ONE Bears at the Gate
A s I steered around the familiar turn on US 101, a fresh burst of anxious adrenaline showered my synapses. I took a long, deep, quiet breath and steadied myself again—tried to, anyway.
Every mile closer to our destination was another turn of the ratchet, tightening the muscles through my neck and shoulders, but this next milestone soured my belly and sped my heart.
“Oh, cool!” Wyatt exclaimed from the passenger seat of the fifteen-foot U-Haul I’d muscled across the country for the past week. “Are they real gold?”
A pair of golden bears stood guard at either side of the entrance to the bridge over the Klamath River. Though I hadn’t seen them in almost twenty years, before that, they’d been so much a part of my world I’d stopped noticing them.
Now, glinting in the rich light of the evening’s golden hour, they loomed large and terrible, menacing sentries of the past I’d fled and harbingers of a future I’d tried to escape.
“No, not gold,” I answered my son as the bears slipped past. “Just paint.”
Wyatt focused on the side mirror to watch the bears disappear behind us. “Still cool, though.”
He sounded a little disappointed. My intuition told me it wasn’t painted bears smothering his enthusiasm; it was my lack of engagement. I’d been lost in my head most of the day.
Remembering my Mom Face, I smiled and brightened my tone. “They are cool. They’re not the original bears, actually. A little farther downstream are two big black bears that stood at the original bridge. A flood took out that bridge, and the whole town of Klamath, about ... I don’t know, maybe sixty years ago? Something like that. When they rebuilt, they moved the road and the bridge up here, and put up the golden bears.”
Wyatt didn’t respond, but I glanced over and saw him nodding, his attention fixed on his window. As the redwood forest enfolded the highway again, he murmured, “It’s so pretty here.”
On that we could agree. Chief among the few things I had missed in the past two decades was the world of Humboldt and Del Norte counties itself. Majestic redwoods walled in the highway, and the lowering sun shone through the narrow gaps around their rough-hewn trunks, turning the world into a pirate’s treasure of glinting gold. The air wafting through our half-open windows was a potpourri of rich wood, eucalyptus, and sea spray. Somewhere above us, an osprey cried out for its mate, its piercing cry overcoming the noise of the U-Haul’s engine.
Nowhere else I have ever been is as beautiful as the place in which I’d been raised.
“Yeah, it is,” I said softly, speaking as much to the forest as to my son.
“Forests and mountains, and the ocean, too,” Wyatt enthused, oblivious to his mother’s melancholy musing. “And it’s not hot!”
“No, not hot. It hardly ever gets hot here—in fact, a lot of places around here don’t even have AC.”
Wyatt had been born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. I looked over at him again and chuckled to see his mouth hanging open.
“It’s true. The cottages don’t—at least they didn’t when I was here. But don’t worry, you won’t melt. Even in August you’ll need a hoodie, at least in the evening and early morning. And there’s lots of fog, almost every morning.”
“So cool!” he said again.
“Literally.”
“Ugh. Mom. We talked about this. No puns.”
“Is that even a pun, though?”
He answered with a look, and I laughed fully—and felt sincerely a little better. Wyatt always found my sunshine. I turned back to the windshield and focused on the final stretch of our long journey.
Only a few more miles to go. Back to a world, and a life, I’d been desperate to escape.
But this time, I would make this place my home.
For my son.
And because I had no choice.
“DOES IT LOOK ANY DIFFERENT from the way you remembered it?” Wyatt asked as we drove down Bower Street, the main drag through Bluster, California. My hometown.
Bluster started off life as a camp during the Gold Rush, named Bluster after a squall tore the camp to bits mere days after the first tent stake had been sunk. Those first settlers—first of European descent, anyway—were plucky enough to cross the whole country in wagons, so a little wind hadn’t scared them off. They’d simply sunk their stakes twice as deep the next time.
Gold went bust pretty quickly in the northwest corner of California, so those hunting for their fortunes turned instead to the forests. Logging became the big game, and with that, a camp became a town.
All those miners and loggers needed to eat, and the ocean was right there and full of all kinds of seafood, from crab to halibut. Those who couldn’t get into logging learned how to fish.
A town made up of lumberjacks, commercial fishermen, and disappointed gold-rushers was not what one might call sophisticated . From its earliest days, Bluster’s been rough around the edges and pretty okay with folks who didn’t quite fit in society. Maybe because of that, it never really became a destination with the tourist crowd, despite some of the most spectacular coastline in California, and it hasn’t grown much, either. Bluster doesn’t have anything like a suburb. Once you clear the town line, you hit forest, rocky coast, a scatter of homes and businesses, and a few cattle and sheep ranches. Oh, and weed farms. Lots of those.
As a place on the map, it's not much, really, and that had definitely not changed while I was away.
To answer Wyatt’s question, I shook my head. “The McDonald’s got one of those sad beige remodels, I see, but otherwise, nothing’s really different. Catherine’s”—I pointed to the diner on the other side of the street—“has been there since before I was born. Looks like it got a coat of brighter pink paint, but it’s the same.” Nodding at the carniceria to our right, its windows filled with brightly painted paper signs advertising the day’s prices, I added, “Mendoza Meat it was his personality that sent him to the top of the heap. He’d been so freaking nice, and to everyone. Young or old, friend or stranger, he listened when people spoke, and he remembered what was important to the people in his wide circle.
That he was wildly in love with his wife and also was the kind of dad who had no compunction whatsoever about making a fool of himself to entertain his child had pretty much broken every girl, woman, and anyone else who was into guys.
I sighed out the weight of nostalgia. That was a good memory of my life in Bluster. I’d forgotten I had any of those.
Feeling my son’s attention on me, I turned to him when I pulled up at a red light—one of three traffic lights in town. He was giving me his too-wise-for-a-teenager look. That look had joined his expressive repertoire within the past year or so, after our life had been shaken like an Etch-a-Sketch and my fifteen-year-old child had decided that he needed to be a man and protect his mother.
I hated that look.
“What?” I asked.
“That is literally the most you’ve ever told me about when you were a kid.”
Stung, I quelled my first instinct for defensiveness, but didn’t entirely succeed. “That’s not true. I’ve told you plenty.” Since we’d decided to come back—since I had realized coming back was the only viable option left to us—I felt like I’d talked of almost nothing but my past. Life had finally sunk low enough that talking about our present, or the nearer past, was the more urgent topic to be avoided.
“No,” he insisted. “You talk about your mom and why you left. You don’t ever talk about the other parts of your life when you were here.”
“Maybe. I think I forgot there were other parts of my life.”
The light turned, and I got the U-Haul rolling again.
My son reached over the console and set his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry it was so hard for you, Mom.”
Setting my hand on his, I squeezed. We needed to get back to a place where Wyatt could be a regular, goofy kid and I had my shit together enough to be the mother he deserved.
At the next corner, I saw a sign on a shop that was different from before. Back in the day, it had been a realtor’s office, run by Hilary Geller, the mother of one of my best friends from school. Now it was a studio called Coastal ArtWorks, and simply by the design of the sign painted on the picture window, I could guess who owned it. One of my best friends from school.
Jessie Geller, Erin O’Grady, and I had been close as sisters back in the day, but I hadn’t spoken to either of them in almost twenty years. When I’d left, I’d done it suddenly and secretly. I’d been so terrified that my mother would track me down, I’d decided there was no other choice but to cut every tie, to friends as well.
In the end, my mother hadn’t tracked me down. I’m not sure she ever tried. But about two years ago, Gerald Holt, Bluster’s mayor as well as the owner of Bluster Beach Putt-Putt & Bowl, had hired a private investigator to do so. Otherwise I would never have known the coast was clear to return.
“It wasn’t all so hard, bud,” I told my son as we drove past my old friend’s dream realized. “With my mom, yeah. That was always hard. But I’m remembering that I had good times, too.” I turned to him and slapped a smile on my face. “That’s the stuff I want to show you.”
“That’s the stuff I want to know.” Wyatt smiled. “This is gonna be good, Mom.”
Man, I hoped he was right.