Not the view from my room, but also very California in its feel. I miss the oak trees, too. Image is public domain.
I managed to come down with the cold that’s going around. Which is bullshit, I demand an immediate cure so I can get on with my life! More seriously, it seems to be passing pretty quickly, and hopefully I’ll be feeling better by mid-week.
Talking to a friend about fencing in digging animals (they’re building an enclosure for possibly-wild turtle that got left in their apartment complex) reminded me of something. Back when I was a kid, a friend of mine, M, had a tortoise. M’s tortoise was an escape artist, and liked to dig under the fence and go tromp around the neighbor’s yard. At a certain point, M’s dad would just throw up a ladder to climb over the fence and go get the tortoise.
That’s not actually the point of this post, though I’m sure there’s something to be said about technically trespassing to retrieve a reptile.
It made me realize just how tall the fences and walls of our backyards were, in my neighborhood. I’d put them at seven or eight feet high, for the side fences, and eight to ten for the back brick wall that separated us from the drainage ditch out back.
And I find myself missing that ditch, sometimes. Understand that ditch was an understatement, this thing was probably ten feet deep at the middle and probably twice as wide. No one used the area for anything, so grass could run wild, and did, growing like six feet tall and waving amber in the breeze year round. One year, a tree ended up back there, shooting up to a few feet tall. Then, when I was older, we had super strong rains. The drainage ditch usually didn’t have a lot of water visible in it, but this time it was basically a river, and the tree’s topmost leaves were sticking out of the top of the water as it stubbornly refused to be swet downstream. When the rains finally stopped, and the ditch dried out, the tree was still there. And it kept growing and growing, as far as I know, though it’s been years since I’ve been back to my childhood home and looked out the window of my old bedroom, where I could see it from.
I could see a lot of other things from my window, most of which aren’t the kind of thing people normally brag about with a view. Just beyond the drainage ditch was a parking lot for an auto dealership. Ford or Chevy, I think? I remember when I was in fifth grade, using the light from the sign that towered over it to trace a map of Rhode Island for our State Project, by pressing the original up to the glass with a piece of printer paper over it, and going at it with a pencil. An improvised lightbox.
Then there was the road. It’s a winding thing that heads off east towards Sacramento, one of those roads that runs next to the freeway and goes a good ways along it before you cut under the freeway, or turn around and head back. Low traffic, so not a lot of noise. Which didn’t matter because of…
…the interstate. Three glorious lanes in each direction, separated by a center line of bushes. Day and night there were cars out there, driving east and west. I-80’s a popular freeway, especially during the winter when people go up to Tahoe for snow sports. I used to bike over the bike overpass (Davis really likes bikes) and see cars just stopped on the freeway, and we were over an hour from Tahoe on a day with no traffic. But I quickly learned to ignore the car noise, and as long as no one’s honking, I find road noise eminently ignorable.
Beyond the freeway was a farm. I don’t know whose, as these were their outlying fields and I never bothered to track anyone down and ask whose fields hugged the Mace curve, one of the main routes we’d take to get to the rest of the town. They planted all sorts of things, but I mostly remember the corn, which grew so tall before they harvested it, forming from a distance what looked like a solid block of green. I think maybe wheat, too. I don’t remember the field ever being completely barren, though it must have happened at some point. But California has everpresent golden-brown grass, that shoots up after the first rains and quickly dies or goes dormant, sticking around only to be played as a rushing instrument by the wind.
The last thing I could see from my bedroom window was a railroad track. It was too far away to really see the track, especially with the field in the way. But occasionally, late at night, a train would truck across it, and the horn would drift across the field to my bedroom window. Never loud enough to startle. Just enough to remind me that it was there, like hearing a coyote howl or the nicker of a horse. A metal beast peacefully making its presence known as it passed through the area I shared with it.
My room was never dark, the light of the dealership sign casting a blue glow at all hours of the night. It was never quiet. The freeway was always there. But I wouldn’t trade that view from the window for all the quiet and dark there I might have had somewhere else. I miss seeing the tall grass move, hearing the train, silently cheering on the tree for another year. It was its own kind of beauty, one that will stick with me for a long time.
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