California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  For the first time in my life, it felt like no one was keeping track of me. There was someone waiting for my story assignments to be filed by noon or one p.m., yes, and my clumsily snapped images, but after that the editors turned their attention to the needs of newsprint and ink and would not think of me until I came into the building again the next morning. If I slid down a rocky embankment, no one would know. No one would know if I didn’t come home at night (the nurse I lived with was gone at the hospital for days at a time). Jim was often not around when I called and had not come to visit any weekend since I had moved to Gold Country. I tried to allow myself to submerge into this sense of isolation, to submit to a dominating loneliness. Hadn’t I wanted to no longer feel like I was being watched?

  One day after my work shift I decided to drive to Yosemite and hike. I would weave my way into the forest, leave my car somewhere and forge into the remoteness on foot to confront it because that seemed to be the thing to do out here. I would learn to love being alone in this wilderness, I thought, navigating my car east on Highway 120. I would coerce myself into a free spirit or terrorize myself trying. “Bohemia has never been located geographically,” Bret Harte wrote in 1860, “but any clear day when the sun is going down . . . you shall see its pleasant valleys and cloud-capped hills glittering in the West.”

  But by the time I got to Big Oak Flat, barely the true mouth of wildness, I was clammy. However it is possible to feel at once that no one is watching you and yet someone is—I found that possibility. Veering to the jagged right edge of asphalt, I pulled off the road, swung into the arc of a U-turn, and sped away from my own foreboding and the forest’s infinite unseen.

  Rock

  The weeks roll on. My summer is a stack of paper news stories. In the nurse’s wood-paneled rambler, I reread them to remember what I’ve done, where I have been.

  On June 13, 1999, an intermediate-sized rock fall of about 279 cubic yards (660 tons) forces me all the way into Yosemite. The rock fall has killed one climber and injured two others who were climbing along a route beginning near the top of the eastern talus cone at Curry Village, immediately below the “release area.” Knowing nothing about rock, I am to write a story, conducting interviews about the impact on tourism and getting “local color.” In speaking with park geologists I learn the travel of rocks along the talus and airborne splatter of rock was very similar to a previous “release event” on November 16, 1998. The arch-like rock mass involved in this rockslide was composed of granodiorite and tonalite rocks from a unit included in the Sentinel Granodiorite. A trigger for that event cannot be determined, though daily temperatures did fall below freezing for eleven of twelve days before failure.

  ABSTRACT: Curry Village was established in 1899 and eventually extended upslope onto two major talus (debris) cones that are themselves the result of prehistoric rock falls. Part of the charm of Curry Village is the presence of the cabins amongst huge boulders. The currently active release area is above the eastern part of a large composite talus cone behind Curry Village. The lower portion of this cone is an area referred to as the Terrace and contains tent cabins used for seasonal housing for employees.

  On June 23, when I am sent by the newspaper back into the park to report subsequent crumbling stemming from hairline cracks developing after the recent fatal slide, some of the airborne splatter pieces, approximately the size of footballs, reach the wood-platformed tent cabins and, falling at steep angles, pierce the canvas roofs of tents 28 and 36, break beams, and fall to the floor. The propagation of cracks is accompanied by occasional audible rock popping.

  “If you grow up in California, Yosemite is holy,” writes author Dennis McDougal in his book The Yosemite Murders. The climber’s death within these boundaries of national park splendor and legend sent those in the region back into a state of being on edge.

  Water

  It seems stupid, but I am afraid to use the nurse’s hot tub in the house where I’m staying. It is set out on her back patio, which because of the slope of her mountainside lot is raised two stories off the ground, surrounded by the spikey trunks of tall pines. I am afraid to place my body outside, alone, exposed. I am afraid of not being able to reach the door to the house fast enough if I should need to. Of being a beacon of soft flesh under a night of shadowed mountain sky. Of slipping in wet feet should I need to run across the cedar patio. Of, of, of.

  Grass

  Joie Ruth Armstrong, twenty-six, is a friendly, strawberry-blond naturalist from Orlando who works at the nearby Yosemite Institute. Armstrong is as at home in the backcountry as I am not, leading hikes and teaching visitors, many of them children, about the history of Yosemite’s indigenous plants, animals, and geology. Joie lives with her boyfriend, Michael, another naturalist, in a nearby pine cabin they call The Green House, a rustic building where they chop wood to stay warm on crisp nights and haul water up from the creek to boil tea and admire the beauty of the glen outside that was cleared ages ago by yet another fire. Beauty birthed from annihilation.

  I don’t meet Joie, but if I did I feel we could be friends. She is the kind of friend I desperately need in my currently friendless-in-Gold-Country state, a woman five years older than me who is not terrified by independence but energized by it. Someone who has figured out how to be at ease, who talks to everyone and has many friends. Someone who writes in a letter to a girlfriend back home in Florida: “I love Michael with my soul and every last cell in my body. I love the big meadow with all its daisies and incredible history.”

  I do not meet Joie. On July 21, she packs her car for a trip to Sausalito. With Michael gone, and despite the reported news that suspects were in custody, she had told friends she was worried about a possible murderer on the loose after the killings of Carole, Juli, and Silvina. At dusk, just before she leaves her cabin for her trip, a car pulls up the dirt road. The young man inside the car confronts Joie, forces himself inside the cabin with a gun, gags her, binds her hands and feet, drags her outside, shoves her into his car and drives up the road.

  Joie attempts to escape, jumping from the moving vehicle and running 150 yards before the man catches her, cuts her throat, decapitates her, and leaves her body in the forest not far from her beloved Green House at the edge of a golden meadow.

  Three days after her murder, Joie’s killer is caught. Once he is in custody, it immediately comes to light that he also killed the mother and two teenage girl tourists that winter. Law enforcement officials are forced to admit to the general public that since June 10, for the past six weeks at the height of the summer tourist season, the serial killer was on the loose in and around Yosemite hunting women while they had mistakenly assured terrified locals and wary travelers that the culprit in Carole, Juli, and Silvina’s killings was already in jail. “We have all of the main players in jail, but we are in no rush to charge them,” FBI chief James Maddock had told the newspapers in June.

  Furthermore, the killer had actually been questioned by FBI agents in February, days after the three tourists were reported missing but before their bodies had been found. Finding nothing suspicious enough about him, police had let the killer go.

  Necessary concocted interrogation with real-life news responses

  Why did you tell the media that there was no fear of a killer on the loose, when in fact there was?

  “I’m confident we’ve done everything that could be reasonably done.”

  Why didn’t your department, during its investigation that winter and spring, contact transportation outlets in the area, including the cab driver who said she picked up a man matching the killer’s description from Sierra Village near where Carole and Silvina’s bodies were later found and gave him a $125 cab ride back to Yosemite Valley?

  “These are not for the most part Perry Mason moments, where you interview somebody and they immediately confess. They aren’t solved in thirty minutes,3 like on television.”

  How do you explain the fact that you could have prevented the murder of another woman in
Yosemite if your team had done its job?

  “I’ve struggled with that issue for the last twenty-four4 hours and continue to do so.”

  Was Joie’s killing a preventable tragedy?

  “It was a tragedy, but was it a tragedy caused by not doing what should have been done? I don’t think so.”

  What do you think the repercussions should be when the FBI has a killer in their hands, then lets him go, and the killer kills again?

  “From the standpoint of the FBI’s Washington management, it’s always hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking.”

  3Note/question from Scott the copy editor: I would spell this out, unless it is from a transcript of some kind, in which case, can you provide that info?

  I will not.

  4Note/question from Scott the copy editor: Ditto.

  Ditto.

  Pulp

  I have a dream I am inside the pages of a Thomas Guide at the center of a two-dimensional mint green topography, cartographic elevations undulating in black wavy lines, county divisions and paper borders cordoning off a knoll upon which sits a steaming hot tub; a quaint green cabin represented as a pile of modest lines in the left-hand corner; all the bodies of water—hairline streams, pebble-shaped lakes, rivers, forks, deltas, creeks, narrows—inked red, for blood.

  Fur

  A few nights before I leave Gold Country I am alone in the nurse’s kitchen. I look out the sliding patio doors and see eight glowing points of light. As my eyes try to adjust to the dark behind the points, a low growl crawls toward me. Two paws with sharp claws levitate off the ground, rise up and slam forward into the door, then two more and two again, allowing me to see in an instant the forms of four large raccoons, their thick underbodies streaked flaxen, amber, burnt bronze, banging on the glass, roaring to be let in.

  Rock

  One day many years after, I have a memory of climbing the rocky line of a mountain in Yosemite with Jim, of my legs trembling uncontrollably on a rough-hewn staircase because my fear of heights would not let me take another stony step forward. What route did we take? I google “Yosemite hikes.” Clear in my mind is a hot, rough ascent, a backed-up line of hikers ahead of me, cable handrails on either side, my hands shaking on the cables, a definitive point at which, after hours of pushing myself through fear to progress, I said, No, and would not move any farther and turned around. For the lay hiker there are only a couple of choices in Yosemite that seem familiar to my memory. A modest day hike to Vernal Falls involves an often-wet stone staircase. The images from the internet, with other tourists grinning in the sun from their various moments of conquest, look like somewhere I might have been. Like somewhere I could feel if I close my eyes. But, though there are granite stairs wet with waterfall spray and some twisting, turning railings to grab on one’s crooked climb, there is no straightforward stepped path with cable rails of the kind my mind recalls. There is such a path, steep and exposed, on another hike: the eight-mile ascent to Half Dome. From my google search returns, the images of this trail loose a tremble in my fingers so that even typing becomes difficult. I can feel the urge of Jim’s body behind me, the safe but never-changing. To go forward, or not. C’MON, GIRL. But we would not have hiked sixteen miles in a day, nor planned to scale a steep four hundred-foot final vertical stretch like the one Half Dome’s summiting requires. Is it a false memory, this believed communion with rock and steel and the sheer cliff of my worst fears, on the edge of a Pleistocene formation whose striking profile represents the majesty and mythos of California herself? Millennia can disappear considering California and how one lone body figures in her long scope. How was I there when I wasn’t? I read on about the formation of the valley, the Sierra block, the domes, numerous fracture joint planes. Uplift, erosion, exfoliation, the pattern of glaciation and thaw, of constantly coming into a state of being.

  National park parallax

  “Sacred . . . ethereal . . . eternal. Cathedral,” writes author Dennis McDougal, who started out as a California newspaper reporter just like me.

  “Yosemite renews.”

  State their names for the record

  Carole.

  Juli.

  Silvina.

  Joie.

  PART SEVEN

  In Which New Breaks Away from Old

  Am I an island?

  When I return to San Francisco for my last year of college, Gold Country feels like a complicated dream that had placed me several Thomas Guide pages from horror but which helped to blow out some of the fog from my mind. I am still afraid of trying to make connections with new people, and I talk very little with my family about my life or what I am thinking about my future.

  But I am thinking about it, and I find the idea of outmaneuvering silence hopeful. In Gold Country I had quietly moved my body all over a landscape like a chess board, while a killer had quietly moved his body across the very same scene. But I had also interviewed everyday people, teenagers with their high school diplomas fresh in hand, farmers eyeing the creep of Bay Area subdivisions, a hairdresser who dreamed of saving enough so she could afford a trip to Hawaii. As a journalist, I will be able to facilitate other people telling their stories, to exercise their own voices. Maybe if I can help other people speak, I can become brave enough to speak in my own life. I will have to forge a new way of being in my mind and in my body without concern for who is watching me, or not watching. This scares me. I doubt that I deserve this unapologetic pleasure.

  California here I come

  A golden, transcontinental thread connects Puritanism and the California myth, the latter a reflection of the prior’s themes of renunciation and gratification, argues Neil Smelser, a UC Berkeley sociologist:

  “A myth has a structure that is ambivalent in at least two senses: it contains a wish and its appropriate negation, and it permits an ambivalent orientation to each of its parts on the part of the hearer.”

  The psychological tensions of the Puritans were rooted in the guiding belief that everyone’s destiny was predetermined by God. “Max Weber regarded this doctrine as one of extreme inhumanity which must above all have had one consequence for its adherents: a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.”

  To cope, adherents decided to act in the world in a way that could surface the surest signs of salvation—this took the form of “sober self-denial and systemic self-control,” of valuing labor and frugality above all else. They felt that if they found success while employing such self-control surely it was a sign of God’s blessing.

  The irony is that this ascetic discipline, in matters of farm, flesh, and feeling, led to capital reward, to pride, and to a different but equally entrenched angst for the Puritans: guilt.

  Like a fun house mirror, then, is the California myth: gold and other wealth there for the taking. “The California myth is the negation of Calvin . . . for it renounces work and discipline and revels in worldly pleasures,” writes Smelser. The whole family of California myths—the manifest destiny of James Polk, John Muir’s reifying of nature, the pretend world of Hollywood and the magic of being “discovered” and put on the big screen—imbues the land and air itself. Embedded in these riches, too, is the risk of retribution: the Donner Party deaths; the earthquakes; all our failures to fully capitalize, personally and economically, on the opportunities afforded by California, and the schadenfreude of everyone else watching you miss.

  California, then, is a kind of religion. “Freedom from guilt. Freedom from obligations. The purifying powers of change”—these are the tenets of the religion of California, writes another California sociologist, Mark Juergensmeyer.

  This idea comes to life in the Sophie B. Hawkins video for the song “California Here I Come,” in which a sexy, East-Coast-freed Sophie speeds into sun-drenched California in a convertible and dives into sparkling swimming pools while a preacher clad in black holding a staff follows her disapprovingly around the desert.

  Sophie doesn’t care about the rules she’s breaking. “
I started becoming less and less confident when it was really time for me to be more extroverted,” the inimitable Sophie says in her documentary The Cream Will Rise.

  In other words, as Sophie almost sings in a more well-known song, free your mind and you won’t feel the same.

  I would rather be a performer than an imposter

  I begin to work part time at a weekly independent newspaper in San Francisco that covers politics and the alternative arts scene. Sometimes, often, while sitting on the commuter train or lying in bed, I fantasize myself living as if in a film. In my documentary life I am in San Francisco, like in real life, but it is different. We see “me” from the outside, and there is a sense that whatever happens to me will happen because of what I choose to do but is also pre-determined. It is poignant that in my imagined life I am being captured by the camera, because in my real life I am experimenting with being a film critic. The newspaper sends me to watch indie films in aging classic theaters where I sit alone in the dark, my sweaty thighs cooling quickly on velvet seats, open to the screen. The smell in these theaters is mauve dust and Victorian lace and metal film canisters, sailors’ forty-eight-hour leave and mink and loneliness. My pen lights up—it was given to me by Jim, from whom I am growing more distant, who hates subtitles and the sabulosity of the city and never wants to see these films with me, who is good but flat, who is not a Hollywood story anymore but a technical manual. The fantasized audience watches me.