The Litany: A Game in Time and Space

By Ursula Rose

Visit the author's website at http://homepage.mac.com/nancyhrose

This book chronicles the connection of one family to a particular piece of geography in the Central Valley of California.

It is a road memoir written while plying up and down the two main highways, from Southern California to the Bay Area, and up into the High Sierras. The dark blue Volvo wagon travels the two interstates at highway speeds, sometimes taking the old road, Highway 99, and sometimes the new road, Highway 5, going back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco--never slowing down and almost never stopping. People ask me what my book is about. I say life, being inclusive but evasive. Or I say its about the cabin or the lake or my family or the Central Valley, being more particular but probably less accurate. Truth and honesty are also problematic. Who knows?

So if I dont really know what its about, whats in it to be gotten out? Mostly it came out of a realization of how important this particular piece of geography was to me, how big a part of my life it was. Something I had never realized before. It was all bound up with my family. I had repudiated them to go off with my husband. Then when he repudiated me, that helped me get closer to my own past.

Like other road books it is a journey to self, a voyage of self-discovery. Like other memoirs it turns out to be finding oneself through discovering the connection to ones family. Now I belong to myself.

The word-hoard is unlocked: out of its store Im repaying my debt to the matriarchy by reproducing the words of my mother, aunt, grandmother, and great-great-grandmother. As I write I have an intense feeling of dj vu. I have heard this all before, said this all before, written this all before. The trickle became a stream, the stream flowed into a river, the river merged with the sea.

This book began suddenly one night as I was driving along a stretch of road in the San Joaquin Valley, somewhere near Sanger, California. It continued as I drove along the roads of the Central Valley, going up to the cabin or heading up to Berkeley to visit my daughter Sharon- -who was a student there from 1980 to 1984. It was written down in roadside cafes, sitting on the dock at the lake, or in the library at the University of California, but it was often composed at the wheel, as I was rolling along.

It is impossible to talk about the book without talking just like the book, since it is itself so concerned with its own gestation process. It talks to itself and about itself constantly, incessantly. Who am I to say what it is about? Praise from Susan Pepper Robbins:

A hymn to California, the Central Valley, and Highway 99, the Litany is full of the anger, joy, and pain of family life, together with an obvious love of the world. The writing has been compared to that of Joan Didion, Doris Lessing, and Wallace Stevens. Set in the San Joaquin Valley and the High Sierras, the essays treat of the many transformations that occur in a family:

the death of the father and the birth of a granddaughter, the departure of a husband and the beginning of a new life, the acquisition of a mountain cabin and its loss to heavy snows. People are born and die, come together and split apart; houses are built and destroyed, crops bloom and ripen, the moon rises and sets. The elements are a powerful force determining events. It is a road book written in real time on the open road, on the highways of California; it also travels to Europe: to Paris, London, Italy, Greece and Israel. The book is full of buried anecdotes that glow through the surface texture. It tells a lot of truth with its lies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 28, 2006
• ISBN: 9781462828371

Ursula Rose

The author is one of five sisters born and raised in California. They all attended UCLA, where she majored in Mathematics. In graduate school she studied French, and has been teaching for a quarter of a century. She has been a writer for that long. She taught in the writing program at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, and in the great books program at Shimer College in Illinois. She has traveled widely, learning many languages, and studying the traditions of many different cultures, particularly those of medieval Europe. She is especially interested in the archaeology, folklore, and mythology of bears.

Book preview

Prologue

11/11/1961

Lots of our friends and relations will want to know how we fared in the fire. In the midst of the pretty general tragedy and devastation it is strange to reflect that the fate of our own house was in a way the most important thing in the world to us, and we rejoice that it survived.

This fact is still almost impossible to realize fully, for the issue was truly in doubt for some time. Except for the miraculous combination of several elements of good luck in both time and place, our house would have burned as so many did around us.

Monday was a very warm day; there was something eerie about the out-of-joint combination of short winter days with hot summer temperature and strong wind. Jim and I had gotten in late Sunday night from a brief two-day jaunt to the place where the trailer is parked near Springville east of Porterville in the Sierra foothills below Sequoia. While there we had been concerned about the extreme dryness of that area; none of the normal fall rains had come, and all the brush crackled dustily underfoot. Then we were further concerned by the very strong dry wind from the north that followed us all the way home.

Monday all of us left for school or work with no premonition of what the day was to bring; at about nine-thirty we were alarmed by the towering cloud of smoke in the hills area, but I, as I stood in the lunch area at Mark Twain supervising the morning break we call Nutrition, had not the slightest inkling that our own area could be remotely involved. After all, the hills are gashed through by the wide Sepulveda Freeway construction project, through which tens of thousands of cars funnel daily to and from home or work in the Valley, and on which hundreds of men and dozens of pieces of equipment are at work every day. The fire was clearly east of Sepulveda and couldn’t possibly cross.

Therefore I was very much surprised to get a message from our Girls’ Vice Principal at one-fifteen that the fire had crossed Sepulveda, was heading west out of control, and that I had better get on home if I could. I called Jim at his office, found that Nancy had already called him, and agreed that we would both head for home and meet up here.

I was delayed in leaving school because I flooded my car in my anxious haste and then further delayed when I chose to try to go up Bundy (the car radio warned that Sepulveda was closed at Wilshire and that all residents were being evacuated from the western canyons and the canyon roads were barred to all vehicles except emergency ones). Bundy traffic was backed up way down at Ocean Park Boulevard near the Douglas plant because they are installing a storm drain, but I finally got through and came up Barrington, then San Vicente, then Bundy again. South of Sunset by several blocks the road was jammed with cars of people coming out and of others trying to get through the barricades and go in. Though I was still two miles from the house, I parked the car, grabbed my purse, and started north on foot. At Sunset I walked through the barricades without questioning or being questioned. A bright orange flaring at the 400 block on North Kenter, where Robinwood intersects, was right ahead of me, and someone said that everything beyond was gone. As I continued past this burning area, everything was suddenly deserted except for one or two police cars going past. Another lady caught up with me and we walked together for a while; her house is below ours in the 600 block on Rochedale. She left me at her corner and I panted on up Hanley. As I rounded the S-turn below our house I could see it silhouetted against a bright wall of flame, for the hillside curving north of the house was burning vigorously. I didn’t stop to count but noted out of the corner of my eye that Dan Raeburn’s and the Newhouse’s and several other houses were flaring torches in the immediate area. As I scrambled up the driveway, I could see tongues of flame licking around the woodpile at our back corner. I turned on the hose full force, not really daring to hope that there would be any water. There was a little looping stream, about one-fourth pressure. But applied at the right point and right then, it was enough.

My feet were unbelievably uncomfortable; finally I just had to go in and change shoes, taking about one minute to get out the key, get in, find other shoes, and get out again. The fire had gained headway in that minute and was coming through chinks in the woodpile, though I had left the water directed on it. Very soon after that I heard Jim yelling, Hal! Hal! from way below on Lennard Street. Hearing the terrible urgency in his voice and thinking he was calling me to come away from the danger, I didn’t answer his first call. Then I did answer, of course; he was soon up the hill beside me and got out shovels, so that we could throw shovels full of earth on the fire in addition to the little stream of water. A couple of neighbors came to help; Brian—no, Danny and Kathy got there before Brian—the whole sequence blurs out a bit—anyway, all helped and all the help was desperately needed.

Once the immediate tide was turned, we could look around and assess other prospects and dangers. The big white house overhanging the hill so spectacularly directly above us caught from its neighbor on the north; soon its stove and refrigerator, released as the floor burned through, plunged end over end down the hill just north of us; the wind, still strong from the north in spurts, was blowing flame into a line of eucalyptus trees on the ridge; these fortunately did not catch fire. If the white house had collapsed outward and its embers had plunged down, we would have been in crucial peril. If the Israel’s house just above us on Bluestone Trail had gone, nothing could have saved our house or many dozens of others below us on Deerbrook and along Hanley. Marion Israel had been up at his house around three o’clock, had turned on the rainbirds (which didn’t go on because of insufficient pressure) and had left, leaving the spigot open; fortunately enough pressure developed and the rainbirds came on later, protecting the area right around his house. Below us on Bluegrass Lane, flames ate down a little gully and fingered between and around several houses; if any of these had caught, the others and ours too could not have been held. A fire truck held the fire as it crossed Hanley at the bottom of the hill. Later, around five or five-thirty a massive fire-storm exploded at the top of the canyon; this engulfed Elsa’s house, which we thought had been spared, I don’t know when the hill across from us burned—earlier in the afternoon, I think—but the houses on the top of that ridge were saved by the fact that the hillsides had been kept watered for a little distance below the houses.

We had all been totally out of communication all afternoon. The telephone was out and the electricity was off—therefore no radio, no television, no lights. We didn’t know where Betsy was; Danny went down about five and he and Amie tried to pick her up at Palisades High School, but she had left, leaving a message that she had gone to a friend’s house; fortunately she went right on to Nancy’s apartment, and we were all reunited about nine-thirty that evening.

There was no electricity to cook anything to eat, so we had to light the barbeque! Danny and Amie came back up and cooked dinner; we dined by candlelight using the best china and silver! Brian and Nancy came and stayed all night. All night he and Jim and several of the neighbors stood watches—we put out the last fire on our hillside about two-thirty in the morning. We had electricity again about eleven and the telephone was open after about nine the next morning.

Funny thing—the freezer was off and we happened to have about three half-gallon cartons of ice cream, so everyone had to eat whopping bowls.

One really crucial factor in our good fortune is the fact that Jim has kept up a continuous program of watering our hillside, which has been a rigorous task, since it involved clambering up and down hillsides with the little portable whirlibird. He will certainly have added incentive now to get our sprinklers installed. The fire came right around to the edge of the watered area and slanted up the hill under the big tree, licking around the woodpile on the way. If that area had been tinder-dry, no little feeble stream from a hose would have been of the slightest use.

Another funny thing—Kathy and Danny walked up from Sunset, having started from UCLA, panted into the yard, said How can we help? and started shoveling dirt and throwing wood out of the way without losing one second. Here was Kathy in her college pleated skirt and sweater outfit—no time to think of changing—looking as if she were leading a cheering section.

Another funny thing—thousands and thousand of birds flew down from the burned area to refresh themselves in the bird bath at about five-thirty on the morning after the fire—many wild canaries and blue birds . . . well, hundreds anyway.

Halstead S. Goldsmith

Genesis

I am driving along in my station wagon. It is the middle of the night. The kids are both asleep. My two traveling companions, Frank and Lisa. The ones who came with me on that cross-country trip when it all happened, in the same midnight blue Volvo wagon.

Many years later my children still salivate when they see one like it. Still have an involuntary physiological response, long after its retirement.

We are on our way up to the cabin. It is very dark. There are no other cars on the road at this hour of the night. There is only the cab, lit eerily with the faint greenish glow of the dash lights, and the peacefulness of the two sleeping, trusting children. Everything is warm and soft. We are going through that part of the world where my father came up, that almost completely forgotten corner of the planet called Sanger.

Suddenly it dawns on me how rooted I am to this tiny piece of geography. I see how grounded I am there to that spot, how the song of the road is engrained in me. How I am a part of that landscape. Even as a transient, a traveler passing through, it is a part of me and I of it.

It is my home.

It is my home even though I never lived there. A nice place to visit, though. In a way my family came from there. And we went back every year for refueling. Only passing through.

I gradually realize that this is what it is all for, that I am to write about that place, about the feeling of belonging, about the cabin, about the lake. There it is. I had been wondering what was going on. I had received the transmission before, but was never able to decode it.

A la recherche du temps perdu.

We would pile in the car. It was always too late, because my father was not home from the office yet. Before he could leave town, he had to meet all the demands of his accounting practice. He thought he could do everything, that he had all the time in the world, but typically time ran out before he had finished everything. I got this from him.

When he retired, it was like going suddenly from a moving sidewalk to concrete pavement.

He would get home late, wolf down his food, and pack the car for the trip. The cars, usually old vintage antique Hudsons, were always over the hill, never up to the demands he placed on them. Not only was the car itself overloaded, he had the nerve to attach a huge house trailer to the hitch. Did you ever see the movie Fitzcarraldo? In it a visionary man, also named Fitzgerald, attempts to transport a paddle-wheel riverboat across the Andes from Brazil to Peru, where he wants to build an opera house in the jungle. A visionary idea, but absolute folly. The making of the movie was itself folly, and to compound the folly, a second film company braved the impossibly dangerous conditions of the Amazon to film the making of the film. The first lead was Mik Jagger, later replaced by Klaus Kinsky. This is documented in the documentary.

We usually lugged a three-room wooden house trailer, a white cottage on wheels with green shutters, impossibly long, impossibly heavy, over the Ridge Route and up the western face of the Sierras. Almost as big as a riverboat—or an opera house. The cars always broke down, on schedule. There was never any question over whether they would, just a matter of the seven-w details of when and where. We took this rig on a twenty-five hundred mile tour of the western states, in the course of which we replaced several axles. Characteristically, father blamed this fact on the poor quality of the roads in Arizona: obviously built by Goldwater Republicans.

At some point the rolling house was replaced by a proper tear-drop trailer, easier to haul but not nearly as much room for our oversize family.

Once, high in the mountains, the trailer started to fall backward, slipping off over a cliff. It was dark and we couldn’t see how steep the cliff was, but we almost went over. Mother nearly went through the roof over this.

She was always distraught because he was always blithely getting us into pickles. She suffered from heat prostration, and was often dangerously hot. One time she reached into the Pall Mall package in her breast pocket for a cigarette and pulled out a bee who promptly stung her finger, making her even hotter. That may have been the time she took Anacin and developed a serious allergic reaction. She did go through the roof this time; she became incoherent.

She had a number of nervous breakdowns, and too many pregnancies. She was always having nervous breakdowns, on the same schedule as her pregnancies.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn’t know what to do. This describes mother to a tee, except for the shoe. She used to say that father never let her use birth control. He secretly wanted to keep her from doing her work, getting a doctorate. Barefoot and pregnant. He also wanted a son, but the only boys were the two stillborn births after we moved to the new house.

When my mother needed to subdue us in the car—we were always unruly: we outnumbered her—she used to pull over, turn off the engine, and stop the car until we stopped. This is as far as I go. I don’t think I ever had to resort to this.

There were five of us children, so four had to sit in the back seat of the car. In order to sleep we made what we called a lean: everyone rested her head on the shoulder of the sister next to her. When one side got tired, we switched by consensus to the other side. This worked fine as long as no one was fidgety. When we stopped for gas we formed a very long line. My dad never understood what took us so long, was always impatient. It was not just that our plumbing was faulty, defective, not as convenient as his, but there were six of us to boot.

I usually had the honor of sitting in the front seat, between my parents, because I kept the trip records. Hour of departure, number of gallons, miles elapsed. Actually they had me sit in the front seat so I wouldn’t make any trouble in the back seat. I also handed out the rations of trip candy, officially a white Swedish mint with two red lines across each side. Wasn’t a trip without them. Substitutes did not work, were not the same. Accept no substitutes.

I wrote down all the Burma-Shave signs, transcribed them in my little black notebook. Wild men pulled their whiskers out. That’s what made them wild, no doubt. Burma Shave. We grew up on these little strings of signs. A cartoon on a stick. At the first sighting, hopefully the first of the series and not a subsequent one, the lookout would whoop Burma Shave! Like a flash news bulletin, these signs had the authority to interrupt all ordinary transmissions. We would read them in a chorus, waiting the eternity between the intermittent installments, afraid the next one would never come, hoping against hope it was not missing, pulled like a tooth or whisker.

My dad would fill the car with his beautiful tenor voice. All the songs he had learned in the Men’s Glee Club at UCLA. His Santa Lucia was the most beautiful sound in the world, but the one I remember best was the Spanish Cavalier.

A Spanish cavalier stood in his retreat

and on his guitar played a tune, dear.

The music so sweet did oftentimes repeat

the blessings of my country and you, dear.

Oh say, darling, say, when I’m far away,

sometimes you may think of me too, dear.

The bright days of spring will soon fade away.

remember what I say and be true, dear.

You couldn’t hear so well from the back. The voices tended to drift above your head and even if you were awake, sounded like they came from very far away, from another world. Sometimes they talked about things we didn’t quite understand.

There is something magical about traveling through the night in the cab of a car. Huddled together in the eerie light, hurtling through space, we go down the highway in the dark, under the dome of the car, the roof of the world. The entire universe is in that cab. Beyond is the dark, unknown.

Something about the way the light bounces back off the roof of the car. Something about the way it is supported by the legs between the doors and windows makes the dome seem like the entire canopy of the sky. The goddess Nut painted on the inside of the coffin lid, life hovering over us as we make our night journey, from dusk to dawn, drifting along through the underworld of death in our boat. The goddess Nut guarding over us, protecting us in our flight. The car is our boat, making the journey of the sun, through the mysterious lands, the unseen, unknown world. All there is is within the cab, our space capsule. Where will it end?

Everything is affected, altered, changed. The voices sound hollow. They are aimed louder, in order to be heard above the roar of the engine. High-pitched, tinged with anxiety, fatigue. The drone below them resonating steadily, filling out the spectrum in our ears. Our heartbeats adjust to this rhythm, this steady drone, adopting it as their own, taking it for their own. Our ears remember it, feel suddenly empty when it abruptly stops.

After a sea voyage, the sound of running water momentarily brings back the motion of the boat upon the water.

We always took 99, of course. The barren interstate had not yet been built. It was still the four lane divided highway that went through all the towns, before it was a freeway. Earlimart, Pixley and Tipton. At least once a year we went to see mother’s sister Mary and her husband Bob, following them to their successive homes in Oakland, Hayward, and Castro Valley. At least once a year we all went to the High Sierras, meeting in Yosemite, Sequoia, Huntington.

We traveled the length of the Valley to reach his mother and father, Grandma Zada and Grandpa Duval, and Uncle Dick in Sacramento. Brother Duval lived in Folsom until they put in the dam, flooding his farm. It was the same oak and lichen studded granite as Morgan Canyon. Then he moved to Sacramento to be a plumber. They are all buried there now.

We stopped at the Sanger farm of his sister Zada, whose husband Raymond was the brother of their brother Duval’s wife Ava. Her daughters Cousin Evelyn in Fresno, Dorothy nearby.

Always the same road, Highway 99.

FALL

At the Lake

It all started three years ago last August. It all started and it all ended, it all ended and it all began. The baby Megan was born. Rushed crying onto the kitchen floor on the return trip from a false start to the hospital. Kathy just stood in the doorway and said this is as far as I go. The doctor took it all in a day’s work. Put all your sheets on the kitchen floor: wearily, and I’ll be right there. Did he say to boil water? Does he do this often? He has come to expect no less from Kathy’s eccentric body. Has a mind of its own. So there she was on the kitchen floor Lamazing the baby out, having that whole-body orgasm that is said to feel like fucking the whole universe. For the last time. I had never heard about it until she told me on the occasion of the birth of baby Mollie, which as it turns out, was a Cæsarean, and she was missing that old orgasm that tones up your whole body, even your hair.

I just found a piece of driftwood floating gently on the surface of the lake. A little longer and thinner, narrower, than a finger. Crooked. Looks like it came from a witch. Little narrow ripples. I seem to have the lake to myself. So different from summer. One truck. Someone is hammering. Constructive. The rigging, a halyard, is slamming against an aluminum mast, a sound you eventually get used to and can even sleep through if you spend enough time around boats. There is something about the restlessness of an aluminum boat working against the side of the dock. And the relentlessness of the wavelets slapping the shore. Never gives up.

My favorite spot is just at the beginning of the dock, at a point neither on land nor water. Halfway up the stairs. You’re not on the sand and rocks, but you haven’t left the trees. Neither are you wholly subject to the movement of the water, bounced and jounced like the boats. I guess I’m afraid of the deep water. So I like it here at the edge between the two worlds where the water is shallow, and the sun’s rays catch the golden particles in the sand. Fool’s gold. A motor boat must have passed because the lake is doing a miniature imitation of the ocean. Real waves. Roll more than a foot onto the shore. Now