Suzy Says

After lunch, my sister suggested that we take Schatzi and explore the Little River Cemetery. It’s a charming place, and though we’ve both driven by it many times, neither of us has ever stopped to pay our respects. I always enjoy walking around graveyards, especially very old ones in England or the fascinating Sleepy Hollow Cemetery which I visited* a couple of years ago.

Still in my unsensible sandals, but with the addition of sunscreen, we loaded the dog into the car and were on our way.

We crossed over the Albion Bridge (fun fact: it’s the only wooden bridge still in use on the entire 655 miles of Highway 1) and were soon at the cemetery. With Schatzi respectfully on her leash, we wandered the grounds. The graves date back to the 1800s, and the most recent we saw was from 2005. There was also one for a couple, with only the birth date for one spouse. That’s planning ahead.

An elaborate monument honors the brief lives of one family’s five children. I don’t know if any of the others grew up, but it must have been devastating. The twins who died a month apart at the age of four or so were heart-breaking, too.

Back then, the style was to say how many years, months and days old a person was, whether they were 6 or 60. Lambs were a popular motif for children; adults had clasped hands, roses, or weeping willows. I liked the epitaph “Lost from sight, but alive in memory”.

Again my footwear was problematic, since the area is apparently extremely popular among gophers. There were dusty holes all over, and once my foot even sank into the grass far enough to be disturbing.

You’d never guess it from the road, but behind the cemetery is a path which leads through the woods to the rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean. The path passes an intriguing sort of bowl, 80 feet deep or so. The bottom is sand, and you can see a cave or tunnel leading to the ocean and stained with salt water. You can also hear the ocean, but the water doesn’t seem to come in. Mysterious…

The forest is magical and hushed and you wouldn’t be surprised to see dinosaurs come crashing through it. Unfortunately, we had to keep to the path since it was poison oak central, but it was amazing. We could look through the clearing to the silvery ocean and its rough black rocks, the waves crashing and the wind blowing through the trees, bowed by decades of past storms.

You’re probably wondering where the visual aids are, and indeed, my ancient camera is full of photos which would show you what I mean. However, the camera is on strike, hopefully temporarily. I’m planning to take it to the Apple store and see if one of the Geniuses behind the Bar can manage to extract the photos for me. I’ll keep you posted (and keep posting) in the meantime.

*Cool photo, if I say so myself.

The red sun against the smoky Oakland sky, Thursday evening

My brother and sister’s Summer Solstice party was suddenly ended by an unexpected and wildly out of season rain-free lightning storm. There were thousands of lightning strikes, setting the dry trees and shrubs on fire. California usually only gets rain in the winter, so wildfires are a real danger every summer.

I am proud to say that my brother has been a member of the local volunteer fire department for many years. He sleeps with his boots beside his bed, and never leaves home without his pager. He and his fellow fire fighters leapt into action. My sister went down to the firehouse to make food and wash the tired men’s sweaty, sooty clothes as they cycled in and out of the relentless flames.

She called me with updates, and for a while each was scarier than the last. At one point, my brother called from the front lines and told her to pack up all the essentials from both houses and get ready to evacuate. Fortunately, the wind shifted and spared them, leaving their houses and gardens coated in ash, like a light snowfall. I have rarely been so frightened or felt so helpless, 150 miles away from where my siblings could be losing their houses – and in my brother’s case, his life.

I am so incredibly thankful that they are safe and sound, though the fires rage on. One hundred and twenty one fires have burned 42 acres and threatened 900 homes in their county. Fellow firemen from Nevada and Oregon have come to help. The skies here are still hazy with smoke.

Volunteer fire departments aren’t limited to small rural communities like the one where my brother and sister live. According to the US Fire Administration, 87% of fire departments are volunteer or mostly volunteer, and protect 38% of the population.

Have you thanked your fire department today?

Update:

When my brother came off a 24 hour shift this week, he found a thank you note in his car – along with $50, a bag of cherries, and some chocolate. All along the roads, there are signs telling the fire department “We love you!” “Thank you!” – and the amounts of water available on that particular property, with directions for the fire department to take what they need. And the lone grocery store is taking donations. Nothing like a small town, especially one with such heart.

When you call 911 in or near my sister’s little town, you’ll get her (and sometimes my brother) if she’s on duty. She, on the other hand, has no idea what she’s going to get. A couple of recent examples:

1. Arrive at scene to find a man wildly attacking his couch with a machete. Back away slowly, call Sheriff’s Office, and make a run for it. Discuss how call could have been made. Find out later that Machete Man’s friend saw the beginning stages of furniture murder and called 911, then had the wisdom to beat it (though he definitely seems to have bad taste in friends).

2. Arrive at tiny hillbilly shack (cue “Deliverance” theme here) after long and gruelling drive in the pitch dark, with trees and shrubbery scraping the sides of the ambulance as you drive slowly down a dirt track. Wonder if there really is a shack anywhere in the vicinity. See light shining out of open door of shack. Go in, calling out, “Hello? Ambulance! Hellloooo!” No response. Start looking through shack, reasoning that if the lights are on and the door is open and someone has called 911, there should be someone on the premises.

   There is, but it’s an old dead guy, clad only in diapers with his dentures beside him.

   Now, dead men not only don’t tell tales, they don’t make phone calls, either. The mystery of who called is solved by the arrival of the deceased’s extremely drunk niece, whose breath is so horrifyingly flammable that EMT’s and paramedics alike immediately move to the other side of the room in self defense. (A little-known skill of emergency personnel is knowing exactly what form of booze is causing the bad breath in question. My sis tells me she always knows if it’s beer, wine, whiskey, etc.) Call the morgue (ambulances don’t pick up those who are already dead) and get away as fast as possible.

Even when they’re off-duty, they’re on duty. A couple of my sister’s co-workers spotted a couple of overly optimistic tourists getting ready to set out on the Pacific in an inflatable raft. They pointed out to these hopeful folks that the wind and waves were so high that the commercial fishermen wouldn’t venture out. But they went out anyway, resulting in a cliff rescue, courtesy of my brother and his fellow volunteer firemen. Incredibly, they went out again the next day, and even more incredibly, nothing happened. And I was going to bet on them for the Darwin Award this year.

Protests and politics, NorCal style:

(Mendocino, California)

(Mendocino, California)

Christmas wreath with a message:

(Elk, California)

Even the cats have opinions (don’t they always?):

(Elk, California)

Mom’s being released from the hospital tomorrow, I’m back in the city, and all’s right with the world. I even managed to lose the mutant cold from hell somewhere on the frighteningly curvacious Greenwood-Philo Road, en route to the equally corkscrewesque Highway 128. It just couldn’t keep up, and I’m assuming it’s lying in wait for its next unsuspecting victim.

Country driving has hazards unfamiliar to city drivers:

– It’s really, really dark at night (and night falls early this time of year, very inconvenient for those of us who just have no talent for getting up early). No streetlights and no ambient light. Finally, a rational, semi-adult reason for being scared of the dark!

– People give you directions like, “Turn left at the yellow house. When you see that really big tree, make a right, and we’re right next to the water tower.” Finding the yellow house is especially challenging in the pitch dark on a dirt road. No cell phone service, either, so if you’re lost, you’re really on your own, feeling like the star of your very own horror movie. Is that an axe murderer or a tree?

– Even the Bambiest of deer are terrifying when they leap out of the woods and right in front of your car. Fortunately, I missed that one and it vanished into the woods, taking a few years of my life with it and leaving me with even more grey hair. I also managed to avoid hitting a cat, a squirrel, and several birds. I guess you could consider it a car game, like I Spy. In fact, it’s a variation of I Spy when you think about it.

– Cattle grating. This was a new one. According to my sister Megan, the country dweller, cattle grating is used to keep cows from crossing the road (anything that reduces the animal population on the roads is just fine with me). It freaks them out, she explained, and they don’t like to walk on it. However, you have to drive over it really slowly, like 10 miles an hour, or you’ll fishtail all over the place and end up even more freaked out than the cows.

My sisters and I (left to right: Beth, Megan, Me) had breakfast together in the beautiful little town of Elk before I left for San Francisco. You have to love eating breakfast outside in December in a place that looks like this, with hummingbirds whizzing around and flowers blooming everywhere. Across the road, a happy little group of people were decorating the Christmas tree outside their church. It was a charming tableau.

My sister’s little house in the pygmy woods (the soil is too acidic for the redwoods to reach their usual majestic heights, so it’s known as pygmy forest, though pygmy is relative) is far too pygmy itself to accommodate the entire clan. It?s overpopulated as it is, with Megan and her husband; Mom’s hospital bed in the living room, and my other sister Beth sleeping on the couch.

So I’ve been sleeping in a tent in Megan’s garden, like Claudia Salinger in Party of Five, only outside. Sleeping in the tent has made me understand more about silence and darkness. It’s not just the absence of noise and light, but the presence of the silence and the darkness. The silence is so intense you can feel it – it almost presses against the city dweller’s ears, as strong a contrast to the usual city noises as a sudden power outage.

But after a while, you realize that the silence itself is made of many components. The wind in the trees, which almost sounds like the ocean. Distant crickets. Grass rustling. An animal walking through the woods: a cat? A raccoon? A skunk? Maybe even a deer? The mylar ribbons on the flower beds (supposed to deter marauding birds) softly rattling as they turn in the wind. You know how they say, you could hear a pin drop? You can hear a pine needle fall, and you do.

The darkness is as shocking to a city girl’s eyes as the silence is to her ears. There’s no ambient light from a nearby city or town, and no streetlights. So if I’m going to be out at night, I need a flashlight to light the way immediately ahead of me. I am returned to my childhood, when it seemed that any sort of monster or imaginary creature could be hiding in the woods, ready to leap out at me. The shadows in the flashlight’s beam, even my own, grow and move alarmingly and in a very monster-like manner.

But if I look up and away from what’s right in front of me, I see something beautiful: countless silvery stars against the blackness of the sky. Light in darkness. Hope.

On Saturday morning, I read the local paper while drinking my coffee to see what was going on in town that day. But I got sidetracked by the police blotter, as always. The paper reports all arrests and so on, and though this may affect the concept of “innocent until proven guilty”, it does make for entertaining reading if it’s not about you:

X was charged with having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. His victim is now his wife, though she was not at the time of the incident.

A German Shepherd with a hanky around its neck was roaming around in the bushes behind the McDonald’s fast food restaurant.

An otter was trying to cross the highway. The matter was referred to Fish and Game.

A woman called to report a large pig on her porch which wouldn’t leave.

There are no secrets when you live in a small town.

We went into Mendocino to do some shopping, both necessary and unnecessary. The latter included the ceramic studio, where a hilarious bench was covered with pink ceramic poodles, and a local craft fair, where everyone fawned over Jed the wonder dog.

On the way home, we stopped at Big River to swim and more importantly, so Jed could swim out and fetch the ball. Jed lives for the ball.

We had a barbecue that night, and about ten minutes before everything was ready, Jonathan’s pager went off. He’s a member of the local fire department, which is all volunteers. He went to answer a call reporting smoke down the road, but no fire could be found despite the best efforts of eight firemen searching the neighborhood. Such is the lot of a fireman.

And here’s the story.

A few years ago, I was coming home from visiting my brother and sister, and actually on the Golden Gate Bridge before I started looking for the $3 for the toll (you have to pay to get into the city, but not to leave it). Uh-oh. No money at all in my wallet. You would think I would have noticed when I spent my last dime, but apparently my thoughts were elsewhere, since this was the first time I had noticed my complete and utter brokeitude.

All the time I was waiting to get to the tollbooth, I wondered what would happen. When I finally got there, the bored County employee called the business office (located on the ocean side of the bridge) and gave them my license plate number, and told me to go over there and wrote them a check. So I did, feeling like a complete idiot.

I never forgot to have toll money again.

But I didn’t have to worry about the toll since I was heading out of the city on Friday. It was a very foggy day. So foggy that the towers of the bridge vanished into the mist, you couldn’t see Alcatraz, and you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began. It was all grey and misty and dreamlike, except for a mystery spot of golden sunlight where a lone, white-sailed boat floated.

With the wonder of micro-climates, though, it was sunny across the bridge in Sausalito and close to 90 in Santa Rosa, where my brother picked me up. We drove through beautiful Anderson Valley – I love the look of the rolling, golden hills with the dark green live oaks making deep pools of shade – stopping as usual at Gowan’s, where we got corn, peaches, and cider. I’m always amused by their sign, “Please park OFF highway”, because you just know someone actually parked ON the highway, at least once.

When we got to Albion, the town my brother and sister live near, I noticed that the flag at the post office was at half-mast. Turned out that the owner of the Albion Grocery, known locally as “the Gro”, had died of cancer on Thursday and the flag was lowered in her honor. Her birthday had been two days before, and the store had closed and her many admirers brought the party to her in the hospice.

In happier small town news, a family of barn swallows have built a nest right over the door to the post office. The nest is now full of peeping, adorable babies!

And at my sister Megan’s house, the sun was shining and the garden was blooming.

That night, we had dinner at the wonderful Ledford House restaurant, just across the road from the Gro, to celebrate Megan’s new EMT job. Our friend Mark was bartending that night, and the owners of the restaurant are good friends of my brother’s and sister’s. It’s an elegant, yet comfortable place, and attracts locals as well as tourists. The sunset was spectacular, as was the food and wine. It was the perfect way to start the weekend.