Pulling Up Stakes

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What struck us most about the country was how quiet it was-also how hot and still. Playing in the hills around the trailer, we hushed up instinctively; our voices, even when we weren't shouting, stood out. We missed the noise of Sixteenth and Sanchez, the kids in the neighborhood, the way you could just walk out your door and find someone to play with. But we trusted our dad to know what was best for us, and we found plenty to do in the country. There was infinity in the dry brown soil and the crackly straw-colored grass, just as there was in the schoolyard on the street corner. But the thing about infinity, about yearning and despair and the hot breezes off the lake, is that as long as you can say 'we,' everything is somehow all right.

Who knows where my father got his dream of bringing up his kids in the country; who knows where that sudden burst of optimism and intention came from, or where it would soon disappear to. He was a city kid himself, though he'd gone fishing occasionally as a child. His preference for the country was grounded as much in ideology as in experience. He felt instinctively that the city, like money, was evil and impure, and that in the country people could live the way humans were supposed to live. He knew how to tie knots and drive stakes, how to run power saws and hammer boards together. He figured he could learn gardening and chicken coops and the rest.

But he did not count on the kind of work available-or not available-in the country, or the kind of money the work paid. He did not count on his children needing to enroll in school, and also needing a way to get to school. He did not count on his family needing a place to call home that was not a tent or a makeshift trailer on a piece of borrowed land, with no water or heat or fridge, just a cooler with a block of ice and a camp stove and a Coleman lantern so we could read or play cards at night. My father did not factor in the character of country people, who were not necessarily up on the finer distinctions between hippies and bohemian artists, or between Mexicans and sun-darkened Jews. He did not count on the arguments and silences and despair hovering in the air above our family, ready at any moment to ignite, like the wildfires Californians are always so afraid of at the end of summer, when the ground can't even remember what rain feels like, and the shoreline of the lake recedes daily, leaving drying pools of mud where water used to be.

On a clear October morning, my father finally gave up on his plan. That summer would be the first and only time I would witness him in the throes of optimism, trying to make a wish come true. When he failed, he seemed to swallow his hope along with his shame, and he never let either of them out again. We spent all morning packing up the truck, then waited till the heat of the day had passed before starting back to the city.

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