Waiting for Autumn (6 page)

Luckily my muscle memory seemed to take over, and I began driving on autopilot, without my brain and hands needing to communicate any longer. At first I started to panic, but I began to breathe deeply and even caught myself closing my eyes. I was lucid enough to realize that even driving on autopilot required my eyelids to stay open, which took a remarkable amount of will to maintain. Once, after catching myself dozing off, I shook myself awake, and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the majestic Mount Shasta. It appeared to glow with a bright white halo, which contrasted with the muted tones surrounding it. I’d always felt a connection with Mount Shasta when I was growing up, and although I had no plans to reach the summit that day, I made a mental note to revisit the mountain as soon as I could.

The closer I got to Yreka, the more I began to get used to my deadened sensory state. And other than one last scare when I headed straight for the guardrail on the steep mountain pass, I was much more coherent during the remaining trip.

When I arrived in Yreka, I was surprised by how empty it seemed. It had always been a small town, but now it appeared nearly deserted. There were no cars on the streets, no birds in the sky, and no pedestrians on the sidewalks. Perhaps my dulled senses were playing tricks on me, but it felt like even the breeze had decided to abandon the old mining town and leave the stillness of the air to imprison all that remained.

After parking in a mini-mart lot, I retraced my path back to the cement island that had greeted me immediately after I exited the freeway. I thought that I recognized some people I knew out of the corner of my eye when I drove past the bronze sculpture of a miner and mule underneath the blue and white tiled Y
REKA
sign. I knew that it was impossible, since I was sure that everyone from my past had left the area many years before, yet I permitted a twinge of excitement to lead me back to the sculpture to find out if what I’d seen had been real or imagined.

As I neared the backside of the sculpture, I was both excited and a bit nervous to discover that the people I’d seen were still there. Standing next to the miner was a young brown-haired boy with a shaggy bowl haircut and his balding father, who had a bushy sandy-blond beard. The closer I got, the more I could hear their conversation, and it chilled me when I recognized their voices.

I remembered the conversation word for word when my family first arrived in Yreka after moving there from Southern California. Yreka was about twenty miles from the town of Greenview, where we eventually settled, but it was that bronze sculpture that had represented the optimism we’d all felt when we first arrived. The possibilities had seemed limitless, and we were all excited to have enough land where we could raise animals and grow our own food. My well-intentioned father had grown up in the heartland of Iowa, and although my mother was a Southern California girl through and through, he convinced her that the country was a much better place to raise children; and at the beginning, I too bought into this idea.

When I circled to the front of the sculpture, the man and child were no longer there, and I immediately fell to my knees and began to weep. I had fallen out of touch with my family, and although we maintained contact through occasional phone calls on birthdays and holidays, my tears finally seemed to express the lack of connection I felt. The bronze statue was exactly the same, but I was no longer the wide-eyed little boy excited about a new adventure, and my father was no longer the idealistic mechanic eager to fix mining equipment. The years had eroded our optimism to reveal pessimism—his financially and mine socially. When we finally felt defeated by Siskiyou County, we both retreated to our respective birthplaces: my father took my mother and sister to Iowa to be near his family, and I left Cheryl’s grave on my way to Southern California, where I thought I’d be able to invent a new family that would be more like me.

After about ten minutes at the foot of the bronze sculpture, I wiped the tears from my eyes, dusted myself off, and began to walk toward Miner Street. I’d come to Yreka to visit the park, but I wasn’t sure I was ready quite yet. I was feeling both fragile and nostalgic and decided to reminisce by visiting a few shops in the town center before going to the park.

On Miner Street, the buildings still had the same old-fashioned façades from the late 1800s; however, years of neglect made it seem more like a decaying ghost town than a vibrant celebration of happier times. A few of the same shops still existed, and an old memory popped into my consciousness with nearly every step. The memories were flooding in when I found myself at the door of the sporting-goods store at the top of the street.

Looking up, I recognized the carved wooden sign in the shape of a green fish hanging above the entrance. I carefully opened the glass door and recognized all the sights and smells from my youth and was instantly transported to my thirteenth birthday. My father had brought me to this very shop on that day, and I remembered the distinct smell of gunpowder mixed with the stench of rotting cheese and salmon eggs. The shelves were still packed with guns, fishing poles, ammunition, and all the paraphernalia needed to quickly and violently destroy any of our fellow nature friends.

As the door shut behind me, I could see three generations of old-timers sitting on green vinylcovered bar stools and sipping steaming black coffee while talking to the store owner. They were all wearing matching pearl-buttoned cowboy shirts and grease-stained baseball caps with tractor company logos stitched on the fronts. Their dust-worn, gravelly voices intertwined with the uncomfortable memory of my thirteenth birthday.

“I’m going to get my grandson this ought-six for Christmas.”

“That’s quite a gun for a thirteen-year-old. It’ll knock him on his keister.”

The store filled with laughter that nearly masked a coughing fit from the eldest.

“Yeah, but he’s a darn-near sharpshooter with his .22. Can shoot beer cans from 300 yards without a scope.”

“I wish I had his peepers. I would’ve got that six-pointer a couple years back.”

“You and that six-pointer. I don’t think I believe you even saw it anymore.”

The other two roared with laughter, and this time the coughing fit went on for a solid thirty seconds.

I’m not sure where my father got the idea that I bought into his theory that you needed to kill innocent animals to become a man, but I had always been secretly proud that I helped save wildlife by letting my grades slip. To be honest, I’d been bored by the curriculum in the new school, which was almost two years behind what I had been learning before I moved. And by the time my new school had caught up, I felt I was so superior to everyone there, including most of the teachers, that I never bothered to do any homework—until I finally dropped out three years later.

Mounted high on the wall of the shop were two deer heads frozen in time while locking their blood-covered horns. Both their long tongues were hanging out, and all four eyes had rolled to the backs of their heads in agony, as they clearly hadn’t passed on peaceful terms. The sight of the deer heads instantly transported me to the first time my father and I had gone hunting, a few months after my thirteenth birthday. Since my report card hadn’t arrived yet, he’d lent me one of his guns, which was way too big for me.

My stomach immediately grew queasy, and I almost passed out in the sporting-goods store. I was instantly light-headed and could feel my face turn pale. I stumbled to the door and pushed it open while gasping for air.

“I believe he just saw Bambi and his little brother.” I heard the shopkeeper laugh as the door shut behind me with a muted thump.

Once outside, I tripped on the curb and scraped my right knee through my faded blue jeans. I decided to stay seated on the curb until I could catch my breath. Returning to Yreka was bringing up some deep-seated memories I hadn’t even known I still had, and I was getting nervous about returning to the park because I wasn’t sure if I could handle what was next. I considered getting in the car and driving back to Ashland without even going near it, but I knew that if I didn’t go then, I never would. And if there was something to my feeling that the portal was only accessible on that day, I would forever regret not finding out what it was for.

After about ten minutes—when I had recovered from my experience at the sporting-goods store enough to continue on—I picked myself up and started toward the park at the top of the hill. I was only a couple of blocks away, and my stomach fluttered when I saw the blackened granite archway that marked the entrance. I had spent many hours in this park with Cheryl, but even during all those years I had never really looked at the hand-carved lettering that adorned the imposing archway. Beneath the name of the park was the word S
ISKIYOU
inscribed in large, ghostlike letters that seemed to dance in place. The name of the county where Yreka resided seemed an odd choice for prominent billing, but most eerie were the letters themselves, which appeared to mirror my every gesture.

The park itself was divided in three sections. The one closest to the archway was a walking area where several large, stately trees had been planted amid occasional benches so visitors could lounge under the ample shade. On the opposite end was a baseball diamond that was the perfect size for Little League games, and to the left was the playground that contained the swing set I’d seen in my dreams.

I was pulled toward the swings with a gravity I couldn’t control, and within seconds I was standing near the one that had been adjacent to the portal from my dream. However, the swing set was already occupied by two young redheaded girls being pushed by a middle-aged man with short red hair and a green and purple pin-striped buttoned shirt. The girls were both wearing yellow flowered sundresses, and the youngest had two matching flesh-colored bandages on her knees.

I could tell that I made the father nervous, and assumed that not many grown men hung around swing sets in Yreka by themselves. I tried sitting in the swing next to where the girls were playing and discovered that it was clearly designed for children less than half my size. I barely fit into the small seat, and my knees nearly scraped the sand as the chains loudly squeaked under the stress of my weight. And as soon as I started swinging, the father began to whisper to his children about leaving, while he squinted his green eyes at me with apparent disapproval. I hadn’t intended to make anyone uncomfortable, so I exited the child swing and tried to casually browse the park-bench dedications while waiting for the family to finish.