Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

“Okay.”

“He just died,” she shrugs. “His heart gave out when he was a young man.”

“That’s so sad,” I say, and immediately start misting up because there’s so much sorrow sloshing around the world. “But why the new version?”

“He was so good, it seems sad to me that he didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. He just worked and fretted himself to death.” I can see her look over at me out of the corner of my eye. “He was a very special person.” I make a sort of bullshit sad smile where your mouth extends flat across your face.

“Anyway, there’s no one left now who knew him or the girls. I can test out all kinds of wild stories.” I look over again and she has an owlish expression.

“I could see that,” I say. “I know it’s not equivalent but that’s sort of how I feel in Paiute. Everyone’s dead or moved on and I don’t trust the people who stayed behind with the historical record.”

“But I can’t do it,” she says, as though I hadn’t spoken. “The things that happened, happened.” I feel brave enough to ask what I have been wondering.

“And your kids?”

“Oh, they really died.” Okay. Honey blats in the back.

To get to Antelope Meadows you drive out past the bird refuge out past the dump to the side of town where the rim rocks grow. Big brown rock formations shot through with pale and glimmering veins, they pop dramatically out of the flat earth here and there, sometimes a mantle of soil and grass draped along the top of them. I point at them to change the subject.

“Rim rocks,” I say. “Pretty,” she says.

“Somewhere around here there’s a set of them called Squaw Rocks”—I feel suddenly obligated to provide some kind of local representation and look around the horizon helplessly for the rocks in question, which I don’t think are actually anywhere close to here. “There’s a legend that the Pit River tribe came over and menaced the Paiute tribe—or maybe it was the Modocs, or maybe it was the other way around, the Paiutes menacing the Pit River—anyway the chief of the tribe that got menaced turned the opposing warriors into rocks as punishment.” Not only have I bungled the story like a horrible colonist but I am not even selling the bastardized version. But I liked the story because it’s sort of like Daphne and Apollo and the laurel tree, ostensibly without the rape, although I’d like to know why the rocks are “squaws.”

“Hmm,” she says.

I remember as we pass the first set of rim rocks that this is my favorite route out of town, but one you would only really take to get to Antelope Meadows since it doesn’t lead anywhere else I would want to go. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to drive out here when the trip could have eaten up just one of the blocks of time spent slapping my heels on the asphalt heading out of Deakins Park and sweating under the straps of the Ergo.

I consider what Antelope Meadows will have on offer. The wine will be challenging but probably $5 or less. Beer will be Coors or Bud and Sierra Nevada if I’m lucky. I will have to make one count because I’m driving. The thought flits through my mind that I am thinking like a person with a Problem, a thought I dismiss, preferring not to add the challenge of achieving sobriety to the resolution of our immigration difficulties, the finessing of my job abandonment, the disposition of my mother’s household effects, the raising of Honey. Especially not with a lingering hangover and a black eye. I kindle a little flame of pleasure thinking about the food, such as it is, which like the Golden Spike is possessing a kind of awful majesty. I am fully intending to get the $21.99 prime rib dinner and damn the expense, and Honey can share this with me and eat the damp wrinkled foil-wrapped potato and reheated broccoli florets and crinkle-cut carrots that will accompany the slab of meat. The meat will have a lot of fat in it and they bring you a little dish of very hot horseradish if you ask for it and it makes my mouth water to think of it.

The road that passes through the rim rocks is on an incline so slight you don’t feel it until you approach the turnout for Antelope Meadows and see a gentle valley spread out before you, the scattered houses of an ill-starred housing development that every year seems to recede further from the possibility of one day becoming a thriving community. There is, of all things, an overgrown airstrip in the vast basin, I have no idea why, maybe for the cattle gentry who were supposed to settle here and never did. Around all the structures plants and native grasses assert themselves, California fescue and Idaho fescue and a lot of other things I couldn’t name, soft and spiky and glinting silvery green in the late-afternoon light, covering the homes of mice and marmots whose holes and mounds are in evidence every few yards. Here and there Indian paintbrush glows red amid the green. In the spring Paiute is a riot of wildflowers, but now it’s more subdued.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” I say to Alice, because it really is.

“It reminds me of where I was born,” she says. “Our mountains are more impressive but your light is more interesting.” Like the Orientalists of yore I have a bad habit of categorizing, taxonomizing that I am trying to break myself of, to not say things like “That’s so Turkish,” etc., like someone after their first summer abroad. But now I feel a rare flash of possibly legitimate familiarity: women who have returned to the stony west for obscure personal reasons.

We make the turn onto the long drive for the Antelope Meadows lodge, which is a wooden A-frame surrounded by some ratty log buildings. I feel a little thrill to see that there are cars in the parking lot. I look at Alice.

“I’ll drop you off in front and park” and she says “I can walk across the darn parking lot” tartly. “I ran around after your baby all morning, didn’t I?” “Right,” I say, and park next to a behemoth pickup. Honey, who had fallen into her traveler’s meditative state, immediately starts clamoring to be released from her car seat. Alice struggles with the button of her seat belt but I don’t help her. I get out and get Honey out. I heft her up onto my shoulders and she laughs and shrieks and we monitor Alice as she steps effortfully out of the car. When she’s on her feet she straightens her skirt and adjusts her carriage, her shoulders just brushed by her dense and immaculate blunt-cut hair.

She sees me staring at her and says, “What,” sourly.

“Your hair is so beautiful,” I say to her without thinking.

“Well, thank you,” she says. “It was always my pride and joy,” she says, and begins walking slowly around the car.

As we approach the door to the lodge I glance at the assortment of bumper stickers in the parking lot. “Save a tree. Wipe your ass with a spotted owl,” says one. “Muzzle Pelosi,” says another, with a photo of the U.S. congresswoman in a Hannibal Lecter mask. They both have the State of Jefferson sticker with the flag with its stupid two crosses denoting being “double-crossed” by the Government according to the last Chronicle article I read. Whatever generosity of spirit the golden light and fragrant air have stirred in my breast snuffs out and I feel myself droop, looking ahead to a meal with a grumpy old woman in a room full of hostile good ole boys.

I hold the wooden door for Alice and stoop to bring Honey down off my shoulders, and discover that she has taken hold of a fistful of my hair. “Ow ow ow,” I say and try to extricate it from below while holding the door open with my hip. Honey grunts as she yanks and Alice says to her, “OH miss! You had better let go of your mommy’s hair,” and pinches the top of her thigh with a gnarled hand and Honey lets go and is first silent in shock and then puts her hand theatrically on her thigh and cries out and I set her down on the floor and pick her back up. I think Alice ought not to pinch my baby but that’s an awkward conversation to have.