California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  Your insides, which have been numb for a while now, stay that way for some time longer.

  Metal

  The frontier newspaper building was dark and cool inside. I was given an old-fashioned punch card that slipped into a metal box on the wall to register my work hours. The news staff included a rushed redheaded editor named Patty, two assistant editors, and four or five reporters. They were distracted, I thought, maybe because the newspaper was an afternoon publication. By midmorning, everyone had only a few hours in which to find and file their news. The day was always hanging over you.

  On my first morning a grandmotherly woman named Emily handed me a camera, a heavy black and silver device with a black canvas neck strap, softened by years around the necks of small-town journalists.

  We have a photographer, she said. But he can’t be everywhere so you’ll have to take your own pictures sometimes. Have you done that? I shook my head; I had never handled a manual camera.

  When you come back in I’ll process your film, Emily said, gesturing toward the darkroom.

  Patty told me I would mostly be covering community events and filling in for staff on summer vacation.

  There will probably be some action on the forest beat, too—summer here we have a lot of fires, she said. That gives reason to go out past our regular coverage areas, into Yosemite sometimes. Fires are the biggest news that happens out here, except for that killing business.

  Killing business? I repeated.

  The Sund-Pelosso murders, she said. We didn’t cover it much, left that to the AP and the big-city papers.

  She must have seen my face then; it must have blanched. They’ve got the guy now, Patty said, nodding her head reassuringly. It’s done with.

  Tree

  Gold Country: deceptively suburban-looking ramblers dwarfed by sixty-foot-tall trees. I rented a room for the summer from a nurse. While the neighborhoods of San Francisco glowed their ice-cream-colored summer sunsets until ten p.m., out here the shadows curtained down on the nurse’s cul-de-sac by late afternoon.

  I drove down a mountain on the Golden Chain Highway to my summer job early each morning. Skinny pines dressed in dry needles pushed out of the sloped earth, purple in the dawn. Rusted billboards, long-shuttered family resorts, and park signs with names carved yellow in Sherwood-Forest script conjured a campy but deserted feel. Though the quiet stretch of two-lane state highway was flanked mostly by conifers, I got the feeling there were houses back there, too, hidden where I couldn’t see.

  Fire

  Later, I typed “Yosemite killings” and waited for the slow tick of the nurse’s dial-up Internet.

  When a news page finally loaded, it told me that in February, a woman and two teenage girls—Carole Sund, her fifteen-year-old-daughter, Juli Sund, and their travel companion, sixteen-year-old Argentinian exchange student Silvina Pelosso—had been abducted from Cedar Lodge, just outside Yosemite, where they were staying while exploring the area. The missing women touched off one of the largest manhunts in Sierra Nevada history. For weeks FBI agents, highway patrol officers, and National Park Service rangers combed the rugged area with dogs, helicopters, and equipment.

  On March 19, on a logging road near the northeastern edge of the park among abandoned gold mines and dense forest, Carole and Silvina were found in the trunk of the charred remains of Carole’s rented Pontiac. Both were burned beyond recognition, identifiable only through dental records. A note was sent to police with a hand-drawn map indicating the location of the third victim, Juli. The top of the note read, “We had fun with this one.” Investigators went to the location depicted on the map and found the remains of Juli. Her throat had been cut.

  I kept reading. Through the spring, police searched for the killer, who it seemed had disappeared into the woods. Then just days ago, right before I had arrived in Gold Country, the lead investigator on the case had made a public declaration: the killers were safely behind bars. Without identifying any suspects by name, FBI District Chief Jim Maddock acknowledged that media accounts had “identified some of the people we are looking at.” Maddock then added, “I do feel we have all of the main players in jail.” It seemed charges would be filed imminently.

  There was a sense of relief, according to the news stories I scanned. Tourists were returning to Yosemite in droves, and residents believed it was safe to again walk in their woods.

  Water

  “Of the four million visitors to Yosemite [in 1998], just 15 were victims of violent crimes, a 70 percent drop from six years earlier,” Joshua Hammer wrote in an article in Outside magazine called “The Yosemite Horror.” “Homicides in the 54 national parks are rare; indeed, 64.5 million visitors thronged the parks in 1998, and remarkably, there were no murders. Until 1999, perhaps the most terrifying crime against women in the national parks occurred in May 1996, when two experienced backpackers, Julianne Williams, 24, and Lollie Winans, 26, were knifed to death at their campsite a few hundred yards off the Appalachian Trail in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. The two women had been out for a five-day circuit hike in the park when they were attacked. The last homicide inside Yosemite’s boundaries occurred in 1987, when a man pitched his wife off a precipice to collect on her insurance policy. According to a statistician at the University of Florida, the odds of being murdered in a national park in 1995 were about one in 20 million—less than the odds of drowning in one’s own bathtub.”

  Water

  I am swimming in the pool of my mother’s apartment with Jim, Suzanne, who is visiting me in California, and Jim’s friend Jackson. The day starts sunny but not hot. We have the pool to ourselves. The plan is to swim, get dressed up, go out clubbing in San Francisco later tonight. All Suzanne and I care about is that we’re together. The balance of everything is only right when we are in the same place on the map. Being with each other in California, which over many visits the past few years she has come to love, too, is all that really matters. It has been this way ever since we met in the fall of sixth grade after I transferred to her school and we were put together for a research project on sharks. She loved sharks and I had zero interest in them, but I had a lot of interest in a black-haired, fast-talking eleven-year-old girl.

  The thing about sharks is you can have no idea how close they are because they comprehend body motion and understand whether a human is facing forward or backward. With this intelligence a shark will always have the ability to sneak up behind its human prey. You can be navigating the most transparent waters, sand right there, shore close, pretty coral and rainbow fish undulating in the gentle swell, and then the shark is on top of you. Suzanne and I are talking by the side of the deep end when it comes to us, gliding across the pool from where the boys are play fighting in their bare chests, swim trunks like loose sails: someone, one of them, I want to think it is Jackson, makes a joke about the Holocaust. Suddenly the water is very cold. Suzanne and I get out quickly, leave them floating there like bloated bodies.

  Air

  or

  Where is her father these days?

  Certainly California is not the other side of the galaxy.

  Why doesn’t he come into the picture?1

  The last time she spoke to him they sat in a car in Montreal, the spring before she moved away. She was fifteen. It was a cold spring, one of the coldest on record. They were in his black Volvo. They had not spoken in more than a year, since he had married his wife. When her father and his girlfriend first began dating, the divorce of her parents—the childhood home sold, the missed pool membership, the family rituals all evaporated—was still raw. The father moved in with the girlfriend and her five-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, the first daughter yearned for a feeling of family, of a house that was not going to slip down a wormhole. She was so very lonely. The father’s girlfriend said that if she wanted to visit them, no problem, she could sleep on the five-year-old kid’s bedroom floor. She never went to sleep on the floor.

  The wedding was large, more than a hundred people, mostly th
e friends and family of her father’s fiancée. She had been fourteen. She wanted to bring both her best friend, Suzanne, and a boy to the party. Her father said it was too much, that the new wife’s family was paying for a lot of the wedding, that it was very expensive. Pick one, he said. But she couldn’t pick. If she chose the boy, if she even had the courage to ask one, they could dance at the party, but there would be no one to talk to for all the rest of those hours and it would be awkward. If she picked her best friend, whom her family knew well, who felt right at home with them all, she would have a constant companion through the ordeal. But what about the dancing? She asked again for two guests or maybe the indulgence of three—a date each for her and Suzanne. She was told no, stop making waves, this was not about her.

  So she boycotted. She told them to take their fancy party and their stranger-guests and the overgrown baby sailor dress they had bought for her to wear to the synagogue and all the bad adult choices she thought everyone had been making recently and shove them. Surely, in cosmic terms this choice of hers would function as the event horizon of their relationship. She did not speak to them after that, and they did not speak to her. No appointments with an understanding family therapist were set up to process the chaos of their recent collective past, no mediations to talk through the ungraspable things—secrets and how the lives we know and inhabit can fade so suddenly like they had never existed. What settled instead was anger and silence, which she carried with her everywhere.

  So then, in the Volvo with her father that cold spring day before she moved with the pasted-together step-family to California. Her father, understandably, was angry at the plan to take his children across the continent. Outside, the air was vapored ice, and inside the Volvo their breathing fogged the windows. Do you want to go? he asked her. His tone was clipped.

  She remembered the first time she had heard of California, from the book in the school library in fourth grade. She remembered the feel of beach on her palm, the smell of the ocean from when they lived down south so long ago, just her and her mother and father in another dimension. She thought of no one knowing her, of starting new.

  I guess, she said indifferently.

  Well I’m going to fight to keep your brother, said her father, angrily, and this, finally, split a tiny fissure. In the freezing, fogged-up car her tears stung. She thought of her middle brother, the only other thread that connected both her parents to each other and to her, the four of them to one another. She thought of their baby brother, of his different father, all these entangled people, the connect-the-dot games they played with scratch-and-sniff markers stretched out on the carpet on quiet afternoons, of how impossible it was in real life to connect the dots, scattered stars across space.

  Please don’t fight it, she begged. We need to stay together. And this at least, it seemed, he granted her.

  1Note/question from Scott the copy editor: This feels a little bit like it’s breaking the rules of the book.

  Okay.

  Stone

  Here I keep coming back to that Junípero Serra statue. I can never recall where it is in the city when I want to find it, but when I am not looking it is everywhere, in the pink shadows of Golden Gate Park, along the sands of Ocean Beach, on the footpaths of my university where I walk with my eyes on asphalt: the father of the ruthlessly colonizing California missions in his concrete robe, one of a long caravan of men inviting themselves in to rape the western frontier.2

  2I wasn’t going to put this in here, but something made me think of it. Just before I leave for Gold Country, I am working at the college newspaper, where I scraped together the courage to run against two other students for Editor in Chief and got the job. Once a week we stay late, pasting up each page, proofing, correcting. I drive the pages down to the printer just before midnight. One night a guy on the staff offers to come with me to the printer if I drop him off at home afterward. I pull in front of his apartment building on a steep San Francisco street, the sky like a black pudding inches above us. Why don’t you come up for a quick drink, the guy asks me, jutting his thumb toward the window. No it’s okay, I answer lightly, believing I am actually being asked. Just one, he says. Aww, thanks, but I need to get home, I say, putting my hand on the gear shift. Come on, just for a bit, he presses, the voice too serious now for the request. No thank you, I say, as everything closes in, the pudding sky, my chest. Come up, he snarls. Next time, I force myself to promise him, as casually as I can lie. He gets out.

  Water

  My father had a California dream before any of us. When he was seventeen he gathered his high school buddies, bought an old VW van, and headed west on a wild trip across Canada and down the West Coast. My mother, fifteen and already his girlfriend, was left behind for the summer. Picture: early seventies, band of boys, long hair, bell-bottom jeans, Chuck Taylors, threadbare white T-shirts hugging lanky frames, tents they could only half operate, seizing their freedom. My grandmother probably handed him a canister of homemade poppy-seed cookies as he left, trailing down the driveway in her flowered housedress pleading, Take care of yourself! to their back bumper.

  Who knows what happened on the way out west. Girls, diners, national parks, and dutiful postcards. Young lungs filled, between Kent puffs, with exhilaration. The important part is what happened in the Golden State. They took turns driving the van. One evening after crossing the border from Oregon and meandering south along the coast, whoever was at the wheel veered west, off Highway 1, their goal to get to the fabled California beach as soon as possible. Fog had set in. Probably some of them were asleep or stoned. The driver followed his instincts, the smell of salt, the shhhhhhhh of surf. But the epic California fog, like rolling secrets, like vaporized pearls, encased the VW and before they knew it they heard, they felt, sloshing all around them. As they came to their senses they sensed themselves inside a swell. Whoa, man, whoa! The driver crawled to a stop. They popped open the side door, looked down and saw themselves, van and all, embedded already in the Pacific. Sitting in the ocean, waves lapping mesmerizingly around them, marine life starting to seep through their Chucks. California, with her mist and her myths, her tiding amniotic, had called them like a siren, so sweetly they washed right into her.

  Plasma

  California is a dream. My father knew it. Before our family came into being he went there in a fabulous van on a timeless journey fueled by boyhood myths. It loomed over us most of my childhood, unspoken but crackling with magnetic pull, a rich state of dark matter, the heart of promise. Mysterious but everything. The distant frontier, the farthest type of life from ours, the place the Beach Boys sang about from the grooves of spinning 45s, connected to us by a current of energy and a hazy wish. A centrifuge from which everything spun. The thing we could achieve separated but never together. It spoke to me my whole girlhood, one Eden spun out from another.

  California is a fable. A fantasy. A fiction.

  A metamorphosis.

  Crystal

  Jim and I traveled once underground to a place not far from the Gold Country town where I spent a summer. In his truck after a long quiet drive we pulled into the parking lot of the Mercer Caverns and followed a guide down a narrow set of rock stairs. With each step the California sky above us shrunk, a blue hole closing, until we were entirely absorbed by the dark, thin air inside the earth. The stairs circled into a wide-open room and, side by side but not holding hands, we stood silent as the glow of lanterns illuminated a castle.

  Fur

  For the Gold Country newspaper, I go to the county fair. I’m asked to find any story I want among the whirling rides and fried cotton candy. In a covered ring I come across a red-haired boy about ten bent over a young cow, sweeping a brush down the animal’s hide. I ask if I can interview him and the boy says yes, flashing me a shy smile.

  He’s in 4-H, of course, and has raised the cow since birth. I know nothing about livestock and will not remember the breed, but I’m stunned at the softness of its fur up close. From a distance cows appear un
textured. In actuality their fur is dense, a shag rug rising and falling with beast breath and blood.

  You must be proud, I say to the boy. What will you do after the contest?

  We’ll sell her for slaughter, he says. I want to believe my eyes when I think I see his own quiver.

  Trees

  In spite of its beauty, I found Gold Country hard to navigate. There were not many landmarks, nor many buildings once you got away from a town’s pioneer-themed central square. Nature overtook civilization and to me it all looked identical: sun-dappled country roads one after another; fields of hay bales and chewing cows; parched barns; curtains that rippled in windowsills; carpets of wildflowers.

  While driving to or from my assignments, which were mostly some distance off—rural homesteads, state parks, and neighboring towns with names like Angel’s Camp and Confidence and Twain Harte, which hosted the conjoined spirits of literary myth-makers—I had to look frantically for road names every time I came to an intersection. I was always disoriented, armed only with a basic cell phone that didn’t work outside town. I learned that street signs are not a given in the country and the more you need one, the less likely it is to be there. One empty rural road forks to others. A Thomas Guide became my talisman: I figured out how to look up roads that began with numbers, ponds with no names, clapboard houses planted at the ends of posted no-trespassing lanes. I held the spiral book of county map pieces on my lap as I pointed myself from one story to the next along still and softly chirping roadsides, checking and re-checking the map key and my odometer for clues of distance, the faint thumping of my heart sounding like a roar in my ears. The possibility of getting lost was real and hung over me every day, and it made each assignment seem mildly threatening.