start of something that may never be finished

CH.1

It was simply the way things were done in the mountains. Your honesty was not questioned, but perhaps your sanity was. Things had their own place and their own time in which to happen. One would not rush the granite as it weathered into sand and flowed down the steep river canyons into the valleys, just as one would not rush Grandpa John Henry getting out of his pickup truck. Especially a little girl with golden Medusa curls jumping like a puppy begging to be put in the back of a truck with the dog Daisy and carted around the ranch.

A grunt sufficed well enough to say ‘all in good time child’.

“Your mamma here?” was the vocal answer to the girls excitement as a screen door on the faded old porch slammed shut.

“Hi dad!” Jenny said as she wiped her floured hands on her skirt, “Come on in. You want some coffee? I’m just making some bread.”

In the mountains one always offers a drink before business: tea, coffee, beer, whiskey, whatever is on hand. Business is never rushed. The legalities of a timber ranch need not be an unpleasant experience. And a chance to learn from your elders should be used and gossiped about later with all other progressives at the swimming hole.

The swimming hole was the social center of ranch life. The meeting place, the day care, the rest of young mothers with active children and active husbands, the beauty parlor of mountain women. Clad in everything from jeans and hats to underwear or absolutely nothing at all, the women (and sometimes the men), of the ranch met at the swimming hole to exfoliate their skin with sand, mask their faces with rich smelling river mud, and soak up the sierra sun taking a few hours rest as their children or nieces or cousins caught frogs and tried to drown each other in the mountain creek. Generations of children survived the onslaught of the swimming hole to move from the rapids as “babies” to the deep water of “you kids”, from the deep water to the high rocks of “those teenagers”, from the high rocks to the grassy banks in a folding chair with a beer as an “adult”. Despite the elevation in social status the only opinion truly respected was that of the crying babies.

Grandpa John moved like a glacier towards his chair on the sagging porch of the cabin.

“Just coffee.” He said to Jenny with a softness in his vo

ice reserved for his youngest daughter and her children. There was a bond between them that was missing with his other children and grandchildren. That is not to say that he did not love his other children and grandchildren. He did, with more h

eart than a run of the mill city man or red neck country man could muster, but there was something different about his youngest. She had left, as all of his children did with maturity, and had gone on to seek a new reality in the rush of y

outhful life, but her difference was that she came back. The ranch and the land came first in her world. Everything else was a pleasant surprise. There lay the bond. Knowing the land.

It is an intimate thing to know land, as personal as o

nes relationship to god, indeed some may state it is the same. To know the land one must live it. Studying it only gives one so many names and processes. To be a part of these processes is something altogether different. The soil on the edge of a meadow has as many colors and smells as there are hours in the year. Individual trees change co

urse, grow, or weaken. Blades of grass move one way and then another. Sand piles along the streambeds slowly over a summer and washes away in the first rains of fall.

It would break Grandpa John’s heart when his family

would say to him:

“I love the Ranch, it never changes.” For it did. Everyday such changes were happening. The Pileated woodpeckers were back in the deep forest and

the mated mallards in the lower big meadow had four eggs to watch now, there were twenty five buds on the leopard lily this year, and the river changed course by the old homestead in the sandbanks. ‘How did no one else notice these things?’ He would

wonder with his sad eyes. ‘Do you not see these changes? They may be small to your eyes, but here they are great changes.’ To the modern eye however, new growth on the tips of the pines and a difference in the number of flowers in the

lower meadow, were not drastic enough to warrant attention, much less anything called “change”.

John had planted the leopard lily by his cabin. Though it was native to the valley no one had seen

one bloom since the cattle were introduced during the depression to pay the taxes on the land.

The lily struggled and produced a bloom, perhaps two, for decades. One year six perfect buds

appeared on the suddenly vigorous plant. John showed a young college aged Jenny the delicate

and precious blossoms with the pride of a new father. She felt honored to be the one who

received such a secret and was in the process of opening her mouth to give her reserved and

collected father, whose eyes were bright as a child's, a passionate response that would unnerve

him when the stick she was throwing for her border collie cut the stem of each and every

blossom leaving the beheaded flowers in the grass at their feet. For a moment they were silent

in shock at the heartbreaking sight before them.

"Well," John finally said with reservation, "there's always next year."

Jenny told her children the story every year after her father died when the leopard lilies were in

bloom while she tended the bulbs.

The curly haired girl child came and sat on the steps near her grandfather’s feet. Her brother played a few yards off in the soft grass balancing one rock on top of another making a tall tower to run into with his Tonka Trucks.

“There’s three baby birds in the sundial grandpa!” The little girl proudly told John, “Dad showed me!” Kirk, Jenny’s husband, was a lover of wild things. He was peaceful enough to get close, patient enough to wait until they told him their secrets, and wise enough not to tell, except to his family. Perhaps it is why Jenny loved him so much for she was a wild creature of another sort and needed a patient man fond of the magic of nature.

“Maybe you want to come for a ride with me today Lara?” grandpa asked the excited girl. She nodded and her hair sprayed around her head like water. Her mother had the same hair, only a rich black which contrasted with her warm blue eyes which usually sparkled with mischief. Coyote the Trickster had a long relationship with the family out at Brownes Meadows Ranch and occasionally showed his face.

Lara loved riding in grandpas truck. He would drive as slow as a turtle over the roads of the ranch, stopping to prune tree branches near the road “because you have to always be working at it” he would say, or talk with a relative about what a dry summer it had been and whether or not it would rain. Or they would go up to the spring and check to make sure the pipe that sucked fresh water down to the cabin was not filled with sludge and leaves. Sometimes they would visit a logging site. Lara had to stay in the back of the truck at these times. Oh how she wanted to go with grandpa and stand with her feet far apart, arms folded, leaning back on her heels like everyone important at the ranch did and say things like “we-ell, I just don’t know about that.”

These rides with grandpa wore him out considerably. It was hard work answering all the questions she asked. But it was hard work for her to stay still long enough to hear an answer. Sometimes they would visit the house site where Jenny and Kirk were building a home to raise their children in. The house site not only had a great view of the big meadow, but also had wonderful southern exposure, a blessing in the winter and a wonderful energy source in the summer. It had been picked for several reasons, the grinding rocks on either side attested to proof that humans, mainly the Mi-Wuk, had deemed this place worthy for the last 15,000 years. Jenny had once had a large tee-pee erected on this site as well where she lived for a few summers as a young woman.

She had a small garden plot out there and a fire ring just outside her tee-pee where she would cook her food. Agape, her beloved border collie would patiently guard the boarder of their small territory and sleep, ever watchful, under the flaps that housed her mistress. At night the shadows of coyotes would grow on the tee-pee walls as they circled outside the dwelling inspecting the camp for food. Jenny would watch them move and listen to them talk in excited yips and yowls.

The coyote and the Matkins had a long history together which each generation honored in their own way. Lois, Johns wife would line their five children up at sunset to howl at the coyotes and help them bring the sun down and the evening up. Jenny still honored this tradition of her mothers and could be caught many a evening howling sonatas and tid-bits of boogie-woogie with the willing coyote pack.

Kirk used to twinkle his iceberg blue eyes at his children and say: “I married your mamma because she could talk to coyotes”, at which Jenny would huff and go about her business with a

smile on her lips. They had met at a “Friends of the River” convention to save the Stanislaus River from being dammed up and turned into a reservoir. Driven, passionate people with a love of the wild had convened together strapped themselves to trees and protested the manifest destiny idea of progress. Kirk walked into the meeting in a pair of leather pants he wore to guard his legs while riding his motorcycle, his blue eyes peeking out of his shaggy black hair like a wolf would stare at prey. Cautiously, studiously, intent on capture, and sure of himself. Jenny took one look at him in all of his handsome devil-may-care-ness and told her friends: “That’s a man who will cause trouble!” Later she would say she knew that this was the father of her children so she had better like him.

At the time she owned a health food store. Kirk stalked into her whole grains section and shyly asked if it was uncouth to invite her out for a beer and pizza. Jenny leaned over the counter, inadvertently allowing her red polka dot dress to open in the front and giving him a view of her that he would never forget. Kirk gazed down her red summer dress and knew he was in trouble for a long long time.