A Fearless Place

by Vernie Lynn DeMille

 

I stand, unsteady on my short legs, in the sandy soil beside a gravel road just where it rises to its highest point then falls away sharply into an overgrown tangle of pine and manzanita trees. My grandfather, also unsteady, his hands gripping his cane handles tightly, legs encased in metal braces, hip shot to the side and alternating to ease the pain on either foot, stands beside me. 

 

I am accustomed to unsteadiness. I run, trip, fall, laugh, pick myself up and run and fall again. Childhood is a constant exercise in falling. Pain is expected, nothing more than the opportunity cost of running. Skinned knees, raw palms, a bruised nose, and scratches are badges of honor for a well played game. I’ve fallen twice just on the walk from our house to the view of the volcano. 

 

Not just a mountain, a rock, or silent stone. It’s a volcano. A living mountain, with a hot and beating heart. It’s beautiful, dangerous, breathtaking. It rises above the trees, white against the blue. I want to climb it. I want to hide from it. I want to be far away when beauty turns to destruction. I want to stand and watch it when it finally burns. They say it’s been an age since it has exploded and it will change the face of the Earth when it does again. 

 

Shasta. I wonder if the people it was named for were around to watch it burn the last time. My brother found one of their arrowheads in the orchard. It was there long before the oldest trees, older than my grandpa, were planted beneath the mountain sun. 

 

We stand on the loose soil, bleached white at this crest in the road, and look. Grandpa watches the mountain and I watch black carpenter ants crawl all over a rotting piece of wood. The mountain is always there, it’s deep and burning heart a constant beat beneath my feet. Grandpa is always there, even when he’s not. Even when he’s in San Jose, hiding in his own tangled pine and loquat trees.

 

A moment under the sun, together on the side of a mountain, aching from a hundred little hurts that we didn’t even notice anymore. Scabbed shins, shattered bones, tired muscles and broken hearts.  We stood for only a moment but something of us stayed.

 

I wandered back to that road, three and a half decades later, but couldn’t find the place. The white soil at the top of Cove Road as gone as the Shasta tribe, as gone as Grandpa, as gone as the heirloom orchard whose fruit grew me. 

 

A hundred little hurts have become a hundred thousand and I feel them all. I am still unsteady. I don’t run anymore. Falling hurts more when you’re not so close to the ground. Sometimes the opportunity cost seems too dear a price to pay for the thrill of being. I drive instead. I feel like I’m running without risking the skinned knees. I can understand why Grandpa loved to drive. It gave him movement when his broken legs could no longer carry him. And I love him more for walking with me to the place I cannot find again.

 

I drive up and down Cove Road but never locate the spot. It echoes in my heart, that tiny pullout on the side of the mountain, where I stood with Grandpa under the sun, volcano and forest spread at our feet, but nothing looks the same now. The sun is dim, it’s setting. The trees are taller, darker, and my son wonders why I feel nostalgic about a place that looks like a location for a slasher film. I look at it through different eyes and chuckle. It does look a little like something from a horror movie. If you didn’t have the same memories I have.

 

And he doesn’t have them. I’ve told the stories. I’ve shared my thoughts. I’ve tried to invite my family and others into my heart where those tender memories live.  But they stay unknown and the hurts become a hundred thousand and one. Because he’ll never really know this place. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones, but still my thoughts remain my own. What makes me all I believe I am is hidden still. And I long to be known.

 

We drive away, eastward and away from the setting sun, golden hills, and the sleeping fire of a dormant giant. Hours and hours we go, until night is full and my children are sleeping as we cross mountain ranges and deserts, through starlight and the glow of the moon, toward home.  

 

Still, there is a part of me that remains, like an ancient arrowhead in an antique orchard, an echo of a life long since lived. There is a piece of my heart left behind in a tiny pullout on a backcountry road in Northern California. 

 

I may never find my way back to the fearlessness of that place but perhaps someone else will stumble across it, pick it up, and wonder who could leave such a thing behind.