Hot Springs Eternal
a novel
John M. Daniel
2015 • Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, McKinleyville, California
Copyright © 2015 by John M. Daniel
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-1-56474-799-0
This is a work of fiction. People, places, and events in this novel are products of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to real people, places, and events is unintended and coincidental.
Published by Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.
Post Office Box 2790
McKinleyville, CA 95519
www.danielpublishing.com
E-book production: Studio E Books
Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423
I wish to thank my writing group, the Great Intenders, for support and feedback, while I was writing this novel. I also am grateful to Toby Tompkins and Susan Daniel for reading the manuscript as it grew and for giving me welcome critique and encouragement.
For Ralph Cantor, who taught me so much about friendship, and for Susan Daniel, who taught me so much about love.
Contents
1. Saving the Beetles
2. A New Home
3. Yellow People
4. The Piano Tuner
5. One October Day
6. Auld Lang Syne
7. Yellow Bugs
8. Eminent Domain
9. Ashes to Ashes
10. Conversations
11. Saving Mathilda
12. The Powers That Be
13. Goodbye Party
14. The Oil Business
15. Illegal Alien
16. Where’s Nqong?
17. The Great Unknown
18. Auditions
About the Author
1. Saving the Beetles
The healing water of Hope Springs gushes from the ground at 165 degrees Fahrenheit. It flows through a series of long tiled tanks until it reaches 98.6, and then it empties into a cold mountain stream and rushes down a steep thirty miles to the Pacific Ocean.
Hope Springs rests in a wooded valley five miles outside the village of Tecolote, in southern California. The place was founded in 1900 by Joel Hope, a young Santa Barbaran who had already made millions in avocados and lemons. He engineered the pipes and pumps that drew the hot, smelly water from the ground, built the tanks to cool it down, and erected a village of little wooden bath houses, each big enough for one person. Joel Hope’s dream was to attract the wealthiest people in the world to his sulfur springs. He built an elegant mansion and staffed it with doctors, nutritionists, masseurs, cooks, waiters, maids, gardeners, mechanics, and musicians. Within a few years he was hosting the finest families from the East Coast, and even royalty from Europe and Asia. They came to Hope Springs by rail, by ship, by stage coach, and by motorcar to soak in hot sulfur water and cure their psoriasis, their acne, their liver spots, their melancholy and alcoholism, their constipation or diarrhea, their complaints of all sorts, because the healing water of Hope Springs is generous and general.
———
Professor Livingston Pomeroy, a tall, rangy, bald-headed and bespectacled scientist, and his demure and fragile wife, Mathilda, had been all over the globe before they discovered Hope Springs. They had spent most of their lives and half of her fortune investigating hot sulfur springs in search of cures and insects. She suffered from acute nervous headaches; he suffered from the insatiable need to collect specimens of every beetle he could find that lived in the vicinity of hot water. He had jars and jars of them, trunks of jars of them, and trunks of other stuff too: bottles of ether and formaldehyde, microscopes, tweezers, journals, reference tomes, maps, tents, pith helmets, wading boots, briars, latakia tobacco, Lapsang Souchong tea, and gin. They took all their equipment and provisions everywhere they went, hiring porters to push wagons up mountain paths in search of isolated hotspots, guided only by local legends. Or, when Mathilda got her way, they settled for a few weeks at a time at luxury spas, so that she could soak and be pampered while he poked about the countryside with a net and a magnifying glass. Once a year they managed to return to Hobart, so that he could find homes for a year’s worth of specimens on his endowed laboratory shelves at the university, and so she could spend time going over accounts with her frustrated solicitors.
Bugs—he was pleased with his nickname—was searching for something, and he had no idea what it was. Each year in Hobart he would publish the journal of that year’s search, a list of all the insects discovered, and a catalog of the features of their native habitats: the climate and the temperature and mineral contents of the water. His bookshelf contained dozens of pamphlets he had written and published, describing hot springs primitive and posh: in Sumatra, Japan, Mongolia, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Palestine, Arabia, the Congo, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Lapland, Iceland, England, and a series of spas across the United States from coast to coast.
———
In the spring of 1916, they stopped in the Tecolote Valley, in Southern California, at a serene and elegant if sulfurous establishment called Hope Springs. Mathilda found the sulfur fumes therapeutic, and she spent her mornings receiving massages in the hotel and her afternoons in one of the private bath houses, immersed in the finest hot water she’d ever found. Her headaches disappeared, and her spirits soared, which pleased her husband greatly, and she even flirted with Joel Hope, the dour proprietor of the establishment, which amused her husband as well. He’d never seen her so lively, or heard her laugh so much.
As for Bugs Pomeroy, he was in heaven sloshing up and down the steamy stream collecting specimens, leaving his wife in the care of his host. Pomeroy felt that he was close to finding the bug of his dreams, although he hadn’t seen it yet. There was something about this place, a smell mainly, that told him this was where he should end his days.
When they had been at Hope Springs for three months, Mathilda Pomeroy realized she was pregnant. She was already in her mid-forties (Bugs was in his late fifties), and as this was her first pregnancy they decided sadly that for her safety they must return at once to Tasmania. They promised each other that they would travel again, but Bugs knew it was unlikely. Children tie one down.
Before leaving the Tecolote Valley, he took one last hike with Joel Hope, up to the source of the water. Mr. Hope was a taciturn bachelor with an eye for his lady guests. Having abandoned lemons and alligator pears, he now was fascinated by hydro engineering. He showed Pomeroy the elaborate machinery he had brought to the source: pumps and valves and pipes and dials. He could control the temperature of the water after it came out of the ground by altering the speed with which it flowed down into the holding tanks in the valley. He could control the mineral content of the water, too, by adding chemicals and powders as he pleased. Having grown tired of farming and never having discovered the joys of marriage, he was content to be an eccentric host who tampered with water (and the occasional guest) for the rest of his days.
Bugs Pomeroy knew this was the place where his dreams would have come true. One could make this water perfect for any insect. Alas, he had never found the perfect beetle to nurture, and now it was too late. His quest was finished, unfinished.
Joel Hope took them to the train in the nearby city of Anacapa. He shook Pomeroy’s hand and said, “I want you both to come back.” Then he turned to Mathilda Pomeroy and kissed her lips. “And I want you to bring your child with you. If your child is ever in need of anything at all, you must let me know.”
———
The Pomeroys returned to Hobart during the first blizzard of winter, and the following summer their daughter was born. They named the baby Livingston Pomeroy and called her Libby.
Following the birth, Mathilda’s nerv
ous headaches, which had been mercifully absent during her pregnancy, returned with a vengeance. When winter arrived, Mathilda caught pneumonia and died, leaving behind two devastated Livingstons.
After a year of grieving with no improvement to his mood, Bugs decided to take another journey. When spring arrived, to the degree that spring ever arrives in Tasmania, he left his daughter in the care of servants, assembled his gear, and booked passage on the ferry to the mainland. There he boarded a train north to the end of the line.
Civilization ended at Alice Springs, so Pomeroy poked about there for a few days. No decent beetles at all. Not a one. He heard rumors, though, of springs to the north, and so, just as summer was approaching its blazing zenith, he engaged mules and porters and set off into the mountains and deserts of the unexplored Northern Territory.
After a week’s trekking through the most hostile, godforsaken landscape he’d seen in a lifetime of travel, he smelled paradise. By this time all the beer was drunk and all but one of his porters had abandoned him and turned back. He and his remaining porter, who was too stupid to turn back, had just made tea, using water from the stream they had followed for two days. They sipped together, and both of them gagged and spat at the same time.
“Good lord, man,” the professor exclaimed to his astonished companion. “Good lord!” The porter was less astonished by the taste of sulfur in his tea than by the wide smile on his employer’s face.
Pomeroy looked ahead up the stream and saw steam rising on the horizon. “This is it,” he yelled, and the porter knew he was being pulled along by a lunatic and would never taste beer again. The professor threw his tin cup down and leapt to his feet, taking off like a rangy mantis. The porter sighed and packed the gear and persuaded the mules to move again. When he caught up with the old man, they were at the daemonic confluence, where their stream was joined by another, a stinking, steaming yellow river of piss, is what it looked like. A sewer full of rotten eggs, is what it smelled like.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Professor Pomeroy panted. “Doesn’t it smell like Eden itself?”
“I’ll leave you two of the mules and half the provisions,” the porter said, having found his spine at last. “Me and Jenny have a prior engagement to the south, thank you very much indeed.”
Pomeroy hardly noticed their departure. He and his mules forged ahead upstream into the canyon, where the odor grew sweeter to his nostrils and his head grew ever lighter with dehydration, exercise, and the homing flight of his heart. By the end of the day he was naked, up to his chest in warm mud, chatting ecstatically with small smiling black men who had never seen a white person before and had no idea what he was babbling about.
He had no idea either.
He was holding one hand up before his face and he was watching a perfect, perfect yellow beetle crawling up and down and around his outstretched finger, and tears of bliss were flowing off his face and plopping into the mud.
———
Pomeroy returned to Hobart in the autumn of 1919 looking shaggy and weathered and beaming with joy. He cleaned himself up and got reacquainted with his daughter, who was walking and even talking now. They spent hours together in his laboratory, where he showed her his specimens and taught her to handle things carefully. The toddler was fascinated by insects.
He wrote and published a pamphlet entitled Paradise Found, announcing to the world that a new beetle had been discovered. No one cared, of course, and the pamphlet would have gone the way of all the others, had Pomeroy not, in his enthusiasm, described the landscape in such detail, had not published the mineral analysis of the water in the fragrant creek he had named after his dear, departed wife.
In September, when the weather was warming up a bit, Livingston Pomeroy once again gathered his gear and oiled his traveling boots. This time, to the horror of his household staff, and against the advice of his solicitors (but what could they do? Professor Pomeroy was now a very rich man, having inherited the rest of his wife’s fortune), he took the child with him. Libby’s nurse, who had the face and the stubbornness of an English bulldog, insisted that he come to his senses and then insisted on coming along for the good of the child. She traveled like a rusted wheel.
Now that he knew the way and knew why he was going there, the journey was easy, except for the nurse. They stopped briefly in Alice Springs, where the nurse tried the beer and vomited. Pomeroy took the child with him to the shops and purchased provisions and horses. After two days they proceeded north into the wasteland, Libby riding with her arms around her father’s waist, shrieking with pleasure at each jolt to her rump. The nurse followed behind on another horse, the first horse she’d ever sat on. She was acrophobic, hippophobic, saddlesore, and furious.
When they came to the steaming confluence, the nurse held her nose and said, “That’s it. Give me the child. I’m taking her back.”
Both Livingston Pomeroys laughed at her, and the trip continued farther and farther into paradise or hell, depending on one’s point of view. There was a glorious purple sunset covering the valley like an umbrella when they reached the community of naked savages. The nurse dismounted and watched with horror as her employer and his daughter removed every stitch of clothing and walked into a lake of mud, laughing all the way.
The following day, Pomeroy left his daughter in the care of one of the black women and escorted the nurse back to Alice Springs, a horseback journey that took two days. He put her on a southbound train. When he returned to Mathilda Springs, little Libby had found a circle of playmates and was the darling of the Wanqong community.
———
It was a happy life. They had their own stone hut. Libby spent most of her time with the children and the women. Bugs spent his time with the men or following the yellow beetles about the landscape. One of the women, Nqa, cooked for them and cared for Libby in ways Bugs knew nothing about. She also cared for Bugs in ways that Libby knew nothing about. Nqa also cared for two other men in the same way, one of them probably her father (Bugs surmised) and another one who was both an uncle and a cousin and very possibly a half-brother as well.
Life in Mathilda Springs revolved around the life cycle of the sulfur beetle. The women did what women do, and the men continually tended to their beetles. In the fall they built dams in the stream farther up the canyon, forming a pool for the larvae to live in through the winter; they were able to control the temperature of the pool by governing the rate of flow. When chrysalises formed on the reeds beside the pool in late winter, the Wanqong carried the firm little cocoons, thousands of them, to the trees on the sunlit side of the valley, to let them bask in warm sunshine while waiting for spring. There was the swarm celebration on the equinox, enjoyed equally by bugs and men—and women—with dancing and singing and drinking and rutting. And all summer long the Wanqong enjoyed poetry and stories and philosophical conversation, in a language enriched by beetle metaphors throughout.
They were a gentle people, these squat Wanqong, the kindest and wisest people Bugs Pomeroy had met in a lifetime of worldwide travel. He was proud to see his daughter raised by them, although he continued to speak English to her and gave her lessons in penmanship and sums and took her occasionally into Alice Springs to buy new clothing for her growing body. Clothing that she wore only on her trips to Alice Springs. Otherwise she dressed like a Wanqong, wearing nothing in warm weather and wearing warm mud in cold weather. Bugs continued to wear his civilized clothes and smoke his pipes and drink his tea. His newfound friends thought he was hilarious.
In the spring of 1920, when Libby was three and a half years old, the woman Nqa gave birth to a boy whom the women named Nqong. The Wanqong had no notion of paternity, and the nuclear family consisted of the entire population (Bugs counted eighty four, including himself and Libby). So little Nqong had no father, but Nqa always paired him with Libby in the sibling games that the women organized for the children. Libby looked after him with a passionate affection.
———
The second
white man the Wanqong had ever seen arrived in the fall of 1926. The women found Bugs and brought him out of his hut to meet this stranger, who was holding his nose with one hand and a rifle with the other.
“You Livingston Pomeroy?” the man said.
“Yes indeed I am,” Bugs answered. He offered the stranger his hand and said, “Welcome.”
The stranger sheathed his rifle behind the saddlebag on his horse, and the two white men shook hands. The stranger said, “Then this is Mathilda Springs? It’s sulfur all right, isn’t it.”
“How did you find us?” Livingston Pomeroy said. “Do you mean to tell me that Mathilda Springs is now on a map?”
“It’s on our map,” the man explained. “Not an official map, mind, but a map the company drew up, based on the description in that booklet of yours, Paradise Found. I read that booklet. Most extraordinary. My name is Henry Parker. I represent the New South Wales Mining Company. Do you own this land? Have you filed the papers? Show me your papers if you own this land.”
“Own?”
“No, I didn’t think so. We checked that out, you know. In that case, I claim this valley, this Mathilda Springs, in the name of the New South Wales Mining Company. You’re witness to that until I file the papers.”
“But you can’t own this valley!” Pomeroy exclaimed.
“Don’t want to own it,” Henry Parker said. “Just want to claim the mineral rights. Damned lucky I got here first. My god, what a horrible place.”
Pomeroy could feel himself grow red in the face. “This valley is owned by the people who live here.”
“People? People don’t live here,” Parker said. He glanced at the crowd of little black men gathering around them, wearing only coats of mud. “Bunch of bloody kangaroos, is all I see.”
“Now see here….”
“There’s one now!” Henry Parker pulled the rifle from his saddle, shouldered it, and fired, killing Nqa’s brother instantly and sending the other Wanqong scurrying out of sight. Parker laughed, his horse whinnied, and the clap of gunfire echoed in the valley.
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