Big Dreams (14 page)

Elegiac feelings swept over me. The state had once been covered with 5 million acres of wetlands, but they were almost gone now, and with them would go the birds.

A spring shower in the desert. A mild fragrance of sagebrush, and the silver and gray-green of its leaves.

H
IGHWAY 395 OUT OF ALTURAS
ran aslong the spine of the Sierra Nevada down to Mojave town in the southern desert, hundreds of miles away. It ran through many different types of terrain, but the terrain it ran through on the way to Susanville was definitely
out there
, yet more dusty, tufted, sagebrushy, disconnected land, the sandy earth much whiter now and the snow banished from the mountains.

Far back from the road, almost far enough to be invisible, I saw solitary, tin-roofed houses that seemed not so much to have been constructed from the ground up as lowered intact from a spaceship. The owners put a premium on privacy and even secrecy. Their only neighbors were jackrabbits, grouse, and kangaroo rats, other critters surviving on the margin.

Termo was
really
out there. It had a gas pump, a general store that was for sale, probably in tandem with the Brooklyn Bridge, and a gaggle of rough-hewn cabins that appeared not to have been occupied since the Gold Rush. A hand-painted sign said, Johnston’s Video Rental and Indian Gift Shop, Cabin #3 Behind Store.

By Cabin #3, there was another sign, above a caked flowerbed where the droopy, frost-damaged stems of some dying plants were taking a nap. Caution, it said, Flowers Growing.

Through a screen door I heard some Texas swing on a radio, the hillbilly skitter of Bob Wills. Inside the cabin, a slender woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, was making some bead earrings at a table. The earrings were a jubilant yellow.

“Are you Mrs. Johnston?” I asked.

“No, I’m Jessie. A friend of the family.” She was minding the store while the Johnstons were in Reno. Mrs. Johnston was a Sioux medicine woman, who went by the name of Tears-in-the-Wind and had been on a vision quest for twenty years. Still another sign attested to it: Vision Quest, Twenty Years with No Drugs or Alcohol. It hung by a shelf of Bruce Lee kung-fu videos.

Jessie didn’t belong to the Sioux tribe herself. Instead, she was
a member of a loosely knit fellowship of Indians whose tribal ancestries were murky. Although she didn’t look much older than fifty, she had six children and twenty grandchildren and lived with her husband in a double-wide mobile home in a location that she wouldn’t disclose, somewhere around Termo,
way out there
.

It was pleasant in the cabin. A warm, dry, desert wind was howling outside, but it didn’t penetrate through the well-chinked walls. While Jessie strung her beads, I listened to the radio and made a mental count of all the Indians that I’d met at random in the Far North. Again, I thought about the separate and hidden Indian universe, a skeletal world that only an Indian could know about intimately or could touch.

Jessie talked about her compound. She had a propane tank and a generator for electricity, but there was no phone and she didn’t want one. It was peaceful that way. Her adult children lived in other states and wrote letters and visited during the summer, lodging in other trailers on the property, and they all stayed up late at night to gossip about things.

“It’s not like in a city, where you live in a duplex and have to worry about waking up somebody,” she remarked, stringing beads.

In Oregon, Jessie’s husband had owned a backhoe business, but the stress of it had bothered him, so they came to California looking for an easier life. That hadn’t really worked out, she admitted. Jessie had done some stints as a waitress and had picked some crops as a fieldhand. Her attitude toward the state was mixed. She loved the physical beauty and particularly the serenity of the desert, but she thought that the taxes were too high.

Jessie said that she had learned for certain that the myth about California magically being able to solve a person’s problems was not true.

Tears-in-the-Wind did paintings on cow skulls, going Georgia O’Keeffe one better. Three skulls were on the floor, bright and colorful, and I would have bought one if she had charged a little less. You have to pay for inspiration.

“She never knows what she’s going to paint,” Jessie declared, with respect. “She has to wait for it to come to her. There’s no plan. That’s the way I do it with my earrings. It takes a little longer, of course, but I couldn’t do it any other way.”

S
USANVILLE, THE SISTER CITY TO FLORA, ILLINOIS
, Was boiling hot, with late May doing an impersonation of mid-July, so I went right into the Susanville Hotel as soon as I hit town and ordered a tall glass of iced tea. I had a second glass and took my tab to the cash register, where the cashier was eating a late lunch, chewing studiously on a big chunk of charred cow that flopped over the edges of his plate.

He was a heavyset Basque in his forties and had the torpid capaciousness that Basques sometimes have, a slow-moving, in-gathering quality. They were prone to melancholy, too, and the shepherds among them sometimes sang of their woe as they roamed the womanless mountains with their sheep.

Susanville had once been Rooptown, after Isaac Roop, a timber baron from Maryland, but Roop had changed the name as an homage to his only daughter, Susan, in 1854. There was still a sawmill in town, but it was having no better luck than the other mills around. The Susan River had already been reduced to trickle by the heat, and the streambed was chalky and dry. Cattle ambled through the desert searching for bunchgrass.

On the surface, Susanville looked like another economically depressed place of the Far North, a town that had not yet broken with its past to invent a future, but if you stayed for a while, you felt a buzz in the air, the shock of something happening.

Old Susanville, Roop’s town, still existed, but it was confined to Main Street. Its spirit lingered in the Pioneer Saloon, a cavernous joint with the brands of cattlemen burned into a back wall. Old Susanville was a hair salon where two women were wondering what to do with the buffalo meat that their husbands had brought home from a hunt. It was E Clampus Vitus, a fraternal organization that
had started in Sierra City in 1857 to parody all the other fraternal organizations in the state.

But while the Clampers were listening to their leader, the Noble Humbug, speak at their Hall of Comparative Ovations, a new Susanville was taking shape. Instantly identifiable California guys and gals formed its population, tanned and aerobicized and aglow with an odd conviction. They ate oat-bran muffins and drank smoothies made from organic bananas and had smart clothes and flashy cars and did the odd line of cocaine. They did not seem to be living
in
Susanville but rather in an idea
about
Susanville, in the California depicted on TV.

On a balmy Friday night, I watched Main Street turn into a boisterous cruising strip for kids of high-school age and a little older. Cars, trucks, and vans were strung along the avenue as far as the eye could see. The kids came from all over, from Termo, Big Valley, and Fall River Mills, driving for hours past ranches and cows to be part of the action.

As they inched forward with their windows rolled down, I could feel their tremendous yearning for romance, excitement, and sex, for all the grand experiences that they assumed to be available in a real city, in Reno, just ninety miles away.

In the new Susanville, the once-great distances of the Far North were being eroded. The sprawl of Reno, where tract houses were going up in a frenzy, had crept closer. There were people moving into Susanville who didn’t know a band saw from a chain saw. They commuted to Reno for work and returned to such subdivisions as Susan Estates—an estate in ranch country!

Susanville was becoming a new kind of western suburb. Money was greasing the wheels, all the bucks being spent on real estate and new construction, but none of it fell into the hands of the mill workers, the wranglers, or the men who drove the lumber trucks. Money had torn a hole in the town’s dynamic, and now rancor and alienation were afoot.

Crime in Susanville was increasing, for instance. Drug-related
arrests and violent offenses were way up. The jail could hold forty-one inmates, but the average daily count was fifty-five. According to the local paper, the Lassen County Municipal Utility District Board “was facing grand jury accusations of willful, corrupt misconduct.” The Salvation Army, short on donations and long on demand, had already shut down its grocery giveaway program for the month.

As part of its “Take Pride in America” campaign, the Bureau of Land Management had requested some civilian help in cleaning up Bass Hill, where residents were illegally dumping more and more junk—garbage, yard clippings, mattresses, old appliances, and the rotting corpses of deer, dogs, pigs, and cattle.

I gathered that the California prison system would be the ultimate beneficiary of the Susanville boom. The correctional center in town was currently oversubscribed and had recently been under a tight lockdown because of a war between two rival Hispanic gangs whose members would never have been in the Far North without the state springing for their fare. Almost 5,000 men were jammed into a facility that was supposed to contain 3,102 of them.

Alturas might have no work to offer, but at least you could sign on as a correctional officer in Susanville. It paid the highest hourly wage in the county, a flat $10.00, which compared favorably to $8.65 for a millworker, $8.12 for a truckdriver, and $5.75 for a secretary.

G
OOD-BYE, SUSANVILLE, AND GOOD LUCK
! Better to build yourself a squatter’s cabin in the Diamond Mountains, I thought, and live on squirrel stew and blackberry pie.

Honey Lake, southeast of town, floated like a
fata morgana
in the ripply heat, its waters a puddle resting in a bowl of cracked and whitened alkaline soil. The entire Honey Lake basin was part of the Sierra Army Depot now. The U.S. military had many such installations in the state’s wastelands, hidden from public view.

In the spirit of curiosity, I figured I’d take a look at the depot and left the highway for a two-lane road into Herlong, where the
tattered homes of army personnel were congregated. From the condition of the place, I deduced that Herlong most be very low on any soldier’s priority list, a duty station with all the plusses of a bus terminal in Waco.

Ahead, there was a heavy-duty fence separating the depot from ordinary human concerns. A woman in a guard booth informed me that it was against military regulations, depot policy, and virtually every tenet in every army security manual to admit an unauthorized visitor wishing to see nuclear warheads, antiballistic missiles, and any other pertinent hard- or software on the base.

I turned around. Herlong, I was thinking, what a pitiful town you are, just blistered sand and G.I. rules, so far from the big picture that the concept of “middle-of-nowhere” doesn’t even apply, but then I passed a plain house and there, sitting on what would have been a lawn if lawns grew easily in the desert, was an elderly black couple who looked as contented as people on holiday. They waved as I slowed down, so I parked the car and walked up to them and saw that the house was really a store of some kind, though I couldn’t guess what it might be selling.

Emma Brown rose from her lawn chair and gave me some instructions. “You go on in and browse,” she told me firmly. “Take your time in there. Go on ahead.”

Inside, the house/store was brimming with merchandise that I would never need, not in an eternity, lots of metal trays and plastic goblets, lava lamps and gurgling babydolls, toy trucks and paper cocktail napkins printed with silly jokes, the sum of it made in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka. Nothing in the store was singular. Every item came by the dozen.

I was fondling an Apollo moon-shot commemorative tumbler when Mrs. Brown came in. “You’ve got some of everything in here,” I said to her.

She laughed and explained how her husband used to go on shopping sprees at wholesale outlets in Reno and Las Vegas every now and then. The store was his hobby. The Browns had lived in
Herlong for thirty-eight years, long enough to feel as if they owned the town, and though they were retired at present, they liked to keep busy.

They had originally moved to California from Louisiana so that Mr. Brown could work at the army depot, and he had stayed with the work through the decades, while Mrs. Brown had raised their children, all eleven of them, nine girls and two boys, who were between twenty and forty-two. She was as proud of them as a mother could be. They were dispersed around the San Francisco Bay Area now and had solid, professional careers. There was even a Correctional Officer Brown.

Mr. Brown was still sitting quietly in his lawn chair, keeping to the shade. He studied the desert scrub and the electrified fences and listened to the cars going by and to the scream of military jets as they streaked through the sky. He’d had a stroke, Emma Brown said, and she hated to leave him alone. I was reminded of how we make up our world from what we have at hand, from the things that drop into our laps from the junkyard of existence.