sonora2sonoma

By Tim Konrad

. . . the day will come . . when walking over the

surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean

trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy

a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself

from the true enjoyment of it.

Henry David Thoreau

Swimming holes used to be plentiful around Sonora when I was growing up. Nowadays, between the ‘no trespassing’ signs, barbed wire barricades, rivers inundated by water projects, parking restrictions, fire safety orders and, for a while, even COVID restrictions, what few swimming holes remain all require more effort to reach and more driving time to get to them.

         Of the three notable swimming holes on Woods Creek–Elsie’s, Mosses and White Bridge—the middle one, Mosses, was always my favorite. Generations of folks used to enjoy gathering to escape the heat of summer at these swimming holes and many stories have been shared about them. Situated about a mile south of Sonora, Mosses was the scene of many memorable outings from my teen years and beyond. Most of those memories are happy ones, save two–the time I got heatstroke from pushing my bike up the long, steep hill back to town on a blistering hot day, and the time I almost stepped on a rattlesnake while packing my stuff back to the car.

Mosses’ swimming hole sat about eighty yards upstream from where Lime Kiln Road crosses the creek. People would park their cars beside the bridge before embarking on the trail that, following the creek, lead to the destination. It was considered safe to go swimming there until about mid-July, after which the water level would drop and the creek’s ability to flush away toxins would be diminished. I learned that lesson the hard way one year when I came down with a particularly nasty flu-like illness after I’d continued swimming in the hole well into August. Over the years, as real estate boomed and more and more septic systems were installed upstream, people began going to Mosses in lesser numbers.

         It was not uncommon to find others enjoying the cool, refreshing waters of Mosses back between the 60s and the 80s. Nowadays, the parking spot has been blockaded by boulders and fenced off with an imposing array of barbed wire, reinforced with chicken wire, hog wire and seemingly anything else that was available, to underscore and emphasize the owners’ determination to make clear that no one is allowed access anymore.

That didn’t stop me, a person whose always regarded such announcements as opinions capable of interpretation. Essentially social statements, such edicts often say more about the thought processes of those who erect them than they do about sound reasoning or reasonable priorities. The fact they’re enshrined in penal codes does not in and of itself render them worthy of respect.  

         Woody Guthrie, in my opinion, was correct when he penned the lines in his song “This Land Is Your Land:”

“As I went walking I saw a sign there.

And on the sign it said ‘No Trespassing.’

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.

That side was made for you and me.”

         After all, I wasn’t interested in vandalizing the place, and if I fell and broke a leg there, I wouldn’t expect the property-owners to assume any responsibility for my carelessness. The half-inflated notion that others might react differently if it were their leg that was broken has always struck me as a long ways to go to justify supporting that sort of nonsense.

         Life can be unpredictable and dangerous. I get that! But I doubt very much that insurance companies, or lawyers, for that matter,  were among the solutions Great Spirit envisioned people would settle on to resolve that problem.

         Guthrie, it turns out, had much more in mind for his song than is generally known. Travelling around the country during the Great Depression and meeting people displaced by the Dust Bowl affected him deeply. During this period, Kate Smith had popularized Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” but Guthrie believed the song was jingoistic and failed to address the facts on the ground as he’d seen them, so he crafted ‘This Land Is Your Land’ in response.

         The first version Guthrie wrote was a sarcastic parody of Smith’s song he named “God Blessed America” but he later decided to tone it down by , in the words of Kenneth Partridge, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/585577/this-land-your-land-americas-best-known-protest-song “celebrating America’s natural splendor while criticizing the nation for falling short of its promise.”

         In one of the several “lost” verses seldom included in most published versions of the song, Guthrie wrote:

         “There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.

          The sign was painted, said ‘Private ‘Property.’

          But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.

          This land was made for you and me.”

Guthrie included the verse about private property when he first recorded the song in 1944, but that verse was subsequently lost and wasn’t re-discovered until sometime in the 1990s. The version people were familiar with for most of the latter half of the 20^th century was recorded in 1951, and did not include the ‘private property’ verse.

         Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger performed ‘This Land Is Your Land’ at Barack Obama’s pre-inauguration concert in 2009. Seeger insisted that Springsteen sing all the verses of the song.

         At any rate, I donned my “trespasser” hat during a recent trip to Sonora and analyzed the safest way to get through the Byzantine maze of wires standing in for a fence. That done, I wriggled through to the other side and traced my steps around the undergrowth, now become overgrowth in the decades since my last visit. The trail seemed longer than I had remembered and was difficult to trace in a couple of places but it finally opened up to reveal a scene much like the one preserved in my memory from back when I was a frequent visitor.

The trees had grown noticeably in my absence but everything else appeared much as it had before, save the unimaginative graffiti scrawled on the rocks. The water level was about right for the time of year, which was surprising, given our current drought conditions, but I chose to do no more than soak my feet, mindful of the memory of being sickened by swimming there too late in the season one year.

To be continued: