Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

Twenty minutes for stories and milk on the couch, although Honey is increasingly reluctant to sit through an entire story now, even the ones she loves, and begins rifling through the pages faster and faster until I can’t even rapidly paraphrase the illustration. I hope she is not hyperactive requiring treatment. Twenty minutes of taking all of the pots pans melamine bowls out of the kitchen cupboards. If we were at home leaving the house at five minutes to eight with my hair clean my minerals powdered across my face a little blush a cardigan and skirt and somewhat stylish sensible shoes we would be in excellent shape for an eight-o’clock deposit of Honey at daycare and a corresponding 9:30 workplace arrival. We would be off to a very good start, all things considered. But here we have no project for which this early waking and breakfast and stories-and-milk represents a smart and auspicious beginning, and no minerals to powder on my face.

So I decide we will go for a walk, a real walk, no stroller, while it is still cool and the birds are chirping and the heat of the day is a hint not a promise. We can buy a newspaper at the High Winds Market. I gather Honey put her into pants and shirt cover her face and chubby wrists and arms and hands and ankles with sunscreen and it gets in her hair and we set out on the move. The High Winds Market is closer than the Holiday but small small small and all the fruit is wax and shipped in from Ecuador and in the deli it’s baloney city. We stop to watch two deer and two perfect fawns in the undeveloped scrub lot next to the original Deakins place. The mothers look at us and Honey shouts “Daggy daggy daggy” until they tense up and bound away, the fawns wobbling behind them. Then it’s ten minutes before we’ve made it out of Deakins Park and that’s with Honey hustling her buns. This land is made for getting across on your horse or your wagon or the railroad. My mother told me that my great-grandfather used to ride a horse two days west every time there was a Freemasons’ meeting in Cassidyville, stopping to camp on the plains to break up the trip. That’s the way to do it. By the time we’ve reached the railroad Honey is lifting her arms to be picked up, and forgetting always the slow rate at which ground is covered in the high desert I don’t have the Ergo and so have to carry her on my own steam the rest of the way to the store. I hoist her up onto my shoulders and we stride through the scrub on the highway that leads to the market, and she puts her mitts on my head and sort of caresses my hair, what a funny thing she is. We are panting when we arrive.

I buy the Recorder for fifty cents and feel that a treat is in order so I also buy a Starbucks Frappuccino in a bottle and Honey gets a string cheese even though she has twenty-six string cheeses at home and I curse myself for not bringing one but she holds the new one in her fist and gleefully bites the head off and smiles at me with a mouth full of cheese. I put her back on my shoulders to take the highway back to Deakins Park and the knowledge that we have seen what there is to see and there is no new route, no new view, adds length to the twenty minutes it takes to get back home. Once we leave the anxieties of the highway and the trucks that barrel down it I put Honey down to walk and I scan the headlines of the paper. The county supervisors are scheduled to vote on whether Paiute should join the fifty-first State of Jefferson and lobby the capital to secede, I read. I find it stunning that Cindy and her lawn sign are a viable political movement although I guess supervisors can vote on anything. What I understand to be the sentiment at the State of Jefferson’s heart is that nameless legislating fat cats in big cities cannot properly represent the interests of the sparsely populated rural counties. Which is probably true. But it seems that this probably true thing is also what dooms this movement to irrelevancy, it’s like if the Greeks and the Bulgarians started agitating to leave the Ottoman Empire but there were only ten Greeks and five Bulgarians. Moreover based on the way the main street looks it’s hard to believe anyone is just waiting for liberation from the yoke of the state to rise up and prosper. “Casualties of Capital!” I say aloud in Hugo’s pompous voice, and Honey pats my head quizzically.

When we are safely back at the house it is 8:45 and I think given Honey’s early start this morning perhaps she can be persuaded into a nap and I can read the paper and have a cigarette and recover from the walk to the store. I look at her until I find a gesture I can reasonably interpret as a rubbing of eyes and I tell her very cheerfully lovingly but authoritatively that she is tired and it is now time for a nap. I carry her to the closet close the curtains in the bedroom toss the comforter over the unmade bed put her into the Pack ’n Play with minimal ceremony say “It’s time to take a snooze” gently pass my fingers over her brow and in between her eyes and over the tip of her nose which sometimes makes her involuntarily close her eyes like a parakeet in a cage when you put a blanket over it. I crack the door and leave the bedroom and immediately her cries begin but I determine them to be a feint and not substantive. I pause to feel sad that this store of Honey-based knowledge I have been building up which is so insanely specific to this time and place and person will live and die with the versions of me and her that exist at this moment. And that Engin is missing his chance to amass this same knowledge, if indeed this knowledge has the same weight for fathers as for mothers.

I drink a glass of water collect the cigarettes from the top of the grandfather clock and go onto the deck with the paper. I scan the letters to the editor which are all Jefferson-related in honor of the upcoming vote. I note with a start that Cindy Cooper has written one.

Editor:

The people in the North State do not have any representation in California legislation and we are trying to get equal representation and that’s the long and short of it.

The truth is we are working to have less laws that keep us from living a better life, so our grandkids have a better life too.

People want the government to stop charging them taxes for everything they do. Los Angeles does not pay the fire tax and they are the ones that pasted it on us and building the train and tunnels we don’t need or will ever use.

We are working hard to make the North State a better place to live and have support from a lot of the people in it.

I would not have pegged Cindy as a community activist necessarily as she seems grumpy but sort of placid and immobile. There’s a dissenting letter:

They say it is all about representation, when really it is about regression, anti environmental protections, anti immigration and the end of all progress made in the last century. Splitting the state is drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.

This from Brian Hendricks of Fairmeadow, thirty-five miles west of us. Go Brian, I think. There are a few other Pros, Big Government, regulation, taxes, blah blah blah. And then at the very end I start to see a letter from by god my uncle Rodney and it is so terse and Rodney-like I wish he was here so I could give him a hug.

People have been talking about this since the 1940s but it was true then and it’s true now that for every dollar the North State sends to Sacramento we get two dollars in services from the State.

I would be amazed if Rodney has ever strayed from the Republican Party in his life but I guess secession is a bridge too far. He does after all work for the Forest Service, which is the Government like the Foreign Service is the Government like the University is the Government, like every institution that has ever employed my family apparently. Honey’s cries have subsided to the point where I can assume she is happy enough being where she is and I look through the rest of the paper. There’s a rambling two-page op-ed from Davis Birgeneau concerning the benefits of letting cattle graze on a specific patch of scrub by a local water channel and the combination of the prose which is full of a cattleman’s reminiscences and my agricultural ignorance means that it reads like a foreign language, I mean I can’t even understand the basic terms of the debate at hand. But reading it, reading about the “Tour of Europe” night at the library and the hunting safety class and the Fourth of July parade gives me a comforting feeling, like things are happening and people know each other and do things and the social networks that hold the world in place are extant here even if I don’t have access to them and don’t know if I would want to if I could. There is a whole column of the paper for the churches and I’m astonished by the number of them relative to the size of the town, Mormon Catholic Baptist Seventh-Day Adventist and things with inscrutable denominations, Grace and Freedom etc. and this is not even to mention an actual full-fledged cult, not listed, that took over a neighboring town in the 1970s and started putting up life-size dioramas of biblical figures along the highway which are there still. Engin loved this town when we drove through and made me stop the car so we could take pictures.