DEVIL’S DEN & ILLUSTRATIONS

DEVIL’S DEN

BY DENNIS WILDS

Copyright 2008

all art work by Leilani Child Wilds

Dennis W. Wilds, author.

No part of this publication may be used in any manner without written permission.

All rights reserved.

 

Preface

This is a story about life in the raw stripped of non essentials and distractions of traditional parenting and nuclear family traditions.  This is a happy story of a family that refused to be shattered by the loss of its patriarch and the inconvenience of relocating across the country into a surrealistically strange environment.

Our tribal odyssey continues into the twenty first century with second and third generations.  It is for these recent additions to the family that this tale is written.  Having a kid tell this collection of stories allowed me to skip over the stark sadness of the adult world view and reveal the essence of our particular circumstance in those years.  Setting the beginning in the most remote area of California framed the events in the context of a minimalism necessary to reveal its true characters.  I repeat, this is a happy tale devoid of self serving angst so don’t feel sorry for its characters because they had a real life and abundant opportunities.

Dennis was me those many years ago.  Named after my father who died when I was less than a year old, I knew only brothers, sisters, and mother as a child.  Starting the story when I was seven allows me to build on reliable memories and that happened to involve the move into the Southlake Farm labor camp known as Devil’s Den.  There were camps before like Squire’s camp, Gus’s camp, Harrigan’s camp. There was Westlake farms camp after Devil’s Den.  But Devil’s Den was the best and biggest with the most memorable residents.  I remember all of them but I bet they don’t remember me at all.  I was more of an observer to their lives and their daily travails.  There were very few bad characters there in my child’s world.  We were not trapped there either. We had opportunities and freedom to come and go.  In this life without trees and lawns we got busy living and loving each other and starting anew.  We were strong and healthy and incredibly hard workers.  We continued to grow up and self improve in Devil’s Den and begin our preparation for the better times and opportunities that lay ahead over the hills and mountains in Santa Barbara.  I will let these real events and characters tell our family story as it happened.  If, at times, you feel sympathy for our plight I ask that you instead laugh along with me.  We were just ignorant and with good cause and this led to more comedy than pain.  We were living each day with the hope and expectations that our tomorrows would be better than our yesterdays.  We were right. 

THE OASIS

  

The spring cotton blossom says to me “You may have been born in Oklahoma, but you are reborn in Devils Den.”

There it is sitting in the distance hovering over the Carrizo Plains floating on pillows of convection mirages shimmering just out of reach, too far to walk to.  Maybe I will climb onto my magic carpet and ride on over there high up in the sky with those muses of my imagination, the buzzards and condors past the sulfurous wells that feed the life forms, the fox, pronghorn, coyotes and the Okies, Mexicans and especially, the children.  Hidden below is the giant life giving aquifer that has waited millennia for our arrival, the workers.  We will turn this arid valley green with crops and we will add laughter and the other sounds of workaday life.  Of all the names, Devils Den. Couldn’t they have given this corner of California a better name?  Why not Golden Poppy Field?  In the spring those hills transform into gold and purple blanketed aprons to cushion my magic carpet of imagination.  In the summer you can slip down into the cool well reservoir with its sandy bottom and stay there defying the overhead sun.  In the cool of the early morning bare feet and industrious hands can find hunks of quartz along the freshly dug irrigation ditches.  There are enough dust devils all day to carry you on zig zag paths around the barracks and cabins if you trust them enough to step into their warm, abrasive vortices.  Then there is the heart of the community, the cook house kitchen where Mom labors long hours and the Braceros keep the juke box going.  What a time.  What a place to grow up.  For the adults there is that precious necessity, work.  With a job you can live, not just exist.  A job is hope and happiness and security and health all rolled up in those intangible three letters. 

In the distance, over the hills, our affluent keepers labor in their own elevated lives and economy.  These landowners, seldom seen, are our benevolent benefactors as long as we work long and hard.  If they are happy with this arrangement, then we are cautiously ecstatic.  We have no law, fewer rules and enough money to buy food and clothes.  There is school if you like and no school if you don’t like.  I remain ambivalent on the subject.  Words and handshakes are currency and giving is the rule.  Saving is unheard of because the future does not exist, just today and yesterday.  You know, you can just breathe.  When the moon comes out, it is night and bed time, as simple as that.  That’s the word, simple, not to be confused with easy or free, but plain, straightforward and uncomplicated. 

Looking down now I feel a wonderful loneliness, unafraid to exist by myself.  I can see the contour patterns of the dry land farming beyond Cholame and the sterile oil pumps and tin buildings of Avenal from up here.  The sun is racing toward its daily disappearance over on the coast, running away from Stratford and its farm labor camps.  When night comes again maybe I’ll look back in time into the night, way back beyond the milky way to first memories and the gunshot that ended one existence and started this one.  This land is so strange.  With its subterranean energy miles down where tectonic plates strain to separate and lose their grip on each other, grinding past each other creating clay dams to send the aquifer upward toward the surface close enough to be tapped by wells, water to quench our thirst and water the crops.  When night does come, darkness closes in on the one perpetual light above the cookhouse steps.  Moths and bugs migrate toward the light and the bats feast on the swarms of insects over the canals.  I strain to remember the WHAT that happened before all of this as I go to sleep.  My brothers and sisters tell me the BEFORE was a farm a thousand miles away and there was happiness there but I can’t force my mind past the barrier of the big bang so this is where my time begins. 

So I am becoming important here.  Mom and I feed the workers who raise the cotton for its seed and fiber.  Gossipol hirsutum, the ancient plant belongs here about as much as we do but we are here together just the same.  I Step into the waist high cotton fields and surround myself with countless beautiful pastel yellow and pink spring cotton blossoms.  By summer’s end this bouquet of gossamer petals will bloom a second time, yielding the bolls packed with white fibrous fruit.  Come fall strong and dexterous hands will gently coax the fiber from the sharp coarse open bolls and fill the sacks which empty into the trailers that flee to the gins where the oil saturated seeds are teased from the cotton fibers.  The machines to do this are too harsh on the microscopic strands so our reward is pennies per pound to separate the fluffy riches from the protective grasp of the plant.  The time between the spring and fall blooms breaks backs with weeding, topping, and cultivating, and then the hard work really begins, the picking.  I can see the daily migration of the rusty yellow buses carrying the pickers and the faded red International Harvester trucks pulling the cotton trailers back from the unpromising horizon toward our cienega, our institutional yellow painted buildings of our little oasis on the sprawling Devils Den Ranch.  But today it’s just me and the promise of those cotton blossoms.

If I could I would ride on forever up here, and maybe some day I will. but for now I slip off my carpet and step down on the hard rocky ground hot to the touch on tough bare feet, feet tough enough to resist the penetration of the goat headed stickers.  Down here it looks different and less promising.  I can smell coffee and beans cooking and the aroma of sage of the surrounds.  I hear the grasshopper buzz over the omnipresent white noise of nothingness.  My skin feels dry and like everything else, I am lightly dusted with the earth that moves down from the hills daily, claiming possession of all that is in its path.  But I am still alive and I keep moving about protected in this sanctuary with a full stomach and legs strong enough to carry me miles in any direction without seeing pavement or people, knowing the coolness of safety waits for me every night back at the oasis.  I need to move out of the dream and into reality now.

The necessity of life and real living takes me away from the magic carpet so I step off and grab the edge of the family quilt and proceed to make this my new home and gradually relax into the new life where daily the horizon offers no new promises and the whispers of opportunity come and go with the passing car tires on the paved road and the night brings the sound of a woman softly crying by herself, and the faint echos of the shot coming from the hills. The pavement flows away from here past the eddies of Reef City and Paso Robles and merges into the river of energy toward the coast and its cities where the whirlpool of the American Dream is rumored to await the adventurous.  This unknown path is dangerous, they say and not for everyone, but its draw is incessant so deep down inside I know my time here in this exquisitely isolated and peaceful asylum is temporary.  I will lay down here for a while on my quilt and rest til I am ready to move again.  Soon we will need to move on in our separate directions, but I will hold on to this fabric just a little longer, bargaining with myself to delay the future and the unknown just a little longer.  It is still safe here at the oasis.  We will work this poor alluvial soil until the cotton no longer grows, and then we will deal with the future.  Maybe I will leave for just a while, after all I can always come back, can’t I? 

I have an idea about the future, and this is how it goes:  When I die and go to heaven I will ask God to let me have my magic carpet back temporarily and I will go back to Devils Den and hover around way up high where I can sail above the clouds and search out those dust devils swirling through the San Joaquin Valley labor camps until I find the Wilds family dust devil with Mom, Eugene, Jean and the rest of our family in it.  I will pick it up and carry it back along Route 66 until I find our Oklahoma farm house with Dad sitting on the front porch waiting for his family and for time to begin again.  I will place this reunion in a snow globe and set it on the forever shelf where it has always belonged.  Only then can our past become the future.

********************

The following story is of Devils Den and its denizens.  Mostly true, if not at least based on fact, my accounts of labor camp life in the 1950’s come out of my memory of family and friends and acquaintance from that place in time.  Devils Den was a former military training camp in the San Joaquin Valley of California.  South Lake Farms converted it into a farm labor camp to serve the cotton farming interests which controlled the area.  This remote outpost had no public services or schools leaving the residents unsupervised and uncounted by most measures.  We had a camp boss to settle disputes and that was the law.  The landowners paid the labor contractor and he paid us monthly.  We had a small store, but Avenal and Kettleman City had the gas and Smart and Final.  I joke now that I was raised by coyotes since most days I saw more of them than people.  I was raised also to be not seen and not heard.  So, I kept my mouth shut and stayed out of the way in those years and the following chapters are what I saw in Devils Den.       

Devils Den Corrections:

Since sharing my last installment with family, and after online research with the help of San Joaquin Valley historical societies, I now know that Devils Den was never a military base.  Instead, the barracks likely came from a nearby Army Air Corps training field in Huron, Coalinga, or Lemoore, California.  The Producers Cotton Oil Company’s land holding subsidiary called South Lake Farms moved them to Devils Den circa 1950 to house the farm labor community needed to pick cotton and irrigate the Devils Den Ranch which comprised approximately 9000 acres of arid land sitting atop a large aquifer.  The current owner of the ranch is the Santa Clarita Municipal Water District, and the ground water is pumped out of Devils Den toward Los Angeles. Interestingly enough, my brother David recalls helping my Uncle Roy Irons survey the area for irrigation canal construction in the early 50’s.  This area was actively drilled for oil during the mid twentieth century, and the communities of Avenal and Kettleman City benefited immensely from oil revenue taxes.                       
           

The Puerto Rican

It happened this way.  Must have been winter because it was cold and raining and the steps up into the cook house had a big mud hole on each side.  The fight started inside by the juke box and the two men soon tumbled outside and down the four steps into the mud.  Initially my point of view was from the top of the steps leading into the dining area of the two story barrack building.  Of the ten or so identical two story buildings, our cookhouse was painted green and this side entrance was for the workers who paid for three meals a day.  The dining area was separated from our living quarters by the kitchen where I spent most of my day.  Around the corner to the back of the barracks there was a stairs to a second level of apartments.  Everything was made of wood and of Spartan design.  The decor was dirt and dust and bare light bulbs and tonight it just smelled like fresh mud.  I don’t remember who the combatants were since itinerant men came and went in the camps so often.  Some were Korean War vets and some were drunks and some were likely both.   But this cool night these two anonymous fighters decided to fight over some private matter never to be revealed to this seven year old.  Now I had seen kids fight and dogs fight and some wrestling matches before but this level of violence beat anything I had seen before or since.  This was a fight to the death.  In my mind the good guy was an African American who I have never known to cause trouble in the camp.  The bad guy was new to me and they said he was a Puerto Rican.  They were likely in their late twenties and able bodied and quick and strong as hell.  By the time I and the crowd followed them down the steps into the yard they were slugging it out and connecting.  The crowd was mostly quiet and non interfering, and like me, keeping a good distance away.  Within a few minutes the Negro was tiring and went down but the Puerto Rican kept at him and the real beating had begun.  I knew I was seeing something really bad happen but no one was moving to stop the fight.  Both men were bloody and covered with mud and the bad guy was not letting up.  To this day I think the African American would have died if my cousin, Woodward, the camp boss had not pulled up in his truck.  At over six feet and two hundred pounds this big Okie waded in and pulled the Puerto Rican off the defenseless victim only to have the Puerto Rican connect a fist to Woodward’s head.  This led to round two with Woodward having his hands full with the tired yet still strong assailant.  This phase of the fight took another two or three minutes with more punches and slips and misses.  This is when I got scared for the first time because it looked like even the fresh Woodward might lose to the bad guy.  I began to think of what would happen then.  The Puerto Rican was murderous and it became a fight for life in my eyes.  Both men were down on their knees in mud and still swinging and it was bloody and the crowd was quiet and scared too. 

The last punch of this fight had the finality of a great event in my young eyes.  I was expecting some divine intervention maybe, but Devils Den did not have a church.  We had the occasional missionaries come through, but if our dusty little corner of the universe had a god watching over us he may well have been an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent extraterrestrial pagan god who at that moment sent a bolt of lightning down Woodward’s shoulder to his elbow and out of his calloused, cotton picking fist into the Puerto Rican’s forehead.  In reality, it probably was the beans and cornbread dinner that gave Woodward the power in that last punch, sending the Puerto Rican down for the last time.  It was over just like that and Woodward was wobbly but rose to his feet and took a few moments to catch his breath.  He had risen to greatness in my eyes by saving Devils Den for another day.  As the Puerto Rican slowly regained his senses, Woodward ordered him to head to the showers and clean up and leave the camp.  With nothing to say and no argument, the loser dragged himself off the fifty yards toward the middle of the camp to a cinderblock structure enclosing several shower heads.  With no reason not to, I followed him across the muddy dirt yard and peeked around the door to see him standing under the cold water as the mud and blood washed down the floor drain, too tired to even wash.  After a while he opened eyes to find me staring at him, prompting him to yell at me “what the hell you lookin at?”  I told him I had never seen a person take a bath with their clothes still on, to which he yelled back, “Get the hell outa here.”

I left and that is my memory of the first adult fist fight I ever saw.  Now I have other first memories, like the first time I kissed a girl. That too happened at Devils Den and I remember learning it is best to ask first and don’t kiss your first cousin.  I experienced my first cool aid drink there too, courtesy of the missionaries.  I have often wondered if it was a young Jim Jones that day who loaded the camp kids in an old school bus and took us out in the desert giving us beans and cool aid while his troupe prayed over us heathen kids. But that’s another whole story for later.  All these memories are like a stack of cards in my mind waiting for a thump on the head or some other trigger to reveal themselves to me fresh again after so many years.  There is this song called “Goodnight Irene” that reminds me of my first polio shot.  It really reminds me of Irene, my friend at Devils Den who is inextricably tied to that first vaccine, and this is why:
                                                      

The Great Polio Shot Event

My friendship with Irene was brief but memorable, if for no other reason that she was as original a character as I have ever met in my entire life.  I don’t think she was destined for greatness by any means but she has become unforgettable for her actions the day after the great fist fight. This day all of us kids knew in advance to be the scheduled first polio vaccine clinic at Kettleman City School.  We formed a grim line in front of the barracks that served as the bus stop for the school bus that cool morning. We watched the yellow bus slowly make its way toward us down the muddy road that connected the paved road to Devils Den.  It would get sideways every now and then and we hoped it would get stuck and save us the dreaded ordeal of a hypodermic needle, something most of us had never had before.  We knew our fates were sealed once we boarded the bus, because at that moment you belonged to the school and had to abandon your semi feral ways to the camp you left behind. There was me, my best friend Gaylord Goforth, his sister, Shirley, Irene and maybe four or more other kids whose names escape me now. Boarding the bus we scraped the mud off of our shoes on the first step and proceeded to our seats like condemned cattle but Irene stayed on her feet and proceeded to attempt to banish fear from the bus by issuing forth proclamations of bravery for all to hear. Next to me, Irene was the smallest of our group and small for her age of about nine or ten. She wore the same dress or style of print dress every day and brown shoes missing the laces.  Her pig tails were tied with old ribbons and she carried no books or purse or bag.  She was going forth into battle unarmed except for her fearlessness. Irene was typical of camp kids in that I cannot remember ever seeing her family since grown-ups worked long hours leaving us kids to our own devices for most of the daylight hours.  People came and went in Devils Den and many kids never enrolled in school.  Why bother since they knew they could easily be leaving again in days.  If I had to assign a metaphor to Irene I would draw on later education in college and assign her to the scientific family of Ephemeroptera.  Literally translated, this means “having wings for a day”, as in the mayfly which lives an entire lifetime to mature for a brief few hours of winged glory.  In other words, kids like Irene were here today and maybe gone tomorrow.  Thus, Irene’s Devils Den legacy proved to be ephemeral but memorable.  She marched back and forth in the aisle of the bus exhorting us “not to worry bout no shots, cause they don hurt no way” and proclaimed “I’m gonna be the first in line, aint gonna cry, no sir”.  I was beginning to feel better with this encouragement even though I had personal experience with penicillin shots two years earlier while recovering from appendicitis.  They hurt and I knew it but it did help to have a cheerleader like Irene that morning.  The bus trip to Kettleman City took close to 45 minutes and this gave Irene time to get wound up even more.  All eyes were focused inside the bus this morning as she worked her admonitions up more along the lines of a sing song sermon.  She had the talent to perform and her march turned into a dance as she gave us detailed instructions of how to hold our arms out and close our eyes and don’t cry when the shot happened.  I remember her grabbing the seat backs with each hand and lifting her skinny body off the floor and running in place.

 The bus driver never intervened but I saw him grinning as he surveyed the action from his mirror.  This had become good entertainment and someone yelled “Irene, do the hand jive”.  Now every kid on the bus could hand jive some but the real hand jive requires good muscle memory and rhythm and inspiration.  Hands slapping bare skin done right with a little song is acapella at its best.  Irene’s threadbare dress and bare legs became the perfect percussive instruments when she began the “hambone”.  Add to all this her unique touch of taking her fingers and everting her upper eyelids upward while body slapping to “hambone, hambone, where you been, roun the world an goin agin, hambone, hambone  where’s yo wife,    in the keechin cookin rice….”, and she danced us all the way to school.  We were a changed bunch of kids on arriving at Kettleman City Elementary School that morning.  We were stronger and confident that we could handle the shots but hoped that they came later in the day.  Disembarking, Irene led the way and soon disappeared.  We didn’t have long to wait because the teachers began to herd us toward the cafeteria and into the chrome stalls that led down the food service line.  I remember the cooks and servers working in the kitchen and no food to be seen and a nurse at the other end of the line. I don’t remember hearing any crying just a hushed line of kids inching toward the nurse’s station and an open door beyond. 

Now that I think, this school was so different from the scores of other schools I knew as a kid.  It was nice and all, with good playground equipment, an auditorium, even a big outdoor swimming pool.  But I cannot remember more than one specific teacher, meaning a personality. The place was basically impersonal.  Kettleman City Elementary was efficient in processing us itinerants and maybe just a little clinical.  They had oil money, enough to hire a higher class of teachers and looking back, I think we could have been the subject of a new sociological trial program.  Like cattle lured by a salt lick, we kids gravitated to the warmth and nourishment of the school, and in particular the cafeteria where wholesome food and milk waited.  In that light, I think it was devious how polio vaccine was switched for food that day.  They tricked us.

My personal strength as a kid was a good imagination. I could imagine my way to other places and times when bored and used this power as a form of quiet entertainment.  I was imagining a new bike or something while in line as we crept forward.  I had briefly considered breaking out of line and ducking under the rails and running out the door past the nurse but the man with a white shirt and tie standing next to the exit nixed that plan.  He probably was the principal and he had powers far beyond polio shots at his disposal.  Men with suits and ties were mysteriously powerful to camp kids.  No, I decided to follow Irene’s advice and take my medicine stoically that morning. I wondered where was she anyway.  I figured she had been the first in line and was already outside in the playground on the swings or sporting her bravery medal or new shoes which surely they would honor her with.  Some people are naturally gifted with character and inner strength. On the other hand, I was a follower, and happy to be led. I would leave greatness to the chosen few.

The screaming from behind, and around the corner at the start of the line jarred me awake.  Someone was yelling, crying, shrieking, screaming and begging all at the same time and the line behind me collapsed into disorder, blocking the view toward the commotion.  I could see two or three adults above the kids’ heads and they were busy wrestling at something about their knee level. Still under the influence of my imagination my first thought was maybe a coyote had wandered in and had panicked the line, except I heard one of the adults yell “hold her down, grab her legs”. 

Just like that my courage evaporated and panic gripped my nerves.  Maybe I could run out the back door.  Where was Irene when we needed her the most?

The crowd parted momentarily and I saw Irene on the cafeteria floor on her back kicking and spinning while keeping the heels of her shoes toward the teachers hovering over her.  Now the body has scores of joints and Irene was simultaneously using all of hers to do everything but turning around inside of her skin.  This level of resistance and energy might be surprising to you, but you need to know that us camp kids may have just black coffee for breakfast and nothing more to eat til the free lunch at school at noon.  Irene was wired for battle and the audience was transfixed.  I heard one of the teachers yell “Get her off the ground, she isn’t wearing underwear.” No surprise there either as camp kids may not even own underwear.  But I was asking myself how Irene could go from song and dance to extreme feats of strength in a matter of moments.  Right about then a second teacher pounced on Irene, pinning her down on the floor, grabbing her feet and pulling off one of Irene’s shoes.  The nurse moved right in and got the shot into Irene somewhere and just like that, it was over.  Just where the shot went, I don’t know, but the nurse was satisfied enough to order her released.  Anticlimactically, Irene settled down to a flaccid whimper and given her shoe back and escorted out onto the playground where she remained uncommunicative to me and the rest of us Devils Den kids the rest of the morning.  No more jiving, she was inconsolable so we just left her alone but her actions that winter day had burned a lifelong memory into my brain. 

    If there was a lesson to be learned that day, I don’t know what it was, except that we should thank God for the oral polio vaccine.  Looking back, I wonder what ever happened to Irene, or for that matter, the other camp kids I never saw again.  When you moved on from camp, it was not customary to say goodbye because you might be coming back or run into the same kids in the next camp or school.  So I’ll just say “Goodnight Irene, and hello Grandma Hammerhead”.

Grandma Hammerhead

If ever I was ashamed of how I have treated a person, it was Grandma Hammerhead.  This story for me is sad with no good ending and I wish I could rewrite this chapter of my life in Devils Den so I could be nice to Grandma Hammerhead, the resident witch of Devils Den. Devils Den camp was sprawled out over about twenty acres of poorly drained and flat land.  On one side of the rectangle a dirt road ran in front of about eight army barracks, each two story and only five or so inhabited. Each barrack had an enclosed stairwell on one end, and a fire escape ladder and landing on the other end, leading up to dormitories on the second floor.  We lived downstairs in one sharing the first floor with a kitchen and a large dining area with wood picnic style tables and a juke box. This part of the barracks never closed as my mom, Emma cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for approximately one hundred Mexican farm laborers contracted to South Lake Farms by Gus Irons labor contractor.  The men worked twelve hour shifts and a large portion of their twelve hours off were spent with us dining or hanging around the juke box.  Mom would sell soft drinks and canned pineapple drinks on the side.  We had two types of pineapple drink.  The first was pineapple drink in a can.  The second was PINEAPPLE JUICE.  The distinction was that one was Regal Pale Beer which was illegal for us to sell without a liquor license.  But what did this have to do with Grandma Hammerhead?  I’m getting there.  The population of Devils Den was maybe two hundred and fifty people, with ninety-five percent being male adults who at any given time may have been under the influence of PINEAPPLE JUICE.  Grandma Hammerhead was one of a handful of women in Devils Den but she was probably in her sixties and a widow.  If she felt threatened it was understandable but not called for.  To keep imaginary suitors away, she took to carrying a claw hammer in the front pocket of her dirty apron.  We kids gave her the name of Grandma Hammerhead as a cruel joke, and if she was crazy we shared the blame because her torment was our recreation.  Left to my own devices I would have never given her a second thought but harassing Grandma Hammerhead had become a rite of passage for me and my friends in Devils Den.  We could either fight each other or turn our energies outward and go visit Grandma Hammerhead’s cabin on the far side of the camp.  To get to her cabin you went diagonally across the center of the camp and its showers and outhouses through a line of tents and prefabricated army huts to a few of the original cabins built before the arrival of the barracks.  Grandma Hammerhead’s cabin was maybe twelve feet by fifteen feet with a small porch and a dirt yard cordoned off from the surrounding area by a makeshift fence.  The fence was made of found objects like wheels, and rusty box springs and wooden gate.  She had a small garden to which she carried water from the camp spigot.  She shared all of this with a small dog.  The dog was a feist, in other words, a diminutive nondescript barker.  You could not approach the cabin unseen or unheralded by the dog, and I’m sure that is why she kept it.  My brother in law, Thomas, aka Candido Herrera, had lived in and around Devils Den for a few years before our arrival so he related to me the following:

Grandma Hammerhead had a real name but he did not remember it, and she had a life with a husband until he died, leaving her widowed and alone in Devils Den some years before our arrival.  Thomas recalls conversations with a sensible old woman who was just scared to be so alone and vulnerable.  But she courageously carried on in her isolation and carried the hammer always for

protection.  As a practical concern, she needed the hammer to maintain her fragile fence and abode against the winds of Devils Den.  Like most of us in Devils Den, when she went to the garbage dump, she returned with perfectly good things with which to further fortify her shack. These things she would hang from nails around her fort until the path leading to her front door looked like a tunnel, hiding the entrance to her cabin.  I am sure this was by design to make her more secure and invisible. On approaching her house, the feist would announce your progress and this in turn would prompt her response which was never friendly or inviting.  I know of no one who ever saw the inside of her little kerosene scented castle but my sister Anna Jane told me that some kids had disappeared from the camp and that Grandma Hammerhead was a witch and had abducted them.  This became the Devils Den version of Hansel and Gretel, and to last one, my friends and I bought in to the myth.  Hence, to prove your bravery, we kids would dare each other to pelt the roof of Grandma Hammerhead’s cabin with dirt clods, or better yet, steal something from her fence.  I remember taunting her until she rushed the gate one day, brandishing her hammer and scaring me off.  She was never vulgar in speech but she was dirty and that ever present apron was the filthiest thing about her.  I remember seeing her only once away from her cabin and she was returning from the camp store.  She wore an old scarf over her scraggly grey hair and she had a sack of groceries under one arm and the other hand was buried in the front pocket of her apron.  Her face was wrinkled and the dirt was tanned into her skin.  Making big strides and talking to herself, I could see that she had on old men’s dress shoes and striped socks.  A small group of taunting camp kids followed her well out of range of the hammer.  Grandma Hammerhead was a caricature of torment and loneliness and even as a kid I was ashamed to have ever been so mean to her because I knew deep down she would never use that hammer on me.  If I could ever go back in time I don’t know what I would do different except, maybe just respectfully leave her more alone than she already was. 

                            THE WATERCOOLED ELECTRIC HAIRCUT

What is the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut?  Two weeks, according to Thomas Herrera. 

 Do you remember Green Stamps?   They predated Blue Chip Stamps.  Retail stores gave you these stamp coupons with every purchase and you could redeem them for items in the stamp catalogue.  Well, Green Stamps paid for my first electric haircut done while sitting in water.   To know how this came to be let me first describe more about the daily routine in our barracks cookhouse.   Devils Den was ungodly hot in the summer and the grasshoppers would sometimes congregate under the eaves of the barracks and drop dead from the heat.   We didn’t have coolers or fans and I had never heard of air conditioning in those days.  You just stayed in the shade as much as you could.  During non school hours and for the summer my job was to work in the kitchen of the cook house and do the dishes and other cook’s helper chores a seven year old could manage.  One hundred men and three meals a day meant lots of kitchen time.  My mom used pressure cookers to cook the rice and beans and beef tongues and my job was to keep the pots and pans clean and ready for the next shift of cooking.  Knives and forks and solid ceramic plates and coffee mugs were all washed by hand and to reach over and down into the sinks I stood on an overturned Coca Cola crate and fixed my arm pits on the sink lip.  My summer friends were Ajax powder and Chore Girl steel pads.  We bought pinto beans and potatoes by the hundred pound toe sacks at Smart and Final in Avenal. 

Except for the shade of indoors, the cook house was not much cooler than outside in the camp.  For distraction we did have the juke box in the dining area and plenty of red quarters to keep it going.  The juke box company would give you quarters painted with red nail polish to prime the box, in other words, keep it going to encourage the diners to restart it when the four songs per quarter were done.  The song list ran from Tex Ritter to rancheros but the big crossover hit was the beer barrel polka which everybody seemed to like.  I remember using oiled sawdust to sprinkle on the wood floors in the dining area and then sweeping it up.  This gave some semblance of cleanliness to the floors while keeping the dust down.  The workers would come in wearing their rubber boots from the irrigated fields bringing in an unending supply of caked mud which dried and turned to dust later.  This was my day every day and play time came at night when it cooled down some. 

Outside at night the camp came alive with ball games and foot races and other heat generating activities.  There was a tractor seat welded to an axel which was in turn welded to a truck wheel in a bar stool design that was the communal barber chair.  If you wanted a hair cut you could sit in it or hang out around it and a camp barber would answer the call and cut your hair.  No money was transacted and you got what you paid for.  I learned to reach under my hair and hold my ears down with my fingers to avoid nicks to the top of the ears by the scissors.  I had a mole behind my left ear so I kept my left thumb over it at the same time.  If you had straight hair you could opt for a real bowl haircut which was just that.  A bowl was placed on top of your head and everything that stuck out was cut off.  I actually envied these cuts but my curly hair was not suited to this style.  Sitting still for any length of time was torture so my hair stayed pretty long and unless ordered to, I avoided the tractor seat. 

My new brother in law Thomas had collected enough Green Stamps from family and friends to send for a pair of electric clippers from the S and H catalogue.  Of my entire family, Thomas was the most enterprising member.  He had worked as a guest worker in the California fields since crossing the border at the age of 10.  From time to time his younger siblings would do the same, but he was the main source of support for his family in Mexico while he lived in California.  He met my sister Chris in Devils Den in the cotton fields and they eloped soon thereafter, to return a year later with their first child, Connie.  My mom and I rode into Huron where we found them living in a labor camp there.  Thomas was a little afraid of our family but he should not have been.

One particularly warm day Thomas was booking hair cuts at the camp. He had dragged the heavy barber stool over to the barrack under the eave to take advantage of the meager noon day shade.  At a glance it was obvious I needed a hair cut bad.  I had hair over my ears and down the back of my neck.  Thomas yelled  “Hey Dennis, how bout a hair cut?”  The thought of sitting still with a sheet draped over my shoulders sweating over a long session of cutting was not appealing at all to me.  Using the excessive heat as an excuse I politely declined.  I wasn’t comfortable with the thought of a power razor close to my jugular even on a good day.   Thomas argued that with the electric clippers it would be a fast cut.  Not convinced I refused again on account of the oppressive heat. Un fazed by my arguments he offered to cool me down with water first. By the way, he was keeping cool by sipping a can of beer.  Before I could come up with another argument he convinced me to sit in the service tub in our living area of our barrack. I had never thought about cooling down this way so I soon found myself sitting in the square deep sink, stripped to my shorts while he filled the tub with cool water and all in all it was pleasant just sitting there while he proceeded to comb and clip with the electric clippers.  I remember the hair falling into water around me in this old precast concrete tub next to the front door of the barracks room which served as our living and bedroom. I also remember the fabric insulated cord running from the wall outlet across my wet shoulders. 

All in all it was as relaxing experience compared to the usual fidgety and sweaty hair cuts to be had at Devils Den.  I believe it would have caught on for the adults there too if Thomas could have found an extension cord that reached all the way out to the water hole next to the ground water pump at the edge of Devils Den.  That big pagan god had to be looking over us there at least some of the time in those years.  By the way, I became a minor celebrity in the camp for having one of the first electric haircuts.  I remember Thomas pointing out to the other prospective customers my un nicked ears and the overall symmetrical shape of the hair line, even if my curly hair was not really suited to hair cuts in general.  Once dry, the nice shape and lines disappeared into a wavy mop on top of my skinned lower skull.  You know, even to this day I am not a big fan of barbers unless they know some good jokes and I am just as comfortable with hair over my ears unless we are going out somewhere nice and my wife insists I get a cut.  The whole topic of hair cuts would bore me were it not for my childhood water cooled electric hair cut. 

 THE PERFECT DAY

Hands down, the most perfect day of my life was one day in March, 1954 at Harrigan’s camp near Stratford.  Having just recovered from appendicitis and too sickly to attend school and barely able to walk, I had long days alone while the camp kids were off to school.  This day the winds were blowing hard and the late morning temp was cool.  My big sister Virginia had made me an egg sandwich for breakfast and while she got busy with house cleaning I began my morning wander around the camp.

As camps went, this one was small with about five or six houses and a Quonset hut.  There were some work sheds made of tin and a landing strip for the owners of the camp, some people named The Roland Land Company.  Mr Stanley Hawk was the foreman and he lived in the nicest house away from the others, while the Duncans, Hills, and our family occupied the other houses.  Separated from the camp by about twenty acres of new barley was the beautiful ranch home of the Harrigans.  Mr. and Mrs. Harrigan lived a world above the rest of us as was fitting for the superintendent of the large Tulare Lake bottom farm holdings of the Land Co.  My mom cleaned house for them and Stanley and occasionally would take me with her to keep an eye on me.  Mrs. Harrigan soon saw the opportunity to save my heathen soul and began to take me to the Seven Day Adventist Church in Lemoore on Saturdays.  Mom would dress me in a white shirt with cuff links and a blue bow tie and deliver me up to the Harrigans each weekend to celebrate the Sabbath.  They actually called it Sabbath School and gave me a picture bible to carry.  As nice as this was, I instinctively stayed clear of the Harrigans on my wanders.  Today, I was lured into the barley field by the wave like undulations of the two feet high crop.  Looking around, there was no one as far as the eye could see, and more importantly, no tractors in the field. I scared a jack rabbit out of its hiding place about one hundred feet into the ocean of tall green grain.  He had matted down about a three foot nest of flattened barley so I tromped some more down and lay down on my back out of the wind.  I pulled my coat collar up and stuffed my hands into my coat pockets for warmth.   With the sun overhead and protected from the winds by the surrounding grain, I looked up to see the wind carrying the occasional cotton puff clouds across the sky.  The sun warmed me as I lay there in my weakened post surgical condition just a little short of breath.  I had only been out of the Sacred Heart Hospital for a couple weeks or so and I tired easily.  I cannot remember thinking about anything specific as I rested except that it was as peaceful and worry free a time as I have ever experienced in my life before or since that day.  Watching the buzzards and crows drift by on the cool gusts overhead, I was warm and protected in my pocket of tranquility.  No one could possibly see me on this level unless they were directly overhead.  A perfect hiding place like this could protect you from mad dogs and escaped convicts, the two evils adults would warn you about in those days.

I recalled then the biggest adventure of my young life that had unfolded in the late summer about a month and a half before that day.  School was ready to start up again and I was looking forward to starting the first grade and Stratford Elementary.  I had about one half a year of kindergarten under my belt and I was ready to take on reading and arithmetic in September.  I had some new school clothes from JC Penny’s in Hanford and new shoes which I did not wear yet, but one day I suddenly took sick.  Nausea and vomiting and an aching abdomen got my mom’s attention so she drove me into Hanford to the home of Dr Benjamin H Pratt.  In his operatory in the basement under his garage, this man of about seventy diagnosed me with a belly ache and recommended castor oil.  After a day or so of this treatment Mom loaded me up in the back seat of our Ford and began a search for another doctor.  Failing to find a doctor willing to treat an indigent case in a couple towns, she drove to Dr Guernsey’s office in Lemoore.  I remember being too weak to walk so first the doctor’s nurse, Francis came to the car and looked in at me.  I was wearing only underwear because it was fairly hot that day.  She was a big woman dressed in white and kind of gruff.  She took a brief history of my symptoms from my mom and went back inside the office.  In a few minutes the doctor came out and reached into the window of the car and poked on my abdomen, making it hurt more.  I remember him saying something to mom about meeting him at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Hanford right away and then he went back inside.  It probably took less than thirty minutes to get into Hanford and find the hospital but mom had to carry me inside and hand me over to the nurses. They seemed to know the deal and I think the doctor had called ahead.  I had never seen nurses or doctors before that day, nor had I seen a nun in full habit.  The nursing staff were all nuns in this little nineteen bed hospital so for years I thought all nurses were nuns too.  They were very caring as I floated along being carried here and there into this strange new indoor environment of cleanliness and disinfected surfaces.  Lots of chrome and concern all about me, I could not have known how close to dying I really was.  I heard the word surgery for the first time in my life and had it explained to me that something inside me had gone wrong but that the doctor was going to remove it and I would feel better soon.  Next I was on a bed on wheels going down a bare hallway past swinging doors and there were rows of butcher knives hanging on the wall to my right as the nuns and I left mom waiting outside surgery.

So that’s what they are going to cut me open with I thought as I passed the cutlery.  I am sure they had given me morphine by now so who knows what the aliens did to me that afternoon while I slept under ether anesthesia.  I do know that when I awoke later that night the nuns had my wrists tied to the bed rails to prevent me from pulling that tube from my nose.  Man alive, it itched and there was a hole in my abdomen that stunk to high heaven and it had rubber tubes coming out of it. I was in a room with a crying baby they said had pneumonia and I couldn’t reach my nose to scratch it so when mom appeared I asked her to scratch it for me.  How worried she must have been for me and probably she was wondering how would she ever pay for the expenses.  Through all of this the nuns continued to impress and kind of scare me with their silent hovering and ministering.   They were very good to me and from what I could gather, to mom too. I never saw Dr Guernsey after that afternoon in the streets of Lemoore but I can remember years later Mom pointing out his large home off of hwy forty one on the way to Hanford.  He had a walnut grove and another small home next to his where his mother lived too.  I remember thinking how I would provide for my mom when she was old, just like the doctor was doing for his mom. 

Back at the hospital there were daily adhesive tape bandage changes and twice a day penicillin shots from glass syringes.  My arms were too skinny so the shots went into my behind and they really hurt.  As days went on the nuns moved me into a room with an older kid, a Portegee of about ten or twelve. This is where my catholic indoctrination began, at the hands of another kid who was catholic and proud of it. He said he had rheumatic fever and his folks ran a dairy, as did most of the Portegees in the San Joaquin Valley those days.   When he found out I had no religion he explained the whole catholic scenario to me, including all about the nuns who he said were married to Jesus.  He never fully satisfied my questions about their strange clothes but he did enlighten me about purgatory in a way I can never forget.  You see, he said, when a catholic dies he goes straight to heaven, and he demonstrated this flight path with a swooping arm gesture aimed at the ceiling.  But, he said, when I died as a non catholic I might go to heaven too but by a more circuitous route which he demonstrated by making a gesture with his finger as if he were tracing a fly’s path around his head and out the window, then up to the sky.  Well I had to believe him as he seemed so knowledgeable about everything else.  Just the same I intended to run this by Mrs. Harrigan too as their churches in Lemoore and the bigger church in Fresno were pretty impressive too. 

This kid could explain everything but he was no help when it came to the shots and the dressing changes.  The nurse would apologize for the agony of the tape removal every time and we tried every possible permutation of removal techniques including soaking the tape beforehand, but in the end, by mutual agreement, I would let her just rip the tape off my abdomen in one quick motion.  As days went by they removed the drains and the stink subsided but the shots never stopped.  Out of desperation I asked mom to bring me some rope from home.  The next day she brought me some clothes line rope and I am sure she thought I meant to play with it but the Portegee and I had devised a plan to stop the shots. My reasoning was that a dropped glass syringe was a broken shot and if I could trip the nun as she entered the room carrying the medicine tray, that would solve my twice daily problem.  That afternoon I had tossed the end of the rope to my new friend’s bed on the far side of the doorway and when the nun entered the room we lifted it up to trip her.  She politely stepped over the rope in her long habit without missing a step and said “nice try Dennis, now rollover for your shot.”  It must have been obvious I was getting stronger even though it was going on two weeks and I still was confined to bed.  When the day to go home came I was dismayed that I had to have one last penicillin shot.  No argument would sway the nun so I rolled over like a man and took the most painful shot I have ever had in my life then mom loaded me up in the back seat of the Ford and we headed home. 

This was over a month ago but I went from crawling to ambulating around the camp and this day I felt really good for the first time I could remember.  Just lying there out of the cold wind watching the clouds float by between heaven and earth may have been my first philosophical experience.  With the sweet smell of the broken blades of barley around me I napped and luxuriated in health and happiness.

    GOFORTH

The characters to this following story remain somewhat vague to me, more than I would expect even after fifty odd years.  The two kids I will introduce you to here were very real and there is no doubt in my mind of their existence and place in my life, but they remain shadow characters in some respects.  They are ill defined with respect to certain details of their existence but the way they lived their young lives has impacted me strongly.  Who ever launched this young boy and girl into life must not have given them much guidance, allowing them to drift along without the mandate my family had to survive and then thrive.

How ironic then their family name, Goforth.  This little lost family of Devils Den drifted thru our camp and my life simultaneously making me sad for them and happy just to be a Wilds.  This is how I remember watching the tragedy of the spilling and waste of the Goforth spirit unfold so many years ago.

We all come into this world with a god given supply of hope.  You use it as a child and live from one promise to another but it is my belief that your mother is the keeper of this fragile flame.  Let’s call this your spirit for now.  There are times you are called on to share this precious commodity such as in building friendships.  When we moved into Devils Den we brought our Wilds family sprit and it gave us warmth against those first cold winter days in that god forsaken expanse of treeless ground. The growing season was long thanks to all the irrigation water pumped from the ancient untapped aquifer below Devils Den  Ranch.  Ironically the season for growing friendships could be so brief with people coming and going seemingly randomly.  Amid this harshness my big sister and I befriended Edith and Gaylord Goforth.   We were fatherless and they were motherless and I believe that was the real basis for our immediate bonding.  By comparison we were rich since those two kids of seven and eleven years had only what they could carry in a cardboard box.  In retrospect, Sad and Hopeless would have been more appropriate names for our new friends.  Gaylord was outwardly happy and fun loving, but there was a sadness to Edith.  That spirit barely flickered in her eyes.  I have to attribute Edith’s melancholy to the absence of a mother in her life. 

Mr. Goforth or “Daddy” as he came to be known to us was an itinerant drunk and a dismal provider for his two children.  He moved his little family into Devils Den one day and quickly abandoned them for days at a time while he sought work wherever he could in this part of the San Joaquin Valley.  Gaylord and Edith’s lives revolved around our cook house and they soon became part of our family in some ways.  Gaylord was in my class at Kettleman City Elementary so we struck up a good friendship right off.  I don’t remember seeing Edith at school often so it is likely she skipped most of her education.  This whole unlikely association between us four kids was brief but on one day we approached the closest thing to true childhood friendship Devils Den life would allow.  That was the day when the fragments of these two fractured families went on a wonderful picnic with “Daddy”.  My big sister Anna Jane tells the following story:

It was summer and must have been a hundred and ten degrees. The sun beat down on me and little brother Dennis. Since there were no trees to sit under to help with the unbearable heat we had been sitting close to one of the little shacks the workers lived in.  It was next to a little black top road that seemed to stretch forever.  Very few cars passed by so when Dennis and I saw one coming, of course we stood up to better look at whoever it was that was coming our way.  Much to our surprise, the car slowed down and pulled in right in front of the cabin, coming to a screeching stop beside us causing dust to fly all around.

Out stepped a boy and girl. The girl was my age, about twelve and a boy about Dennis’s age of  about seven. The man who had been driving didn’t bother to get out of the car. He was drinking a beer. While the girl and boy unloaded some boxes which contained their clothes the man popped another beer and waited for them to finish unloading. As soon as they finished the man drove away.  Dennis and I as well as the boy and girl stood there looking each other over. Not having many other kids to play with we were delighted to see them.  We offered our names and they did the same…Gaylord and Edith. They told us that the man we saw was their daddy and he was going to another labor camp to look for work. He’d be back later. The four of us put boxes in an empty shack which was to be their home for a while. After that we showed them around the camp and when we got to the barracks where we lived we were proud to show them. It was a long two story building and that is where our mother ran the cook house for the nationals (men who were in this country from Mexico). Two or three days passed and no sign of Daddy. They were given food from the cook house and slept on the floor of their cabin. Since none of us had any obligations we mostly roamed around the camp and looked for things to do. We were sitting by their shack when here comes “Daddy”. Once again, he was driving like a maniac and drinking beer. When he stopped he yelled “Hey, you kids want to go have a picnic?”  Well, of course we did so we jumped in the car, all vying for shotgun. Edith won and the boys and I sat in the back seat. We looked around for some evidence of the makings of a picnic but there was nothing. Then, “Daddy” pulled up in front of the camp store and told us to wait a minute. Shortly he came out carrying more beer, a stick of bologna, a loaf of bread and four cokes.  Hot dog! We were all set so off we went down the blacktop road. About a couple of miles on the road he turned and we took off over the low, sun browned hills which surrounded Devil’s Den.  About a mile into the hills he stopped, opened another beer and asked, “Who wants to drive?” Since Edith was shotgun, she was quick to slide over her daddy’s lap and take her position behind the wheel. Not knowing anything about gears, and with “Daddy” not caring, she grinded away until she hit one and the old sedan bucked ahead in a slow crawl.  She tried shifting but like all of us kids, she didn’t know how to do it and the car just kept jerking and the motor was roaring.  We went on for a while then she stalled it and it died. “Daddy” laughed like a crazy and he yelled “Who’s next?”.   I jumped out and got behind the wheel. Problem was, in order to reach the pedals I had to lower myself so much that I was literally looking through the steering wheel. Like Edith I didn’t know what I was doing.  I too was driving in the wrong gear and the kids in the back were screaming, “Faster”. I hit the clutch, found a higher gear, and then poured on the gas. It worked!  We were flying over bumps and then it happened. The front wheel of the car didn’t quite make it over a large hole and the car came to a rather abrupt stop. Everyone in the back hit the back of the front seat. The whole episode made “Daddy” laugh even more. We got out and took a look at what was to seal our fate. The entire wheel was stuck in the hole and the prospect of a picnic faded quickly as we assumed “Daddy” was going to have a fit of anger and would slap us around.  But instead he said, “Well, how are you kids gonna get us out of this mess?” Us kids, we eyed the bologna and cokes hoping for a miracle when he said “Get to digging”. He went back inside the car and continued with his beer and we began to claw at the dirt as if we were going to actually get the wheel loose.

After a while we noticed that “Daddy” was sound asleep. Well, the bologna and bread and cokes were there so Edith stuck her hand through the window and pulled them out. After our feast, we sat in what little shade one side of the car offered and wondered what to do.  Now rattlesnakes were plentiful around there so none of us wanted to venture off.  We sat there and watched the sun making its descent and began to get scared.  Daddy was snoring away and the boys started to cry. “Snakes are gonna get us, Mama’s gonna whip us.” On and on they complained and whined.  Now it wasn’t that Edith and I were not afraid, we were just as scared as the boys but too old to cry in front of each other. It got dark.  “Daddy” continued to snore and then we saw car lights. We all jumped up and started waving our hands and shouting “Here we are. Over here.”

We realized that there were more car lights all around us. Everyone in the camp who had a car or truck was out looking for us. Leading the pack was Mama. She got to us first and after looking at “Daddy” who was sound asleep, she started the slapping. She didn’t discriminate though. We all four got the slaps upside the head and put into Mama’s car.  Honestly, I don’t know whatever happened to “Daddy” and the kids. I heard different stories but don’t know anything for sure except the next morning when Dennis and I slipped down to Gaylord and Edith’s cabin, they were all gone. They must have pulled a midnight move.  I’ll never know. However, I do know that we had us one fine picnic, hot cokes and all.

This is my big sister’s memory of the picnic with the Goforths and I too remember having fun on this adventure.  In addition to letting us kids drive, I remember “Daddy” letting Anna Jane and me ride on the front fenders holding onto the hood ornament while he and his kids were driving down the dirt roads.  As drunks go, “Daddy” was one of those happy drunks.  At one point in the picnic, he ate an avocado.  I had never seen an avocado or a drunk eat one and it was disgusting to see all this green stuff on his bad teeth and to see him sucking the fruit off the large seed.  “Daddy” was a caricature of fatherhood and I felt sorry for Gaylord and Edith for being his kids.

 NORMAL KIDS

I know there is no such thing as a normal childhood.  The closest thing to Dick and Jane I ever saw was during adolescence in Guernsey, California one summer day. That’s the day I finally had to admit to myself that I was not and probably never was going to be a NORMAL KID. To fully understand my idea of normal it is time to introduce you to a miserable man whose life I am sure I personally made a little more miserable for the six years he lived with my family.   That would be Billy Ray Morphis, aka Billy Ray Mop-ass and Billy Ray Morphidite.  I would actually introduce him as my new stepfather using any and all of these monikers.  If he was drunk he might laugh. Otherwise I kept some distance from him during those instances.  In my mind, he deserved these names and I refused to use the suggested name of Daddy Bill.  Even as an eleven year old I knew he could never have my respect.  This lazy, musically talented man was tormented by alcoholism and eventually Parkinsonian symptoms.  Having served in the navy during world war two, he suffered from self diagnosed shell shock.  For whatever reasons, he stayed drunk most days.  At first he was a source of amusement until he drug the family down with him into chronic poverty.  His big claim to fame had been his stint on the Louisiana Hayride entertainment show after the war.  He could sing, play the piano, and guitar but he could not do manual labor.  While a shovel or hoe did not fit his grip, he could drink with both hands.   Being poor is one thing but our worst economic times were the six years he lived with us, meaning me, my mother, and my sister, Anna Jane.  I will leave this discourse until later chapters, but suffice it to say Bill was a mess we survived in the end.  By now I was going on twelve years old and my mom was running the Guernsey Café and Bar.  There was a gas pump and rental cabins too at the Guernsey intersection on Kansas Avenue about ten miles out of Hanford, California.  Bill was in charge of the beer joint aspect of the operation and I was the cleaning crew and dish washer and all around flunkey. 

Today was house painting day and by eleven o’clock Bill showed up at the open window of the house we were renting with a can of Olympia beer in his hand.  Like the mental child he was, Bill said “Ha Ha Ha, you’ve got to paint and I don’t.”  With that my sister, Anna Jane pushed a paint roller full of yellow paint up his neck, over his ear, and over the top of his comb over hair do.  My older sister always had more courage than brains and I couldn’t believe she actually did what she did.  I stood there in wonder at the site of this yellow white visage with what looked like a big yellow rooster comb sticking straight into the air.  “God damn your time!” Bill said.  “I’m gonna to kill ya!” With that he climbed through the open window and we vacated the house with him behind me.  I headed out the front door across the dirt yard onto the lane headed to Kansas Ave.  Turning right onto the paved road I kept ahead of Bill in my worn out high top tennis shoes.  I wasn’t really worried because I had raced him before and knew I was faster.  I kept about thirty feet ahead of him for about a hundred yards when we settled down to a lope.  This was Sunday and only one car was on the road with us.  The car was a four door late model sedan and was clean compared to the usual dusty work vehicles on Kansas Ave.  It was two-tone blue and white car with big wrap around front and back windows.   As this car passed Bill and pulled astride of me, the nicely dressed woman in the front passenger seat asked if I was all right.  I said yes and she relayed this to her husband, also nicely dressed, who was driving.  Incredulous, he leaned over and asked again if I was all right with this man chasing me.  I again said I was ok and added for his relief an explanatory “I can out run him”.  I remember him kind of grinning as he shook his head slightly and then drove ahead.

As the car passed I saw them, the NORMAL KIDS in the back seat.  The little girl and boy, also dressed nice, had turned and were standing in the back seat looking back at me and Bill with wide eyes.  They probably had just left church and couldn’t believe what their religious eyes were seeing.  

Bill yelled ahead to me, “What did you say to them?”  I yelled back “I said you were a queer”.  The miserable motherfucker deserved that.  Oh yes, we were big time homophobes in those days.  I don’t think I really knew the definition of “queer” then but it was guaranteed to piss off an adult if you called them one.  “God damn your time.” he yelled again and the race resumed at full speed for another hundred feet or so when Bill stopped and bent over, hands on his knees panting like the dog he was.   I stopped at that point and watched as he slowly caught his breath enough to say “You’ve got to sleep some time”.  With that, he slowly turned and headed back to the house, limping on his bunions in his old dress shoes.  He was still mumbling something when I ran past him on my silent thin rubber soled JC Penny tennis shoes, slapping him on the back of the head.  With that the race was on again as I led him home at slow gallop.  As I write this I distinctly remember not being embarrassed in front of the NORMAL KIDS for some reason. I guess life with Bill was beyond humiliation by this time in my life, and we lived in a continual looney-toon world of nonsensical alcoholic turmoil.  When Bill reached the house I was waiting on the porch for him with a cold beer. For the moment all was forgotten as he drank the beer with me standing a good distance off to the side of the porch.  In due time, Anna Jane and I resumed painting and Bill cleaned up and returned to bar tending that day.  You know, I can’t blame anyone for not believing this story, or any of my other stories about my childhood, but the simple fact is they happened just as you read them.  Sadly, they exist in full color memory and I don’t even have to enhance the details one bit.

Thinking to myself, I wondered how Dick and Jane’s folks would ever explain to them what they had just witnessed on Kansas Avenue.  Those two kids were riding safe inside that glass and steel protective bubble with two normal parents close by to shield them from life, while I was on the outside swimming around in my own beer foam filled existence.  The poor fools were going nowhere fast in that pathetically limited life of theirs.  What suckers!  All I had to worry about now was surviving the next night without Bill murdering me in my sleep.  Just as my day presented me with abundant problems, it also taught me unconventional solutions.  Imagination and bailing wire can fix almost any problem, so continuing the logic of the day; I went to sleep holding a loaded bow and arrow pointed at the bedroom door.  I’m sure glad Bill didn’t stumble into my room that night, lost on his way to the bathroom, otherwise I would have shot him for sure.  That arrow was the only one of my three that had a steel tip. 

One day soon after the bizarre Guernsey slow speed chase I was cleaning the bar and visiting with one of our regular drunks, Mr. Solon. As I remember him he looked like a miniature Dwight D Eisenhower. If he just sat there on his bar stool and didn’t say anything you might think he was intelligent and articulate.  He just had that calm, confident look until he finished off his first beer.  He was on his monthly social security check sponsored binge drinking and dancing all by himself to the tunes of the juke box.  The top half of his body did not match his bottom half gyrations and neither matched the music.  Occasionally, he would just stop mid dance and cup his hands and blow a whistle like a train, followed by a laugh of pure ecstasy.  I have to this day never seen a happier drunk.  I said to him that he must be feeling good today and I’ll never forget what he told me.  He said “Dennis, I know I’m going to heaven, cause I’ve already been to hell”. I put a red quarter in the box and punched in the Orange Blossom Special three times and left my mentor for the day to dance on alone.  I was learning valuable lessons every day from all these people around me.  Mainly, I was learning how not to live.  I knew I didn’t want to end up like Solon or Bill.  The propane man looked promising though.  He drove that big important, dangerous bomb of a truck and he had a uniform with a propane flame insignia on his company jacket. He was somebody for sure.  The Yocums owned all the farm land and they were rich too so I kept my eye on how they behaved and lived.  But nobody lived up to Dr. Guernsey because he had respect and money and he had saved my life when he removed my ruptured appendix. This is how I had begun to plan my life.  I was watching and imitating and when it became apparent to me that education meant better living, I began to pay attention to school. For now that meant Lakeside Elementary School, the third school that sixth grade year I would attend.

TARZAN OF HYW 41

One fine sunny morning I fried two eggs and ate one for breakfast and made a fried egg sandwich with the other.  Wrapping the sandwich in wax paper and putting it in my hip pocket, I grabbed the knife and helmet and headed to Stratford.  Highway 41 was moderately traveled since it was the direct link from Fresno toward the coast via Paso Robles.  I would make a note of the car makes and models as they passed, priding myself in recognizing each one.  I would routinely walk on the right shoulder since the irrigation canal was on that side of the levy which supported the road.  The canal sides were choked by tall cattails and I considered this my own personal jungle. I knew how to sharpen knives using a whet stone.  Slow reversing pushes and pulls across the stone with a little spit for fine edging would provide a good cutting edge, allowing me to use the butcher knife as a machete in the reeds.   By mid morning I had walked about half way to Stratford and the river crossing from home at Westlake Farms.  As the sun warmed up the road I would step down into the mud at the edge of the canal to cool off my feet and cake them with clay for insulation. With hair covering my ears and the helmet liner down to my forehead and the butcher knife in the belt loop of my cutoffs, I had slipped into the fantasy world of ape men as I proceeded toward civilization with no particular plan for that day.  Few cars had passed and I was relatively alone on highway forty one and I liked it that way.  No one knew where I was and I reported to no one on most days.  I exercised my independence and imagination on my foot travels and I had big dreams of one day having a bicycle and expanding my world by miles and miles. 

Lost in thought about something, I heard the sound of slowing car tires approaching from behind.  Instinctively I retreated into the reeds and turned to note a Cadillac pulling onto the shoulder next to me.  There were four adults, two men and two women, in the new car and they were dressed nice.  The women were in dresses and the men were in suits without ties and they appeared to be in their forties or so.  I placed my back to the jungle, squared my feet and placed my hand on the handle of my machete while they all four turned their gaze in my direction.  I said nothing while they stared.  They had silly assed grins on their faces and I became more suspicious of their motives.  The driver stepped out and walked around the back of the car and approached me smiling.  As I held my ground he greeted my politely and while gesturing to the reed choked canal, asked me if I owned those cattails.  I wanted to laugh out loud at his ignorance but waited a moment to reflect and replied in the affirmative with a simple “yes sir”.  At this he put his hands on his hips and looked down at his dress shoes and then again at me and told me that his wife used them in her flower arrangements and he was interested in purchasing some of my cattails.  Now, I had seen Mrs. Harrigans indoor bouquets so I guessed that was what he meant by flower arrangements, but for the life of me I could not imagine putting the hot dog shaped cattail sticks into a bouquet without ruining the whole purpose of a bouquet.  Just looking at these people I could tell they were city people and obviously not from my world, real or imaginary.  In fact, I felt a kind of pity on them for their stupidity.  How they could ever have acquired a Cadillac and nice clothes while being truly ignorant amazed me, but they were at least polite.  This in turn made me feel like helping them so I told Mr. Cadillac that I would just give them some and they didn’t need to pay me.  With that out came the butcher knife and down into the water I leaped and began slashing at the reeds until I had an arm full of the worthless cattails. 

Actually I had a use for the weed because you could use the cattail as a sword or even bang the brown thick end on the road and release the thousands of floating seeds into the breeze like a cloud of smoke.  With proper technique, the cattail could sail like a javelin for some distance too.  But as a flower, I was doubtful.  At any rate I emerged from the canal laden with enough cattails to fill the trunk of the Cadillac and I felt like Tarzan doing so for these helpless city slickers.  As I placed my machete back into my belt loop I heard one of the women say “Isn’t he just darling?”  What the hell did she mean by that?  No ordinary kid could brave the snakes, crocodiles and lions to slash thru the jungle and emerge unscathed.  That was not darling. That was courageous and manly.  I was instantly indignant and my scowl in her direction conveyed that.  At this Mr. Cadillac reached into his pocket and offered me quite a large amount of pocket change for the cattails.  I politely declined and stated again that they were free and that, by the way, I didn’t really own them anyway.  True to my role, I was both brave and honest even if offered riches in coins.  They were wise not to test my bravery because one false move on their part and I could have cut their gizzards out right there on the side of the road that morning. 

The Cadillac headed on toward Stratford and I resumed my casual pace in the same direction reflecting on the city slicker experience.  I patted my hip pocket to check if my sandwich had gotten wet and found my lunch still dry and edible.  By noon that egg would smell about the same as the sulfurous canal water.

                                                    Hut, two, three, four…  

You’re in the army now………….You’ll never get rich diggin a ditch…………Your’re in the army now.  You’re in the army now…………. You’re not behind a plow……….. You’ll never get rich you son of a b—-, You’re in the army now.    Hut two, three, four…hut two, three, four.  This summer morning I was marching from Westlake Farms labor camp to Stratford down hwy 41 in a parade formation of one.  My brother David was in the Marines, you know that outfit that had won every war that ever happened.  And now that he was travelling the world I had received some official Marine gear including a Marine helmet liner and a down filled sleeping bag, and a Japanese transistor radio with a leather case.  But the best gift of all was a CO2 powered bb gun replica of a Winchester lever action repeater rifle with a blue steel barrel and wood stock.  I oiled that gun’s moving parts with three in one oil and wrapped it in a blanked and slept with it.   With the helmet liner on my head, sleeping bag tied on my back in a tight roll, and gun on my shoulder, I would head out daily for adventure thanks to David. 

Now David was famous around our corner of the San Joaquin Valley on account of his 56 Ford Thunderbird which was so fast, the cops couldn’t catch him.  It was two toned white and lime green with port holes in the hard top.  With the added chrome touches that car looked absolutely regal. The upholstery was plush and the same color scheme and I relished the rare rides in that car.  It looked fast just sitting still but that T Bird couldn’t outrun a Motorola cop radio so the tickets piled up and soon David joined the Marines to avoid jail.  Soon thereafter the military paraphernalia began coming my way from San Diego, Hawaii and parts unknown.  One day David came home on leave with a Doberman Pinscher pup named Diablo and he left him with us.  Like all the other gifts, Diablo came David’s way free of charge and cost him nothing.  He said he found the pup tied to a news stand outside a San Diego liquor store so he rescued him.  David was a very good person to do that for that poor dog. 

After about an hour  of marching I arrived in downtown Stratford and made my way toward the center plaza next to the fire station and city library.  There I unrolled my bedroll on the lawn of the library in the shade.  I found a shaded spot under an elm tree where the grass was short and barely covered the tree roots.  The grass smelled clean and had been freshly mowed.   I had enrolled in the summer reading program which promised a trip into Fresno to the zoo if you could prove you read twenty or so books.  I went inside and checked out “India Ink” and “The Book of Textiles” but I was more interested in the doings of the winos who lived upstairs above the Black Cat beer joint across the street from the library.  One of the winos would occasionally come down the stairs and take a swig from a hidden bottle of red wine and then replace it behind the garbage can.  Now it was common knowledge that even a wino would share his bottle so this guy was pretty low in my opinion so I hid his bottle and had the pleasure of watching him search in vain for it the rest of the afternoon.  That’s what I figured a Marine would do.  The book on textiles won out over “India Ink” since it was mostly pictures and an easy read.  Amounting to little more than cotton industry propaganda, the book did explain how cotton was made into clothes, so I did learn something that day.  In retrospect, this turned out to be an uneventful day.  I had toyed with the idea of shooting the wine bottle out of the wino’s hands if and when he found it later on but he finally gave up the search so I turned in my books for zoo credit and asked the librarian to tally up my count of books so far that summer.  Assuring me that I was within striking distance to the twenty count, she must have felt it necessary to warn me that the zoo did not allow guns so I couldn’t take my rifle when that day came.  Well, I knew that because it was well known that Fresno was a very civilized place with two and three story buildings. I had even been there a few years before when I rode a camp bus into skid row to pick up cotton pickers with a man named Snowball.   Now that I remember, that was an interesting experience in itself since I was about five years old and when we got into town Snowball went one way and I went the other way down the street and into the various old hotels announcing “cotton pickers for Gus’s camp, cotton pickers for Gus’s camp”.  We loaded up a motley assortment of day laborers and took them back to the cotton fields in the Tulare Lake bottom where they performed poorly as cotton pickers.  Snowball was  a former deputy sheriff under my Uncle Walter, the shefiff of Mc Curtain County, Oklahoma.  His real name I found out years later was more like “Slabaugh” or something but I heard it as snowball and that’s what I called him for the brief time I knew him.  He wasn’t an albino nor did he have white hair so for years I thought he came on that name because he apparently didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever  amounting to anything. I do remember he had an odd sense of humor.  On the way back to Stratford I was riding down in the stair well of the old school bus watching the road side speed by through the open bus door wondering what would happen if I just frog jumped out into the passing landscape when Snowball asked me I if I was hungry.  I turned and looked over my shoulder at him as he was driving and answered “yes’.  He said he was hungry too, so hungry that he could eat a maggot pie.  Not knowing what a maggot was I said “Me too”. 

Meanwhile, back in Stratford, I gave up on the wino and books and began a casual retreat toward Westlake Farms.  I stopped in at Gentallinis Grocery Store to check out the one shelf dedicated to toys and admired once again a leather Rawlins baseball glove.  It had four fingers and a thumb where my glove at home was a three fingered plastic cotton contraption and all of the stuffing had migrated into the last finger and the thumb making it useless for catching a fastball.  Being a regular window shopper, the clerk paid no attention to me as I fondled the Rawlins and smelled the fine leather before carefully replacing it on the shelf.  Stratford offered few other attractions so I headed out onto hwy 41 and soon had marched back home to the cookhouse in time to help with the dinner dishes.  Within a couple weeks I would head off to Fresno and the zoo if I could reach that goal of twenty books.                                                  
 

The Giant Technicolor Chicken – Part One

When the day came three or so weeks later for the zoo trip, Mom let it be known that I had to get cleaned up for the trip into Fresno.  This meant a haircut and long pants and a shirt and shoes.  By midsummer my hair was over my ears so mom remedied that with her sewing scissors and, on inspection, found a hole in the seat of my pants. To save time she bent me over her lap and sewed the pants with me in them.  Wearing way too many clothes for a summer morning I walked outside where my dog Tiny must not have recognized me and grabbed my heel growling until my familiar voice convinced her it was me after all, just more presentable than normal.  Mom came out and we loaded into the 59 Chevy Fleetside truck and headed into Stratford and the library.  All of a sudden this was reminiscent of going to church with the cleaning up routine but I was optimistic that my visit to Fresno would be worth it.  The last time I was there was about three years prior with the Harrigans to their main Seventh Day Adventist church.  I was now in the ninth year of my life and struggling to escape my role as the baby of the family.  Actually, I was enjoying some benign neglect since Mom had begun dating for the first time since Dad had died about eight years before.  My daily life was spent on my own this summer with little or no supervision and I was looking forward to this trip to the big city of Fresno, intuitively knowing wonderful things existed there among its big buildings beyond the grape vineyards. 

When we arrived in downtown Stratford I left Mom in the truck and joined a small group of kids on the lawn in front of the library.  Confirming that they too were summer bibliophiles, I waived Mom off and watched her head back to Westlake Farms.  I didn’t recognize any of the kids from school and none acted like they wanted my company so I wandered about the town square til Chester arrived in a school bus.  Chester was my favorite bus driver of all time and he also worked Sousa’s gas station on the edge of town out on hwy 41. Chester was smallish and had his blonde hair slicked back and parted on the side and was dressed in civilian clothes, not his standard khaki janitor uniform so today already had the makings of a festive trip.  I remember Chester as our driver when we lived in Harrigan’s camp about three years before.  He was agreeable to being talked into driving our route home in reverse order occasionally making Harrigan’s the last stop home from time to time.  About a quarter mile from our stop all of us kids would head back to the long bench seat in the back of the bus and holler for Chester to speed up so when we crossed the raised canal bridge the bump would send us in the air to his and our delight.  Yeah, Chester was a friendly face this morning and I knew this was going to be a good day at the zoo.

The ride from Stratford took us through Lemoore, Armona and Handford and into less familiar territory.  There were fewer dairies and pastures and more orchards and vineyards now and I settled into a nice daydream ride rattling along in this metal enclosure larger than a lot of the cabins I had lived in so far in my life.  The bookworms were quiet and the low whine of the transmission drowned out what little conversation the kids attempted.  I recognized a stretch of hwy 41 that I rode on my big brother’s Harley Davidson  when he bought it in Fresno about four years prior.  Man, that was a thrill since he let me sit on the tank and hold onto the handle bars making me believe I was driving it.  Fifty years later I would remember this moment when I bought him a brand new Harley Davidson.  Yeah, Fresno was where great things happened and dreams began. My thoughts wandered to the zoo and for the first time it occurred to me that I was going to actually see and maybe touch real wild African tigers, lions, rhinos, and elephants.  There had been a lady at school one day that brought in some ostrich eggs to pass around and a camel saddle which she placed on the floor and sat on making me snicker.  I think she worked for the school system since she took over from the teacher and began talking about Egypt and Africa.  She reminded me of Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend from the cartoon series, and she had bad breath which I noted when she handed me one of the large eggs.  When she sat on the camel saddle her knees under her long skirt came up under her chin.  The whole effect of her lecture was comical and bizarre to me, but the zoo was going to be the real thing, for sure.  As we entered the outskirts of Fresno, I couldn’t sit any longer and I got up and walked forward to Chester’s driving alcove and asked him how much farther it was.  Not much farther he assured me and I rode the rest of the way holding onto the vertical metal support bar at the top of the bus steps.  Chester was a cool guy who didn’t enforce many rules except the real important ones like on foggy mornings at intersections and railroad crossings when it was mandatory that everyone drop their windows and keep quiet while Chester and everyone strained to listen for cross traffic or trains before he started the motor and quickly crossed the intersection to avoid the common collisions in those conditions.   No books today, and I was travelling light too with no money or lunch or gun or anything to slow me down. At about ten o’clock Chester pulled the bus into a big gravel parking lot and parked in the shade of some big pine trees. Barely hearing Chester admonish us to be back by four, I flew out the door first when Chester opened it and left the book reading geeks behind and proceeded to the entrance gate where a lone attendant paid me no special attention surely knowing I had read the twenty books and belonged there.  Leaving the gravel lot and entering the lushly landscaped urban wilderness I could smell the odor of wild animal manure mixed with the sweet scents of  jasmine and honeysuckle.  Then I heard it in the distance.  It was a screech or a yell and it was coming from the general direction of the center of this big overgrown park.  It was much like the yell the elephants used to answer Tarzan’s call for help in the movies.   I had just heard a real elephant and I headed right for it.  My head was on a swivel and I followed my ears past a monkey enclosure til I found the elephant enclosure on the other side of a big steel fence.  He was eating some hay some fifteen feet from me and he matched all the drawings I had ever seen therefore he was real, tusks and all.  I must have stayed there for the better part of an hour mesmerized by his size while he quietly ignored me.  His name was Nosey and he was smallish by elephant standards.  He had big flat toenails and eyelashes at least six inches long and one big lower goober lip under his trunk.  I kept waiting for him to holler again but Nosey just stood there masticating and nosing through some hay and grain on the ground of his enclosure.  Then I heard it again, that same noise but it was closer now and came from behind.  It sounded like “Heeellllp, heeelllp”.  Someone or something was in trouble and it obviously wasn’t Nosey this time.  I searched my memory banks for an animal to match the sound but this was a strange and disturbingly new sound to me and it was half distress and half warning sounding.  One by one I ruled out lions, tigers, baboons, monkeys, dinosaurs and the missing link.  For a moment I thought about Cheetah, Tarzan’s chimpanzee sidekick.  Hey, maybe it was Jane doing her thang.  No, this was a beastly sound so I spun around and headed down the asphalt path in search of this wild and exotic creature that seemed to be moving about inside this jungle in the middle of Fresno.

I headed down an asphalt path through some dense bamboo where an unconcerned gardener worked hosing down the path leading to a gazebo.  He had to have heard the screams but he too was unconcerned by all outward appearances. I asked him where the sound was coming from and he pointed in the direction of some tall trees up ahead.  Keeping in the spirit of the wildlife safari I said “Thanks Bwana” and headed deeper into the jungle where in turn I found cages with tigers and lions and various deer and antelope but no screaming beast.  Passing through a small carnival ride area I found a train /track and followed it to a miniature station where a grown man was sitting on top of a miniature engine followed by six or so equally scaled down cars.  Guessing this was part of the deal I climbed in the last car and waited for something to happen and then I heard it again as the train pulled out of the station.  This time the double yell was from ahead and the train was going in the same direction so I craned my neck left and right past the bushes and trees.  By now I was truly at a loss to even imagine what creature could make such a sound, and it was obviously on the prowl and moving about freely in this city jungle. I was on the verge of the biggest surprise of my young life. 

                                                 The Giant Technicolor Chicken   

Part Two

Now here I am chugging along on the Roeding Park miniature train around a small lake, over bridges and through plywood tunnels thoroughly enjoying the new experience as the engineer, myself and a handful of other passengers made a lazy circle past the giraffes and zebras toward the far side of the zoo.  Along the water’s edge there were these big pink crane like birds, some of whom had their heads submerged upside down in the ankle deep water. They looked like the big blue herons I saw along the canals near Westlake Farms but they were definitely pink and exotic.  There were more out on a  small island with a sign saying “Flamingo Island”.  Quite a few of these birds had only one leg and those that slowly walked about had knees that bent the wrong way.  I felt sorry for these goofy birds as the train left them behind in the doldrums of the small lake.  I allowed myself  to get lost in my thoughts as we negotiated this strange landscape of exotic animals and very few people.  I began to fantasize about the local natives.  What language did they speak?  How did they dress, or maybe not dress?  I had learned a little native American and Mexican from the camp Mexicans and Uncle Walter.  Let’s see now, “chickama hobuck, comeshaw, chick a shay, sheepshitahamayho” all words Uncle Walter used from time to time. Then there was “bwana” which already had come in handy, and “oomgaawaa” from the Tarzan movies.  Yeah, I could probably hold my own with the natives without resorting to the Mexican swear words I also knew. 

“Ding, ding” went the engineer’s train bell and I came to as the train pulled back to where we started in the general vicinity of the carnival area.  It was getting close to noon and I could smell the burgers from the snack shack as I wandered toward the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster.  Watching, I noted that occasionally people would get a ticket at a small outhouse looking building and then hand it to a fella standing by the Ferris wheel.  Once three or four cars were loaded, the bored looking worker would set the wheel in motion and up and away the riders would swing toward the sky and back down again making some of the littler kids scream at first.  This looked like great fun so I went over to the shack and inquired about the ticket cost.  An elderly lady inside said each ride was five cents so I reminded her I was from Stratford and the book club and wondered if the ride was included in my deal.  I added that I had read over twenty books so far. This was probably more information than she needed, so barely looking up from a book she was reading, the old gal pushed a couple tickets out of the half moon slot toward me without saying a word as she moved two nickels from a can on one side of her desk over to a small metal strong box on the other side. I was off to the wheel making a mental note to read more books when I got back to Stratford. 

After waiting way too long for my turn, I climbed up into the waiting Ferris wheel car and began the incremental ascent higher and higher as subsequent cars accepted their passengers below me.  I had made the mistake of climbing high up in a eucalyptus tree and getting too scared to come down in the past but this was a bit higher and it was scary at first until I got used to the funny feeling in my stomach as each spin crested at the top and then dropped downward toward another revolution.  Besides, I was too cool to scream anyway.  After a few revolutions, I relaxed into sightseeing as the distant tall buildings of downtown Fresno appeared on the horizon.  Some were over five stories tall and bigger than the Stratford cotton gin.  The cars in the parking lot were like toys from that height, and Chester’s yellow school bus sat where I left it, under the pine trees off to the side. I could see the occasional group of visitors headed toward the entrance.  There was a father and his son, holding hands with the boy slightly behind, carrying his head down as if bored by the occasion, acting like he didn’t want to be there. I wondered why a boy wouldn’t want to go to the zoo with his dad, or for that matter, what it would be like to even have a dad. I figured that neither knew the danger waiting ahead for them and I momentarily thought of yelling out a warning from above, but reconsidered at the last minute as they disappeared among the park’s trees inside. Pondering missed opportunities, I came to the conclusion that I should have ignored the librarian and brought my well oiled Winchester bb gun.  This day didn’t add up anyway, because the few adults I had encountered inside the zoo were obviously unconcerned about the danger all about them.  I wondered what the ticket lady knew that I didn’t as she so nonchalantly gave me the tickets without looking up at me.  Adults had a way of just stepping back and letting kids rush forward to experience life on their own, risks and all.  It was amazing to me that more kids didn’t meet their demise in this world.  Maybe adults did know more than they let on.  They were hard to figure at times.  Later in life, I would recognize this as a pattern of rights of passage that both kids and adults were faced with where older folks stepped back allowing young fools to recklessly push by in life, simultaneously marking their

respective milestones in life.  The kids were allowed to grow up in small increments, while the adults edged further through maturity to seniority, with everyone headed inexorably in the same direction.  The rarity of the atmosphere high up on the wheel was making me more philosophical by the minute.  Then I heard it again, that double yelp and it seemed to be coming from the big fig tree across from the base of the Ferris wheel.  

The Giant Technicolor Chicken    

Part Three  

The Conclusion

I craned my neck as the wheel dropped downward looking in the direction of the wild yelps.  It seemed to be coming from the group of trees across the path from the carnival rides.  As soon as the wheel man off loaded the cars, and mine, I headed off in a full run in the direction of that grouping of small trees surrounding one very large fig tree.  As I rounded the curved path I ever so briefly saw a brownish, low moving object that appeared to be dragging behind a long rustling cotton sack as it ducked under the limbs of the fig tree.  The animal was about three feet tall in front and maybe six feet long including its “sack”.  Whatever it was, it was moving slowly and methodically away from me and under the tree and I found myself contemplating following it into its lair, weighing the dangers all the while.  I was reasonably sure this was the source of the sounds I had been hearing, so I slowly worked up the nerve to drop down on my hands and knees and crawl into the tunnel like passageway behind the creature.  Once inside the fig tree’s canopy the sunlight gave way to shade and I could smell the decaying leaves in this cool musty hidden world.  As my eyes adjusted I looked in the direction of a low rustling sound off to my right and saw, from its nose to tail, a strangely shaped bird-like, two-legged form about twenty feet away.  It was ignoring me as it passed around the massive fig tree trunk and just stopped there with that long sack like appendage showing from behind the tree.  Cautiously, I crawled forward and touched the tip of its tail and saw how it separated into individual long strands, one of which I grabbed, apparently startling the beast causing it to lunge forward, away from my grasp and leap up onto one of the fig tree’s lower limbs.  Continuing in one fluid motion the thing turned facing me and spread open a giant fan of appendages from the “sack” and yelled right into my face, “Yeeeeelp”.  Recoiling in terror, I jumped backwards and fell on my backside and dug my heels into the thick soft soil and dead leaves and crawdeaded out of striking distance.  I was looking at an amazing transformation as the beast now had two beady eyes from its smallish head staring at me and its mouth open.  It was a bird, and it had a small three feathered comb on its head, and a plump body, but its tail was a thing of wonder.  This “sack” now had opened up into a giant Japan-fan-like appendage that rose up from behind like a wall of iridescence that shimmered in the rays of sunlight that filtered down through the fig tree’s canopy.  Focusing my eyes on the fan, I saw more eyes, scores of green, black, blue and purple eyes, large evil eyes, all on the tail. The whole apparition was one of the kings of the jungle sitting on his royal throne in the tree of life in this otherworldly jungle world with the massive fig tree roots converging upward directing all attention to his majesty.  But the sound and the sight did not match up.  How could something so beautiful sound so bad?  What was this thing?  I’m thinking giant Technicolor chicken, maybe.   And then the whole tail assembly began to shake like a rattlesnake as the beast leaned forward and hopped down from its low perch and strode two small steps in my direction.  Then the yelp again, and this time right in my face it said directly and unambiguously to me, “Yeeeelp”. I was frozen by this specter of beautifully sacred splendor and its otherworldly profane sound. In my short life, this beat any visage I had ever encountered, real or imaginary, and believe me, I had a great imagination for a kid.  Not since Godzilla had I heard such an animal sound, and I had never seen such colors, many more than I had in my six pack crayola box.

Having put me in my place, the beast slowly turned and majestically strode off again around the tree and ducked down under the ferns and limbs and disappeared out of sight on the far side of the fig tree.  I sat there for a while processing the event until I noticed the long feather in my right hand.  In the panic I had hung onto the tail and gained a souvenir, a long tail feather with one eye on the tip. Choosing not to press my luck, I crawled back out of the Technicolor chicken’s private world the way I came in and wandered the paths for a while, admiring the quill in the full sun, which was getting lower now, reminding me of Chester’s admonition to meet back at the bus by four.  Finding Nosey’s compound, and therefore my bearings, I back tracked out of the zoo and into the parking lot and trotted off toward the bus where Chester and the kids were waiting.  Chester handed me a cold orange soda pop from a ice filled tub and told me they were getting worried that the lions had eaten me.  With that, we headed home toward Stratford leaving this strange and wonderful place and time behind. 

Watching the farm country slide by on Hwy 41, I wondered again about the zoo people, and people in general.  What curious jobs, to work at a zoo, or to build a zoo in the first place, and then let kids loose in side with all the danger around.  How could they justify the inherent danger, unless, of course, there wasn’t really any danger?  All in all, it was a pretty tame place considering the animals were in cages.  I had to admit that the workers seemed to be keeping somewhat of a watch out over the kids, while appearing not to at the same time.  What about the lady in the ticket booth and the shuffling nickels?  Who paid for the sodas and the bus ride?  I mean, why reward a kid for reading books anyway?  Thinking about this kindness of strangers intrigued me and made me feel good at the same time.  Yeah, this was a good day.  I was learning new things.  And I was getting hungry.  By the time we pulled into the familiar town square of Stratford, I saw the cars waiting to pick up the kids and I looked for the Chevy fleetside with mom, but she wasn’t there yet.  Getting off the bus I went into the library and showed the librarian lady my feather and told her about the giant Technicolor chicken and asked her if she had ever seen anything like it.  Without saying anything she went over to the shelves of books on the back wall and returned with a large volume called “Birds of the World”.  Opening it to a page with a likeness of the giant Technicolor chicken, she turned the book around so I could read it and it plainly said the word “Peacock”.   

                                                        A Halloween Apology

Postmaster

Stratford, Calif.

San Joaquin Valley

Mr. Mailman, could you please deliver this letter to the folks who lived at the second house on the right down the street from the gas station at the North end of town?

Hello neighbors.  Do you remember Halloween night in 1954?  You came home to a wet living room floor and you have me to blame for that and I am truly sorry.  I am guilty with an explanation and here it is:

On this, my first participating Halloween, I went a little wild, but I had some help.  That day in school the kids were buzzing about tricking and treating, a new concept for me.  I had just recovered from appendicitis and slowly had regained my strength enough to be invited into town with the big kids for Halloween.  My sister Anna Jane explained how you first put on a disguise or costume so I grabbed my coon skin cap and headed to the trash burning barrel and sooted up my face with ashes to look like an Indian Davey Crockett.  David, my big brother and his friends gave several of us Harrigan’s camp kids a ride into town in his Lincoln Zephyr from which he had removed all the seats so there was standing room only.  The seats had been removed so that he and his friends could roll the car over while making smaller and smaller circles in the fields.  Theoretically, this made the ordeal more like a carnival ride.  David denies this but it has become part of his teen legend. 

Once into town, David dropped us smaller kids off by the library and proceeded to Weir G Smith’s house.  Mr. Smith doubled as Stratford’s school principal and truant officer; therefore, he was considered the enemy to camp kids.  David played the old joke on Mr. Smith by lighting a paper sack on the porch and then knocking and running off.  You can figure the rest out from there.  Meanwhile, my group of hobos and charcoal mustachioed tramps took up collecting candy, pennies, popcorn balls, and fruit from the townspeople of Stratford.  Occasionally, the home owners requested a performance from us before surrendering the treats.  Being the littlest, I would perform a rhyme or sing the new shoe song or something, to the delight of the adults.  I must have been cute as heck because the treats kept coming.  I was hoping the night would never end when we came to your house.

You were gone and the lights were out and one pie tin sat by the front door on the porch.  A few pieces of candy corn were all that was left, so someone said “Let’s trick them”.  Instantly the mood turned ugly and with great malice and aforethought the rest of my group began to rearrange your porch furniture.  That seemed inadequate justice from my point of view so I separated from the group and went to the right around to the side of the house where I found a spigot and hose under the living room window.  I turned the hose on and began to shoot a stream through the screen into the house, figuring that that would teach you a lesson about the spirit of Halloween as it had been briefly explained to me.  When Anna Jane rounded the corner and saw what I was doing she yanked the hose from me and yelled for everyone to run like heck.  We didn’t stop running til we were on the other side of town.  There and then, Anna Jane gave me more insight into the limits of tricking and treating. 

So there, I am very sorry for the christening of your home 56 years ago and I know the odds are slim of this letter actually reaching the right people now, but just the same, here is my sincere apology.  For what it’s worth, my punishment has come over the years from other kids who have made me the butt of Halloween tricks so I guess it all evens out. 

Happy Halloween,

Devils Den Dennis

                                           The Treasure Years 

I remember the day I came to.  Now you would think a kid would just wake up the morning he became a man, but it was more like I came to after a long bad six year stupor that ironically I now call my treasure years. But before I get into that, you need to know a little more about me and my Okie tribe and how we went about our lives fifty years ago. So here’s a story.

There was this beer joint called “Okies” where a local Michaelangelo had been commissioned to paint a large map of the United States on one wall.  Being a proud Okie myself, I understood the art’s purpose when I saw this map.  The proportions and state lines were exaggerated, with Oklahoma occupying a good two thirds of the central U.S. with California portrayed as small bacon like strip of land falling off into the Pacific and Texas pushed down into the Gulf of Mexico like an old run down boot.  Arkansas was a small postage stamp of a state to the east of the great Oklahoma Territory.  The artist had placed an oil derrick and an Indian Tee Pee at the center of the great state of Oklahoma which was painted gold. This was our birthplace along with some famous people including Will Rogers, Kate Morgan, and Mickey Mantle, or so I had been told.  You see, my early life had been preoccupied with developing an identity and being an Okie was my essence.  We moved a lot but we took our little pieces of Oklahoma with us and planted them in each of our new temporary locations and proceeded to cultivate our little transplanted culture. I remember Mom finding the phone book in one new town and proceeding to dig up relatives who we would visit. We visited one family whose only connection to us was that the father had stabbed my uncle back in Oklahoma.  We could get desperate in our identity search at times but we clung to our fragile heritage in these new places that farm work took us. You see, I lived among Okies wherever we moved.  We were a tribal group stripped of non essentials and when you looked at us you got what you saw, proud desperate people.  Non Okies called us liars and thieves at times, but my older brother Eugene told me that you might call us stupid or worse, but you could not call us liars.  We had little more than our word and we lived by that.  So fifty odd years ago my dwindling family unit moved from Devils Den to Westlake Farms.

 Westlake Farms was like any other place in this respect but I was around eleven now and I began to have some questions about that Oklahoma world I knew little of, other than the legends of my folks.

Westlake was a giant landholding owned by the Howe family, and it encompassed thousands of acres of cotton, barley and assorted other crops.  We lived for about two years in the cookhouse cabin complex at the intersection of Hwy 41 and Nevada Avenue.  If I stood in the middle of the intersection, which was fairly safe since there was very little traffic day or night, I imagined myself in the center of my new world with Stratford three miles ahead, Kettleman City five miles back, Huron twenty miles off to the left, and Tulare Lake some ten miles off to the right. This was a seminal time and place for me because important events and thoughts happened here.  This was the beginning of my treasure years. 

By treasure, I mean a small fishing tackle box made of oak that belonged to my dad who had passed away back in Oklahoma some ten years past.  Sensing my need for a connection, my Mom had entrusted this box to me and it held small artifacts of our life on our farm in Oklahoma.  Inside the box I found Dad’s Marine medals, a brown plastic wallet, his Marine laundry stamp, and a piece of the Great Wall of China. The box itself was about twelve inches by eight inches by eight inches.  It had a brass handle and brass hinges.  The medals were also brass with faded ribbons. The wallet cracked if unfolded and was empty.  The piece of the Great wall was the size of my small fist and had pieces of smaller rocks cemented into its aggregate.  I had heard the Chinese put human bones into the wall. With its contents this musty smelling box became the embodiment of my father son connection.  I began to protect these icons of past happiness and kept it under my bed and placed a small master lock in its hasp.  I had the only key, but the lock was just as easily opened with a bobby pin.  Just the same I began to collect other valuables at this time in my life so the box stayed with my bb gun, sleeping bag, army helmet and the newly acquired peacock feather.  Over time I began a coin collection and amassed some silver dollars and a few two dollar bills which fit nicely in the plastic wallet. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen, I had collected over sixty real silver dollars and a double hand full of miscellaneous change in fair to good numismatic condition.  I knew the worth of the silver because I had invested in a coin collector’s book which I studied often.  I was rich and then there was Bill Morphis. 

One day, Mom brought Billy Ray Morphis home and introduced him as my new step daddy.  I was unimpressed and when I found out he was from Arkansas, the breeding ground of idiots, his stock sank to an even lower level.  For the next six years we lived with this drunk, and in all fairness, he was good for an occasional laugh even though he never brought home many paychecks.  Just as this chapter of my life began, it had a definite and conclusive end, and that is where my treasure really paid off when I was seventeen and in my last year of school.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  The four of us sat around the kitchen table after dinner in Santa Rosa, California.  Bill and Mom sat across from me.  Whistler, our mutt, sat in her high chair at the table between them with her short paws on either side of the beer saucer in front of her. That’s right; we had a beer drinking dog.  We had finished dinner and Mom and Bill were playing cards while I was doing trigonometry homework.  Their petty arguing had escalated after a couple beers and Bill was feeling sorry for himself as usual.  Whistler’s attention shifted back and forth between Mom and Bill as they communicated through her, not talking directly to each other.  Add to this picture the fact that Whistler, a Corgi-Dachshund mix, was also dressed in red a polka dot shirt. By this time I was a senior at Montgomery High, the third high school I attended in three years and how I ever graduated second in my class with a home studying atmosphere like this I’ll never know. 

At that point in my teenage life I was in a daily survival mode at school.  I had become painfully shy, but I kept that weakness to myself.  I was a typical scared teenager in that I would go to great lengths to avoid attracting attention to myself at school or in public. Too bashful to accept my scholarships and awards at the school assembly, I sat anonymously in the crowd at the awards assembly while my name was called several times for separate accomplishments.  I was even too timid to take my driver’s test because that meant going into town on the city streets, even though the previous summer I had driven dump trucks on Hwy 101 for a construction company.  My brother, Eugene, loaned me his Ford Thunderbird when I worked up the nerve to finally take the test.  He warned me to go easy on the gas so as not to get a ticket for the noisy hole in the muffler.  You know, I laugh about this even today when I remember the reaction of the examiner when I negotiated a busy intersection on a yellow light. I faced the possibility of being stranded in the middle of the intersection on a red light, and you know how much attention that would attract.  So what did I do?  I did just like any panicked teenager in that situation and I layed on the horn as I stomped on the gas pedal with my number eleven hushpuppy and floored it, noisy muffler and all. By the way, Eugene had replaced the Ford horn with an Ahhhooogaaah horn. That did get the attention of the examiner, a fiftyish and effeminate gentleman, armed with a number two pencil and a clipboard and test sheet.  I thought he would blow a gasket when he yelled “What the f…. are you doing?” and a few other things.  Compared to what happened, I could have just stopped mid intersection, rolled down the window and yelled “Okie teenager coming thru!” and “By the way, I’ve got bad breath, holes in my underwear and I had pinworms as a child.”  and I would have drawn less attention. But instead, I just blub, blub, blubbed along down Main Street in the old T Bird and when he finally settled down I responded weakly, “Does this mean I flunked?  That brought on some more expletives but then he passed me just barely while admonishing me to “Slow the hell down”. You see, he too must have been goofy and awkward as a teen.

I grew up a little more all at once that day.  Maybe that’s what they call a growth spurt.  I experienced another growth spurt of sorts that night as I was struggling with Archimedes’ calculus and the Pythagorean Theorem when Bill commiserated that he was sick and tired again, and if he had the price of a bus ticket he would head back to Russellville, Arkansas and be done with us once and for all. Whistler gave out a sorrow-full moan and at that precise instant I came to.  I woke up from this six year long comedy of the absurd. Saying nothing, I went to the bedroom and fished out the treasure box from its hiding place under my bed and brought it out to the table. Pushing aside my homework, I opened the box and quietly arranged the treasure onto the kitchen table.  After getting Bill’s undivided attention, I explained each denomination and its face and real valuation, and told him the total redemption amounted to over one hundred and fifty dollars.  I told Billy Ray he could take the entire treasure trove to the Santa Rosa Coin Shop in the morning and cash it in and buy himself a Greyhound Bus ticket to Arkansas.  Mom said nothing and neither did Bill.  The next day I left for school and returned in the afternoon to life without Bill Morphis.  He took the coins and rode that big dog out of our lives and I never saw or heard of him again to this day. 

You know, I still have that treasure box.  If you drive down the nicest street in my town and turn into a long tree lined drive up to a big house, and go inside and look on my library shelf, you can find that old oak tackle box.  Its contents, the medals and piece of China’s Great Wall are framed and mounted on red velvet over the window facing the library door in a beautiful shadow box. Even though it sits empty the treasure box is full of memories and every now and then I take it off the shelf and open it filling the room with imaginary music, the vibrant strains of Rogers and Hammersteins’ “Oklahoma”.  Yeah, I’m the King of the Okies for a moment, living out my exiled life in California.

                                  MOTORCYCLE,  MOTORCYCLE……
                                   

I had been hearing that motorcycle sound off and on for the last thirty minutes and it was within a minute of high noon now.  It was Eugene’s 51 pan head all right, but he was usually at work this time of day, not riding around the school ground outside.  I looked at the crayon depiction of his motorcycle in front of me on the undersized first grade class table.  The wheels were brown and the tires black and the tank blue.  It was a crude drawing unlike Curtis Adney’s black and white ford V8 cop prowler which he had been quietly creating across the table that we shared with David “Beans for Breakfast” Orton and his flatulence. Curtis’ dad was the local law which made Eugene the local outlaw by comparison.  Curtis had the silent concentration of a true artist, and he was a natural born artist for sure.  I was admiring his work from across the table when the WWII vintage siren went off in the town square heralding noon. Glancing up at the clock to confirm this I was, in an instant, at the door with my lunch box in hand yelling “Bombs over Tokyo”.  Outside in the playground I ran over to the fence between the street and the school grounds, craning my neck looking for Eugene.  The rumble was gone for now and I turned from the fence, which by the way, was put there to protect the school kids from mad dogs and escaped convicts.  It sure couldn’t keep me in if I had the mind to climb its flimsy wire barrier.  Looking down the corridor I saw my big brother David, a seventh grader headed my way. He was carrying his shoes and was bare footed.  This was his usual visit to me at lunch time just to check up on me.  He was my guardian this time of day, but he looked messed up with uncombed hair.  I asked him why he was not wearing his black dress shoes and he lifted up his foot showing me a big blister on his heel.  Telling me to be sure to eat my lunch, he headed back from where he came leaving me on my own for the rest of the lunch hour.  I saw Norma, Curtis and David playing a Ring-Around-the-Rosie game out on the lawn so I ran over, barged in and accelerated the clockwise motion of the kid-ring singing, “Motorcycle, motorcycle, go so fast…..” until the speed sent us hurling outward until we all tumbled down in the grass, at which point I sang, “Motorcycle, motorcycle, skin yo ass”, laughing out loud.  Yeah, I was fascinated by Eugene’s motorcycle, as was the entire family.  It attracted attention wherever he rode it, especially the attention of Curtis’ Dad whose flathead Ford had little or no chance of ever catching it out on the open road.  There was a local controversy over the legality of dragging a wooden sled loaded with camp gear down Hwy 41. Technically, since the sled had no wheels, the consensus was that Eugene and his motorcycle buddy, Jack Strachner could legally do so in spite of Deputy Adney’s opinion otherwise.  The law was clear about one point however, and that was that you could not carry a person on the sled so Eugene would drag us kids up and down the local camp airstrip on his motorcycle sled for the occasional thrill. 

As I sat down with my back to the school building and began on my lunch, I heard the rumble again but I could tell that it had to be someone else on Eugene’s Harley Davidson because, whoever it was went through the gears just a little too tentatively, not with the wild and aggressive acceleration which was Eugene’s style. Whoever it is was in for big trouble if Eugene caught them on his 51 Panhead.   I heard the V twin muffler sound fade out on Hwy 41 headed toward Lemoore, but what I couldn’t see was that today my big sister Chris, who had been much too sick to go to high school this morning, was now well enough to have borrowed the Harley and that had been her killing time around town until lunch time at her high school. 

Chris was sixteen and her beautiful red hair was streaming behind as she passed Doyle White’s used car lot on the outskirts of Lemoore.  She had gotten one of the workers at Harrigan’s camp to kick start her brother’s motorcycle and she took it from there.  Out on the highway she got up to seventy or more on the straightaway and here Maybelline was mixing with tears making black stripes from the corners of her eyes back toward her ears.  By the time she slowed down through the residential Lemoore neighborhoods, she had gnats stuck to her fresh red lipstick.  She was dressed casual with a sleeveless blouse, pedal pushers, oxfords and white anklets.  The one family comb and a dollar bill were stuffed into one anklet and David’s one pair of socks was stuffed into her big sisters brassiere that she had borrowed for the day.  A natural born beauty, this was all superfluous because there was none more pretty than my big sister.  She was just making sure she got the attention of her classmates today, because, like our entire family, we just didn’t fit in.  When she pulled up to the hamburger joint across the street from Lemoore High, she circled the parking lot slowly so her classmates could get the full effect before coasting to a stop, shutting down the Harley next to the group of picnic tables in front of the hamburger joint.  Immediately she was surrounded by the boys in white tee shirts, Levi’s and engineer boots.  Sitting down on top of the picnic tables with her feet on the seat, the Queen of Sheba took her place on her lunch time throne while the boys went all oohs and aahs over the bike and the girls surveyed her from a distance knowing they could never top this act.  Chris picked her table strategically so as to command the most attention, purposely facing her back to the three pretty pom-pom girls in school sweaters and pleated skirts.  Those girls were all show and they arrived daily assured they would be the stars of the lunch hour, but, today their place in the sun was eclipsed by Christibel Ouida Wilds, the center of the solar system.  Chris smiled in this knowledge.  She had rehearsed this day in her mind since last summer in the cotton fields of the Tulare Lake bottom.  The only attention the three pretties would get today was from the two jug heads who dared to sit across from them eating bologna sandwiches from their black barn shaped institutional lunch boxes.  So Chris grinned more and pushed her chest out a little further and shook her hair back, soaking in the noon-day adulation.  Soon enough one of the boys produced a pack of Lucky Strikes from his rolled up tee shirt sleeve and offered Chris a smoke which she accepted casually but was careful not to inhale, avoiding the paroxysmal coughs which would mark her as a novice smoker.  Out came the family comb and she needed a good five minutes to detangle her hair, knowing the inevitable ride home would undo her grooming again.  If this was her day to bask, It was David’s worse day, going to school sockless and combing his curly hair with a fork.  The world maintains its balance one way or another I guess.  Chris’ dollar bought a shake and cheeseburger and fries which she ate heartily while holding her court of motorcycle royalty, knowing that in a few minutes her courtesans would head off to class and she back on the freedom road on this righteously glorious spring day.  This could be a little tricky for an inexperienced biker but she knew she had already pulled off the perfect first and second acts of her performance.  Timing her departure for the fullest effect, Chris asked one of the bigger lard butt boys to help her start the motorcycle.  Instructing him on how to find the compression stroke with the cycle in neutral, and warning him of the kickback, she had the big kid raise up high off the ground and stomp on the pedal with his entire weight while she handled the handlebar accelerator giving just enough gas to keep the motor running as she slipped her leg over the seat and rocked the bike upright.  With her left hand she flicked the Lucky Strike off to the side, then pulled in the clutch and dropped the bike into first gear with her left toe.  Sitting astride the machine with its low rumble, Chris felt every eye on her as she expertly kicked the stand up and she gave it some gas, releasing the clutch.  This could be a great exit or a disaster.  Waiting until even the pom-poms turned to look and hoping for the best possible outcome Chris gritted her teeth and advanced the throttle from a low rumble to a sufficient rpm level to assure escape velocity. 

I’M NOT FROM HERE

Christobel Ouida Wilds was the second of three wild women from Oklahoma.  Her genealogy bore this fact out.  Not only was she wild, she, like her two sisters Virginia and Anna Jane, was beautiful to the bone.  But when I say wild, I mean wild like in a wildcat that if you backed her into a corner she would ride your surprised ass back out to where you came from.  If you called her Christo-bull, or Okie or rusty necked and freckle faced or messed with her family or family name…. well you only did it once.  Other than that, she was a sweet cotton blossom of a teenager who just wanted things to go back to the way they were back home on the farm in Oklahoma.  You see, Chris was a practitioner of the Many Worlds philosophy and the theory of Parallel Universes.  Chris coped with her harsh labor camp life by switching back and forth between the Lemoore High/Harrigan’s camp California world she lived in now and the Oklahoma world she left back on the farm.  She was trapped in the California Universe and could not get back into the Oklahoma Universe.  Today at sixty miles an hour, her only tie to California was the three square inches of motorcycle tire contact to the asphalt.  She and that motorcycle right now were straining to get back to Oklahoma and she was almost there again…God how she wanted to go back home.  The curve to Stratford was up ahead and she had a choice to make.  Slow down and she would lazily head back to the house or accelerate and try for escape velocity and break free.  The family, or what was left of it was going to move to Devils Den on the promise of steady work and she really didn’t want to go there either.  She was a young girl with no good choices and she just wanted to ride on forever.  She shared a common plight with her Mom and sisters, and the rest of the Okie girls in the San Joaquin Valley these days.  That’s why Chris was mad so much of the time.  That was the source of her tight lipped stare, and if you dared to look her in the eyes, and I mean look deep into those pretty green eyes you saw that still waters run deep in the feminine Wilds’ gene pool. 

I guess now’s about as good a time as any to enlighten you about the feminine side of the Wilds family history.  These women carry their mitochondrial DNA deep down somewhere between their kidneys and their souls and if you unravel this cocoon you may follow its silk thread back through sixteen odd generations of beautiful and strong women down Route 66 through them Oklahoma hills and from there across the Midwest to Salem through Mary Elizabeth Wilds.  This ancestor met her fate in the witch trials.  From there the thread crosses over to Swiss and Germanic families and from there, and this is where guesswork is needed, those women trace their pasts across the steppes of northern Europe down into Eurasia and finally North Africa for another two hundred generations.  That’s where it ends with an old gal named Eve in the Euphrates Valley.  How’s that jar your mother’s preserves? 

But wait, there’s more if we hop onto the male Wilds Y chromosome trail.  These men over generations were strong but they wandered and they were emotional adventurers.  Their trail of bread crumbs has faded over the generations but most recently we pick up the trail with the patriarch Dennis Roy Wilds over in Shanghai during the Boxer Rebellion and Roy Eugene offshore working on oil boats, and David Nelson in Libya during the Suez Crisis.  These men were always somewhere doing something making large orbits around their families and providing but the women stayed in close in their more intimate orbits and took care of the children.

Chris was vaguely aware of all of this family history since she carried it with her in her collective genetic memory but today she rode along glancing down at her shoes noting that her saddle oxfords and anklets had chain oil splattered over them.  The shoes could be cleaned up but the socks were ruined.  She looked up just in time to see the low rise of the Central Union Canal Bridge and felt the front wheel of the bike break free followed by the rear wheel doing the same launching her into the air a few inches off the pavement.  For just a second or two she was six inches removed from California and she felt the weightlessness in her stomach and she was not here at all but standing in front of the rose arbor back home seven years ago breathing in the scent of the red roses and holding a rose in each fist and then, strong gentle calloused father’s hands were lifting her from behind higher and higher tossing her over his head and she was laughing and laughing like many times before back home in Oklahoma.  In the next instant Chris came back to earth in California as the motorcycle slammed down hard on the pavement in the soulless San Joaquin Valley.

Chris made some decisions the rest of the way home and she took that curve back toward Harrigan’s Camp where she parked Eugene’s cycle under the cottonwood tree facing the kitchen window.  Chris sat there and watched her big sister Virginia as she was cooking supper until Virginia reminded her how much trouble she was in with Mom and Eugene.  But Chris had a plan brewing in her mind and she knew today that this would be her last few weeks in school and she would do whatever it took to avoid moving to Devils Den.  Somehow, some way, Chris knew she would find a better life for herself away from the valley, maybe over on the coast next to the ocean.  Just then, Virginia yelled “You better get your rear end in here and help with supper, and, by the way, you wouldn’t know where my brassiere and comb are would you?”

ZUNDAPPE

Zundappe, a noun implying perfection in gift giving, or the art of giving, or generosity of the highest order; synonym, post WW2 German made motorcycle

If you have ever been fishing and get that backlash when you cast your line, then you know how much patience it takes to untangle the bunch of line in your reel.  Well, I do and I learned to relax and in a strange way enjoy the laborious task by slowing down and sipping a beer and taking as long as necessary to undo all the tangles.  Well, to untangle the Wilds-Zundappe conundrum it could take a six pack but bear with me on this and keep an open mind because, believe me, this is one story that belongs in a believe it don’t book, and it goes something like this:

They say in the Black Forest of Bavaria there is an order of monks devoted to generosity in its purest form.  From this order charismatics are sent out into the world to spread the message to the selfish.  In their forest you could hear the low rumbling chants in the morning and evening,……… “MmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmZuuuuuuunnnnnndappe, Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmzuuuuuuuunnnnnnndappe”, or as we pronounced it in Gus’s camp in Stratford, Zooooomdab,…zooooomdab, as in a little dab will l do ya.  The Germans pronounced the “e” on the end I think making it come out dappy.  Furthermore, I am sure the modern word “zoom” is derived from “Zundappe” meaning “to go fast on a two wheeled motor-driven cycle”.  This much I know because one of these charisma men was sent to live with my family.  His name was David and he was my older brother.

I learned from David early on some very important life lessons.  For instance, did you know that pennies are worth more than the other coins, or for that matter, that if you planted your pennies and watered them they would grow into a money tree whose leaves were dollar bills?  David taught me this lesson but we had to move on to another camp before those trees sprouted. When Mom told David to get that thing cut off his head, meaning his new Mohawk haircut he got for his school pictures, she added as an afterthought, “And take Dennis with you too and get his hair cut”.  That was my first buzz cut and I was proud to look just like my big brother while our hair grew out again.  David taught me my first bawdy adult nursery rhyme and I recited it perfectly for my first grade class and my teacher, Miss McAllister.  It was about Miss Muff and her Tuff and a spider. You can probably imagine the rest of it. I learned from David how to use that special middle finger to express frustration too.  A gullible little acolyte, I soaked up everything David sent my way, but of all the great and magnanimous gestures of generosity David sent my way, the tip top best was the concept of Zundappe, or how to give to someone just the right gift or present.

If you just take the time to listen, and I mean really listen to someone, they will tell you what they need or really want.  David must have picked this up from the monks because when I really wanted a helmet liner he brought me one from Camp Pendleton when he graduated from boot camp.  I only had to wish for a sleeping bag and it appeared on his next furlough too.  On my lonely sojourns away from Westlake Farms I wondered what it would be like to have a radio on my bike and just like that David sent me a transistor radio in a leather case from Hawaii.  Not only could I listen to distant Fresno on it I heard “houndog” on it for the first time out on Nevada Avenue miles away from camp.  Then the best Xmas gift of all time arrived when I was eleven.  David sent me a bb gun powered by carbon dioxide canisters.  This rifle was lever actioned and had a narrow blue steel barrel and a deep brown wood stock and it smelled good like a rifle should.  I wore that gun out.  I would head out daily from camp wearing a butcher knife in my USMC belt, rolled sleeping bag on my back, helmet liner on and rifle on my shoulder.  I was weighted down with David’s perfect presents.  I was happy and totally fulfilled on those days.

David must have been satisfied that I was progressing along the Zundappe path by then and my instruction in the intangible aspects of gift giving began in my teen age years when gifts were replaced by compliments.  By this I mean David would brag on me and my good grades in school, and this made me try even harder in class.  When it became obvious that I was college bound in my senior year in high school David hit me with the full force of Zundappe by giving me a 1957 Zundapp 250 cc motorcycle.  MmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmZuuuuuuuuunnnnnnndappe!  How could I have known the Zundappe sect actually made motorcycles too?  Who were these people and how did I join up? This incredible gift of gifts was even more amazing because it wasn’t even David’s motorcycle in the first place.  You see, he liberated it from a neglectful owner in Santa Barbara and took it to me in Northern California.  Only a Charismatic could do that I guess but it is good to know that statutes of limitations do expire eventually.  Anyway, I rode that Zundapp in the true spirit of Zundappe all over Northern California without a license or registration and never with proper riding gear.  I loved that motorcycle and sometimes I would just take it apart and put it back together for the pure joy of it.  I bonded with Zundappe figuratively and literally.  I was washed in the spirit of Zundappe and felt invincible as I flew higher and higher in my first years of college amassing knowledge and soaring upward toward my goal of being a doctor.  I was one jacked up kid.

From the heights I was pretty full of myself and my abilities and potential and I wanted to pull people up with me and this naiveté came to a sobering end the day I asked the most stupid question possible to my older sister Virginia.  I called her Jean and she had been my surrogate mother when I was a toddler, before she started her own family.  Jean had not finished school and she had three children and no husband to care for her.  She was trapped in the welfare existence living in an apartment nearby subsisting and languishing in a hopeless life.  Her only transportation was a bike with a wire basket and she used this for grocery shopping.  This day I had magnanimously offered to fix the flat paper thin rear tire on her bike and I just asked her “Jean, have you ever thought of just getting off welfare?”  Her answer was as honest as it was short.  Uneducated Jean had to explain to college boy me the bone jarring simple facts of her life from a single mom’s perspective.  No school, low wages, no transportation, unaffordable child care…..she lived in a trap with no escape.  I was humbled as Jean matter of factually laid out the truth of her life to me and she did it with a sincere honesty without asking for pity.  I went down to Pep Boys and bought a new tire and tube and put it on her rusty bike and then tucked my tail and went back home.  The next few times I visited Jean and my nephews and niece we talked more about her options or lack thereof and I just listened and learned.  I learned that Jean really wanted to be a nurse but the distance from her grade eight schooling to college appeared insurmountable.  Then one day, MmmmmmmmZundappe!  I hatched a plan for Jean and her future and it was brilliant, inspired and maybe a little illegal too so for the second time in this story I need to invoke the statute of limitations while I tell her college story.

Jean’s Motorcycle Story

Goleta sits north of Santa Barbara, California about a fifteen minute ride by car.  By bike the ride into Santa Barbara could take a good hour or more, mostly uphill.  In the center of the beach area sits the City College and site of the nursing school.  If Jean could get accepted, she still had the problem of reliable transportation to solve too.  To top it off, Jean was afraid to drive a car and relied on her bike alone for transportation.  On the subject of school, Jean’s education stopped at grade eight in Oklahoma which left grades nine through twelve to learn before being qualified to take the nursing program entrance examination.  It just so happened that I had a college girlfriend who was pretty darn sharp and easily bribed so I sent her to take Jean’s nursing school entrance exam and all it cost me was a $25.00 portable television set in return. While that’s another story, suffice it to say Jean entered nursing school at the top of her class.  Now there was the problem of transportation which I solved by buying Jean a Honda 90 step thru motorcycle with a book rack and a centrifugal clutch. Jean took to it like riding a bike and off she went to nursing school that fall. Rain or shine, Jean rode that motorcycle back and forth thru Santa Barbara wearing her helmet and nursing uniform for the next two years.  Now that’s college the hard way, but she did it and to this day I am as proud of my big sister as I am of any of my family for making up for four years of high school while getting a nursing degree.  How’s that saying go, “How’s that jar of your mama’s preserves?”  Or as I like to say, “MmmmmZundappe…..”.

Over the next years I traded my Zundappe cycle in on a succession of Hondas, Kawasakis, BSA’s and even a few Harleys and Jean traded up to real cars after nursing school. In fact, after a full career as a nurse, Jean drove a few years cross country in big rigs and I think she did this just to prove to herself that she could drive anything anywhere.  I think she really was just expressing her independence and self esteem to the max though. This brings me to last year when I was telling Jean about my cruise to Alaska and she told me that Alaska, along with Hawaii, is the only state she never drove to.  I listened and heard a touch of regret in her late seventy year old voice, and Zundappe, guess who is going to Alaska on a cruise this August? Mmmmm…Zundappe.

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