Three Memories of my Father

1.

January 7, 1984. Lake Evans, Riverside.?

Wearing my brand-new, Sherpa-lined jacket, I am walking above the shore of the lake. It’s late afternoon, and the golden sun is about to disappear behind Santiago Peak. The cold Santa Ana winds are blowing hard, making my long, blonde bangs smack against my forehead until the skin itches and tingles. The reflection of the sun on the lake water is so bright that I have to squint just to look at it. Unable to see me behind the tall barley and buckwheat, Dad is calling out to me: “Joel, where are you?” “Dad?!” Now I hear his big footsteps in the crunchy, phyllitic dirt. I look up, and I see his face smiling down at me from a superhuman height. Dad is forty years old (as old as I am as I write this): His fine, brown hair is parted down the middle of his scalp; his big glasses are tinted in the weakening light of the almost-setting sun; and his weightlifter’s biceps are stretching the fabric of his Le Tigre polo shirt. “Come on: Let’s go get some good food.” Dad holds out his three-fingered hand, and I eagerly take it. And that is the last thing I remember from that day—my oldest memory of Dad.

?2.

My second-oldest memory: Watching Dad gather leaves of deer grass for his first basket. This was at Horsethief Creek in the mid-Eighties, and on that September day the groggy, listless stream glittered in the sunlight as it snaked around the slick, pink boulders that dwell—and have always dwelled—in the creek’s narrow, mossy bed. While I watched Dad work, dozens of huge, black ants were crawling all over me, stinging me and biting me—and I was swatting them off as quickly as I could as I sat on a smooth boulder that was half-buried under tangled vines of wild grape. Since I didn’t want to burst the silence that swelled around Dad as he labored under the swaying shadows of the cottonwood trees, I did not complain…. A few weeks later, Dad finished his basket. It was roughly ten inches in diameter, and it was completely covered in intricate designs—perfect patterns that Dad had created using the black juice of the elderberry. Although Dad was not Cahuilla, he learned from old, out-of-print books (which he borrowed from the library at UC Riverside) exactly how to make all kinds of Cahuilla crafts: blankets, arrowheads, flutes, peon sticks, houses, and—of course—baskets. For a “White” man to know this much about the Cahuilla people’s material culture was strange enough. And yet even stranger was Dad’s extreme humility as an artist. Never once did he brag about his extraordinary skills—although he had every right to. And never once did he even mention his craft to me and mom—although he must have had an overwhelming desire to do so. Mom—watching him work in the sweltering garage for hours on end, day after day—eventually gave him the nickname, Squaw. And whenever Dad heard her call him that, he would chuckle, and sometimes even blush—but he would never say a word.

3.

The last time my dad saw his brother Jim, he knocked his two lower incisors through his bottom lip. And for as long as he was married to my mom—over thirty-six years—he did not speak more than just a few times to his mother- and sister-in-law, Rose and Nancy. (His last words to me: “Watch out for Nancy.”) By his own choice, Dad had no friends to go camping with, so he camped with me and my best friend Wade almost every weekend for about ten years. “I don’t expect anything from other people,” he once said at the dinner table, much to the chagrin of my mother, whose faith in other people was as strong as her faith in God—and indeed was her faith in God. If Dad were alive today, he would hate the recently constructed wind turbines whose sixty-foot-long rotor blades constantly spin just north of the tiny village of Ocotillo: He would hate how their flashing red lights can be seen at night from the painted “shaman’s cave” at Indian Hill. One dark Winter evening at Dos Cabezas, when I was eleven years old and Wade was seventeen, he told us—as the light of his lantern pierced deeply into his eyes—“Girls are nothing but trouble.” When he was in his early thirties, Dad found Christian Science: And that’s when he began to believe that the “material world” is an empty “illusion,” a “ghastly farce.” And thus every time he, Wade, and I went camping, the Desert in his heart would meet the desert in the world, and the wind that blew within the former would occasionally wend its way into latter, filling the deep and narrow canyons with its echoing wails, erasing our footprints in the sand of dry river beds, making the desert willows and their long, thin shadows bounce up and down like fornicating witches, and ushering in the thick and heavy clouds of a sadness that Wade and I could not even begin to understand—and still cannot.

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