This piece was written for the Dark Mountain Project Issue 6: The Rising of the Waters.

It was published in October of 2014.

Please visit the Dark Mountain Project, they are honest and beautiful thinkers.

Genuine California Almonds

We waited all winter for the snow that never came. All the mouths gaping.

Where I come from we have always supplicated for water, and now it has begun to shrink from us. This is hurtful because lakes abound and rivers run wild, released from the snow in the high quiet places where it sleeps in the pines. But there are great cities below, and they are dying of thirst. They demand we cement the walls of our granite valleys and hold the water back for them, for without it they will surely die. They flush their toilets with it.

The ground is sinking in the valley. We are siphoning the aquifers too quickly, and they have begun to compress. The great fruit basket needs the water. To feed the almond trees. For the world has become accustomed to almonds.

Where I come from the curled peeling bark of manzanita scrub spreads its legs for the lick of wildfire. This last August it burned, burned, burned the paws of bears and they had to be killed because they were screaming from the pain. It burned our swimming holes and now the waters flow soapy with ash and spent retardant. This spring I did look for morels and found instead broken pinecones populated by green siblings elbowing for the newly-found light. I wanted to find the morels. I wanted the destruction to amount to something magical, fed by moonlight. I wanted to fry them with wild turkey eggs and feel, just this once, that we could thrive in abundance by just looking. I will continue to look. I can feel them below the surface. They blossom from flame and detritus.

My knee is welted and weeping from where the oily oak kissed it and where I scratched it in my half-sleep, spreading the poison everywhere. It would have remained dormant if it hadn’t felt so good to draw my nails across the blistering flesh. I wish I could slice the welts into crosses and let the burning bleed away.

Where I looked for the morels was at the top of the Priest Grade, on the highway to Yosemite. There is a farm being started. There live the wild turkeys and the goats and the sheep and the ticks that the dog brings back into my sleeping bag. There live the poison oak bushes and the dirty beautiful ones who don’t do their dishes, they just make sure to keep their plates straight.

They live in trucks while their sheep have houses. They burn rotten wood and dead squirrels the cat brings back. They are building a place to belong.

At the squirrel’s funeral pyre I drank too much scotch and said to a boy isn’t this just a wonderful place to have a farm? It is at the top of all these roads which could be destroyed so easily. He laughed. I hadn’t meant to be funny. With the roads gone all the goats will be safe from the strangers.The pipes which bring water to the fine espresso machines of San Francisco plunge down the hill just two miles away. There are neighbors here with guns. It is indeed a good place to have a farm.

I am anxious that I do not have such a farm. There was a man once, he could have built one for me. He knew how to run the chainsaw. He knew how to change the oil. He knew how to shoot the quail. He knew which leaves were which and the path of Orion. But he never did stare into my eyes and tell me of his dreams, and so I left, because I am a dreamer and I am wistful and I need words, so many useless words, to feel alive.

Then I think, what good will words do me if there are no goats for the milking? I thought, perhaps, if I had the green-eyed children and the cast-iron skillets then I could live without the whispers and the grasping hands and the pounding hearts. But something pulled at me from the notches in my spine and I created scabs to nurse on my scalp and then I was gone. There are ravenous things below the surface. The man could not afford to lose any fingers or toes down there with me.

Now it is the dog and I–he watches birds. He is the culmination of centuries of evolution, and he will find me the quail and I will shoot them myself. I do not have the farm but I can fire the gun. In this, I do not feel so weak-hearted.

The ground is sinking in the valley. But we are accustomed to almonds now. They grow in what used to be a floodplain, where the rivers once split their bellies full of digested igneous rock. We fixed it, though. Now the rows are orderly and the great-grandchildren of Rose of Sharon smoke meth in their trailers and hurl epithets at the foreign-tongued laborers who rendered them impotent. I think of Steinbeck, and all the spilled dreams of California weeping into the Pacific. I see coming tides of seagulls and star thistle. In a world so accustomed to almonds, it will grieve us when only the strong remain. I never want to forget the taste of them, hot with oil and salt, shattering from the gentle pressure of my strong, white teeth.

We waited all winter for the snow that never came. Today it falls on the daffodils.

Someday I won’t be so lucky. Someday I won’t be so pretty. Someday perhaps a child of mine might die, perhaps the flaky patch on my elbow will develop into cancer, perhaps I’ll burn my face, perhaps I’ll lose it all. Hubris is a funny thing. Three men tonight were on their knees for me, and I sit here in bed eating fast food from Reno, Nevada, two hundred miles away, because on a whim I requested it, and it was delivered. I said I will destroy you. He only smiled, goofily grinning, missing a tooth, hearts in his eyes.

The most recent love of my life said goodbye, goodbye, goodbye for reals this time my heart is bleeding for you and you won’t hold it. I said no, I am too busy flirting with this new boy, this ginger bearded elk-killer, we are going to take the dogs out, yes, MY dog, my little Parker dog whom we decided on together, our little test-child, and we didn’t last, and now he is mine. Thank you for paying for all the vet bills, and take care.

Ha, hah, I am free. I am free to sit in bed and smoke pot and write existential bullshit onto my computer while the dog lays at my feet, the only companion I desire these days.

The phone buzzes and I wonder which one of them it is. As though I’m twenty two again. Perhaps this is why I do this. Grasping at straws. Grasping at youth. Carefully cultivating the cocked head and the sideways smile, the brief hand on the shoulder, the upturned corners of the mouth that I know men find so endearing. Perhaps I’m punishing my father. Perhaps my mother was doing the same to hers when she drove around in her jaguar, smiling sweetly. It’s funny to imagine my face as hers, but it is. She looks so much more like my sister. But the cunning, the cunning, that is where I see her in me. The plotting, the plan Bs, the one foot out the door. I ruined so many of them. I was the one to beat for so many of them. Where is the winning in that? Have I done it? Have I succeeded? Will I live forever?

I am bleeding again. Another month without the feeling. I played with the children today, picked them up and placed them into the notch on my hip where they belong. We danced to reggae. I swung them upside down and they laughed and laughed. Noah said one day I’d be a wonderful mother. Or auntie. I said I didn’t care which. But I was lying. I want to be a mother.

I took charge tonight and made Betty introduce me to this new man. Her roommate said that “You can call me Al” was Betty and her sister Alex’s song. “I can call you Betty, and Betty when you call me you can call me Al.” I had loved that. I felt like I had first heard Graceland while I was in the womb.

This man is shorter than I generally entertain, but I like the way his nose turns up, and I like  that he hunts, and I like the way he said that because I played mandolin and hunted and cooked, that he’d fall in love with me.

Yes, do, do, I am so very lovable. Please do, I so deeply need to be wanted. Nevermind the damage, I’m pretty, so it’s tolerable. Don’t mind the man in the corner kissing me desperately on the forehead, he is one past, and it’s you I’d like to have dinner with now. Perhaps he’ll call and interrupt us, and I’ll smile at you with apologies on my brow, and you’ll understand, and you’ll hold me, because you’re the one in my good graces now. Aren’t you lucky? Lucky us.

Tonight I pulled from my purse, an elephant-patterened bag I won at some all girls clothing swap, the following:

Apple

Avocado

16 oz Mason jar borrowed from the coffee shop with a bit of arnold palmer left inside it

A letter from a prisoner.

There was a time when it was all idyllic, at least it seems so in my memory. My sister and I lived together in the ramshackle house on Crystal Falls Drive and we baked brownies and I made chicken stock. We went running and did yoga together, atop mats that separated us from the carpet that smelled a little too strongly of dog urine to concentrate completely on yoga. I worked at the health food store and brought home just-expired glass jugs of milk with cream on top, which we scooped out and stirred into our coffees. Globules of fat would rise to the top, and I liked that. Sister didn’t, so very much. She wouldn’t eat the cream straight off the top of the milk like I would, but I respected her choice.

She worked at the Diamondback Grill and sometimes if I was stoned or hungry she would bring me a Table Mountain Beef Burger. Grass fed and topped with Lamb Chopper sheep’s milk cheddar, washed down with an expensive beer, we were poor but we were fancy. Hippie rich. And we played music, and we built forts out of blankets and pillows around the fireplace when the power went out and the huge, cavernous house couldn’t even begin to think about keeping us warm. It was built in the sixties, I think, when propane was cheap and you can tell because there were vents everywhere for central propane heat to escape and warm its occupants briefly before radiating out through the huge single-paned glass windows that ringed the entire upstairs. We would tape plastic sheeting over those goddamn windows to try and keep the heat in. Some people who came to visit said it was creepy. It didn’t really work, anyway.

We took the wolf for excursions together out in the woods, where he could run off-leash. My mom brought him home from Washington one year when I was still in college, using him as a panacea for her crumbling marriage. The save-the-marriage-baby. Sister said she always felt an affinity with Wolf because she was a save-the-marriage baby too. Except that was a different marriage. I remember the day I met him. “We brought something ho-ome!” my mother said, in that singsong voice that implies that that something is alive. But her husband turned into a meth addict, and mom couldn’t care for the creature. He could leap 5-foot gates. And when he did, he killed baby deer and brought them home. He dug up my dead cat, Loki. Several times.

But when he ran with us in the woods it was glorious. Caitlin would walk him, on the leash, away from where we’d park the car, ambling for a few hundred feet down the old logging road that before it was a road was old logging train tracks. We could smell ponderosa pine and bear clover, and the sound of the cars would fade. In the spring the red dirt was squishy with melted snow, in the early fall crimson dust would swirl up around our tennis shoes and settle into the white patches of Wolf’s coat. When we were far enough from the road for him to only care about what lay ahead in the wilderness she would have him Sit! Stay! And remove his leash. His limbs trembled with anticipation, and he glanced, tongue lolling, toward the beckoning bend in the road up ahead. Then back up to my sister, who somehow held the power despite the fact that he could have torn both of our throats out. And then… “Okay!” with an open-armed gesture towards his destination, and he would be off like a starting gun had sounded. His rear end always listed slightly to the right, making his graceful, loping gait slightly imperfect, which endeared him to us all the more. Within seconds he’d be out of view, and we’d start running to follow him, hopelessly clumsy, chunky, slow–breathing methodically and reminding ourselves that we were supposed to be enjoying this. When he’d sometimes appear in view, racing down a hillside that he’d dashed up chasing a scent, I’d feel a sting of envy to watch his delirious face as he moved quickly through the woods, feeling the pure joy of running singing in his tendons.

It was a day like this when we found the goose nest. Rounding a corner just after the wolf had paused, smiling back at us, we heard an almighty kerfuffle, which is a word my father, with his love of H.L. Mencken and Spike Milligan, would be proud to know I’d used. Shrieking, jumping, we followed the sound through a grove of Jeffrey pines and emerged upon the scene–an enormous goose flapping about in the water, and the wolf running full-tilt down a steep embankment toward the shore.  On his way, he crashed over a grand, fluff-covered nest of eggs and proceeded to pace the edge of the water, panting, eyeing the goose.

The wolf could be a real sissy when it came to the hard fact that he had to enter into a body of water to accomplish his goals. In fact, mostly I only saw him swim when my sister swam with him, beckoning him, her blonde hair swirling around her shoulders and he paddling to stay at her side. It seemed that this was not, however tempting his quarry, an instance in which he could justify entering the water. The goose shook its wings menacingly and squawked, flustered, panicked, angry. Geese have a reputation for incomparable avian meanness, and I’m certain that the wolf standing between us and the water was the only thing deterring her from chasing us, snapping at our rears and protecting her unhatched offspring. I felt her panic with a deep sense of concern and responsibility for our beast’s inexcusable behavior. As my sister made moves to harness her animal, I raced down towards the downy circle encompassing the eggs, wondering what irreversible and deadly damage our blundering pet had done to this wild family. Incredibly, blessedly, each of the four perfect, cream-colored eggs were intact. His deft paws had sailed right over this precious little landmark on his way to chase the far more active and enticing prize that was surely, upon the first sight of him, making its way to the safety of the water before we arrived to witness the scene. I couldn’t help thinking that, had we not been there screaming at him, had he the luxury of wildness without a leash waiting in a pocket, without the threat of love withheld, he would have turned his nose up at the mourning goose and proceeded to eat those eggs with gusto. Do wolves eat eggs? Or am I transposing the qualities of a pine marten or badger upon my meat-eating pet? Surely those exposed fangs and that bulbous nose would sense a meal when he saw one.

Regardless, for the moment, panic notwithstanding, this mother goose would live to hatch her chicks. We would take our cameras and our running shoes, our leashes and our half-tamed wolf home.

When the Eastern Sierra wakes from winter, it’s a collective breath being drawn. Oh how I wish I could watch you bloom, bitterbrush, but just all of a sudden there you are, blushing all yellow after months of looking at me with brittle dark green leaves. And when did you return, Mountain Chickadee, calling “cheeeese-burger” outside my window as though you’d been at it since time immemorial?

You all forget how lonely I was without you. How I pleaded, “I’m sorry. Please come home to me” as the snow fell and the icicles encroached. For how strong the primordial longing for the green leaves to grow again on the trees, to squeak joyfully, I am alive! And this winter did not take me, oh no, I have cheated death’s grasp once more.

Oh, what an agony it is to be alive, and sentient, and beautiful, and able. When I run through the woods I bemoan each graceful footfall. The pines smell of vanilla and the dog barks at yearling bear cubs. I say out loud, “I’m sorry, Oso, he has no manners.”

When I was young I wished for lithe limbs and long bejeweled fingers and fine wrists like the women in Vogue. But I was born short and sturdy, a little farm girl, Sarah Jean, and it was a very long time before I realized I had my own peculiar beauty. Now I see this is the finest I will ever be, and I am pleased. My belly will always be slightly distended and jiggly, but I will continue to eat duck fat and drink beer. I just run. Running makes it all make sense. The world hushes. It is just me and the dog, our panting, our jingling.