by Bill Bryson
Hawkins bought 200 acres just north of Gilroy and married Emma Day, the daughter of a farmer. In 1864 they had their first child, Charles, and by 1867 Hawkins was a father of four and a prosperous farmer. Though he was largely self-taught, that year he shipped, he wrote, 10,000 centals of wheat to San Francisco.
Hawkins soon heard about a Colonel W. W. Hollister, who owned 21,000 acres of agricultural land nearby. For many years, that land had been in the hands of Spanish clergy, after most of its Native American inhabitants had been expelled or drawn into the mission system. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, much of it was given to Mexican soldiers and settlers. After the Mexican-American War, Hollister bought his tract of land from Francisco Pérez Pacheco. Hollister had followed a southern path to California, from Ohio down through New Mexico and Arizona to Santa Barbara and then north. He’d started out with 8,000 or 9,000 head of sheep, intending to move the largest herd of its kind across the continent. By the end, he had only a few thousand left, but when the Civil War began, Hollister made a fortune selling wool that outfitted the Union Army.
By 1868 Hollister was ready to sell his property, part of a ranch known as San Justo. Hawkins organized a group of local farmers to buy the parcel for $370,000. They split the land into 50 tracts, leaving 100 acres in the center for a town site. They were about to name the town San Justo when one of the men objected. Does every town in California have to be named after a saint? he asked. And so, after much debate, the farmers settled on Hollister, honoring the character Hawkins called “one of the noblest men I ever knew.”
Hawkins had one more child, and gave up farming to establish the Bank of Hollister. Eventually, his 5 children had 11 children among them, and all but one thrived. Hazel Hawkins, born in 1892, died at the age of nine, of appendicitis, although the illness isn’t mentioned in Some Recollections. In the 161 pages of his memoir, Hawkins seems stoic, even cavalier, about any adversity or loss, but the death of Hazel Hawkins left him devastated.
“She had lived with us all her little life. She was my constant companion, and we loved each other with a devotion I had never known before. All of her days she had striven unselfishly to make all around her happy,” Hawkins wrote. “On the fifth of March, as I stood by her bedside, she opened her eyes and looking at me said in her sweet voice, ‘Good-night, Grandpa,’ and then fell asleep, to waken in the Paradise of God.”
To some extent, Hawkins blamed his granddaughter’s death on the lack of proper health care in rural Hollister, so he threw himself into the construction of a solution and a monument. He named it the Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital.
I stood on its white stone steps, wondering what had happened. Looking for some insight into the state of the building, I went to Hollister’s chamber of commerce. But first I had to wait. The chamber’s president and CEO, Debbie Taylor, was occupied with a woman who wanted to know about the local Boy Scout troop. She was a new arrival, and a talkative one, having high expectations for the Scouts of Hollister. While I waited, I flipped through the brochures on a table in the office. WANTED! a flier said. Apparently the Hollister Hills Junior Off-Highway Rangers, a group of young ATV riders, were looking for members to rampage through the surrounding golden hills.
When I got a chance to talk to Taylor, I asked about the golden hills, commending the city for preserving them. Taylor was not so sure she agreed. It might not have been the official chamber-of-commerce line, but Taylor implied that the town would not mind anyone building on the hills. They wouldn’t mind economic development of any kind. The recession had been tough, Taylor said, and they were looking for any bright spots. There were too many tattoo parlors, she told me, and she lamented the karate studio that had recently closed under suspicious circumstances.
Without much prompting, we arrived at the subject of Abercrombie & Fitch, and Taylor talked about the litigation the company threatened and about the interesting fact that it refused to open a Hollister store in Hollister. But, she said, the town would soon have a Walgreens, and everyone was excited about that—no one more so than Debbie Taylor.
She asked me what brought me to Hollister, and I told her about T. S. Hawkins and my connection to him. She flipped through my copy of Some Recollections, and I showed her the photo of young Hazel Hawkins and explained the connection between her and the hospital in her name.
“Oh!” Taylor said. “You know there’s a ribbon-cutting tonight at five-thirty?” I didn’t know. I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained that a new wing of the relocated Hazel Hawkins Hospital, a women’s center, had just been built, and a few hours hence there would be an opening. She gave me the address—it was far from the site of the original building—and I left, the two of us marveling at the lucky timing of my visit.
It seemed as good a reason as any to get a haircut.
I went back to the old Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital building and opened the door of Eli’s Chop Shop to find a large tattooed man behind a barber’s chair cutting the hair of another large tattooed man. In a second barber’s chair, there was a third large tattooed man, apparently just hanging out. They seemed baffled to see me.
Then I saw a mother and her middle-school-aged son sitting on a couch, waiting their turn. I didn’t look like the rest of the clientele, and I was far older—even the mom seemed a decade younger than I am—but I still had my hand on the doorknob, so I had to do something. I could have turned and left them in peace, but instead I asked, “Is it first come, first served?”
“Yup,” the barber said.
I sat on the couch, a wide and low-slung black leather model, and began watching SportsCenter on the flat-screen TV mounted near the ceiling. Loud hip-hop overwhelmed the room.
I could tell that the three men were wondering why I was there, but they got back to talking among themselves, and, in an effort to disappear and to put them at ease, I watched SportsCenter so intensely I must have looked as though I were listening for coded messages from space.
There were some hugs and backslaps when the occupant of the barber’s chair stood up, and then the boy took his turn. The barber, in the meantime, had changed the TV channel to a reality show called World’s Dumbest Criminals.
The mom and I laughed at the show, which was periodically very funny, and then she lifted her chin at me and said, “You’re up.” The barber had carved an elaborate geometric design into the hair on the lower part of the boy’s head. It had been done with a confident hand, and the boy was thrilled. He and his mother left, and I sat down. The man who’d got a haircut was leaning against the counter where all the gels and combs and washes were kept. The man in the other chair crossed his arms, revealing a pair of tattoos: FAMILY on one arm, FIRST on the other.
“So what’s it gonna be?” the barber asked.
He was looking at the back of my head, and his two friends were looking at me. I told them it had been 22 years since I’d had a professional haircut.
“Looks like it,” the barber said, and we all chuckled. “How come?”
I explained the budgetary benefits of cutting one’s own hair, and the guys all nodded.
“I gotta come in here once a week,” Family First said. He turned his head side to side, revealing an intricate design that would require regular upkeep. It was the work of an artist.
I told the barber to just take an inch off anywhere he saw the need, and he got started. Another man entered, athletic and tanned, with an array of tattoos on his arms. He sat under World’s Dumbest Criminals and talked with the barber about an upcoming UFC fight in Sacramento.
Then the barber turned to me. “So how’d you hear about this place?” He said this with a mixture of nonchalance and wariness. It was the question his two friends had been waiting for. Even the guy on the couch turned around.
I told them the story about T. S. Hawkins coming to this land, about how he built the former hospital where we were sitting, that the structure was dedicated to his granddaughter who had died young. All four men
nodded respectfully.
Then something happened. The TV was on loud, and there was the stereo, too, so I heard nothing new, but the two friends were suddenly wondering what a certain sound was.
“Hear that?” the one with the new haircut said.
“Hear it?” Family First said. “Is that you?” he asked me.
I didn’t know what they were talking about. The men said something about some ring or some electronic sound they’d just heard.
“Is someone here wearing a wire?” Family First asked. His friend laughed and patted himself down briefly, running his hands over his chest and ample stomach. Now they were looking at me again, and it finally dawned on me that they thought I was a narc.
“Aw, man,” the barber said, about the possibility that I was wearing a wire. “I’d be out the window, I don’t care.”
The three of them discussed what they’d do if cops showed up, or were already in the room. I suddenly remembered the sign in front of the building, indicating that trespassers would be shot, sent to heaven, etc. The atmosphere was still lighthearted, but the three friends around me were uncomfortable. It was odd: they continued to be polite to me, and my hair was being cut with great care, all while they were talking about the possible narc in the room as if he were some other person—not me.
Trying to change the subject, I asked Family First and his friend where they were from. Only then did I realize it was the kind of awkward question that a normal person would not ask but that a narc would find brilliant. One of the guys said he was from Visalia. The other didn’t answer. The barber tilted my head down to work on the back of my neck. When I tilted my head up again, the two friends had gone.
The silence stretched out, and I decided to fill it.
I asked the barber how long he’d been in Hollister.
“I don’t know. Not long,” he said.
“You like it here?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said. “It sucks.”
He said he was from Gilroy, and he liked it much better there. Gilroy is not a booming metropolis—except maybe during the garlic festival—and is only 15 miles away, but it’s bigger than Hollister, and that’s what mattered to him.
I asked him how he’d chosen the former Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital as the location for his barbershop, and he shrugged. The rent was cheap enough, he said. I asked how he stayed in business when there was no sign facing the street. Except for the doormat, there was no sign at all, come to think of it. He said that he had enough customers through word of mouth. I said something about the building having charm and history, but he didn’t like the building, either.
“You know there was a coroner’s office in the basement?” he asked.
For him, this was another reason to leave. He believed the building was haunted.
With the utmost professionalism, he trimmed around my ears and brushed the hair from my neck. He removed the bib. The haircut was $15, and I paid him and thanked him—the haircut was flawless—but we were both very confused about all that had just transpired.
“See you in another ten years,” he said. I was halfway through the door when he added, cheerfully, “I probably won’t be here then, though.”
Hollister, like many towns of its size and socioeconomics, has been affected by gang activity and by the related spike in meth and heroin use. The town had been discussing the possibility of adding police officers to address the drug trade and the gang presence. Maybe the barber thought I was one of these new cops—and he’d assumed that I’d made assumptions about him and his friends. I thought about going back to apologize, but wouldn’t that be exactly what a narc would do?
Gang activity, real and imagined, has a historical echo in Hollister. In the early part of the 20th century, the American Motorcyclist Association started the Gypsy Tours, for which bikers were encouraged to hold races, rallies, shows, and picnics. During the Second World War, the rallies were suspended, but afterward they were revived. The atmosphere, though, was different. Many of the young men returning from Europe and the Pacific were shattered, disillusioned. Men who otherwise would have expected to stay in their rural homes or work in urban factories had now seen the world, had seen unnameable horrors, and were no longer beholden to pedestrian life paths. Motorcycling became more popular than ever, and the rallies became bigger and wilder.
And so, on July 4, 1947, the Gypsy Tour descended on Hollister, and, by some estimates, the town’s population of 4,500 doubled overnight, with all kinds of clubs—the Boozefighters, the Market Street Commandos, the Galloping Goose, the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington. The members rode through town, making noise, drinking beer, breaking bottles, and generally causing low-level mayhem. Police struggled to control the crowds.
Rumors of the unruly bikers morphed into rumors of rioting, and six years later Marlon Brando was playing a confused and misunderstood leather-clad young man, caught up in a riot in Hollister. The Wild One terrified law-abiding citizens, but to rebellious bike-riding men it seemed like a blueprint for life. Soon enough, the Hells Angels took note, and they began to attend yearly gatherings, although the locals were divided on the advantages of their patronage. In any case, the town saw fit, in 1997, to commemorate the “riot” of 1947 with a 50th-anniversary party.
The celebrations have continued over the years, only occasionally called off owing to lack of interest or the fluctuating tolerance of the town. Debbie Taylor was quick to point out that though the rally hadn’t happened the year before, they were planning to reinstate it. “Definitely next year,” she said. (There was indeed a rally the following year. It would be Debbie Taylor’s last. She’s moved on from the chamber of commerce and away from Hollister. Eli’s Chop Shop has closed, too.)
After I left the chamber of commerce, I meandered through the town, passing Hazel Street and Hawkins Street and Steinbeck Street, and the middle school and the high school, the students, most of them Latino, finishing the day and heading home. The afternoon was aging, and I figured it was time to make my way to the modern incarnation of the hospital. Only then did I realize that I hadn’t come across one person, all day, wearing the Hollister name. It seemed like a remarkable inversion: anywhere else in the world, seeing thousands of kids leaving school, you’d see the word “Hollister” on someone’s chest or hat or shorts. But here, where the word might mean the most, you don’t see it at all.
When I got to the hospital, the sun was setting and the shock was real. The complex was large and modern. Signs everywhere featured the name Hazel Hawkins prominently. And the new women’s center was a gleaming addition, with its own roundabout and a two-story atrium.
Already there were a few dozen people gathered, all of them well dressed. I was wearing shorts and a torn brown brandless hoodie. I walked in, carrying my copy of Some Recollections, with pages of Hazel and T. S. flagged. And then, moving among the attendees in their suits and dresses, I realized with great clarity that I was that peculiar relative: the poorly dressed and unshaven man who shows up carrying a hundred-year-old book with certain pages marked. My new haircut, given to me by a man who thought I was a cop, was the only thing that made me look presentable or sane.
I saw Debbie Taylor. She introduced me to a number of doctors and dignitaries, always as the descendant of Hazel Hawkins. Most of them didn’t know the story behind the name and were even more surprised to hear that Hazel Hawkins was a child when she left this world. I told truncated versions of the tale, always pointing to the book, trying not to appear as unhinged as I looked.
Otherwise, the ceremony was practical and funny and joyous. Gloria Torres, the hospital’s director of Maternal and Child Health, said that this new facility was what the community needed and deserved—she called the complex’s previous birthing center “embarrassing.” Gordon Machado, the president of the San Benito Health Care District Board, noted that the construction was done by local labor, and this news received some sturdy applause. The project manager, Liam McCool, was introduced, after Machado joked
that though he was Irish, McCool showed up every morning, even the day after St. Patrick’s. McCool waved and smiled at the audience, whose diversity reflected the particular blend of people in today’s Central Valley: there were the older, whiter representatives, there were the second- and third-generation Latino families whose parents were laborers and whose children might be college graduates, there were nurses and doctors who had immigrated from India and China and beyond.
There are those who think that California is a state where Spanish speakers should have natural sway. And there are those who think that this is a state where English speakers have preeminence, and there are those who insist that if we have any sense of history, of decency, the native peoples of California should be given the first seat at the table. And then there are those who have no idea at all about the history of the state and do not care.
But California has always been a state of visitors, of late arrivals, of seekers innocent and not so innocent. Though it might not be good enough for a Hollister clothing outlet, this is the real Hollister, a place where people work hard and sometimes struggle with their past and their present but look with great practicality toward the future. They build new hospitals that will bring new Californians into the world, new hospitals named after a young white pioneer child few ever knew existed.
GRETEL EHRLICH
Rotten Ice
FROM Harper’s Magazine
I first went to Greenland in 1993 to get above tree line. I’d been hit by lightning and was back on my feet after a long two-year recovery. Feeling claustrophobic, I needed to see horizon lines, and off I went with no real idea of where I was going. A chance meeting with a couple from west Greenland drew me north for a summer and part of the next dark winter. When I returned the following spring, the ice had failed to come in. I had planned to travel up the west coast by dogsled on the route that Knud Rasmussen took during his 1916–18 expedition. I didn’t know then that such a trip was no longer possible, that the ice on which Arctic people and animals had relied for thousands of years would soon be nearly gone.
