sonora2sonoma

A collection of short essays on my recollections of growing up in the Sierra foothills in the 1950s.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

My parents were fond of gambling. They would make the drive to Reno or Carson City several times a year for weekend getaways. Unlike my Uncle Bob, my parents were wise in how they managed their gambling. Uncle Bob had caught the gambling bug after he’d won a huge jackpot playing the dollar slots at Tahoe. Soon after, he began making ever more frequent trips from his home in San Francisco up to the casinos in hopes of scoring another big win. The odds, as they say, were against him, however, and he ended up losing the house he’d inherited from his mother over an accumulation of unpaid tax bills.

My parents, by contrast, only gambled for the fun of it. They would bring along a pre-agreed-upon amount of cash,  just for gambling, and when it was gone, they were done!

On occasion, my parents would bring me along on their junkets. I always looked forward to these excursions because I loved to travel, and the stunning drive over the Sierras never failed to excite me.

One time, when I was quite young, I was awakened by my mom and dad in the middle of the night. My mom bundled me up and we set out on an all-night drive across the mountains—a spontaneous scenery change in which we awoke to the early morning light parked in a roadside turnout the other side of Ebbett’s Pass en route to Carson City. The excitement I felt from the spontaneity of that adventure has remained with me to this day!  

My parents would often arrange for a babysitter to care for me when they went off on their trips, although I still seemed to be able to accompany them once or twice a year on such adventures. None of the later trips bore the magic of that first spontaneous adventure, however.

I enjoyed getting to come along, because it afforded the opportunity to eat out, which I’ve always loved. There were also other perks—a motel swimming pool in the warmer months, and a movie theater for kids at Harrah’s Club in Reno, where they ran old pirate movies from the 30s starring Errol Flynn and Louis Hayward. There was also a movie theater in downtown Reno, where I saw the film Elmer Gantry when I was about ten. Although I was too young to understand the more sophisticated aspects of the film, I wasn’t too young to be able to appreciate Burt Lancaster’s exceptional and powerful acting in the title role, a performance for which he won that year’s Oscar for best actor.

I was also happy when my parents chose to leave me with my Godfather, Selby Covington. Selby, and his room-mate, Jim Bishop, had a place north of town out by the Gibb’s Ranch. Selby and Jim had a big vegetable garden at their house, with all manner of different vegetables growing in it. I loved to roam through the garden marveling at all the wonderful plants, row upon row, that lined the hillside, each plant with its own reservoir beneath it to catch the water that gave it life.

Of all the skills my father possessed, and they were many, the skill of vegetable gardening was not among them. He enjoyed great success with camellias and azaleas, and we had a great rosemary bush in our back yard, but he left the growing of vegetables to others to perfect.

Our next-door neighbor down the hill, a fellow of Italian extraction, grew a garden each summer that was the pride of the neighborhood, with all the usual staples displayed in neat little rows—tomatoes, squash, corn, etc. Where our yard was shaded by large sycamore trees, his was mostly exposed, allowing the sunlight needed to produce the bountiful crops that resulted. I tried my hand one year with a small garden plot, but the only plants that made it to maturity were a couple of anemic-looking radishes. My father theorized the problem was too much shade.

I used to accompany my mother when she would purchase fresh vegetables from an older Italian woman who had a medium-sized commercial vegetable garden behind her house a mile or two out Highway 108 to the east of town. She had a glorious garden. Walking around it with my mother was, for me, a true inspiration. There was something about seeing big juicy tomatoes on the vine, huge zucchini squash lying about just waiting to be picked, and corn cobs, their tassels glowing in the morning sunlight, that excited me. I envied these peoples’ farming skills and their ability to produce their own food with such style and grace and often thought that, someday, this was something I wanted to learn how to do for myself.

One weekend, in, I believe, 1956, my parents went off on one of their gambling junkets and I went on a fishing and camping trip with Selby and Jim. We found a place to camp on the south shore of the Walker River on the east side of Sonora Pass. It was in a large meadow with a good view to the east where, it was hoped, we might be able to witness the mushroom cloud from an atmospheric nuclear test that was scheduled for the next morning.

The primary purpose of the expedition was to go fishing—something that, although I wasn’t very good at, I still loved doing in those days. My bigger hope, however, was that we would be able to see a real-life mushroom cloud. I suspect, looking back, that Selby and Jim knew the odds of that being visible from our vantage point were slim, and probably for the best, but they allowed that hope to remain alive in me until the facts on the ground proved otherwise. I remember the disappointment I experienced when I realized we weren’t going to be able to see the test, but what I recall most about that trip is a stunt Jim pulled on me early the following morning.

There had been a herd of cattle bedded down across the river the night before when we retired. I had expressed some concern over this since, while Selby & Jim planned to sleep in the bed of Selby’s pickup truck, my sleeping bag was set up on the ground. They assured me that I would be safe and that the cattle would not cross the river without warning and trample me in my sleep.

The next morning, before the sun’s first rays lit the hills to the west, I was awakened by Jim’s shouting “Get up! Get up! The cattle are crossing the river!” I leapt out of my sleeping bag and looked around, expecting at any moment to have to dodge marauding cows.

To me, Jim had always been an enigmatic person; he seemed to take pleasure in maintaining an air of mysteriousness that always left me feeling unsure of where I stood with him. He’d been the victim of a gunshot wound in Canada as a young man, and was still said to have the bullet lodged somewhere inside him, the details of which he was always a bit reticent to explain. Selby was a safer person for me to be around. A straight shooter, he didn’t play games like Jim did. When I sought reassurance, he was there to supply it. In this instance, however, Selby played along with Jim to lend an air of authenticity to his alert.

Once I was up and standing and, thanks to the jolt of adrenaline, fully awake, Jim announced, “Well, it looks like the cows changed their minds. But since you’re up anyway, you might as well start the fire.”

***

Selby had two brothers. Originally from Mississippi, all three spoke with a southern drawl. The eating habits of Southerners, my father told me, were different than those I was accustomed to in California. Where Selby came from, he explained, squirrels, opossums, and rabbits were considered to be, if not haute cuisine, perfectly acceptable substitutions.

I won a baby duckling at the carnival one summer when I was around eleven. For a short while, the chick had the run of the house, until my parents grew tired of its incessant pooping and banished it to a large box. I named my pet duck the first thing that came to mind—Quackie—but the poor thing never had the chance to grow old enough to live up to its name. Unbeknownst to me, my parents gave Quackie to Selby while I was off at summer camp for two weeks. They told me what they had done when I returned from camp, assuring me that Selby had a place that was more suited to raising a duck and that he “would be happier” there.

Little did I know Quackie’s true fate until several months later, when my dad admitted my pet might indeed not have been happier there for long. He thought it likely the duck’s subsequent disappearance, under mysterious circumstances, was an indication that Selby had fatally misinterpreted his pledge to look after the fowl’s welfare, accustomed as he was to rural cuisine, Mississippi-style. 

Of Selby’s two brothers, one of them, Jim, died as a young man, the victim of a fall during the construction of the second phase of the Hetch-Hetchy Dam in the 1930s. The other brother, Bill, a general contractor, lived to the ripe old age of 102, although he spent the last decade of his life as a paraplegic after falling from his roof while cleaning his gutters. Selby himself lived to be 101. Poignantly, not one of these men, as far as I know, ever fathered a child.

Jim Covington, the younger brother who perished during the construction of the dam, was a particularly close friend of my parents and is buried in my families’ burial plot at Mountain Shadows cemetery in Sonora, alongside my older sister, Pearl, who died 18 hours after she was born.

Selby himself might have had his long life cut short were it not for his cigarette lighter, which, tucked in his shirt pocket, had stopped a bullet meant for him while he was in Europe, fighting during WWI.

I always find it fascinating to learn that, for the slightest of reasons, one sibling can leave this world early on while another can remain far into advanced old age.

To be continued: