Out of the Fire

Highway 26 Revisited

By Constance J. Corcoran.  Partially extracted and revised from the book, Gumption; a grandmother’s story.  © Constance J. Corcoran, 2013, Rev. 2014.  Lulu press.

Eight black and white miles of skeleton-treed road wind up the ridge south of the river.  Charcoal landscape starts at Happy Valley.  The ruins of Boston Yale Ranch are exposed.  An old cowhand’s cabin survives where the water ditch used to cross.  Places I knew as Lawson’s and Robinson’s are surrounded by stark black ground.  Past the cow pond and charred pasture, I pull into a burnt dirt driveway. 

Wet ash makes my eyes run. Grandma’s house is marked by a melted refrigerator, tangled bedsprings and foundation.  Up the hill, strands of wire dangle from charcoal posts that once framed my uncle’s dog kennels.  

Through a tangle of leafy branches, I see my childhood home. It is layered with different versions of siding now, and raised up on a real foundation, but the windows are in the same places as the pictures and my memories.  Two old stumps were linden trees that suspended my rope swing.  Fresher cuts made days ago saved the house. 

The homeowner stands in her open doorway on the phone. 

My family built these houses in 1948, I explain. I had to see it.

Sure, take a look, she walks with me, gracious.  We could never find out which house was built first.   She is eager to hear. 

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We told the story over and over my whole life.  Our family came to California after the war for warmer weather and jobs.  Before I was a year old, Mom’s brothers and her mother migrated from Galesburg, Illinois, where they were all born and raised.  While working at Mare Island, Dad met a man who said there were jobs in the saw mill at Wilseyville, in the heart of the Sierra Nevada.  So, we followed the Mokelumne River through the Delta into Calaveras County’s foothills. 

Local rancher Carl Dell’Orto sold Dad and Mom’s brother Dick four acres from a corner of his winter pastureland east of Moke Hill in an area known as Rich Gulch.  It had been a prosperous mining camp in the late 1850’s.  They paid $200 over time from their wages at Associated Lumber and Box. 

Dad and the uncles brought scrap lumber from the mill.  They salvaged iron from an abandoned gold mine near our property to make plumbing.   They witched for water and then blasted a well, using old dynamite they’d found under a miner’s cabin. 

Greenhorns!  I don’t know how we survived, said my uncle.

While the grown-ups built, my brother Johnny and I collected rusty square-headed nails that sifted up from the red dust, evidence that our homestead once had been a stage coach stop.

Our house was nearest the highway, now named the Stephen P. Teale Memorial Highway in honor of our family doctor.  Doc Teale, who later became a State Senator, used to stop by the house to check up on my mother when she was pregnant with my baby brother.  I watched the ash grow on the end of his cigar as he bent over Mom’s belly. 

My older brother and I shared bunk beds in the back porch, where Mom read to us every night and Johnny sang songs he made up while trying to fall asleep.  Later, Dad added a deck which extended along the gully side of the house.  After my brother Chris was born, the deck was closed in with a wall of windows. It served first as a dining room and finally my room.  Mom and Dad slept off the ever-changing combination living-dining-kitchen area.  Walls went up, walls came down to make larger or smaller rooms.

Carl got Dick a ditch-tender job at Camp Four off Lower Dorray Road, just up the Highway.  The pay included a cabin, living quarters for Dick and Grandma until their house was built.  Grandma hauled buckets of water from the ditch for bathing and cooking.  She washed her clothes in it, hanging wet laundry to dry on a Manzanita bush.  She was fifty-two and had never lived outside Galesburg, with its Victorian houses, green lawns and town square.

We had to pack in, said Uncle Dick, supplies, food, everything.  There was only a narrow dirt path from the road to the cabin. 

The trail wound down the mountain through dense chaparral, past the water ditch to the Mokelumne River far below. 

Lower Dorray Road is red with fire retardant today.  This is the first time I’ve been able to see the river from here.

Uncle Dick built his and Grandma’s house across the lower end of the gulch, a drainage that cut our four-acres in two.  He added a footbridge across Wet Gulch, so-named for the muddy slough it became during rainy season.  In summer Wet Gulch baked to hard clay and we made tunnels in the chest-high wheat grass. 

A tall stand of Scotch thistles grew along our approach to the footbridge, near the outhouse.  Some people deliberately add it to rock gardens for the large purple flower, but those thorny leaves had a real bite.  All I see in them is the outhouse smell.

Uncle George built a square, white house with wrap-around porch directly across the upper gully from us.  We sent messages back and forth to our cousins on a pulley clothesline that extended from our back stoop across to their porch.  That house was replaced some time ago by a newer one, built by a stranger.  It too has survived the fire.

Twice a year I ran to the highway to watch cowboys driving Carl’s herd from winter pastures to the high country in spring and down again in the fall.  When the herd was pastured next to us I was soothed to sleep by the clanking of cowbells. 

Two Cypress trees rose fields away on our southwest horizon, marking the gates of an old pioneer cemetery on a property we knew as Lockheed’s.  The buildings had burned long before and the people left.  We enjoyed picking from their apple trees in fall. 

I thought Grandma’s house was the nicest on the homestead.  It had a pitched roof and front and back porches.  It was painted light yellow, a reminder of her grandparents’ Victorian.  Grandma would sit in her rocker with a crocheted afghan across her shoulders, while visitors shared a small sofa or claimed the overstuffed chair.  Her own grandmother’s mahogany spinet desk and a music box were treasured family heirlooms.  A Seth Thomas mantle clock softly gonged the hour as we studied Scrabble letters or worked a jigsaw puzzle.  An oval braid rug warmed her knotty pine floor. 

While washing supper dishes, Grandma stood at her kitchen window to watch the sun set over the pond, listening to classical music, smoking her Raleigh cigarettes that she did not inhale.  Afterward, Grandma and I walked across Carl’s pasture to the pond and back, taking her daily constitutional, with her cat and her Airedale Koty.  She liked to pretend she hated the cat but we couldn’t go without him.  Sometimes we walked further, following the dirt road to a hunter’s cabin. 

Mom used to drive my brothers and me down the lower Ponderosa Road, near Robinson’s.  She took our old Chevy while Dad was at work.  No four-wheel drive needed.  In August we picked blackberries at a wide bend in the road.  I learned to swim under the bridge on the Mokelumne River, just above the dam on Electra Road, right about where the fire started.  I saw a picture taken after the fire:  the boards were gone from the bridge deck.

When Uncle Dick married, he sold the yellow house and the family came together for one last construction project.  We built Grandma a small cabin on our side of the gully, just behind our house.  My job was sitting on the saw horse to hold boards steady while Dad cut, or walking under the raised floor to pick up nails for reuse.  I even got to pound nails in some of the floorboards until they saw how many dents I made. 

Mom said that house was the last straw--she thought it was the worst of all the houses we built.  It was my favorite project, because I was old enough to participate.  The cab of a truck carcass now covers its sooty remains, bulldozed there during the fire fight.

By 1959 saw mills in the foothills were struggling.  Dad’s job at Associated came to an end.  We left the family compound for the suburbs of Sacramento, where there was work in the aerospace industry.  It is a lifetime since I left Rich Gulch. 

Before the fire, our homestead had become littered with rusty vehicles, broken appliances and cast-offs from a succession of occupants.  An oleander thicket along the highway hid the houses.  I haven’t had this good a look in years.  Now a seared landscape reveals too much.  The property is too clean.  Views across the county are too vast.  Cypress trees no longer mark an old pioneer cemetery.  My house has lost its family.