Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

Clabbers is sitting up at the podium with her fake smile, very coiffed, very white teeth and power suit along with her colleagues, who are all over fifty and don’t seem to be suffering from the general physical and spiritual malaise as the other residents of Altavista I’ve seen here and there on the streets. Maybe they live out of town, in big spreads out in one of the valleys where the grasses are green and the air is sweet. They drive down below to Reno once a month to do their big shop at the Costco and they go over the border to Oregon for their above-standard health care and they have life insurance and homeowner’s insurance and boats to put on the lakes and snowmobiles to put on the winter snows, and they are rooted and prosperous and friendly but apparently mad as hell about something.

Based on the quality of her noises which are calm but rising in volume I feel that Honey is in the vanishingly rare frame of mind and body when she might actually go to sleep in the stroller rather than just lying there gaping up through the stroller window at the sky or the fluorescent light until she panics and screams and struggles to get out. And people have been flowing into the room and the crowd has actually become so large as to encroach on our patch of territory at the back. So I take her off my knee where she is still “hey hey hey”ing and put her back in the stroller, and while another man is at the podium saying “We are an island now, controlled by a foreign government” I wheel her out whispering “’Scuze me ’scuze me sorry pardon me” and the people shuffle aside and smile at the baby and we wheel down the accessible ramp to the side of the courthouse stairs which is hey a federal intervention from which I am now benefitting.

We go three circles around the courthouse which lets me admire what a beautiful little building it really is—they’ve painted the dome an odd bronze color but the rest is white and polished, probably some kind of veneer because underneath I’m guessing it’s that porous volcanic Paiute stone. And it’s got nice lines, neoclassical, short without being squat. Just the right size to stand out of the high desert as an edifice of colonial law and order. Things take a turn for the worse in its immediate environs with those too-wide streets. Somehow up here we missed the narrow Victorian niceties of the gold country, we’ve got no cozy saloons and our main street is so wide you can see two tumbleweeds ambling down it at the same time. The land is always trying to reassert itself or the people always trying to spread out.

I have done one loop looking at the wide streets listening to something that is probably a frog and feeling the waning heat of the day but I see that Honey has her eyes closed and we head back to the ramp and haul open the big door of the courthouse and stand just outside of the meeting room from where a woman’s voice has slipped out to echo around in the dim hush of the rotunda.

I see it’s an older woman, classic Altavista, short hair western shirt nice white pants, she could actually be my grandmother back from the dead, except that my grandmother loved being a Californian, loved going down to the cities, loved eating Crab Louie in San Francisco and tacos in San Diego and going to Los Angeles to visit her cowboy friends in the film lots. I can’t in my bones believe that she would support any of this but then again she was a Republican her whole life and maybe this is where that ends up now. I’d also like to think my grandmother wouldn’t say “Barack Hussein Obama” like a curse. I realize it’s a luxury, not to know.

This lady says “We’re just having a terrible time up here. Our economy is hurting. My husband and I were looking at property recently and the number of foreclosures—we just couldn’t believe it. Like the gentleman said, we’ve lived here all our lives and this was just a paradise. We had all the industries we needed and we were providing food to the whole nation. Something has to change, I don’t know what but it seems like this is the closest thing to an answer we’re going to find. I just hope we can do it in time.” In time for what? She leaves the podium very straight back very fine paper skin on her hands and her forearms and makes her way slowly to her husband who is older and has a walker in front of him, darker skin like he might be Native although why a Native American would support this movement is a mystery and is I guess unlikely. I wonder how many people here in Paiute County can say they are Paiute let alone in this room. The old-timers’ accounts in the historical pamphlets sometimes have some loyal character named e.g. Indian John who helped out at the ranch and was like a brother to them in all ways but the most important one. Maybe the malaise, all the rotting homes and sagging enterprise, are punishment for taking the land. Maybe nothing good is ever happening on this land again for anybody.

There is a very young woman making her way to the microphone, she is beech-tree slim fair-skinned straight strawberry blond hair and can’t be more than fifteen I think, and how awful that her parents are trotting her out like this when she can’t even vote etc. etc., and she begins speaking. “I’m not even from Paiute County,” she says confidingly. “I live down in Shasta, but I wanted to come up here to tell you that we are with you. Other counties are with you. The next generation is with you. I’ve lived in the North State my whole life, all twenty-three years, and I tell you now as a wife and mother myself”—impossible , I think to myself—“the State of Jefferson is the kind of place I want to raise my baby son now.” A hooting sound, and a blur of happy motions around a sturdy good-looking man with a beard, who is wearing the Snugli with the infant. “We didn’t have the problems of the rest of the state,” she is saying. “We didn’t have drugs, or gang violence, or those types of urban problems.” There it is, I think. Suddenly I have a vivid memory of someone at my grandfather’s funeral cornering a pregnant blonde near me and asking apropos of nothing if she was “gonna give it one of those names like Sharniqua,” an interaction I didn’t quite grasp. Maybe this is about Urban Problems. But she is going on. “We don’t need to pay a tax for a water tunnel or a bullet train we’re never gonna use, we don’t need to send our water down south, and we know we’ve got everything we need right here. Anyway, we’re with you,” she says, so confident. She heads back to her little tribe and cups her baby’s head in her hand and her husband puts his arm around her . Bitch , I think. Clabbers leans forward into the microphone and says “I’m not supposed to say anything but I just have to tell you it’s so nice to see a young person in here today,” and there’s more quiet hoots and affirmations from the audience and I want to throttle this smug interloping teen with her intact family and her burly husband and her white panic. Until now I have regarded the proceedings as something of a sideshow because obviously the fucking Union is not going to get a fifty-first state and obviously California is not going to accept being split in two, not to mention part of Oregon, but Clabbers who is an actual elected official appears to be affirming everything that’s being said here.

The supervisor who called the proceedings to order leans forward into his microphone again and says, “Like I said we’re gonna do this the right way, so anyone who still wants to say anything, I really encourage you to come up to the podium. You’ll have to fill out a comment card, but you can do that after you speak—we don’t always need to follow the rules just exactly as they’re spelled out! So come on up, folks.” I have a brief insane thought that I will go up and say something about, I don’t know, my grandma and how she was in the historical society and how she ate Crab Louie and bled California gold but the impulse dies in its cradle. From the doorway between the cool dark air of the rotunda and the fluorescent buzz of the room I see the Cunt stand. I look over at Cindy and feel a little wave of almost fondness for her as she shifts in her seat and turns down the corners of her mouth with admirable economy of expression.