It had become a ritual, every time I went with some friends to the Bear Lakes, to at least visit Big Bear Lake briefly and touch its water. One could not fight gravity and wrestle flora for so long up that trail without at least communing with one of the major reasons for doing so. Big Bear and Little Bear lakes rest in the blown-out cirques of ancient twin volcanoes, and the elemental energy lingers. Certainly, Big Bear is the larger of the two bowls, and deserving of much esteem. It was especially important to pay respects with neophyte visitors, who had not experienced the awesome beauty firsthand, and would remember the moment …and pass it on to others. We stashed our packs at the foot of the drainage, where the best ascent to Little Bear began; next to a huge root crown that was all that remained of a toppled, gigantic tree. Refreshing breezes from the valley seemed to lift us up the last few hundred yards, floating in the weightless reverie of removing a sweaty, mortal burden. There was nobody else at the lake.
“Oh, my God.” That was all Suzanne could say at first. It wasn’t the whiny, impertinent “omigod” that was so prevalent in the lexicon of California ladies at the time. It was a plain statement of fact, spoken reverently, and with clear conviction. She was really saying, “Oh – this is what God looks like. Now I understand.”
“I told you.” The big brother in Greg couldn’t resist a reflexive rebuke, accompanied by a gentle, affectionate tussle of the hair. The lake was performing its own unique version of a welcome dance, as the stillness of the lovely afternoon reflected in its surface; rippled with alpine breezes. The rocky rim stood out sharply in contrast, reaching to a brilliant cerulean sky,
Suzanne looked back at me, mouth agape in awestruck muteness. Her face conveyed a rapid-fire transmission of emotions, like watching a video on fast forward. She grimaced at first like she was about to cry, then got mad at herself because she didn’t want to, then got mad at me because I hadn’t warned her enough that this would take her soul to a new dimension, then wanted to hug me, or hug a tree – hug anything, even Greg – and finally she looked back at the lake, pointed, and repeated, “Oh. My. God!”
I sagely nodded my assent. Words were superfluous, anyway.
Sierra and Rogue were not the swimming sort, and were content to nose around for ubiquitous chipmunks. Their breeds were mongrelized beyond recognition, but they vaguely resembled small German Shepherds. Suzanne sat down slowly on the flat rock, cross legged, in the humble manner of one preparing to pray. She rested her forearms on her thighs, and gazed in wonder at the magnificent display of craggy, surrounding peaks and swaths of green vegetation that made up the rim, almost completely encircling the lake. Her head rotated first one way and then the other like an automatic sprinkler. Greg and I sat on logs (anything softer than granite, for our butts’ sake) and recharged our mental batteries for times ahead in life when we would surely need stores of beauty to see us through the rough spots. We could have stayed that way for hours, and none of us was particularly looking forward to another brutal ascent over hot boulders and scratchy bushes.
Greg spoke what everyone was thinking. “We could stay here tonight. I’m just sayin’.”
I saw his bet, and raised him one. “This is nothing, Suzanne. You should see this place in the morning.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She didn’t even turn around.
“Well, I’m going to get my fishing stuff, and I’m not bringing your pack.” Greg rose from where he had been seated on a rotting log, and all the bits stuck to the backside of his clammy jeans like nuts on a sundae. He squished back down the trail in sweaty boots, brushing off the bits as he walked.
“I’ll get it later,” she waved us off pleasantly and distractedly as if toddlers were interrupting her church service. I followed Greg, wanting to get camp set up so I could relax completely, and fall under the spell of beauty once again. The dogs were torn between staying with their beloved companion, or following the guys who were headed back towards the food. They chose the food, and darted happily ahead of us.
Greg went off the trail where there was a pile of storm debris, and fetched two slim alder poles. “Let’s see if the dogs will carry Suzanne’s shit,” he said with a complex mixture of mischief and guilt for not offering to bring his sister’s pack. We carried them down to the cache where the dogs were already sniffing about. Greg took a strap from a pocket and lashed the ends of the parallel poles together. He spread out the other ends like a V, and lashed Suzanne’s pack a foot above the widest part like a crossbeam. I had been making a sort of Y with some rope, so one arm could be tied to Sierra’s collar, the other to Rogue’s and the thick part to the poles, travois style. The dogs were worried about this last bit of nonsense, but a bag of beef jerky distracted their attention long enough to get it attached.
Greg dug out the dog food, which seemed to take up most of Suzanne’s pack. “What the hell is she going to eat,” I wondered to myself. Greg twisted into his backpack and groaned to get the beast on his back one last time that day, and I did the usual maneuver, leveraging my pack and me back to my feet with my walking stick. The dogs were very concerned that we might actually go through with this ridiculous plan. Greg started out, shaking the dog food. Sierra and Rogue lunged forward hungrily, brought up short by the monstrous contraption to which they were tied. The load moved about a foot.
“Come on Rogue! Come on Sierra!” Greg oozed mock exuberance, in the time-honored tradition of human beings trying to get dogs to do something they most definitely don’t want to do. “Come and get it!” He tossed out a few nuggets of dry food, and the dogs broke decorum. They pulled that tangled sledge of sticks and nylon robustly across to where the food had hit the ground. Greedily, they gobbled the kibble and happily looked for more. Like us, they were ravenous after the rugged exercise of the day. “Come on!” Greg began a systematic tossing of the food in strategic spots, and the dogs lurched and erratically conveyed Suzanne’s pack fifty yards or so, in the erratic manner of a drunken Inuit’s dogsled. Their muscles stood out in their shoulders, and their legs trembled. I felt awfully sorry for them, and picked up the ends of the two poles in my hands.
“Mush!” Greg took off up the trail like Nanook of the North.
To the birds in the trees, we must have looked like bizarre refugees scratching and clawing up the last of the trail through the trees, but we made good time. Sierra and Rogue held up their end, I held up mine, and Greg kept the kibbles flowing. When we got close to where we would camp, we stopped and fixed everything nice and neat, then led the dogs triumphantly around the final boulder to where Suzanne was still on her flat rock. “You guys are noisy,” she said as she turned.
“Look what the doggies brought you!” Greg announced, and waited for Suzanne to stop laughing.
“Get my camera,” was all she could say between gasps, pointing to her pack.
We set up camp quickly as seasoned veterans, with Suzanne and her dogs off to the side for privacy. Greg rolled out his bag next to a sheltering rock. I had been waiting to see what spot he would claim, because I knew about his prodigious snoring, and wanted to be far away from it. The side of the rock would reflect the sound waves in Suzanne’s direction, so I rolled out my sleeping bag on the other side, behind some insulating bushes.
“Did you find this place first?” Suzanne asked later, still agog over the sheer scenic grandeur of Big Bear Lake, now fading into a glorious lavender twilight beside a crackling campfire.
“Actually, I guess my dad did, back when I was almost twelve.” Suzanne had never met my father, but had heard the stories. “He whipped our asses to get us up here, but I’m glad he did. Debbie has never recovered, emotionally. I don’t think she’ll ever make it up here.” My little sister had hung out with Suzanne and our next-door neighbor, Heather, back in the Rusty Bucket Ranch days when my father represented a legendary malevolence in our family, somewhat equal to Sauron in Mordor. An exceptionally sensitive child, Debbie’s traumatic experiences of emotional cruelty from our father had resulted in a whiplash of dependency – on abusive men, drugs, familial assistance, and alcohol. She was living boyfriend to boyfriend, and couch to couch, bodysurfing on the wave of life’s turmoil, and riding it as best she could with the tools she had. I was afraid it would soon lead to a wipeout, and I asked Suzanne again to reach out to her as a friend.
“My dad used to take us camping, too.” Greg offered, poking at the coals. His was a severely broken family too, with parents who couldn’t stand each other but were at least civil to their kids. “He was pretty strict, but could be a lot of fun when he was sober.”
Since that fateful day in 1973 when “Good Ol’ Dad” led our family on a forced march up to this very spot, my father hadn’t been much a part of my life. Until very recently, that is, when I started a purposeful effort to forge some semblance of a relationship with a man who was emotionally crippled when it came to having a meaningful one. My parents’ own relationship, which had been dying for many years by then, was thoroughly decomposed within a few months of that first hike up here. I was almost thirteen when they split like an atom, releasing the pent-up energy of decades of tolerance. I might have lived with my father if he had shown any indication of wanting me. I needed a strong guiding hand in my formative years, but he thrust both of his in his pockets. He would have nothing to do with “your mother” or “her hippie friends,” and he expressed his disapproval by ignoring his children almost entirely. He lived fewer than 20 miles away in his swinging bachelor pad, but never called or wrote, and seldom even sent birthday cards to any of his kids. Judy couldn’t have cared less, Debbie was terrified of him and was secretly glad he stayed away, and I just felt confused and abandoned.
We were never close, my father and I, until I was a grown man. He never played catch with me, came to any of my sports events, or showed the slightest interest in my games or drawings. When I was a boy, he was the mad dictator who expected his terrified subjects to obey his every command without question, and then laugh at his jokes. He ruled by fear and ridicule, which are anathema to relationships, and downright toxic to children. As I got older and my body changed, he never once spoke to me about growing up, or asked if I was interested in girls. He didn’t do anything to display affection, camaraderie, or the slightest interest in my personality. When he looked at any one of us kids, there was only the critical, omniscient, indefatigably judgmental Eye. We all avoided him as much as possible, so it wasn’t much of a loss when he forsook us.
When I married my dear wife in the Philippines, my mom and foster brother, Paul, accompanied me to the wedding. My dad acted like I was making some farfetched decision, like colonizing another planet, or entering an induced coma. He never even mentioned attending, or responded to the invitation I sent him. I didn’t expect him to, guessing that his son’s wedding to a non-American was the ultimate waste of time and energy that could be better spent playing golf at the country club. When I got back to America, and Monica (aka “Joy”) joined me a few months later, he seemed surprised, as if he thought it wasn’t really going to happen. He realized he had to buy a wedding gift or look like a complete schmuck, so he got us a cheap particle board table for our kitchen, with some tacky plastic chairs that were fit for use in a Moose lodge. Hurray for Good Ol’ Dad!
When Fiona was born, however, things changed. I didn’t want my kid to grow up not knowing her grandparents the way I had not known mine, so I persisted in contacting my father until he had to do something about it. By that time, he had moved to Reno for the cheap golf (and cheaper hookers), and it was quite a disruption to his routine to fit in a few phone calls. Eventually he warmed up to the idea a little, and even called me a couple of times. His pride wouldn’t allow him to completely let down his guard, so over the years he developed an unofficial “scorecard” of who had called whom, and on what special days. He sent a strangely inappropriate card to Fiona on her first birthday, and elevated to sending Christmas cards for all his kids a few years later. When I’d call him he’d say something like, “You called me last time, so now I owe you one.” Or, “I remember I called last on your birthday.” Whatever. At least we were making phone calls, which was a start. I have always had a strong aversion to the telephone, so this was no small accomplishment.
By the time Fiona was three, he was talking vaguely about building us a house in Reno – a dome house he had designed himself. With his usual obsessive attention to detail, he had built an accurate model out of mat board and balsa wood, with all the beams cut to scale, the geodesic angles calculated on his slide rule, and even blocky furniture models to show the living space. The model was designed so you could take off the roof, pull the half-shell frame apart, and see the interior walls. It was truly impressive, and I actually loved the idea of living in a dome house, so Joy and I made plans to call his hand, and we moved to Reno to make it easier for him to bestow upon us his heritage. We wound up in dumpy old military housing 10 miles north of Reno. He stayed in a little apartment way on the south side, so it was easy for him to reestablish the pattern of ducking commitments and being not available. It became rapidly apparent that he was holding a bust hand, and had been bluffing all along. We moved back to Marin after only 6 months, but there were no hard feelings. I had long realized that’s just the way Good Ol’ Dad was: as incomplete and useless as a deck of cards with all the hearts removed. It must have been hard for him to grow up, emotionally handicapped as he was, and I learned to feel compassion for his fear and inadequacy. We stayed in touch formally, and he deigned to visit us in our new place in Marin, and everything became nice and easy as soon as nothing was expected of him.
Still, it was very fulfilling to finally have some semblance of a relationship with the man who provided me with half my chromosomes. Oh, and also a couple of worn-out old cars.
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
— J.R.R. Tolkein