I’ve been writing, though I have very little that is ready for much more than my own editing. I finished my masters thesis this spring, a thesis which ended up being 100 pages over the recommended page limit, and then took a break from writing work. I’m now working on what I hope will turn into a short book which is admittedly, a compromising career move. I have pieces of it down, pieces of it in my head, and pieces that still have quite a ways to go. All of it I furiously dislike when I reread it. The piece I wrote titled ‘Two Dreams’ would fall somewhere in the end of the book, this short bit here would fall somewhere in the beginning. It would be a short book about my folks and about the distance wrapped up in memory. Publishing things here is useful in that it forces me to edit more, though none of these pieces feel anywhere near finished. Invariably, I’ll come back and change everything.
Before I was born, they lived in wooded canyons carved down by streams, mountainsides quilled by Douglas fir and redwoods, their slopes carpeted in clover and sword ferns and in beds of dead needles. The slopes are steep. Where sunlight falls, tanoaks and bay trees grow. Small streams leap against the worn sides of mossed boulders and into the valleys. The streams run into rivers and creeks that run to the bay. Beneath the fanning dark branches, are open meadows of light, fields of light green and gold and the fuzzed purple of foxtails. The smell and pitch and pollen hangs in the summer air. My father grew up in these mountains, in a summer hunting cabin. He rode dirt bikes along the logging trails with his brother. For their birthdays they were given small rifles.
This was in the late nineteen fifties. The dusty hum of loggers had clamored northwards in search of ever more oldgrowth. Already twice, San Francisco had burned to the water. They live in open forest, cleared by fire and industry and speckled with summer homes that have become year round homes, where fireplaces were added and where woodsmoke marks each smiling hive of light beneath the trees. On the drive are more Scandinavian families, children in fives or sixes or sevens, Lutheran in name, though our idioms are far more strange and fatalistic. Don’t worry, nothing ever matters they say in rhythmic Norwegian.
This is where they stopped, in these woods, said this is far enough. The slow westward crawl, generations long, easing to an end in unhurried comfort. They clear the forest a little wider, fell the leaning trees by axe, park new cars beneath new garages next to their houses alongside the winking yellow dots within blue forgetmenots. Round vascular miner’s lettuce and clover carpet the shade of redwoods growing in ringed cathedrals. The family pictures are of squinting children on the beach, facing the sun against the sand and foam in blue and white and red reindeer sweaters.
__
My parents meet one another in these mountains. She is studying for a master’s in education in San Jose that she never completes, he went to high school up the road and up the river from her cottage. His friends live on the same drive. He is working construction. She orders a greenhouse for her garden and he arrives to assemble it.
I imagine they fell into one another easily, in love among the foxgloves along the path to her doorway. From yard to yard from bedroom to bedroom. My father’s friend wakes one morning and through his kitchen window sees my father’s truck in her tended yard. Just like that.
He builds trestled bridges, fords rivers in his truck, winching himself across. Bouldering the truck through the stream. In a photograph his flatbed truck is brilliantly white, water charging across the tires as he drives over the riverbed. He tells me how it could pull itself up a cliff face with its winch. The new bridge and the old bridge they call them. He repairs them clad in black rubber rain gear, working late into the night by the lights of his electric lamps and headlights as boards and pilings wash out in swollen, stormwashed, high waters. He fords the river, winching himself across in the hulking metal frame, easing into the rolling waters, the white hood inching out from the lines of shade cast by bay trees and hazel bushes and leaning granddaddy firs, into the sunlight as the water runs and laps along the sides of the smoothed river rocks. He is careful and steady. He runs cables across the rolling expanse, builds lifts and pulleys, sets posts. He reads books on trigonometry and joinery, I find his notes and math folded away in these volumes as I slowly sort through the contents of the house, stunned by the array of his work. My little father, like a spider. Fastidious, spinning the world into silk. He is the even voice of reason and advice. He is first across the river, working always.
Driving down the hill into town, I watch the road out over the dashboard, watch my father shift slowly and deliberately as the giant frame rolled down the mountainside. The Ford logo in the center of the steering wheel is winged with beams of silver. The winch lever is a tall iron bar in the floor with no handle. The mountains surround us, the hillsides are deep green and the jagged shapes of the Douglas fir trees jut out of the imperial symmetry of the redwoods. The firs are laden with the hanging stands of light green moss. Old man’s beard, it is called. We arrive at the stoplight and I look out over the town below us, the covered bridge, the grocery stores, and the gas stations. We drive through the town to the train yard and turn and cross the train tracks. The quarry cuts a rocky tan gash through the tree line above us. My father makes slow turns through the corrugated barns and rusty silos of the San Lorenzo lumber yard. We park beside tied stacks of plywood. The sound of gasoline rushing in the metal gas tank behind us is sharp and rhythmic.
My father had the truck rebuilt and repainted when I was a boy. Then, the truck was already thirty years old. Parts were machine shopped to rebuild the engine. When it is finished, my mother drives us take the truck home. In a high metal garage on a cement slab in a field, we walk around the truck’s thick metal frame. I stare into the shining white paint. I watch my father climb into the cab and inspect the doors and the ceiling. He is speaking with the mechanics about the engine. He starts the ignition and the machine rumbles, a powerful instrument of my steady, thoughtful father.
My father would laugh when people would tailgate him as he eased in and out of turns. “They’ll hit that bumper and we’ll never even feel it,” he would say.
I can still think in his voice, though it is becoming harder to do so.
The truck sits now, rusting away in the sand. I can remember resolving to fix it, to return my father’s machine to order and to power. I swept the oak leaves and sprouting acorns out of the wooden bed and spent a disorganized hour or so getting the hood open with a wrench and WD40. That was as far as I ever got, called away to less symbolic erosions. Wood rats have chewed through the Ford’s seats and, I’m sure, many of the insulated wires. I can hear the rats running within the metal when I open the doors or walk by the bed. A hole has rusted in the corner of the cab above the driver’s side door.
The truck could be rebuilt, be towed to a garage and stored. It is never important enough. Still, it disturbs me immensely. I think about the last day my father drove it, of when that may have been. Of him turning the engine off and climbing out of the cab. Did he know it was the end of something. When do you ever know.
Each year it rusts, parked in the sand, part of an overwhelming and ubiquitous sense of entropy. On my father’s birthday this year I was home to check in on the house and on the family that rents our home. I tie a tarp over the cab and sweep out some of the chewed up yellow seat foam and chewed up acorn shells and chewed up insurance cards. Mice droppings fill the rubber grooves of the floor mats. I feel the cracks in the oxidized rubber that seals the windows and roll the windows down and then back up. Robin’s egg blue lichen grows on the side of the truck in the white paint on the eastern side. I rub it off with my palm.
The white Ford comes to me in my dreams. Ants eating the house, warping shingles, a corner of the deck that has sunk imperceptibly until you set a level upon it. The house is still unfinished. I wake in sweat and in a rattled unease. I dream that I will build a garage and studio, a sister to the house, and rebuild the truck and park it in that dry, windless room on smooth cement, that my children will run underneath the manzanita trees, that I will have children, that I will have a family again. I dream of a recovered world and of a completed life and wake only to slow erosion. Seasons pass under me. I think in eddies about the picture of my father driving the truck across a river, of the boulders rolling under the tires in the stream, of my father’s steady, easy hands. You do what you can, I tell myself, with varying degrees of conviction.
In a box, some months ago, I find a picture of my parents in front of her cottage. The summer leaves are behind them in layers of shining dark green and soft light green. His hair is blonde and brown and wavy down to his shoulders. Her hair is dark and brilliant. She holds a pair of new blue jeans, I can see the tag and the label in her hands. They are looking at one another and smiling. A vision of ease and comfort and self-assurance in the sunlight. The truck is in the background, the bed full of lumber.