Cottonwood Drive

Step out the front door and the view is simple, yet majestic. A field of gassy horses and sheep lay directly across the street.

Down the road on the right, as our house sat on an inside corner of the 'U' that made the Mouth of the Canyon, there was a field that sloped down a small hill and opened up into wildflowers and all sorts of greens and browns that attached themselves to my clothing. Beyond the field sat the forest. Another story...another time.

A plum tree grew next to an old rusty roll of barbed wire fencing that I had made my little home. I put carpet remnants on the bottom inside so I could lay there, staring at the clouds or the stars through the broken gaps in the orange deteriorating wire. I wove (weaved?) yarn and photos and other important items through the tangles of the fence and it became my perfect escape. My very own world. It was far enough away from the house that it perfected my escape, but it was within close enough proximity that I was not without needs that can only come from a home.

Beyond my escape, there was a tree that taunted and none rivaled. Becky climbed it one day and although the exact details of the climb and sudden descent are hazy, I recall with perfect clarity the spiral her body made as it plummeted in slow motion. The pain of my heart stopping and the pressure of the blood in my head.

I have an intense vivid anxiety thinking back... as her feet stayed suspended in the air but her head and torso continued to fall. Upside down, her thick, matted chocolate hair was not cushion enough to silence the bile inducing crack that followed her head settling between two small boulders.

Her body and legs seemed to crumple so slowly into her neck until finally she fell sideways.

I knew she had died. I knew that I should have been able to continue in the speed of the real world to save her as she climbed, glancing back over her shoulder, giggling, her hair bouncing as she looked back up toward the sky...all of this happening in a fraction of time, but seeing it in slow motion - then reverse.

Screaming.

Horror.

Terrified pain in all of us.

Screams from Becky.

Muted, but noise enough. She hadn't died!

Becky lived!

Our family’s shared best friend was alive!!!

Then real time.....the world was spinning too fast and as we filled the universe with chaos and noise, I couldn't utter a prayer to slow the time... to slow the bleeding...to ease the pain. To allow any of us a clean thought to know what to do.

Good thing for mothers. My mom knew what to do and several hours and stitches later, Becky arrived home from the hospital. My only friend. The coolest person alive. She had lived. Lived to tell her story and to fall again.

Beyond the tree was Becky's house. The grass always too long, the fruit trees shedding their pounds to the earth allowing us to watch nature take place. The deer and the birds - it was beautiful.  It seemed like her dad, Jack, was always mowing the lawn though.  My only explanation is that it was an old metal mower that seemed to cut only when it felt like it.

Inside her house was cozy but I never felt quite comfortable upstairs.  Unless I was by the enormous windows looking over their deck and forest.

My memory of Becky's basement holds room for cabbage patch dolls, the 1980’s horror flick The Changeling, Top Gun and Ramen.

Her backyard was another world all together. An enormous towering deck with bird feeders covering the rails and hanging from every branch.. The wall of glass from her living room looking out onto the deck where we spent countless evenings with Jack singing of bugs, and frogs and Maraih...the wind

I found an egg, a tiny blue egg, abandoned in one the feeders one day. It was still warm, so I carefully took it back to my house where I knew a Robin and her eggs lived. In the pine tree of the front lawn, sat a carefully built nest. The mother bird was out hunting or stretching and so I placed my tiny blue egg so carefully among the other 3. They were larger with white speckles on them and my egg was tiny and the color of the sky in the hour before it storms.

I said a prayer, hoping I wasn't too late to save the egg and miniscule beautiful being it would become, and went back to Becky's house.

That night, I walked home with my flashlight held high above me, encircling me with light. That, and my primary songs quietly sung, made it impossible for any harm to come to me.

I decided to see if mother Robin had come home from her days jaunt, but I was crushed instead of warmed.

The egg had been pecked open and thrown out of the nest. I couldn't understand how any creature could destroy an infant like that.

I was destroyed.

Nature had failed me.

Animals must eat other animals - sometimes babies - to survive. I am not naive. I know this, and I, being a dirty little Indian, accepted that fact as the way of Mother Earth.

But for a bird to throw out an abandoned, helpless infant egg...

I lost faith in birds after that.

I later found out that it was my doing that got the egg killed. Birds will throw out even their own egg or chick, if there are human oils on them.

It's natural. Instinctive. Not vindictive.

Beyond Becky's house was a raspberry field, followed by a gigantic, perfectly manicured lawn.

The Berg’s house.

On its left were the rock strips where I hunted (humanely for pets) garner snakes.

I caught many snakes there but my favorite was the one that dared to bite.  I had kept him for a few days he got lost once up inside the saw table in the shed just off the carport, but he was the best pet a girl ever caught and kidnapped. 

One day while hunting in the rocks for a friend for him, my dad and the fam pulled up in our blazer that he had recently taken the top off of.  He said it was time to go on our drive up to Tony Grove and I yelled to him that I needed to put the snake back in his box real quick.  I guess the sound of my yelling voice startled the snake and it bit down hard on my index fingertip.  It hurt but not as bad as I thought it would, so it didn’t bother me. The thing that bothered me was that he didn’t let go.  As I ran toward the house to put him back in his cozy box his jaws became tighter and his fangs sank deeper.  My concern at that point was that his germs might infect his little fang marks in my finger… if he ever let go.  I got home to his box and didn’t know how to make him let go other than just pulling him off but I didn’t want to rip my skin and I didn’t want to break his teeth.. snakes need teeth.

Holly came running up a few minutes later to get me because everyone was waiting in the blazer.  She saw my predicament and suggested that I just start flinging my hand around and that he would let go.. but then we remembered Brant’s incident with the praying mantis and how shaking it only made it dig deeper into Brant’s finger.

We then tried just being really still and really quiet, which didn’t work either.

After a few minutes longer, we heard my mom’s notorious whistle that meant ‘drop everything and come NOW’.

Logic and reason abandoned us and Holly grabbed the snake by its middle section and tugged, and then tossed, then grabbed my arm and pulled me as she ran toward the blazer. 

My finger bled and the snake was up inside the saw table when we got back, but it turned out way better than my little unbathed head had planned for.

To the right of the rock strips wound the river that passed through Becky's back yard. There was a bridge that was the driveway that capped the rock strips, the endless lawn, and the river.

Under the bridge, a perfect moss covered slide was being groomed by my dear friend Nature. Many swim shorts and swim suits were shredded and dyed green - which did not look like moss stains - more like over excited, over fed, under washed children's bottoms.

We took the canoe down that slide and down the river and cracked it once. We never told Becky's dad. Mostly we slid down it over and over on our bums and worried that the tiny little black leeches were going to get under our skivvies and suck us dry.

My canyon went on for days.

Each day, a new adventure.

Each adventure, a new tale.

I lived the in the mouth of Smithfield Canyon. I have introduced you to one side of one block of Cottonwood Drive...the street I grew up on.

The street I was roughly and painfully carved into existence on.

My canyon did not end.

And neither will my tales.