Tehama: Exercise #6

Tehama
If we were a religion, it would be our Paradise. It is gorgeous, serene, idyllic. It is peace. It is solitude. It is community. At least, it is all these things if you are a member of my family.

Ask any of us our favorite vacation and Tehama is on our lips. Describe it to someone who has never been—100 acres, bordered on all sides by Lassen National Forest, no electricity, no bathrooms, an outdoor shower, the lake—None of these do any justice to the trees. The sky. The lake. The meadow. The dream.

We have wandered the desert for twelve years and we want into our Promised Land.

Spoons
Cousin Mike’s campfire is raucous. His fire burns bigger than any Dad has ever made. While Charlie, Emily, Lauren and I perfect the art of melting glass bottles—green and brown—on sticks, Cousin Mike sings Bob Dylan, sounding dead on from what I can tell. He slobbers drunkenly into the harmonica and slurs his songs while my parents soberly join in on the chorus.

My brother, the musician, cringes when my mom runs to the Cookhouse for spoons. He leaves the fire circle, stalks from the meadow and puts himself to bed when none of the adults will curb their attempts at making spoons musical.

“Spoons can be quite musical,” my mom says.
“Not how you play,” my brother sulks.

After two nights of this, Matt sneaks me into the Cookhouse. He opens all the utensil drawers, shows me the empty space.

I don’t remember where he hid the spoons. I don’t remember why no one noticed.

Bodily Functions
In the cabin. At night. A pot to piss in. Turn to the wall to make privacy for others.

Or, hike to the outhouse in the mountain chill. The moon and more stars than you’d ever guess from the sky at home guiding the way up the dirt path, softened with decaying pine needles, their sharp scent wafting in the night breeze.

The outhouse stands, tall and narrow, a moon for a window and two latches, one inside, one out. Inside it is the blackness of spiders and deep wells. By feel, find the seat, knowing there are bugs and things crawling below. Before leaving, hear the gritty scrape of the tin cup through ashes in the metal bucket, hear the soft plashing as ash rains down the hole, covering the acrid ammonia smell.

Pad down the hill, the darkly sparkling lake on the left, saplings fencing the path’s edge. Inhale the crisply frozen night air.

The Cook Stove
The menfolk chop wood. The women feed it to the stove. All day it burns to feed everyone. Sometimes is burns us as we reach out hands, not realizing. Almost always it burns the food. Or else the food is perpetually undercooked. Perfection is when we have anything to eat at any reasonable hour.

Pioneer women must have been married to their stoves.

Bird Funeral
The thunk of your head on glass stunned us all. Pressing our nosed to the glass, we looked for you, saw you lying on the rough-hewn deck, unmoving. Mom rushed outside and cradled you in her hands, softly waiting for your fluttering heart, which never came.

We gathered under the pine tree between the Cookhouse and the Bunkhouse, overlooking the lake and its beaver-slap of tails. Dad scratched out a hole. Mom ladi the small blue and grey feathered body inside. We collected stones and ringed your little mound with pebbles, marked the occasion of your passing.

In the morning you were gone. Dug up. Scratched out. Eaten.

The Photographs
These are things I don’t remember. These are things that exist now only in the photo’s memory.

There is me in a pack on Grampa’s back, my yellow flannel blankie pressed to my nose. In another, my Grandma Marjorie, the grandma I can’t remember, stands smiling before a sapling. She is my mother’s age. It seems too young.

The last one captures me and Matt, age 5 and 10, maybe. In it, we hug, sitting on the Bunkhouse deck. Our smiles are huge. Our clothes are identical.

I can’t remember ever seeing Matt smile like that. We will never express our love for each other so openly again. At least, not in my memory.

Beavers
Dad shows me the pile of sticks, nearly submerged in the clear lake water. He points out the wood chips at the base of trees, strange v-shaped notches cut out of them.

As we approach the inlet at the Caretaker’s cabin, the nose of our canoe nudging the water reeds and rushes, we hear the sharp slap of a tail on the water.

Years later, the beavers have gone. What have we done wrong?

Caretaker’s Cabin
There has never been a caretaker. Not to my knowledge. The cabin is smaller than the bunkhouse. One must skirt the whisp of trees between the lack and the meadow and cross the single-log bridge to get to it. The babbling creek is clear and bright before it spills into the lake. The beaver dam is long gone. The lake is a diamond just beyond.

It is a pioneer cabin from the 1880s. It is a time machine.

I sit, dangling my toes in the frigid mountain water that flows from the craggy cliff waterfall. I pretend to read my book, but really I daydream of wintering here. Snow. Chopping wood. I consider food. I ponder shooting. Deer.

Then I remember, just behind me, in the trees to the right. How Cousin Mike, Emily and Charlie and I set up rusted tin cans in the boughs of a sapling. How I hefted the weight of Cousin Mike’s pistol, the strange power emanating. How I leveled its muzzle and shot. How the sapling branch from a neighboring tree was shorn away from the its trunk by my wayward shot. How the tin can stayed rusted to its spot.

I am no Annie Oakley. I am no pioneer.

Canoes
Everyone learns to paddle a canoe. We pretend we’re Indians. We practice silently dipping our oars in the water, making tiny whirlpools. We loudly race across the lake. We edge our way to the dam, to the rush of water over the edge, backing away before the current pulls us in. We police the shore, paddling to where the intruder chopped wood across from the cabins, looking like a badly dubbed movie as we saw him chop and then heard the “thunk” come across the water.

And once, we paddled out into the farthest reach, where the stumps of trees felled to make this pond stand like jagged teeth, blackened with time. We were pirates, navigating the treacherous snags.

Another time, we laughed as Katie dog-paddled after us, barking when we got too far. Only when she tired and sank lower in the water did we start to think on drowning and turn back.

Huckleberry Lake
We were trying to find Huckleberry Lake. It lay somewhere up the mountains behind the cabins and their meadow, somewhere past and to the right of the waterfall. That’s what crazy Cousin Mike said as he drunkenly lead us on our hike. Everyone sober but our leader who had had more beers than anyone could keep track of.

Every time we turned or crossed the rivulets of streams or squished across marshy bogs, I oriented myself to the cabins. They are behind me. They are to my left. Behind me again. At my back. If I had crumbs and believed in things like that, I would have left those behind me. Instead Mom stopped now and then to pile up rock cairns.

We never saw any of them again. We never found Huckleberry Lake. Instead we walked across a lake-shaped hyper-green marsh and somehow made it back to the Cookhouse in time for dinner, Cousin Mike’s hoarse laugh in our ears, “We had an adventure, didn’t we?”