Haunted Cities

Los Angeles

    I’ve always liked Los Angeles, a position that is borderline heretical if you’re from Oregon (or any of the other places I’ve lived, now that I think about it). There are a lot of things wrong with it, of course, most of them to do with the sprawl. But it’s a haunted city, where the present lies atop the past as lightly as the dust lies atop the buildings — it sometimes seems like a good rain might wash it away, and leave behind one of its previous iterations. It’s the biggest city I’ve ever been in where I can point at a street-corner and say, When my father lived here, this was an orange grove. When my grandmother lived here, it was a sandy desert.

    As you can see, it’s also haunted by my family, which is true to one degree or another of almost every city in California. I like to imagine my grandmother here during the War — the big one — when she arrived from Nebraska on a bus. Did she have dreams of glamour? I’ve never known, and I didn’t think to ask until it was too late. She was a thin, pretty Irish girl from a minor railroad hub called Falls City, and over the years I’ve heard her make reference to nights out dancing, to seeing Glenn Miller play live. These are just the vaguest hints of what it must have been like to be young and single in LA as it boomed with movie and military money during, and just after, the war. At some point, she met a handsome young man of American Indian extraction who hailed from Nemaha, just up the road from Falls City. He had been with the Coast Guard before the war, but was being seconded to the South Pacific with the Navy now. They fell in love. I’ve never been clear on whether they married before he shipped out, but by 1943 he was back in the States and the knot had been tied. In spring 1944, my father was born. In summer 1944, the handsome Indian man — my grandfather — fled, and never really came back.

    But there was that time in Los Angeles. If there hadn’t been, there would be no me.

Fresno

    Anytime you bring up hot weather around my parents, they will mention one of two family reunions: the trip back to Falls City in the summer of 1980, when I was an infant and my sister was 15 and my father had a broken arm and the Quigleys suffered through a heatwave so awful it has its own Wikipedia entry; or the trip to Fresno in 1983, where the Chandlers have been stoically weathering temperatures north of 110 every summer for generations, and I learned to swim in a pool behind our motel.

    I have no memory of Fresno as it was then. I was too small. It was half the size it is now, a busy metropolis of about 200,000 in the midst of some of the country’s most productive farmland. With prodding, some people can be provoked to talk about “the old Fresno”, a place of commerce, a solid, not to say stolid, mid-sized city in mid-century America.

    Fresno isn’t like that anymore. I was there a couple of days ago, on a stop along the route from Los Angeles to Portland. It was a 111 degrees the day that my brother and I came tooling into town in a U-Haul with all his worldly possessions in the back. The next morning I got up to go running before the real heat began. After a couple of wrong turns, I was treated to a sunrise tour of the grim reality of a city that has not only grown but mutated since that family reunion all those years ago. I ran past tumbledown shacks and vacant lots, places where rusted toys and other detritus were gnawed at by leashless dogs. Somewhere along the way there was a set of barracks, abandoned, adorned with Christian crosses. As the heat rose, a thick, ecru fog began to collect in the air, so that by the time I finished I felt as though I was smoking cigarettes and running simultaneously.

    There’s another element here, less poetic, but more important than the musings that precede this. Fresno has doubled in size, adding a layer of desiccated slums, because it has added an underclass of Hispanic people, people systematically kept poor and disenfranchised by an agricultural economy that increasingly produces a few huge winners and very many losers. It’s sad. It seems as though there must be a solution. I don’t know what it is.

Weed

    When I was a senior in high school, I starred as George in John Steinbeck’s stage adaptation of his own novel, Of Mice & Men. This was the first time I was introduced to the idea that there was a town somewhere in California called Weed. My castmates and I all found this hilarious, for the reasons I imagine my loyal reader can guess. Little did we know that the town was named not for a plant but — and I confess that this is a disappointment to me — for a timber baron named Abner Weed. Oh, well. The name remains funny, and almost every time I drive through the Siskyous I make a point of stopping there. It’s actually kind of a pretty place, high up in the mountains near the Oregon border, a little outpost of a few thousand people borne up against the pine forest.

    It is haunted by the curse of little freeway towns all over America: no matter where you go in Weed, you can hear the roar of traffic not far away, people in machines from far away going somewhere else far away. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like that, where the commerce consists largely of gas stations and restaurants designed to cater to through-drivers, and the sound of cars is a constant reminder of how insignificant you and the place you live in are. What percentage of people from places like Weed make it their business to escape? Is that more than you get in other little towns? Do people ever leave Weed and come back to stay?

Ashland

    When I was in the fifth grade, my entire class piled into a school bus and trucked the six hours down I-5 to Ashland, where every year one of the world’s most famous Shakespeare festivals is mounted. We had spent several weeks in Mrs Dundon’s class reading, not the plays, but comic book versions of the plays, written in simplified language. I remember reading Othello in comic book form, thus eliding everything about Shakespeare that makes it artful, beautiful, or at all worth caring about. To this day, that’s the only time I’ve read Othello.

    We stayed in dorms at what was then Southern Oregon State University, and is now Southern Oregon University. I don’t remember much about that. I do remember going to see Merchant of Venice in some kind of modern dress — were they wearing trench coats and fedoras? That sounds right. This would have been 1991, so maybe that wasn’t a cliché yet.

    We were given a very stern warning before the play began: any fidgeting, or noise, or moving around too much, was strictly verboten. I’m not sure that the consequences were spelled out, but I got the idea that the punishment would be something in the neighborhood of summary execution. And yet, somehow, I neglected to use the bathroom before the show. Then I neglected to remove my coat — a very cool neon windbreaker — after we sat down. When the lights fell and the actors entered, I suddenly realized that I was in big trouble. I needed to pee, and I needed to take off the coat. Oh, how I needed to take off the coat. I was hot, and then I was itchy, and then, in the way of children, I was crazy. I was dying either of boredom or suffocation or a burst bladder or something. I was far too young for Shakespeare, of course, but I was a pretty smart kid and I might have been able to make a go of it if I hadn’t been, you know, concerned that I was going to die. But then, if I took off the coat, or got up to pee, I was dead certain I would die. It was a classic rock or a hard place: die of heatstroke and urine overdose in the theatre, or leave, go pee, and take off the coat, and be beheaded by Mrs Dundon upon returning.

    I somehow survived until intermission, which I was pretty sure made me a great hero of some kind. Somehow, I have no memory of the second half of the play, either. Did I fall asleep? That seems possible. Ugh, what a waste of money that trip was.

Portland

What a bunch of fucking hippies.