Tales from the Gashouse, Four

According to the school bus driver, I lived in a place called "Mann Ranch." I asked him once because I was curious as to how the morning bus driver communicated with the evening bus driver about my stop. I was the first one on the bus and the last one off--in other words, for some reason, the trip to school was quicker than the trip home.

There were four structures on Mann Ranch: the Gashouse, a double-wide trailer that served as an office and a mistress-den for the Ranch manager, a nicely kept house with a giant front yard that belonged to a "normal" American family, and a giant, dilapidated barn, which was both a safety hazard and my clubhouse. These four structures sat beneath the giant Eucalyptus tress that protected us from low-flying airplanes--they stood guard all around us like the stone heads of Easter Island. All day long, the God-trees moved about in the wind, releasing a fresh, clean, smell that made it all the way to the first step of our house. It lingered there, and didn't dare come in. The Gashouse wouldn't have it. These were two different environments, the toxic one which nurtured me, and the godly one which I could only admire. At night, the trees blocked out the moon and cast a deep dark shadow on the structures beneath. They were still--one could hear leaves falling. I could see the guardians of our island from miles away. Sometimes, when a sudden sadness would overtake me (or nostalgia, or fear, or homesickness), I would search them out--I could make out their outline from any part of town. I felt safe knowing they were there.

The God-tress are gone now--so is the Gashouse and Mann Ranch. They dug into the roots and yanked them out of the ground sometime in the late 90's, cutting them to pieces once they were rootless. There is no sign of where they stood. Whenever I drive down the 101 toward Southern California (if I do, because to get South from the North, it is easier to take the I-5, and everyone knows it), on the bridge that connects King City to the rest of the world, I always seek them out and catch their absence. I guess they are some sort of empty symbol of my childhood--or maybe a metaphor for my own uprootedness...or the death of memory...or I don't know. Whenever I think of them, though, I can't help but feel exposed. I guess they kept us hidden in our Gashouse--hidden from God, the law, history. The God-trees absorbed our sins, our crimes, and our suffering into the green of their leaves. And that's why this blog.