What I Saw by Christine Beebe

I'm driving along the rugged California coast on my way to visit my friend Cynthia.  She's a talented writer whose dedication to her craft and enthusiasm for life has again beckoned the Gaviota Writers to come together for a morning of sharing, connection, and rejuvenation.  

We are a small but varied group and as we arrive, we'll exchange greetings and mingle.  Some will hug and others might be introduced as newcomers, then we'll settle in under the sheltering sprawl of a gnarled oak tree.  We'll take turns reading aloud the words we've each crafted into a story, an essay, a memoir or a song, and time will begin to slow.  There will be trust, appreciation and acceptance, as we listen closely to stories that are often deeply personal, exposing vulnerable bits of our humanity, reminding us that we're not alone on this conflicted planet.

A moody gray sky is hovering low this morning over a steely sea, and I slowly navigate the twisty road as it dips in and out of small canyons.  I veer around potholes and pass a sign that cautions:  "Cattle on Road."  Thick tendrils of fog reach up the cliffs from the ocean below and drift slowly across the road.  I ease through a sharp blind turn, and suddenly I'm upon them.

Three hulking black steers fill my windshield, and the sight of them causes me to inhale and brake sharply.  They are plodding deliberately in single file along the edge of the pavement, and they appear identical.  Their mud-caked hooves move in unison and their lowered blocky heads swing from side to side, as if choreographed.  Steam rises from their hairy hides and disappears into the fog. 

I don't stop, yet each detail remains inked into my vision.  It's not that I'd come close to hitting them, or even that I'd been unprepared. It's something else . . . it feels like an omen.  Three.  Not two, not one, but three.  In a perfect line, head to tail, as black as obsidian.  

I glance repeatedly into my rearview mirror even after they're out of sight, but by the time I turn onto Cynthia's road, I've forgotten them.  

Hours later, when the last of our group's written words has been spoken aloud and our gathering has ended, I head for home.  I brake at the stop sign where the road T-bones into the 101 Freeway.  I focus on my left turn across two lanes of speeding southbound traffic as it approaches from around a bend, then visualize where I will merge into the lanes of speeding northbound traffic.  

And now I'm moving north in tandem with cars and big rigs and horse trailers, away from the ocean and through the abrupt dark blink of the Gaviota Tunnel.  The freeway climbs over the pass and descends into the valley, between undulating hills of stubborn chapparal and ancient oaks.  

I'm driving fast in the slow lane, feeling light and blissful and a little more hopeful about everything in general.  It was a delightful morning, the sun has just emerged, and the afternoon seems full of possibilities.  

***

In my reverie, gaze fixed on the horizon, I don't register what I see until I've already passed it.  A dark shape in the dirt, in the weedy stubble at the very edge of the asphalt.  At first, I'm not sure what I've just seen.  But now my mind is reconstructing it, and I begin to see an image appearing and sharpening - like my black and white photos emerged many years ago when I swirled them in a bath of chemical developer.

And now I know it was a human being, a man, sitting hunched low to the ground, a grayish-black hoodie pulled down over most of his face.  He was motionless, facing the traffic, close enough to feel a slipstream slap from every passing car. 

I hurriedly voice-dial 911, but the operator begins to sound bored as soon as I describe the man and his location.  He's homeless, she tells me, and they've received calls about him before.  I find myself breathlessly repeating to her how dangerously close he's sitting to the edge of the freeway, but she remains unimpressed.  She'll send an officer out to check on him, she says.

As I continue my journey home, I can't stop thinking about the man.  How did he get out there in the open countryside in the first place?  What was his story?  

And then I have an unplanned mental segue, and find myself revisiting my African safari from several years ago.  My Tanzanian guide Isaac noticed how much time I was spending behind the viewfinder of my fancy new camera.  "Just LOOK at the animals," he whispered to me.  "Don't take so many pictures!  Use your eyes!"

When I took his advice, a large family of elephants materialized before me there in the shade of a monstrous baobab tree.  I could hear them, smell them, and see their trunks swinging, ears fanning, mothers nurturing their fragile babies.  They were wild and free.  I was witnessing a scene as timeless as Africa itself, and I wept from the intensity of emotion that swept over me like a tsunami.

As Mary Oliver wrote: "Pay attention.  Be astonished.  Tell about it." 

That man beside the freeway.  What was he looking at?  Did his view of the world ever give him joy or cause him to catch his breath in amazement? Could he tell someone about it?  Would anyone ever listen?

And then I inexplicably find myself remembering those three black steers, focusing on the path directly ahead of them, lumbering into a future they could never anticipate.

She Ran Past Mystic Lake (by Christine Elizabeth Beebe)

My Great-Grandmother Elizabeth Schlador was born in 1881 on a ranch in Bittercreek, Texas.  She was the first of Samuel and Maria Schlador’s ten children.  The ranch was located along the route of the great Texas cattle drives, and cattle ranching was her father’s business.  The family home was a large two-story adobe with verandas on all sides, mulberry trees, and a fireplace outside where the family would shuck and cook corn.  I remember hearing Elizabeth describe these details with clarity even though she left Texas when she was a child. 

She lived for 102 years, a wise and stalwart family matriarch, and she often told me tales from her long-ago past.  There was one story in particular that she told many times, although her words would falter and catch with each telling.  She usually started by closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. 

“I ran as fast as I could,” she’d begin, with a slow shake of her head.  But as I would listen to her, I could hardly imagine this well-padded ancient woman, who could barely rise from her wingback chair unassisted, ever having run anywhere.  Had she really ever been young?  As long as I could remember, she’d always been old.

“It was ten miles to town and I ran the whole way,” she’d continue, and I would sometimes glimpse a brief mirage image of a wisp of a girl in long skirts, legs propelling her down the road.  And then the young girl’s face in my imagination would be replaced with the old woman’s deeply crevassed dumpling visage, the girl’s slim legs morphing back into the swollen blue-veined pillars in support stockings before me.

“I ran till I had no more breath left in me,” she would say, “and still I ran.”

When Elizabeth was five years old, she moved with her family from Texas to the sleepy pueblo town of Los Angeles. Her father built a hotel on Broadway, near the terminus of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad Station. When trains arrived, he met visitors from the East and drove them to his hotel in a horse-drawn carriage. He reportedly enjoyed being a “man about town” in his black top hat and tuxedo, but her mother didn’t appreciate having to stay behind at the hotel, scrubbing floors and managing the children. Elizabeth was called upon regularly to help her mother clean hotel rooms and care for her younger siblings.

The hotel was a success and the family continued to grow, but within a few years, an old injury began to trouble her father. Back in Texas, he’d accidentally shot himself in the leg while herding cattle, and the wound had never fully healed. Doctors now wanted to amputate, but there were rumors of a valley called Moreno east of Los Angeles that was renowned for its therapeutic hot springs. In 1897, he decided to move his large family there, where he would return to his ranching roots and attempt to heal his infected leg in the curative waters.

He acquired 300 acres in Moreno Valley, land that had once been part of the major Spanish land grant called Rancho San Jacinto Nuevo, and the Schlador family journeyed there in a horse-drawn covered wagon loaded with their belongings. In addition to the hot springs, there was a large lake adjacent to where they settled, called Mystic Lake.

“The lake was so big,” Elizabeth would say, “I thought I would drown in it!” She recalled that they lived in tents when they first arrived, and that it was very primitive. In the early years, her father hunted ducks and rabbits for meat, and she remembered that one time he shot a crane for the family’s Christmas dinner. They raised cattle, chickens and other farm animals, planted grain, fruit and vegetables, and ate what they grew.

Her father built a framed ranch house and outbuildings in the low foothills of the badlands overlooking the San Jacinto Valley to the south. The main house was L-shaped and contained a living room and kitchen in one wing, the parents’ bedroom in the center, and a dormitory for the children in the other wing. Elizabeth said he also built an adobe “milk house” to keep milk, butter and eggs cool.

Many years after my great-grandmother’s death, I found myself researching my family history and came upon an archaeologist named Rachel, who was writing an extensive report on the history of the ranch. She was advocating for the curation and preservation of a unique adobe ruin along with some large farm equipment found on the site. The ruin turned out to be the only physical remnant of the Schlador Ranch that survives today, and it was once part of the milk house Elizabeth had described. I gazed at the photographs Rachel sent me: there it was, the weathered adobe-walled structure, and in the distance I could glimpse the ephemeral glitter of a shrinking Mystic Lake.

Rachel was eager to hear the stories my great-grandmother once told, remarking that it was exciting to know that the family had once lived in an adobe house in Texas. “It adds credence to the idea that the adobe ruin was part of your family’s ranch,” she said, “especially since we don’t see adobe structures elsewhere in the region.”

Rachel’s associates had interviewed a few of my distant relatives who’d remained in the Moreno area, and she revealed details I’d been unaware of. By the mid-1900’s, years of drought had created disastrous conditions for farmers in the area, but Elizabeth’s father had seen it coming. He created new opportunities by constructing a 2-story brick building in the center of the town of Moreno that housed a general store, soda fountain and pool hall. He built a gas station, restaurant, and post office, and became the town’s postmaster.

I then told Rachel some of the oral history my great grandmother had shared about her earlier years at the ranch. But as we began to review the names and birthdates of Elizabeth’s siblings, Rachel said: “Her mother must have had her hands full, with all those nine children.” I told her that there had been ten, but she was adamant that her census data had revealed only nine.

I reminded her that data didn’t always reveal every truth, and then I told her what happened that day on the Schlador Ranch, the day my great-grandmother could never forget.

The hot Santa Ana winds had begun to blow early that fall morning, and tumbleweeds careened across the dry fields. After breakfast, Elizabeth’s father and four of her brothers had headed out to a distant part of the ranch to mend fences. Her mother and four sisters had ridden into the town of Moreno by horse-drawn carriage to shop for provisions. Sixteen-year old Elizabeth was left behind at the ranch to do chores as she kept an eye on 3-year-old Albert, the youngest of the Schlador children. She remembered his mop of blond hair, blue eyes and boundless energy, and that she often had carried him around on her hip when he was a baby.

Elizabeth had been hanging wet linens on the clothesline when the child began jumping out of a barn window down onto a bale of hay, screaming with laughter. Then, as she paused to watch him, clothespins in hand, a smile frozen on her face, she saw him misjudge his landing and come down hard upon a broken wagon wheel, a bent spoke driving deep into his stomach.

“It was up to me to get help,” she would say. “Poor little tyke, he laid there all alone. And by the time I returned with Mama, it was too late.”

“You see,” I told Rachel, “I am certain there were ten children. I know because my great-grandmother told me.”

And in that moment, I could clearly picture my Great-Grandmother Elizabeth as a terrified teenager. Her brown pigtails were flying out behind her, unraveling in the wind as sweat poured down the back of her neck. Her face was flushed, her breath coming in gasping wheezes. She held up her long dark skirts as she ran, her racing feet furiously churning up dust down the rutted road, past Mystic Lake, and all the way to town.

She was running to get help for her little brother Albert. She was running as fast as she could.