The History Lesson

The mailboxes were right here. And this hill was steeper. A suspension bridge spanned this creek until a winter storm tossed a stately sycamore tree into mid-span, sending both tree and bridge down river to the lagoon that swallows Volkswagons. I swear the beetles are stacked three high under the sands in the beach lagoon; and there was the refrigerator floating by from upstream that I swam out to ride in. A few bookcases, at least a dozen bicycles. When the rains ceased, people would gather around the rim to watch appliances disappear.

The Statue of Liberty in the Planet of the Apes.

How do you explain childhood? Or describe life in an open meadow where the only remaining evidence of homo sapien domesticity is a random staircase to nowhere concealed by bamboo, or a rogue grapefruit tree patrolled by a granddaddy rattlesnake?

You smile and laugh and step over the snake. You remember where the full moon rose in winter, the hillside you climbed to escape homework, whose yard had the best loquat trees. And you re-live it all in the telling: a conspiratorial half smile revealing your personal conspiracy with history. And you harvest the grapefruits.

I watched my cousin go through the same process a day later in a clandestine ravine behind the hillside house that began life as our grandparents’ home. The homestead was handed down to her father, who took up caring for their fruit trees, a career in medicine that mimicked theirs, his own three children and eventually a new wife and her two kids. Last year everything but three oaks were reduced to ash by a careless migrant flipping tortillas over open flames in the canyon below.

But here we were wandering up a stream in Rattlesnake Canyon, dragging the next generation over boulders, across fallen logs, dodging poison oak and parachute-shaped spider webs collecting dew from the dense ground fog, listening to Moira tell her kids about the times when the world stood still, right here.

In the morning, viewing the coast through the window of a southbound train is like seeing through a Holga camera: every scene a murky, hand-tinted postcard from 1959. On the back would be a brief attempt to record the smell of salty ocean air, the ecstasy of ripe strawberries, standing below a two-story tall plaster Santa Claus with your grandmother.

At a consignment shop somewhere in Omaha, Nebraska, someone is lifting the lid on a wooden cigar box full of 50-year-old hand-tinted postcards from Santa Barbara.