 © Steve Grace
|
Mr. Garibaldi's Cabin Click to read Click to |
etg cover page | to purchase
© Steve Grace
|
Mr. Garibaldi's Cabin Click to read Click to |
Mr.
Garibaldi's Cabin
I fled Los Angeles in 1961. I was a flower child wanting simplicity and a quiet place
where I could flourish and be queen. I bought a house and two acres of land in the
foothills of the Sierra Nevada from Alberto Garibaldi.
Mr. Garibaldi’s aged face was brown under a khaki hat centered squarely on his head. He wore a khaki shirt and trousers, with brown boots stained red by the soil.
The house was a squat, unpainted rectangle with a large front window facing east. The interior had unfinished plywood floors and plasterboard walls. Mr. Garibaldi had furnished the kitchen with a 1920s black-iron wood-burning cookstove with sturdy bowed legs and white porcelain oven door and warming shelf.
My two acres sat smack in the middle of his two hundred. Black oak, black walnut, and yellow pine grew on my land, which was shaped like a kite, the tail angling straight down to the creek. Manzanita was so thick in places that if I went for a walk I ended up crawling on hands and knees through tunneling deer paths. I drank water out of the kitchen faucet until the day I saw a dead deer floating in the utility ditch that supplied the house.
One week after closing escrow, Mr. Garibaldi coasted up in his brown Toyota pickup truck. He’d decided to develop his remaining acres.
Every day thereafter he strode up and down the hills squarely waving work-gloved hands, directing a bulldozer to cut roads. The roar of the bulldozer reminded me of the LA freeways I’d so recently fled.
One day Mr. Garibaldi came to my door and asked if he could use the iron stove to fix his breakfast. I agreed. He extracted a flat loaf of sourdough bread from his knapsack, followed by a long knife, a grapefruit, and a spoon serrated on the leading edge. He made himself at home in his former home.
Breakfast time became routine: the thick slice of sourdough bread tossed upon the stove’s hot surface, the sooty bread thickly spread with ricotta cheese, washed down with swallows of spring water, a whole grapefruit dug out with the serrated spoon, and then Mr. Garibaldi would depart to wake up the bulldozer.
Two acres had seemed huge in Los Angeles.
Mr. Garibaldi began to build a cabin down the hill from the house.
"Um, Mr. Garibaldi," I said, "it looks like maybe you might, um, be building inside my property line. Like, um, maybe in my front yard."
"Maybe just a little bit," he said. He took a swig of spring water from a plastic jug, his gaze on the tips of the yellow pines, and told me a story in his accented English. "I was raised on polenta and tomatoes in Roma," he said. I’d heard it before. Every breakfast, Mr. Garibaldi told a story about his childhood.
"My poor mama. She had twelve children. I stole fruit and vegetables out of gardens. I stole firewood. When I come to San Francisco, I was nineteen. I work hard. I start a restaurant. I never am hungry again."
The cabin walls rose. I heard the bulldozer in the morning, and hammer, saw, and "Santa Lucia" in the afternoon. The weekend after roofing his cabin, he brought his six-year-old grandson Alberto III. In the morning, I could hear him calling, "Alberto. Alberto. Wake up, Alberto." I wondered how many grandchildren he had, and would they all come to visit? Did he carry their photos?
One September Saturday, the Toyota didn’t arrive. I prepared an extravagant breakfast and ate it with Thoreau. I took a leisurely walk past a slumbering bulldozer. I sunbathed nude until vultures began to circle overhead.
Sunday I washed the breakfast dishes and sat on the front porch. The air was warm and scented with pine. The cabin below was in shadow. I waited for Mr. Garibaldi to see the rising sun, to come up and make toast. But there was no Toyota, no Mr. Garibaldi.
A month went by. One morning the Toyota roared up the road. It was driven by Mr. Garibaldi’s son. His passenger was a blonde and thickly lipsticked woman: his wife, Mr. Garibaldi’s daughter-in-law. Alberto II looked triumphant and sly.
"Gee, it’s great up here." The daughter-in-law laughed. "It’s nice to come up and get out of that San Francisco rat race." She sounded like a scrub jay.
"Um, where—I mean, I haven’t seen Mr. Garibaldi."
"Oh, he died, honey. His heart. He was seventy-six," she continued. "His time, I guess." She joined Alberto II. They surveyed their kingdom.
I slept little that night. I felt pain in my chest and, surprised, identified it as grief.
In the morning, I marched down the hill.
"He built this cabin on my property."
"He was an old man. He made a mistake."
"It’s inside my property line. You are in my front yard."
Alberto II cursed me. They climbed into the Toyota and roared away.
I drove into Sacramento for supplies. When I came home that evening the cabin was gone, torn down and hauled away. A circle of trash tangled in the Manzanita marked the site.
People left alone won’t survive more than eight months, I’ve read. For me, it was less. I did not flourish as queen. I rented my house and returned to the city.
My tenant’s young son, left alone, attempted to rekindle the stove with gasoline. He survived the explosion with a broken arm and burns. My house burned down. What was left? The rectangular cement foundation, and the ruined 1920s wood-burning cookstove.
Profile
—Janne Graham
Bio
Vada Russell
Place of residence: Sacramento.
Birthplace: Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Grew up in: Oklahoma, Washington, and California.
Day job: Secretary.
Education: B.A. in theatre, California State University at Sacramento.
Awards: Ellie awards for acting and directing.
Current project: Directing the premiere production of Hurry Up Please Its Time
by Joyce Lander.
Admiration for Václav Havel: I played Flasta in The Increased Difficulty of
Concentration by Václav Havel at The Actor’s Theatre of St. Paul in Minnesota in
the 1980s.
Apaches: I was born in the town of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where the Apache Geronimo
died. At the time of his death he was a Christian. On the bulletin board by my computer
there is a picture postcard of Geronimo holding a rifle and looking fierce. Next to that
is a postcard of part-Cherokee Will "I never met a man I didn’t like"
Rogers, who is smiling. I like the juxtaposition.
A strange time: I toured five states in the Midwest with The Dakota Theatre
Caravan, fondly known as "Car and Van," since that’s how we traveled. We
played in high school gymnasiums, 1930s movie houses, and churches. I wrote country songs
and crocheted afghans to while away the miles. I also became a professional spoons player.
Where I live: My neighborhood in Sacramento is called Midtown. The blocks are
filled with Victorian, Queen Anne, and Craftsman homes, interrupted with concrete and
brick apartment and office buildings. There are a dozen coffee houses within a half-mile
radius, each with its particular clientele. There are bikers here and chess players there;
political, theatrical, sexual preference coffee houses where minds brew.
For fun: Once a month I don a yellow hard-hat and an orange, reflective vest and
pick up litter along Highway 50. As I work, Mack trucks are speeding 70 miles per hour six
feet away from me. My co-pickers once found a cheerleader’s pompom, a quarter-mile
later another pompom, farther along a cheerleader’s short skirt, then a shirt, and
finally the boots. They did not, however, find the cheerleader.
Family: I am mother to Kendall, twins Shelley and Shannon, Jason and Larri, and
grandmother to Noelani, Christopher, and Nora Belle. These are the most important people
in my life. I hope to be an example for them—an example of what my mother used to
tell me: "Can’t never did a thing."
Click to
Purchase
Return to ETG cover page
English
From the Roots Up |
Cover | Skills | Essays | Travel | History | Fiction | Poetry | Reviews | Ordering | Books Online
