Big Green Country

by Frances Rivetti

  While other people’s parents jumped on the bandwagon of TV dinners and convenience foods that flooded the market in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we McCleerys had little option both geographically and financially but to look to the earth for sustenance. Mom managed her meager budget with meals made almost entirely from our own backyard. I pinched a sprig of mint and pressed it to my palm, closing my fingers around the pungent leaves to hold to my nose. Smelling it in its freshest form, the strong, sharp distinctive aroma of mint transports me back to happier times, kicking around in the spring sunshine after school, my long hair swinging loose around my shoulders, my feet swimming around in my sister’s too big, hand-me-down, western boots, the two of us picking herbs and making daisy chains out in the long green grasses of the dairy pasture.

  I leaned against the rusty hinges of the door to the milking barn. It opened with a low groan and I tumbled in. Someone had clearly spent time cleaning it out; except for a few ranch tools, a mower, two or three rakes and a slew of thick, green tinted ropes that hung from the walls, it was empty. The milking equipment and clutter of the old dairy days, three single unit Henman Milkers, the old man’s serious pride and joy, along with his DeLaval vacuum suction pump and all the pipelines were gone.

  You don’t have to believe in ghosts to be haunted. Though in the off chance the old man’s spirit was lingering around, I wanted him to know that I was not in the least bit fazed to find myself back in his domain. “It’s OK, Dad,” I called out into the shadows: “It’s me, Maggie. And believe me, I’m not here to give you a hard time.”

  The cracked concrete floor was coated in only a thin layer of dirt, an indication it had been scrubbed clean after its contents were removed. I climbed the narrow, wooden staircase into the raised, glass-fronted cubicle Dad had rigged up as his office for overseeing the milking bays in what had been the best of the old days before he was left to manage it all on his own. He’d had his own father by his side, ‘til he’d passed, plus a few ranch hands on and off, not to mention Bridget and me when we came of age, helping out with some of the milking duties. His rusty iron desk and a squeaky old swivel chair was all that was left in place of the old man’s long abandoned workspace. Somewhere in the midst of the overriding smell of damp, I detected a lingering scent of the Brylcreem he’d used to hold his hair in place, old-fashioned stuff squeezed from a black tube with its unmistakably musty, floral, soapy mix. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year you would have found him right here, when he wasn’t outdoors feeding calves or tending the land. I half expected to see him at his desk, in his trademark denim coveralls, one of his motley collection of free hats from the feed store perched on his head, the type with plastic mesh at the back for ventilation. The old man was never without one, worn high on his greaser head, except for in bed, I assume or certainly at the dinner table and then, only on our mother’s insistence. He treasured these tall, stiff, foam caps he carefully assembled on a long, narrow rack by the front door. Each was emblazoned by the name and logo of some protein feed supplement or other. I never knew him to throw one away, no matter how grimy.

  Dad took out loans to keep his dairy operation afloat. He was so stretched so thin he mortgaged the ranch his family owned outright prior to his making his final, desperate move of selling the herd. Feed and fuel prices soared yet milk prices stayed the same. In order to produce more milk, the herd required far more food than grazing would provide. Dad had trouble paying off his loan. Half of the ranch families we went to school with lost their shirts this way along with their land. The math was simply not there. The Holsteins were a burden and he had to let them go. Hell, he let it all go — anything of value, the old wagon plus the harness and collars from his parents’ generation’s old workhorses, even the family’s once-prized 1929 Chevy truck. In turn, he took his solace in the bottle.

  I’d spent years not thinking of all that we’d lost, refusing to feel my father’s pain. It had been bad enough being raised around his disappointment with the world and with himself. I didn’t need any reminders of how fucking unfair life is. And I had no clue how much Mia was aware of the level of disappointment and loss she was born into. If my old man was hiding there still in those dark shadows of the past, it was on account of his shame. The old folks, the first of the McCleerys, they’d milked their small grazing herd by hand, squirting milk into a pail, taking pride in separating the cream from the milk.

  Since my grandparents’ day, the Holsteins they’d favored for their plentiful milk production have morphed into beasts of human engineering, genetically modified for a substantially higher volume of milk than the humble dairy cattle that grazed my family’s ranch when I was a child.

  My footsteps echoed as I made my way over to my dad’s old built-in desk. I felt so alone I may have welcomed his ghostly apparition should it have appeared. I twisted and turned in my father’s chair and placed my hands palms down on the cold surface of the desk, recalling the wire-haired skin of the old man’s calloused and leathery hands.

  A penetrating chill rose up from the frigid floor. I swear I could smell the cleaning fluid that was used to wipe off the milking teats, a distinctive solution containing iodine as a disinfectant. Tears welled and free-fell down my cheeks in a cascade of sudden, unexpected overwhelm, a compound of sorrows. Why was this still a thing? This place? Who the heck declared the McCleerys must press on here come hell or high water? Bridget and me, if we’d sold the whole deal, lock, stock and barrel, the minute Dad died, what would have become of us?

  There was no way the old man would have been the one to let it go, if he’d lived. He would have considered it a double failure, losing the herd and later, the ranch itself.

  Chapter 11

  Mia

  Thinking about it, I developed what I can only describe as a kind of allergy to my mom and Bobby when I was about 13. That’s when every little thing they did around me began to irritate the hell out of me. I don’t know why, but it did. I felt this overwhelming urge to be different from them. I hated the faded old, ill-fitting clothes they slopped about in, the dumb stuff they talked about, their annoying music, Mom’s ugly sneakers, the way she drove, Bobby’s endless and predictable doggie bags of leftover food for supper from the roadhouse, you name it, it was on my list.

  My mom ignored my behavior for the most part. Bobby told me every now and again to shut it, but only if I was pushing it too far with my disrespect. I guess it wasn’t Bobby’s job to keep me in line, though I’m telling you, if it was my kid or someone else’s dishing me such a crock of shit, I would figure out a better way to deal with this kind of sassy and mean-spirited behavior, at least acknowledge them.

  I’m not saying that some of my feelings wasn’t justified, though when it came to my mom sitting me down to tell me she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, that last summer evening, I was old enough to have known better, to have put my annoyance with her aside, to have comforted her, hugged her even. I had nothing else to do and I never reached out so much as a second.

  Chapter 12

  Maggie

  I’d left a message for Andres first thing that morning. It pained me beyond words to have to make communication with him, but for once, I put the urgent needs of my blood family before my own feelings. The only one who had a strong shot at getting through a locked computer was my conniving soon-to-be ex, an individual who prides himself on his ability to hack his way into just about anything password controlled. He is paid to do it, after all, the tech world being a bottomless pit of information mining, legal and illegal.

  Since I had made Andres aware of my whereabouts, I was quick to make myself scarce from the ranch. Last thing I wanted was for him to show up ahead of our assigned meeting point, full of bravado at my lingering dependence on him in front of my sister. I knew this would be something he’d enjoy, if I let him in, sticking the knife in a little deeper, twisting ‘til I squirmed.

  I made my way down to the beach behind the wheel of the old man’s rusty Toyota truck — s
tick shift — the one workhorse he’d failed to drive entirely into the ground. Bridget had managed at least to keep it gassed up, if only a quarter tank, keys she’d said were in the glove compartment.

  You’ll find a near identical, trusted, rust-encrusted pick-up truck out back of just about every barn in the county. Worth their weight in gold, though I doubted Bridget had bothered to keep the insurance and registration up.

  Rain clouds produced spittle not nearly heavy enough to deter me from taking a restorative walk along the shore in order to bolster myself for my meeting with Andres. Cold, slate blue waves rolled in from the depths of the wild Pacific, a bitter reminder not to be fooled by its beauty, not even for a second. Archaeologists claim 100 unexplored shipwrecks sit below these frigid waters rolling in from the Sonoma Coast to Mendocino County’s shoreline in the north. It’s a deceptively treacherous stretch of coastline.

  A middle aged blonde woman with a medium-sized, jaunty black dog strode by. The dog was of mixed breed, its red collar embroidered with a heart shaped pattern. I watched as its human unleashed her pet, the eager dog leaping through the grassy dunes in that cheering display that is gleeful canine delight. We only had the one dog growing up. Bram. He was a mix, though we never could say what his particular combo may have been. He had a distinctive shaggy, gray and white coat and he’d been impressively devoted to our dad, despite the old man’s miserable demeanor. Bram was just as good with cattle. How we’d adored that oddball, scruffy character. And he, in turn, loved nothing more than running down to the beach with Bridget and me, chasing birds up and down the shallow surf where he dashed, back and forth, full tilt, all day long if we’d let him.

  Bram is buried on the ranch in full view of the ocean. For the first time in many years I sensed him beside me, his soft, fluffy coat rubbing against my legs as I made my way down to the frothy water’s edge. Though it had been a long time since I’d spared a thought for him, I felt a pang of longing for his unconditional companionship. More than I miss the old man, that’s for sure.

  I walked barefoot a while beneath the looming storm clouds beside the ocean’s prickling swell, slipping my hands into my pockets, my gloves and woolen beanie heavy from the salt spray. I could feel the chill from my feet up as I climbed on into the dunes, dodging a run off of a narrow rivulet from the previous night’s storm. Dune grass whipped against my exposed skin as I turned back toward the shore at the point of a spindly dirt road, narrow and barely two track that follows an early stagecoach trail that transported beachgoers from a long gone, narrow gauge train station in the nearby small town of Tomales.

  It’s a short, downhill walk from tiny Dillon Village to the sand. I looked up at the clustering of weathered cottages that cling to the hillside above, cute little wooden cabins that sit here, huddled together, side by side, as they have since Victorian times, first serving as summer homes for the growing population of the Gold Rush riverfront city of Petaluma, then a 20-mile horse and wagon trail ride away from the beach.

  The village is named after its founder, pioneer potato farmer, George Dillon, who, along with my great-great-grandparents’ generation, traveled a continent to cross the plains in order to settle this land.

  I stomped my feet in a feeble attempt to increase the circulation.

  Lawson’s Landing sits at the far end of Dillon Beach — a fisherman’s trailer park positioned at the mouth of a skinny little inlet of water known as Tomales Bay. It is there that a modest wooden pier stretches out from the trailer park into the pristine waters of the bay, a waterway known for its kayaking and oysters. It may appear fairly tame and certainly scenic to the newcomer, but believe me, the scenic natural beauty of its surface hides a dangerous undercurrent that is deadly if miscalculated.

  I watched a lone kite surfer dip in and out of the pounding waves in his shiny black wetsuit, harnessing the wind in order to propel himself against the frigid water. I might have mistaken him for a seal if not for the strange and multi colored wind sail, a crazy combination of windsurfing, paragliding and skateboarding.

  Winds from the Pacific whip up without warning and as I’ve already said, it’s a cruel trick of Mother Nature to lull the uninitiated into any kind of false sense of security on these dangerous waters. The shallow area that sits at the mouth of the bay causes the ocean swell to build, as it was doing that day, creating a breaker line of two or three big waves at a time.

  My Grandfather on my mom’s side made sure to drum his warning words into us as kids as to the dangers of these waters. He knew this to be absolute, having been raised in a rudimentary shack on the banks of the bay in the small fishing community of Marshall. How I had reveled in his stories of the bootleg years up and down this same stretch of water.

  One of the scant few subjects my own dad cared to discuss at any length was that of the region’s rich Prohibition lore, the romance of the old days and the lure. There was and still is an element of the outlaw factor in our heritage, I’m sure of it. His dad claimed it had been near on impossible for the law to contain the smuggling of booze on shore during those heavily romanticized bootleg years. This being so far west, it proved an ideal place for hiding contraband loot. Everyone was in on it, according to the old man. And a maze of unlit back roads proved impassable for the Feds.

  Nocturnal high tides in the bay are especially risky to outsiders. I watched as the kite surfer flew dangerously close to the narrow waterway, the key spot, apparently for those daring nighttime drops of coveted Canadian whiskey and rum. It took a skilled navigator, my Grandfather claimed, to risk running the notorious third wave of a moonlit high tide. That’s how they did it. That’s how they brought the contraband bounty into the 50 foot mouth of the bay. You had to know the risks and work the perilous currents in order to survive. Silently, I wished the solo, wet-suited sportsman safe anchorage as he continued to battle the waves.

  Down at the pier, I came across a tin can abandoned on a ledge. Instinctively, I dropped it into the water below, dangling it on its string. It was the height of Dungeness crab season and the ocean appeared at once calm, ominously so, despite the storm brewing.

  Drop a single line or a can into the water without a license from the Department of Fish and Game and you’re liable to run into trouble. I’d learned this from one of my numerous teenage misadventures. Still, the bait shop at the landing was closed. I doubted anyone was out there checking on folk, what with it being a deserted weekday in the dead of winter with yet more rain coming in. To catch a crab, even the most basic of a fisherman or woman must have access to bait. Whoever walked away from the can must’ve placed it there that morning, for inside was a single, raw chicken wing — common bait of the casual crabber. Crabs being carnivorous creatures, they feed on small clams, oysters, fish, shrimp and worms.

  Minutes after I lowered the can into the water, I felt the old tug and thrill.

  I hauled it up, peeking inside to inspect its contents. Sure enough, I’d caught myself a crab, its pincers at the ready. This one was way too small to take home to Bridget for supper. We’d learned from our dad how to identify which crabs were okay to eat and which to throw back into the ocean. Undersized, the young crab was reddish/brown with a slight purple tint, five intact pairs of legs and ten small teeth. I inspected its hard shell that, given the right conditions, would molt away in order for the crab to grow. I carefully lowered the can down to release the fortunate fella back onto the eelgrass bed below.

  On each of the countless occasions I’ve ordered crab from the menu of some fancy restaurant in the City, it paled in comparison to the pink flesh and flavor of the ridiculously fresh crabmeat I’d taken for granted growing up. The melt-in-the-mouth flavor of delicious, same day ocean caught crab was a given during the holiday seasons of my youth. I never once tasted any as sweet, fine and tender as the salty, pink-fleshed crabs fresh caught in these home waters.

  I tore myself away from my nostalgic crabbing expedition or I would’ve been soaked to the skin within the half hour.
My feet were freezing, pins and needles making it painful to walk as I headed back toward the truck, but still, I held on to my coveted boots.

  As I hurried back, I reminisced how Bridget and I had learned to best to prepare a fresh-caught crab from Granddad’s fishing boat. It was the one time of year the old man had taken over the kitchen. Dad showed us how to cook a crab and to stop us squirming, though we had to brace ourselves in order to plunge the poor creature head first into the boiling water to simmer a quarter of an hour. What a mess we’d made, I recall, while Mom kept herself out of the kitchen ‘til Dad and Bridget and me had the whole scene cleaned up.

  To ready a cooked crab for eating, we cringed for first few times when we were taught to rip off the triangular belly flap before we pried off its back shell and drained the internal liquid, removing the reddish membranes that covered its core. A good rinse under cold water readied the poor crab for the further necessary evil of twisting off its legs and claws. It’s hard to shake the image of the old man stepping back in at the end of this intense activity to give the shell a good, hard crack with his wooden mallet, before cutting its core into quarters for the family to devour. It’s brutal, yes, the more I think of it, but we sure did learn the importance of understanding where our food came from and appreciate its primal dignity as we dug in with our fingers, savoring at the last juicy pieces of flesh with the aid of a little crab fork.

  I drove back over the rise toward Tomales, my appetite piqued as the truck climbed and dropped in turn on the narrow road that cuts through verdant green hills studded with giant rock formations that make for panoramic viewpoints on a clear day. I checked my watch as I pulled into a deserted main street for one last stroll down memory lane. I was hoping to score a cup of soup of the day from a hole-in-the-wall bakery that closes shop at random hours according to when the last of the daily specials have completely sold out.