This story is about a place. A very small, very specific place: a few meters of sidewalk, a few meters of asphalt, a gate. A tree. It’s interesting how such an isolated chunk of the surface of this planet could branch into so many different kinds of memories, but there you go, humans are like that.
Until I was able to move in with them at 15, I spent summers and most school holidays with my grandparents. I lived with them for a year when I was 8 or 9, as well, when my (step)parents were traveling. Before any of that, I lived for two years across the street from
my grandparents in apartments designated for the families of students of the university down the road.
My grandparents’ house was an oasis of love and academia, magnificent gardens and happy dogs, music and culture, splendid cooking and a continual supply of things I didn’t realize until much, much later were precious rarities: fresh macadamia nuts, guavas, Macintosh apples, youngberries, loquats. It was possible to disappear into the garden, to experience true privacy, and the house, designed by their good friend, a world-famous architect, was open and airy, light and warm, private and social – that house was the center of my world and it pangs me terribly that I’ll probably never see it again.
When I lived across the street from my grandparents there was a rule: I must not ever cross the street by myself. An older person must always take me. It was a time when staying out of the house as much as possible was the best approach to life; no five-
year-old understands it when a genuinely loving parent is emotionally unavailable, even hostile, let alone grasps any inkling of the kind of backstory that can bring this this kind of thing about in the first place. All the kid knows is, when certain moods are prevalent the most valuable possible contribution to the general peace is to get out of the way. At this age, thus, I spent a lot of time wandering the playground and lawns of the apartment complex being variously entertained, exploited, and pushed around by the other kids, depending on who was out and about. I lived the general Great American Novel feckless outdoor childhood existence: terrifying parent at home, nurturing grandparents available, no supervision but a mandate to stay outdoors as long and as often as possible, and a made-up world superimposed upon the real one. There was a fort, for example, which we used in a wide variety of warlike fantasy games. A great cylindrical brick construction three of us could hide inside, peering out the broken-down side for enemies. I went back there about 15 years ago, and you know what that was? It was a round little wall that had once held a tree, the whole thing barely as tall as my knee.
The playground was good for spiders and often lizards, and there was a semi-tame dove believed to have been raised by a rescuer; it would let you stroke its breast, but if you made a move to reach above its back it would fly away. Behind the apartments were some woods where I wasn’t supposed to go without asking first – this rule saved me from that skeezy man that one time but it was years and years before I put that together and went a little cold inside.
There were stairs over by the storage units that made a great castle, sand pits, other peoples’ gardens. Butterflies to chase. I did make shift to help out sometimes, wanting to see what I could do to improve my parent’s woes, but I never got it right. I remembered one day, for example, in the later hours of the morning while I was still the only one awake, that I’d been listening for a couple of days to grumbles about how dry the plants on the patio were getting and how much work it would be for the parent to see to them, so I thought to myself, hey, how hard can that be? I went out and turned on the hose, and was feeling pretty proud of myself as I carefully filled each pot to the brim, watching in satisfaction as it ran out the bottoms, enjoying the feel of it on my hot little feet. Until a neighbor left her apartment and, without speaking to me at all, went around to the front of ours and leaned on the bell until the household adult, ripped from the comforts of the bed, threw the door open. I was, it was conveyed, “drowning” all of the plants on the patio.
I was grounded for a week for showing so little respect for other people's things. The idea that I was trying to help was accepted but it was explained to me that if I were to help with things in the future, I had to promise to “do it right”, “not be stupid”, and especially “stop just playing around all the time”.
So yeah, I tried to not be at home as much as possible. As
much of that not-at-homeness as I could, I spent out with nature or at my grandparents’ house. This one day, I really had a hankering to go see them. I was again the only one awake at home, though, and I wasn't allowed to cross that road by myself, only with someone older. What I did about it was stand there at the edge of the road, waiting. Waiting for someone older. Eventually, a little girl wandered by and I asked her how old she was. Seven! Score! That was a whole two years older than me, and she was very willing to hold my hand and walk me across. My grandparents were charmed by my logic but I caught holy hell at home for being too stupid to understand that “older” meant “at least a teenager”.
A lot of people died at that spot. That one few meters of sidewalk, few meters of asphalt, was a deathtrap. The problem was, it was just around a bend coming off a long straight road from a particular point A to another, trendy, point B. Almost nobody had the sense to obey the sudden, prominent warning signs to reduce speed for the upcoming curve. And just off the curve on our side – a tree. A very large, deeply-rooted, utterly stable eucalyptus tree. You get it: people would fly around that curve straight into the tree. My grandparents and all our immediate neighbors kept kits by the door for this eventuality. Flares, blankets, first aid kits, a bottle of water. One of us, from each household, would go out first while another called emergency services. Usually we couldn’t save the victim, though. I remember when I was 16 or thereabouts, I stood for a while looking at the tree, thinking of Ursula LeGuin’s incredible story Direction of the Road, about the contemplations of an oak tree forced to face eternity in the violent auto death of a human being at its base. I looked at Google maps just now and the tree is still there; here it is for you to see. There didn’t used to be cars parked along there; I suppose they’re what gets hit now.
This crossing point was also, for decades, where we all stepped across to go for a walk (unless we were going down the canyon, over to the campus, or out to the cliffs). Behind the apartments was a valley of eucalyptus trees, sudden fields of grass which seasonally was taller than I was and where I lost myself delightedly for many an entire day, and a scrubby desert-canyon landscape teeming with life. Cactus and Indian paintbrush and ground squirrels and lizards and so many wildflowers grew there. Sometimes, in the natural way of the region, the underbrush would burn off in summer (even then humans had already badly corrupted the fire cycle and what would become the modern season of flames had already been created). The land there was adapted for this, depended on it. We would go walking after the fires, and the air would be suffused with the scents of aromatic resins, smoke, natural incenses. Even as the crackling and pings of the not-completely-extinguished layer of fallen eucalyptus branches still sounded all around, wisps of smoke yet escaping here and there, green shoots of new growth would already be breaking through, drinking in the nutrients released by the combustion.
We would go over there with the dogs, of course, a succession of them over the decades, and they knew to sit quietly at our sides while we waited for a safe moment to cross that road. One day I went out there with good old Joey. He was a smart, very idiosyncratic dog and we suspected because of his circumstances and appearance that he had more than a little coyote in him. I’ll spin many a tale with him in it but this a short one. Joey was getting on a bit by then, his stamina waning. He bounded out into the woods with me and we had a grand time tossing sticks and running around and just plain hanging out, and then I lost myself in a view or activity or quest of some kind and eventually noticed that I was sans canine. Worried, I started calling him and looking for him, getting more and more frantic as he didn’t turn up. I decided to round up a posse and ran for home, only to find deeply concerned family members coming the other way. Joey, it turned out, had simply gone home without me – leading everyone to conclude I might be in some kind of trouble.
Naturally we worried after that about Joey crossing on his own, and started using a leash more often when closer to the road, but then one day someone saw him do it. This time he’d got out of the garden on his own (he could climb ladders and trees, and navigate openings smaller than you’d think a cat could use), and was seen to walk to the edge of the road, sit down, and proceed to scan left and right, left and right, until there wasn’t a car in sight; then he slipped across the road and disappeared into the woods. We kept a better eye on him after that.
It’s funny how this little section of road and stoop, serving no function of its own either in my life or as a coherent geographic element, being only a coincidental means of here-to-there-ing, means so much to me in so many ways. Just thinking of that one spot now brings up memories of sunsets, the day the Olympic torch went by, university parties and trysts, family dogs, good times, fiery deaths, purple statice, hanging over the gate waiting for my wedding cake to be delivered, personal etymology, naval air shows, natural cycles, trick-or-drinking as a teen, ancestry, love, nature, that one eclipse, and an endless stream of narratives. I’d be willing to bet, though, that I’m not the only one.
Add comment
Comments