Island of Times Past
Part One: Lessons from my Big Brother.
Written 9/19/23
My brother died, not yesterday,
though it seems so.
That is, some X plus Y number for days
or weeks, either way
where N is too soon a passage to count.
in his sleep wind came,
filling his sail as he floated off shore, away.
Waves alapping, lapping.
Meanwhile, he shows up
while I sleep upon a liquid-filled couch,
(Dog curled at my feet)
to show me how to set the timing on my old truck,
Showing up, some time passing
across the lake of a long night.
Or, to put it another way:
During what turned out to be, and unexpectedly so, our last conversation before he floated away, we weighed a heavy anchor from Memory’s waters and sailed off to the old home port of Recollection, a place he and I could be the last souls to recall.
This place was an island in the middle of California's Lake Almanor, in reality, Almanor is a reservoir. Man made, they say.
Before the reservoir, before the dam, completed the same year as the Panama Canal, and same the year the world went to war upon the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and the year nearby Lassen Peak blew, 1914, this island was a hilltop above a narrow Feather River valley, then called Green Meadows, between the towns of Chester and Greenville. That is, before the waters washed over a Maidu village, whose name we do not now know.
Not long ago, I looked for the island from the Heavens’ view of Google Earth. The satellite view. I saw not so much as even an atoll. Gone, I presumed, washed away, I thought, by wavelets I remember slapping at its shore, and likely eroded to oblivion. “Gone,” I said, aloud. “Must be gone.”
Our dad had this boat we trailered to the lake, an old plywood and mahogany cabin cruiser with two finicky outboard motors, and so it was with this vessle, the family sailed out to the island where we set up a camp, Dad always wearing a jaunty skipper’s cap.
Four of us: Mom, Dad, Brother, Myself, age 8. Sister Jean was then faraway, then married, working in Washington DC for the FDA. She was there in name though, as Jeanie was the name our dad had registered as the name of our boat.
On that island we had August days and nights of starlight, a camp fire and smoke to ourselves, having gone Native in our bathing suits, a little world with a daytime view of the expanse of water before a backdrop of the faded blue sfumato range of South Cascade peaks, looming over a distant shore beyond the sparkling sheen. The most prominent of those peaks, the still snow-capped Lassen, that most eastern and southern volcano of the proverbial Pacific Ring of Fire, then as now, awaiting another day’s eruption.
We walked the island’s shore pocketing the Maidus’ arrowheads. We cast fishing lines and reeled in trout from the trunk of a downed centuries-old Ponderosa Pine, once a silver grandmother tree that had gone gray, died, then fell, splashing into the very waters that drowned her roots, later becoming both our boat dock and fishing pier.
To my way of thinking, my brother was practically an adult. I think seventeen, and way more athletic than I would ever be. He had an instinct for building things I would never have.
From driftwood and debris he collected, he built a raft, rope-lashed atop three truck tire tubes we had brought with us. While that would be good enough for Jim and Huckleberry Finn, that was not the end of the project.
My brother set a mast in the center, and rigged a sail out of a bamboo fiber mat from Jeanie’s deck.
With the camp ax, he carved an oar out of a plank that could have floated up from an old miner's shack the reservoir had inundated. Another found scrap of plywood became a keel board he dropped trough a slot on the deck.
Kee-ill? What’s that? What deoes it keeil I did not know.
My brother’s lesson here was that without a keel, the raft would only wobble and drift directionless under the sail.
I knew nothing, nothing of direction. Nothing of stability in wind. My brother somehow knew everything about the physics of navigation, wind and stability upon water.
We shoved off. We circumnavigated the island maybe three times, each trip around taking another thin slice of geologic time that tick-tocks off the timing of floods, quakes and volcanic eruptions, all the time Lassen’s peak appearing and disappearing at the bends around the island. From windward, to leeward. Windward, leeward.
We broke off from that. Later, I decided to shove off on my own. Solo . Taking my brother’s hand hewn oar in my hands, I paddled away, dipping the oar on one side, then the other to steer a course.
In these mountains, the wind likes to awaken the afternoons. There is where these winds caught the sail, filling it, and blowing my skiff toward the dark open waters, in the direction of the volcano.
So, now blowing, blowing, the wind blowing with no way to turn back.
This wind blew stronger than what I was able paddle against. I set down the oar. I grasped the mast. I gave tbat stake a shake, and another shake. I yanjed on the sail, My struggles and my panic would not bring either mast or sail down, down and out of menacing wind.
I hollered for a rescue. Our mom and dad stood on the shore, beside my bother, the parents showing grave concerns in the creased configurations of their faces, and widening eyes. My dad pushed back the brim of his skippers cap with one hand, while holding in the other the beer can at his side.
The wind blowing, blowing, with no way to turn back. Blowing the raft, blowing my cries for help further out.
My brother sprang from shore's edge. Dove and thrashed through the drink. Legs and feet kicking up a froth behind him. Arms ablur, churning the water before him, sparkling ribbons flinging off his elbows, the bicepts plunged and rose, plunged and rose, his head flipping left to right, left, right, shoulder to shoulder, his mouth opening wide and closing shut in sync, chug-a-lugging one gasping breath after each gasping breath.
Meanwhile, the wind drove the raft further, toward a bleak unswimable expanse. My eyes set then on the receding shore, where my parents stood, and with the felt presence volcano on my bare back.
Fortunately, though, the shore was not receding at a rate greater than my brother's swimming. He was gaining. When his hands hit the deck, he pulled himself dripping on board, took down the sail and mast, and paddled us back to the safety of the shore.
Today the safe shore is now submerged, I believe, with these recollections, and with the foundations of the Maidu’s homes. Memory's port-of-call, now under the waters of our pasts, and at the same time in the pastness under our present.
The volcano asleep.