Mining Memories in a Return to California

GOLD COUNTRY, CALIFORNIA – I took a trip down memory lane the other day, though the signs said I was driving on Highway 49 – so named because it connects the towns that sprang up during the 1849 rush to find gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

I lived in these parts – the Mother Lode — for more than a decade of my adult life. It’s where I became a reporter and where my three children and two stepchildren were born. When I come back, I’m reminded at every turn in the road of stories I wrote for the two newspapers I worked for before I moved to State College.

In Angels Camp, population 4,000, I covered the filming of the pilot for some now-forgotten TV series. I asked the production manager what her budget was. Then I went to City Hall and asked the city manager what Angels Camp’s annual budget was. Fun fact: The budget for the TV show was larger. 

Also in Angels, I “interviewed” Hans and Franz, two toads that had been confiscated from a local couple accused of smoking the hallucinogenic secretions obtained by squeezing a gland on the toads’ heads. The story prompted a fad for T-shirts with the message, “Smoke a Toad, Go to Jail.”

Being toads, Hans and Franz were not eligible to compete in the annual jumping frog contest, a tradition inspired by “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a Mark Twain story you may have read during your school days.

Shortly after passing Frogtown, I saw a highway sign indicating the number of miles to Coulterville, where, showing my reportorial versatility, I pivoted from chronicling the frog jump to the coyote howl: Judges pick a winner among humans skilled in the art of howling like coyotes. 

As I crossed the Parrotts Ferry Bridge from Calaveras County to Tuolumne County (pronounced TWA-lummy, more or less), I peered down at New Melones Reservoir, half empty as a result of yet another droughty year in the Golden State. That reminded me of an earlier dry year when the old bridge, drowned when the Stanislaus River was dammed in 1979, re-emerged. I walked out on the ghost bridge and, of course, wrote about doing so. 

California weather extremes being what they are, moments after crossing the new bridge, I drove over a section of road that had collapsed during a particularly wet year, and then I continued past a neighborhood that had been flooded by an overflowing Mormon Creek that same year. 

In Sonora, “Queen of the Southern Mines,” I cruised past Courthouse Park, where reporters covering the case of Ellie Nesler, accused of the 1993 courtroom murder of the man charged with molesting her son, had organized a betting pool around guessing the verdict and the time the jury would deliver it. Nesler, incredibly, joined the pool. (She was found guilty and went to prison, though not for very long.)

A couple blocks away stand the offices of the Union Democrat, whose logo features a line drawing of a gold miner. Once, I glanced out the newsroom window and saw a dead bear on the sidewalk. A hunter had brought his trophy downtown to show his pals at the Sportsman Bar. Then, as now, an alarming sign in the bar advertises “Guns – Ammo – Beer.”

This week, I’m continuing south to Yosemite, where I wrote about fire, overcrowding and bears that break into cars.
You see why I liked being a reporter? If you’ve ever wondered what qualified yours truly to teach journalism at a prestigious joint like Penn State, now you know: It was writing oddball stories like the ones I’ve just described.

An ongoing topic in my life is whether to move back here if they don’t carry me out of a Penn State classroom in a box. I felt done with the place when I left – imagine State College without the university – and since I’ve been gone, the summers have gotten hotter and the threat of wildfire more worrisome. 

But four of our five kids live out west, and this is just about the only place in this part of the world where we both know people and can afford housing. 

In Portland, where my daughter just moved, in Vancouver, B.C., where my stepson lives, and in the Bay Area, where my stepdaughter lives, you’re lucky if you can find a shoebox for less than a million dollars. These same urban areas are awash in homeless encampments.

I’m writing this column on July 4, a day when we’re supposed to celebrate America. That’s hard to do in a region where, more and more, only the rich can buy houses and where you would think the evidence of climate change would be too hard to ignore. 

California has its charms and, for me, its memories, but if someone organized a pool, the smart money would be on my staying in green, relatively affordable State College until the one last, inviolable deadline.