Poppy Seed

I was curled up on the couch, listening nonchalantly, on Thursday, July 18 when Baba called Jul and Jonathan on speaker phone. Earlier in the day, when Julia said Jonathan had something to tell us, and that we should call them when Baba got home, we all thought he had some amazing new news about school. So when the two of them yelled together into the phone, "We're having a baby," I was more stunned than I have ever been in my life. And so, I burst into tears.

When we first found out about him (or her), the baby was a mere orange seed, with a beating heart the size of a poppy seed. A poppy seed! A miracle that led Pappy, the new great-grandpa, to christen the wee one Poppy Seed. At least until we know him, see him, touch his soft cheeks. Right about now, our sweet little baby is about the size of a blueberry with a beating heart and brain cells developing at 100 per minute. She (or he) has working kidneys and an umbilical cord that could be seen in an ultrasound (though we have not yet). She also has nose slits and eyelids - and also a hint of a tail! I am so in love with her I could bust!

I know every baby will be wonderful and special and important, but the spreading of the news of the first baby in a family has a dream-like awesomeness that dances into your life and makes you wonder why everyone with babies isn't floating on air all the time. It's the biggest news of the century, this sweet baby, I don't care what CNN is saying. When we went to a theater performance the other night, I kept wishing I had my warm little niece or nephew cocooned in my arms.

I was "pinning shit" when we learned the news, likely something onto the secret board I've been compiling titled, "My Sister's Baby." And it's amazing how quickly my night went from, "what random craft should I try to make before I go back to school?" to re-evaluating my spirituality. Because I have, with the coming of Poppy Seed, with the growing of an entire life inside my own sister's own belly.

I know these are words belonging to a parent, and I am by no means trying to steal the thunder of the beautiful new parents, but I can't believe how much I love that little life. I had only known it for two nanoseconds before my heart swelled ten sizes. It's so full, my eyes overflow every time I think about it. And worry! I am so worried about that child that I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight. Oh, Baby, it's going to be a long twenty five years for the both of us! For all of us! And we're SO happy!

I've always believed that no one could ever be as blessed as I have been in the way of parents. But faced with the reality of Jonathan and Jul as parents, I've come to think that this new little acorn may have landed my luck. Poppy Seed will learn, from her (his) papa, how to shoot a gun and handle an Xbox controller. She will gain a healthy respect for Darth Vader and, if lucky enough, will find herself apt with her hands and smart in the wilderness. From her mama, Poppy Seed will learn the Sun Salutation and how to clip coupons like a pro. She will have the prettiest handwriting, but more importantly, she'll remember to use it to write loving notes that will lift others up. She will know innately how to  take care of her baby dolls (and younger siblings) better than any other kid on the block and how to crochet an afghan. And from both, this Poppy Seed will grow to be: brilliant and moral and creative and selfless and endlessly caring; Poppy Seed will know: how to read and write and think like someone who can change the world; and Poppy Seed will; Poppy Seed will have integrity and class and compassion, a loving heart and courage and strength. And these are the things that will make up Poppy Seed's life. His (her) roots and his wings.

But these are weighty things for a little one the size of a blueberry to worry about just yet. For now, Poppy Seed is growing, tucked safe away by the grace of so many things, Great and small. And showered in all the prayers and love of the people who adore her (his) parents, and now her. Working hard, we hope, at simply growing, in all its complexity. And we are so overjoyed that he (she?) is coming!


-R.E.A. (a.k.a. Aunty)

The week my neighborhood built a playground and my government went further into debt

In less time than it took my wisdom teeth to heal, my neighborhood built a playground. I know this because I was hoping to go help them, only I was collapsed on my couch with otter pops pressed against my cheeks. I also know because every time I drove past the park there was something going on within the gate surrounding the new jungle gym: a band playing; a fire truck; hammering and climbing and people moving about; and finally, a tent and rows of folding white chairs, presumably for some kind of closing (opening?) ceremony. The beautiful, old playground, made entirely of wood, was, I read in the East Sacramento newspaper, burned down by an arsonist several weeks ago. And because it is no longer legal to build playgrounds out of wood in the state of California (As an aside, it is also illegal 

This is real...captured by Mom!

to sell Mylar balloons without a balloon weight in the state of California. Some people wonder why the state is bankrupt and why our youth are growing up into soft, complaining idiots, but I think you need only look at a California law book to figure out the reasons), the new playground is not. If I didn’t know better, I would suspect that the entire thing was a conspiracy by WIC or some other public health organization determined to save our poor, troubled children from the traumatic horrors of an occasional splinter, but it was probably just some asshole smoking pot under the swing set. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that the loss of a warped, worn, well-built, even better-loved wooden playground is a tragedy. But even I have to admit that the new playground is pretty magnificent to behold. To begin with, it is huge, sprawling fantastically across a much larger area than the humble old one was allowed. And although I am usually morally opposed to faux wood, given the spirit behind this particular venture, I appreciate that it’s built to look paneled. It looks like a fairytale cottage, with a muted colors on the roofs and ins and outs, twists and turns that leave me longing for the days when I was smaller and younger. Even now, old and clumsy as I am, my imagination takes hold when I see that playground and I yearn to play on it. But these are not the main reasons that the new playground is so splendid. The playground is splendid because it puts an exclamation mark at the end of a story that has been played out over and over in East Sacramento even just in the short time since Jason moved here three years ago. It is the story of a neighborhood taking over where a government failed. It is the story of individuals united under a common interest making change where the wealth of one of the most expensive states in the country fell embarrassingly short. It is the story of the way things should be in a country that is falling apart at the seams while it waits for its government to do work that it is neither capable of, nor supposed to do.

            

McKinley Park, according to whispered, careless rumor that moves on the wind and comes from no one knows where, is a perfect square mile, and resides (this is not rumor, but fact) just down the street from my house. A dirt path runs around its perimeter for the enthusiastic runners of Sacramento (which may be why the whole mile squared thing seems so imperative). It also includes tennis courts; a rose garden; a soccer field; a baseball diamond; a pond inhabited by innumerable ducks, geese (yikes!), turtles, red-winged blackbirds, hosts of dragonflies, and other beasts of earth and water; a couple of maintenance buildings; and an old two-story brick building called the Clunie Community Center. Inside the Clunie Center is McKinley Library, run by the county; a teeny, tiny Sacramento picture museum that is too small to be called a museum; and some modest event rooms (newly remodeled…more on that later). And behind the Clunie Center is an old swimming pool with a small fountain beautifully built circa the 1940s that is open during the late summer for two dollars a pop for lap swimming and wading.  I love the Clunie Center because it is brick and beautiful with a cool, dark front hallway that whispers of history and because of the library which has a loft where I like to sit between the rows of sweetly dust-scented books and look out the narrow windows and remember all the reasons it’s lucky to be alive. I also love the Clunie Center because it is the beginning, for me, of the story.

            

A lot of what I know about East Sacramento comes from the neighborhood’s newspaper, Inside East Sacramento. Like any small neighborhood newspaper, it often includes some pretty atrocious editorials and some utterly worthless articles that make you wonder if it’s worth the ink its printed with. Still, for what it is, it is the best of its kind I’ve seen. The people who write about the local news and goings-on seem to have done some research and know a thing or two and for the most part, the editors are aware of basic grammar and spelling. Also, East Sacramento happens to be a community with some good old fashioned common sense, so the paper is usually a fairly interesting and informative read. When Jason first moved to Sacramento, the city was in the process of closing down – or at least thinking of closing down – several library branches. McKinley library was (unsurprisingly) on the list of potentials. Not only is McKinley Library decidedly puny, it is also inside the Clunie Community Center, an establishment which, in and of itself, the city is constantly considering shutting down. The truth of the matter is that libraries in Sacramento (and probably much of the state and country), including McKinley, just don’t earn their keep anymore. Neither do old community centers. But East Sacramento rallied. Unwilling to see the library or the community center defunct, its citizens opted to keep them both open and managed to come up with the money or persuasiveness (or both) to make it happen. This same event has happened at least two more times that I know about, in the past two years. McKinley Library remains open five days a week. The swimming pool is still open two months out of the year at a pretty ridiculously low rate. Not only that, but with the extra money the community pulled together, the inside of Clunie Community Center got a mild face-lift. All cleaned up and replenished, it now stands ready with three different rooms dedicated to events (which, if they can get them going, can really help build future funds for the center). I know this in particular is true because last time Jason and I went to take a run at the park, we decided to peek in to see what had been done. The proud purveyor of the place, who happened to be on her way out and saw us snooping around outside locked doors, gave us an enthusiastic tour and a new flyer, encouraging us to plan our next event there.

            

About a year ago, I read in the paper about the dire straits of the McKinley Park Rose Garden. Now, you know how comfortable small towners can get, a little bit melodramatic about everything traditional and established. But even I could notice that the garden was becoming a little peaked, slightly overrun with weeds, some of the rose plants mildly blighted. I never saw anyone of authority moving about the rose garden’s office building, rarely saw gardening taking place there. Out came the East Sactonians with their garden spades and donations and the rose garden was refurbished. A fence  was put up around it for a couple of months and then, new bushes planted, new pathways put in. The rose garden is back. 

            

And now the neighborhood has built a playground. Not just any playground, mind you. A colossal, beautiful, envious playground. A community build over which, for a mere five days, folks straight out of the neighborhood, the ones whose children and grandchildren will actually be playing there, labored with a commitment and passion that a state-commissioned contractor could never have completely possessed.

            

Within the past few years, the state of California has begun collecting taxes on online purchases and legal medical marijuana (both the selling and the buying of). We have the highest minimum sales tax in the nation – further increased during our “budget crisis” in ’08 and ’09 – and the highest income tax in the nation. Due to (among other things) our nauseatingly high taxes, California has been rated for the past eight years as the worst state in the country for business. Thanks to Prop 30 in 2012 (which I fully acknowledge was voted in by our intellectually questionable citizens), we are now saddled with $6 billion dollars in new taxes, annually. And yet, somehow, someway, our fearless leaders cannot seem to muster up enough money to maintain a few public libraries. Now I personally am one of those (few and far between) people who is overly excited about the discussion over the necessity of the entire publicly-funded library system to begin with. In our current state of immeasurably colossal government dependence and overarching societal pursuit of education and literacy, I would generally argue that the public library system no longer necessarily has a place as part of the local government’s duty  and should perhaps be doled out appropriately to the private industry. But mine is not a popular opinion and with all the fuss the government makes about it, you would think they could pull enough pocket change out of their inept pockets to keep the library system eking along. So why can’t they? Because they don’t care? Because they really are that incapable of managing money? Because they’re trying to get a rise out of the public to convince us to pass another Prop 30? (Good luck with that because, thanks to another one of the government’s inept programs, Education, running the way it is, there aren’t a whole lot of people left who really care about the library system anyway). It could be a combination of all of these reasons – and others. I no longer care why. Because regardless of the reason, here’s the truth: the harder the government crashes and burns, the more people (not “The People,” but the actual Individuals that comprise “The People) will invest themselves in the things they actually care about and let the rest fall apart. Which is exactly the way it should be. If the East Sacramento community isn’t renting enough books to keep a library running, should the local government keep it open anyway? Certainly not! But East Sacramento did want its library. And so it put its own effort into keeping it.

            

Naysayers will say that East Sacramento’s success is only on a small scale, as though that were a bad thing. But that’s exactly the point. Thing’s don’t get done on a large scale, they get lost. What is a small, 45,000 volume library to a treasurer in a state-issued cubicle? Not a damn thing. Nor should it be. California has other things to worry about (actually finding prison space for violent criminals may be a good start, but that’s my bias). But what is a small, 45,000 volume library to a child who lives down the street? To a hobbyist? To a dreamer? To a teacher? To a student? It is an Everest, a treasure, a fairytale-come-to-life, the sweetly dust-scented reminder of why life is so lucky, a reason to love thy neighbor, to build castles in the air, and a way to put the foundations beneath them. It is a future of intellect, of world-changing. It is the happiness of a Summer day, the growing of solid roots, the development of wings. What is it not? That should be the question. Small things are largely important to ordinary people. And that is as it should be. For all our talk of massive group thinking and change, of collaboration, of safety in numbers, we do not tell our children, small and starry-eyed and learning the ways of the world, that they should find a group and cling to it; that they should write their names on a list and wait for the list to change the world; that they should listen for popular opinion and then jump on the bandwagon. We tell them to forge their own paths, to trail blaze, to march to their own drummers, to fight for what they feel passionately about. And though they are small, we believe great things can come from them. Because they can. Why then, do we think that the bigger our government is, the more anonymous and distant and unrecognizable it becomes, the more it should be able to accomplish? Signs on the backs of those monstrous eighteen wheelers driving down the highway read: “If you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you.” I cannot see my government’s mirrors. And it cannot see me. But I can see my neighbor. He is right over the gate, there. I can see his chickens, and his children. I can smell his barbeque. I can hear him raking leaves. Sometimes, his cat crosses my front porch. I like him – or I don’t. But either way, he is real to me. And so, if we have a common cause, we can build it together. We do it every day, in fact, in small ways (smaller, even, than building a playground). I don’t throw trash on his lawn, for example, because I believe in the Golden Rule, and because I believe in keeping things clean and tidy and not burdening the world with unnecessary wear and tear, and because I believe in karma. He also does not throw trash on my lawn, for the same or different reasons. And this is an unspoken understanding that we have. That we wish to be decent neighbors and decent citizens of the world. We did not need our government to pass a law about it. We did not ask that our government hire a trash collector to pick up the trash in our yards so that we can toss our litter out the window with reckless abandon, on any whim. It is something we care about enough to take care of ourselves. Why then, do we not use these same principals to build our communities, educate our children, grow our businesses?

            

Naysayers will also say that only communities with some affluence, like East Sacramento, can do such things. That other communities, where the residents have neither extra money nor leisure time need the city government to hold communities together. But after all, it is not enough to put an open library on the street corner. People who have not been raised to care about reading will not enter simply because it is there. If I did not know this before, this last year of teaching has taught me this sad truth. The fact of the matter is that you need both effort and money to achieve improvement. And, although you cannot grow dollar bills in your backyard, literally, you can care enough about something to invest creativity and good old-fashioned elbow grease. And you can teach your children to do the same. And money comes with creativity and elbow grease. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, the government does not possess the necessary qualities to do the same thing. We question whether plants and animals think, feel, react. Why do we not question whether government does? It does not. It is not an organic mechanism. It has (unfortunately) all the money it needs and (even more unfortunately) none of the passion born of a true purpose, a purpose based on necessity and goodness and righteousness and worth, and meaning; none of the judgment that can tell a smart idea from a dumb one, a waste of time and money from a strong investment. People do that. Not establishments. Just as it is not a leaf, moving mechanically across the sidewalk on its own, but the focused herd of tiny ants marching along beneath it that carry it forward, that affect movement, change. Why do we find such inspiration in underdog stories, in stories of people coming from nothing and making something of themselves, in stories of people like Michael Oher, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Jesus? Why do we have such faith in those people in an abstract sense, but no real faith that those types of miracles can actually happen in our own worlds, and so thinking, do not enact that faith in real life, instead passing things off  to the government which neither can nor should achieve them? These are the questions I asked myself as my wisdom teeth healed, as my neighborhood built by hand a playground for its children, quite literally out of the ashes, as my government grew and failed, grew and failed, grew and failed again before my very eyes. I have no answers to these questions, only a certainty that my government, huge organizations, mass cults of people, do not hold the solutions. That solutions come from much lower and smaller down.  If you want society to be healthier, build a community garden; if you want people to be smarter, read books to random children; if you want your world to be stronger, better, purer, safer, pet your neighbor’s cat and build a playground.

-R.E.A.

Relish

What exactly is it about people who see treasure in humble beginnings that is so uplifting, so divine, so profound and magnificent? I came to the realization today that I have always viewed these types of people with awestruck gratitude, as though the beauty of their faith was a particular gift to me. I know that, indeed, the beauty of their faith is, intentionally or not, a true gift to the entire world, but it always somehow feels humblingly personal. I have been lucky enough to know many of these people in my life. My mom and my sister are, to me, the first models of this rare trait, and to be around them is to be unendingly inspired by their ability to find and recognize the worth in that which has been cast off, the greatness in the overlooked, the secret in the seemingly transparent, the glimmer in a sea of dullness, excitement in the mundane, magical in the ordinary, the potential in things – and people – as yet untapped. There are many others, more and less well-known than these two beautiful women, people like Shel Silverstein, Saint Jude, Henry David Thoreau, folks who find their pets at animal shelters, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, farmers, Emily Dickinson, L.M. Montgomery, John Steinbeck,…and, as I joyously learned today, Ray Bradbury. I am coming to believe, in my ponderings on this characteristic, that it is in fact this, in a nutshell, that propels me to read ceaselessly, to seek out loveable literature. And furthermore, perhaps to want to be a teacher.

            

Today I went to the coffee shop to finish the last several pages of my book Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Not three minutes after I sat down, I was in tears. This novel has spoken to my soul ever since the introduction, when I learned that Bradbury wrote it in an attempt to capture his childhood in North-western Illinois. In so doing, he managed, at least at the beginning, to capture pieces of my own. But the novel is not a story about me, that much was clear to me midway through. The novel is, however, a story about (among other things, of course) a piece of my soul. And, like those people who see treasure in humble beginnings, it feels to me, somehow, like a personal gift. Don’t get me wrong, I think Fahrenheit 451 is a phenomenal book. But if I had known that Ray Bradbury had this book in him, I would have worked, by hook or by crook, to see him at the L.A. Book Fair before he died. Before I go on, let me make it perfectly clear that this is not a recommendation – from me to you – that you read this book. The meandering, near-plotlessness of the story had a strange and lovely effect on my being, and I don’t claim to know anyone else’s being well enough to know if it will do the same to you. You may read it and wish to throw it aside as abstract hogwash, and if you do, and if you do, I hope that you will not tell me either one, although I am sure, somewhere deep inside me, I will feel a prick nevertheless. In describing his grandma’s cooking, at one point in the story, the main character, Doug, says, “The food was self-explanatory, wasn’t it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasn’t it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense?” This is precisely how I feel about the novel as a whole and, basking in its moment of ritual and rare incense is all I am doing here, and very little more.

            

My copy of the book is from some used store somewhere, the best place (some will tell you) for finding diamonds in dust. It is an old, but well-kept paperback edition with slightly yellowed edges and not a single tear. Also not a single indication that anyone else had ever read this copy had I, until I neared the end and turned to page 222, somewhere in the last twenty pages. There, in spidery, pretty handwriting, in blue ink, were two notes from a reader of bygone days. The first note, somewhat spookily - for someone who has not read the book - reads, “I must die.” The spookiness of this remark is slightly diminished for those who have read the book because it relates to an earlier chapter. The strange part about it, though, is that it comes at one of the most uplifting moments in the entire story, a moment held long in anticipation, a moment soon after, in fact, I dissolved into tears in the middle of the coffee shop. And by this point those words, “I must die,” are no longer relevant. They are no longer profound to the story. I wonder why they are here, instead of somewhere else, earlier, when they may have done some good. The next note is slightly longer, short commentary on two of the characters. And though I read this note both before and after I read the chapter it belongs to, and perhaps a dozen times over, I still cannot gather exactly what the reader’s thoughts were in writing it, why they are important, why they needed to be written there. And it concerns me, not in a disruptive way, but in a curious way, because that is it, the only other note she leaves and I wish, I wish I knew what she meant by it. Because you see, she might have been a seeker of treasures herself. Or even a master of finding them. And if so, there is a message in those words that could, too, be treasure to me.

            

Of all the beloved, unparalleled characters in this modest novel – Colonel Freighleigh, Helen Loomis, Mr. Tridden, Mr. Auffmann, Tom, Doug’s Great Grandma, his dad, Lavinia – Mr. Jonas is inexorably my favorite. He is a seeker of treasures. And he is what brought me to tears. Mr. Jonas is a collector of junk and he carries it around in his Conestoga wagon, drawn by his horse named Ned and he sings as he travels along in his corduroy clothes and hat, covered with old presidential campaign buttons, so that children can hear him a mile away. And, like Hector the Collector, he sings songs like this:

“Junk! Junk!

No, sir, not Junk!

Junk! Junk!

No, ma’am, not Junk!

Bricabracs, brickbats!

Knitting needles, knick-knacks!

Kickshaws! Curios!

Camisoles! Cameos!

But…Junk!

Junk!

No, sir, not…Junk!”

And he is right, because one of his pieces of junk, a bottle full of fresh air, saves an entire life. Mr. Jonas doesn’t sell his junk. His is a cycle of collecting and giving away. Tiring of his life as a businessman in Chicago, Mr. Jonas “set out to spend the rest of his life seeing to it that one part of town had a chance to pick over what the other part of town had cast off. He looked upon himself as a kind of process, like osmosis, that made various cultures within the city limits available to one another.” And it seems to me that, somewhere in those words, perhaps, are written the secret to peace among men. I wish to be Mr. Jonas, both literally and figuratively. But I, like Doug, must settle on the next best thing, to pay it forward. Because, after all, it seems to me, that looking for goodness, and worthiness, and hope, and success in all the cubbyholes of the plodding, patient world, is both the intended journey and the end goal spun into one. And I love those people the most!

It all makes me wonder about happiness. It sounds stale to speak of happiness being the secret to prolonging life. Not happiness in a grandiose or demonstrative way. Not winning lots of awards, with the adoring eyes of people you love and respect waving you on, or going to a million concerts where you get the thrill of all the pounding, glorious music down into your soul over and over again, or zip-lining across a tropical rain forest with your mouth open wide in a cry of breathless excitement, though these things help. Doug’s great grandma, who always took it upon herself to re-shingle the roof each year, tells him, just before she dies, “Douglas, don’t ever let anyone do the shingles unless it’s fun for them.” For her, shingling is a joy because she can see the whole town, the whole countryside, spread out around her from up there on top of the house. She tells him to look for the person whose eyes light up when he mentions shingling the roof and then he’ll know who really wants to do it. See, she’s got the right idea: finding richness in the mundane, happiness in a chore. It’s a simpler way of looking at things. Roald Dahl, another master of treasure-hunting said, “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” And this is what I wonder – about happiness, I mean – perhaps we overlook the seeming fact that happiness can prologue life because it is too difficult to hear. Because happiness is too much in our control. Calvinists seek comfort in knowing that their outcome, their final peace (or piece) is pre-ordained. But who seeks comfort in knowing, instead, that is it entirely in our own power? Now I, personally, fall somewhere in between the Calvinists and the idea that it’s all in my hands. And so, I suspect, do most of us. Still, it’s easy to shy away from the responsibility of taking life as completely into your own control as you possibly can. Choosing neither others’ decisions, nor the path of least resistance as your own, but picking, instead, happiness, however it looks in that moment, for as long as it looks that way, to you. It’s impossible, even, for some of us, to separate one of these choices out from the others. And as chaotic and relentless as this world sometimes seems, such thoughts are not always comforting. Looking through his grandma’s spice jars and cooking ingredients, Doug finds one marked RELISH: “And he was glad he had decided to live. RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have trompted the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH!” Words to live by found pasted to the side of a condiment. An epiphany from the mundane.

            

There is so much left to say and so much Summer left before me that I feel somehow that the two are appropriately, inexplicably intertwined. I put Dandelion Wine on the shelf next to my Anne books, because I think Ms. Montgomery would have appreciated it. Relished it. The story – the characters, really – linger now, on my mind like the fading strains of a symphony more innate and universal even than sound, than the taste of sweet tea on a hot, humid Virginia night. And, putting the book down, I looked up, immediately, the recipe for dandelion wine, a reminder, in the story, of each momentous moment of a bittersweet summer. Refreshment, vibrancy, beauty, happiness created out of a tiny, yellow weed. Treasure.

-R.E.A. 

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.

Doing things the normal way

Yesterday, driving home from work, I saw a car with some kind of company name (I wish I could remember what) on the side scooting down the highway. And on its back was one of those big stickers that said in bold letters: “CAUTION: CAR MAKES FREQUENT STOPS.” Now, besides the fact that the car looked like a goober, I was pretty irritated by the sign. It seems that, much like political commentators on Fox and CNN, cars who wish to drive without following basic traffic precautions no longer need any relevant credentials.

I can understand those signs on big rigs that say, “IF YOU CAN’T SEE YOURSELF IN MY SIDE MIRRORS, I CAN’T SEE YOU EITHER” (or whatever it is, exactly, that they say) because those actually help keep the rest of us from being rammed by a semi- (unless you’re me – but that’s another story) and because truck drivers and their trucks are part of the heartbeat of America. I can even understand those signs on the backs of buses that say, “STOPS AT ALL RAILROAD XINGS” because that’s the law and it helps keep the rest of us from ramming into them. (Don’t get me started on the role of buses in America).

But I can’t just plaster a sticker on my car that says, “CAUTION, THIS CAR SWERVES RANDOMLY INTO OTHER LANES” or, “BEWARE…IDIOT DRIVER ONLY USES TURN SIGNALS EVERY OTHER TUESDAY” and expect that it’s someone else’s fault when we crash because, after all, I gave them fair, authoritative warning in the form of a peel-off sticker. If anybody would actually read the driver’s handbook, they would know that using your own caution while driving is actually part of the law. Common sense will also remind you it’s your responsibility, but I understand that’s asking an awful lot.

What the random, credential-less car should have written on its rear, if it must be perpetually stopping at inconvenient times is something like: “INNUMERABLE APOLOGIES FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, BUT THIS HUMBLE CAR MAKES FREQUENT STOPS, SO IF YOU HOPE TO MAINTAIN YOUR SANITY, YOU MAY WISH TO AVOID DRIVING BEHIND ME. p.s. I’LL TRY TO STAY OUT OF YOUR WAY!”

Being informative is no substitute for being responsible. And if you are the type of person who insists on doing things your own way, you should also learn to be the type of person who doesn’t get in the way of other people doing things the normal way.

  -R.E.A.