Soundtrack

The Mamas and the Papas — California Dreamin’

Dolly Parton — Jolene

Simon and Garfunkel — The Boxer

Tom Waits — Blow Wind Blow

Buck Owens & Dw. Yoakam — Streets of Bakersfield

The Beatles — Rain

R.E.M. — King of Birds

Buck Owens — I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail

Michael Maxwell — Rocky Mountain High (inst)

Ludwig van Beethoven — Adagio un poco mosso

Rush — Summertime Blues

Blue Öyster Cult — Burnin’ for You

R.E.M. — Oddfellows Local 151

Jethro Tull — Locomotive Breath

The Who — The Seeker

America — Ventura Highway

U2 — Yahweh

The Jimi Hendrix Experience — All Along the Watchtower

U2 — Miracle Drug

Dick Dale and His Del-Tones — Miserlou

Ludwig van Beethoven — Adagio molto e cantabile

Ludwig van Beethoven — Shepherds’ Hymn

Ludwig van Beethoven — Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso

Counting Crows — Rain King

Husbandry

When far Japan and so many of her people were finally incinerated, the camp was finally cleared and dismantled. All the crews left of it were the cemetery and the foundations of the barracks. The orphanage was closed down and all the orphans were scattered, for the orphanages in San Francisco and Los Angeles had been closed with all Japanese American businesses. The orphans and the orphanage workers cried out their farewells together, but Frankie cried alone. His tears slipped quietly down his cheeks as he watched the camp from a distance, standing in a sandy wash. He yearned to be with his fellow prisoners then, though some had been unkind, but he knew that he would be forced to part ways with them all in any case. The orphanage workers did not realize he was missing until it was too late. He had turned and set out for Whitney-san.

Frankie had made preparations. He had pilfered and packed out several loads of supplies and secured them against the local coyotes and mice. When the day came, he began to move his supplies further west, until he’d brought it all to a flat by a little stream just above the water line, where all but the greatest streams vanish into their respective alluvial fans. As he explored upstream, he found places where fish could be trapped. After a while, he returned to Manzanar. The barracks were gone, but the apple, peach, and pear orchards remained. For a year, he cared for the abandoned orchards and crops, packing water to them from the nearby stream, and the orchards and crops returned the favor with much sustenance.

The day came when Frankie realized that he’d been noticed and was being observed, so he left the camp and avoided it for some time, and as time went on he spent more and more time in the mountains. The crops died and he did not replant them. The orchards aged and dried out. Frankie got more and more of his food from the mountains, covering much ground to obtain a little fish here and a few berries or pine nuts there, and occasionally the meat of a marmot or a injured deer. In those days, there were plenty of quiet places on that part of the Range, and Frankie often traveled by night, so he was rarely seen.

In time, Frank grew less secretive, and he even began to go out of his way to greet travelers, and so he came to be familiar to frequent visitors. In some parts, the most frequent visitors were cowboys, so Frankie came to be known well among area cattlemen, particularly for his nocturnal skills and his knack for catching an occasional fish with his bare hands. He would love to hear the news from civilization, and would sometimes even learn something about his own mountains. He had been in the mountains for more than a decade before he first heard that the mountain he knew as Whitney-san was known to the world as Williamson. Sometimes, he’d get an occasional lesson in horseback riding or some other useful skill from a lonesome cowboy. One day, he would even get to watch a herd of his own.

In the Yard

Prison did have its privileges.

Frankie hadn’t been incarcerated for more than a week when he was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of the other prisoners liked to play baseball. When Frankie saw some prisoners constructing a baseball diamond, he watched their progress from a discrete distance. When the games began, he stood nearby and watched till the final pitch, waiting in earnest for an opportunity to catch a foul ball and get a chance to exhibit his throwing arm. Finding a stray ball one day, he began to practice with it, throwing the ball against the backstop before and after games, until he finally lured in a sparring partner so that he could at least play catch.

As aspiring and practiced a ballplayer as Frankie was, he was younger than most of the ballplayers. And he was white; a white Jap, perhaps, but white enough to make him easy to overlook. But Frankie had his moments. He got to fill in for one of the bigger boys on occasion, and proved himself with the opportunities that he’d been provided. Frankie’s efforts on the field may not have bought him the glory that he’d dreamed of, but at least he’d made himself part of the group. He wasn’t quite as white as before.

Frankie had plenty of time for reading while he was incarcerated, so he would sometimes check out books from the Manzanar library. He read some boys’ books by Twain, Thoreau, and London. He enjoyed reading, though his reading was often wanting in comprehension.

Frankie sometimes visited one particular elderly man because Frankie liked to watch the old man carve faces in pieces of wood. The man was accomplished at sashi netsuke, a Japanese art of wood carving. After a while, Frankie began carving on his own. He began to carve within sight of the old man, hoping to attract the old artisan’s attention. The old man looked in Frankie’s direction many times, and then one day Frankie got his wish. The old man waved him over. Frankie humbly approached the old man. The artisan took Frankie’s carving and observed it. Then he put his blade between his thumb and forefinger and pressed the blade against the edge of one of Frankie’s cuts. When the old man moved his hand away, Frankie could see that the old man had given the cut an appearance of depth and shadow.

Frankie continued to get tips from the old man until the man disappeared. Perhaps he had died. Maybe he had been released or moved to another camp. Frankie didn’t know. He kept carving.

Later in the war, after camp security had been eased, prisoners were occasionally permitted to travel outside the gates of the camp. Father Steinbeck, who ran the prison chapel, started to take kids out on overnight hikes toward the mountain that towered over the camp. One time, Frankie was invited onto one of the Father’s outings. It was a lot of walking for Frankie’s short legs. It seemed to him that they hiked forever. As they hiked, the mountain grew and grew imperceptibly until it was too close to see. Finally, they camped at the foot of the great mountain, above a stream that flowed out onto the desert. Frankie wondered where the stream flowed from and where it flowed to. It must not have come from far into the mountains. There just wasn’t that much water in it. To where was it heading? Did it flow out past the orchard, or did it disappear into the desert sand before it ever got that far?

After the camping trip, something about the desert clung to Frankie. He found solace looking out at the desert through the barbed wire, even though the desert wind filled his eyes with dust. He would sometimes spend hours in a day just looking out over the low desert bush, at the mountain the inmates called “Whitney-san.”

Sometimes at night, Frankie would slip under the barbed wire perimeter fence and the tired eyes of the guards in their towers, and he’d walk out onto the desert. The desert was flat and sandy. He could cover many miles in the moonlight, and in time, he learned to even do without the moon. He could get by with the stars and the lights of the prison, and sometimes even a scent on the desert breeze. It surprised him how much his nose could detect out on the dark desert. He could even smell water.

It was during these solitary excursions on the open desert that Frankie discovered a fondness within his heart for the prison, or rather, for the orchard that predated the prison. As many times as he had seen the fruit trees, it had taken hours of solitude for him to notice that this orchard reminded him of the orchard that his father had worked. Looking out across the expanse of desert, he had realized that such orchards are not as commonplace has he had previously assumed.

Continue …

The Orchard

Later that year, the Japanese Empire attacked an American naval base in the Pacific, and many Americans were killed. Before that dark day, Japanese Americans had rarely been trusted or treated fairly, but after the attack, Japanese Americans were suspected to be enemies of the United States. Thus it came to pass that Frankie and all the other kids at the Christian orphanage were bussed to a prison far out on the desert, where neither they nor their caregivers could threaten the security of the United States.

It was a long, hot bus ride across the Great Valley, over the Range, and into the desert. The bus was often pushed side-to-side by the desert winds. Finally, they came to a great prison camp in the desert, enclosed by barbed wire fences and guard towers. It sat in the shadow of mammoth, snow-capped mountain the inmates called “Whitney” and “Fuji.” The prison was named Manzanar, Spanish for “Apple Orchard”, because it had been placed in an old orchard of various fruit trees. It once stood out on the desert like an oasis, but lately it had become even more prominent as a prison.

The high desert was hot and windy, and as summer and autumn passed, it became cold and windy. It was always windy. The wind blew and blew through the camp, so that the dust never settled out of the air. The land, once a fertile valley, had been dying from thirst since the aqueduct had been completed.

Frankie was placed in an orphanage on the prison grounds called the Children’s Village. As before, he was treated as an outsider by the other orphans. Each morning, the orphans would race to the laundry to get the best pickings of clothing for the day. Frankie waited outside the mayhem, and settled for what clothes remained.

The prison was not a bad place so far as the orphans were concerned. They were accustomed to incarceration and isolation, but Frankie didn’t have it so good. When the other inmates looked at Frankie, it was easy for them to see the white folk who had kicked them out of their homes, closed their shops, and locked them up. Thankfully, most of the prisoners didn’t hold Frankie’s white blood against him.

Continue …

The Orphanage

One day in spring 1941, just after Frankie had turned eight, he came home to find that neither of his parents was in or around the house. That was not an uncommon occurrence, but after a while of waiting and wondering, he began to worry. After a couple hours, a patrol car drove up to the house and his mother climbed out, covering her face. When she entered the house, Frankie could see that she had been crying. She walked straight back to the master bedroom.  He came to her and asked her what had happened. She didn’t respond.

Late that evening, Frankie’s mother told him that his father had been in an auto accident. He had been in a collision with a produce truck at a rural crossroads, and he had not survived.

Frankie and his mother had to leave their farm and move to San Francisco, where she had family. They couldn’t take the water lanterns with them, so Frankie released them into a nearby canal.

Soon after Frankie and his mother arrived in the city, his mother found that she couldn’t support him any more than she could support her koi, so she was forced to put him in an orphanage. He was placed in the Salvation Army Children’s Home, a Japanese orphanage in the city.

Though Frankie remembered being called a Jap once or twice, he had never really thought of himself as a boy of any particular race. This changed at the orphanage, but the identity he acquired was something of an anti-identity. He’d never thought of himself as particularly Japanese, so he saw the other Japanese-American kids at the orphanage as foreigners, and they in turn saw him as a hapa—a half-breed—when they didn’t see him as a Hakujin—a Caucasian. On any given occasion, the term that applied to him was generally the term that happened to do the most harm.

Frankie would soon come to realize that the world at large saw him as a Jap. He would live as an alien among aliens.

Continue …

Prologue

Hundred degrees in the shade here at Sportsman’s Park. Martin leading from second after his eighteenth steal of the season. Frisch at the plate, two-and-two is the count. Frisch facing the mighty southpaw Hubbell from the right side. Bill Terry’s New Yorkers are ahead of the Redbirds by a run here in the sixth.

The stretch, and Hubble delivers—Frisch swings and slaps—a soft liner over second; it drops in and Martin touches third. He’s on his way! The throw from Ott—on a wire to Mancuso. Martin dives—he’s saaafe!

Frisch took second base on the throw. Just then he stopped as if realizing something, then he announced, “Oh man! I’ve gotta go home! I’m supposed to help my dad. See you guys tomorrow.”

Rocky Hill, California

Frankie ran off the diamond and up Rocky Hill Drive. He ran up to a roadside orchard, and cut into the grove, and ran on glancing left and right until he spotted a ladder. He turned and ran to the ladder, and said “Hey dad” as he struggled to catch his breath. “Hey! Not a minute too soon,” his father replied down from the tree. “More sacks over yonder.” Frankie fetched a shoulder bag and a pair of clippers, set up a short ladder, and took to picking the lower reaches of the nearby trees.

Frankie’s father, Joe Walker, was an immigrant from Oklahoma who’d been chased to California by the Dust Bowl and met a beautiful California girl who would soon become his wife. Her parents, Japanese immigrants, were dubious about their daughter marrying an Okie, but they reluctantly consented.

Frankie had been born on the edge of the Sink during the Dust Bowl years. To be precise, he was born on the 4th of March, 1933, which was the day of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration. It was thus that the newborn boy got his name, after that great leader whom Frankie’s parents and so many others had rested their hopes upon.

Frankie preferred to think he got his name from Frankie Frisch, the “Fordham Flash,” all-star switch-hitting infielder and manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. The Redbirds had won the World Series when little Frankie was a toddler. They were known as “the Gashouse Gang” for their scraggly appearance and their tactics—and antics—not befitting a gentleman. They were proper role models for the son of a Dust Bowl Okie, an Okie like Pepper Martin, the Redbirds’ head-first sliding madman of the base paths who once said “I grew up in Oklahoma, and once you start runnin’ out there there ain’t nothin’ to stop you.” The Sink is like that, but a Sink-runner had better be prepared to leap the occasional canal.

The worst of the Great Depression was over and things had been looking up for Frankie’s family. His dad got work operating an orange orchard just outside the town of Exeter. He even got a place to stay with the job—a farmhouse amid the grove. The owners even let Frankie’s mom make a water garden next to the farmhouse. Frankie helped her with the landscaping as much as she’d let him.

The orchard sat in the morning shadow of Rocky Hill, which pushes out of the Sink on the western edge of the Range. Frankie spent many an hour listening to Beethoven’s final symphony open on his mother’s phonograph—and sometimes in his head—imagining Rocky Hill and the Range behind it subsiding into the deep silt of the Sink. The monolithic descents and ascents of that first movement made the mountains want to move.

The boy imagined a great subterranean cauldron full of a viscous red broth which the land rested upon. Deep down, there was another land, a sunken land, sinking deeper and deeper through the boiling broth. As it sunk, it pulled the world down with it, a Plutonic undertow, biting off chunks from the belly of the land; tugging the mountains down through the silt sea here, the far, unseen end of the mountain tilting upward like the stern of a sinking ship.

Along with her modest music collection, Frankie’s mom kept several koi in her garden pond. The water garden reminded her of the garden her grandparents had kept when she was a girl in Japan. She often called the koi her “water lanterns.” She sometimes tasked Frankie to look after them; sometimes feeding them diced table scraps or helping her to clean the pond.

Continue …

Exit

Armen burned through a cigarette in his dream. There was much noise outside the door. Knocks and shouts about evacuation. Cars starting. Sirens. Distant explosions. Trucks roaring by. A motorcycle decelerating nearby. A knock. “Armen? You in there?”

It was Sue, he realized. The realization nearly failed to stir him, but he woke enough to reply, “it’s open.”

Sue jiggled the doorknob. “No it’s not,” She countered.

“Coming,” he groaned as he got up to let her in.

“What’s this, some kind of offering?” she asked with the remains of the feather held erect in her hand.

He threw out his hands and shrugged. “Sam. It was for Sam.”

“What’s Sam going to do with this?” she scoffed and whipped the feather on each side of Armen’s face, leaving a streak of ash black on his cheekbones. “A little eyeblack for the highway glare. Suits you.”

She tossed the charred feather skeleton on the floor and shook her head in disapproval. “You’ve heard about the evacuation? Of course not. You have your wallet? Anything else you need?” Armen looked around the floor, his dark hair wildly woven and dented, his dense beard matted and untrimmed.

She led Armen out to her bike and started it up. She handed him her helmet, tied back her slick black hair, wrapped a black bandana across her face, and slid a pair of broad sunglasses over her eyes. Armen mounted the back of her saddle and sleepily wrapped his arms around her.

They rode down the winding canyon as the conflagration exhaled smoke and spat sparks across the highway. Armen closed his eyes and felt the waves of heat and smoke pass. When he opened his eyes, he was riding through the fire’s wake. He saw a few fires amid the charred, smoldering wasteland. As they wound up a ridge, the wastes that they passed were no longer smoking. A couple miles on, he noticed green seedlings breaking through the charred earth and ash by the roadside. He saw tender shoots sprouting out of the root balls of pyrophytic shrubs. The fresh growth grew thicker and thicker as they rode on, until little trace of the fire could be seen beside the banks of the ash-loaded streams. As the bike swayed left and right with the highway, Armen noticed that he could see the deep blue evening sky. He turned back to the roadside and watched the grasses age with every turn.

The cycle roared as it swung through low, yellow hills peppered with jagged metamorphic castles and cattle. It crossed its last rise and hit the long straightaway that welcomed the riders to the Great Valley. Sue torqued the accelerator and the bike shot far into the valley darkness.

The wake of the cycle swept through a nightgown worn by the roadside. The gown held to a girl like a flag in a storm. The girl’s auburn hair leapt aloft in the highway wind with the sea of high grass behind her, all aglow in the firelight of the Range. Her amber eyes gazed up the highway at the orange glow that sat upon the Range like a sunset in the east, and the orange light of the igneous range burned in her eyes.

Continue …

Reports

The storm moved onto the land. She planted fires here and there, and both sides of the gorge were soon alive with flame, and the exhalations of the inferno filled the air. The fire chewed away groves, consumed the village of Foresta as though its name were Fuel, and bore down on El Portal as Armen sat on the edge of his bed. He stood up to walk outside. He saw the ridgeback smoking, and just then three green CDF trucks sped up the highway. He pulled out his cigarette pack to knock out a smoke, only to realize that he’d already emptied it. He stepped back into the cabin and lay down.

A moment later, he got up, pulled the Recipient’s book out from under his bed and pulled out the feather bookmark. He stepped outside to his concrete door slab, pulled out his cigarette lighter, and he lit a flame against the feather. It Ignited quickly and surprised Armen. He dropped it on the slab and returned to his bed, leaving the feather to burn on the concrete.

The village was soon marked for evacuation. Transformers exploded and fists knocked on cabin doors as Armen lay dreaming.

On Aug. 7, intense thunderstorms lashed Yosemite’s western edge, sparking more than a dozen blazes. Despite intensive firefighting efforts, several of the blazes grew uncontrollably, destroying the community of Foresta near the park boundary.

Science News, October 27 1990

The bombers appeared soon after the smoke, but not soon enough. In what seemed like no time at all, the canyon was choked with orange smoke, temperatures at canyon bottom had dropped for lack of daylight.

Van Wagtendonk, like many other fire specialists, had expected the prescribed burns to prevent such a blowup. “We had all thought that when the crown fire got to an area that had been prescribed-burned, it would drop to the ground,” he recalls. “I had thought that without the large amounts of surface fuels there, there would not have been enough heat to sustain a crown fire.

“But it didn’t care what was on the ground.”

Science News, October 27 1990

Continue …

A-Rock

It was going to be more than just another hot August day in Merced Canyon. Armen sensed something familiar in the air. He couldn’t figure whether it was good or bad, but it was irresistible. There’s something about a scent that reaches deep into us; deeper than ordinary consciousness—deeper than memory. There is something immediate about a scent that bridges time and brings faded memories into the sharp immediacy of the present. Armen decided to take the day off.

He took a walk up Foresta Road, a dirt road that winds up the north side of Merced Canyon, which is about three thousand feet deep at El Portal. Armen leaned against the bridge railing under the falls and let the last cigarette out of a pack he had been carrying around for a week. He lit up, took a couple drags, and continued at a casual pace up the road. It was a hot day, and the familiar thunderclouds gathered on the heights as the day’s heat amassed.

Upon reaching the town for which the road was named, Armen continued eastward to a summit that overlooks Merced Gorge. The sun rode hot and heavy over that summer day, bringing the sea of air below to a boil, and bringing everything within that sea to life. A light breeze could be felt everywhere. Air was sliding in to fill the places where the air before it had taken flight, pulling more air in from surrounding lands and following the great updraft into the sun.

Armen had seen enough, so he decided to turn back, but just then he saw someone standing down ridge. That was strange enough—if it was strange at all, but there was something oddly familiar about the silhouette between the ridge and the brewing clouds. Armen approached the figure. He was astonished to find that it was Sam. He might have wondered what Sam had been doing anywhere near Yosemite if he hadn’t been so stunned to see his old friend standing there on the ridgeback.

Sam stood alone on the summit, feeling the updraft and the sharpening gradient of the electric field, his long, sandy blonde hair whipped by the solar wind and charged by the voltage of the air. His translucent green eyes were dilated by the trance that had enwrapped him. The wind whipped through his tattered pants, striving to lift him as the Simorgh took up young Zal of the Shahnameh. So this Zal stood, waiting—it seemed—to be taken up by the atmospheric fire.

The igneous breezes slipped up the mountainsides, and upon reaching the ridge crests, took flight. More and more of the air was sucked inward and upward by the fire, upward into the frigid heights where heavy water vapor grew slow and heavy and fell out of the air as rain too short-lived to reach the earth, reabsorbed by hot air rising from below. Likewise, the great updrafts and downdrafts carried ions further and further apart, but the ions would only be held apart for so long. Electrical attraction would eventually overcome convection, and the divorced ions were reunited in explosions of current, plasma, heat, light, and sound. The terrible unifications cracked the air and split trees, igniting forests, and giving rise to another species of weather—wildfire.

“Take me.” Armen saw the words slip from his friend’s lips, something inside told Armen that Sam wasn’t speaking to him.

Thunderbolts split the air. Armen watched, and then he spoke his friend’s name. Armen put his hand on Sam’s shoulder—he wasn’t sure why. Maybe he wanted Sam to know that he was there. Maybe he meant to comfort him. Maybe he wanted to assure himself that he wasn’t comforting a phantom. Sam turned to Armen, his eyes glowing and damp, and he turned back to the updrafts, and the cloud over the ridgeback broke with a cracking, pounding violence that could knock a man off his heels.

Armen dropped his daypack, said “there’s food in here,” and turned to flee for shelter as the assault of the sky intensified. The wind danced uneasily amid the hammering thunderclaps and flashes. Smoke wafted from the land. Armen turned for a final look at his friend, and saw him standing amid the shadow and flashes of light, his long, sandy hair tossed wildly in the shifting wind.

Armen turned away, but then he looked back. Some mote had flashed high in the corner of his left eye. He looked up and saw it: a black fleck high amid the cumulonimbus. He turned his back to Sam and the storm.

Continue …

Void Where Prohibited

Working in Yosemite’s primary wastewater treatment lab meant collecting and testing water from different stages in the treatment process. It also meant collecting and testing the water up and downstream from the plant, and also meant testing water from collection points throughout the region. All this reminded Armen that the Range was a water supply for southern California. What he had not previously realized was that the water of half of the park was owned by the City of San Francisco.

Armen had first heard years before of how Frisco had permanently scarred the Hetch Hetchy, a great canyon-valley much like the Yosemite, to enable Frisco to grow beyond the pale of reasonable growth. That cynical rape had followed a series of disastrous fires—the phoenix years of Frisco, and it was determined that the sunny peninsula needed a reliable water supply for firefighting, but Frisco didn’t need Hetch Hetchy for that modest purpose. Firefighting was a mere poster child for a grander ambition. Just as with LA, the water was needed to quench the thirst of power. Frisco grabbed the water of the Tuolumne River, just as the City of Los Angeles had done to the Owens River. Where Los Angeles had dehydrated Owens Valley into a dust bowl, Frisco permanently flooded Hetch Hetchy, etching upon her granite walls the City’s signature bathtub ring.

The waterworks of the two cities, Armen realized, had spread across the state and met at the crest of the Range. It was as though a sign could be posted at Tioga Pass saying “LA City Limit” on one side and “Frisco City Limit” on the other. Northern and Southern Californians—liberals and conservatives alike—had conspired against the land. Frisco and LA had become one city in body and in spirit.

The thought troubled Armen at length. He began to get headaches and lose sleep. He finally decided that he would have to do something to clear his head of the mounting pangs of indignation, and he resolved to make a pilgrimage to Hetch Hetchy Reservoir to perform the sacrament of defecating in Frisco’s drinking water. It really was quite a relief. The headaches went away, and he was able to sleep through the night again. Sometimes the simple remedy works best.

Continue …