9781532050541

I am eighty-three now, yet my memories of those days on the Klamath River are as vivid and real to me as the accumulating age spots on my hands or the creeping pain in my knees as I climb the stairs. I recently drove down from the Canadian line to Los Angeles on Interstate 5 in my son’s khaki-green Range Rover. What a glorious trip! I am so intimately familiar with the entire expanse of this great, variedly beautiful and truly magnificent land that driving trips anywhere almost always result in a flood of pungent memories gathered over a lifetime of exploring the obvious and the hidden ways of this country and its peoples. As I said, for some time now, I had been toying with writing a book about our adventures on the Klamath River which began when I was just a month past my fifth birthday and this recent long “road trip” across the country solidified the need to actively start writing. This is a true story of a family, who in 1939, ventured from its safe nest in “Indian Country” in Oklahoma to “Indian Country” in Northern California to gold mine and back again. It is told through the eyes of a five-year-old girl and her father as they lived it with perceptions added by her eighty-three-year-old adult who also lived it. Life and times like these no longer exist!

At that time in our lives, we lived in “Indian Country.” In 1939, the area on the border between Northeast Oklahoma and Northwest Arkansas still had a wildness about it that savored its Oklahoma Territory days.

It was, after all, the land where the Cherokee Trail of Tears dropped many of its tattered and shaken traffic of human survivors. It was the land where the five civilized tribes were dumped. It was the land where Zeke Proctor, one of my ancestors, who was the only individual person with whom the federal government ever signed a treaty, prowled in the service of his culture and his people. Jessie James and Belle Starr had sought their kind of justice against the encroaching railroads and corporations for the common people in this part of a world being trampled by industrialization and big business. In the world of my childhood, these “outlaws” were still heroes. I remember how my family bragged that we had an uncle, a banker, who had been shot by Jesse James. Their response always – “Damn fool to draw a gun on Jesse!”

My small world in Oklahoma was inhabited by a people who were quite willing to accept Christianity and go to church – actually, church was fun. And, underneath the Western clothes and Western ways of the white nation, almost underground if you will, was another whole world. This was the world of the Cherokee, the Muskogee, the Chickasaw and the Cree. Everyone was Indian! We just didn’t talk about it. It was “assumed.” We had to cope with the dominant culture. We didn’t have to “live” it or agree with it. Even our form of Christianity, I later learned after we left, had been assimilated into the basic “knowings” of our Indian people.

For us, the rules were:

1) Honor the Creator.

2) Honor all Creation.

3) Be of Service.

4) Preserve the culture, even if underground.

We all lived by these four tenets even when they were unspoken. Honor, respect, honesty and humility were integrated in our life and everyone was “family,” whether they knew it or not. We were one with all creation. That’s just the way it was and my five-year-old assumed that it was the way the world was – and it was for us – then.

In this underground, more basic world, if you will, the “old ways” were very much alive and well. Everyone I knew hunted and gathered from the abundance of the natural world around us. Everyone came to my great-grandmother for healing. Everyone accepted without mentioning or question that all people were one with one another and with all creation and that we were here to honor the Creator, honor all creation and to serve. It never occurred to anyone around me to ignore that we all were spiritual beings, living in a spiritual world created by the Creator for us all and everyday was an opportunity to give thanks and be grateful for everything we had. Everyone knew that honesty was good and that people who were dishonest could not be trusted – no matter who they were. Humility and spirituality were never spoken of – in fact, we had no words – they were lived. The unseen and unknown were our constant companions.

There was an underlying assumption shared by almost everyone around me that to live in community, harmony, and balance was the natural order of the world. Oh, of course, some people forgot that natural order sometimes or were “misguided.” Yet, there was always an assumption that they knew how to behave and had either forgotten or were “not brought up in a good way.” There were no “takers” in our small community in Oklahoma. Everyone tried to see that we all got what we needed and strived to give or give back what they could to maintain the natural balance. Maintaining the natural balance was of utmost importance – even my five-year-old knew that.

It was from this “warm bath” of a world that my father, mother and I decided that we would take an indefinite leave of absence from his work, sell all we had, and try our hand at gold mining on the Klamath River in California, which was somewhere way beyond anything we knew or had visited. I say “we” because that’s the way things were done in my family. Even though I was very young, I was always in on the discussions and the decision to undertake this adventure was clearly a family decision. My memories of our trip and our time on the Klamath reach deep into my psyche and strongly impacted who I became and who I am today. My desire to write about a time long gone and heroic people who shaped a time and a place had long since been percolating within my being. I had even gone so far as to have my father dictate his memories of the trip before he died over thirty years ago. I had feared that I had lost the tape in moving until I had discovered that I had the transcription of those tapes on paper. But, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, the present. On this recent trip down Interstate 5, I could feel the excitement building as we left Grants Pass and pushed south into California. We had spent the night in Grants Pass after deciding that we would rather stop to see a movie we wanted to see, Life as a House, in some town, any town we were passing through rather than try to push on farther that evening. As it turned out, there had been a heavy snow that night on the pass and we had made the right decision. We were cozy and warm with a fire in the fireplace of the spacious rooms of an off-season, cut-rate executive suite in a grand motel while the December storm spun and raged around us. When we checked out that morning, we were told that chains had been required on the pass the night before and that morning and we should be cautious.

“Not with my son’s Range Rover,” I commented. “It’s all-wheel drive all the time.” I felt somewhat smug in his choice of a vehicle and very grateful that he had lent it to us for this winter trip. We had driven from Big Bear Lake, California. As we acquainted ourselves with the Range Rover, we carefully maneuvered it around the icy horseshoe turns of the back way down the mountain, emerging relieved as we transitioned from high mountains to the desert in only 20 minutes, driving through nature’s daily light show of afternoon shadows, deep-purple and muted, peaceful reds moving over the undulating desert sandstone. Then, at Victorville, we caught the interstate, which would take us all the way to Montana. After we went through a crowded and irritating Las Vegas, we entered the peace of the “scenic drive” country, crossed a corner of Arizona and then moved up the magnificent width of Utah into Montana, paralleling the mountains on our right almost all the way. I never cease to marvel at the breathtaking beauty, the changing land and the splendors of every dance of light and shadows as the earth offers up its secret beauty specific to each hour of the day or the moonlit night. The drive of fifteen hours is never too long, for the land soothes and entertains the whole time if we remember to allow it to do so. The earth massages the eyes, relieving tense muscles in neck and shoulders. The sounds and smells of the land return the ears, nose and skin to the stress-less vortex of their existence, taking nothing, giving all.

After meetings in Montana, we headed west on Interstate 90. The Clark Fork River was our guide and companion through a breathless land that defies human description demanding that it be taken on its own terms or ignored completely. To try to describe it is an arrogance only the foolhardy or unaware would attempt. I never doze or leave a state of mindful presence while going through it, fearful that some natural awareness might go unnoticed and not be recorded in the secret beauty of my memory. The lushness of orange-pocked, pewter lichen challenges the black-green of the pines and the firs for a definition of green. Mottled, verdant valleys and mammoth, precipitous passes ricochet and reverberate in my brain. Then Coeur d’Alene – a gigantic oasis of water holding the lifeblood of a land in sacred safety, through Spokane and on to the desert-like wheat lands – flat, dry and seemingly uninteresting unless you open more than your eyes. How powerful the starkness, punctuated by lava outcroppings scattered here and there as if dropped by a celestial shaker not unlike the “comma shaker” my college freshman roommate used on her term papers. Yet, these are massive “punctuations” dropped on a land to give definition to its seeming plainness. I drove through this land after Mount St. Helens had blown her top. It was a dreamscape of white mystery. Volcanic ash covered everything. The familiar land of golden wheat fields, patches of irrigated, deep-green alfalfa, and black lava rock were all smothered in a thick, whitish gravy of gray ash. Even the houses, barns and farm implements had been turned into ghosts. The cows were no longer Hereford, Angus or Jersey. They were apparitions of partially deflated parachutes suspended above the gray-white ground with entwined strings for legs that hung down, not seeming to touch reality. Only attenuated movements defined them from their dreamscapes. Little furrows of volcanic ash gave definition to the sides of the road which flowed due west, a black snake separated from and exposed by its ash-white surroundings.

This present trip was not like it had been after Mount St. Helens exploded. My flat land of subtle tones, golden wheat stubble, charcoal earth and slate-colored, life-giving waters was as I remembered it. It had returned to itself. Just when I began to tire of the flatness, and the subtlety of the dried colors of the winter-sleeping terrain, the road plunged precipitously down to the Columbia River. Eons of silent persistent flowing water have carved a gorge so deep and wide that seeing it is always a welcome reminder of the patience of water and that the water and the rocks have been here long before we arrived and will remain long after our passing. As my old ones have said to me, “The rocks and the water have much to teach us if we can learn silently and expectantly to listen with all our being.” There is a comfort with that knowing coupled with an inescapable uneasiness as we plunge into and crawl out of the gorge along with other cars, trucks and campers who will occupy this place in space no longer than we will and probably never again with us. There is always something unsettling about being reminded about just how finite we are and how eternal the rocks of the gorge remain, unrelated to, yet one with us.

On to Ellensburg, a surprising oasis that opens us to the promise of the green just beyond and the quiet power of Snoqualmie Pass. What a relieving pass – gradual on both sides, wide roads, no precipitous drops – and beauty, just beauty (except, perhaps, for the clear-cut areas and even they have the hastening beauty of coming back. Oh the promise of regeneration!) With the accompaniment of the crashing, falling, rushing rivers, we cross over into the lushness of Western Washington.

On this trip, we have come to join in ceremonies with the Cherokees who have been displaced from their homeland to the westernmost part of our country. They have banded together to participate in the ceremonies, practice the language, guard and pass on the wisdom, and preserve the Cherokee culture. Our being there is supportive to them and supportive to us as we link back with our ancient ancestors and the wisdom which has always been carefully preserved and protected, though remaining hidden until the prophesized time to share it with a world in desperate longing for its truth.

Then to Orcas Island, that gem of perfection nestled in the Puget Sound as part of the San Juan Islands, home to a living Northwest Indian heritage and named after the elusive and often misunderstood Orca whales. Orcas is a lush, healing haven for all who come there and we always want to linger longer. After a painfully too short stay, we leave Orcas on the ferry, making our way through pale winter flat fields that soon would be covered with rioting splashes of shameless color, as spring ushers in and empties in waves of tulips, evolving into the fullness of berries. Passing these lush, flat fields, we come to the static four-lane rope of Interstate 5 that will pull us all the way to Los Angeles.

So, when we reached Grants Pass on this particular trip and we rose not too early as is our style – rolling out about nine and getting on the road about ten (we always say we will get an “early start” and have discovered 10 a.m. is an early start for us), all seemed as it should be. The storm had passed and sunlight ricocheted off the fresh snow, bounced into our rested eyes and faces, and welcomed the new day. Leaving late has its advantages. The road was plowed and mostly clear, banks of snow were pushed up on either side defining our passage through the pass. We tried to avoid the big trucks spraying slush, rocks and mush on this clear, sunny day. Avoiding more windshield pits took some maneuvering and resulted in many fingerprints on the glass as we held to the belief that our hands on the glass could prevent a chipping disaster.

I like to navigate and am usually pretty good at it if I do say so myself. It’s not that we need much navigation, knowing that one can go all the way from Canada to L.A. on Interstate 5. The truth is, I love maps. I love having the bigger picture embedded with all the small details. Maps, when they’re well made and accurate, of course, are my dear friends. My current favorite is an atlas made for truckers that has laminated indestructible pages. No amount of use seems to phase it in the least. Unlike a road atlas for common mortals, this one for truckers has big, readable, laminated page maps and details – details I never could have imagined that I might need, or frankly, never do need. Yet, these details have increased my travel need quotient for details considerably. I carry this truckers’ atlas with me on all my road trips.

After we cleared the pass and started the easy descent, I pulled out “the atlas.”

“Let’s see where we are.” I said. “And see if we have any more passes while we’re coping with this front.” We had seen on the weather report the night before that there was a possibility that a heavy storm front would be stretching from the Oregon-California border in the north to Los Angeles in the south. I was hoping that our passage on Interstate 5 wouldn’t involve too many mountain passes if we had to deal with such a large and intense storm front. A quick glance at the map immediately told me that we had not cleared all our passes and would have more mountains ahead of us.

Since Pete, my manager, was driving, I had time for map play and I decided that I needed to locate us in time and space – for myself, of course.

“So, you’ve never been to the Redwoods?” I asked for the umpteenth time. I found it incredulous that Pete, who had traveled so much and traveled with me so much, had never been to the Redwoods – any Redwoods. I, on the other hand, was intimate with every patch of Redwoods, great or small, that was in any way legally (or sometimes not legally) accessible.

To say I love the Redwoods is so flat, so unimbued with my reality as to be almost recklessly meaningless. I love the Redwoods like a familiar lover who knows all the folds and flows of my body, tenderly reaching out to stroke back life into hidden places that have gone untouched by daily living. I love the Redwoods because I know the presence of God in a unique way when they encircle me with a meditative stillness that eagerly listens for my soul to speak. I love the Redwoods for having seen a history in their rings of growth and holding it in majestic silence to transmit it to those who risk opening their soul to hearing what we can never know. I love the Redwoods because the silence of their standing movement heals wounds I have yet to comprehend. I love the Redwoods because they never cease to remind me of the alive fullness I feel in being a lover and having that love infinited back to me. I love the Redwoods, for in the Redwoods, I have no question about the practice of the presence of God in all my comings and goings. For me, the Redwoods and the nearness of God are one and the same. I love the Redwoods.

How could someone so close to me not know the Redwoods? They are as integral to my essence as life itself. To know me must mean to know the Redwoods. Pete must just mean that he hasn’t met them in person yet.

With the knowledge of a “Redwood non-knowing” person sitting in the car next to me, I started scouring the map trying to spot the nearest Redwood grove. Maybe there was an accessible stand of Redwoods near enough to the highway that we could make a small detour. We were in a hurry and I know that “The practical shall always be in the service of the important,” so I looked for Redwoods.

Then, I spotted it – The Klamath River! Yreka and Eureka! – the towns that were for me the beginning of the Klamath River Road. Seventy-five years melted into nothing as I gently put my fingers on the map and traced the road along the Klamath River as if the map could transmit memories through mere touch. A flood of images infused my being as my fingers moved slowly, carefully along the line of the river . . . Happy Camp . . . Clear Creek . . . Eureka. The tug of the Klamath River was so strong for me that when we breezed by the turnoff for the river, speeding straight down Interstate 5, I felt my body pulled so intensely to the right, down the ramp, away from the Interstate, and onto the Klamath River Road that I found myself dazed in disbelief that the green Range Rover had continued straight ahead down the interstate.

It was then that I knew, as I approached eighty-years-old, the time had come to share a history and experiences no longer known or even imagined. As I said, my father had dictated and I had transcribed his memories of that trip, that brave and precious adventure. Even the fact that we did what we did when we did it at all says so much about my family, who we were, and how we encountered, embraced, and plunged into life. And, even more importantly, it is a story and a history about a time and place that is no more. It is about ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives while being extraordinary people living lives that were ordinary in that time in history. It is about the lives and souls of a people and of a place inextricably intertwined in their separateness. These Tales of the Klamath are the real life adventures of a family that dared to live fully. These memories, so vivid and clear, transport us to people and lives not even imaged or thought about in today’s world, yet precious in their existence. Unlike grave markers, these memories are the living testimony of a land and a people who deserve to be remembered the way they were.

I have my father’s memory of the trip, dictated before he died. I have the clear and amazingly vivid, still sensory memory of a barely five-year-old, toe-headed blonde, little girl who lived in cowboy boots (my feet were too narrow for the children’s shoes available in 1939), my “cowgirl costume” sewn out of black and white cotton, patterned to look like the skin of a paint horse or a Holstein cow and fringed around the knees. My cowgirl costume consisted of a short, knee-length culotte shirt with a matching vest and, along with a six-shooter holster and belt, was a birthday present from my mother for my fifth birthday shortly before we left to go gold mining. My six-shooter was slung on my left hip facing backwards so I could easily reach across with my right hand, after some practice, being able to twirl it and be ready for action. I still have the cowgirl outfit.

And then, there is the memory and perception of the woman I have become who has lived much and well with my eighty-three-year-old perceptions, who has studied others and studied herself, observed family patterns and raised her own family, worked with people who were so controlled that they were afraid to allow any change in their routine and those whose impulsive, restless abandon fractured their lives and that of those around them. I have looked deeply into others and myself, lived intensely in nature and drunk happily and painfully of life, its simplicity and its complexity and I treasure all its aspects. These “tales” then, will be an interweaving of that little girl, that woman and the man who shaped her life as her father as well as those memories shared in loving musings with her long dead mother over the years as we looked back together over this time.

Perhaps that time and those people will, then, never be forgotten and the history and lives of the people of the Ozarks and those of the Klamath River in California can be a part of those who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone who knew another way, in another time, and will bring forward a wisdom sorely needed of roots and lives and ways of being with all life.