Tag: travel

The streets of Bisbee- November 2012

All shot with a Nikon D3200

Roads on Her Face #22: Town Kids

There was a big difference between town kids and us. A gaping chasm, in fact, if you asked us. Town kids were afraid to get dirty. Us, we jumped in mud puddles with both bare feet. Town kids were soft, and ate too much candy. We were hard, with leather soles able to run through patches of goathead stickers with abandon. We ate beans and rice. Town kids sat lazy butts in front of the TV all day, while we roamed wild through the desert or forest or on lucky occasions, near the ocean. Town kids needed someone to entertain them, they lacked imagination. While we, when Dad said “Go amuse yourselves,” we had hours and days of complicated games and storylines – we were horses and cowboys, we built entire cities where certain trees and rocks were buildings (the jail, the store, our houses), we had clubs and threw parades and were the heads of armies. In the desert, we built swirling labyrinths delineated by stones and walked through them as if we could not see their outcomes without walls. We had friends in the trees and magical beings all around us.

Yes, I am the oldest, and much of the wild imagination came from the overload of books I’d consumed already. The other kids followed me because they had no other friends, and because my age and the fact I often had to watch them made me default leader. When they were older and off with their own crowds, other boys, I missed them though I might not have realized it at the time. My little sister doesn’t remember most of those wild free times, being the baby and not included in the complicated little hierarchy we had established in those road-days. She was 4 or 5 when we settled in New Mexico. I think she feels like she missed out, in a way, and maybe she did.

When we wanted to insult each other, we might call each other town kids, or maybe dweeb or dork, because those weren’t on the list of forbidden insults that might get a swipe from the belt around Dad’s waist. We came up with some of our own names, like “weed” or filthy little wretch, and those were worst and stung the most. We had fistfights, for a while, until we stopped. We shot each other with BB guns and stabbed each other accidentally with knives, and decided not to rat each other out to the grownups. Rowdy and I ganged up on Reno, and he and Rowdy ganged up on me. Sophie was the baby, the outcast that we didn’t want to have tag along. She turned out to be one of the coolest of us, though, tough and self-assured. She has us and the trickledown meanness of our clan to thank for that.

We didn’t speak about our parents much when we were off alone. It was unspoken that Dad was in charge, and that Mom got picked on the way Sophie did. When they fought, more often in the latter days, we merely made ourselves scarce and kept quiet, not wanting to draw any of the overflowing cauldron of ire our way. We protected each other from outsiders, knowing what it felt like to be broken from the herd and left alone to face strangers, the way antelope are picked by lions from the outskirts of their crowds of brethren.

The road and the way of life left lasting scars and opened minds (it calls me insistently, all the time). I like the person it made me, the inner toughness it left, the appreciation for everything it instilled. I hope my brothers remember it always, and I hope they’ve gained some of what I did from the experience. I thank my dad for that, if nothing else. He gave us a start in this life that most people never dream of.

I still think we’re better than the town kids.

Roads on Her Face #19 : First-rate Forest Service

When you mention you’ve lived in Mammoth Lakes, California, people naturally assume you are a wealthy brat whose parents have a ski lodge in the mountains, built especially for escapes a few times a year from the sprawl of L.A. We didn’t live there in the winter, though, as we would head south to the blessedly warm desert before the first hints of snow. Living in a car limits your environment, seasonally.

I remember the sweet smell of pine sap and the soft needles underfoot that let you creep up on unsuspecting brothers, the glistening black carpenter ants that hurried up the superhighways of the ponderosas which seemed plain as lighted roadways to the ants, the highways that you could strain your eyes and imagine you too could see. I remember the hush and sighs of the forest, the caws of crows and the yammering blue jays, the tap-tap-tap of the brilliant woodpeckers. I remember how a short walk would take you into the woods, away from anyone. I would settle down beneath a tree and read or write in my journal, cushioned by bark or perched on lichened-softened rocks, I would revel in the protection of the forest. After empty deserts, I felt so protected, so hidden, between the trees.

We were living in the car, then, either sleeping in the back or the tent. It was dry that summer, so we didn’t bother packing everything up into the car each day. Just our food, to keep it from bears. We were out miles from the edge of Mammoth, tucked into a quiet pocket of the John Muir Wilderness of the Sierra Nevadas. Years later, I picked up a photograph of an eagle at a yard sale. John Muir’s signature is penciled across the back- I don’t know if it is a fake but I knew who he was because of his name on the wilderness signs.

Occasionally we would see rangers, but they left us alone. We weren’t littering, and we kept the campsite straightened up so it didn’t look like we’d been there for weeks. I think they felt sorry for us kids, and didn’t want to make things harder for us. They weren’t hard, though, that’s the part no one ever realized. We were happy being kids, and the forest was a playground made just for us.

My book supply was stocked by the bookmobile, driven by Miss Heidi and parked weekly not far from where we were camped, providing “forest service” to outlying homes and the occasional itinerants. She was warm and friendly, and loved books almost as much as I did. Right away she got me a library card, and handed me the first list for the summer reading program so I could get started.

“You’ll have to work to catch up to the other kids, they have a few weeks’ head start,” she said. “Do you want some help picking out books?” I shook my head, and in minutes had a stack that took Mom and me two trips to load into the car. We had library bags with the string top, so we had to hold the bags to our chests so the books didn’t break free from the cheap plastic material. I was back each week, with every single book in those bags on my “read” list, even the little kids’ books we picked out for the younger ones. I gave Heidi one-page book reports so she would know I’d read them. After the first week, the amazement on her face changed to a welcoming smile. She wrote me letters for years General Delivery or to P.O. Boxes in Nevada or Oregon or Arizona, telling me about her husband, sons, and her dog. Another touchstone, and a very grateful little girl.

Ghosts

Let me say that Bisbee is indeed full of ghosts, drunken nights, ravaged earth and scarlet water. And lots of tourists. I have some beautiful road-photos to share with you soon. I had a wonderful birthday week, thanks to my love. He did a good job this year.

P.S. My love kindly came up with a new name for a blog for me, after brushing away the remnants of a wonderful birthday meal. Coming soon “Crumbs on Her Face.”

~ A

Roads on Her Face #18 Touchstones

People can be touchstones, as well as places. There are those who, when you reach out for them, are anchors in this constantly changing sea of time and place.

People can be touchstones, as well as places. There are those who, when you reach out for them, are anchors in this constantly changing sea of time and place. As the type of girl who always had my nose buried in a book, my preferred method of contact was writing letters. Besides not having a phone with which to just give people a call, it was always easier to express myself with time to think and a pen and paper in front of me, ideas coming more freely and no awkward half-formed social skills to rely on. It makes me sad that no one writes letters anymore, only because they meant so much to me through the years. There were people who wrote back to me, who stood as touchstones and took the time to make me feel as if I did have friends, as if I were not so alone, as if I were not strange. There was Heidi, the bookmobile lady in Mammoth Lakes, California, who was floored when this little wood-nymph child from the campground read every single summer program book on her list and wrote book reports for her to be proudly presented each time she parked the long white bus in its weekly spot. There was Jacci, my oldest and first friend and the only one my age. There were Wes and Elaine, the couple with their little ranch in the foothills of Nevada. They may have looked at me with pity, but they also had hopes for me. I know they knew that I would have to make my own chances in life, that starting out in life homeless too often leads to drug addiction, or jail, or hopeless-to-useless-to-nothing. I think they wondered what would happen to me, and that they wished they could help me succeed. They did, even if they don’t know it.

Driving to Burning Man for the first time on my own, I stopped at the Stagecoach casino off Highway 95 next to the gas station with an old photo of a little boy on its sign. As I entered the dark, smoke-scented bowels of the casino I saw my dad for a second with a beer in his hand, leaning against the bar in front of the ex-prostitute bartender with only a few teeth and none of her dignity left. I remembered the hopeful feeling I’d get when we rolled into Beatty after a long stint on the road, or after money had gotten tight and we needed a place where Dad could work for a while. Wes always gave him a job doing something on the ranch. He loved me, and he’d let me tag along to the chicken coop or would take me out to the greenhouse where I could pick fresh tomatoes warm from the vine. One time he bought me a purple Huffy mountain bike that I somehow held on to for years, across miles and states and while we had a place to stash it in the trailer. At some point, it was left when the trailer was left.

Wes and Elaine were right next door to a brothel with a crashed plane as a signpost. I’d always peer down the dirt road to the red building hidden in the trees and try to catch a glimpse of a whore. What was it like for those women? What would it be like to sell yourself all day?

I walked slowly through the casino, a dizzying sense of déjà-vu slowing my usually fast pace. A flash of me getting caught beneath a rickety merry-go-round and being dragged in a circle while the flesh tore from my thigh, the faint memory of Wes filming us kids playing in his front yard, my dad soaking in the hot springs at the Beatty trailer park. All of the letters through the years, the cow Wes named after me, the glances I would catch Elaine giving me that almost looked like jealousy. He had his own kids, but they were gone.

I sat in the café in the back of the Stagecoach and had coffee, listening to the servers chat about town gossip and stare at the tourists. I didn’t see much that had changed, but when I drove by the ranch I remembered Wes had died and Elaine had moved away. The place looked the same, the strong old cottonwoods rustling their coin-leaves over a bright spot in my childhood, over the earthy smell of the chickens and the peace I would feel there.