Living Water, Part II: A River Runs Through It

A couple of years later we rented a home near Bishop Creek, waiting there while Dad put a contractor to work on our new home. Typically “ET and Dollie,” made of cinder block, it was never faced with brick. No castles for these two. Housing was a means to an end, what Aristotle called an “instrumental good.” No child today in the circles where my grandchildren run, does the word "shack" ever surface. Dollie knew the word and what a shack was. Any deviations? Hardwood floors throughout but a small kitchen. Where was Dollie in the planning? Maybe she had agoraphobia—the fear of open spaces? Too many horizons already? Not enough closure?

Once, knocking doors in Germany with a Wyoming kid, Wayne Brown, quiet, gentle and competent like so many, a German woman looked at him and asked if he was from Ukraine. “Du hast Russsische Augen?” she questioned. That far away look; that open, perhaps vacant stare of a man from Wind River country—who else but Germans, suffering even more after the Lost War from claustrophobia. The women had a habit: they sucked air in; a nervous reaching for air, for space, stuffed into apartments, beehives without a queen, with a neighbor who often remained a stranger for years. Never “Du” only the more formal “Sie.” Paul calls such, “strangers and foreigners,” still filled with the fear of the American Occupation [1945-1948], a dark, untold story of casual rape and opportunistic robbery.

Not always. Sometimes love and children and a new life, not in a crowded apartment, but an open American Midwest life. Kansas.

Bishop creek emerges as the main artery, an aorta of my childhood. Yes, I've discovered I was at least Playing Boy. Gene and Tommy Weaver and I worked the creek banks, mastering every blade of grass. Silly in our play we collected tadpoles. A life in a bottle of river water was no life at all. And boring for us, finally. Our nemesis, the Victor kids, also collected tadpoles.  Then they maimed them with their jack-knives and tossed them back into the creek. Into the creek went potential frogs that would never be. The infamous Victors would cut the tails off, and scar the stomach.


They would pay; this David would bring down those Goliaths, with a sack of rocks at the end of the summer, a week before school began.  I lobbed to my heart's content--lots of “thunks,” lots of swearing, three bloody heads, but no lawsuits, thank heavens!

Our stay in what we would always call "the new house" did not last long. Naturally, a man and a woman who knew the difference between a new house and shack would care little about location. In terms of money in the bank, we were easily “upper middle” class, but Dad never showed anyone that. A trailer park settled in half a block away. A cement company had been in operation for years. We ate like kings, a feeding frenzy on Dollie's Mediterranean-Oakie combos:  lamp chops with okra, tossed salad, biscuits, and chili rellenos.

Other memories float through my mind like Bishop Creek, a home for me, and a body of water that was "alive" enough for people in Los Angeles to get in their cars and drive all the way up into the Sierra Nevada village to chase fish—and in season, deer and elk. For me it was simply home. And that new home we would soon leave. I knew it the Saturday my Dad mowed the lawn himself. Whenever he pitched in with yard work or had someone paint a room, it meant we were moving. Oakie restlessness. On the move … to Escondido, the “hidden valley” and the American Graffiti chapters of my life.

In Escondido two bodies of water emerged: The ground water pond across old Highway 78 and the ocean, 17 miles away. The pond was a passing chapter, made more infamous by Gene's threat to single-handedly destroy the entire “squad” of five Junior Marines. The ocean, on the other hand, became the most important place in my Escondido life. I spent as much time “walking” the beach, usually a girl in hand, or walking alone, trying to put myself together. Yes, the primal ocean, our place of birth, my friend, Steve, contends. “The soup, i.e., a little ammonia, some eukaryote cells, a lightning strike—and primitive life. A cell with a nucleus; The Cambrian Explosion.

My brother-in-law, who lives in Escondido, says he could “never leave Escondido,” because it's near the ocean. “You rarely go to the ocean, Warren,” I would say. He murmurs, “Yes, but I need to know it's there.” So the ocean remains a constant metaphor in American life, for those near or far. Those away, those there, “go down to the ocean” far less than they admit. For those of us in, say, Texas, it still works. For me it's the ebb and flow of life, the flow of time and history itself.

We hear Matthew Arnold's voice, still barely ringing in our high school heads. “The sea is calm tonight.” And then, like Sophocles, the wise old Greek dramatist, we also look and wonder if this is the “ebb” or “flow” of our America-as-we-know-it future. Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish writer, isn't looking at the ocean when he thinks of history, but his river works in the same way. “The stream [time and history flowing] pulled with its willing and unwilling.” Those of us sometimes “unwilling participants” in history are flotsam, caught in strong currents [politicians and generals] who push us like the river, like “logs … crosswise [we] twirl sluggishly and helplessly away … push[ed] among stones and rubbish, wedge fast, and pile up like clasped hands" [italics added].

Or, think of the poignant ending of A River Runs Through It, ye sons of ET, ye fly fishermen who spend a day staring at the water, thinking of time as a river...