An essay in seven parts:
I took a walk up the mountain today. It was a pretty walk, a bit too steep for my usual tastes but productive. Since I came home to live for a while--around mid-December--the water has been a bit quirky, and has been off around a third of the time. My father has been fixing it constantly.
My fathers health could be better, and the mile or so walk up the mountain to work on the water isn't a picnic for a man who has had two heart attacks and two strokes, but when my brother couldn't get the water running for more than a day or two at a time he began to make the walk. I asked him to take me from the beginning, but it was a "mans job' and I just wasn't suited for the task. After this last week, when he made five trips up and couldn't get the water to run for more than a few hours, he finally allowed me to help today, so I grabbed a shovel and some tools and headed up the mountain with my father to try to fix the water.
The first bit isn't too bad, steep but managable, the hills are green now with thin wild grasses, and the first flowers of spring are beginning to bloom, There are some manzanita on the trail that are over one hundred years old judging by their size, grown over time from bushes into twisted red trees. Before we got very far the going got rougher. From there until about an eighth of a mile from the top of the pipeline you can reach out and touch your next steps--if you brush away the leaves and pine needles first. There are a number of deep gullies to get around, the result of the old pipeline my fathers family built in the thirties to bring water to the lower ranch. Over the years it leaked so much that the mountain washed away from the constant flow of water. Once past this it didn't really level out, the trail just ran across the mountain instead of straight up it, until we reached the creek that is the source of our water. The water used to be diverted into a wooden and tin flume, then through screens into the pipeline, but a bit more than ten years ago the people on the water line--no longer relatives--decided that it needed to be updated.
Now the pipeline comes from a filtering box set down in the stream, and through a section of pipe into an overflow box where the pipeline starts. The filtering box is made of metal mesh--a cube around two feet per side--with a T shaped section of perforated pipe in the center of it that connects to the section of pipe that leads to the overflow box. Packed in around the T are small rocks, to filter sand and debris from the pipeline. I know this now, but I learned it today.
To find it out, I had to help my father dam the fork of the stream that feeds the pipe with sandbags, then dig out the contents of the filtering box until we cleared all the sand and silt that had stopped the water. We rinsed the sand from the rock and replaced it in the box to finish, and went home confident that the job had been done well, and the water was restored. Dad even said that there was more than twice the water at the top of the pipeline than he had yet seen. Job well done.
The trip down isn't easier, downhill is worse on bad knees, and I took a misstep or two that almost got me down the quick and dirty way, but we made it without real mishap and came home to find the water not yet fixed.
We knew that there was water at the top of the pipeline, so we went to check the pressure control valve about a quarter mile back up the hill. Yet another new thing I had never seen. I turned off the main pipe, and turned on a secondary pipe that pointed up and to the side above the valve. A huge jet of sand and water shot out of it. Dad and I decided the clog must have been washed away, and we set everything back to its original setting and walked back home. A bare trickle was all there was when we arrived.
Still not willing to let all the work go for nothing, I told Dad I would check the pressure control valve one more time. I went back up the trail again and turned off the main pipe, then opened the secondary pipe above the valve once again. I let the pressure of the water downhill pull air through the pipe to dislodge any sand it could, then turned on the main pipeline and blew water throuch the secondary. This time there was even more pressure from up hill, and the water shot about 25 feet into the air. I turned off the main pipe again, allowed the suction to start, picked up a short piece of pipe and tapped the control a couple of times saying, "Now you be good!". Again all was replaced to its' original positions and back home I went. The water was finally on.
There is a five and a half foot clawfoot tub on the back porch, and now there is water to fill it. I'm so tired I really don't know if I will, but it would sure feel good.
When I was five or six, I hated to go to bed in the summer. It was still light outside, and I didn't want to be in bed when the world was still awake, but my mother would shoo us into the bedroom promptly at eight, shut the windows on the smell of red clay dust and bear clover, and tuck us into bed before shutting the door. My younger sister always fell asleep quickly, and my older sister was never far behind her, but I was usually sitting on the bookcase by the window, watching the light fade until it became too dark to see. Just at dusk one summer evening, as I was at the window wishing I was outside, a mountain lion jumped down the bank on the other side of our road, and silently padded down the side of our yard about fifty feet from where I sat.
Back then I was an intrepid explorer, I wandered the mountain alone and with my dog for fourteen years, and one of the places I loved best was at the bottom of the trail up the water line. It's just a small fold in the mountain, with a crease that runs with water when it rains. The mountain grows soft, thin grass there, just right for lying on your back to look up at the sky, but the best part was the flowers, Shooting Stars. They were my favorite flower when I was a child. They are small, not much more than 15" high at the tallest, with multiple blossoms that vary in color from pale pink to deep magenta and lavender. I picked them as fast as I found them, but only the ones with long stems, ones that only grew a few inches tall went to seed because I left them behind. Shooting Stars smell like the Frosty Root Beer my dad would buy for me when he took us up to Cressman store for the Sunday paper and sweet s. I always asked for a Frosty and some black licorice. I would bite the ends off the licorice and use it for a straw, then eat the gooey licorice. The smell of those flowers makes me small and easily pleased again. Even after more than twenty years the mountain remembers that dark blond child; the Shooting Stars that grow in that small fold of the hill are just the tiniest bit shorter than the ones higher up.
I noticed that this morning as I walked by riots of Shooting Stars. Dad has been sick this week, so it isn't a good time for the water to go out, which is probably why it did. Until he is well again, we need the water to be on, so I took another walk up the mountain. Like my favorite flower, the mountain lions responded to the pressure of the people who moved in around us over the years. Their numbers diminished, partly because they don't much care for people, partly because people were killing them. They have come back now that they aren't legal to hunt, and we have one in the area now. I already knew that, but I saw signs of the pretty kitty on the mountain too.
When I left the house I brought with me a kitchen cooking spoon--to clean sand from the overflow box--and some bite size candy bars for energy in a plastic grocery bag. I wasn't paying that much attention to where my feet were going; I was looking at all of the Shooting Stars on the trail. I stepped over the first few piles-o-poo without even looking at them, but eventually I noticed that there were quite a few of them, and they were awfully regular on the trail. I looked closer and decided that the local lion had claimed this trail for itself. I started to feel very nervous. The trail is a narrow corridor hacked out of the brush most of the way up the hill; one can go up or down but not off the trail. Some of the piles looked awfully fresh, so I went back home to have another cup of coffee.
Mountain Lions are a sit and wait kind of predator. They don't want to have to run too far for their food, so they often pick a likely spot to the side or above an area where their prey--in this area it's deer--might wander by. Water sources and trails, like the one up to the water, are the kind of places one might happen to find one of these solitary cats. The animal was marking the trail though, and any deer in the area must be long gone--so obviously the cat isn't hunting on the trail. I had nothing to worry about. A full grown man usually has nothing to worry about from a Mountain Lion, but children and small women--did I mention how short I am?--are sometimes attacked. The dance of predator and prey has produced a cat here that has canines perfectly spaced to slip between the vertebrae of the local deer, and they teach their young to attack at the back of the neck. A well-executed attack kills the deer instantly, and the Lion doesn't wait long between dash and dine. I'm not a deer, and should I chance to meet the top of the local food chain I doubt I would have such an easy time. I still felt worried.
Worried or not, I had to go fix the water. I wasn't going to be able to deter a predator with bite sized candy bars, so I decided to take the shovel with me too. My dad told me to take his gun. It's a single action Ruger Bearcat handgun, a twenty-two. I know how to shoot it, but the idea of getting it out of the holster , cocking and firing it, while I'm looking at a lion who might be looking at lunch, was almost as silly as using candy bars. I took the handgun. I put it on a belt, and attached the bag with the spoon and candy bars to the belt as well, picked up the shovel and started back up the mountain.
I am no longer the intrepid explorer, when I was a child I just didn't know how many ways a person can get in trouble in the mountains, but I do now. My heart was working much harder than it usually does on the walk because I was terrified. I walked slowly, looking carefully up and down and into the brush on both sides of the trail every few steps. The animal had marked the trail at very regular intervals, and every few minutes I was reminded that I was on disputed territory. When I stopped to look around, the bag on my belt would sometimes shift, sounding like my steps on the dry oak leaves. I jumped the first few times it happened, but after that it just made me curse. About half way up I came upon a pile-o-poo that was no more than a few hours old. I took a break there, wanting to just go back down the mountain, but after a few minutes I continued the climb.
When I got to the top, and started working on the water, I realized that I should have brought a wrench instead of a shovel--I couldn't get the drain cap off the pipe. I shoveled sand out of the collection box and sat at the overflow box, scooping sand out of the pipe as the pressure pushed it through for thirty minutes. Had I been able to open the drain, it would have cleared on its own, but a partial job was all I could do. I did manage to increase the flow, and put the system back together.
The walk down was easier, I was still nervous, but not as much as I was before. The pipe began to fill with water, and I could hear it trickling as I walked down the trail. When I came to a place where the trickling stopped because the pipe had filled, I knew that I'd solved the water problem, at least for a while.
I'm almost home at the place where the oak leaves stop and the soft grass and flowers begin. The air smelled of Root Beer. I saw a perfect Shooting Star, and stopped to admire it. In all the years I've walked this mountain I've never seen one like this; it was a beautiful creamy white. The dark blond child wanted that flower. She wanted to take it home and put it in a jelly jar with some water; a rare prize captured. I knew it must be a recessive gene being expressed and I might never see another.
I told her she couldn't have it, and left it to go to seed.
Of course, those poo piles weren't a mountain lion, and if I'd come by my knowledge of this animal in the woods instead of in a classroom I would have known that. The animal that is using that trail for a bathroom is the local singing group of coyotes. The deer are also still using the trail occasionally, and there may be a bear as well. The rotted logs at the top of the trail have been being pulled apart, and Dad thinks that a bear may be up there eating grubs while waiting for blackberry season to start. Once Dad recovered, we went up and worked on the water again together, and fixed it--for a while.
Every time I climb the trail it has changed. Unlike in a city, the seasons don't pass slowly here, but in a headlong rush. The Shooting Stars fade quickly--surrendering in a wave from the bottom of the hill to the top--giving way to all kinds of Brodiaea, deep violet wild pea, and Baby Blue Eyes, which surrender in their turn to Farewell to Spring, Mustang Clover, and Mariposa Lily. These last signal the beginning of the dry season, and an end to the waves of color that wash up over us from the bottom of the hill. From now until the rains of late autumn the red clay dust will slowly begin to cover everything on the mountain, gradually muting all colors with a haze of burnt sienna. The air will smell of dust and the resins of Bear Clover hot from the sun. All the grasses go golden, and rattle with the passing of every small animal and breeze.
Now the afternoon wind will start, that moment in the early afternoon when the air warmed in the lower canyons and valleys gathers itself together and combs itself through the trees as it rushes up the side of the mountain, with a sound so big and so deep that you feel it as much as hear it . You can watch it come if you stand in the right spot, watch the trees down the canyon begin to tremble with the passing of that first strong push of the wind, listen to the sound as it builds and comes closer, then--like the feeling of drinking water when you're thirsty--the touch of the wind reaches you, blowing the smell of the low canyons.
The wind isn't here yet this year, it should be, but this year has been cold then wet, a year in waiting, a sneaky year. It has been a year that cannot be depended on--like the water.
My sisters installed a new collection box for the water. The woven iron mesh of the old box had given way at the bottom seam, and the box was falling apart, so my oldest sister had a box made of thin sheets of stainless steel to replace the old iron mesh one. An exact duplicate being impossible, she had the person who constructed it put rows of slots, around two inches by an eighth of an inch, in three of the sides. The upstream side she requested to be left solid. My sisters and some friends installed the box and took some of the tools stored back down the hill to be repaired and restored.
The first storm proved the value of the iron mesh on all four sides. The force of the water, filled with silt and sand from the storm, began to fill the box with silt. Since the water couldn't flow straight through as it had previously, when the water slowed a bit, and the flow lessened, the box couldn't clear itself as it had sometimes done before. Filled with silt and sand the flow of water slowed, allowing more sand to deposit until the water ceased.
No water. I think I'm getting a complex. I will never take running water for granted again, but will give thanks every time I open a tap and water comes out. I will wonder where it comes from, and who fixes it.
Dad and I and sometimes my siblings fix the water here, and it seemed to be Dad and my turn again. It's usually our turn, because my sisters are away during the days and have a water tank to store water so that the inconsistencies of our system don't create so much havoc for them. We have no tank at this house, so when the water goes out here, certain things come to a screeching halt--like washing clothes, doing dishes, taking baths, and flushing toilets. This last winter, after a storm that started wet (stopping the water) turned bitterly cold and dry, I melted the powdery, dry snow for hours to get enough water to flush the toilet. There is no snow outside now, though, so it is either fetch water, or fix water.
Dad and I made the trip to go take a look at this new water box in the morning. The grasses, already going golden, were still wet, and the sunshine was intense but not very warm. The trail up to the water is already getting overgrown, just a few weeks ago it was clear and easy to see, now the wild plum and grasses have grown so that in places it seems to stop in a wall of bushes. The small, bright red splashes of shiny Poison Oak leaves have grown into tall shiny green bushes, and the Fremontia is bowing long arches of bright yellow blossoms over the tops of our heads. The mosquitoes are ferocious. All the water from this very wet spring is fostering a population explosion, and everything is responding. The plants are lush and growing into a hasty tangle, the insects and animals too are fecund and quick in their rush to take advantage of this wet year before the long dry summer, so late this year, finally begins. The fall will be as ferocious as the mosquitoes are now, I think, when all this lovely green has gone dry and golden, and has baked in the hot sun for months.
It's green now though, and grabs at my feet as I walk up the mountain. Walking this trail has put me in better condition, and I don't tire as quickly now as I did the first time. We take it slow, with lots of rests, and come to the top of the water line after about forty minutes. The new filtering box is hidden under a strong flow of water still murky from the storm, so Dad and I move sandbags and clear the drain of the collecting pool until we get the water to drop and reveal the pretty new box. It has filled to the top with sand and silt.
My sisters had taken the wood and screen box that we used to rinse sand from the filter rock, so I spend an hour removing rock and sand, and rinsing the sand from the rock. After replacing the cleaned filter rock, Dad decided to leave the top off of the box, to improve the flow, and we put the system back together and went home. The water was again running, although I no longer call it fixed. We are getting faster at this job now, and instead of most of a day it's taking a couple of hours.
Dad has walked this hill since he was a boy, and has seen it change through the years. On each trip he has something to say about this spot, or that hill down there. He points out the old logging roads, and the places where buildings or mills used to stand. He talks about the downed trees, and how long they have lain there. He speaks of the way things happen, and I feel the echo of that knowing, I have a bit of this mountain in my heart too. The rhythm of this piece of the earth has formed the structure of his lifes melody, and runs a counterpoint in mine, even though I will never be able to make this place my home as my sisters have.
The seasons rush by here, time passes quickly, yet the cedar stump cut before my dad was born is still there, slowly flaking away. Like I waited for the unusually cold winter to end, now I wait for the delayed summer to start. Then I will wait to be away from my home that I love best in short visits and from far away.
Leaving the top off of the box turned out to be a mistake, and some of the sand that came in through the top was too large to flow out the slots in the sides, the flow of the water to the house gradually began to decrease, and the day when the water was coming to a stop came when I had a friend up to visit.
He reminds me of a hummingbird. He came up to relax, he said, yet spent the time here in a constant search of things to do. He wanted to wash dishes, he wanted to fish, he wanted to walk in the moonlight. He was always three steps ahead of me. I wondered--were I to reach out and feel his chest--if his heart would be beating much faster than mine as well. He kept himself busy, moving and talking in a constant flurry, and when Dad and I talked of the water, he said he wanted to help.
We walked the path to the top of the water line while my friend peppered my father with questions. He wanted to know the names of trees and plants, the ways and places and times of this chunk of mountain were things he wanted to hear. My father obliged him. He pointed at a Ponderosa pine of average size, and said; "Now that's a big tree", and at that moment I decided that the afternoon must be spent in a giant sequoia grove near my home.
We reached the water and found the box filled to the top with sand. After moving sandbags to divert the flow, we began the task of cleaning out the filtering box. My friend was a great help, and did nearly half of the work. My dad was allowed--this time--to spend most of the operation smoking cigars and answering questions. I carried sandy buckets of rock to one side of the stream, rinsed them, and brought them back clean. The work was done quickly and we returned home. I took a quick bath and took my friend to have lunch and see the real big trees.
As many times as I have sat on the ground, looking up at the Sequoias, I can never hurry the process. They are so big, so old. I don't touch them often, and when I do it's with timid hands. They whisper to me of a past that still lives, they wear the scars of the fires of a century ago. My hummingbird friend moved quickly through the grove. I gave him my knife to carve his name with thousands of others into the flank of a fallen giant. While he worked I breathed in the smells of trees, of dogwood blossoms past their prime, of fresh summer on wet spring earth.
We didn't stay long, he needed to catch an early evening flight, and wanted to have a taste of my favorite brew at the place that makes it. The ride from the high country of the Sequoia grove to the city is a long one, and we went from the clean cool air and bright sunshine into the hot smog of the great valley of California in a bit more than two hours. A quick brew with some snacks on the side and we were headed to the airport. He walked quickly into the airport from the car, then I drove home at a leisurely pace.
Summer finally came, and almost as quickly left again. At the end of June record lows in the central valley and here in the mountains had us all chilled and wondering what was next. Sunset brought the temps into the forties the last week of June, and by the second of July sunset brought scant relief from eighty degree heat left over from the scorching days of summers return.
This year continues sneaky, and I can't rest comfortably into the usual passage of seasons when they won't decide what season to be. I am waiting here, in my family home, for the end of a divorce and a return to the university I left behind when I decided to marry. I am waiting here, wondering if promises made in sunny weather will be fulfilled in a time of stormy souls.
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Last updated 3/24/97
It's been a while, five years, since I have written about the water. (insert your favorite cliche here about time going by so fast, or maybe so slow)
That time of stormy souls washed away all the promises, and my return to the university was lost to the bitterness of divorce. This is when I stopped writing about the water, but I was still fixing the system when it broke.
I found out that I couldn't go back to school, but I didn't believe it for a while. I was registered, I had all the classes I needed, I waited for the first day of classes like I was waiting for the train. The first day of classes hit me like that train.
On the mountain, it's only cold at night in late September. The land is as dry as it will get all year, and every whiff of smoke smells like danger. Miles away, down Blue Canyon, the hills caught fire. For three days the sun was setting all day long. I woke up over and over when the smoke got thick at night, frightened from sleep by a fire fifteen miles away. The days faded into winter, getting colder and darker, but dry. The real storms don't come until January.
While I lived in Lost Angles, there was a five hundred year storm. That morning it just looked like any other rainstorm in Southern California. It might rain hard once in a while, but not for long, always the sun would come back and throw leaf shadows against the wall. Then it would settle into the shining path laid across the ocean to my eyes and disappear by degrees. Nearly every day it was exactly the same, just like this--predictable, benign, and quite pretty.
The clouds gathered together and lowered in the sky. I started cleaning up the livingroom and began to plan dinner. The day darkened and the wind began to tear at the hillside. The power failed. The wind pushed at the windows and sliding doors, forcing them apart in the center and moaning through the gaps. We were a quarter mile from the top of a 70 foot cliff that verged on the water. The spray from waves began to blow up the street and past my windows. It was almost time to go get my daughter from school, so I put on some thick clothes and went out to my car. I pulled onto the main road and went about a half mile when I saw that the road was completely flooded in a low spot, and a vehicle was already stalled in the water that came halfway up the door. I turned around and decided to go all the way around the back way.
I passed my street and came up over the next rise, the other side of the road was filled with water and rocks and dirt that was coming down the hillside. Through a break in the median, all this stuff was coming onto my side of the road as well and was in the process of filling up the next low spot in the road. I turned around at the break in the median and gunned my engine to fight the current and the rocks that began to bang into my car as I drove back over the rise. Time to park the car.
I was obviously not going to get my daughter in a car, so I packed up a box of trash bags and asked one of the neighbors if they would like to take a walk to go get all the children we had between us. His name was Tiny, no surprise since he was about six and a half feet tall, and he worked part time for the Coast Guard. We walked up to the road and as we came out from behind the last house we were nearly knocked to the ground by the wind. He suggested we shelter in the lee of the house until the wind eased and after about fifteen minutes it did.
We walked the half mile to the school. In the course of about a half hour the storm just melted away. We skirted around drowned low spots in the road, sinking up to our ankles in the hillsides which had become mud the consistency of pudding. He told me that the sea had 20 foot swells. We walked by a drain that was sucking down a creeks worth of water with the sound of a giant bathtub being emptied. A woman in an ATV managed to get through the receding water and offered us a ride to the school. I thought she was crazy to let two soaking wet people sit on her nice upholstry, but I didn't turn down the ride. We dressed the children in trash bags and led them home single file as the day grew dark again. We walked home on a bike path, the only part of the road that appeared above the standing water when the storm passed. For the rest of the night the CHP led cars to and from on the bike path until crews could unblock the drains.
This was the only real weather that occured while I lived in that place. I missed weather when I lived there, and now I was home for another winter. This winter I would get to live through another five hundred year storm. We were home, dad was gone, and my daughter was asleep. There was nowhere to go, and for entertainment I watched the storm after the power went out. Lightning struck the ridge the water line runs down, so close I could feel the heat of it on my arm and the side of my face through the window. The wind began to blow down bug trees along the ridge next to the water line. I could hear them cracking and crashing down into the brush and the other trees. By morning the road would be blocked in two places. The mountain sounded like a giant beehive for days from the chainsaws. Dad and I eventually hiked up the waterline and sawed through three pines that had fallen across the trail to the top of the waterline. I rolled the rounds of pine into the ravines, just another piece of check dam. The top of one of the trees was hanging from another tree across the ravine, but it wouldn't fall on the trail. The trail to the waterline was clear.
This was a good thing, because the winter had a lot more wet storms in store for us, and Dad and I would be walking the trail a lot. Three days later a large storm came through and the water went out. Dad had an idea for a different kind of dam. We had been moving the sandbags so much lately that they were disintegrating, and the sand was filtering down into the pool where the water box was located. He decided to use a check dam.
We took a large piece of plastic and weighted it down with rocks and some of the sandbags that were still in good shape, then dad and I draped the downstream end of the plastic over a branch and lifted the branch to make a temporary plastic dam. We wedged the branch between a rock and the bank to complete the dam and stop most of the water. At the bottom of the cement wall that contains the pool and the water box is a small hole to drain the pool, we used a piece of black pipe to clear the drain hole of sand and small rocks and then the pool drained completely except for the small trickle of water that was getting past the check dam. The job of rinsing the sand out of the rock was a lot easier with the pool drained. We cleaned the box, shoveled sand from around it, put the lid back on and released the check dam. The last part of the process was to reblock the drain hole with a branch, and to open the bottom of the pipe next to the overflow box to allow the sand to clear from the pipe. We cleaned the sand out of the overflow box then put it all back together and headed back down the mountain. I ran some water through the secondary pipe, gave the pressure control valve a couple of lucky taps, and went home to wash up.
After the next storm, I was away and Dad went up there on his own. He got too cold and began to have chest pains (he didn't tell me this, I had to figure it out). When he was finishing up he couldn't get the latches to seat properly so the box wasn't completely closed. The next storm through took the top of the box away--along with all of the filter rock--and filled the box to the top with sand. When we walked up to the top, he told me he hadn't fastened it all the way down and I nearly sat down and wept. I know he felt awful, I felt awful too. I was angry at him for a week until I figured out why he couln't finish the job. I hiked up and down the stream looking for the top of the box but didn't find it. Because the rock and the top were both gone, I began hiking up the hill every day to clear the box of sand. I opened bottom of the pipe just before the overflow box, shoveled sand out until the pipe cleared, then closed it up and went home. This was getting old. I needed to replace that filter rock.
The next trip into Fresno I went to a sand and gravel outlet and bought 60 pounds of rock to take up to the top of the water line. I dumped half of it into a backpack and headed up the hill. I dumped the rocks in a pile not too far from the stream then walked over to clear some of the sand out of the box. As I was finishing up I decided to drop the rocks into the box to get some idea how many I would need. The thirty pounds I'd brought up with me barely covered the bottom of the box, I was going to need almost ten times that much. I felt like weeping again, but then I looked down into the pool and saw the faintest outline of a straight line under the sand. It was the top of the water box. I closed things up and went down to tell my Dad that I'd found it.
Three hundred pounds of rock. That first trip with thirty pounds of it laid me up with a sore back for days. I was still hiking up there every day to clear the sand, but I couldn't carry any rock for a while. A friend of mine from the east coast was coming to visit, and I wanted to be in good health so I could enjoy the visit. I was part of an online group of writers, and I met my friend Peter there. I had also started a real time poetry group that met every Sunday afternoon, and grew out of the larger writing group. I was looking forward to meeting Peter and showing him the water line. I complained about fixing the water to all my online friends, and Peter was planning on taking some photographs. Peter and I are both poets, though he didn't participate in my poetry group on Sundays. His visit was the best thing to happen since I came home from Lost Angles.
Peter decided to go for the burn, and as I carried up fifteen pounds of rock he carried up a full bag of sixty pounds. We piled them up where I was storing the rock, and he walked off to take photographs of the creek. Those photos are beautiful. He took pictures of me and my daughter as well. We read each other's poetry. He went home too soon.
My friend Tim moved up to our road since the last time I lived here. I have seen him and his wife Cat walking their dogs on nice days. Tim has offered to help me take the rock up the mountain, and he and Dad and I are all taking the walk every few days. It only took a couple of trips to get all three hundred pounds up there, and we cleaned and filled up the box on the last trip. The rocks were covered with a white powder, rock dust, and the water turned cloudy as we filled up the pool at the end of the process. We latched all four latches, cleared the line by the overflow box, and walked back down the hill. One more stop at the pressure control valve to run some water through and we were done. The water was fixed, well fixed, and I didn't walk up the mountain again for over a year.
I found a job in Fresno, eventually I got an apartment there and my daughter, Laney, changed schools to join me. She grew to hate Fresno, and so did I. It didn't hold a candle to Davis, or even to Pine Ridge, and she wanted me to take her back to where she was happy. We did find a friend in one of my co-workers, Jennifer. We spent time in the bookstore with Jen, and went to movies too. I brought Jen up to the mountains to meet my dad and watch the snow fall. On one of our trips up there the water was out, so we decided to go fix it together.
The trail was wet, with patches of snow still on the ground, but we decided to go up there anyway. When we got there I opened the box without damming the water and found that all the rocks were missing. I stared in disbelief at the place where there was three hundred pounds of rock barely a year before. My back began to hurt immediately at the thought of replacing it. I walked down the hill to ask my Dad what could possibly have happened.
My dad told me a new neighbor had moved into his Cousin David's old place, and that he had gone up to work on the water a few times recently. I was furious about the loss of the rocks, and assumed that he had left the top off to make this happen. Jen and I walked down the road to his place to talk to him. My first words were, "do you own this place?", when he said he did, I asked him what he had been doing to the water system. He said he had opened it up and somehow a bunch of rocks had gotten in there, so he shoveled them out to fix it, then put the top back on. I felt like I couldn't breathe. I carefully explained how the system worked, and that he would have to replace all the rock for it to work properly again, and then we left. Jen told me I had lacked a certain amount of charm and diplomacy. I told her that I felt like thrashing the man, so maybe I did okay after all.
My dad went to Georgia to visit my younger brother and his family the next winter, so the water line didn't concern me much. He looked tired when he returned, and collected his truck that had been left in my care and went home. My Dad had taken me and my daughter camping at least once a year most of her first ten years of life. The last few years we had stopped, but Laney wanted to go again, and my younger sister and niece wanted to join us as well. That next autumn we all went to the ocean, and Dad fished and flew kites with his two oldest granchildren. Laney and I slept on the top bunk of his camper, and he slept poorly. He was up multiple times, I knew his heart was bothering him.
I had been applying for jobs in the Sacramento area, so I could take Laney back to where she was happy. Just before Y2K, I found a job there, and I began to plan to move back to Davis. My Dad caught the flu right after the new year and had a bad case of it. He began to feel better in a few days, and my older sisters brought him some fresh chicken noodle soup on Saturday and cleaned up the house for him. They came by the next morning to see if he needed anything and found him on the kitchen floor. He got up for a little more soup and his heart attacked him.
My sisters and brothers emptied the house. My Mother told me she intended to leave the house to my younger sister. It's quite amazing how homeless the whole process made me feel. I still feel that way. I suppose the next walk is the journey to creating a feeling of home that doesn't depend on that place I grew up or the man who lived and died there. I no longer care about the water, but I miss the shade in the fold of the mountain at the top of the water line. I miss the patterns of fall color change in the leaves of the pear trees Dad planted. I miss the smell of the upcanyon wind.
My Dad's passing left me flickering, I moved poorly and the happiness I thought I was moving back to was tainted by my sorrow. I lost the place I went to when I was hurt or afraid, and the loss has made me weak. I still have a long walk ahead.