Lotowana

By Robert Klassen

2001 © Robert Klassen

Pacific storms roll over the land from the sea in a broad band stretching for hundreds of miles to the southwest. It’s called the Pineapple Express. Rain falls in sheets whipped forward by the wind for hours at a time and then stops, while heavy gray clouds lower on the land and a fine mist fills the air. Daylight comes late and leaves early and warm-blooded creatures would rather sleep. The temperature is not cold, not like the brief Arctic storms that blast out of the northwest with spectacular fury and leave snow in their wake, but it is still cold enough and wet enough and dark enough to enjoy a warm fire and the cheeriness of electric lights in the daytime.

Time was running out or I would have been keeping warm in my room high above the lake, working on my manuscript. The owner had announced that he was selling the house, and I had to find somewhere else to live. Thanks to my own mistakes, I was in no position to buy a house, nor did I want to. I had some vague notion of moving elsewhere to live on this planet. Instead of renting, however, I had decided to buy a motorhome and to live in that. Now I needed to find someplace to put it.

Terry went with me. He was thirty and single and a good roommate, a quiet and responsible man with a slightly wild appearance, shoulder length hair and a black goatee. We drove through the drizzle and mist, and we stopped at each trailer park on the lakeshore to check on the spaces available. I wanted to live next to the water and I wanted an open view of the lake and the mountains. The trailer parks were uniformly run-down, pot-holed, and muddy, and all of the spaces we found were sandwiched between decaying hulks tucked back away from the lake, with a view of nothing.

“Screw this,” I said, after our tenth stop, “let’s get a beer.”

“Sure,” Terry agreed, “I don’t think you’re going to find what you want today anyway.”

I took a shortcut over the mountain on the Sulfur Bank Mine Road and entered the town of Clearlake, located on the southeast finger of the lake. Seen from above, Clear Lake resembles a cartoon bunny, with the big round head to the west and the ears to the east, one to the north and one to the south. I skipped my favorite bar on Lakeshore Drive, the one with a view, and I drove to one in a trailer park that I knew Terry had never visited—The Lotowana Village Resort and Marina.

Clement Street dropped away from Old Highway 53 abruptly and went straight down the slope to the lake between closely built houses and then a few travel trailers and ancient cabins. The street had been paved at least once but there were still small ponds of standing water where the asphalt had crumbled. The paving in front of the bar had not survived repeated flooding, so I tried to straddle a puddle when I parked the truck.

I don’t know when this place was built; nobody seemed to know. It could have been there fifty years or it could have been there a hundred. One local told me he remembered the resort was a going concern when he was a boy in the fifties, so it was older than that. The saloon was a low, frame building with two six-by-four-foot windows in front and a wooden door in the middle that swung out and was usually tied open with a rope. Today the door was closed.

A few tables stood on industrial carpeting just inside the door and a pool table took up the corner to the left, in front of the restrooms. The L-shaped bar was ahead. A kitchen was hidden behind the back-bar and the walk-in cooler and a small dining room had been tacked on next to it, with two windows that faced the tiny boat harbor and the lake. The place was lit by neon signs and the television set, and it stank of cigarette smoke and beer and urinal deodorizer. Terry seemed to hesitate at the door, I laughed and went to the bar.

I recognized the bartender from seeing her here and there over the last twenty years, but I didn’t really know her. Middle-aged, crusty, and blunt, Merry was not merry, but she wasn’t outright offensive either and I knew she was honest, so I didn’t count my change. Terry drank his beer and lit a cigarette and watched the two guys playing pool out of the corner of his eye.

“My second wife and I used to come here a lot,” I said, taking out my own cigarettes.

“Really?” Terry didn’t know anything about my second wife. “When was that?”

“Twelve, fifteen years ago, I guess. They used to have a real good dance floor. Hardwood floor.”

Terry glanced at the floor. “Where is it?”

“I don’t know, gone, covered up. Maybe the last flood got it. There used to be a bandstand in that corner, where the jukebox is. A little crippled guy named Howard used to sing. He wrote a song called, ‘Put this hearse in reverse, I ain’t going to die’.”

“What happened to him?”

I shrugged. “He died.”

I turned to look out the back windows and I saw the rain pouring down again, obscuring the view of the lake. This day was shot. I ordered two more beers.

“What happened to your second wife?” Terry asked, somewhat cautiously.

“Oh, well,” I breezed, “she picked one too many fights with me and I left her. Twenty-two years we were married. Hey, she even got thrown out of here one night for being nasty. She wound up in jail that night.”

Terry looked at me steadily, looking for the lie. “So what happened to her?”

I looked right back at him. “Two years after I left she got cancer, three years after that she killed herself—on my birthday.”

“Jesus.” Terry turned his attention back to the pool table. One guy with long tangled hair and a long messy beard stood roaring with laughter and shaking his pool stick. His somewhat cleaner opponent had scratched on the eight ball.

“Shut up, Bubba!” Merry stood with hands on hips and gave him the eye.

“Aw, I’m sorry, Merry,” he shouted back, still roaring.

Merry came around with the bar rag and emptied our ashtrays. “World’s best argument for abortion,” she growled, wiping the bar in front of us, “those two are brothers.”

An old man who looked exactly like Santa Claus came in smiling and went to the bar and Merry poured him a coke. The guy with the beard hollered, “Hey, Pappy!” and the old man turned to salute him. Several cars and pickup trucks drove into the parking lot and suddenly the bar filled up with people and noise and smoke. Merry turned the jukebox up. Terry shouted in my ear, “Does this happen every day?” I could only shrug.

I looked at every face, looked for somebody I knew from the old days. Truth is, I hadn’t been in this place for a decade; I had pretty much quit going out to bars during my third marriage. Then above the din I heard familiar laughter and I got off my barstool to go find the man in the crowd.

Tom Pace was a loud-mouthed, brawling, red-haired Irishman, about five-foot five and one-sixty, who was born and raised in this town and who earned his living as a master carpenter, normally for cash. He had no bank account, no telephone, and no permanent address. If you wanted him, you had to find him; or rather, you had to find his pickup in the parking lot of some bar. If he didn’t want to be found, he disappeared into the mountain wilderness for days or weeks at a time. Unlikely circumstances had thrown us together many years earlier, and we had become friends.

“Roberto, how the hell are you?” he shouted, as he embraced me in a bear hug, “where is your beautiful wife?” He gave me a toothy grin, his yellow teeth, crooked from many a smashing, seemed almost white in the frame of his bushy red and gray-speckled beard.

“I left her,” I shouted back, laughing at the startled expression in his eyes.

“Jesus Christ, you left her too?”

I nodded and saw his blue eyes twinkling. “Damn, I thought you were in loooove,” he yodeled, “come on, we gotta talk.”

I led him around the bar to the dining area, tapping Terry on the shoulder to join us. I introduced them.

“So what the hell are you doing?” Tom shouted, “you can’t just leave the most beautiful woman on earth, can you?”

“I guess I did,” I shouted back.

“Shit, man, she’s rich too, isn’t she?”

“Not yet.”

“You could have waited, for Christ’s sakes.”

“Yeah, maybe. I got tired of it, she couldn’t grow up.”

Tom slammed his fist on the table and beer slopped out of our glasses. “What the holy shit is that all about? You’re crazy! What’s her phone number?”

I laughed, “Pace, she wouldn’t give you the time of day.”

“Ain’t that the truth!” He smiled the way angels are supposed to smile, a kind of wistful and happy and self-satisfied smile, while he ran his glass through the slop on the table and sucked on a cigarette. “So what are you doing?”

As I told him about the motorhome and the search for a place to put it, he continued to smile like an angel, and he gazed at me with undisguised amusement. When I finished speaking, he looked out the window. “Okay,” he said, “come with me. I want to show you something.”

Twilight and rain were falling when we stepped outside and walked past the bar toward the boat dock. Tom led the way around and through the puddles in the dirt road to the breakwater at the end. Here were two giant native willows with a row of four fruitless mulberry trees planted between them. There were three numbered white posts, three electrical outlets, three water faucets, and three sewer pipes, three RV sites right on the lake, and nobody was parked there.

“Here you go!” Tom shouted into the gloom. “Here’s your new home!”

Neighbors

The motorhome was twenty-years old, basically a windowed box built on a truck chassis with a big engine, but everything I thought I needed worked, so I had shelter, heat, cooling, electricity, water, and mobility. I installed a security system, a computer, stereo, and a microwave oven.

The thing was a monster to drive, I had driven trucks and heavy equipment that were easy by comparison. It wandered on the highway, so it required constant attention and correction. The low mileage that initially impressed me as a virtue and the low selling price were thus explained.

The lake sparkled with brilliant morning light reflected from millions of tiny waves. A light breeze from the west stirred new leaves on the trees and I sat on the breakwater mesmerized by the view. Mount Konocti, an extinct volcano, dominated my horizon six miles west across the water and smaller ridges framed the lake to the north and south. Indian Island, covered with Live Oaks and majestic Valley Oaks and surrounded by tall green reeds, called tules here, stood a half-mile off to my left, guarding the channels that led to Anderson Marsh and Cache Creek, Clear Lake’s only outlet. At my immediate left, only a dozen feet away, lay the marina with its floating dock and slips for twenty boats and the old railway for hauling boats out of the water and into the boat shop next to the bar. At my back the sun rose over half a dozen old mobile homes and the dusty dirt road that looped around them and just behind me to the right sat another mobile home with three motorcycles and a car parked alongside. I wasn’t interested in anything that lay behind me, however, I was interested in the mystery and beauty of what lay before me. So I sat there, looking.

“Good morning.” The rough gravel voice startled me and I turned around. It was Santa Claus.

“Good morning,” I replied, getting up to have a closer look at this man. He had long white hair and a white beard, a pot belly, a friendly smile, and a twinkle in his eyes, but his thick, bare arms bore most un-Santa-like tattoos.

“They call me Pappy,” he growled. I introduced myself and we shook hands. He was strong.

“I walk my dog every morning,” he said, nodding his head toward a tiny, skinny, black animal that tottered out from under my motorhome. “His name is Wino, he’s almost blind.”

His voice was strange. Then I saw a hole in his neck about the size of a nickel: Cancer, larynx cut out, permanent stoma, so he swallowed air and belched it out as words, a very difficult technique to learn.

“You had cancer,” I said.

“Yeah,” he gave me a sharp glance, “twenty-five years ago.” Then he laughed, silently, a laughing smile and jiggle of his tummy, like a bowl full of jelly, and he pointed to the hole in his neck. “They did it to make me quit smoking.” And he went on laughing until I had to laugh too. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a can of chewing tobacco, licked his lips, gave me a wink, and walked away with a little skip, still laughing. I watched him walk past the motorcycles, giving each one a pat, and into the mobile home with his little black dog.

I went inside the motorhome and poured another cup of coffee, then went on to the rear where I had set up my laptop computer and I sat down to work. I had been writing every day since Bill died seven years earlier, and I was hooked on it, convinced that I would accomplish something before I also died. My novel was finished and revised and revised again, but I couldn’t find an agent who would sell it, not because it wasn’t any good, but because the message wasn’t something they wanted to represent. Still, I kept studying the market and sending out queries, and proof reading the thing over and over. I also had a collection of short stories that was steadily growing and a group of essays on various subjects. None of it was published; I didn’t even try. Finally, I kept a daily journal of my thoughts, observations, and intentions. Writing in this journal had already taken me down strange paths to examine otherwise unspeakable personal issues and had led to behavior that I could not explain to anybody except myself, like abandoning the woman I loved. This morning I gazed at the lake and the mountains, and I wrote what I saw before me and what thoughts this vision stimulated in my mind.

I finished recording a train of thought sometime in the afternoon, and I decided to have a beer. The floating dock rode high on the water, almost as high as the concrete retaining wall that bound the small marina. I dallied, and I peered into the green watery shadows under the dock for fish and there they were, dark fish-shapes moving slowly from one place to another. In the narrow open channel beyond the dock a small brown bird was floating and also peering into the water. After a minute it tipped forward and disappeared beneath the surface. I watched, but I did not see it reappear.

Coming out of the brilliant sunshine, I was temporarily blinded by the darkness inside the bar, a veritable black hole in the daylight. I went to the side where I could see out of the windows over the lake, and I ordered a pitcher. Merry was busy gabbing with two women on the other end of the bar, the jukebox was turned down, and the sound on the television was turned off, though it displayed a pre-season baseball game. The only other person in the place was the hairy guy I had seen playing pool, the guy Merry had called Bubba. His head was bobbing over a beer glass next to an empty pitcher and he was humming to himself.

I let my eyes watch the game on television while I enjoyed my beer and the new train of thought that was building steam inside my brain, so I hardly noticed the light touch on my shoulder.

“Hi, there, neighbor, they call me Bubba.”

I must have jumped because when I faced him he was already apologizing. “That’s okay,” I said, “I’m Bob, glad to know you.” Seen up close, his eyes behind thick glasses were like a child’s eyes, curious and innocent of thought or purpose.

“You going to live on the point?”

I guessed what he meant. “Yes,” I said.

“Gets mighty cold out there,” he said, waving toward the lake, making it sound like a hundred miles away instead of a hundred feet.

“That’s all right,” I said, “I’ve got heat.”

“Good,” he said, “that’s good.” He moved unsteadily toward the men’s room, repeating his words. I watched him and I thought about him. Forty-something, Vietnam vet, maybe, alcoholic, living on disability, damaged vocal chords, damaged liver, damaged lungs, damaged guts, dying without knowing it, just like my buddy Bradley, dead at forty-two. Beer for breakfast, he used to say, try it, it’s good for you. Bradley was a genius, his mother told me, before he went to Vietnam. Beer for lunch and beer for dinner, drink beer all day, it’s good for you. His necrotic bowels killed him, rotten guts from drinking beer all day every day for twenty-five years. Not so good.

I drank my beer and smoked my cigarettes and I watched the silent game on television. Pappy came in and Merry poured him a coke and before he could pull his money out I said, “I got that, Merry.” He grinned at me and he hoisted his glass. I left a dollar on the bar for Merry, and I went home, way out on the point, before the afternoon crowd arrived.

I intended to sit on the breakwater and watch the sun go down behind the mountains, but the growing wind out of the west was much too cold for that. Bubba was right. So I sat inside to watch and to wait for my new cellular phone to ring. She called me every day after work.

What am I doing? What have I done? Most improbably, I had been asking myself those questions every day for five years. And even more improbably, I had been answering them, the answers sometimes coming out in forms of emotional agony for which I could find no words at the time. Yet this was not some kind of ritual self-flagellation one might associate with religious enlightenment; this was an honest curiosity to know the truth.

Death can affect us, like it or not. The death of my step-mother permanently derailed all of my trains of thought, for example, and I was literally lost there for a while, for a year or so, while desperately trying to hang on to my identity as a husband and father and family provider. I was literally unhinged from the frame of life my mother had given me, and I had to create a frame of my own.

I was in the process of building a new life for myself when my best friend died, suddenly and unexpectedly. Best friend, what is that? Bill was my soul-mate, the one person who knew my thoughts as I knew his, the one person who laughed when I laughed, recognizing the same silliness in the world at the same moment that I did. I had longed to die, I wanted to go with him, but it was not to be. Whatever meaning I had invested in my new life crumbled before my eyes and I resolved, resolved, to start over again and to build with understanding and with knowledge. What have I done? What am I doing?

Cache Creek

“Hello? Do you have a Livingston for sale?”

It was hard to ask that question without laughing because Livingston the boat company was also the name of my friend, Kermit Livingston, with whom I had been corresponding for thirty-years. I had already owned one Livingston boat, an eight-foot dinghy that I used to get to my sailboat moored offshore in Konocti Bay. The dinghy had been crushed under pilings during a northern gale. This Livingston was a twelve-footer offered in the classified ads for three-hundred bucks, and I wanted it. It was there and I bought it.

These small boats were strongly built fiberglass catamarans that were stable in rough water. This particular boat looked like it had been dropped on its transom, drilled for attachments, and holed at least once, it was covered with patches and chipping layers of paint. It was perfect for my purposes.

“Hey, Bob, how’s it going?”

“Hey, Kat, come on in and see my castle.”

Katarina was an ICU nurse at the hospital, and we had been good friends for many years. We respected each other. She climbed the stairs into the motorhome and surveyed the place.

“It’s a little smaller than my stone-house,” she remarked, “but it looks like you have everything you need. How do you like it?”

“As you say,” I replied, “it’s okay.” She looked uncomfortable, so I grabbed the thermos jug and my camera and I said, “Let’s go.”

The little boat floated obediently inside one of the slips. I had already attached my son’s two-horse motor and loaded the oars and cushions and the gas can and the ice-chest. Kat stepped into the boat gingerly. She was not too sure about such a small boat.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “it isn’t going to sink.”

“I’m bigger than you are,” she said.

“Not a problem, just scoot forward a little.”

The boat didn’t have cross seats, or thwarts. It had a rigid and flat raised section between the hulls that ran fore and aft. It also had built-in air tanks for flotation in the bow and stern to sit on. There was plenty of room to scoot around.

I cast off the lines, stepped in, and started the motor on the first pull. The morning was cool and the sky was clear and a light breeze out of the west ruffled the surface of the lake. Gulls were fishing and squabbling, Mallard ducks were feeding on algae along the breakwater, and Western Grebes were hunting here and there, announcing their presence with a screech. Kat faced the bow and took it all in as we crossed the open water toward Indian Island.

I had been sailing on this lake for fifteen years and I knew its moods. A calm, safe breeze on a morning like this could turn onto a dangerous thirty-knot gale by late afternoon as the hot air rising in the Sacramento Valley fifty miles to the east drew in the cool air from the Pacific fifty miles to the west. The long axis of the lake pointed to the west wind, and the mountains all around funneled the wind over the surface for miles, pushing the water into steep, choppy waves that could easily swamp a small boat.

There was still abundant green on the mountain chaparral, but the grasses had already bloomed and seeded and dried to a light-tan shade of brown, the brown hills of summer, brown until they burned, that is. I slowed the motor, and we drifted past the tule beds along the island. Kat had her binoculars up, and she was watching a half-dozen cormorants drying out on the limbs of a dead oak tree up ahead.

“There’s an eagle over the marsh,” I said, pointing up and to the left. Kat glanced at me, then looked through her binoculars again.

“Bald Eagle,” she said, watching it swoop down until she lost it in the line of willow trees that bordered the marsh.

“They winter here,” I said. “Watch for Golden Eagles, too, they nest here.”

We putted past the cormorants, who spread their wings in the sunlight and stared at us indifferently. How silly for a bird to take up diving for a living when its feathers got wet.

“You could use the cormorant as an argument for the non-existence of God,” I remarked.

Kat put down her binoculars and peered over her shoulder at me. “Come again?”

“Why would God make a diving bird that got wet? It must be some kind of mistake.”

“Maybe they are the reincarnation of men who ask stupid questions,” she said.

“Ah, punishment therapy, that makes sense.”

Kat shook her head and muttered something I couldn’t hear. Reincarnation did come up in conversation between critical-care professionals sometimes, perhaps because we saw so many people die and nobody knew what happened to them afterwards. I mean, one minute you’re dealing with a person and the next minute you’re dealing with a corpse. Where did the person go?

“Do you suppose cormorants have individual personalities?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, not turning this time. “They all look alike to me.”

“We probably look alike to them, too. I think that ducks do.”

“Ducks do what?”

“Have individual personalities. I’ve been watching a pair of Mallards, a male and a female. They sit on the breakwater every afternoon and gossip.”

Kat turned around this time and stared at me. “Bob, you’re crazy, you know that, don’t you?”

“No, I’m not. They sit there side by side, touching, facing the lake, and they sub-vocalize back and forth. It’s not this quack, quack stuff, it’s a soft and rapid vocalization. One will look to the left and say something, and then the other one will look to the left and say something. It’s exactly like two people sitting on a park bench and commenting on the changing scene in front of them.”

Kat smiled and turned away. “I love it,” she said and then she laughed out loud for a minute. Quack, quack, quack. Quaaaack, quackquackquackquackquack.

We crossed the tiny strait and passed into the main channel of Cache Creek. The steep slope of the ridge on the right was a perfect demonstration of altitude habitat zones. The narrow strip of riparian reeds and willows gave way to Blue Oak Savannah, then to Black Oaks and Yellow Pines (Ponderosa Pines), and finally to the mighty Sugar Pines with their two-foot cones on the top of the ridge. To the left was Garner Island with its ancient willows hanging over the water and its acres of tall, impenetrable, poisonous Hemlock.

“Isn’t there an Indian village site on that island?” Kat asked.

“Yes,” I answered, “John Parker, the archeologist, took our class to see it, but it’s been pretty badly plundered by people hunting for artifacts. He said there were sites all over this area. Indian bones have been carbon-dated back ten-thousand years.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. He also showed us the burial site in Big Valley. You can see the bones sticking out of the bank on Kelsey Creek. Just think, people were living here at the same time people were building Susa and Mohenjo Daro.”

“Where’s that?”

“In the Tigris and Indus river valleys, Iraq and India, today.”

Kat faced forward again and said nothing for a few minutes. Finally, she said, “Where do you get that stuff?”

“Books, Katarina, books, I read books. Great things, books, it’s amazing what’s in some of them.”

After a straight half-mile, the creek turns left and meanders south. For another half-mile the shoreline is indistinct in marshy woodlands, then around a bend some expensive homes appear on the left bank, while the right bank becomes thick with tall Valley Oaks, a rookery for Great Blue Herons, on what is called Rattlesnake Island. Passing between these places in my tiny, tattered boat on a weekday amuses me far more than reason could explain.

“Look up, Kat, see those piles of sticks in the treetops? Those are the heron nests.”

I stopped the motor and let the boat drift beneath the trees while Kat scanned with her binoculars.

“Yes, I see them, I see the birds walking around. They look awkward up there.”

“You can hear them arguing.”

I put an oar in the water to steer and let the current carry us past the housing development and the rookery; then I started the motor again to push on through the tumble-down, poverty stricken mobile home parks and under the new highway bridge, now home to several dozen families of barn swallows. We motored through a neighborhood of old vacation cottages that were now occupied year-round by their aging owners and then broke free into the uninhabited wildness that waited there just outside of town.

Another steep and rugged mountain slope rose on the right and a broad open plain of grassland stretched away on the left. Ahead I saw where the trees ended and the mountain was covered with brown grass. The locals invariably called such places Bald Mountain or Mount Baldy because there were few trees growing there. It was the wind, of course, the prevailing wind scoured such open slopes and kept the trees away. I searched for a cut-bank on the opposite shore and then drove the boat ashore.

“What are you doing?” Kat asked, unalarmed.

“Tom Pace told me there was an eagle nest up there,” I said, pointing up to three large pines growing out of a cleft in the bald mountain, “he asked me to check on the fledglings.”

“Really?” she said, pulling up the binoculars again. “Who is he?”

I struggled with the zoom lens on my camera and finally got it focused well enough to find the nest and then to find the birds perched here and there on the pines. I started shooting pictures.

“Tom is an old drinking buddy of mine,” I said. “He grew up around here. How many birds do you see?”

“Five,” she said, after a moment.

“Hmmm, that’s what he said. Good.”

I packed the camera away and pushed off with an oar. The current took the boat and slowly turned it around and around as we floated down the stream. I kept my eyes on the eagle trees and a few moments later I saw one of the adults soar out and over us to hunt the open plain beyond.

“How much are you drinking these days?” Kat asked.

“About the same as ever,” I said, “why?”

“I just wondered. I quit, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Drinking screwed up my life, I had to quit. I think it’s different for you.”

“I don’t know. My life looks pretty screwed up, I suppose, but I don’t think it is.”

The creek became wider and the current slower on the south side of the mountain and the dam came into view. The water in Clear Lake had become the focal point of political battles a century ago. Farmers in the Sacramento Valley where Cache Creek emerged from the mountains wanted the water to irrigate crops. Farmers in Lake County wanted the water too and they also wanted a stable lake level throughout the year, especially during the winter months, the rainy season, when the lake flooded. There were more farmers with influence in Yolo County than there were in Lake County, so the courts gave the water in Clear Lake to Yolo County. Pretty simple. Yolo County built a dam on Cache Creek in Lake County to control the flow of water out of Clear Lake. During a flood in the 1920s the farmers in Lake County blew it up, so Yolo County built another one.

Water is a major big deal in the west—where the water goes, the money flows. When the development and growth of California south of the Tehachapi Mountains, that is Southern California, was stymied for lack of water, the influential people persuaded the state and the federal government to build gigantic dams in Northern California to impound and to regulate the water, where it was, and to build gigantic pipelines over the mountains to the golf courses, toilets, and swimming pools of Southern California, where it wasn’t. Politicians, land developers, real estate companies, and movie stars are pretty much indistinguishable from each other in California—they all feed on public gullibility—so the south-land got its water.

The issue visited Lake County many times. Somebody noticed that the Eel River was born in the mountains of Lake County and then wandered out of the watershed to the northwest, away from the urban sprawl far to the south. Engineers said it would be relatively simple to bore a hole through the mountains with taxpayers’ money and pour the Eel River into Clear Lake, which would divert the water toward the Sacramento River and to those gigantic pumps and pipelines to the south. The national political timing for this project was wrong, however, and it was shelved.

Clear Lake residents always screamed when the lake flooded and shoreline property was inundated and they were always assured that the sluice gates on the dam were wide open, aerial photographs demonstrating the contrary notwithstanding. Influential citizens living in expensive rural developments screamed to the right people in Washington and the Army Corps of Engineers came to the rescue. They analyzed the situation and decided that the problem was located in a section of Cache Creek called the Grigsby Riffle, an outcropping of bedrock near the highway bridge, despite the fact that at flood stage the outcrop lay beneath ten to fourteen feet of water and did not obstruct the flow. Eliminating this problem would have been a major first step in the Eel River Project, however, because this outcrop stopped the flow of water out of the lake during the dry months of summer—Yolo County had already tried pumping water out of the lake and over this outcrop years earlier. The Corps proposed several drastic schemes that involved widespread seizure of land and destruction of property in the poorer districts, but they never breathed a word about the dam. At public meetings held to review these schemes, the old-timers laughed the Army out of town, but I’m sure they’ll be back some day.

Clear Lake has the unique distinction of being an ancient and natural body of fresh water in a land of artificial impoundments of fresh water. It was not designed and dug to engineering specifications, it was created by volcanic and tectonic forces of nature. Sometimes it flowed to the west, sometimes it flowed to the east, sometimes it nearly dried out, and sometimes it was two-hundred feet deeper than it is today, as it will be again, given an earthquake at the right time in the right place. Fish evolved there that cannot be found elsewhere and unnamed diatoms still lurk in its foodchain. Clear Lake is not clear, by the way, and it never was. It is green. Core samples of the lake bottom demonstrate that algae and tules and willows have lived there for thousands of years. Watching the lake and smelling it day after day soon reveals that it is a living and breathing soup of life.

I ran the boat ashore again opposite the gatekeeper’s mobile home and we walked over to the fence to look at the dam. It was a primitive structure, as dams go, the concrete surface was rough and cobbled with aggregate, concrete mixed by hand, and the iron clamshell gates were thick with rust. It looked like the set for a movie, an old-time fantasy, and I half-expected to see a troll appear from the mossy shadows under the waterfall. We sat on a log to eat lunch.

“How are your kids doing?” Kat asked.

“Great! They’re getting rich in the silicon gold-fields. How is your son?”

“He’s doing well, too. He will graduate next year. This generation of kids constantly surprises me.”

“Yeah, it’s all work and no play for them.”

“It wasn’t like that for us.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“I ran into a woman in the grocery store who used to be a neighbor. She said her kids were either in jail or on probation and she said my kids had an unfair advantage because I didn’t have a television set.”

“Hmmm, neither did I.”

“She was kind of pissed off about it.”

“Moron.”

“Yup.”

The sun was high and hot and the breeze had died in the canyon. We loaded up, and I started the motor for the return trip. The Great Blue Herons and the Common Egrets stood still as statues along the banks of the creek and watched us pass. There were no other boats out on a weekday, and we saw nobody near the water until we reached the trailer parks again, where some children played in the shallows on a crumbling boat-ramp. The breeze was fresh out on the lake, however, and I stayed in the lee of the mountain until I could square away toward the Lotowana Marina. The waves were rising to the height of the transom even as we crossed the open water, and I was happy enough to run behind the retaining wall and tie up in the slip.

Kat helped me carry things back to the motorhome. She put her stuff into the Jeep and then she stood there grinning, waiting for me.

“That was a wonderful trip, Bob, thanks for inviting me.”

“Hey, thanks for coming along.”

She glanced at the beer can in my hand and she shook her head, still grinning. She got in and cranked it up and drove away. I opened my beer.

Trailer

“I’m telling you, I’ve seen that trailer and it’s a piece of junk.”

“You don’t have to shout, Pace, I hear you.”

“I’m just telling you that he gutted the inside and he ruined it. He even put in an ordinary refrigerator. It’s supposed to be a travel trailer, for Christ’s sakes, not a park trailer.”

“I get the picture, Tom, you don’t have to repeat it again.”

“Well? Well?”

“I’m going to look at it in the morning.”

“Jesus!” Tom gave me a lopsided grin. “You don’t listen to anybody, do you?”

“Not much, I guess.”

“Well, to hell with it, then, let’s go have a beer.”

I really had not thought about it until the voltage regulator in my battery charger failed and destroyed my brand new deep-cycle battery. Everybody thought the sulfurous stink was coming from the sewer as the west wind carried it off the point and wafted it throughout the park. I searched everywhere for the source of this nauseating annoyance, for it was clearly coming from my motorhome. Finally, I thought it might be the rotting carcass of an animal who had crawled into the engine compartment to die and I popped the hood to have a look. I could feel the heat coming from the battery, it was hot enough to explode. I quickly shut off the electricity and then I sat down to study the situation.

A twenty-year old motorhome with only forty-thousand miles on the odometer had been sitting around somewhere, doing nothing, for an awfully long time. It had been exposed to a lot of heat, cold, dust, moisture, and idleness. Gas and oil and synthetic gaskets deteriorated in idle time and so did electric switches and plastic pipelines. Puddles of water had formed on the roof and sat there for months at a time, making the rafters sag and stretching the joints between the aluminum sheathing panels to the breaking point. This thing was a disaster waiting to happen.

Okay, so I made a mistake, what do I do about it? I read in the classified ads that somebody wanted to sell or trade a restored thirty-foot fifth-wheel travel trailer. I decided to look at it and find out what kind of deal I could make.

Gustavio Bertolucci was a chunky man in his eighties. He had a wild shock of white hair, bushy white eyebrows, and fierce black eyes. He sat in a lawn chair on the back porch of the double-wide mobile home next to an ice chest full of beer.

“Call me Gus,” he said, “you want a beer?”

“It’s pretty early for me,” I said, placing his accent in the San Francisco Italian community, “sure.”

“So you knew Chet, did you?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I met him years ago when he tended bar, then I helped to take care of him in the hospital.”

“Cancer!” Gus ground out his cigarette angrily, “What a way to die! He did okay, though, he was a tough guy.”

“Yes, he died well.”

“Well, you probably don’t know this, but Chet and his daughter didn’t get along, so he put me in charge of his estate. I gotta get rid of all this stuff.”

“That’s a big job,” I said.

He gave me a sharp look. “Yeah, it is. So you’re interested in the trailer, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, go on up and look at it, it’s open. I got tin knees, I don’t walk so good.” He patted the two canes that hung from his chair.

I briefly wondered what, or perhaps who, had ruined his knees, but I didn’t ask. I walked up the hill and then walked around the trailer. It seemed to be pretty big, but it was jacked up on blocks, so that was deceptive. It had lots of windows, a plus in my opinion. I opened the door. Pace was wrong, it was not torn up inside. Quite the opposite, it had new carpeting, new tile, a new furnace, a new water-heater, and a new refrigerator. He was right about the refrigerator, it was a small, standard, apartment model. The bedroom over the hitch had only four-feet of headroom, but I didn’t think that mattered. I checked the ceiling panels for dry rot and water stains and I didn’t find any.

“I like it,” I said, “I’d like to trade you a motorhome for it.” I saw a split-second flash of interest in his eyes.

“What kind of motorhome?” he asked, now wary.

I gave him the details and I even told him about the switch I had installed on the battery charger. He seemed more than a little interested.

“I could use something like that during deer season,” he said, “I’ll come look at it in the morning.”

He liked what he saw the next day and we shook hands on the deal. We went to the bar to sign the papers.

“I’ll get Sonny over here this afternoon and take it for a drive,” he said, “maybe I can get it smogged today.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go out to your place and pick up the hitch; then I’ll meet you back here.”

I was already fretting about that hitch. I was still driving my ex-wife’s pickup, another twenty-year old with a big-block engine that she used to haul hay and to pull the horse trailer. I didn’t think she would mind having a fifth-wheel hitch installed in the bed, but I didn’t know how I was going to install it. The bolts were half-inch in diameter, so I bought a half-inch drill-bit that had been machined to fit a three-eighths drill chuck, but my utility drill just didn’t have enough power to drill through that steel. I was working on it in the shade of the willow tree next to space three when Pace drove up.

“What the hell are you doing with that toy drill?” he yelled.

“What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to drill a hole.”

Pace got out of his battered, vintage pickup, and stood there with a toothy grin. “You’ll never do it with that,” he said, clearly delighted by my feeble efforts.

“What do you suggest I do?” I sat down and wiped the sweat from my forehead with my shirtsleeve.

“Use a real drill,” he said cheerfully.

“And where do I get a real drill, Mr. Pace?”

“Oh,” he laughed, “I got one right here.”

He walked around to the passenger side of his pickup, opened one compartment in the tool-bed and pulled out a two-handed electric drill five-times larger than mine. He held it up jauntily and said, “This ought to do it. Now, what are we doing?”

“We’re installing a fifth-wheel hitch.”

“Aw, no.” He looked crestfallen. “Aw, Jesus, you didn’t buy that thing, did you?”

“No,” I said, “I traded for it.”

“Bob, listen to me,” he came close, I could smell him, “you’ve got a perfectly good motorhome. You can live in it here or you can crank it up and go live in the mountains or you can live on the coast. Don’t throw it away.”

“Tom, I know, I’ve thought about it, I don’t want to drive away, I want to stay put.”

“And do what?”

“Write.”

“Okay, okay,” he sighed, “give me that bit and let’s get it over with.”

Everybody who lived in the park or who came to the bar every day knew what I was doing and I listened to advice from each and every one of them.

“You watch that Gus, he’d skin his grandmother for a nickel.”

“You don’t want a fifth-wheel, they’ll tip over in a cross-wind.”

“You’ll freeze out on the point come winter.”

Even Patrick stopped me in the parking lot, he wasn’t allowed in the bar, to tell me, “Listen, man, you got a good deal, live with it.”

I looked into his watering, unfocused eyes, and I stayed upwind of him, “Thanks, Patrick, I will.”

“Just live with it, man, live with it.” He reached out to touch me and he nearly fell down. I grabbed his arm to steady him and I thanked him again. Stupefied from a steady diet of drugs and alcohol, this man might stand in one place for an hour, like a man standing on the edge of a precipice, afraid to move, staring into his own abyss.

The next morning I drove out to pick up the trailer. Gus was in his usual place and Sonny was there to help me. I took Sonny to be a very intelligent youngster, twenty-something, tall and strong, who wasn’t afraid to look you in the eye. I knew his dad and his dad was the same way, only his dad was a trickster, a two-bit con artist who talked the talk and then didn’t show up to walk the walk. Still, I kind of liked the guy for his brazen lies and for his bottomless sense of humor.

We jacked the trailer up and pulled out the blocks and then let it down on its tires. I checked the air pressure in all four, they were fine. I hooked up in no time and drove away.

I had sketched out my strategy in advance. I would drive up the old highway from the south and make a left turn on Clement to give the rig extra radius to turn and then drive straight into space three on the waterfront, between two of the fruitless mulberry trees, somehow disconnect the truck, and then somehow push the trailer headfirst into the site. I wanted the raised bedroom to face the lake so I could lie in bed and look out over the water to the mountains beyond. Besides, the rear end had no windows. It was the bathroom and it had to face the dusty loop that was the driveway. I had purchased two planks and greased them, thinking I could drop the jack skids on them and skid it into place.

So I drove in until the front bumper touched the breakwater and then I got out to study the situation. Nobody had noticed my arrival yet. I wasn’t quite lined up the way I wanted, so I backed up and tried again. Pappy came out and stood off to one side to watch. I figured the angles as best I could and I dropped a marker on the ground, then I backed up again and turned the steering wheel as far left as it would go. I got out and eye-balled the angles again. This time Jack and Sue-Marie stood with Pappy off to one side to watch. I inched forward to see if the truck would hit the tree and then I got out to crank the jack down and to put the planks in place. Sue-Marie had gone, but Pappy and Jack had been joined by Ronald and Sissy and Sonny and his dad and another half-dozen people were walking over from the bar. I disconnected the trailer, got back in the truck, and drove it around to the parking lot.

The trailer stood about halfway in and halfway out of the trailer space. I had to move it forward about fifteen feet. I looked at it and the crowd looked at and nobody said a word. Pappy walked over to me.

“You want to put it in there head first?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“You won’t be able to get it out.”

“If I can get it in, I can get it out.”

“What will you do when it floods?”

“I don’t know.”

I walked to the back end of the trailer and gave it a shove. It didn’t budge. I shoved harder. It didn’t budge. Then Sonny’s dad, Michael, came over to help me and we both shoved. It didn’t budge. Then Sonny and Richard came over to help and we all shoved. It didn’t budge.

“This isn’t going to work,” Michael said.

“I think you’re right,” I said.

“It was a good idea, though,” Richard said.

“Yeah, it might have worked,” Sonny said.

“What the hell are you doing now?”

I didn’t see Pace drive in. He walked up to the trailer and leaned into it and it moved a fraction of an inch. “It’ll only take about a week of this,” he shouted, “I’ll bring up the truck and push the damned thing into place, then you’ll never get it out.”

“Wait a minute, Pace,” Michael said, “I think there’s an easier way to do this.”

“What the hell do you know?”

“I know he doesn’t want to push it in the lake.”

“Yeah, that’s where it belongs, it’s a pile of junk.”

“Wait a minute, I know how to do this.”

Instantly, I was hearing a dozen suggestions for moving the trailer, everybody had a bright idea. Michael disappeared, and then he reappeared kicking a ten-foot length of white-painted telephone pole along the ground. It was one of the barriers from the parking lot. He kicked it under the trailer and then squared it around by hand.

“Listen up, people,” he shouted, “we’ll drop the frame on the pole and then roll it forward.”

He cranked the jack until the front end of the frame rested on the pole. Tipped down in the front like that, the trailer looked poised and ready to jump into the lake. He ran to the back of the trailer and pushed with one hand and the trailer rolled forward three feet. Others got the message and manned the jack handle while somebody else grabbed the log and moved it forward. I stood back with Pappy this time and watched.

“They’re going to push it in the lake,” he said.

“Maybe they will,” I said.

Four sets and the trailer stood in place. The people laughed and cheered and I walked with them to the bar to buy everybody a beer. Pace was not there. A little later I returned to the trailer to hook up the utilities and I found him sitting in his truck, staring at the lake.

“I’ll help you level it up,” he said, getting out and grabbing a long steel level.

“Did you look inside yet.”

“No, I don’t want to see it.”

“I’m telling you it’s a nice place.”

“And I’m telling you, you’re crazy. Go put the level on the floor and I’ll crank it.”

We fussed with it for a while, yelling instructions back and forth, until I thought it was level enough to live with, but Pace wasn’t satisfied.

“See if the door opens and closes all right,” he yelled.

“Yes, it does.”

“Check the doors inside.”

“There’s only one, it’s okay.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He came around the trailer and he poked his head inside. He looked and he looked and finally he said, “Hey, this place looks pretty nice. You know what? It’s not the same trailer.

I didn’t say a word.

THE END