Song of Fire

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Song: “Reminiscences” by Jon O’Bergh
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We would always leave the day after the Fourth of July. There would be the sound of latches clicking shut on the tan, boxy toiletries case. The muffled sound of suitcases being moved around in the trunk while I sat expectantly in the back seat. Then the thud as the trunk was shut. Pillows and blankets. “Did you check the oven?” And off we would go, usually heading north to San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Seattle. I kept a log of all the bridges we crossed, the names of creeks, streams, sloughs, washes, canals, and rivers that carved meandering lines across the land. When I grew tired, I would ask Grammy to keep a lookout. Upon awakening later, there would be perhaps five names written in the unsteady hand of my grandmother compared to two dozen names in my childish scrawl. “Are you sure you got them all, Grammy?” “Oh, yes — at least those that had names.”

Along Highway 101, small billboards periodically appeared with a grinning skull and the words, “The Winchester Mystery House.” 210 miles ahead. 125 miles. 76 miles. Golden, rolling hills dotted with oak trees undulated beside the highway. Giant sprinklers sprayed out arcs of water over crops growing in long, green rows. As we neared San Jose, the highway paralleled railroad tracks on which box cars squatted like migrant workers waiting for a job. I thought of the sheet music Mrs. Minden had given me earlier in the year, a red duotone Dionne Warwick on its cover with the words emblazoned, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” Dionne sang about a peaceful, small town, a place in sharp contrast to the frenetic car culture of L.A.

On the outskirts of town, the Winchester Mystery House sat by itself on a quiet stretch of road surrounded by orchards. Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, began constructing the 160-room Victorian mansion in 1884 following the death of her husband and infant son. A medium told her that she could assuage the angry spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles only if she never stopped building. She filled the house with architectural oddities to fool the restless spirits: stairways to nowhere, doors that open into thin air, strange staircases, windows that look into other rooms. I was fascinated as we toured the eccentric, sprawling mansion.

From the revolving rack in a motel gift shop, I picked out a small paperback that billed itself as true stories about monsters and the paranormal: Loch Ness, the loup garou of Languedoc, Bigfoot, incidents of spontaneous combustion. The world was filled with mystery and strangeness. In Gold Hill, we drove off the highway to visit the Oregon vortex, a peculiar place where the laws of physics purportedly did not operate. The guide related the story of the strange land, how it was avoided by Native Americans as a place that was bewitched, and how a mining company’s assay building slid off its foundation after it was built, sending floors and walls askew. We watched water flowing uphill. A girl exchanged places with her father and grew taller than him. Mom fanned herself with the brochure as cicadas whined in the trees.

Eight summers later, cicadas were again whining as Jeanine and I drove cross-country to Michigan. She wore a sundress, her straight red hair falling to her waist. I was the postcard of a surfer, with long blond hair and shorts. When we stopped for lunch at a diner somewhere on the Texas plains, the cowboys and waitresses eyed us suspiciously as we entered, as if we were creatures out of that paperback.

We took country roads through rural Kentucky, passing slate fences and houses set far back from the road. As dusk fell, we found a campground and dined at a restaurant overlooking a lake. Years later, Jeanine tells me we had grasshopper pie for dessert, a concoction of cream cheese and crème de menthe, but I don’t really remember. She can recall the details of that evening vividly, the fireflies at the lakeside, the lights on the boats gently swaying on the water. I nod vaguely, wondering how our memories can be colored so differently from the same experience.

After our stay in Michigan, we took the northern route back, and while crossing Wisconsin decided to stop at The House on the Rock. The house is built atop a chimney rock formation, incorporating the rock as walls and floors and seeming to grow organically out of the earth. As if this architectural achievement was not a sufficient draw, however, other attractions were included with the tour. We strolled down an imitation nineteenth century main street. Farther along was a collection of wild-eyed carousel horses and a colossal circus wagon with a forty-piece band operated by pneumatic pumps and wires. As we approached the wagon, the mannequins came to life like an episode of the Twilight Zone, filling the warehouse-like space with bizarre circus music. Startled, Jeanine and I edged closer to one another, protectively drawing our arms to our sides. We nervously laughed and hurried on.

We drove through Glacier National Park along the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, climbing up and up over the Rocky Mountains. Four years later I would find myself stopping along this same highway, standing with Ella and three friends, thinking to myself how strange to have passed this way with Jeanine never imaging that I would return to spend a summer here. My hair would be much shorter then, already starting to recede. It was an illusion to imagine that the place was the same and only I was changing. Streams and rivers were washing sediment down from mountain peaks, inexorably carving lines into the landscape.

It was Ella’s idea to head north at summer’s end to explore two of Canada’s alpine parks. We drove north along the park’s main route. For long stretches, we were the only vehicle on the road. At the cusp between Banff and Jasper National Parks, atop a high plateau, we crossed the Columbia Icefields. Although it was August, snow clung defiantly to the peaks and mountainsides. The Athabasca glacier gleamed white in the cold sunshine. There in that bald land, it felt like the loneliest place on earth, what I imagined it must be like in Antarctica. We stopped at the visitor center, but something in the fields of white frightened me, a resurgence of the panic from years earlier. “We have to leave,” I told Ella. Once we had descended into the forested valley, my breathing eased.

We slowly made our way south through the Pacific Northwest. In northern California, we pitched our tent in Lassen National Park beneath the craggy incisor of Lassen Peak, remnant of a massive Mount Tehama that blew its top over 600,000 years ago and left behind intriguing geothermal phenomenon: bubbling mud pots, smoking fumaroles, and pools of boiling water. The park sits on the Ring of Fire that rims the Pacific Ocean where tectonic plates collide, reminding us that even the land beneath our feet is in motion. I had learned in college how the oceanic Juan de Fuca plate, comprised of denser sediments, is slowly sliding beneath the continental North American plate. Deep within the earth, the rock is heated under enormous pressure to become fluid magma, which pushes up through weak fissures until it reaches the surface to create the volcanoes of the Cascade Range. Mount Tehama was believed to be extinct until 1914 when Lassen Peak began erupting. Numerous spectacular eruptions occured over the course of three years with pyroclastic flows, lahars and clouds of ash. We hiked all day to Cinder Cone, a young volcanic vent that geologists date from the 1800s. Scaling the loose, black pumice was arduous, but from the rim of the small volcano we were able to survey the landscape of colorfully painted dunes.

The earth sings to us. High above the ionosphere, particles from the solar wind collide with the earth’s magnetic field, creating a symphony of chirps and whistles to accompany the aurora borealis and aurora australis. Sand dunes that meet certain conditions emit a sound that is likened to a kettle drum, bass violin or foghorn. Marco Polo, in his 13th century travels, said the singing sand “at times fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the clash of arms.” It is believed that the face of the dune acts like a huge loudspeaker, amplifying the sound of colliding grains of sand as they cascade down the dune. The earth itself hums at a subsonic pitch that shifts between hemispheres in a pattern that follows the onset of winter and stormy seas.

Geophysicist Frank Scherbaum teamed up with composer Wolfgang Loos to release Inner Earth: a seismosonic symphony, a recording of natural seismic signals from the earth that Loos creatively rearranged. The remarkable sounds that are produced — at once electronic and natural — are strange and mesmerizing. In Scherbaum’s words, “The fault beats, the volcano whistles and howls, and the Earth rings and hums.” Earthquakes typically produce percussive signals. The spectrum of volcanic tremor signals, however — believed to be generated by instabilities within the magma system — show regular frequency spacings similar to that of a flute which change over time, in essence creating a melody. Crudely stated, earthquakes are drums and volcanoes are flutes.

It’s during the spring that Ben and I set out along Interstate 10, the route Jeanine and I took to start our cross-country journey fifteen years earlier when I was in college. The blond in my thinning hair has darkened to brown. Beyond Palm Springs, millions of monarch butterflies are migrating across the desert. Their delicate orange wings are veined with black. They flutter across the roadway in the rising sun, then fall to the ground like orange snow after colliding with cars. Ben closes his eyes, unable to watch.

We cross into Arizona, where saguaro cactus punctuate the desert like exclamation points. I catch a glimpse of myself, younger, taking turns with Jeanine posing in front of an impressively large saguaro by the side of the road. When Ben meets Jeanine for the first time, I’ll tell him how Jeanine and I once took that cross-country trip. Jeanine and I will laugh, recounting how she jokingly laid down on some train tracks like a damsel in distress, shortly before we had to jump down the embankment to avoid a train coming around the bend. “We were impetuous,” I say, and Jeanine adds, “We camped without a tent — just cots and sleeping bags beside the car. People thought we were crazy.”

At Wupatki National Monument, Ben and I take a walk through the pueblo ruins. No one else is around. Ben saunters behind me; his rich singing fills the still desert air. We come upon the blowhole — a place considered sacred by Native Americans — a small, natural opening in the ground through which the wind, echoing in subterranean cavities, lowly moans like the singing of the earth.

From Flagstaff we take the picturesque route through Oak Creek Canyon south toward Phoenix. Talking a bit too fast, I describe for Ben the sinuous road through the canyon and how light filtered through the oak trees, just like my mother had described it to me on our trip when I was sixteen. I remember the smell of piñon when we stopped to stretch our legs. Yet as we are driving through the canyon, I feel a twinge of disappointment, unable somehow to recapture exactly what I felt that day.

On a smoggy day in August, I took André to the Winchester Mystery House. It had been decades since I had visited as a boy. The orchards were gone, and two busy freeways now intersected nearby. San Jose had grown from a small town into a sprawling metropolis — not quite L.A., but no longer the place about which Dionne Warwick had sung. The city had swallowed the house, as it has swallowed much of the past, surrounding the grounds with cinemas, shopping centers and apartment complexes. Highway 101 no longer paralleled the train tracks with their empty boxcars, but instead came zipping into the city, a modern freeway. Across the street from the house, André and I occassionally performed in a plaza at Santana Row for the strolling shoppers and diners who lingered over meals at the outdoor cafes. My head was now shaved because there was no point in growing out what little hair remained.

The first thing I noticed was that the house’s exterior was painted a cheerful yellow — much too cheerful for a place of mystery. We brought along a friend’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Janelle, who was staying with us for the weekend. I tried to convey to them the thrill I experienced touring the house as a boy, but they kept giggling at its eccentricities. “A stairway to nowhere? That’s just dumb,” said Janelle. It was hard to refute her point, but I felt like something had been lost in the intervening years.

After the tour, Janelle took my hand and turned it over to reveal my palm. “Who do you think you are, Sarah Winchester’s medium?” I asked. She made a face as if about to stick out her tongue but thought better of it.

“Here’s where you’ve been, and here’s where you’re going,” she said, tracing a line in my palm. “You’ll have a long life.” The line merged into a vein, and I saw a map of interstate highways and roads, rivers and streams, branching down my arm. A country road leading to a Kentucky lake. The place where Ben and I leaned in wonder over a small opening in the earth. A trail through pine forests to a young volcano. Paths crossing back and forth, all the places that had left their imprint on me.

On the drive home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the boy who was once Janelle’s age, riding in the car with his parents along this same route. In the rearview mirror I could see Janelle sleeping, her head resting on her hands against the corner where the back seat intersected the door. We passed over a bridge with a small white sign by the side of the road that said “San Mateo Creek.”

Are you sure you got them all, Grammy?

And beneath us was the earth, turning slowly, the afternoon shadows lengthening almost imperceptibly, and this strange present that seemed to hold all of the past and all of the future in its generous arms; yet even as I thought that, the moment had moved on to become something else.

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