Igneous Range

The events reported in these pages transpired in that most mythical of lands, California. Of late called “Gold Mountain” by the Chinese, that fabled land was first mentioned, some believe, in the 11th Century epic poem the Song of Roland: Califerne.

According to eminent mythologist A.J. Carnoy, Califerne was a derivative of the Persian Kar-i-Farn or Kar-i-Farneh, a corruption that I can easily imagine a Frenchman conceiving. Kar-i-Farn is the name of a great fire-temple crowned mountain in ancient Persia, a land famous for its stone griffins, guardians of the Empire.

It would be natural that the legends concerning divine fires, the paradises on the mountains, and the marvellous birds which kept them or transported them were located on the mountain of Kár or Kár-i-farn (Kár of the farnah) as one had to call it.

—A.J. Carnoy

Centuries later, Garcia Rodriguez de Montalvo revived this mythical land of griffins in his romance, Las Sergas de Esplandian (ca. 1510 A.D.). Montalvo seemed to have based the name of his fictional land upon a place known to his readers, whether real or legendary:

In this island called California, because of the great ruggedness of the country and the innumerable wild beasts that lived in it, there were many griffins, such as were found in no other part of the world.

Montalvo imagined this island called California east of the Indies, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that when a rugged, griffin-inhabited island was discovered west of America, that it occurred to a Spaniard to call the island “California”.

And make no mistake, there were indeed griffins in California. L. T. White of UCLA reported that in 1647, Bisselius the Jesuit insisted that in California

griffins (gryphes) are found; and this is not a fable but the truth.

With such reports on the record, it’s easy to see how the name California stuck.

But of course we have learned much since those times. We know today, for instance, that California is no island (though it may have appeared to be, looking at it from across the Gulf of California). And we also know that no griffins inhabit California. Or do we?

There is actually a very large Californian raptor that once had the scientific name Pseudogryphus californiacus, and for good reason. Today we call it the California condor. It is not even the state bird, yet it may have been one of the primary reasons—or even the primary reason—why California got its name from an epic poem and a romance novel.

Cindy Adroushan was a neighbor of mine in Slough City when I was a boy.

She wasn’t born in Slough City. The Adroushans adopted her when I was too young to remember. They were an Armenian-American couple with one son who were hoping to adopt an Armenian orphan from Turkey.

The Armenians of Turkey had been the victims of genocide at the hands of the Turkish government, and the very identity of Armenian Americans had been altered in the crucible of that genocide, such that that dark event became a permanent part of their consciousness. So it was that Armenian Americans sought to help the Armenians of Turkey in any way that they could.

But Cindy wasn’t Armenian. When the Adroushans heard about her, Cindy was a toddler, living in an orphanage in Istanbul. They were told that she was born on the nearby Island called Tenedos. They were told that she and her brother were the last Greeks born on that storied Greek isle. Now all the Greeks were gone, and it would be a Turkish isle from now on.

No one knew what had become of Cindy’s twin brother, except that he had been adopted. Their mother had not survived childbirth, as was once so often the case. The Adroushans could only presume that the father could not have cared for the two newborns.

Greek turned out to be close enough for the Adroushans. Cindy’s story would not be easy to forget. It reminded Mr. and Mrs. Adroushan that the Greeks had also been the victims of genocide in Turkey. They knew the sufferings of their own people more intimately, but they knew they shared their misery with the Greeks. It occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Adroushan that this little child, though not Armenian in blood, knew firsthand the nightmare that they had only known through their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Could they then reject such a girl for her failure to be born Armenian?

The snowy cones of Mount Ararat and Little Ararat cut into a blue Armenian sky, suspended on the wall above Cindy Adroushan’s bed. There she lay silent and warm under her grandmother’s coverlet of Armenian Lace. Her mother’s shadow lay across her, with the ambient light from the hallway drawn out in a folded and warped rectangle that spilled across the woven throw and climbed up her bed and the wall in steps. Siranush Adroushan stood in the doorway, awash in love. Her husband Garegin called her in a voice intended to slip through the house, more to let his wife know he was coming than to call her to him. He noticed her just as he turned into the hall, and stepped silently behind her to join her in her reverie.

Garegin kissed Siranush and bade her a good day as he left for work. Mr. Adroushan was a history teacher at Slough City High School. He’d been teaching there for several years since getting his history degree at Fresno State. Being Armenian, history was something he’d been immersed in since childhood. It was understood among his elders that a career in teaching history, though not lucrative, would be a means to communicating the truth about the Genocide. Young Garegin enjoyed history, and he was a natural teacher, so he received the role of teacher with the blessings of his elders as well as the consent of his nature. Though his passion for history was challenged by the daily grind of teaching high school kids, to say nothing of the grind of history itself, Garegin found the job suitable enough.

His girlfriend at Fresno State, Siran, had not been terribly put off by the fact that her boyfriend had not set out to be a prime breadwinner, so long as he didn’t mind her seeking to win some bread on her own. She had been studying to be an architect.

Cindy was generally regarded as something of a tomboy. I guess she couldn’t help it, with the strength in her arms her hawk-like eye. She could have been a pretty girl, but she didn’t seem to care enough to try. She didn’t yearn to be included by girls or chased by boys. Thus a girl who simply abstains gets the name boy. Doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the way we saw her.

I remember first noticing that she seemed to have strong arms and great hand-eye coordination. She liked to play baseball, if only because she had so much natural talent for it. But it wasn’t a competition for her. It wasn’t a matter of excelling against her peers, but the pure interaction with the ball, I think. She took pleasure in the weight and trajectory of the ball. She never seemed to keep score. She did mind the count, of course.

I remember the time I let her try my new slingshot. She took it and knocked a  nut out of our walnut tree. Her arm never seemed too shy to pull hard. Her eyes always seemed steady and undistracted. They seemed to take hold of whatever they focused upon. It was a little spooky, but it wasn’t like they were shifty or scheming eyes. They were just very strong and certain.

Cindy always carried an air of confidence, even when she was uncertain about something. She could be aloof or engaging from moment to moment, but she wasn’t flighty. She just didn’t seem to care to belabor one moment at the cost of the next. She never seemed to crave anyone’s attention, but she was no solitary daydreamer. She would draw you in with her practical charm, but she never made an effort to keep anyone close.  She was far from incurious, but she sometimes seemed aloof toward social events. It seemed that people, though of interest to her, held no special place in her heart.

There was one thing that got under Cindy’s skin: fire. This was really peculiar given that she was raised in that pyrophyllic Armenian culture. Though her family and relatives never passed up an opportunity to adore a fire, Cindy would stubbornly reject the very thought, and if one pressed her they would have to contend with a violent anger or mad fear, or even a combination of both.

Cindy, as everyone in Slough City knew, was an excellent archer. She discovered archery when her brother Armen got a toy bow for Christmas. Armen never quite got the hang of the bow, so he just let his little sister play with it. She didn’t need it for long, though. Mr. and Mrs. Adroushan soon realized that Cindy would make good use of a proper bow of an appropriate size. She spent hours upon hours with that bow, and before long she was a feature at civic events, like the fair. She even took to crafting bows and arrows herself. She didn’t seem to distinguish between the craft and the sport, really.

Cindy was rarely preoccupied or inaccessible, but she always seemed to be occupied with something. Because of this practical inclination, she did well in school, though she didn’t appear to derive much pleasure from the approval of her teachers. Like anyone she had her days, and there were those days that fire ruined completely.

Some hazards appear to be acquired tastes. Oftentimes a child will first appear to be blissfully aloof to a danger, only to slowly mature into one paralyzed by irrational fear. Not to imply that the hazard is as a rule unreal, but that the fear itself is out of proportion with the risk, taken statistically. It has seemed to me for some time now that this was the case with Cindy Adroushan’s fear of fire.

The whole thing started so very innocently, with a minor burn. At first, her parents were amused at how well she learned the lesson. Her brother Armen, they’d recalled, had forgotten the lesson by suppertime. Cindy didn’t forget. She thought about it. She internalized the lesson, a lesson that might have been better forgotten.

She watched fires attentively, but always from a safe distance (which grew and grew over time). She watched the gas burners on the kitchen stove, and she followed the gas line from the back of the stove to the wall. Later, she discovered that a similar line fed the clothes drier. She dropped down to the utility room floor and saw the reflected blue light of the burners. The fire, she observed, flowed through the walls of the house. When she later discovered the water heater and the furnace, she began to envision streams of fire flowing throughout the walls of the house, and she wondered what stopped the fire from escaping and burning up her home. She would watch the hot drier exhaust blow out of the house, or when she would feel the hot air blow out of the furnace registers, it seemed to Cindy that the blue fire was exhaling. She began to have bad dreams about the blue fire. She would wear warm clothes around the house so that she could better avoid the breath of the fire, and she spent more and more time outdoors. Then came the day that she considered the exhaust blowing out of the back of the family car, and she realized the fire must be burning in the engine of the car. Then she saw footage of cars exploding and burning, seemingly spontaneously, on TV. She heard warnings about gas leaks after earthquakes.

This attitude on Cindy’s part toward fire may seem quite neurotic, even psychotic, and perhaps there was some neurosis or psychosis as well, but I think it’s important to recognize that Cindy wasn’t imagining a non-existent hazard. What she feared was—and is—a real threat. The problem for Cindy and her family what that she was too aware of that threat to function normally. And this phobia was no mere inconvenience; it was a source of embarrassment for the Adroushans, particularly when among their Armenian family and friends.

When the word got round that the California aqueduct had been completed and would soon be carrying water from the Sacramento Delta to Los Angeles, the Adroushans drove out to see this great feat of engineering. They took a picnic basket along, and ate lunch from the tailgate of their family wagon. Armen and Cindy listened to their father hold forth on the wonders of this great canal that carried life-giving water from Northern California, down into the sink, over the Range, and into the desert beyond.

The desert breeze blew tumbleweeds and shreds of trash across the plain. A dog tracked scents randomly from shrub to shrub.

The sun was eclipsed by the great cross from where the boy stood. That is why he stood where he did, sheltered from the afternoon sun. The cross had little accordions hanging from its crossbar. It might have been a telephone pole, but it felt like a cross, for he could tell that something had died there.

The flat vastness of the Mojave Desert engulfed the Iranian-American boy and his Dodger-blue cap.

He turned his green eyes back to the solitary chimney. There was no other trace of a house. Had it blown away, or sunk into the desert sands? More likely it had burned. The cross stood there as a monument to all that was lost.

The sun dipped down toward the tail bone of the Range. He turned around and headed for home.

He had been named after his father, who had been named—according to custom—after the legendary king. His mother so loved his father that she wanted the name for the boy. Anyone could see his father in him. They shared chins, cheek bones, and their eyes were just the same shape. Anyone could see it except for his father. It’s not always easy to see oneself in another, but this was a hard case. The elder Sam was vexed by the boy’s green eyes and sandy hair. Even if he could stifle his own suspicions, he could never hope to quell the suspicions of others. A shadow of shame fell upon him. He tried to numb the shame with drink, but every drink only seemed to add its volume to the depth of his shame. Finally, he lost his job at Lockheed, and after months of limbo, his brother offered him an oil industry job, over the mountains in Bakersfield.

One hot night in July, the Adroushans were sitting watching TV before bed. The windows of the house were open to prevent the house from cooking its inhabitants. The Adroushans heard shouting outside, competing with the audio of the TV. Armen ran out to see what was going on, then burst in a moment later to report that the Hacienda was on fire. The Hacienda was a Mexican restaurant down the street. Armen grabbed a drink out of the fridge and ran back outside. Mother and father followed. The crying of sirens soon followed them. Cindy waited inside, then thought better of it, and walked out to the street to keep a watchful eye on the fire down the way. Her pyrophyllic family was down at the corner, admiring the flames up close.

Cindy did not approach the ruins of the fire for days, but spent hours in front of her own house keeping an eye on the wreckage, as if on a fire watch. Cindy got precious little sleep. Finally, Armen talked her into getting a closer look so that she’d know that the fire was truly dead.

Once Cindy gained the courage to approach the corner, she would walk by it often, over and over again, looking into the black, saturated ruins. Neighbors, kids at school, and people at the supermarket checkout line all wondered aloud about the cause: Arson? A casually discarded cigarette? A gas leak? A grease fire? Cindy listened, and she silently inquired into each suspect and brooded.

How could grease start a fire, she asked. Nobody in her family gave her a very good explanation, so she tried asking a librarian. She was given a book that gave an explanation, but she needed help understanding the explanation. It occurred to her that a firefighter might know, so she dropped by the fire station that was a block out of her way on her way home from school. A friendly firefighter took the time to explain to her how water can expand quickly when heated, and how steam could blast out of pan like steam from a kettle, or even an old locomotive. Then the firefighter showed her some superheated grease. The firefighter then explained to Cindy how the steam could carry the the grease very far very fast, and Cindy began to understand. She understood that even water and cooking oil could conspire to burn a building down. She could see it quite clearly. But this enlightenment only deepened Cindy’s fear.

There are few pleasures more terrible than the waking of the Tulare Basin on a summer morning. The air has warmth that seems to whisper of the heat of the day, yet comforts as it haunts. The light of roads, the farms, the combines, and the trucks are scattered over the flat expanse like boats on a great, placid sea. One imagines the machine of Valley agriculture to be a sleeping dragon, both terrible and beautiful, and like the dragon, never sleeping very deeply on its treasure mound.

Above the yellow haze of pre-dawn lights, a blue glow appears above the profile of the Range. The glow grows imperceptibly brighter, until spears of white light shoot skyward, heralding the impending arrival of the sun. When the sun arrives, everything is blinded, and the soft hues of dawn are usurped by the glare and deep shadows of the day. The driving becomes strained and dangerous. The dragon is no longer feigning sleep.

The drive from Mojave to Tehachapi is surprisingly short. This is because the lowest dip of the tail of the Range lies immediately beneath one’s wheels. Sam looked up at the ridges, wondering whether the distant figurines were all joshua trees, or whether some of them were Indians poised for an ambush.

The descent into the Sink, though an easy, almost welcoming descent, is quite extended. There is no missing the fact that it’s a long way down. From the top, one enjoys a serpentine escort, as twin rails wind in broad coils and cut through the mountains. Leaving the breezy high desert behind, one meets a stagnant, purple blanket of trapped exhausts, herbicides, and pesticides. It is nothing new. Smog has been a companion of the Basin as long as fire itself, and it’s not just bad air that it traps.

Summer always arrives a little early in the Sink. The air is hot, dry, yet stale and sticky. Sam caught valley fever as soon as his family moved into their new home. He sat coughing, looking out his bedroom window through the heat of the day into the viral suburbs. He’d come from the desert where he was accustomed to wandering in every direction and following every mirage with a boyish relish. Now he looked out from his aching eyes to see a maze of cubes, each an impenetrable fortress. He labored to breathe.

The mountain streams from the Kings to the Kern once knew the Lake like other streams know the ocean. The lake itself would spill over its natural spillways into the San Joaquin River in spring, keeping its water relatively free of salinity. It was not a park-like place. The lake was a massive breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes. Every summer, as the river flows dropped, the retreating shores of the lake would leave a plain of rotting fish carcasses where the lake had previously been.

Ever since the harvesters reclaimed the lakebed, it’s been hard to think of the lake in the same way. The maps today might represent the lake, but there’s no reason to label the Sink. It’s just the southern San Joaquin Valley today, but if you spend any time there, you can still tell the difference. You can still feel the lake water in the air every time you inhale.