a weekend with relatives at high altitude
i have seen four cats alive (black, white calico, ginger longhair, tabby with white socks), one cat dead (tabby with white socks, no relation). you can tell a half-feral barn cat from a normal housecat by how close it lets you get. of the living population, none of them let me get closer than three watchful yards.
there's definitely a phenotype here. i guess that happens in all remote towns. my dad passed a lot to my brother and nothing to me but a tremendous set of eyebrows. i am told by several relatives that i look like my mom, whose people are not two-hundred-year locals--being a different flavor of white is enough to be a little foreign here.
i never fully remember these facts until i come back.
i try not to seem too, uh, "different" in flyover country. my folks can at least be trusted not to care very much. they don't understand me, but they are never mean.
my dad says his accent could be pinpointed to this town when he was young. kids from other schools and counties could hear exactly where he was from. i wonder if that's still true.
the teenage checkout girl compliments my hair and asks (politely, without guile) why i'm visiting. i know the checkout girl the next day is a different girl because this one's hair goes down to her waist, but they could be twins. they might be. she is nice too.
i hear a lot of eurasian collared doves, but no mourning doves. i see a few killdeer, some flashy red-winged blackbirds, but no magpies. where have they gone? i hope i've just been unlucky.
"only one cut this year so far," says an uncle.
"one and a half for us," says his son-in-law.
there is a man an hour south who usually gets seven per year. this year, not even two. it's the drought.
(they're talking about hay. it takes me a minute.)
i ask why my dad didn't get into farming like the rest of them. "probably 'cause he married your mom," says an aunt. not rudely. and she may be right.
but i offer that my dad liked math too much to give up doing it professionally. "well, he's certainly good at it," she says. "always has been." genius is another thing he did not pass on to me.
one of my dad's brothers remarried only a year after his wife's death. but she was a widow matching his age and temperament, and everyone has happily accepted her. she doesn't try to replace a beloved sister-in-law and is not expected to. she's still my aunt.
a cousin tells me with revulsion that her own dad wants to remarry, now that her mom is some years gone. "he's aiming way too young," she says. further, he's trying woo young ladies from places that consider marriage to a white man, any white man, to be a step up the social ladder.
this doesn't surprise me. he's one of those child-beating boomer men who's completely helpless without a woman. my dad's poor sister died having done the work of two people for her entire married life.
"she'd always wanted to go to scotland," says another aunt. by the time it'd even crossed his mind to take her there, her condition was too bad for travel.
earlier, i put on sunscreen, but i can feel that i've turned darker. maybe the UV rays up here are too powerful.
i don't know how anyone else stands it. except for me and two cousins, everybody here has freckles. they burn before they tan.
my aunt describes her town as having been "found." by who? plague of remote workers looking for cheaper property than what is available in the country-glam city beyond a nearby mountain pass.
she describes a set of "cracker box" rental cabins that completely spoil a view of the mountain. and the school where she used to teach was torn down for development. "there are three-floor apartment buildings on the main street," her daughter says. and speed-demon traffic accidents have killed multiple people in the past few years.
their town, or what could only technically be called a town, is where i rode with my cousins and uncle to collect some escaped cattle. i knew we were getting close to their house because of the little river falling a short way down a volcanic slope turfed with thick grass and fallen needles. there were two streets, as far as i could tell. the feed store was bigger than the grocery store.
i can't picture apartments in that town. maybe that's why i'm not a multimillionaire land developer--i lack vision.
every town gets "found" now. even the little one where my motel is. there had been one holdout restaurant when i was here ten years ago--a second one had tried to emerge six years before that, but couldn't turn a profit and closed within the year. now there are five restaurants of different kinds, and an outdoor supply store, and a chain dollar store. now there's enough traffic to piss people off. crossing the street feels like frogger.
i visit the new sandwich shop (pretty good) and overhear a guy on a bluetooth headset talking finance shit on the phone. i used to wonder who would ever rent my late grandma's little old house in the middle of absolutely nowhere. now i know, i guess.
the aforementioned country-glam city is where my dad wired new mansions with electricity in the mid 80s. back then, he was a poor newlywed who'd grown up inside depression-era clapboard and had spent his brief adulthood in a series of shoebox apartments. he still talks about those mansions like they were summer palaces for visiting princesses. at the prices they demand now, they may as well be.
it's all because of californians, of course. i don't remind them where i'm from--they know. they just think i'm one of the good ones.
one of the young once-removed cousins is trying to do something with the nightcrawlers. she's picking them up but keeps dropping them and shaking out her hands in a little-girl grossout dance.
her dad says, "just tear it in half."
"i'm trying," she says. "i feel bad for it."
"it's part of fishing."
she does it. she shakes out her hands while he puts half a nightcrawler on the hook. the other one, dropped back in its cup of dirt, doesn't thrash around.
"i used to not care about that when my dad took me fishing," says an aunt. "now i make someone else bait the hooks."
there are way too many leftovers for my aunt and uncle to take home. my uncle tries convincing everyone, with varying degrees of success, to take more pieces of cake. "you better take two," he says sternly. he feels my arm; it's bony because my parents are bony, and he has the ropy beef-jerky muscle you'd expect on an elderly farmer. "maybe three."
on this visit i've learned a lot of grandpa trivia. i was only eleven when he died, but i remember a lot. he wore bolo ties to church and plaid work shirts everywhere else. he liked fishing, hunting, and road trips. he'd let us small grandchildren mess with his hair, adding barrettes and ribbons--a rhinoceros tolerating plovers. "he'd never let us kids do that," an aunt tells me, "'cause it'd mess up his brylcreem."
i also remember him putting a cat out of its misery at the bottom of a dry canal. (i don't remember what type of gun it was. a small pistol.) even if we'd taken it to the local livestock vet, there would be no way to save its life--it was dying of coyote wounds.
it had been gray. white socks, green eyes.
at dusk, a herd of antelope gaze at us from a scrubby pasture. antelope--pronghorns, but i grew up hearing the other name--are eerily prehistoric. among the ungentle native flora of this place, they seem like lucky ice age survivors.
i've never seen so many in a group before. in a young sundown, their hair has turned red. their backsides look like dim white moons as they bound away.
the real moon is absent this visit. a cousin tries to clap off the trouble lights so we can look at the sky. it doesn't work at first, so her mom suggests adding a little dancing to the clapping. then it works. we cheer but we don't applaud: that might turn the lights back on.
the milky way stretches from one end of the dome to the other. the darkness is almost total. we clatter around on the gravel with craned necks and point out scorpio, the lazy W, both dippers. between the dry cold and high altitude, the stars here don't really twinkle.
one of my aunts has an old photo. it shows herself, my two late aunts, and my late grandma.
she says, "i look at it and think, 'you left me here.'"
i have a childish hope that there's something afterward. i don't need or want it to be some other world i don't recognize, or the same world i came from before this one, if that's how it is. i'd like it to be earth. maybe an earth sideways from ours, full of gentle spirits.
the air is cool now that the sun has gone. the breeze is lighter and slower.
my brother and i walk back to the house through a copse of windbreak pines. all the air under the boughs is suddenly warm, like an exhale.