Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

The sky is just starting to mellow into the warm pre-twilight light, bruising faintly at the horizon, when we get out of the last stretch of plain and up over the forested hills to the basin where Altavista sits. Honey wakes up now, crying. “We’re so close, sweet one,” I tell her. “Hang in there,” but she’s justifiably grumpy and she cries and I listen to the crying and roll down the window to imbibe the juniper and try to bolster myself for the sight of the wildlife preserve and the fields and the town that will greet us over the crest of these little mountains, but as with everything up here it’s the scale and the sparseness that are striking, and the thrill of recognition at first sight is replaced almost immediately with a feeling of deflation, the knowledge that there’s no one waiting on the deck to greet us. The highway turns into the main street and we pass the area they called Indian Town which is a rocky slope just outside of where the grid begins and presumably where the people were made to live who weren’t shipped off to Oklahoma after the Indian Wars or into one of the tiny rancherias out yonder. And then we are in town proper, Honey crying past the abandoned false-front emporia past a few shops past the High Desert Hotel past the tiny movie theater with by god a newish release spelled out on the marquee. My heart sinks as I take in the empty sidewalks and empty storefronts, the gas station, the railroad tracks now defunct, everything looking like it was the last time I was here, that is, not exactly thriving.

The drive is supposed to take six and a half hours but somehow we have been on the road for eight when we come to the wooden sign sunk into grass that signifies the entrance to Deakins Park. Although Honey is still caterwauling, passing the sign feels like entering protected land, something apart from the ravages of the town. It sounds like hair-splitting to parse the varieties of mobile home, like something only a person obsessed with imperceptible class minutia would do, but there are mobile homes and mobile homes and despite how mortified I used to be by the fact that my grandparents lived in one now I happen to think Deakins Park is just as nice if not nicer than many a suburban cul-de-sac of for example the Nut Tree–adjacent variety. It’s a circle of nicely appointed and discreetly mobile mobile homes of different styles and patterns built on either side of a large circular street, each kept up nice and with a good-size yard. The outer ring of houses is bounded by a split-rail fence, and beyond this the town gives over to the high desert, with low, prickly sagebrush and rafts of tumbleweed through which jackrabbits bound and antelope poke delicately in the cool mornings. Everyone has plenty of space and a view of the low-lying mountains ringing the basin. It’s a little neighborhood on the frontier. Home on the range, if you will.

I drive past what was the original eponymous Deakinses’ place, left empty by their deaths like my grandparents’ and also kept up by their children, and down the road ahead of us I see my grandma’s birch tree with its white paper skin I picked strips off of as a child and its luxuriant fall of green and the low chain-link fence and the tidy squares of yellowing grass bordering the concrete walkway up to the porch.

I pull up to my grandparents’ house, or my house, I should say, and the empty lot next door which is technically also mine. There’s a Realtor’s sign stuck into the front yard, curling at the corners and cutting off the final vowel on the Basque name of a local gal who handles all the dealings for a hundred miles. Every few months someone makes as though they want to buy it, ranch hands or frail retirees hoping to be closer to grandchildren, but they tend to melt away after their first inquiries to the bank, or some issue with the required paperwork. Uncle Rodney informs me that last winter the only title company in Paiute County closed, precipitously leaving all real estate deals such as they are in even greater disarray.

Honey is quieter now but still mewling hungry and tired of being squished up in her car seat, long past her bedtime already. I park in the driveway in front of the garage and step out to release her and once she has tottered around on the front grass a bit to stretch her legs I get her to hold my hand and together we climb the back steps and I fumble for the key I keep on my keychain even though I’ve only been up here twice in five years. I hoist Honey up on my hip and open the door holding my breath. It’s been more than a year since the last time I walked in this door and I think what if it’s been colonized by local youths meth-users or pillheads or whatnot and I prepare myself to see something I don’t want to see. But it’s as pristine as it was when my grandmother presided, with its all-over faux-wood paneling which somehow comes together with her couches her dining room table her Indian baskets her hutch her milk glass her torchère lamp, everything left as it was, cozy and immaculate, my grandfather’s encyclopedia and his World War II books on the low shelf by his recliner. The house is an aesthetically closed circuit, not a detail out of place, its mobileness less apparent within than it is without. I breathe in the smell, the smell as it’s always been, the smell of old paper in a dry cedar cabinet. I eye the woodstove on its brick platform and think how cozy it will be in here and remember that it’s summer and I won’t need to use it. Or not yet, I think, and then unthink it, because we are not prepared to travel that line of inquiry.

I feel the enormous squishy heft of Honey’s diaper and set her down and consider leaving her while I go back to the car to get the diaper stuff but see too many incipient hazards about the place. So I heave her back up and trot back out to the car and pull out the tote bag with the essentials and trot back into the house and change her diaper on the living room floor, and she looks at me with a surprising amount of good cheer given the strange day she’s had, and I feel that we are two gals out on an adventure. I button the onesie and pull up the pants and consider the living room and the hazards and, patting myself on the back for being so conscientious and prepared considering my general frame of mind, take a bunch of clean rags from the pantry and tape them over the razor-like corners and edges of the brick platform under the woodstove, and since I’m at it I take my thirty-pack of socket protectors and stick them around, and I put the heavy brass lamp down on the floor where she can’t pull it down onto her head, and I feel the mirrors and still lifes the cowboy ephemera and weavings to make sure they’re secure on the flimsy walls, and then I lie down on the couch and watch as Honey makes her first lap around the living room, poking and stumbling on little legs that have only just learned how to walk. It’s very, very quiet and I wonder what we are going to do next. Then I consider what Honey has eaten today and I get up and make for the pantry and there are cans of baked beans and peas and I bustle around the kitchen and get them into a little saucepan and I survey the house. My house. My house. “This is my house,” I say aloud, and everything in the house contradicts me, down to its dubious foundation. “You’re a visitor,” the house seems to say. But it still welcomes me, even if we have mutually rejected the existence of an owner-owned relationship between us. We are safe in the house, I feel.

Despite the caretaking efforts of my uncle the house is beginning to show the signs of disuse. I can see that rain comes through the master bathroom window; there’s a small soft place in the wood at the sill. The shadows of deceased bugs are visible in the white bowls of light fixtures. Carrying Honey I slide open the screen door which complains a little in its tracks and step onto the porch and see that something has got at the feathers that once hung from the dreamcatcher wind chime, and its remaining wood and metal are in a little broken pile below. A cow skull propped against the house is minus a horn. I peer around at the neighboring houses and note the absence of any lights blinking cozily across the park. I note the mountains with the slightest bit of snow still on their peaks in the distance, neither the Sierra nor the Cascades, but some weird in-betweener range. I feel enervated rather than invigorated by the landscape. But the air feels warm and good and smells like juniper like I promised myself it would, and the light is otherworldly purple, indisputably beautiful.