For the Californios, like the Anglo-Irish, the 1830s were something of a Golden Age; they lived as rural gentry atop a huge labor force that was not exactly enslaved but far from free, they spent their time on dances, festivals, horsebreeding, and racing. These Mexicans and their indigenous servants were remarkable for their horsemanship; the saddles with their high cantles, horns, and long stirrups came from Spain, but the utter refinement of skill with which the vaqueros rode, roped and cut cattle had no European precedent. Cowboys didn’t start out as the kind of white, English-speaking Protestants that populate most Western books and movies, but their Hispano-indigenous origins west of the West have long been forgotten. In 1846, Irish Catholics began pouring into the eastern US in flight from the Famine and Catholic Mexico began fighting a losing battle for its northern half. Some Irishmen joined the Mexican Army in what became the San Patricio Brigade.
After the war ended in 1848, the Mexicans joined the native Californians as an underclass with roots in a land that was no longer theirs, and then many other Americans who had already forgotten how California came into the Union began to denounce Spanish-speakers as outsiders. The more radical of those speakers still call California occupied Aztlan, after an indigenous name for what became Mexico, but some of them also mention that the same Spanish that is the language of the colonized in the US is the language of the colonizers in Mexico, a forked tongue. During the First World War, Germany pursued a policy of trying to create local trouble for its enemies; it was for that reason they encouraged Irish nationalism and the 1916 Easter Rising. They encouraged Mexico too. The United States entered the war on the side of England after the infamous Zimmermann Telegram, an intercepted diplomatic cable in which Germany proposed urging Mexico to try to regain the territory it had lost in 1846–48.
But back to Timothy Murphy, a Catholic Irishman, in the halcyon days of the Californios, after the atrocities of the missions initiated and before the atrocities of the Gold Rush carried out the decimation (but not the extinction) of the indigenous population. California was a nominally Catholic country before 1846, and most of the Americans who also settled there before the US seized it were Catholics or converted to Catholicism to marry local women. Murphy was a huge bear of a man, said to have weighed about three hundred pounds, and as Don Timoteo Murphy he became a great favorite among the local rancheros. The administrators of the region gave him land that wasn’t really theirs to give, except perhaps by right of conquest: a vast estate covering much of what is now northern Marin County between San Rafael and Novato, the country on whose coast Sir Francis Drake landed and which he named New Albion and claimed for England, names and claims that didn’t stick, the county I grew up in. There is little to see of that era, when local grizzlies were set against imported bulls for entertainment, a dozen families owned the whole expanse, Murphy raised wheat to sell to the Russian fort a few dozen miles up the coast, and the local Miwoks had not yet forgotten their language or lost all their land and their names for it.
Murphy never married, and he left large plots of land to the Catholic church. When I was growing up, the old Catholic cemetery in the next town south and the beautiful church and orphanage out in the country were still in operation, fruits of his generosity that far outlived him. The two of them, half-abandoned, with Italianate baroque architecture, overgrown weedy foliage, and the aura of romantic ruin, were the closest thing to the Europe I longed for then, and I cherished them. But there were no stories about them, or about Murphy, or about much of anything, and so I looked east for history. For all the passion I had for my locale I saw no way of staying there and uniting stories with landscapes, and an unstoried landscape is still somehow not yet a place, a home, a ground. I moved to Europe when I was seventeen, with money I saved up for years, beginning with my first job, in a used bookstore called New Albion Books on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Such yearnings sent me the first few times; later a passport and a story about a migratory beggar propelled me back. (Everyone’s life is tangled up in storylines that stretch far around the world, and if mine has any significance at all, it lies in ordinariness, not exceptionality.)
The sense in which Ireland was a colony is easy, concrete, political; there’s a sense in which my real homeland is also a colony, a cultural one of Europe and the East. A colony is, most simply, a place and a people forcibly told that they are not central but marginal, that history is elsewhere, about someone else—perhaps a place where memory and history don’t coincide. I have a permanent antipathy to the New England poet Robert Frost simply because I was assigned too many poems about spring, and snow, and maple leaves as a child, terms which at first seemed to me like nothing more than poetic convention, the same poetic convention that showered me with cuckoos, bluebells, duchesses, and other such unfamiliar things. Where I come from we don’t have four seasons, and the imported maples are so confused they often turn red in January, when the plum trees are beginning to bloom. Even the cheap motels across the West I know so well inevitably have some degenerate descendant of an English Gainsborough or an eastern Hudson River School painting on their walls, images of a lush, domesticated rusticity that has nothing to do with the arid expanses outside, evidence that the locals have not yet learned how to imagine the place as home. Even the wars we were taught about had happened far to the east of us, and the war that united our vast region with the United States was glossed over as a minor detail. This is, of course, slim stuff in comparison to real colonialism. Ireland’s own landscape was squeezed and scraped and made to yield profit, so that it never had much of the leisure and rural felicity of the dominant culture’s ideal landscape. Likewise, until independence its schools too taught history as something that happened elsewhere, to other people, though its people were better equipped to counter the official version.
I want a Garden of Eden in which the serpent is a diamondback rattler and the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a prickly pear. I didn’t find it then. The natural seemed utterly separate from the cultural in this landscape whose history no one could narrate and whose relics had all been ignored or effaced. Toward the end of my days in Novato, when my parents had split up, my father briefly dated an amateur archeologist, who told me that in the 1950s the biggest Indian burial mound in California had been bulldozed into flatness without being excavated, to make way for one of the shopping centers in the center of town. With that, a place familiar to me all my life became mysterious, the site of an obliteration. Suburbia has ever since then seemed to me a voluntary limbo, a condition more like sedation than exile, for exiles know what’s missing. But we were on its outermost edges, and other worlds came seeping in.
Go up Seventh Street—the last time for you, one of countless times for me. Go past the horse pasture to your right and the hill to your left, past the house whose tall grass made a maze, past the plum trees and the pines, past the huge prickly pear cactus I dreamed about once in a dream of flying away from a man who was two men I loved, past the rosebush cavern, past the old bottle dump we excavated, the buckeyes, and the shed, over the crest of the hill and down the gravel road past the pasture where I learned to ride, through the dust past the end of the road and down to the marshy far end of the pasture where the sticky weed that smells like tar and licorice grows, through the loose strands of barbed wire, across a wider cow pasture to the foot of the biggest hill between my town and the next. The hill is named Burdell, after a rich and insignificant dentist who lived at its foot a century ago, but the place where he lived is called Rancho Olompali. This is where I’m headed, to the war at the end of the street.
Only the hot days during summer vacation seemed long enough to reach Mount Burdell, the highest point between Novato and Petaluma, a big hill around whose head oaks clustered among the grass that would always be bright, dry gold by that time. There was a spring halfway up, welling out of a little cement basin, and a quarry with all the charms dangerous plummets have for children, and scattered deer waking from their daytime slumbers to burst away in
weightless leaps. Running along the top of the mountain was a long wall of stones gathered from the slopes around (built in the nineteenth century by Chinese labor, as I read later, but most of those laborers had gone back to China or died unmarried and forgotten; the wall is their only monument, as the shopping center is a secret memorial to the erased cemetery). The wall marked the boundary of Rancho Olompali, whose buildings at the foot of the hill faced the northern end of the San Francisco Bay. I saw it often and toured it once when I was tagging along with my brothers’ cub scout troop. Otherwise no one mentioned the rancho in our history lessons or mentioned that any of California’s history was local and tangible. When we peered at the mud bricks of the original adobe through a glass window set into the walls of the Burdell mansion that had been built around it, age itself rather than specific characters and events were supposed to make this dirt significant.
The site had originally been a Miwok village. In 1843, a Miwok man, Camilo Ysidro, who had successfully assimilated into the Spanish lifestyle of the rancheros (and whose daughter later married a Harvard man, a gringo), received the Olompali region as a land grant, much as Murphy received his huge spread slightly to the south. There wasn’t much said about the Miwok either; in the days of my childhood the textbooks said that all California’s Indians had been primitive Diggers with little culture, material or intellectual, and the same colonial textbooks implied they had conveniently vanished in some manner as vague and uninteresting as the Diggers themselves. I was an adult when I found out Olompali was the scene of the only fatal battle in the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846.
By 1846, it had become clear that the US was going to have California one way or another. The annexation of Texas was a prelude. There had been a few abortive raisings of the US flag in California in 1844 and in March 1846; and even the Mexican military administrator of the north, General Mariano Vallejo, was prepared to hand it over peacefully. The American consul in Mexican California wrote on April 23, 1846, “The pear is near ripe for falling.” How ripe the consul could not have known: the first battle against Mexico began on the Rio Grande in Texas two days later. On June 14, a group of Yankees, many of them in California illegally, began their own war by taking Vallejo prisoner at his Sonoma house, ignorant both of the war already being waged and of Vallejo’s acquiescent position. Afterwards, Murphy came to help take care of Vallejo’s family, and when he admitted he was a Mexican citizen he was taken prisoner too. He was released when he allowed his captors to add his name to the list of the conquerors. The Bear Flag Revolt, named after the flag they raised soon after their initial raid, was something of a farce, a handful of eclectic, grimy, and often drunk Americans chasing after the widely scattered Mexican citizens of the region (who thought the bear on the original flag looked like a pig).
On June 24, the insurgents attacked the Mexicans at Rancho Olompali while the latter were eating breakfast—perhaps California’s first drive-by shooting. It was the only fatal battle in the farcical rebellion, in which one Mexican died and a vast slice of the continent changed hands, or flags, or deeds. Long afterward, the marks of bullets were said to be visible on the old oaks and bays clustered around the house, though I have not found any. When I was taken there as a child, Olompali had passed into the hands of a real-estate consortium and then become a hippie commune called The Family. The late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once said that he had his last LSD trip there: “He developed three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, died a few thousand times, and saw the word ‘All’ float into the sky before he turned into a field of wheat and heard ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ as a coda,” explains a biographer. In 1969, The Family accidentally burned the mansion down, but the adobe walls survived. Its trajectory seems to embody California history perfectly: indigenous village, mestizo rancho, Mexican-American battlefield, Anglo-American estate decorated with exotic plantings, abandoned psychedelic countercultural community. Since then, the place has passed into public hands as Rancho Olompali State Park, though its significance as a war zone still goes virtually unmentioned, as does the war itself.
The California Grizzly pictured on the flag these robbers or conquerors raised, the flag that is still the state flag, was hunted into extinction by the early part of this century. Soon after the Bears declared California a republic, the war with Mexico expanded to the Pacific front, where it dragged on until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The transfer still holds: California is part of the United States. No one seems to remember that all this happened; history was something in books about someplace else; and I was waiting to grow up to visit countries hallowed by history, the history I knew best, western European history, particularly English and French history. Now I have unearthed the history that seems more mine than that of a faraway continent, the long largely unrecorded oral and brief bloody written history of the American West. And I have questions, questions that rise like fumes from the grounds of these places, the very ground I stand on, which is a graveyard as much as a garden.
If Ireland properly belonged to the Irish after seven and a half centuries of English occupation, who does California belong to? If some of the English became Irish and thereby belonged to Ireland even if it did not belong to them, what is the process of becoming native in a place where native is such an ambiguous term? What about all the rest, not the Scots Irish whose interim presence in northern Ireland became a real relationship to the American South, but the Catholic Irish who came later, after the failure of the potato, and who so often decried English but not American imperialism? If being an Irishman meant being a colonized subject, did Timothy Murphy cease to be Irish when he became a colonist? Did he become Mexican, then American, as potatoes and rock and roll became Irish? Does being American require a more profound degree of adaptation, a passionate knowledge of place that is abysmally lacking in most Americans? Such histories as these suggest that identity is not a social but a geographical science, and they suggest that the opposite of remembering may not be forgetting but creating, out of the mixed and hybrid materials that come with relocation.
There are still distinct places called Ireland, and Peru, and California, and England, but only two languages prevail there now, Spanish and English, and potatoes and blues and bloodlines have so mixed up the contents of these countries that ethnicity without geography means something else or means nostalgia for a time when things were simpler and separate, for the time before even rhythms and spuds went rolling round the world and words like home and native were easier to say.
8
Articles of Faith
A pair of feet, moving along a road. Feet imply legs, and on and on, to a head, with histories inside, and the feet are mine. A road implies landscape, and around this road, steep and heading north, are thickets and steep slopes screening the rest of the earth. So far, the world consists of nothing but me and the road, the narrow road that eternally snakes around another bend, over another crest, out of sight; the me that consists of a bevy of sensations and thoughts and no sight but the swinging of hands and feet into the periphery of the view—of the road. Everything else in the world is a leap of faith, and I am only walking. To say that this walker has a name, a past, another life, has ancestors, that half those ancestors came from an island called Ireland, that this place with the island-name is what spreads far to the north and east of this road—those things are articles of faith that I sometimes forget, sometimes believe, but I’m not sure I know, though I know the names. Everything I’m sure I own is on my back, or in my pockets, for the world I’ve come from may have been destroyed, and I wouldn’t know it, out here alone. I’m traveling as light as I can. One can leave the words home and native, words that are about staying still and remembering, out of one’s load and try being nothing but a traveler in a landscape bisected by a road—and a road is not itself a place but the way between places and the ribbon that ties them together.
Being in motion wakes the body up. In repose one is nothing but a surface face of potential sensation, on
ly the surface, the skin, is awake. Exertion and pain make the rest tangible—otherwise bones and muscles and organs would be little but articles of faith beneath the visible and sensible surface of skin, and so one’s own interior anatomy may be among the things explored in the course of a journey’s exertions. At the same time, journeying reduces the self to the boundary of skin: everything else is foreign, unknown, belongs to unfamiliar others. In the course of many travels, I was beginning to learn how much the self, the soul, extends into its world, the world one calls home. Though always described as an autonomous, individual, internal thing, it inhabits the world that welcomes, shapes, and accommodates it. At home I was a creature insulated with in a home that fit me snug as a shell, and beyond that a circle of friends who permitted and provoked me to think and speak of certain things, to draw forth certain possibilities that might not exist otherwise, and beyond that a society and a landscape so familiar they formed almost a second skin for a self that has only moved thirty miles from the road of my dreams and the house of my childhood. It’s a pre-Copernican world of nesting crystal spheres, and among those spheres, ancestry and nationality were among the most distant constellations, faintest in the daytime of the familiar.
A Book of Migrations Page 12