By the time I left, the white blossoms on the potato vine had begun to wither, and their sweet scent was tinged with sickly rot. They hung in browning bunches that draped over the arbor marking the entrance to my front yard. I paused for a moment and looked back. My chickens softly clucked as they scratched the bare dirt on the hillside below. I stared at the apples that hung from the small tree in front of them.
They were still striped with green, but with the cold breeze and short days I wondered whether it was too late in the season for them to ripen, whether they would stay mealy and sour until an inky brown lesion appeared and then it would become clear that the core had been rotten for quite some time. But the answer would be weeks away and by that time I would be gone, so I latched the gate behind me and walked to my old silver truck, whose chipped hood allowed tiny patches of rust to peek through the paint. Not normally the first one ready to leave, my mom was waiting for me in the passenger’s seat. The back seat was piled with bags of clothes, books, and everything else that I thought was important enough to take with me halfway across the country.
“Did you forget anything?” She asked me as I turned the key in the ignition. I’m sure she was thinking of the countless times growing up I had forgotten jackets wadded up on the benches of playgrounds in the excitement of movement only to wonder why I was shivering for the rest of the day.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said, though I was still not completely convinced that some essential item would not later be revealed to have been left behind. She would have to trust me, whether I was right or not.
“Then let’s get going.”
We drove past the little log cabin bar that never takes down their Christmas lights, with the hitching rack often full of horses swatting pestering flies. We drove past the grocery store that used to be called New Leaf, but despite the big white letters on the marquee that exclaimed the new name to be “WILD ROOTS” everyone still calls New Leaf. My little town of just under 4,500 was still waking up as we left, and a few people sat beneath the redwood tree in the middle of town. I recognized the old man with the long gray braids and messy goatee sprouting from his leathery skin, who seemed to always be passing his time in the shade of its branches, whether in the company of others drifting through the center of town or alone. The plaque on the tree says that it was planted in the early 1890’s by a Canadian immigrant named George Featherstone, who “knew the wonder and beauty of these trees.” Many others were overcome with amazement by the amount of wood that the forests held, and by the time that the tree in the center of town had sprouted, the laying of railroad tracks had allowed for easier access for the logging crews that filled he air with the gnawing of saws and cracking of splitting wood. They kept cutting until the hills were empty, and just after the turn of the century the mills were forced to close when there were no more trees to cut. After just two decades of life, the tree that the old man with the braids was sitting under would have been a lonely spire above the abandoned lumber camps, when the men who felled the trees so massive they posed for photographs in their excavated trunks retreated in search of virgin acres in all directions but west.
Some of the rotted stumps of the old trees are still anchored into the hillsides. Redwoods were desired for their resistance to rot, and now that refusal to decay serves as a reminder of what happened to the land. We crossed El Camino Real, the three-lane highway that brings commuters to the headquarters of the wealthiest companies in the world. In their quest to make this land a Christian one, the Spanish padres sprinkled mustard seeds along the well-worn paths of the Costanoan and Chumash and Tongva and called the route El Camino Real. The first of the 450 iconic shepherd’s crook bells along the route was installed in 1906 with the goal of guiding the emerging class of automobile tourists through the series of 21 missions from San Francisco de Solano to San Diego de Alcala. A long day’s journey by horse became a leisurely afternoon’s drive. To many Californians, the missions became a romantic memory of the state’s Spanish past, one that is echoed in the red tiled rooves of suburban homes. But beneath the famed swallows nests are sites of cruelty and brutality. The missions were the site of cultural erasure and de facto enslavement, but California is a state that is perpetually forward looking even at the expense of history. The road that connected them would, in the end, fuel the creation of the golden cities that had drove the Spanish to explore this remote coast. The difference between legend and premonition is sometimes difficult to discern.
Two hundred years after the bird songs were first drowned out by the deep chimes of the mission bells, my grandparents on my mom’s side, the only grandparents I have, met while cruising along El Camino Real. Teenagers would spend their weekend nights creeping along the historic route with their windows down, talking with their friends and meeting new ones. My grandpa was driving his family’s Oldsmobile, my grandma was driving the same station wagon that just months before had brought her and her parents and four siblings from the plains of the Midwest. Noticing my grandma’s out of state license plates, my grandpa asked if she needed a tour guide. They decided to pull over and get pizza, and he left with her phone number. Later, my grandparents danced together at a party, and a couple years later they were married at the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Belmont.
This was the city that my grandpa’s grandma had moved to decades earlier. After her husband became abusive, she socked him in the nose and boarded a westward bound bus. She lived in the same small apartment above a hardware store for the rest of her life. Like many that came out west, she needed to find a place where there was no blood in the soil.
Almost immediately after I had booked my new place, my mom started planning the road trip out. The demands of providing for two sons on her own meant that it had been a while since she had last gone on a vacation and thought that moving me in would be the perfect opportunity to do so.
She wasn’t much of a traveler in her adult life, at least not in the sense that one normally thinks of a traveler. She wasn’t interested in tropical beaches or the French countryside. She was much more focused on being able to buy a home, which she did a few years before I was born. It was the house that I grew up in, and as of just a few hours prior, no longer lived in.
We quickly reached the flat expanse of the Central Valley, with the tree lined Coast Range fading in the rear-view mirror and the glistening wall of the Sierra Nevada ahead. This massive valley is where my mom spent the early years of her adult life. The sleepy suburbs of Redwood City proved too hectic for her, and she took comfort in the emptiness of the fields. She biked through stalks of corn and waves of cotton to get to her classes in college, where she learned to heal injured bodies in Fresno State’s physical therapy program.
Her own interest in the career was spurred by what can only be described as the destruction of her left knee. The key to healing an injury is time and effort. One must be dedicated to performing the prescribed exercises, however boring or small or painful they may be. The belief that the body will simply recover on its own is why so many patients come back with the same problems.
Sometimes things don’t heal. Not in the same way that were before. After 11 surgeries over two decades, her doctors finally realized that a total replacement was necessary. Her knee is a lattice of scars and still swollen. But most of the time, she can walk without pain.
The landscape outside my window was still familiar. I’d driven through it countless times en route to this destination or that. But as we moved east and the high elevations squeezed the last drops of rain and flakes of snow out of the clouds, parching the desert beyond the granite peaks of the Sierra, we would reach places I had never been and had difficulty imagining.
“I wonder what it’s going to look like?” I said to my mom.
“You mean the desert or Colorado?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Utah’s beautiful. There’s Bryce Canyon, Zion. And then the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. They’re some of the prettiest places I’ve been.”
“And what about Colorado?”
“Colorado is gorgeous. You know, I wanted to move to Boulder after college. It’s really a special place.”
But she hadn’t moved to Boulder. She spent the eight years after her college graduation in Redding, a city in the northern Central Valley situated between the volcanoes of Lassen and Mt. Shasta. When we visited once, I kept imagining that the peak would suddenly explode, releasing voluminous clouds of ash and blanketing everything in sight in glowing molten rock that would harden into some bubbling hellscape. I didn’t know how she could live in a place where an unpredictable catastrophe could constantly be looming beneath her feet. But I guess one just gets used to it.
“So why didn’t you, then?”
“Well,” she began, “the friend that I was going to move with eventually changed her mind, and I was too scared to move alone. I wasn’t ready to move somewhere on my own.” She thought for a moment. “But you’re going to love it. Boulder is still one of my favorite places.”
I wasn’t really moving on my own. I would be living in a house with people that I had never met, but a good friend from home was going to school there. Beyond her, I knew nobody, but trusted that I would easily be able to meet people.
I realized that I knew very little about Boulder. Whenever I mentioned to anyone that I was moving they would tell me how beautiful it was, but I didn’t really have an image of it. Much of my decision to move was rooted in an unexplainable intuition that this place was the right one to spend the next two months. I didn’t yet know that half a year would pass before I would leave for good, before I would find so many reasons to stay.
By the end of the summer, I felt that I had stayed too long in my hometown. Many of my friends had returned to their college towns, while my classes remained online and my dorms closed. It’s a strange sensation to wander through familiar streets without seeing familiar faces, to have friend after friend leave and the tedium of loneliness hang over days that stretch far longer than one wishes them to. Many evenings I would go for a run by the coast, and as I watched the light fade on the rugged cliffs, I would feel the profound tragedy of being amidst such beauty without anyone else to bear it witness.
It was only after the fire that I made the decision to move. During one of the shortest nights of the year, a summer lightning storm struck the mountains surrounding my hometown, and wildfire quickly spread through the drought-stricken forest. A shifting wind could decide whether or not my home would burn, and in the midst of the uncertainty I realized that I needed to be somewhere else, that if I could not move my home out of the path of the flames, I could at least move my body. My house was still standing when the evacuation order was lifted, but the hillside behind it was charred, and the forests on the top of the mountain had been completely reduced to ash. I felt that the desolation could be escaped by moving to Boulder.
The directions were easy to follow: we were to stay on Highway 80 for one thousand miles. We would stay the night in Salt Lake City, get on the road early, stop in Cheyenne, and get to Boulder before sunset. We would be crossing the entirety of the American West in 36 hours.
I woke up in the hotel room in Salt Lake City and, having arrived at night and only seen the lights of downtown, wondered what was outside. My mom made me a coffee from the little machine in the room, and I sipped it as I opened the blinds to get my first look at Utah. Immediately outside the window was a large parking lot that was mostly empty. I gazed down the wide streets and tried in vain to look for any signs of life. The trees had already lost their leaves, the mountains were brown, and the clear morning light only highlighted their emptiness.
“So this is where the Mormon’s decided to build their city,” I said as I sipped my bitter coffee.
My mom looked out the window. “I think I would have kept walking.”
I laughed. It wasn’t what I expected a holy city to look like. Salt Lake City didn’t seem to be flowing with milk and honey, and I thought that in the heat the milk would curdle and the honey would spoil. I didn’t understand how divinity, much less earthly existence would be able to survive.
I wondered where the sanctity of the land came from. When the band of less than 150 Mormons arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 trying to find an isolated area to practice their religion without the persecution they had faced elsewhere, the president of the church had a vision of the barren valley planted with the splendor of Zion, the settlement of the pure of heart. The band began to plow the hard and dry ground, but though the soil proved fertile and the wheat they sowed sprouted, a late spring frost decimated the crop, the fields were invaded by hordes of crickets. Some tried in vain to fight off the pests, others planned their westward wander toward California. How could the settlers have known that soon a flock of seagulls would fly in from over the mountains, devouring all of the crickets and leaving them with enough food to survive the winter?
I wondered what I would have done. I’m not sure what makes people stay or leave. Sometimes a prophetic dream I suppose. Sometimes chasing, sometimes fleeing. I was not sure which was driving me to Boulder. Maybe both. My mom moved to Redding to spend time in the mountains, fly fishing in the streams and fishing in the lakes. How did she know that came to the right place, that she made the right decision? And when did she finally begin to agree with my grandma, who for years would say that it was time for her to move back to the Bay Area? Leaving and returning. Losing and gaining. It was all so easily blurred.
I looked out the window again. The landscape was hostile. Maybe it was holy. But I didn’t want to live in Zion anyway. We kept driving.
The vastness of Southern Wyoming overwhelmed me. It was like the surface of the ocean during a storm. The flat expanse was punctuated by bone dry hills. Perhaps one could drown in it.
Sixty years earlier, my grandma had driven through here, before the highway I was driving on had been completed. She was fifteen and sat by the window, wondering when she would cross the mountains. She was headed west. I was headed east.
Opportunity brought her family to California. Her dad had been promoted and would head up the Western State’s headquarters of the Hormel Foods Corporation. Their home in Minnesota was brick, with mature trees in the front yard and woods in the back, with a creek that my grandma would skate down once it froze. Their home in San Mateo’s Eichler-designed Highlands was made of beams and glass, with a large bright atrium. The house was new and the trees were young, but the lawn would stay green all year.
My grandma was lonely in California. She had moved after the school year ended and left her childhood friends in Minnesota. She knew nobody outside of her family and spent her time babysitting to save enough money to visit her friends back home. She did go back home at the end of the summer, but it would be the only time she made the trip.
I could see dirt roads stretching out onto the horizon. “Should we go see where that one leads?”
We pulled off the highway, in search of respite from the semi-trucks and dead bugs. We reached a cattle grate surrounded on either side by barbed wire, and the seemingly endless dirt road crept into the distance. There was a sign that notified us we were on Carbon County Road 340 with three bullet holes in it that allowed the pale blue sky to shine through. Below it was a yellow diamond road sign that said THINK. I wondered what about.
The engine roared as we made sharp turns and we swayed as we partially ran up embankments. My mom asked me to slow down, but I told her that this was just how someone was supposed drive on a dirt road. She said I was going to pop a tire and I told her I was not
I was sure that her asking me to slow down was about more than the truck. She would have liked me to stay at home for a little while longer, and surely wished that I wasn’t always thinking about where my next destination would be, whether for the weekend or the foreseeable future. She has the admirable quality of being able to achieve contentment while being in one place. I do not. I feel stuck.
My home is on the lower slope of a long, narrow valley. The green canopies of redwoods and Douglas firs line the hills. Growing up in a valley, one understands that it is often easier to stay than to leave, especially when the hills are steep and the destination is unclear.
I once hiked through the forest near my home, and decided that since I had the afternoon free, I would try a new route instead of the trail to a hilltop observation deck that I had been frequenting. I eyed an adjacent hill, whose scraggly, eroded summit seemed to promise a novel perspective. As I neared the top, the rich soil gave way to bright white sand that slipped beneath my feet. A dry chaparral surrounded me, and as I wandered off of the main trail and through the brush, sticks and thorns scratched my skin and caught on my clothing. I was lost, and continued to circle around in search of a way out, but seemingly made the wrong decision each time. I finally made it to the top of the hill, only to see that this peak was not in fact the highest around, and that the only view was that of the higher peaks that I should have explored instead.
We drove for some time, and the wash boarded road shook the car. It was violent. A cloud of dust followed us. It must have been visible from the highway, tempting other travelers with the prospect of adventure.
In the soft fold between two hills, a black mass appeared. It was bulbous but not quite organic, like a tumor growing in some hidden corner of the body.
“What is that?” My mom asked.
“I think they’re tires.”
We pulled over, and I climbed a nearby hill to get a better look at the pile. I picked a piece of sagebrush, crushed the slender leaves between my fingers, and held them beneath my nose. It smelled sharp and rich. Not as sweet as the sagebrush that grew on the cliffs above the ocean near my home, but drier, tougher. I noticed the tangy punch of hot rubber. I surveyed the tires baking in the sun. There must have been almost one hundred.
“Don’t cowboys have trash cans?” I asked my mom.
She shrugged. “This has got to be one of the ugliest places I have ever seen.”
And it was. The landscape was scarred, blemished and plain. Its vastness was frightening, and its desolation distressing. The bleak hills provided no refuge, no place to hide. I felt that if I were to lie down to rest, a coyote or vulture would pick apart my bones before I woke. I wasn’t sure if anything could even rot out here, maybe the sun would just dry everything out until there was only dust, and with a strong gust of wind the lack of integrity would suddenly become apparent.
I had waited the entire drive for some sort of awe-inspiring beauty, a confirmation of the stories of the West’s grandeur that I had heard and believed all my life. I had not found that beauty. I had found ugliness. Perhaps it was the vastness of the West that ruined it from the beginning. There is no reason to conserve that which is inexhaustible.
But the West was not inexhaustible. The tire pile would keep growing. It would never decay. I imagined that someday that the entirety of southern Wyoming would be a sea of putrid tires, bitterly warping and melting in the sun.
Had it always been a landscape of disappointment? The day after my grandpa’s family arrived in California, his parents decided to take their young kids to see the ocean for the first time. My grandpa and his brother decided that they wanted to swim as well, having never felt the pull of the tide or the breaking of a wave. But when they got out of the water, they were shocked to find that they were covered in a thick black grease. The ocean had appeared pristine from the shore. The beauty of the West was the way it hid its ruin.
The ground immediately surrounding the tires was bare. It was pocked and cracked, and it seemed that it would always stay that way. I thought about my hometown, similarly empty after the fire. Would it stay that way forever?
After the mills closed a hundred years ago and the hills were empty, I’m sure that many wondered whether the trees would ever come back. The forests, once believed to be inexhaustible, had been logged for everything that they could give until the industry cannibalized itself. Some may have mourned for the loss of the world’s biggest trees, but most simply moved on. I imagined that the ravaged hills would have looked a lot like the barren landscape in front of me now.
But there was divinity within the dirt. Beneath the massive stumps, still bleeding from the sawblades, tiny green audacious saplings pressed through the splinters and shaved bark. Though redwoods produce a massive number of cones, most never sprout. Instead, the next generation grows from the shallow roots that radiate laterally from the trunk. The forest survives below the ground, as the tangled roots continue their subterranean search for the strength to try again. Loggers couldn’t kill the forest. Fire couldn’t kill the forest. Maybe nothing could. The forest would come back. I didn’t know when. Maybe in just a few months there would be a defiant explosion of green, or maybe it would take a few years. But it would come back.
We crossed the border into Colorado. We had just over an hour left to go and had finally reached the Great Plains. Grasses stretched into the seemingly unending horizon. I had never seen something so flat. I wondered if my grandpa thought the same thing seeing the ocean for the first time.
The hills became more rugged. Their gentle rolling became restless. In the distance, I could see the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. The juxtaposition of some of the tallest mountains in the country immediately abutting its flattest land was surreal. I strained the limits of my geologic knowledge, and finally decided it was some kind of miracle.
Ten years after the California gold rush, the Colorado gold rush hit its peak. One hundred thousand miners flocked to the state, and a group of prospectors camped along the creek that runs through the center of Boulder, establishing the mining camp that would eventually become the city. But the easy to reach gold in the streams quickly ran out. The miners turned to the dirt, which was a much more difficult process of exhuming and extracting the precious metal than merely picking it out of a river, but got their gold nonetheless.
How many gold rushes can there be? How many times can one head for the hills with hope?
I looked to the west. Over the peaks of the Rockies, across the vast empty desert, beyond the jagged granite wonders of the Sierra Nevada was my home. The morning before last, dappled sunlight had streamed in through the window of my childhood bedroom, brightly reflecting off my white sheets. I woke up in my room and knew that it would be the last time for a while, but I was only starting to feel the gravity of that once-intellectual concept as I approached the place I would sleep for the foreseeable future.
As I showered the morning before I left, I looked out the window at the hillside in the distance. It was brown, burnt from the fire. But I remembered when it used to be green. I remembered the way it looked after rain, when mist partially shrouded the giant silhouettes of the trees and brought the boldness out of the dark green. I remembered how endless and blue the summer sky looked above the saw teeth of the trees, as if the days would grow longer and longer until there was no night and life became something pure and azure.
But it wasn’t like that anymore. This winter would bring the risk of landslides. The burnt soil was no longer held together by the roots it once was. I was not sure if the sky would ever look that blue again after I had seen how chokingly dark and brown and orange it could become. At least not at home.
In the distance, I could see the silhouette of the Flatirons, the jagged rock formations that sit high above Boulder. At the time, I didn’t know that was what I was looking at, or even that they were called the Flatirons. I didn’t know that those rocks, or that place, would come to hold such a special place in my heart. Can such a thing ever be known?
As my grandma spent her first lonely summer in California, so far from the friends she had in Minnesota, I’m sure that it would have been difficult not to think of everything that she had left behind. Maybe she thought moving had been a mistake. It was impossible for her to know that just months after her move, she would meet my grandpa, and that they would be married for over sixty years.
I once asked my grandparents why they stayed in Redwood City so long. My grandma looked at me blankly. The answer was obvious. They had put down roots.
Strong roots are, of course, the only way to survive in the West. The roots of the sagebrush are divided into two sections. There is a taproot that can grow up to twelve feet deep that allows it to access water stored in the lower layers of the soil during times of drought. There is also a shallow root system that radiates laterally, allowing for exploration and the ability to access rainwater, a resource so rare and precious in the West. Each plant has both, and it is the artful interplay between depth and breadth that allows the sagebrush to survive the extremes of its environment.
The sagebrush doesn’t know whether or not there is water deep in the ground, or whether the rains will come in time. The act of creating a root is an act of faith.
I looked over at my mom. I realized that I would not be seeing her for what would be the longest stretch of my life so far. It would be the longest period of time I had gone without standing on the deck watching and listening as the trees swayed gently in the afternoon breeze. It would the longest period of time I had gone without sitting at my spot at the old oak dining room table, the same one that she ate at growing up.
I was leaving, and she was being left behind.
I could barely make out the features of the Flatirons in the distance. Still, I knew that there would be something beautiful waiting, even if I couldn’t yet tell what it was.