My sister with hand plow. My father came across an abandoned farm off Dairy Mart Rd. There was rusted equipment — an old well pump, a hand plow — and one lone live fig tree.

My life has had little dramatic value. I grew up in a traditional intact family with four siblings, no abuse, no substance addictions, all five of us college graduates...was never raped, never arrested, never went to war, never became a street person, never tried prostitution, never had to give up a baby for adoption.

— from a profile of Cris Mazza by J.R. Foley, Poets & Writers Magazine, March 1996

My father with handmade sand crab net gathering bait in the surf at Torrey Pines. There were always thousands and thousands of sand crabs

Mine wasn’t a family in public housing, not on welfare, not living in an urban war zone. No encounters with gangs or guns or any crime more dramatic than shoplifting at Disneyland (I confess).

Also not a destitute farm family in Oklahoma’s dust bowl or a flooded plain beside the Mississippi.

This isn’t a story about victimization and deliverance. It’s about a middle-class family that didn’t realize it was middle class, in any sense of the word. We just didn’t know any better: that middle-class families ordinarily didn’t cull the rejected vegetables left in a farmer’s harvested field nor eat what the fish store sold as bait.

Our house on Hartzel Hill in 1963, close to where Spring Valley touches La Mesa at Spring Street and Highway 94.

But I’d never claim that a family living in its own three-bedroom home in the semi-rural suburbs, a family whose main source of income was a father employed as a community college professor, was suffering or merely surviving. Even if the family numbered five kids (three in one room, two in the other). Even if a community college professor only made around $10,000 in the late ’60s.

My parents in the '70s beside one of the rock walls her father made of granite

Even if new school clothes meant new sneakers from FedCo, plus bundles of hand-me-downs from cousins and older siblings. Even if coloring and drawing paper were what would now be found in the recycling bin in the teachers’ workroom. And going to the movies meant the drive-in with five kids in the back of a station wagon, later the occasional Saturday matinee at the Quonset-hut one-screen Helix Theater. (Oh, I do remember once going to the lavish, velvet-draped Fox Theater to see Mary Poppins. Years later sat in the same theater weekly to hear my then-husband playing in the then-San Diego Symphony. The irony of my life. But I digress.) There were toys —. at Christmas and birthdays, never in between. Sometimes the cheap copies of Barbie or troll dolls, but they wore the same size clothes and added their own unique personalities to weeklong doll dramas. Always books to read (due to library cards and my mother’s childhood collection, like her first-edition Frank Baum Oz books — would’ve been worth thousands now but we read them till the spines disintegrated).

I used my father’s beehives for my sweepstakes winning junior high science fair project, “Do Bees Perceive Color?”.

A black-and-white TV, until it broke down and wasn’t replaced for over a year. (Doesn’t matter, we could only watch if Dad turned it on, and then could only watch what he chose.) Had to ask permission to open the refrigerator, never knew the (admittedly coveted) joy of individual chip bags or Twinkies in our school lunches. As kids we were required to split a can of off-brand pop (so to this day I can’t finish a whole can of anything).

But this was not a family in poverty. Not in distress. Not in trouble. Just an ordinary family like millions of others where Dad had a job, and Mom was the Girl Scout leader, a family that might’ve eaten hamburger and tuna seven days a week without feeling deprived. Instead this family dined on quail, rabbit, alba-core, calamari, duck, eggplant, squash flowers, artichokes, figs, olives, natural honey in the comb, persimmons, even quail eggs. What might’ve seemed, had I gone to a child psychiatrist for any reason and described these activities, like an indigent family scavenging — a family going on weekend outings to gather abandoned or discarded, still living, freshly killed, or already dead food from the countryside — was actually just a way of life, a deep relationship with locality or region, possibly tacitly handed down from an immigrant father to son. But these were also experiences that not only added depth of atmosphere and diversity of event to the stories and novels I would eventually write but enriched my “normal” childhood and my connections to my Southern California “homeland” to a degree I can’t hope to quantify.

How We Got Here

Every story begins before it actually starts. And interestingly enough, this one begins with fewer archetype particulars of the “quintessential” (or stereotyped) immigrant family than I would’ve ever guessed. Rather than an ignorant peasant fleeing increasing destitution in the southern regions of the newly unified Italy, bringing with him a family of uneducated children to “America” (i.e., New York), my grandfather, Crescenzo Mazza, came to the United States around the turn of the century, after he finished his high school education in Naples, Italy. He came with his brothers, their wives, and his parents — after his father sold the family’s two Mediterranean shipping vessels.

Soon my grandfather was working in Manhattan as a salesman for three or four Italian jewelry importers. He was married to Anna Capriglione (who’d come to the United States when she was two, spoke English with a Brooklyn accent, understood and spoke Italian, and had worked since finishing sixth grade in various factories, especially lace making and shoes). With five children plus various extended family members, Cris and Anna lived rather well in a two-story house in the Flatbush district of Brooklyn. My father played stickball in the street, rode the streetcars out to Coney Island, and — the first example of the pattern of his lifestyle — used to get walloped for staying out fishing and clamming at night at Flatlands Bay (which is now a megamall at the end of Flatbush Avenue). The family then feasted on cioppinoy, an Italian anything-goes fish soup.

As it would for so many others, everything changed when my father was nine years old. The stock market plunged, the Depression descended, and my grandparents eventually lost everything, including my grandfather’s livelihood, so he went to California to hawk trinkets at the second California-Pacific International Exposition in Balboa Park. After he finished ninth grade in Brooklyn, my father, the oldest, quit school when the whole family left Brooklyn for good and moved west, stopping briefly to sell baubles and pennants at the Texas Centennial in 1936.

After arriving in California in 1936, my grandfather was offered the opportunity to manage an Anaheim fish market owned by the DiMassas of the L.A. Fish & Oyster Company. The family lived in San Pedro across the street from the temporary quarters of a private academy called Chadwick School, where my father worked part-time as a janitor, in addition to working for his father to help support the family. His younger siblings were enrolled in school. But the owner and headmistress of Chadwick School was more than pleased with my father’s work. I’m sure he was diligent, earnest, and mature beyond his years — impressive enough qualities that the headmistress invited my father to be part of Chadwick School’s first graduating class, and when the school relocated to its permanent (and present) site on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, my father went along to board there with all the other students, grades K-12, who lived on campus. He was two years older than his classmates due to the years he’d spent out of school working with his father, but this first-generation son of an immigrant who’d lost everything was now to graduate from an exclusive private boarding school.

Chadwick School would later become home and school to the children of celebrities and movie stars — among others, Jack Benny, Dean Martin, Edward G. Robinson, Jascha Heifetz, Sterling Hayden, George Burns, and Joan Crawford sent their children to Chadwick. Yes, high school scenes from Mommie Dearest take place at Chadwick School (my parents both taught there at that time). Liza Minnelli attended classes at Chadwick, as did Jack Jones.

Meanwhile, my grandfather bought the fish market as well as the two other storefronts in the building, and he moved the family (except my father who was at boarding school) to a house he’d purchased in Anaheim for around $2400. Vine Street, where the house was located, was one block long, encompassed mostly by orange groves. The surrounding level and gently rolling region — divided occasionally by long rows of huge, old eucalyptus trees — also contained farm fields with lima beans, bell peppers, green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, and other produce.

Every Saturday in the fish market my grandfather would prepare a big bowl of raw fish, and the fieldworkers — Mexican and Japanese — would come in to get supplies for their weekend festivities. (Ceviche and sushi? My father says he doesn’t know.) My grandfather was therefore acquainted with many of the farm workers; he also knew the owners of the produce fields — and they granted him permission to come anytime to pick his own produce. So, even though he was the son of a shipping merchant in Naples, even though he himself had been a salesman in Manhattan and then became a retail proprietor and landlord, there was a tendency, perhaps cultural, to augment his family’s lifestyle — or at least to procure food — in ways other than with money.

After graduating from Chadwick, one of the other founders of the school sponsored my father’s college education, which was interrupted by World War II. After the war he finished college, then returned to Chadwick School as the chemistry teacher, where he met my mother, a phys. ed. teacher out of Boston University. My older sisters and I, and the first of my two brothers, were born on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, when it was nothing but rattlesnakes, coyote, tumbleweeds, shepherds with dogs pushing flocks of black sheep across the hills — and Chadwick School. Oh, there was something called Marineland there too.

When my father was a young unmarried teacher at Chadwick School, he and a friend would hitchhike to Oceanside on weekends, then catch a ride east to Fallbrook to go dove hunting in what is now Live Oak County Park. This, however, did not lead directly to my family’s transplantation into San Diego County — just a precursor, a foreshadowing. My parents’ little stucco house on the campus of Chadwick School was rent-free and their children were given complimentary admission to the school, but their salaries were approximately $250 per month in the years around 1953-58.

Concerned that growing up with movie stars’ children as classmates would give us a distorted view of the world and our lives (boy, did they turn out to be right), my parents sought to move out of Palos Verdes. After a series of one-year stops at various public schools — junior high and high school — from Wheatland to Bell Gardens to San Diego, my father was hired in 1960 by San Diego City College as a physics professor. The family spent three years in one of the older housing tracts in San Diego, Allied Gardens, then moved to the “final homestead” in Spring Valley in the summer of 1963. That same year was when Mesa College first opened its doors, and my father was among the first batch of professors who moved over from City College to staff the new campus. He stayed at Mesa, teaching physics and astronomy until he retired in 1985.

The Dove Hunters and the Gleaners

From sometime in late summer, through fall and into early winter, until I was in high school, this time of year was never called football season. This was hunting season. Dove, quail, and cottontail rabbit were all available and legal to hunt in San Diego County and even in undeveloped parts of the city.

When my mother started hunting with my father in 1963, they had one child old enough to baby-sit — no other baby-sitter would come to work at 4:00 a.m. Saturday or Sunday morning! But they usually brought at least two of us kids out hunting with them. Partly, I suppose, to expose us to the techniques and philosophy — that shooting was something you did with concern for safety as well as preservation of the terrain, including mindfulness of game limits and recognition of which birds were strictly off-limits; and was an activity you did as calmly and quietly as possible (except for the report of the shotguns). So while my brothers did engage in target practice, shooting at plastic green army men with BB guns, they were never the type of kids who roam the neighborhood shooting at windows, cats, or songbirds. One of my brothers hunts near his home in North Carolina, but none of the rest of us owns any kind of firearm.

The main reason for including us on hunting trips was that we were the bird dogs. These bird dogs were specially trained to not only find the downed game, but to find the spent shells (which could be refilled at home), pick up trash — ours in addition to any other litter we came across — as well as to decapitate and drain the blood from the birds before completing the retrieve.

Ronnie is the bird dog. She keeps her eye on the doves as they fall, staring at the spot where she sees them land. Then Bill waits on the trail while Ronnie follows her eye and finds the bird, usually not yet dead. He taught her to do this: she holds the body with one hand, thumb and forefinger of the other hand in a ring around the bird’s neck, jerks her hands apart, pops the head off, drains blood from the limp neck. As Bill’s vest fills with birds, its heavy bottom is dark and wet with still more blood that drains slowly after the hearts stop beating.

from “The Dove Hunters”

Animal Acts

by Cris Mazza, FC2, 1989

A dove or quail meal was always a Sunday dinner with china and silver, and, I’m not ashamed to add, was enjoyed with zest. Slow-cooked in a wine-based tomato sauce, the little bodies stayed whole but melted apart when touched, the engorged dark meat could be kissed from the fragile bones. Drumsticks smaller than a toothpick, wings the size of bobby pins. We ate with our hands, licking our fingers, dirtied cloth napkins, sucked the tiny skeletons dry. Quail — about the same size as a dove and 100 percent white meat to the dove’s complete dark — was usually fried with oregano. Cottontail rabbit was stewed with tomatoes. Sometimes our teeth hit shattered bone and we would stop chewing, feel with lips and tongue — or use a finger, manners could be suspended — to locate the tiny shot pellet that had been embedded in the muscle.

But the entire activity — being pulled from sleep at 3:30 a.m.; the tranquil, liquid chill before sunrise; the swell of dusty heat as soon as a September sun rose; the soft traipsing in our parents’ footsteps (obviously, we were taught to stay behind them, to stop and squat down when we heard the whistle of dove wings flying overhead); the retrieving, the decapitating, the defeathering and dressing, the cooking, the dining — was not experienced without a twinge of.. .not guilt, exactly. Maybe some sort of contrite sigh.. .the same sentiment that for decades caused wildlife filmmakers to avoid including a successful kill, a carnivore beginning its meal before the prey has even stopped struggling or breathing, the violence of the food chain. As I helped my parents hunt (and thoroughly enjoyed the eventual prepared “fruits” of the day), as I bred rabbits for similar purposes, as I gave up my adolescent roosters to the burlap bag, I was never without some trepidation during the volatile flash of death.

I slammed myself into a chair.... I had to keep quiet, just let you talk.... I felt like a bird when my uncle would take me hunting: suddenly pelted with shot, falling, fluttering, bones shattered, killed without being dead, waiting on the ground for someone to come pull your head off.

from Your Name Here:_

by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1995

My father would scout the county, looking for potential hunting sites, often finding caches just as valuable. Somewhere between Solana Beach and Oceanside, where the original El Camino Real was two parallel dirt ruts through the weeds going up a hill near an old adobe stagecoach stop (which is most likely now enclosed in chainlink fencing), he found huge beaver tail cactus, bearing fruits called nopales or cactus apples. This is a species of thornless cactus that had been imported to plant on cattle ranges, still can be found everywhere, including the “native landscaping projects” around the lagoons in North County. The old specimens my father located had been eaten bald up to head level by the cattle who free-ranged in the area. He harvested as many cactus apples as he could bring home. Once the thick, succulent cactus skin is cut away, cactus apples are extremely juicy fruit, about the size of a small fist. They are a little like watermelon but with pleasant differences: the flesh is not as mealy, the seeds are mere chewy bumps, the taste has a deeper, brighter flavor. My father also cut several lobes from the cacti he’d found and planted them on his property. They are now as huge and gnarled as the gnarled old ones he’d found.

East of Escondido, near Vista (probably in what are now housing developments in Vista), my father found an abandoned grove of walnut trees. Another family outing had us knee-deep in wild oats and other grasses, picking up the walnuts my father shook from the trees, bringing home full burlap bags, then helping to shell the nutmeats, which were frozen in plastic bags for year-round use in brownies, cookies, Waldorf salads (made with persimmon instead of apple), and holiday candy.

It’s difficult now for my father to verify exactly where some of these places are. He had to cease looking for hunting spots around 1970, maybe earlier — he moved his hunting trips to Mexico. During the years we roamed the “back roads,” there was no or little development — 30 years later, my father can’t remember the names of the roads he took, some of which may not exist anymore. Highway 78 was there—a two-lane road—and I-15 was Highway 395. He can assert that the walnut grove was “west of Escondido, near Vista,” but some of the places are going to look utterly different now — and since he’s had no reason to be in these areas for 30 years, he hasn’t witnessed a gradual change — so pinpointing exactly where certain sites were has proven to be frustrating.

One of the places he can specifically point to is near where the nature conservancy is now located off E Street in Chula Vista. It was a farm packing house where local truck farmers brought their harvested produce to be shipped to grocery stores. Nearby they would dump the rejects. From piles over eight feet high, we salvaged boxes of celery—taking only the hearts from the culls the farmers had cast out. There were also loose tomatoes scattered all over the ground — fully ripe, not squashed yet but probably unable to travel to a store without sustaining bruises. We likewise filled boxes with those, to be taken home and, in a huge caldron on a Coleman stove outside, turned into jars of tomato sauce. In the same area, we discovered a trash dump. Perhaps an unofficial “landfill” devised by the local residents, perhaps a site where migrant farm workers had been encamped. My brothers started picking up soda bottles. By the time we finished, we had several boxes of those as well, some needing to be scrubbed with bottle brushes at home, but at a nickel each, we had anywhere from three to five dollars of spending, money. I still have a little glossy-blue pottery bowl I found in that trash dump.

One of my father’s most interesting hunting places — the one he stayed with the longest before having to abandon hunting in San Diego County entirely — was just off Manchester Road at the junction of the villages of Encinitas, Solana Beach, and Rancho Santa Fe. We would take Manchester off I-5 and go east just past the wetlands. There, my father says, an old man owned 10,000 acres and ran cattle on his land. Cattle need fresh water, so the small creek making its way toward the ocean had been blocked in several places with dirt dams, creating square watering holes no more than 30 feet across.

In an arid coastal region, water attracts birds — especially dove who feed in stubble fields and on the grain left behind after cattle forage.

My father asked the old landowner for permission to hunt on his land. The man said yes, provided my father stopped by the house to make known his arrival and departure, so the man would be aware that the sound of shots was nothing to worry about. Was the landowner concerned about “poachers” hunting his land? Maybe cattle rustlers? As far as my father can determine, he was the only one who had permission to hunt on the old man’s land, but we did occasionally find other shot shells th§re (we picked them up too; sometimes my father could reload more shells than he’d spent). My parents usually brought something, like a hostess gift, in return for being allowed to hunt on the old man’s land. Once my mother brought strawberry shoots because, after having brought strawberry jam on a previous trip, the man’s wife expressed an interest in growing strawberries.

Then my father tells me the name of this old couple: “Weegan or Weegand or something like that.” Until I expressed my surprise, my father had been completely unaware that on El Camino Real, just a few miles north from his former hunting ground, there’s now a theater complex in Encinitas called Wiegand 8 in a shopping center called Wiegand Plaza, marked with an old stagecoach, the whole plaza built in an “old West” motif.

The Wiegand land where we hunted, south of Manchester Road between El Camino Real and Rancho Santa Fe Road, was lowland but not really flat — mostly sandstone bluffs and gullies, slightly higher plateaus and clusters of huge eucalyptus trees planted probably 50 to 75 years before we hunted there. Dry, arid bushes, sandy washes, bristly weeds where grasshoppers flew in front of each footstep. We found snakeskins and weathered, bleached seashells. The whole tract was crisscrossed by cattle trails, dotted with parched, weathered cattle droppings. I can’t remember ever seeing the cattle.

One of the last years we hunted on Wiegand’s property, probably 1968, we did something that might’ve been illegal. As we got out of the Volkswagen Beetle (this was before Ford Explorers and Toyota Land Cruisers), we found a desert tortoise crossing the dirt road we used to get onto the property. My father put the tortoise in the car, left all the windows open, and after the morning hunt we took him home. My father drilled a small hole in the back of his shell, attached a fishing leader, and used his strongest fishing line to tether the tortoise in the front yard where he could enjoy the lawn when the sprinklers came on and then burrow under the jade bushes in leaves that fell from the magnolia tree. We fed him lettuce and sometimes fresh figs. But, despite his constant amiability and willingness to eat “in captivity,” the tortoise broke his tether and found freedom again on the so-far undeveloped south side of Hartzel Hill in Spring Valley. After a few days of self-centered 11-year-old moping, I realized it was probably the way it should be.

One day, probably in 1969, my father returned to the VW after hunting Wiegand’s land and found a note on the windshield, “No Shooting West of 395,” so that was the end of hunting in San Diego County. By then the fringe of houses being added in Rancho Santa Fe was beginning to creep down the hill toward Wiegand’s land.

We drove by there recently, taking Manchester Road off I-5, then going east past the small vegetable farm. Of course the tidal wetland, San Elijo Lagoon, across Manchester from MiraCosta College’s San Elijo campus, is still excellent natural bird-watching terrain. My father used to hunt beginning at the edge of the marsh. Just east of that — about a quarter mile after the El Camino Real turnoff — we found the lowest section of our old hunting site is still indigenous and uninhabited. Consulting a map, I was pleased to discover it’s within the boundaries of the San Elijo Lagoon Ecological Reserve and therefore is protected. This parcel features a few big stands of eucalyptus trees and a conspicuous lone pine tree. Remnants of barbed-wire fences are visible in the chaparral, and a creek or string of pools is surrounded by thicker brush. Orange dirt paths suddenly become miniature Grand Canyon gullies carved in sandstone.

Change was apparent as soon as we looked slightly east where the land rises into small knolls. I remember trudging up the sandy paths on those bluffs, always behind my parents, trained to stay in the halfcircle behind the axis of their parallel shoulders. Now these low swells are dotted with houses, I’m guessing between 10 and 20 years old — the vegetation around them is fairly immature, the trees are small, the landscaping modern.

Wiegand’s wooden farmhouse, which had been just off Manchester, is no longer there, nor is the dirt driveway that went past the house and across the land to the hills on the other side. My father spotted a few likely sites where the house might’ve been — a flat place where several eucalyptus trees grow in a half-circle, or beside that on the site of what is now a landscaping company. Along the south side of Manchester Road, up to Rancho Santa Fe Road, none of the houses, horse ranches, landscaping companies, or Christmas tree farms were there when we hunted. Arriving at the eastern end of Manchester at Rancho Santa Fe Road, with its cluster of restaurants, upscale grocery store, and small boutiques, I realized that the creek that ran through the middle of our hunting site, crudely dammed to make water holes for cattle, is the Escondido Creek that comes all the way from Lake Wohlford and used to flood Rancho Santa Fe Road until they recently built a new bridge.

Back down Manchester, closer to the specific part of the land where my father hunted, El Camino Real, going north up the hill, has grown to be as big as a six-lane highway. I now live in Illinois but still spend my summers in the La Costa area of southern Carlsbad, just about five miles north of the former Wiegand land. As few as ten years ago, from La Costa Avenue south to the “new” downtown of Encinitas, El Camino Real had nothing on it, just two lanes through native terrain, as serenely rural as the days when we hunted. Now I shop at a big Home Depot, and across the street a flower farm was cleared for an even vaster conglomeration of warehouse-sized retail businesses — Petsmart and Target Greatland, Comp USA, and Barnes & Noble (where you can find my novels in the literature section). There are places to get a lube job and places to get checked by a doctor. There are places to climb a StairMaster and places to shop for a car via computer; there are banks and restaurants and bakeries and linen shops. Anything you could possibly need or want to buy or have done to your car or to your house or to your body is available in that three-or four-mile stretch on El Camino Real.

The other day on a radio call-in show—apparently the topic was the “ridiculous” things the government makes us do for endangered species — I heard a young employee from the Encinitas Home Depot snidely report that he was working in this brand-new state-of-the-art hardware warehouse, but when it was built they were required to maintain an adjacent chunk of native landscape, install sprinklers and keep it wet, “and I Ve never yet seen one of the stupid little birds we’re supposed to be doing this for.” Well, do you wonder why?

And yet, for all our hunting, dove are still plentiful, in back yards, in the remaining open spaces, in the preserved wetlands. Sadly, it seems that dove, like their disreputable relative the pigeon, are one of the few species able to adapt to development and rapidly changing habitat. Mourning dove come to my feeders in snowstorms during Illinois winters.

Before settling on Wiegand’s cattle ranch as what would become his last San Diego County hunting area, one of my father’s previous hunting grounds is now the EastLake housing development, another location was very near what is now Southwestern College, and another was in territory where there’s now an Olympic training center. He hunted on the site of Miramar College and at Lake San Marcos when it was a mud puddle without a single house in the vicinity. An early favorite was off Dairy Mart Road in the Tijuana River Valley, part of the city of San Diego where now there are large parcels of park, some houses, and flood-threatened equestrian ranches. In the mid-1960s there was nothing but waist-high grasses, dry sandy washes, native barrel cactus, fragrant sage and anise, coyote and foxes (we basically saw only their poop), rabbits, snakes, hawks, owls, meadowlark, roadrunners, horned toads, wasps, and tarantulas. On this hunting ground, my father came across an abandoned farm. There was rusted equipment — an old well pump, a hand plow — a dead falling-down tree near a house foundation, and one lone live fig tree.

My father had found the farm site on a previous hunting trip with a friend from Mesa College. So on a separate outing, while we played below, he climbed the low, thick branches and filled a bucket with ripe figs. Figs can’t be picked green to ripen later and once ripe only stay perfect for a few days. That’s probably why grocery stores so rarely carry fresh figs. My father eventually established three fig trees on his property — three different types that ripened different months — and we had as many ripe figs as we could devour (and more). But in the mid-’60s, when any trees in our yard were mere sticks, this tree was like an island paradise for my parents. Paradise for kids too — bugs and lizards to catch, an easy tree to climb (fig trees seem to spread thick, strong branches close to the ground), neat old tools to pretend to use, and a house foundation to pretend to excavate (until I was 13 I thought I would be an archaeologist). Now, as I write, it seems these kinds of outings, and all our hunting and gleaning trips, permanently colored my perception of the world — of my world, and the different worlds I create in my fiction. Perhaps that’s why the San Diego I know (or remember) seems so much different from the popular conception. Why is it this landscape that I picture when I think of Southern California?

It’s a clear summer night with a lopsided moon. They walk soft-footed down the long driveway toward the old highway that’s hardly used anymore. Both sides of the dirt road are thick with wild oats, buckwheat, semi-arid shrubs like sage and tumbleweeds, low trees, tall rubbery bushes that taste like licorice, and a few taller trees: pepper and fig, like islands in the chaparral, left over from abandoned turn-of-the-century farms. Old equipment rusts beneath the waist-high vegetation.... Crickets and toads buzz, rabbits run or sleeping birds nestle farther into darkness.

Tara moves close to his side, but as she does he suddenly drops to his knees and begins crawling into the bushes.

from How to Leave a Country

by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1992

In How to Leave a Country, a young man “leaves” the real world and chooses to live, instead, in his imagination. I selected this abandoned farm site — and other details from the backcountry of San Diego County — for him to build his imaginary house and set up residence. I wrote scenes like the sample above without referring to my mother’s old slides of us in pink pedal pushers playing with the rusty equipment in the weeds. What I recalled clearly enough to recreate for the nearly fanciful atmosphere I wanted in How to Leave a Country was us being the only seven people on the face of the earth, in a pristine prairie of brown, waving grasses interrupted only by the dusty dark green dome of the old fig tree, no sound but the mournful cry of dove, intricate piping of meadowlark, rustle of mice, wind chime of rattling leaves or creaking branches — certainly a place that could no longer exist except in memory, which automatically renders it romantically, pastorally idyllic. Kids probably don’t notice — and anyway nobody remembers — stickers in their socks, bug bites, or wind-tangled hair. So maybe it’s a good thing some things disappear, leaving us only with phantom recollection.

Beach Days

My memories of the beach — like all family outings — also have us there alone, the only people alive. It’s because of where we went and why. Because of how long we stayed. And because of the decade. (It’s also because of my mother’s picture-taking technique — somehow she was able to get candid shots of us playing or posed shots in public places and include no one else in the picture. I recently went through her slides of a trip we took across the country, and at Williamsburg and Jamestown, in Civil War forts and on the beach in North Carolina, we seemed all alone, no other tourists, as though there was one day a week when places of interest were reserved for the exclusive use of the Mazzas.)

It’s interesting, as I dredge up recollections, that I seem to have, in particular, a slightly alternate perception of The Beach than most San Diegans might. San Diego County beaches are still some of the nicest anywhere. But I no longer go to the beach. I don’t even pause to wonder why. I know why.

A day at the beach was exactly that...a day. Starting as early as 9:00 a.m. (meaning we left home around 8:00) and ending at around 9:00 p.m., sometimes later. First, however, my father referred to a tide schedule. There were no spontaneous trips to the beach. We only went on days when the tide would be low in the morning and then start coming in in the afternoon and evening. This is because fish feed during a flowing (incoming) tide, and a day at the beach was a day fishing for perch and corbina.

Even though we lived in Spring Valley, we only went to the beach at Torrey Pines. Before I-805 was completed, this meant driving all the way down I-8 to I-5, then up the coast to Carmel Valley Road. The only parking available was a tiny lot at the south end of the beach and parallel parking along the coast road (the larger parking lot off Carmel Valley Road hadn’t been built yet), so the*beach was populated only by the number of families that could park in the limited spaces. Black’s Beach already existed — you had to walk in on the sand from Torrey Pines, past the cliffs. There were lifeguards; I was even “rescued” once.

Morning, arriving at the beach, it was always still overcast and chilly. We kept our sweatshirts on over our swimsuits and kept our sneakers on our bare feet — at least until after we’d unloaded and carried the gear precariously down over those huge concrete pieces with dangerous rusty rebar jutting from them, piled just off the road to protect the old state highway from high water (these jagged concrete pieces have been removed and/or replaced with more visually pleasing, natural-looking rocks). We had our choice of sand space and fire rings, planted one old beach umbrella — its most useful function was to easily spot our “campsite” when we came out of the water after waves dragged us south down the beach — and spread out seven towels. Then we set about making things in the sand, like bathtubs, drip castles, moats, and volcanoes, while we waited for it to be warm enough to take our air mattresses into the waves.

Meanwhile, my father began gathering bait. He never used store-bought bait (that we usually had for dinner, as I’ll explain later). He used what the fish might naturally be eating — sand crabs, the ones who’d recently molted so their shells were soft. The wet sand at water’s edge was etched with the inverted Vs of thousands of sand crab tentacles. Sand crabs are basically shaped like beetles. They burrow backwards into wet sand at the water line and leave their two antennae on the surface of the sand, gathering microscopic pieces of food as the waves lick their feathery tentacles. My father had a special sieve made from carpenter’s cloth, shaped like a minibulldozer with the “shovel” curved inward instead of outward. Standing up to his ankles in the surf, he pulled the “crab net” against the movement of the waves, digging it down about two inches into the sand, first when the wave came in, and then again as the water drew back. Under the water, he twisted his heels into the sand to keep his balance against the force of the wave filling the net with swirling, muddy sand-water. Then he stood with his back to the ocean, waves crashing against his calves, held the net up against his waist, and picked through the crabs, discarding all but those with soft shells. A crab might only have a soft shell for a day or two after molting. On any given day the crabs he discarded might’ve been soft the day before or would be soft tomorrow. But we only went to the beach, at most, once a week.

We kids also dug for crabs with our hands. Torrey Pines didn’t often have a lot of shells to collect, no rock crabs or tidepools (unless you followed the inlet back into the lagoon on the other side of the coast road), but there were always thousands and thousands of sand crabs. We searched for the huge ones, then kept them as “pets” in pails or in the moats around our castles, digging them up and watching them burrow down out of sight over and over. We found the big females — carefully lifted the protective flap under their bellies to see the glop of bright orange eggs. We never touched the eggs themselves. All were granted freedom when we left.

It was my mother who taught us to catch waves on our canvas air mattresses (a former phys. ed. teacher, also a WSI — water safety instructor). But she’s not the one who “rescued” me. I was probably 11, my youngest brother around 6. We were out together with one of the rafts, trying to catch a wave, but we couldn’t seem to get one to carry us in. We weren’t worried, but we also couldn’t touch the bottom. All of a sudden I saw a bright orange thing approaching — it was a lifeguard with one of the orange buoys they used to carry out with them. We hadn’t realized how far out we were. He didn’t drag us back in with a lifesaver’s hold. We just told him we couldn’t catch a wave, so he put us both on the raft and somehow convinced a wave to carry us in. We couldn’t even find him once we were back on the sand. My mother was probably interested in our story, but I can’t remember any special reaction — she certainly was not hysterical, didn’t become overly protective. Nor do I worry about her now—she’s in her 70s and still rides the waves at the beach on her Boogie board.

After a picnic lunch (sandwiches, peaches or nectarines, cookies, and the requisite sandy potato chips) when the tide turned in the afternoon, my father would begin to fish in the surf. He maintained a distance between himself and the nearest swimmers (I don’t remember there being any surfers except across the inlet at the north end of Torrey Pines). It wasn’t difficult to maintain space, however, because the beach was never crowded, again due to the lack of parking and the “long” trip up from San Diego. North County wasn’t nearly as developed as it is now, and North County communities had their own uncrowded beaches. Following the coast road south from Torrey Pines to La Jolla, the golf course was there, but there were none of the high-tech labs and biomedical research companies, just sandstone, scrub bushes, eucalyptus groves, and a very young university. So there were relatively few people living in a location where Torrey Pines would be the closest beach.

Surf fishing requires a long pole, a strong reel, two leaders (meaning two hooks attached to the main fishing line), and a fairly good-sized weight. My father would wade into the surf up to his waist, twist so his shoulders were facing the sand, likewise cock the pole that direction, then somewhat like a baseball pitcher, he used legs, body, arms, and the leverage of the long pole to cast the weight — thus the baited hooks — as far out into the surf as possible. With the reel still open, he backed up into shallower water, closed the reel, kept the line taut, and waited. When he felt a hit (a bite), he jerked the tip of the pole back to set the hook, then began reeling in. Unlike lake or river fishing, you can’t feel the fish fighting while you reel in, so you don’t know if you’ve felt a fish bite or if your hook hit seaweed. Probably less than 50 percent of the times my father set the hook then reeled in, there was a fish (or two) on the hook. Rarely, maybe once, he caught a small sand shark and released it. Most of the time the catch was perch, and on special occasions when corbina were running, he would get some of those too.

When we got tired of catching waves or covering ourselves with sand, we would stand beside my father, waiting for him to jerk the rod and set the hook, anticipating what he might reel in. He let us hold the pole ourselves, helping us reel in when we hooked a choice hunk of kelp.

Through the afternoon, twilight, and evening, my father continued fishing as long as the fishing was good — sometimes as long as the tide continued to come in. We repeatedly moved our towels and beach bags, our books and radios (as we got older), farther and farther east, toward that scrap-concrete breakwater just below the road. My mother would hold a beach towel around us while we squirmed out of damp, sandy swimsuits and put old sweat suits (from Chadwick School) on over our bare salty skin. As the sun went down and the coastal layer moved back in, we made a fire, roasted marshmallows, ate more cookies, and even cooked some of the fish wrapped in foil and placed on the embers. Sometimes my father would fish until an especially high tide would start swamping up over the dry sand right to the edge of the fire rings. We would scramble to rescue our belongings and my mother would call, “Honey, yoo hoo,” to catch my father’s attention.

But most of the time we sat contentedly, or drowsily, around the fire. The beach wouldn’t be completely abandoned; there were usually a few others fishing — the closest might be 50 yards — and there were fires in each of the rings up and down the beach. But over the thunder of the surf, we couldn’t hear so much as a giggle from other parties, no radios thumping, no shouts or dogs barking. The roar of water was rhythmic and constant. Gulls continued to call in twilight, after that the snap of the fire and the pop of dried kelp “floats” we threw into the embers were the only nearby sounds, under the surging of waves. Sometimes we chewed the dried kelp — never even considered that it might be dirty, what would make it dirty? It tasted salty and green and oceany. The enchanting atmosphere stuck with me, and when I needed it — in a different context, in a novel about the subtle line between imagination and reality, there it was:

Well, it was a big chess tournament, all the masters and grand masters were playing.... No boxed-in tournament hall, quiet and shuffly and old guys coughing. They had fires up and down the beach, as far as I could see both ways, bonfires, and the boards were set up on low benches in rings around each fire. We sat in the sand. And no clocks ticking— just some kind of invisible bug singing, you know the way at night it seems like the stars are making the cricket sounds. And the fires popped and hissed. There were fishing poles, and the players who’d finished their games would fish, then wrap the perch in foil with onions and butter, and put them in the fire

from How to Leave a Country

by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1992

And then, years later, different characters, a less whimsical situation, but the same setting’s atmosphere lent a mood I knew and understood, even if I’d never personally experienced the circumstance:

Did you know that when there’s no moon at the beach at night, you can’t see the water at all? There’s just a dark rushing motion, felt but not seen, the waves roaring as though just beyond the end of your arm, standing up and crashing down. And the sand is gray-black, dotted with even blacker spots and pits: the hollows and dents of footprints or somebody’s body that lay there in the afternoon. It was cold, even the sand was cold, but with a blanket down between two small dunes to block the wind, the sand insulated us enough that we never shivered.... The air was so salty that in a few minutes we were sticky and tasted brackish. Grains of sand blew off the dunes and stuck to us. The fog rolled in so there were no stars, just velvet, salty darkness, and I wondered how, without a single source of light, I could still see him.

from Your Name Here:__

by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1995

Clamming, another beach activity, was not done in the summer—for health reasons, shellfish can only be eaten fresh in winter months. Besides that, the extreme low tides of winter are advantageous for clam digging. In the ’60s my father dug clams on the very south end of Silver Strand, just north of Imperial Beach and the navy communications facility. He would climb a chainlink fence near the north end of the navy facility and walk into the clam beds the short way, rather than hiking down the whole Silver Strand. One day my father was caught by a military guard as he came back over the fence. Today he might’ve been arrested and searched for explosives or weapons, but the amicable guard just told my father he couldn’t allow him to climb the fence onto the navy facility, but he could go east a few yards and climb the barbed wire fence. My father’s hunting, fishing, and clamming didn’t make him a wanton trespasser — he had assumed that because all tidal lands are public, he had not been on navy property when he climbed the fence.

An activity a family could all do together, clamming is basically digging in muddy sand. There were no licenses required, but there were mandated limits in quantity (50 per person) and size of the clams you could take (1.5 inch minimum). My father had a measuring device, a flat steel rectangle like a broad ruler with a series of holes ranging in size for various types of clams or the various size requirements designated by different jurisdictions. When a clam’s size was in doubt, my father used the device — if the clam fit through the designated hole, it was too small and was left in the clam bed. Each member of the family dug his or her limit, and my father filled jugs with seawater, then at home the clams .were leached: in a metal tub he put them in the clean sea-4 water with cornmeal, changing the water several times. Clams feed by filtering water, so as they fed on clean cornmeal and water, they extracted any sand they’d been holding from previous meals in muddy water. Most of the time, my parents ate clams raw on the half-shell, sometimes in clam chowder — they took turns having Manhattan-style chowder (my father’s favorite, the kind in tomato-based soup) and New England-style (the cream style, for my mother).

In the early ’70s we clammed on Camp Pendleton (no fence jumping — all tidal lands, up to the high-tide mark, are public; some are just harder to get to than others). Now, however, for several years, the clam beds have been dead — hopefully just dormant. I know people like my father are blamed for the death of the clam beds, and I suppose it’s true that if no one had dug clams, they’d still be there. But a variety of things marred these clam fields. One was an influx of other gleaning cultures, particularly when the Vietnamese refugees were housed at Pendleton, and they also brought children to raise their limits. But this alone wouldn’t have done the damage as quickly as it was done and maybe wouldn’t’ve spoiled the beds at all — after all, people have been clamming in Asia for generations. Sometime in the ’70s the L.A. Times ran an article blabbing about the rich clam fields between Orange County and San Diego County, on Camp Pendleton, come and get them. People did come — in what seemed like hordes. But the most harmful aspect of the deluge was that they didn’t know how to take care of the clam beds: whether or not they respected the limits or used a clam-sizing device is up to speculation, but after digging, they did leave their holes open, exposing the next generations of baby or immature clams to be consumed by sea gulls.

Miscellaneous Sources

I said my father didn’t fish with purchased bait. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t purchase bait. The People’s Fish Co. was near the Coronado Ferry landing, before the bridge was built. There my father bought bait — squid at 25 cents a pound. But he didn’t use it to fish. He helped my mother clean out the cuttle-bones, cut the bodies into macaroni-sized pieces, but left the bite-sized tentacles as they were; then she cooked them in a slightly spicy tomato sauce and served them with spaghetti sauce, a recipe she’d learned from my grandmother. Recently, in a Chicago restaurant, my father ordered an appetizer that was the exact same recipe — probably at $8.95. But squid are no longer called squid — they’re calamari (even in some Asian restaurants, which I find curious), they’re no longer sold as bait, and they’re no longer 25 cents a pound.

Sometimes these gourmet meals seemed to fall from heaven (almost literally, I guess). Driving up I-5 on one of our frequent trips to Anaheim to visit my father’s parents, my father stopped on the side of the freeway on Camp Pendleton to pick up a pheasant that had recently been hit by a car. My father, an experienced hunter, could tell how long the bird had been dead, put it into a bag and brought it to my grandparents’ house, where it was defeathered and dressed, then roasted to go along with the huge Italian meal my grandfather always prepared for us. (My grandfather would become annoyed when we—the kids — always requested that he make us pasta e fagioli, which is spaghetti and beans. He said it was peasant food. He cooked Italian food that only recently has shown up on menus with the advent of the gourmet-style Italian restaurant.)

Through the ’60s, my parents were raising five preteen children on my father’s paltry community college professor salary. My mother went back to college at San Diego State part-time — as soon as my younger brother was in school— to get her elementary teaching credential. She didn’t begin working until the ’70s — by that time my sisters were in college but still living at home. So while he was the sole financial support of the family, my father taught an overload at Mesa for an extra paycheck, taught summer school for another extra check, and for two or three weeks a year he worked the afternoon-evening shift as a gate man (ticket taker) at the Del Mar Fair. (An article in the San Diego Union recently detailed the summer activities of some local public school teachers — many of them have summer jobs, and a surprising number of those summer jobs are at the fair. I think my father got his job at the fair through a friend who was a high school teacher. Is there some connection between teachers and summer jobs at the fair?)

For a while they called it the Southern California Exposition — does anyone remember that? Well, here’s another trip down memory lane: the Golden Arrow Dairy. Does it still exist? I guess not — it’s not in the phone book. They delivered milk to your doorstep in glass bottles. Johnny Downs, who hosted a local cartoon program (featuring Popeye), was a spokesman for Golden Arrow— in a stunning special effect of the times, he tap-danced on top of a huge Golden Arrow bottle! Well, at the Del Mar Fair, Golden Arrow exhibited its famous Golden Guernsey dairy cows. As is the nature of a dairy cow, they needed to be milked daily. Golden Arrow didn’t sell the milk they took from cows at the fair — they did ladle out free samples of whole milk, straight from the cow, to anyone coming to the exhibit. And at the end of his shift (midnight), my father would leave his post (the entrance to the fair near the barns), go to the Golden Arrow stalls where they’d saved jugs of whole, unhomogenized, unpasteurized milk for him to take home. I think this is illegal now, because no longer do any exhibitors of dairy cattle give samples of milk to anyone — it’s thrown away. Were cows cleaner then or were we just lucky?

Bountiful Backyard (The Ten Years of Work)

Morning on any ordinary day — his first call is what pulls my body from sleep. Outside, I’ll be aware of the watery scent of dew and the smell of wet rotting mulch leaves under the avocado trees, the earthy compost pile, new fertilizer worked into a vegetable garden, a husky odor of ripening tomatoes or the green scent of bell peppers. I’ll feel the cool damp air splash on my face and spider web lines brushing my arms and legs. I’ll hear any mouse who rustles the weeds, a cat stalking, a bird shaking the heavy night air from its feathers.

from “Attack at Dawn”

Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?

by Cris Mazza, FC2, 1991

My parents’ “homestead” is three-fourths of an acre on Hartzel Hill in northern Spring Valley, close to where Spring Valley touches La Mesa at Spring Street and Highway 94. The property had a long, low ranch house built on the slope of the hill — therefore no slab; it had half a standup basement that narrowed to crouching height as you moved farther into it. The average-sized front lawn on one level and back lawn on a lower level were both horizontal. The rest of the property sloped downhill at anything from a 30- to almost 43-degree slant. From the edge of the back lawn down to the property line, and from there continuing down about three-fourths of a mile (on a slope) to the bottom of the hill, existed the familiar terrain of tumbleweeds, wasps’ nests, rattlesnakes, wild cucumbers, buckwheat, cacti, and other indigenous flora and fauna, some of which have disappeared from the area.

My father looked around at his property and announced, “There’s ten years of work here.” Thirty years later, he’s still working. But the majority is complete.

It started with dynamiters who leveled out a place in the granite hill for an above-ground swimming pool. Then for several months my father (with a wheelbarrow), my mother, and all five children (aged 3 to 13) picked up the rubble and made rock piles around the perimeter of the property. With these rocks, over the next 25 years, my father constructed walls — some as thick as two feet, ranging in height from two to six feet—which terraced the entire property into four levels. He searched through the rock piles for those with any flat surface, saved them in a special pile, and fitted them like puzzle pieces glued together with concrete to make the tops of all the walls flat.

These terraced levels, probably a half-acre in all, have been (and still are) home to a wide variety of fruit trees, including fig, persimmon, tangerine, lime, several varieties of orange, quince, avocado, nectarine, peach, and apricot — almost any kind of fruit tree that does not need a frost. Plus there are beds of rotating seasonal vegetables: lettuce, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, asparagus, onions, garlic, herbs of all lands, radishes, carrots, squash, pumpkins, artichoke, eggplant, spinach, swiss chard, rhubarb, bell peppers, tomato, green beans, strawberries, boysen-berries, raspberries, and more.

There were also rabbits (yes, for meat); and, under the rabbit hutches — in a steady, always-ready supply of nitrogen-rich fertilizer — he raised worms for freshwater fishing and to aid the garden. We kept chickens in a 10' x 10' x 10' coop cloaked by fig and avocado trees, beehives for honey, and quail in their own smaller coop — not for meat, just for the tiny eggs. The property came equipped with two full-sized olive trees, so my father also cures olives in several ways — green, black, and Italian salt method. My mother cans and preserves everything from strawberry, peach, plum, and boysenberry jam and mint jelly, to quince sauce (very much like applesauce), to tomato sauce, to boysenberry and pomegranate syrup. Both my brothers and one of my sisters are actively carrying on these conventions of lifestyle... and I’ve procreated them in a different way:

It was no longer raining. The sun had been out since the clouds broke at around seven that morning when she’d gotten up to make applesauce out of the box of bruised apples she’d bought at a farmer’s market for $2. The last of the jars was being processed at noon. Every window was steamed-up and the house smelled appley.... Brenda went out into the back yard to weed the small garden area she’d cleared the week before. She’d planted some quick-growing, easy-care vegetables — lettuce, chard, bush beans, green pepper. The ground was saturated and the small plants were flattened. She used twigs to support the ones that weren’t beaten to death

from “Bad Luck with Cats”

Former Virgin

by Cris Mazza, FC2, 1997

Backyard chicken coops are nothing new—they’re still popular in the East County. I say “popular” rather than advantageous because I suspect they are no longer cost-effective. Feed is expensive and, unless poultry are kept in small cages artificially lit to create longer “days,” hens really don’t lay an egg every day, more like five out of seven days (for the best ones) or every other day (for the average ones), depending on the breed. Also some banty hens will “go broody” after laying eggs for three weeks — that means no more eggs for a while, they just want to sit and incubate. I used to feel sorry for them when they got this way— gave them avocado seeds to sit on and satisfy their urges. Their broodiness could be broken if I dipped their undersides in water several times a day. But if I needed some fresh stock, I could wait for a banty hen to go broody, then purchase some chicks from the feed store. At night I would slip into the chicken coop and, one at a time, take each chick in my hand, reach into the dark nesting box, and nestle the day-old baby under the broody hen. In the morning the hen got up, clucking with pride, and led her new brood into the yard to teach them to scratch. In three weeks the babies had all outgrown their mother (because commercial laying breeds are so much bigger than banties) but were still trying to find security under her wings. She would be sitting with wings raised over her head with a huge, gawky “baby” under each.

It was even funnier when we used the banties to raise quail. The Asian quail we kept were for eggs only — little delicacies smaller than the end of my thumb. But these quail didn’t have many parenting instincts. They didn’t even lay eggs in nest boxes, just left them lying around, and never were they interested in hatching out their eggs. We tried an incubator, but the percentage of successful hatchings was very low that way—it takes constant surveillance, turning the eggs, making sure the heat and humidity are consistent. So we decided to let a broody banty hen hatch some quail eggs. Ain’t nature amazing: she hatched all the eggs, probably around 10 or 12 (because so many little eggs could fit under her). The quail chicks were yellow and black, no bigger than bumblebees. But this method had its problems too. She took the tiny quail chicks out in the yard, but when she tried to show them how to scratch for food, the eager little chicks (instinctively aware of the importance of this activity) would themselves be scratched out from underneath her feet like pebbles. Several were mortally injured, so they had to grow up in the incubator after having been given life by the warmth of a genuine maternal body.

Many people have wondered how I could find my chickens so fascinating — giving them names (my roosters were Eugene and Clarence, some of my hens were Whiteness and Lovable, and my duck was Chickie — long before the duck in Babe, I had a duck who thought she was a chicken) and viewing them as individuals with personalities. Perhaps I was already augmenting my “undramatic” life with imagination. Later, in reverse, my chickens augmented the subtle dramas I was inventing on paper.

there was a small commotion: long hen-necks stretched and pointed toward a corner of the yard. I went around the outside of the coop to see what it was, stopped and stared, pulse thick in my ears. A king snake was oozing through the wire with his pellet eyes on a new family of chicks.... I took the dowel and slipped inside. The chicks scattered from me like leaves blowing over the ground.

from “Attack at Dawn”

Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?

by Cris Mazza, FC2, 1991

He was there the day some of the eggs cracked. He missed the end of the basketball game and didn’t go to math class. No one could make him leave the incubator. He stayed after school. The eggs trembled. The hatching eggs all had little holes where the chicks were breaking the shell. Phelan could see the beaks chipping away at the holes in the eggs. Then they would rest, and he could see them panting, a part of the body pressed up against the hole, pink skin and wet feathers.

from How to Leave a Country

by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1992

Twice during my education I used my rabbit-raising experience for school projects. (Lest I forget, I also used my father’s beehives for my sweepstakes winning junior high science fair project, “Do Bees Perceive Color?”) For my high school chemistry project, I tanned the hides of a litter of rabbits. (Usually we dried the hides on stretching racks, and my father traded them for bags of rabbit feed.) My tanned hides weren’t exactly soft, but they were preserved! I only earned a B on the project, yet the only criticism I received from the teacher was that she couldn’t stand the idea that the skins came from rabbits I’d helped slaughter. Later, in a college photography class, I did a photo series of the wordless slaughter choreography my father and I knew by heart. The experience cropped up again, more than once, arriving almost spontaneously in my fiction as I wrote.

The rule was: if he was allowed to feed and breed them and take the young rabbits out to play on the lawn, then he had to help slaughter them eight weeks after they were born. Phelan was like a surgical nurse. His father never had to ask for each tool anymore. Slaughtering was done in silence except the grunt in his father’s chest as he hit the rabbit behind the ears.... The blow had to be clean — breaking the animal’s neck instantly — or the rabbit would scream. Few rabbits ever struggled, hanging upside down [by their feet] as Father held their ears.... [ A] s Father raised the hammer, Phelan turned away and poked his fingers through the wire of the buck’s and doe’s hutches, wondering how they felt about seeing and smelling what was happening. But he couldn’t plug his ears because as soon as he heard the hammer hit and the bones crack, he had to be ready to take the hammer and hand Father a knife.

from How to Leave a Country

by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1992

No, I didn’t enjoy killing rabbits. But the distasteful part of the process was, somehow, disconnected in my sensibility from my enjoyment of fried-rabbit dinners. It was disconnected from the sublime phenomenon of the half-pound, pink, blind babies that would appear, without anyone’s help, the morning after the doe had lined her nest box with fine white fur. It was disconnected from blithe sunny mornings playing with six or eight softball-sized bunnies on the lawn. The slaughtering was somehow so disconnected from all the other care of the rabbits that I felt true sorrow and distress when roaming stray dogs came and bloodied the adult rabbits’ feet through the bottoms of the cages; and another, more horrible time when the bees in the nearby hives became angered by something and attacked the first animals they found — the rabbits in their wire hutches. Filling their vulnerable ears with stings, the bees killed a pair of adult rabbits. I remember my rage at the bees and the dogs — but bees attack their enemies and dogs hunt in packs, and people all over the world raise their own food. People ask how could I do it? I don’t, I’m afraid, have an answer that anyone who hasn’t done it finds satisfactory.

Living on a hill is supposed to be peaceful — the stars go forever, and the valley below likewise, thousands of porch lights and window lights with spaces of black in between.... I can’t sleep. The windows are open and there’re birds singing — at midnight!... And the house moans. And toads belch. And in the valley a rooster crows. When the air dares to move, the trees whisper.... A scream outside, on the road below the house. Not human or dog or coyote. Immediately recognizable — four tires.

from Exposed by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1994

Halfway down Hartzel Hill, not far below the house, is a road named Lakeview that snakes, slightly downhill, from the east side to the west. Now lined with big custom-made houses, Lake-view was, the first ten years we lived there, an empty road with no shoulder and no sidewalk, rarely used except by teenagers for drag racing or making out. At the bottom of the hill is a housing development called Brookside — a tract built in the ’50s on the site of an old golf course.

Why “Brookside”? Why “Lakeview”? Before the golf course, at the bottom of the hill there was a little lake, or pond, and most of Spring Valley was ranches and groves. I don’t know why the pond was drained to make a golf course. But the creek that fed the pond remained, even after the housing development was built — it ran down the middle of Fairway, the main street, in a concrete canal. But when the creek came out the other end of Brookside, it went back to a natural creek bed. This portion of the creek, no more than 100 yards long, was located directly below our house, perhaps a mile down the hill on the zigzagging paths. From the creek, we filled our parents’ old, refurbished aquariums with mosquito fish, polliwogs, craw-dads, and African clawed frogs— flat, slimy frogs that live underwater. The crawdads and polliwogs were native. The county stocked the mosquito fish to, obviously, help control mosquitoes. The clawed frogs were originally brought into the country for labs, used for pregnancy tests, then escaped or were thrown out and established themselves in the creek. I hear they can now be found (many times bigger than the size they grow to in Africa) in Sweetwater Reservoir, where the creek eventually terminates.

He used to talk to them while he tried to catch them.... Besides minnows and small tree frogs, there were crawdads and some salamanders, bugs that skated on the surface of the water, polliwogs and dragonfly larva, and clawed frogs — large, flat, slimy frogs who never came onto land because they were clumsy and sluggish there but in the water could swim like eels.... Phelan tried to talk them out of their hiding places while he probed under the bank with a stick, waiting to see the sudden jet of cloudy water, which meant he’d flushed a clawed frog out of the mud.

from How to Leave a Country

by Cris Mazza

Coffee House Press, 1992

Of course we played with dolls, Lincoln Logs, and Monopoly games. Of course we went to the zoo, swam with friends in the above-ground pool, threw balls for our dog Shep (how much more idyllic can a childhood be than having a dog named Shep?). In the summer, as a treat, we went to the movies — in a Quonset hut turned movie house called the Helix Theater in La Mesa — to see a “Tammy” movie, A Hard Day's Night, and The Absent-Minded Professor. We were fairly normal semirural middle-class kids.

We also caught snakes and lizards, black widow spiders, horned toads and tarantulas. We caught big green fig beetles and fed them to the chickens. We stepped on wasps’ nests and ran screaming, sometimes collecting a dozen stings. We tapped the webs of funnel-web spiders with sticks until the spider came rushing out to get the fly it assumed was struggling there. We excavated trap-door spider burrows. We played with ant lions in the back yard. Anyone ever play with an ant lion? It’s an insect that buries itself in fine dirt then (somehow) makes a funnel about the size of a thimble right over where its body is. When an ant comes along and tumbles into the funnel, it can’t climb back out because the ant lion has made sure the dirt is fine enough and the angle of the sides is exactly what it needs to be to stymie an ant. The ant li6n then bursts out of the dirt to grab and eat the ant. We would find a batch of ant lions and either bring ants to drop into the funnel and watch the ensuing drama or dig up the ant lions and make them build their funnels in boxes or pails. I don’t know why ant lions dwindled around my father’s property—perhaps it was partly our fault, perhaps the fault of my father’s vigorous spraying to control the ants. But when my brother bought a house in Lakeside and found ant lions there, he dug some up and brought them to my father, repopulating the yard. My father keeps an eye on them and usually knows where the funnels are.

There are other native animals that are increasingly difficult to find. Horned toads were once, while not as prevalent as fence lizards, at least somewhat accessible. We never caught and kept one as a “pet,” so their disappearance probably has to do with much bigger issues — loss of habitat and/or pollution — than children who want to hold every crawly thing they see. Tarantulas and tarantula hawks, trap-door spiders, foxes, and roadrunners have joined horned toads on the list of creatures we used to watch living out their lives but might not be easily found today. The roadrunners nested in our bougainvillea, the foxes fed their kits earthworms from the compost piles. Houses increased along both sides of Lakeview, their yards and fences up against my father’s property line, so these animals left to seek habitation elsewhere. Those that didn’t — coyote, opossums, and skunks — face the death penalty.

A Parent’s Vacation

My father may have been a community college professor, but that doesn’t mean he had the whole summer “off.” Summer school, the Del Mar Fair, and the flourishing back yard (always in need of weeding, spraying, harvesting, a new sprinkling system, a rock wall in progress) filled more than 24 hours a day for him in the months of June and July. When August came, he gave himself two weeks’ vacation.

Through the entire decade of the ’60s, our family vacation was the same every year, and we never complained at the monotony. My parents packed up the station wagon and the trailer (handmade by my father) and drove eight hours up Highway 395 to Big Pine, a high-desert town just south of Bishop. In the eastern Sierra above Big Pine was (is) Glacier Lodge and a series of rustic campsites (meaning no toilets, just outhouses) at altitudes from 4 to 7 thousand feet. A glacier creek rushes out of the mountains, after flowing into and back out of seven manmade lakes at altitudes from 10 to 12 thousand feet, created in the early 20th Century to provide water for a developing little place called Los Angeles. The State of California stocks the Big Pine Creek with rainbow trout, while brown trout — originally from Europe — now live as though indigenous in streams and lakes all over the Sierra. Here my father taught us river fishing.

His first time out, he’d almost landed a 20-pound brown trout in a pool at the foot of a short falls. What an incredible pumping sensation, the five or ten seconds he’d had that thing on the line.... He lay awake that night listening to the river.... He couldn’t close his eyes without seeing his bait disappear under a riffle, then feeling the strike and the struggle, his heart racing, his legs going weak like softened wax, even his fingertips buzzing...the gush of adrenaline in his guts at the moment of the bang-bang-bang of the strike.

from “Not Here,”

Revelation Countdown

by Cris Mazza, FC2, 1993

Although my mother packed and brought boxes of canned and dried provisions, at least three-fourths of our dinners and half our breakfasts at camp were fried trout. A Coleman stove and a cast-iron skillet were, therefore, necessary equipment. As were metal washtubs for giving baths to toddlers and little children who daily masked their faces with dirt and wood smoke; sometimes a baby table or playpen — the old kind, made of wood; buckets and jugs so my father could hike up the mountain and bring back fresh spring water to drink; several sizes of saws and two axes so my father could keep firewood supplied; five to seven fishing poles and enough tackle for five children to lose plenty of hooks; enough socks, underwear, sweatshirts, jeans, flannel shirts, tennis shoes, and boots so five children could fall into the river daily; an old canvas wall tent with wooden poles from army surplus; a sheet of stainless steel so my father could make pancakes over an open fire; seven sleeping bags and two army cots; two Coleman lanterns and five plastic flashlights; a first-aid kit, a dog, and two or three worn-out decks of playing cards.

To pack the trailer took him all night the night before we left on our camping vacation, two weeks every summer, five kids in a station wagon, tents, coats, sleeping bags, propane stove, black skillet, canned food. After the rain trenches were dug around the pitched tents, he began to carry big rocks into the cold, quick river, laying them across, side by side, slowing the water just enough to make trout pools. He fished early mornings then again at dusk, working both sides of the river. Without a shirt, while chopping wood, a muted shout from his chest, the ring of the ax, but few words. His beard grew.

from “A Father’s Vacation”

What's Become of Eden

by Cris Mazza

Salpering Hoi Press

“Vacation” was not introduced to us as a time of rest and relaxation. It was, like so many of our other family activities, somehow related to the gratification in procuring our own meals and was likewise both hard work and hard fun. My mother loved to fish and hike; she also cleaned fish, cooked, and cleaned up (yes, we always helped, from the time we could walk), bathed us, changed our wet clothes, took us on hikes, and sang us to sleep. And not only did my father supply firewood and drinking water (it wasn’t advisable to drink the river water, even in the ’60s, not because of pollution but microorganisms) and get up before dawn to fish, then fish again from late afternoon to after dusk; but he also spent more than one camping trip working with the river itself— moving rocks (some nearly boulders) into the water to slow the current in certain areas, to create deeper pools for the trout and places for fishermen to stand or cross to an opposite bank. Though I now do recognize manipulating an ecosystem as a questionable practice, what my father was doing was working with an ecosystem already under heavy manipulation, considering the stock truck arrived every other week to dump huge hatchery-raised trout into the river. While in a way my father was enhancing the river strictly from a fisherman’s point of view, to make better fishing, in another way he was also making hiding places and a more variable environment for the trout suddenly dumped into what was, during the summer, an overpopulated, somewhat stressed habitat. (Actually these fish probably depended on the bait that kids like us continually lost off their hooks.)

He packed his saw into the woods to cut logs he lugged or dragged back to camp, brought jugs up the side of a mountain where a spring surfaced, drinkable water, three gallons on his back, one in each arm. He hooked trout then thrust the pole into our hands to land the fish, exhaled sharply, a nearly inaudible grunt, when we flung the fish out of the water backwards over our heads, tangling fish, line and pole in the heavy brush.

from “A Father’s Vacation”

by Cris Mazza

The habitat was sometimes stressed further, especially when more and more people discovered this (at the time) inexpensive, pristine, rich, and lovely place to camp. We were taught— by example and also directly by our parents — not to clean fish and dump the guts into the river, not to throw our empty bait jars or cans into the river. We picked up other people’s junk when we found it on the riverbank or could reach it in the water. And my brothers and I actually completely stocked our own tackle boxes with the hooks, weights, leaders, lures, bobbers, flies, and tools left behind by more reckless fishermen. On a return trip to camp as an adult, I continued (or completed) the tradition by finding an entire almost-new reel in the water.

I’ve included this diversion on camping in the eastern Sierra — even though my main focus is my family’s relationship with the changing San Diego County of the ’60s and early 70s — because those two weeks every August seem to epitomize my parents’ approach to life the rest of the year: Hard work is fun; the fruits of your labor are rewards; the entire family shares both the activity and the satisfaction.

A few times each camping trip, he made pancakes on a sheet of shiny metal over a fire pit built with rocks so everything was exactly level. He poured big, perfectly round pancakes, nothing fancy, none shaped like Mickey Mouse. Standing in the firelight in a blue sweat suit, the bowl of batter in one hand, spatula in the other, the blood of a fish still on his arm from the morning’s catch, he made pancakes without smiling.

On a big rock between two trees, we wore out the knees of our jeans, got sap in our hair. It smelled thick and piny, turned black and tacky (and later he would have to use gasoline to scrub it off). He walked back and forth, past the rock, gathering dry greasewood for kindling, a red bandanna around his forehead. We played with kids from other campsites and glanced up at him as he passed but never shouted, “Hey, Dad!” nor waved, and one little girl said, “I’m afraid of that Indian.” Later I pushed her off the rock and my father sent me to my tent.

from “A Father’s Vacation”

by Cris Mazza

Yes, I originally used the little girl’s inaccurate identification as a comment about stereotyping and fear. But now it gives me pause for further contemplation: why does there seem to be an undefined similarity between my father’s relationship with the landscape and Native Americans, whose lifestyle once was hunting and gathering?

Thoroughly unqualified to make any broad pronouncement about relationships between cultures, I am licensed only to assert that, to me, these experiences indicate that every American of every color has a cultural “specialness,” and mine seems to have something to do with a — perhaps Italian or southern European—proclivity to gain gratification in directly supplying or producing some of life’s fundamentals.

I can further confirm that my childhood angst over not having a new bicycle or fashionable clothes has long dissipated, whereas what I did have is something I can keep longer than I could’ve kept desert boots or a Sting-ray bike. My “uneventful” childhood was not only, therefore, actually somewhat extraordinary but has gone on to enrich the sensibility, atmosphere, and events in my fiction. The native San Diego back-country I was exposed to became the San Diego that I best like to remember and fantasize about. In that landscape, I experienced a taste of a priceless relationship with flora and fauna and, while savoring memories, have now realized my melancholy over the loss or mutation of so much of it. Maybe it’s this landscape itself, outwardly tough yet in its own way so fragile, that inspires people of any culture — at least those individuals perceptive enough to admire its subtle, delicate character — to achieve a more sincere relationship with it than too many developers have the capacity to appreciate.