or six, then I perceived by sharp light and shadows. If a child bonds with places explored at this tender age, and those bonds anchor her, then I chose textures and tones of dryness over humidity, expanses that embraced distance over both skyscraper and temperate forests.
So when my father, nearing fifty years of age, decided to return to Washington, D.C. to try again, I told my parents to leave me behind. We had visited his family there; I wanted no more of it.
But a seven-year-old has little choice short of running away. If I could gather sunlight and stones, if I could keep Pacific Ocean water from spilling or drying up, then home could come with me.
Sifting through memory’s remains—of words spoken, decisions made, actions taken—feels like the work of imagination in hindsight. The scaffolding that ordered my world stood on happenstance. That because my father decided we’d drive across country in a leased Cadillac, roomy and comfortable enough for four; because he chose to stop at national parks on the way—because of these things I stood at that edge, a small child with a Kodak Instamatic in hand.
Those moments at Point Sublime illuminated a journey of and to perception, another way of measuring a world I was part of yet leaving behind. I felt no “troubled sense of immensity” but wonder—at the dance of light on rock, at ravens and white-throated swifts untethered from Earth, at a serenity unbroken.
The ocean I’d tried to bring across country had evaporated. Sunlight wouldn’t be contained. But pebbles came willingly. Limestone joined basalt, sandstone, and granite on the rear window mat. Images of the canyon, Kaibab Plateau forest, and Colorado River thickened the growing stack of postcards.
EROSIVE FORCES CARVED the North Rim’s edge. My family crossed many edges that summer. West to East. One childhood home left for another. Before to after. History began for me on The Move. What preceded was a sense of infinite promise and possibility in a world that made sense. What followed promised nothing. Daddy hoped the nearing future would be a return to origins and dignity. My soon constant question to him, “When are we going home?” always met the same response: “We are home.”
My bearings lay in memories of bright days, in snapshots and postcards, stones and a salt-encrusted jar. By the age of ten I knew it was better not to want anything too badly.
I’ve tried to return to Point Sublime many times. Fire danger and an impassable road aborted all but two attempts. The wooden post still stands, but without the carved sign that marked our presence in a photograph from that distant morning. POINT SUBLIME ELEVATION 7464. Three of us face morning light; our shadows stretch toward the edge, oblique dark columns. Dad leans against the sign, his mouth caught in midsentence. Cissie stands next to him, her Uncle Chip. In front of them, in pressed pants and first-grade uniform blouse and sweater, a child looks down and away. She waits for the shutter to click.
Good morning, yesterday. Gazing into this image, I see us as my mother did—then beyond, toward the abyss. I know our future.
Now my father’s age then, I am a witness from a later time checking the rearview mirror. Most of my life has taken place in the East for reasons that at moments of decision seemed right. It’s impossible to step into that bright summer morning again, attentive to it, to parents alive, to an intact family drawn by hope and promise. Point Sublime remains. I still try to negotiate its terrain.
Seven years old on a sun-bright June day, she stands by the curio shop’s postcard rack. In their move across country her parents have visited many national parks—Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Zion, the Grand Canyon’s North Rim—and at every stop made, for gassing up or seeing sights, she runs first to the postcard rack. Turning through metallic squeaks she seeks more images of home, a vision grown beyond California’s coast to canyons, deserts, and mountains of her West. These places must come east, too.
Ten cents a card. She takes selected treasures to the cashier: Point Imperial at sunrise; goldening aspen groves; layered, dusklit canyon walls; brick-red river against brick-red rock. Light, texture, home.
The woman behind the counter tilts her head but greets a man approaching the register. She will help him. Marlboros. Then another customer. Postcards and questions about road conditions and nearby motor courts.
The girl stands quietly, her head at counter level. These people act as if she isn’t there. Through the display glass she examines polished stones and beaded place mats under sunlit dust. The room smells stale.
Only after all others have gone does the woman behind the counter extend her hand. Six cards, sixty cents. When the girl reaches up with three quarters the woman avoids the small hand to take the coins. Cash register clinks shut. The woman turns away.
The girl starts to ask but stops as the woman faces her. At seven she doesn’t yet know contempt or refusal, and runs far into the pinewoods behind the store. That night, with all her home-cards covering the motel bed, she wonders if each bright place is enough.
SAND AND STONE are Earth’s memory. Old worn postcards keep a child’s memory safe in my desk. Stanley Kunitz wrote in his poem “The Testing-Tree” that “the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.” At a young age I began to hope that despite wounds a sense of wholeness could endure. That each of us possesses a hardness—not harshness, not severity, but the quality of stone or sand to retain some core though broken again and again.
This child-hope remained hollow of adult understanding until my second journey across country alone some years ago. After two months on the road I reached Southern California, the point of return. A threshold to memory opened in crossing the Mojave Desert to the Devil’s Punchbowl.
Steeply tilted sandstone ledges hundreds of feet high rim the Punchbowl, a “geologic curiosity” within the San Andreas Fault zone. Fluent and patient in its work, the small stream draining the rocky bowl gathers and reworks pieces of the cliffs and abutting San Gabriel Mountains, today as it has done through centuries of days. It is a tactile reminder that here is a land of process and response. From cloud to creek, the motive forces of water—the forces of weathering and erosion—and abrasive, shuddering movements along bounding faults shaped and continue to reshape the cliffs and basin. What one might perceive as timeless is but one frame of an endless geologic film.
I descended through stands of pinyon, manzanita, and mountain mahogany to wade the cooling water. To watch grain after entrained sand grain roll, bounce, and be carried aloft. Long-avoided questions emerged as the current nudged me downstream with its sediment. I was five years old when last at the Devil’s Punchbowl, on a picnic with my mother and father. Decades later the cliffs and basin still fit within memory’s frame, satisfying a wish to feel sun-warmed sandstone and this stream’s grainy flow. But perhaps I also returned to reach beyond memory to some origin, to some direction. That five-year-old had imagined these waters flowed from the beginning of the world.
Odysseus said, “I belong in the place of my departure and I belong in the place that is my destination.” I hadn’t known either place, fear stilling me for years. But the Punchbowl’s ledges, this stream, and the shaping faults seemed to re-turn me to an awareness I couldn’t reach alone. That long-ago picnic fired a child’s passion to inhabit stories the land held—stories that assumed great importance as I grew up in a family with little spoken memory.
• • •
The San Gabriel Mountains rise to ten thousand feet, jutting high above Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert.
