acceptable opening sentence would not present itself. They all whined and contained too many first person pronouns. Writing about experiences in lockdown was still to record a communal event, even in my solitude. This personal lockdown of recovery affects mostly me, and the kind souls – Erika first among them – who have been solicitous of my well-being and comfort. Whining feels unappreciative. In fact, it is a bit unappreciative. And as I am strongly appreciative, I don’t want to leave a contrary impression. But I am not a happy sitter even in the best of times, and while these are not the worst of times except to my restless legs and over-used buttocks, one does get bored and a little hysterical when the clock tells us that the interminable day is not yet half wasted.

I feel for prisoners of all epochs. Wonder at the anchorite. Am made humble by the hermit. Have great empathy for the bed-ridden and isolated. It is not how we are made, to be this sedentary and apart from community. It takes a great measure of letting go; some of that is good, too much can begin to turn morbid.

Cynthia’s lovely apartment, where I am spending this period of seclusion, even completely re-arranged and protected, is a godsend. If I seem to be whining now, imagine how I would sound confined to my former cottage’s upper floor, wonderful neighbors notwithstanding. Given that I have to relocate while my leg heals (with the kind assistance of yet more friends) I would have had to leave even those confines in the middle of my recovery (the house has been rented to a new tenant, already) whereas here I can see out my term. And the place that will be prepared for me is lovely in many ways. But I look at its photos online – for I saw it in person only in late May, and only once – and wonder at the kitchen, its lack of storage, its lack of an over-the-sink dish drain or alternatively, a dishwasher, and try to imagine how living there would actually be. I have to entrust to the advice of others who can physically visit and draw practical conclusions.

But I have shelter, wonderful friends, good doctors, and relative comfort and health. That is so much more than millions of others.

The surgeon will come tomorrow to see if the stitches are ready to come out. He put them in almost three weeks ago in a beautiful hospital outside Siena during an operation that involved no discomfort, not even a bill. If they come out, that will be a marker, at least. I doubt that my mobility will much increase, or if it does, it will do so incrementally. So, perhaps once I exorcise this demon of restless squirming, I will find a way to write again; about this remarkable town I live in and my view of it from Cynthia’s lovely, long terrace. A hobble onto and upon the terrace is my – practical, I hope – next goal. It will broaden my horizons, and that is always a good and welcome thing. And a reward.