Friday, April 19, 2013

Nothing Much Yuba City and the unreachable Buttes

Between the constant moments of panic that have continued to accompany my waking and sleeping hours despite the blessed conclusion of my Master’s program, I found myself, last weekend, bound and determined to go adventuring. I didn’t want to go hog wild because, let’s face it, too much freedom these days tends to send me into a panicked state of "There-Must-Be-Something-I-Am-Forgetting-To-Get-Done-Lurking-Back-At-Home." Also, the laundry basket in my bedroom was becoming dangerously near to bursting forth in a sudden fit of Disney-esque personification and smothering me in my sleep. Sometimes, I could feel it glaring at me through the darkness. But having obligingly visited“Sudz Your Dudz," and my fresh clean laundry tossed artistically on my bed for folding another time, I decided it was time to hit the road, picking back up my quest for that secret plot of perfect land I know is waiting patiently for me somewhere around this ol’ world.
            
I decided to go to Yuba City because I needed to see somewhere new without staying out the rest of the night, and also for curiosity of what lay north on the 99 since, until I just recently began thinking about it, I had the impression ended near my house at the 80. On the road map in my car, 99, north of 80, turns from a prominent blue highway to an undemonstrative green line and this was enough to convince me that it must hold a whole lot more charm going north. (I was right, by the way. It does.) Chico was too far and also – in my mind, which is based on nothing concrete (but only in this instance) – the kind of place best explored with a fellow adventurer. I was on my own, so Yuba City it was, which was compounded by the fact that people in the Sacramento area – if they speak of Yuba City at all – always seem to accompany the words with an apologetic eye roll, as though they aren’t entirely sure they should be acknowledging its existence at all. I’ve learned from experience that that is usually the type of place I like best.
            
“What the hell’s in Yuba City?” their looks seem to say.
            
And they’re pretty right. For the most part, nothing much IS going on in Yuba City, I guess. But in my opinion, the best towns usually are a whole lot of little Nothings Much: nothings much on a map; on a Google search; in travel magazines and local newspapers. When people generally have nothing much to say about a place, it seems to hold on better to its own sweet charms, without becoming increasingly over-priced, commercialized, crime-ridden, tourist-trappy, irreverently copied, or crassly built-up. Good people live in Nothing Much towns, minding their own business and adding their own particular specialness to the universe. (Of course, it’s also true that some Nothing Much towns really are nothing much, or worse, Muchly Awful, and the reason they get no recognition in any way from the civilized world is because they would much better be abandoned entirely by the civilized world and left to become a nothing much part of the natural world again instead. But in my experience, these types of Nothing Much towns usually do become infamous in some way or another, acquiring names like Stockton, or Compton, or San Francisco.)
            
See what it boils down to is that people tend to believe that something is Nothing Much if it:
  1. lacks bars, restaurants, hipster coffee shops, or street lights, or
  2.  lacks the striking, unsurpassable beauty of natural wonders like Mount Everest or the Redwood Forests.
All those wonderful, undemonstrative, mysterious places in between become Nothing Much and are spoken about with subtlety by people who have grown up in or around their nothing much reputations. Yuba City is one of those places. And when I tell you about some of the things I saw in Yuba City, you may persist in believing it is a Nothing Much town. But you’d be crazy if you didn’t develop some small amount of appreciation for the Buttes.
            
(If only I had a picture of the septic tank bull!)
Here are some things that will forever stick in my mind about Yuba City: brown and white cows in their fluffy molting-out-of-winter coats, including the ABSOLUTE LARGEST BULL I HAVE EVER SEEN (which I initially believed to be a septic tank); Hock’s Farm, what has to be one of the dumbest historical sites in the state; this old broken-down house with a wrap-around porch that my heart yearns to take up and make my own; chickens, crowing roosters, and their fuzzy, multi-colored chicks pecking in the grass along the side of Route 99; an Indian man with a long white beard and a turban riding down the 99 on a bicycle with an American flag waving proudly between his handle bars; what I can only describe as ugly, stucco mansions tucked in randomly amidst otherwise older, middle class farm houses; fields aflame with golden California poppies and brilliant purple lupines, so easy to miss unless some perfect, divine calculation of temperature and rainfall leaves them bursting in blooming clumps amidst the poppies; two cowboys, but no great country radio channels; the unreachable Sutter Buttes.



Up here, you can tell a lot about a town from its welcome signs. Small town slogans sprinkled along the 99 reveal the cities’ greatest prides and the words give them an identity, an importance, which they do not possess on a road map. The welcome signs in Solida inform you that you are passing through the Raisin Capitol of the world; Lodi reminds you that Napa is not the only place to find good wine; Galt’s proud of its wildlife preserve where you can find elephants amidst the almond orchards; Sacramento is the City of Trees; and, well, Davis has bikes. 
            
There is nothing written on the one welcome sign leading you into Yuba City from the 99, except for the words: YUBA CITY WELCOME and the silhouettes of waterfowl flying above a sparkling river. (I’m assuming this is a reference to a bird hunting area nearby called Dingville, which from what I can understand is not actually a place so much as a state of mind. If you can’t appreciate a name like Dingville, even if it is only a state of mine, you have greater problems than than this blog can address.) What I got from the welcome sign is that Yuba City doesn’t feel the need to be famous for anything. My kinda town, I thought, as I drove past, finding solidarity with the sign. Neither do I.
            
The City of Commerce in Yuba City, where you are supposed to be able to find visitor information, is a charming old Victorianesque house located on a corner in a parking lot with a Foods Co and a Starbucks. It was Sunday, and closed. Still, I walked up to peek in the windows and, mostly, to see if there happened to be any signs around it pointing to a yellow brick road that might lead me to the Buttes. Because somewhere along the drive up the 99, I realized I wasn’t really going to Yuba City anymore. I was heading for the Sutter Buttes. And it was those Buttes, for me, that were the real magic of Yuba City (although the patriotic Indian man on a bike was a close second). 

(I did not take this picture. I got if off of Google images. But this is the sign I saw.)


I first heard mention of the Buttes from a friend of mine at UCD, a native Davisite and lover of our Nor. Cal. natural world. Knowing how endeared my heart is to my own sweet Seal Beach, he is constantly trying to prove to me that Davis is a better place. One day, he was harping about the sky. (Okay, I’ll admit it, but only because he will never read this. He wasn’t actually harping and he was absolutely right. The Davis sky on that particular day…and many days before and since…was breathtakingly splendid.)
            
“Look at that sky,” he told me (or something of the sort). 

The sky was stretching all around us, intermingled with white and pink wisps of clouds across the vast, kind blueness, as though the entire earth was merely a crumb at its doorstep and I tried to hide the appreciative sigh that caught in my throat as I looked at it. I didn’t need to look up at that sky. It was all around me, like a curtain of sun-kissed air, and it was wildly beautiful. And I remember thinking – though I would never admit it – that it even rivaled those eternal, million-shades-of-blue, stretching-on-forever, kneeling-at-the-foot-of-God skies against the Pacific horizons of Home.
            
“And sometimes,” he continued, jerking me out of my reverie as only someone hell-bent on pushing your buttons can do, “if you look out to the north, you can even see all the way to the Buttes.” 

My heavenly meditations were really over when he got to the word buttes. See, I had heard the word before, but much like fjords and badlands, it was a word that had created its own, foggy and not quite graspable image in my mind, developed solely by an overactive and romantic imagination, as opposed to any personal experience.
         
“I have heard that word,” I told him. “But I don’t know what you mean.”
            
He tried to explain, but for things like buttes and fjords and badlands, explanation will never do. To know what a badland is, you must see a badland. And though pictures on Google images may give you some idea of what to look for, they are as abstract as a word on a page in this regard. You do not know what a fjord is until you have touched a fjord. And that was the first time I knew that I must touch the Buttes.
            
It wasn’t until I was having another discussion with some other friends that I really got butte fever. From them I learned that the Sutter Buttes are surrounded by private property and try as it might, the state can’t seem to wrench any of the land from the families who own it in order to create a public, protected passage to the Buttes. The occasional charity event or school fieldtrip or environmental effort will allow people passage up the Buttes from time to time so they aren’t impossible, but a mere slip of a person without any search warrant or land ownership really has no business – according to everyone but herself – going to the Buttes at all. (As a matter of fact, this is not true. I have learned since my almost-visit to the buttes that you can drive up through the Buttes, but if you are bound and determined to do things the legal way, you cannot stop in the Buttes.  Because in this regard, I am by no means bound or determined to do things the legal way, this new knowledge gives me great confidence that I will find myself satisfyingly in the center of the Buttes next time I try. But I did not have any of this insight at the time and the Buttes seemed as out of reach as Knee-Knock Rise.) Of course, the seclusion and inaccessibility of the Buttes only served to fascinate and frustrate me further. Besides which, despite the inconvenience, I was, and continue to feel, delighted that private citizens still have the power to do as they please with their own damn land, and that every single place of worth and mystery in the world does not have to be thrown to the public to become fussed-over and picnic-tabled and desintation-ey. My love for the Buttes grew stronger and my determination remained. Private or not, I needed to touch those Buttes.
            
So it shouldn’t have been of any great surprise that I found my enthusiasm over Yuba City replaced by a more reverent and eager excitement over visiting the Buttes. Except that the realization came together for me gradually, as I drove up the 99, piecing together where I was heading and what lay ahead. Up here, where I cannot see or smell the ocean, I very rarely know which direction I am going, so I suppose it is expectable that I didn’t realize I was aiming for the Buttes until I created a mental image of myself driving toward Davis on the Causeway, complete with self-fabricated compass rose which indicated that the direction to my right – the direction in which I knew the Buttes to lie – also happened to be North, the direction in which I was heading that day on the 99 toward Yuba City. You have heard that timeless, sagacious saying by John Muir: “The mountains are calling and I must go.” That day, the Buttes were calling, softly, at first, without my even knowing, but then, finally, loudly enough that I knew where I was going and that I felt in my chest, when they suddenly met me around a bend, rising up into the plain sky, a sight for sore eyes, a trumpeting feeling of admiration and awe.


The ultimate end to this story may seem anticlimactic. I did not, in fact, manage to touch the Buttes that day. I learned later that, as it turns out, I was about ten miles south of being where I should have been to get on the road that would have led me there. The Buttes remain an enigma to me, for the time being. But the navigating I went through in my attempts to reach them was exhilarating nevertheless. Weaving in and around the small land plots and miniature farms of Yuba City, through all the flat, mellow terrain, I would constantly and suddenly move around a building and see the Buttes again, silhouetted against the California sky, strong and old, and wise, giving dignity and adventure to this small chunk of nothing-much earth. Having neither the craggy elegance of the deep desert buttes, nor the demonstrative personality of a mountain range, these Sutter Buttes are merely, magnificently, the placid buttes of home, alive with all the moving, pulsing natural world which we know so little about, wholeheartedly “fulfilling,” as Dickenson says, “absolute decree / in casual simplicity.” And I felt, driving out of Yuba City – a failure, perhaps, by some standards – my heart patiently pulsing with them.

(I did not take this picture either...obviously.)


-R.E.A.

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