This was the first place I really loved. Western novels talk about love of the land, and how a certain location can wrap around your heart.
I was born in the rainy Northwest and didn't think of escaping since I didn't know anywhere else was any different. My eyes opened when we moved to North California.
Mother didn't want to go. She liked her comfortable city life where she had everything together, a big house with fancy furniture, room-sized closet stuffed with fashionable clothes, new car, respected at church. Life was just as she liked it. We probably never could have gone except the only means of persuasion Daddy had that she couldn't resist, namely, TEOTWAWKI. It's coming. We have to get out of Babylon quick, before the crash!
In retrospect it probably didn't need to be that scary, and yet, if it hadn't been that scary, it wouldn't have happened. If he hadn't filled my mother's head with doomsday scenarios she wouldn't have budged. I only realized that angle thinking back on it decades later. I think really Daddy just wanted to go to the woods.
I was pre-teen. School was abandoned. So were piano lessons. You don't need those things when the apocalypse is coming. I began to smell the free air.
Maybe I'll put in my school story right here. Why not? If you're bored, here you go.
Part of my mother's clawing for status included making the accidental baby, me (my brother and sister were 16 and 19 when I was born and Mother had begun to smell the free air), into the very bestest baby ever, as if there was some competition for whose baby could talk first, and tie shoes first, and play Mozart first, wearing a dress hand sewn by Mother. Being on the autism spectrum, as I now know, reading came easily for me, and Mother poured her energy into molding me into a star. She had me reading at two and writing at three. Piano was my native talent, but cooperating with stardom was not.
When I was four years old, I was sitting on the steps reading a Little Golden book about kindergarten. I remember that day clearly. I remember trying hard to understand the relationship between that book and life. Is school a real thing? Could I go there someday? Or was it too late, and the chance had passed? Was school only for others?
I brought the book to Mother and asked. She threw me in the car right that very minute and drove me down to the Christian school at the end of the road. She wrung the principal's arm and drove home without me. I remember feeling confused, abandoned, and a bit suspicious. That had been too easy.
Kindergarten was okay. They did fun things just like the book had promised. I loved the puzzles and worksheets. We were forced to take naps, or at least to lie quietly on a mat for a while.
One of my distinct memories was of the day they had all the kids get down on the floor and pretend to be worms, and wriggle over to the other side of the room without using arms or legs. Ummm "or not."
The teacher called for backup. I remember sitting on a bench with my arms crossed while four adults reasoned with me. I just watched the kids on the floor, thinking, "Don't they have any idea how stupid they look? Where is their dignity?"
I realized that we must have "friends" to get along here. One girl was willing to be my friend if I'd pay her in stickers, so I kept giving her stickers every day. When they were gone, I asked my mother for more stickers, but when Mother heard why I needed them, she refused. She said that's not the way it works. But that was the only way I knew how to do it, so when that survival tool was taken away from me, I was left friendless.
In first grade they tried to teach me to read. I made my feelings known. Are they trying to insult us? Do they think we're stupid? We do NOT need a teacher!
I was put into a room alone with a worksheet to fill in while the masters discussed my fate. They moved me to second grade. In second grade I was the one at a disadvantage, and there are some painful memories from that time. I was bullied by some and bullied others, looking for somewhere to fit into that awful pecking order. I remember some shocking acts of spite that I committed against other kids, quite at random; kids were hurting me, so I hurt back. It didn't matter that it wasn't the same kids. And I remember feeling rage at the popular girls who dressed fashionably, not in homemade dresses by Mother, and did trendy, cool things.
There was a group of smart kids who did other math problems than the rest of us. I asked the teacher if I could be in that group. She refused. I don't remember the reason given. I remember being upset. Did she think I was too stupid? But wait, what if she really did know better, and she was right? Welcome to self-doubt.
Another clear memory is one day when, instead of hating it as much as usual, I actually began to feel happy, for the first time in a long time-- that was because I had just learned how to zone out. I was enjoying myself very much, staring out a window high above my head at some sunny clouds up there, enjoying a long train of lovely, interesting thoughts-- interrupted by a teacher's rebuke. I learned, that day, what the word "daydreaming" meant. She explained it to me. Thank you.
I told Mother I had changed my mind and didn't want to go to school any more. Then came the first really awful disillusionment of my life. All this time, I had thought I was there voluntarily. The reason for the suspicious alacrity of sticking me in kindergarten was because she had anticipated a pitched battle when it was time to go to school, but then I had stepped right into it.
I ran to Daddy and got another shock. All-powerful Daddy told me he couldn't take me out of school or the truant officer would come around and collect me. Well, don't let them! Nope. Then the police would haul Daddy away.
When Daddy took me out of school to move to the boondocks it felt like vindication. A great wrong was finally righted.
By that time, like many of the other ways our souls are crushed into conformity with this world, I had lapsed into the surrounding assumption that people who don't go to school are stupid and doomed to failure. It's hard to resist when "everyone" knows this to be a fact. But I decided I didn't care. The pain wasn't worth some imaginary reward. Anyway, the world was going to end soon, so it didn't matter.
There was some attention paid to me at first, with lame school-at-home lessons which I resisted. Shortly before we went from the rural woods to the real woods, Mother invested in three years of a workbook method some charlatans convinced her was all that was needed. I hated the workbooks even before I did any of them. A thumb-through was enough. They had stupid cartoon illustrations two to a page, which I persuaded Mother, with a panicked sense of urgency, that the very sight of would irritate my brain to a fever and doom me to stupidity forever. She returned them for her money back.
Eventually I was allowed to read whatever I picked up at garage sales. It wasn't always healthy choices. Some really weird stuff comes with scholarly-looking marbled covers. De Maupassant as a pre-teen, really? Well, it was food for thought. I read 1984 in 1984 when I was fourteen. I was too young and it left some gouges. So did Foxes Book of Martyrs.
Daddy at one point must've had a qualm. He came across an old history book and handed it to. "Read the first two chapters and write a paper on it." A paper? Never tried that before. Might be fun. I wrote a beautiful recap of the first two chapters, and he said, "You're fine. Go play."
Okay.
I had come from a suburb, then found myself alone with two parents and three dogs in a mountain valley where we owned clear to the top of one hill and partway up the other. There was BLM on three sides. Instead of people, cars and sirens, there was the sound of the wind, or maybe once a day, a jet plane up so high that it was hard to spot it. At night there were more stars than blank sky between. It looked like sparkly icing. I found the Andromeda galaxy with Daddy's binoculars.
All that warm grass to romp on, and giant trees of subtypes I was delighted to learn, sugar pine, ponderosa pine, Coulter pine, oaks, Douglas fir, manzanita, giant interesting twisted old maples stretching around and over a creek that was big enough to make electricity but small enough for a kid to move, channel and dam. That was my new playground. I planted my own garden. I sewed clothes for my Barbie dolls.
One day I was looking up at the hill and it occurred to me that one could get there from here. If I kept on walking, I would eventually get to the top. I asked Dad, then took a dog and headed up there. That was my first experience scrambling, sometimes on all fours, straight up the side of a big hill. I still remember the feeling of the top. It was a big deal.
The hill on the other side was four or five times as high. I did that later on. It took all day and pushed my comfort zone.
I can make just as good a case for its being quite miserable. I didn't fit in, even before we became mountain people. Seeing a human being once every couple of weeks doesn't help one's personal growth. I had disliked them, as a lot, before, and even moreso when I began to look like a crazy redneck in whatever rags I favored, with accessories from garage sales over my mother's objection, and their reaction was as you'd expect.
Eventually even I got lonely. I had conversations in my head, but couldn't have them with real people. My tendency to be snarky and blurt hurtful truths went unchecked. Later, when I met normal people, I felt unacceptable and out of place. I worried about the future. I was ready for the world to end but began to lose faith after a while. I didn't know what I would do if it continued.
I had an engulfing mother. When Dad was in the house, she told him every move to make, but during daytimes she stayed mostly in the house and garden doing boring things. Dad was down in the shop, fixing cars for money, building things on the place, messing with alternative energy. He knew everything about everything. I really should have come out with so much more knowledge! I could have had a college education for free if I'd paid attention. Mostly I followed him around, read books out loud to him while he worked, played with the dogs, talked to him about my pet philosophies. Decades later I asked him why he hadn't taught me more of his skills. He says he tried, but I made it clear "in no uncertain terms" that I was uninterested.
Hm. How old was I then, thirteen? Well, I admit I'm usually not exactly tractable.
There was no music except what I or my mother made. My brother had given me a tape recorder, but the batteries were for the flashlights. Whenever Dad would start the generator, I'd run for the record player and the one record I really liked, the Emperor Concerto. I could get most of the way through it before he turned the power off again. After listening enough times I had it basically memorized so that I could hear it play in my head any time I wanted.
I have more photos of the interior of the house, but I'm little interested in them. The house was necessary to sleep at night and read indoors when it was hot, but the woods were where I preferred to live.
Here's a stitch from the olden days when we had to take the photos manually. This is the view standing on the ridge to the east of our small east hill. I only went up there twice. Our east hill is down in the middle and then the higher one behind it is the west hill.
Do you see a black blob on the very far right side? That's my dog Cindy, who once treed a bear by herself.
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