The house I grew up in was built inside an almond orchard, and once the house was built, along with hundreds of others, there were almond trees, but no orchard. The house was in a suburb of San Francisco, and when my parents bought it in 1955, it was new. The housing development grew off the main road that went straight out of the centre of Concord, out to developments like this one that eventually spread to the base of the mountain that was a sentinel in the area, Mt. Diablo. The eastern edge of the town was signified by a sturdy barbed wire fence, where the Concord Naval Weapons Station began. The Weapons Station was strictly off limits, of course, that side patrolled every day by stern-looking men in pickup trucks who did not banter with those of us on the other side of the fence.
But the development didn’t extend that far at first. The street my parents bought on, Cottonwood Drive (there were no cottonwoods; I doubt there ever had been; there probably weren’t any for miles), ended at the house to the east of theirs. Beyond were more almond trees, and then the Naval Weapons station. None of the streets in the development that had been built on an almond orchard was named Almond Drive, or Street, or Avenue.
Our lot had eight almond trees dotted around it, in one of which we built a tree house, and all of which we harvested every year, as a way to make a little money from the sale of the almonds, to pay for small things that my father’s modest salary as a public school music teacher couldn’t provide.
I want to make it clear that there was a great deal of open space in this development at first, this carving into the almond orchard: trees and open space to the south, trees and fields to the east, all the way to the Weapons Station fence and beyond. The space in the Weapons Station was filled with foxtails and sere grasses, and hills that rose to a ridge separating the East Bay – hot in summer – from the Central Valley – a furnace in summer. While no civilians could enter the Naval Weapons Station, it was a large, open space, which would eventually become an island in a sea of houses.
One of my earliest memories is of riding a tricycle with my older brother and sister – I suspect my brother was the driver, I was perched on the rear platform, perhaps my sister running alongside to help – up the street towards the Weapons Station, to the light pole past the neighbour’s house, where the sidewalk ended. Nothing else happens in this memory but that: riding the tricycle up to that light pole, as though the memorable part was to venture out. The memory is always of us riding away from home, towards the Weapon Station, not back.
One of the few other memories I have from that period is in bright daylight, brilliant sunshine, about the same year as the tricycle, I suspect, possibly 1957, or 8, or 9, in the front yard of our house. A snake has appeared in the yard, and my father and other fathers in the neighbourhood – One? Two? At least one – are hacking at it with hoes, hoes rising into the air then slashing down, cutting it in two, killing it. I remember the hoes rising in the air, the slashing, the solemn and serious expressions on the father’s faces, the sense of duty the men displayed. They were killing a rattlesnake that had ventured into their homes from out of that open space to the east. Many years later, I asked my father why they had killed it; my father said they thought it might have babies, that moving it wouldn’t solve the problem, as they saw it, and more rattlesnakes could only be more dangerous. Later, my mother would tell me that they hung the rattlesnake in a tree; for what reason, neither of us knew, and now both parents are gone.
The fathers were protecting us from danger, from snakes. It is hard to fault them for this. This is, after all, the parents’ job, as they thought of it. A few years later, a year I can identify exactly – 1962 – the sirens in the Weapons Station began to moan and wail. It was late, well after bedtime for four children, only one of whom had just become a teen. My parents gathered the four of us in their bedroom, and we huddled on their bed, sleepy, not quite sure what was happening, listening to the susurrus rise and fall of the sirens. I know the year exactly because it was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when America and the Soviet Union, Kennedy and Khrushchev, played a game of chicken with nuclear weapons over the virgin prize, a dry island. All throughout grade school in California, we had practised our drills for nuclear Armageddon: hiding under our desks, gathering in groups in the lunch room, walking – not running – steadily home in case of an attack.
Armageddon had arrived: the sirens were hailing it, and we were gathered in the bedroom together, together for the final time, to await the end, but at least together. I don’t remember how the night concluded – at some point, the sirens stopped, we went back to bed, the lights went off; that I don’t remember, only our parents gathering us all together on the bed, that togetherness the only protection we had as we awaited the end.
Many years later, still, I was camped along the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho, one of the country’s great rivers – a country once filled with great rivers – in a particularly dry summer, when the rattlesnakes came down out of the hills, driven closer to the river than ever, in order to hunt the small things that needed the water. Late at night, when the only light was cast by the last embers of a dying campfire, I was sitting beside the fire with a few other river guides, everyone else having long since gone to their tents. I became aware, after the sensation had been there for a few moments, of the feel of something sliding slowly across my feet. Something smooth and cool passing from my left foot onto my right. I leapt up, having realised in those fractions of a second that it was a snake. We turned on our headlamps, saw the rattlesnake sluicing away into the brush, and laughed about this odd event, about my being singled out in this way; the kind of thing that can only happen when you leave home, lose your isolation from the rest of creation. We laughed at my reaction, too, my instant response – pre-conscious, primal, primaeval – to the existence of the snake.
But what I remember most, will always remember, is that smooth feel, in the darkness, of the snake passing companionably across my feet. A sensation like no other. Cool, impossibly smooth, like a tactile whisper, sliding across my skin, skin on skin, into the darkness. And I remember the fathers slashing downwards at the danger, the snake that had left the Weapons Station and entered the orchard.
