In the spring of 1970, we packed up our essential belongings and set out toward Key West, stopping at every fruit stand and roadside attraction. When the road was smooth, Jim would put an LP on the record player—Richie Havens’s Mixed Bag or Fred Neil—and those soulful voices carried us down the highway: “I want to go where the sun keeps shining, through the pouring rain. I want to go where the weather suits my clothes.”
We were on traveling time, lazy and slow. We had no schedule or destination, no errands or household chores; certainly no one was expecting us. When the sun beat against the windshield, Mother peeled back the curtains with a toothy rip and drove to the nearest beach. She sat on a blanket and practiced her guitar, leaning over her fretting hand and singing in a reedy, off-key voice. Jim and I fished from the pier with our bamboo poles, and while he trailed his line in the water, he talked to me about the virtues of patience. Jim was a man who, if you bought him his favorite candy bar, would thank you and tuck it into his shirt pocket for a while. “Anticipation is the biggest part of pleasure,” he used to say. To him, fishing was something of a spiritual exercise.
The thrill of traveling sustained me for a while, but it was a difficult age to be rootless. I played with other kids for a day or two at a campground or a city park, and then we drove on. After a day on the road, mother tucked me in on my foam pad, warmed from below by the engine’s heat. I drifted off to the tick of the cooling engine. Once, when we were parked on a dark residential street, I woke to the knock of a policeman, asking us to move along.
And move along we did, down the eastern seaboard and through the Carolinas, Georgia, and into Florida, where we stopped in to visit a distant acquaintance, Mrs. Virginia Clark, who lived along the Saint Johns River, south of Jacksonville. We drove down the sandy roads through acres of pine forest to her house, perched on a wide lawn sloping down to the river. Mrs. Clark was nearly one hundred, ran a turpentine plantation, and seemed not to know that slavery had been abolished. She was an avid bird watcher, and had built perches in the forest where we would sit in the evenings, watching herons fly upriver. She still baked in a wood-fired oven, and upon our arrival she threw in an armful of logs and taught my mother the secret of a perfectly flaky pie crust. We spent a few weeks parked under a huge willow in her yard, helping Mrs. Clark check the tree taps.
When we drove out of Florida and into the Deep South, Jim took on the easy stride of a man returned to his native soil. We stopped at a string of Civil War battle sites—rolling meadows with nothing to hint at the carnage that had taken place there except a few antique cannons and commemorative plaques. These were places Jim’s daddy had taken him as a boy, and when he rolled out their names—Chattanooga, Appomattox, Shiloh—and ran his hands over the blackened gunnery, stories started to well up out of him. His father had been a Nabisco cracker salesman, and for every dollar he made he saved fifty cents. “That man taught me the value of a buck,” Jim said with a shake of his head.
When he was sixteen, Jim told me, he had saved up enough from his paper route to buy himself a broken-down Austin Healey, and he took the engine apart on the garage floor, laying each piece out carefully on a tarp, until he had an exploded model of the car. All summer, he worked from the manual, polishing and replacing each part, until he rolled it out into the driveway and the engine turned over and purred.
That place was full of good memories for him, but he was no longer the clean-cut boy who had taken to those roads in his sports car. We stood out in the South, in a way we hadn’t in Boston. On an interstate in Tennessee, we were slowed by a police roadblock. Up ahead, station wagons and family sedans were waved through, but when we came to the front of the line, the patrolman motioned us onto the grassy center divider. Just the sight of a man in uniform made my breath go shallow. I posed daintily on the engine hood, my hands folded and ankles crossed, while a policeman pulled the van apart. Other officers milled around the grass, their radios squawking. They were looking for drugs, of course, but at the time I had no idea what they wanted from us.
The search seemed to take hours. A patrolman made Jim empty out every jar in our toiletry bag, frustrated that he found no sign of illicit substances. Finally, he seized on a bottle of aspirin with a faded label and threatened to take it to a lab. Jim knew we had nothing to hide and was unflappable. He told him, in his polite Southern drawl, that he understood the officer’s concern and that he was welcome to test the stuff if it would set him at ease. The cop stared him down, then shrugged and let us drive on.
It was midsummer when we made our way through the Southwest. Even with both sliding doors open, the van heated up like a toaster oven. We drove over the Sierras at about fifteen miles an hour, nursing the water pump, stopping often to savor the mountains—jagged granite laced with snow. We were following the route of the great wagon trains, and barely making better time.
Once we reached California, we headed toward the Santa Cruz mountains to look up an old friend. Franny London and Mother had met in Boston back in 1969, and had lived together for a while after my father and mother split up. Back then, Franny wore slim leather skirts and high heels, and drove her convertible along the bank of the Charles River, turning heads. She came from old money and didn’t need to work a day in her life, but not long after my mother took off in the mail truck, Franny traded her pumps for rope sandals, quit bleaching her hair, and moved out to Santa Cruz to start a knife-making business with her lover. Apparently, in those halcyon days, you could make a living selling antler-handled bowie knives.
We rumbled down Franny’s rain-gutted driveway, passing a vegetable patch in a sun-filled clearing, and pulled into the shade of a redwood grove. She and her lover lived in a yellow slant-roofed house, set under the trees like a wedge of cheese. I was bowled over by the place: the mulchy sweetness of tree bark and needles, the green light, and the quiet—broken only by the patter of the creek, which wound down the narrow canyon, its banks undercut and riotous with ferns. I had come a long way from the brick walk-ups and steaming manholes of our city days.
My mother jumped out of the truck and threw her arms around her old friend. Even in the dim light Franny was radiant: long, honey-colored hair and a liquid grace. She led us into her living room, an enormous space with windows giving onto the creek. Old couches and tapestry-covered pillows surrounded a potbelly stove, and against one wall was a long table covered with heaps of leather. The windowsill was lined with jars of stain and sealant, X-Acto knives and wire brushes gathered in coffee cans.
Franny made us licorice tea and set me up at the workbench. “You can make your mother a change purse,” she said, handing me a scrap of cowhide. She showed me how to decorate the surface, using stamps that looked like dental tools. On the ends were stars and sunbursts, comets and half-moons. You set the design in place and then whacked the handle with a rubber mallet. I pounded a whole galaxy into my scrap, while Franny and my mother caught up on things.
“God, was I uptight back then,” I heard Franny tell my mother, recalling their Cambridge days. “Remember how I flipped out if somebody borrowed my coffee cup? The woods have really mellowed me.”
The next morning, I went into Franny’s room. The walls were covered with mandalas and Mexican weavings. The top of her dresser was covered with jars of what looked to me like vitamins, but which I now know must have been spirulina and bee jelly and brewer’s yeast. I curled up in her covers and watched as Franny dangled a crystal over the jar lids, closing her eyes and humming to herself.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“The crystal taps into my body’s needs,” she told me. “If I feel it vibrate over one of these, then I know that’s what I need to take.”
My mother didn’t truck with the spiritual, but Franny’s allure was her ability to immerse herself in something and at once give off the air that she found her own immersion amusing. She talked of reflexology and chakras, but seemed to keep some of the irony of the Boston society girl she had once been.
Now Franny, who credited my mother with having cut through some of her rich-girl puffery when they had been roommates, made my mother buoyant. Their watchwords were Why not? And in the face of that simple question, nothing seemed out of bounds. Not skinny-dipping, or eating pie for breakfast, or refusing to comb your hair until it matted into a burr at the back of your head. Once I caught their mood, I flew all sorts of test balloons. In the mail truck, tucked into a wooden chest, was a floor-length chiffon dress that I had worn as the flower girl in my aunt’s wedding back east. I could tell from the way Grandma Kate had fussed over me on the wedding day, telling me not to sit anywhere dusty, that it was a dress reserved for special occasions. Now I asked my mother if I could wear it into the woods.
I still recall the exhilaration I felt running wild in that dress. I dashed into a clearing where a shaft of light cut down through the redwoods, stopped short by the sunlight on my sleeves. When I squatted down, the dress puffed around me like a pincushion, so I practiced that a few times: jumping up to catch air under my skirt, then curtsying and saying, “Yes, my lady.” I hadn’t found myself nearly so fetching at the wedding, when my tights had cut into my belly and my white patent-leather shoes made me skid unexpectedly across the church floor. I ran back to the house, where mother and Franny sat chewing on candied ginger, their feet propped up on the porch rail. They laughed at the sight of me, my tangled hair and dirty feet, the hem of that custom-fitted dress already ripped into a muddy fringe.
Life was cheap at Franny’s place on Zayante Road, but we had been traveling for more than a year, and our funds were starting to run thin. I was nearly five and about to start kindergarten. Mother and Jim were ready to spend the last of their savings on a piece of land—“our pie in the sky,” as Jim called it. Mother browsed through Franny’s copy of Mother Earth News and saw a classified ad that looked promising: “Wonderful mountain parcel with springs and a good road.” She located the town, population two thousand, which was marked with the tiniest speck the map allowed, and we drove up through San Francisco into the coastal mountains headed for that dot.
The parcel that lured us north was at the shoulder of a mountain, set above a narrow valley. Road was a generous term for the rutted dirt track that snaked up the hillside. The mail truck barely made it. Our books strained at their bungee cords. The kettle flew off the wood stove and hit the back door. At the top of the grade, the owner waited in his pickup truck to show us around. He was a wiry old man in overalls and a feed cap. As for the land, there wasn’t much to show: only acres and acres of dry grass, with a few live oaks scattered here and there. Below us, the irrigated fields and vineyards spread out like a patchwork quilt. We could see the town’s main drag, which we had passed on the way up, the post office and butcher shop and country store lined up like sugar cubes. We wouldn’t be walking to the corner for a quart of milk.
“The ad mentioned springs,” Jim ventured. “It seems pretty dry around here.”
“You worried about water? No problem,” the man said. He tipped his hat toward one of the oaks. “You see that tree there? It uses four hundred gallons of water a day, just to stay alive. You chop one of those down, put a draw right there, and you’ll have four hundred gallons of pristine drinking water.”
“Is that so?” Jim said. He was too polite to call anybody a liar. He kicked the dust and gave the tree a careful once-over. “Well, we’re just city folks, so maybe we should go talk to people a bit more before we settle on a parcel.”
Down at the general store, he and my mother ran the story by the shopkeeper. “That place is bone-dry,” he told them. “Nate’s been waiting for some city slickers to fall for the view.”
Despite our brush with dust-bowl homesteading, Mother and Jim decided that the town was worth sticking to, so they looked around for a place to stay. A few doors down from the store, we came upon a cluster of paint-blistered bungalows with ivy growing through the walls. Up on one roof, a sign lettered around the rim of a wagon wheel said “Madge’s WheelIn Motel,” the word motel drooping down as if Madge had painted it herself when she was three sheets to the wind. There was a big dirt parking lot in front, and a few scruffy kids played in front of the doorways. Mother and Jim decided to ask if we could rent a room. Parking the mail truck on someone’s land was unlikely to make a good impression on our future neighbors.
We made our way to the main building, where a dead neon “Office” sign pointed up a flight of darkened stairs. Through the slats in a fence beside the entrance, I caught a glimpse of a small pool, surrounded by decaying lawn furniture. A little trap door with the word snacks scrawled over it was set low in a stucco wall. I liked the look of the place right away. And it has become fixed in my mind, our first visit overlaid with the many summer days I would spend there, clinging to the sides of the pool, dog-paddling around the dead wasps, listening to Donny and Marie piped from a tinny loudspeaker.
We knocked on a door at the top of the stairs, and Madge swung it wide with a grand “How do?” She was a buxom gravel-voiced lady with a peroxide-blond hive above her forehead and a Lucky Strike stuck in her fist like a sixth finger. Her apartment was surprisingly airy, with white carpeting and glass shelves packed with Hummel figurines and crystal paperweights. Mother and Jim asked about a room, saying they planned to stay awhile. Madge looked them over: “I don’t got a room, but I got a piece of property for sale down the street.”
Back down in the driveway, Madge hopped on the running board of the mail truck and directed us down Spring Street, hanging on to the rear-view mirror with one hand. “It’s just a stone’s throw,” she yelled as we passed a post office, two churches, and a filling station with old white pumps as smooth as tombstones. She had us pull up at a clapboard house on the corner. Beside it was a duplex with cracked stucco siding and tiny sagging porches. There were a handful of ramshackle sheds on the property and a few rusted cars in the driveway. The yard was nothing but thistle and dry grass.
“Well, this is it,” Madge said. “It ain’t much.”
Mother and Jim took a look around inside the buildings. Later, Mother would say that you had to call the people who lived there homeless. Only two out of the four toilets worked. The ceiling plaster bloomed with stains. Mother and Jim dickered with Madge a little, and agreed to buy the place for eighteen thousand dollars. The down payment, which they had carefully guarded during their travels, was the last bit of largess from my great-grandmother, the widow of a wildly successful bonds lawyer.
Our new address was 12000 Spring Street. Apparently the town’s founders had been anticipating an explosive growth period that never arrived. Just past our house, the only sidewalk in town ceased abruptly, the last slab jutting out toward the cow pastures and orchards down Old Dam Road. We would hold down the end of the main drag on about an acre of good river-valley soil gone hard from neglect.
All the apartments were full when we took title to the place, so we lived in the mail truck for a while. Mom and Jim told the Riders, who lived in the back half of the big house, that they would have to move out, but there was no hurry. We were happy to live in the truck until they found a suitable place.
The front half of the big house was rented by an elderly woodcutter named Floyd Root, who sat around in his undershirt drinking gin. In the evenings, he had a lot of visitors: Indians from the reservation up in Covelo, old logging buddies. Floyd lived amid heaps of moldering newspapers, dirty underwear, and assorted chain saws, but his guests would pull up a stack of magazines and make themselves easy, playing cards into the night.
When Floyd heard that we were living in the truck until the Riders resettled, he called my mother to his porch. “They don’t have to move,” he told her.
My mother explained that we were in no rush to force them out.
“There’s no need,” he said, giving her a rheumy-eyed stare. “I’m going to die soon, and then there will be a place for you folks.”
Mother brushed this off, but his flat tone spooked her.
It took us a week of scrubbing to make that place fit to live in. There was standing water in the sink that the neighbor told us hadn’t been drained for six months. Mother snaked the drain, lined the musty drawers with butcher paper, and sewed batik curtains for the windows. In the bedroom, the wallpaper hung in thick tatters, a yellowed flowery print laced with ribbons. We pulled that down and found a layer of cheesecloth tacked beneath it, and when that was stripped away, solid foot-wide redwood planks, rough-planed from trees that must have been over five hundred years old.
I was given Floyd’s bedroom. Mother and Jim slept in the living room on a platform bed that doubled as a couch. I was not yet five, and it was summer, so I had to go to bed before the sun went down, which felt like exile from the world of light. While the air outside turned gold, I would press my face against the screen and watch the older neighborhood kids playing kickball in the street. One evening, not long after we had moved into the house, Mother and Jim came to tuck me in, and the two of them lingered for a while. Mother sat on the edge of my bed and sang to me. Jim stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking out the western window at the torn-up yard, the bristle of cattails in the ditch, and the corrugated roof of Earl’s welding garage across the street, where he went every afternoon to buy glass bottles of Coke from the vending machine.
The novelty of the two of them tucking me in together in my very own bedroom set me humming with pleasure, and I wanted to say something in honor of this, but I didn’t dare break their reverie. Even as I lay there, mute with happiness, I was conscious of the fragility of the scene: two parents, one child, pausing for a few moments together under one roof at the day’s end.
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