by David H. Haight, copywrite 2009
A tall stoop-shouldered figure climbed a ragged suburban street which ran uncompromisingly across a little hill at the south end of San Pablo Valley. Swirls of fog circled about him in flight from the rising west wind. His thinning hair was grey, his countenance saturnine, but his step, though not elastic, was firm and vigorous. It had need be, for sometimes the sidewalks were paved, sometimes a single plank, and sometimes simply rough earth.
Arrived near the top of the hill the man began to look about uncertainly as if to locate some well-known landmark. The fog was thinning a bit toward the south and an outcropping of rock came into view. Nearby a solitary carpenter was engaged in building a twentieth century bungalow with a worse than mediaeval technique.
Stepping hesitantly forward he stopped and gazed at the ledge of rock with a puzzled expression. “The old rock must have fallen into the hands of quarrymen to have shrunk to that size.” So he thought. Surely the light of other days, encased by time’s passage, could not magnify memory to shrink the rock to that extent,” he muttered. Then with more certainty he added, “It must be beyond and to the right.” Almost as he spoke a fresh, cool gust of wind cleared the top of the hill to his right and the object of his walk was before his eyes. A jagged outcropping of hard jasper boulders crowned the little hill. Poison oak bushes grew in the clefts between the rocks, and the whole area had the air of a tiny wilderness, very much out of keeping with its immediate surroundings. The man quickened his pace and was soon in the outskirts of the rocky citadel. As he went on, vivid memories loosened his tongue again to softly give voice to those many shadows tumbling forth from his mind.
“There is the big coffin-shaped block of green jasper I used to stumble over as a lad.” He took two steps forward along the side of the great block and began lovingly to finger the broken side of the great boulder. “These,” he said, “are the very niches I used to climb. Strange that these boulders have not weathered more, but jasper is hard indeed. The boulder was shaped like a great seat with a sloping back. The man climbed up and ensconced himself there, taking pleasure in fitting his toes into the niches which had been more suitable for his boyhood feet.
More fog was coming in from the west but, for the moment, the view had become quite extensive. The man gazed westward. First a steep slope, then a flat expanse, crisscrossed by suburban streets on which, as yet, nobody lived, then a low muddy beach, with San Pablo Bay just beyond leading to the Marin County shoreline with the Mount Tamalpais mountain range towering above. Seen from a distance native Indians envisioned the range as a sleeping maiden, her feet to the north, hands crossed on her breast, her nose at a high point with her long streaming hair flowing south down to the Golden Gate — a view the man loved to contemplate from boyhood.
The man doffed his hat, which now lay beside him, so used was he to fog, wind and cold that was typical of the Bay Area during the summer. He gazed on the prospect below with extreme distaste. “Not pleasant at all. They, the planners and developers anticipating the hordes to come have succeeded in methodically spoiling this spot of country without making it more useful to anybody.”
Looking back in time he saw through his father’s eyes the valley as it lay in sunshine so very long ago, a pleasant land between low hills and the Bay. To the north the mountains became low hills and ran down to the water with little cliffs here and there. The flatness of the north end of the Valley was relieved by a gentle eminence which had been ploughed about till it lay like a very breast of grown mother earth on the northwestern horizon known as the “Little Little Hill”.
At the north end of the valley nestled the little village of San Pablo consisting of a few saloons, a general store, a blacksmith shop, two churches and quite a number of scattered cottages. Farms, each with a windbreak of trees, often varieties of Eucalyptus imported from Australia, were dotted about the valley, mostly at distances of about a half a mile from each other. Only the richest inhabitant, whose farm occupied the center of the valley ever thought of painting his house or out-buildings. All the houses were, more or less weathered to a brownish grey color, the windward surface having a soft, furry feel. It was not an exaggeration to say that all the farm outbuildings were in a tumbledown condition. A well-kept kitchen garden was nowhere to be found, though each farmer usually had a few fruit trees for his own use. Hay, grain and cattle were the principal products and some of the proprietors tried horse breeding with varying success.
Land titles in the valley were in such a chaotic state evolving from the latter days of the “Spanish Land Grant” in California that most of the inhabitants were reluctant to invest heavily in their property. Thus it was that most of the landowners held their fields by possession only, and if they would be certain of future legal ownership had to buy title to cover their claims, an expensive and uncertain process.
The real awakening of life came in October or November of each year, when, with the first rains, after the long dry summer, the brown hills clothed themselves in living green and remained so through the winter to again begin turning brown in late spring.
The one active Civil Officer was the County Sheriff who spent most of his time at the County Seat to the north east where he was more than sufficiently occupied in traveling the estuaries of the Bay and the nearby rivers to discourage the so-called “river pirates” in their endless petty thievery from water craft whence they stole copper, tools, chains, etc, for surreptitious re-sale in San Francisco. These river pirates were always the shyest and most unobtrusive of beings, shadows sifting through early dawn and dusk hours, but whenever cornered fought fiercely, quite in the manner of a Western-style “shoot-out”.
With land rights in the valley so tentative, life for the meager population flowed at a slow pace, lazily in tune with the tides and uneventful mild weather days, just waiting for the inevitable human migration from the East to flow over the landscape imposing a rapidly varied cultural stage-show upon this somnolent land.
Heaving another great sigh a host of childhood memories crowded in upon him of the days when his Aunt Julia, or the Irish maid, would accompany him to the rocks and sit beside him on this very seat. He recalled the slope was then alive with chattering squirrels before the days when Medicine’s “witch doctors” decided they had bubonic plaque and poisoned them all . . . his friends. He remembered how he would be allowed to run down the hill toward the Bay, and was always told that he might run down till he was called back. He always had hoped vaguely that he might someday reach the sea, but never came within less than half a mile of it, and even the device of pretending not to hear the “Halloo” echoing down from the rock ever worked.
Dense fog was coming in again, cold wet and clinging. The man shivered and scrambled down the opposite side of the rock to that of his approach from the western side. Then he proceeded to the north over the brow of the hill. More curling wreaths of fog, lit from above by sunshine that appeared only as a faint and ghostly light to the man on the ground. The dry grass under foot was now wet and where the departing sunshine lingered on the ground tiny drops of water sparkled along the stems. Then fog and nothing else enveloped all. Not a London “particular” mind you, but a fog which gave a distance of a hundred feet roundabout to the sharpest glance.
Abruptly above and to the left rose great dark shapes, so dark that they were easily seen though still two hundred feet away and they had a strange uncertainty of outline as if alive “. . . must be forty feet high if they are an inch,” said the man peering through the fog. “What can they be? I did not know of any such constructions on the hill that I can remember.” He had been moving forward while speaking to himself, but now stood stock still, quite amazed. “Good Lord? Cypress trees! I know this must be the back line of our old orchard. I helped father George set them and water them just half a century ago. Then, I was just five years old.” A long pause ensued interrupted only by the gentle sighing of the westerly breeze singing in through the Golden Gate.
He stood as if transfixed, a flood of poignant memories streaming before his eyes. Then from the bottom of his being he heaved a groan of longing and regret. “They are all that is left . . . all that is left of so much that has sunk into the deep . . . below Time’s ceaseless churning.” He drew near and placed one hand lovingly on the rough wet bark of one of the trees, then continued down the hill and, to his surprise, found a few gnarled pear trees, but could not get his few teeth into their unripe fruit.
Down, down toward the valley floor he wandered in a zigzag course, while signs of a mean and poor civilization appeared dimly through the fog right and left, then he strode straight ahead into a wavering, heavy bank of fog and gradually passed from view as in a set of slowly flashed still photos . . . gone . . . empty.
Many years later his no longer young son remembered a meager depression era picnic one warm summer’s day to Point Richmond, part of which had become an oil terminal, which jutted out into San Pablo Bay. His father, the big man, now more stooped than ever, moved so slowly into the gray water, his worn body draped in improvised linen swim shorts dangling loosely about white flesh, until just his head appeared above water, then the slow, even breast strokes, powerfully moved him beyond our sight.
He was gone such a long time that the three of us began to seriously wonder when he might reappear or if he wanted to return . . . terrible thought, that. Another half hour passed when like a great tired whale he was spotted, rhythmically breast stroking his way back to us, this a man when as a youth, swam easily out the golden Gate and back. The boy stood silently watching his slow return, focusing on his face, those dark brown eyes growing bigger and bigger, until the rounded shoulders heaved from the water. His gaunt face seemed so pale and expressionless. He stumbled slightly, never smiled and with a few short words to “the wife” sat down to gaze wordlessly westward at the far shore and into the distant fog beyond.
–o0o–
