Kirk Creek

The ’70s

They started making their annual sojourn to Big Sur the same year they met at Chevron, not pumping gas, but getting buttoned up every morning to put their chemical-engineering degrees to good use at the refinery in Richmond, the one that still sends billows of steam visible from two towns away when standing in the flats, and all the way from the Oakland hills when the sky is blue. These guys, they became quick friends, speaking a language that transcended their Irish and Montanan and German hometowns, a dialect they scratched out in graph-paper notebooks with mechanical pencils while looking through almost identical glasses, each fashioned from a slightly different shade of molded brown plastic, as was the current style. They loved chemistry, had since they were boys, loved it enough that they imagined it could sustain them, somehow. All had fled a former life. They didn’t know this about each other at first, but when the friendship grew beyond petroleum derivatives and mimeographed reports and watercooler commiseration about “the man,” and their banter evolved into marijuana-laced weekend adventures, each of them was able to say, without really saying, that there was a starting-over afoot, that there had to be, or else, well, they didn’t say what the consequences of denying this rebirth might be, but they all knew it would be someplace very dark, a precipice without warning, a place they knew existed because they had already lost their favorite musicians to that rocky drop-off that always seemed to arrive somewhere around the age of twenty-seven. And that’s another thing: They loved the same music, obviously both Jim and Jimi, and that folky stuff too, each of them eventually buying a different instrument at the same shop on Russian Hill in San Fran (yes, they called it San Fran), arriving that first year in Big Sur with a banjo wearing a mother-of-pearl star on its neck, and a guitar that already carried some dents rendered by the previous owner’s passionate strumming, and a curvy mandolin that would eventually just be referred to as your girlfriend. And they did get girlfriends, real ones, each woman seven to ten years younger than the chemical engineers, each of them remarkably adept at doing that thing, that performance a girl does where she pretends to be hip and liberated in a big floppy hat and Mexican blouse, with her bookshelf that holds a dog-eared copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves but she simultaneously knows how to make meatloaf and martinis just like her mother and how to pretend that everything is okay with a man even when it’s not. Those women, who would eventually become our mothers, they didn’t know exactly what their new families would look like, now that their boyfriends had declared themselves so different from the rigid father archetypes that they all left back home. Defiant and with instruments they only half knew how to play, and hearts they only half knew how to decipher (because this was, after all, the decade when what was called empathy was actually just hedonism, and let’s not forget that these guys were still math nerds raised in cold places), they all set out in a caravan of endlessly tinkered-upon VWs to find this mythical place, the one where they heard you could swim out into the kelp forest and pry abalone from the bottom of the sea, then eat its sweet flesh washed down with jug wine and a joint, a place where they could finally express themselves and un-stunt their psyches, finally live in harmony with the land, man. They looked so young and proud in those first photos, arms slung around each other’s shoulders as they donned their down jackets (purchased at a brand new store in Berkeley they referred to as Rei until gently corrected at the cash register), with the state campground sign in the background announcing their annual utopia would henceforth be called Kirk Creek, the name revealing that nearby there was water that ran into the sea, though they couldn’t yet find it under the thick cover of poison oak and bramble in the ravine; that would take another few years of bushwhacking while drinking Koozie-clad beers, at first with mutts in bandanas acting as eager scouts, and then, when the women finally surrendered their bodies to the ultimate chemistry experiment, with babies slung on their backs and squinting in the coastal sun.

The ’80s

It was a dream we visited every year, indelible postcards of the landscape collected with our young eyes aimed out the back window of an eighty-four Vanagon, the second one our parents would own. Our kicked-off Converse and sun-whipped hair would give away that we were Californian, if you were to happen upon our family hurtling down the 101 in the glow of a coffee-thermos sunrise; even our dreams were Californian, built up from the belief that the land is an oracle that can be walked upon, driven upon, that every movement across this state sneers back at our parents’ former lives and says, freedom, that’s why, that this place surely must be the center of the universe. The trip to Kirk Creek was our homecoming, our pilgrimage (though devoid of any of that Catholic shit, which is a direct quote from one of our dads). We lumped ourselves under blankets in the backs of our vans and let the rain-routed shape of the foothills cradle us as we drove south through the Central Valley, waited eagerly until shaggy cypress trees signaled the approaching ocean, stopping for tacos and gas in the farming town that meant halfway. Then our dusty vehicle drove shoulder to shoulder with the unending sparkle of the Pacific, until time seemed to stop, until we had to pee so bad. And then finally, nudging up against dusk, we’d loop the campground two or three times before choosing the tiny Eden where we’d unpack our stuff, at first using the unbelievable glow of the sunset to light our way, then circling around an inscribed picnic table while a dad showed us how Prometheus became famous, how he dared to steal fire to give to his family. We waited for this signal, like disciples, like the flare of escaping fuel from the Coleman lantern was actually a new universe exploding into existence, Bang! we were newly celestial; ready to invent everything. When we were babies, they kept us safe from the bite of the photogenic cliffs by corralling us in expandable wooden pens, the moms circled around us in fold-out chairs where they read Didion and Sunset magazine, applied sunscreen to us at regular intervals, while also checking the lift of the sun above the blue horizon, the only measurement that would tell them the husbands might be coming back up the beach trail with creatures from the sea stowed in five-gallon plastic buckets, buckets procured specifically for this purpose, but also doubling as bongo drums when the drugs kicked in after bedtime. We heard them from our zippered nest, singing Bobby McGee and every single Dylan song they could recall, heard their unintentionally syncopated strumming providing just the right amount of structure for their reveling. As we grew, we dreamed of being old enough to go out in the yellow inflatable kayaks with our dads, to scale the fish ourselves, to roam without the requirement of shoes or clean fingernails or inside voices. We wanted our own rituals. We got our way as soon as we could walk. We were a pack of animals clad in OshKosh, thinking our ferocity greater than that of the dog-sized racoons that arrived last at the campfire parties, rangy kids with tails from the wrong side of town looking for fistfights, looking for food scraps after the humans stopped howling. The evidence in the morning was always fascinating, muddy paws stamped on windshields, the ring of cans strewn around the firepit. We wondered about chemistry. We wondered which came first, the liquid or the laughter. We’re still wondering, but in that decade we didn’t dwell on it too much. We instead demanded eggs and bacon, disregarded our parents’ red eyes in the morning. We had an idea, a big one: Let’s follow the topography until we find that creek the state sign keeps telling us is around here somewhere, let’s ask Dad if we can use his machete, we’re big enough, right? We were not, but they humored us, soothed their hangovers with tiny white pills and hiked us up the ravine until we found a slice of cold water hiding inside layers of underbrush. We didn’t have words at the time for the sensation brought by this discovery, but it was something like taking off our socks in our sleeping bags in the middle of the night and feeling bare skin against the nylon for the first time, feeling brand new and like a whole hidden life of pleasures lurked underneath those fuzzy enclosures; socks or a thicket; as above, so below.

The ’90s

I got too stoned the first time I was allowed to join the teenagers at their campfire, sat stock still with my hoodie cinched around my face, not speaking even when spoken to, staring instead at the backlit profile of the steep hills that ran into the sea, recognizing their contours as identical to the iconic silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock. Mentioning something like that would be sudden death with this audience of sixteen-year-olds, who were more interested in playing a game of spin-the-bottle and smoking cigarettes, both activities transferring carbon from one source to another, lip to lip or flame to lung. I survived that first night by focusing on the singing coming through the bushes from one fire ring over, from the domain of the old-timers, remembering that the laps of all the mamas would always be waiting for me, despite the fact that I was now thirteen, had been led by the hand, out of their nest to this foreign land of bong rips and reggae. And by reggae I mean, yes, there was that one kid who decided to rub his hair into waxy white-boy dreads, and yes, there was a girl (also white) who was just so grateful that we got to escape Babylon, as she called it, every year on this trip to such an auspicious landscape. I couldn’t begrudge these kids I’d known my whole life for hitching themselves to things they thought were spiritual and righteous and, well, just fucking cool, but I did have a growing suspicion that something had been missing since the seventies, since our parents didn’t explain to us that the land we were standing on was called Los Padres National Forest, the Forest of the Fathers, and that there were thousand-year-old drawings on some of the rocks up the same ravine we now considered to be ours, its water ours, running downhill just for us into the pond we liked to skinny dip in like our wrinkled-skin hippie parents, the pool we discovered that one El Niño year, when most of the evergreen foliage was shredded thin by the whip of the rain, revealing bodies of water and bones of animals that had died in an earlier season. I didn’t say anything that night about Alfred Hitchcock gracing the hills with his presence, and later in that same decade, when I was no longer thirteen but in college at UC Santa Cruz and learned words like indigenous and watershed and appropriation, I still was the quiet one around the campfire. One year someone new did the talking, side-eyeing our strewn detritus as he walked through our site. The boys and the dads thought it would be funny to hit golf balls off the cliff into the double overhead swells, and they did, for almost twenty minutes until this ranger had the best day of his career explaining at the top of his state-trained voice that This is an otter sanctuary for Christ’s sake! and Have you no respect for those who came before you? I remember my dad that day, remember thinking that his rarely seen smile was worth hitting just one otter in the head, just once, that I would give any number of things to see him stepping away from the existential cliff one of his friends told me he might be approaching. He’ll figure it out, I said, having been fully indoctrinated with the mantra better living through chemistry, an adage that those (now old) guys adopted two decades ago, but now applied via selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and benzodiazepines instead of their originally practiced repertoire of petroleum products (thanks, Chevron), cheap beer, the occasional acid trip, and birth-control pills. After the ranger’s reprimand there was a palpable shuffling of power, and so I took my shot, wanting to see what it would feel like to be a ringleader for once, decided to try my hand at steering these wild beasts toward new rituals that wouldn’t endanger any wildlife—or any egos. I spent an afternoon alone collecting driftwood on the beach while the humbled and defeated napped under a eucalyptus tree, separating the longest pieces out from the bull kelp and strewn fish innards, and when there was a stack big enough to garner some respect, I pulled my blonde hair into two braids and suggested we make a sweat lodge, suggested that we absolve ourselves of our recent sins using hot stones heated in a fire and then doused with water; the steam could speak to us through our skin, I thought, could bypass all the oversized words that never seemed to say enough. We could start over, I said. At this, my dad smiled.

Defiant and with instruments they only half knew how to play, and hearts they only half knew how to decipher, they all set out in a caravan of endlessly tinkered-upon VWs to find this mythical place, the one where they heard you could swim out into the kelp forest and pry abalone from the bottom of the sea, then eat its sweet flesh washed down with jug wine and a joint.

The ’00s

He met me for lunch in Santa Cruz a few weeks after returning from Kirk Creek, picked me up from my dorm room with the million-dollar view through the redwoods. The back of the VW was stratified with weeks’ worth of ignored objects, including his half of the camping gear that was negotiated in the divorce. Without any salutation or eye contact, he said, Remember when we christened you on the beach, gave you the name Sea Anemone? I smiled, of course remembering that a semicircle of grown-ups had decided in the eighties to anoint the heads of all the small children with sea water from mussel shells and give them new middle names, this beach ritual captured in a series of three Polaroid snaps that I always found myself looking at when I was sad, somehow always finding myself a little sadder afterward but still seeking them out nonetheless. He said, Did you know that me and the guys walked all the way up the creek once, looking for its source? Got poison oak so bad, holy shit. We didn’t find what we were looking for, but would you believe it, there were fossils of shells that far up? Still can’t figure out if the ocean used to be up that high, or if everything started in the sea and somehow…but then he trailed off, gripping the steering wheel though we were still parked in the lot by my dormitory. We ate lunch at the taco place with the neon sign, and then he dropped me off again at my collegiate tidepool, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and said, See you at Kirk Creek, honey, seeming to forget that the next trip was almost a year away and that I would be home for Christmas in the meantime. He left me standing with my leftover Mexican food in one hand and a manila envelope in the other, which wasn’t something new for him to do, because remember, this was before the internet was everywhere and before you could grab the computer in your pocket and ask an algorithm exactly how seashells got to the top of a coastal range, so instead he would photocopy articles that he found enriching and include them with burned CDs of Jim and Jimi and Bob and Neil, blessings sung by all those deities he worried I might never really respect or understand, worried that I might not grasp that he too had once belonged to something. This time the send-off included five thousand dollars in the envelope, divided into crisp stacks and tucked among the sheets of paper.

The ’10s

It took you almost ten years to go back there, though two years later you did drive past on the back of your boyfriend’s motorcycle on your way to a weekend in Ventura. The sweet boy asked if you wanted to stop, but you said no, smiled and said you wanted to get to his mom’s house by sunset, not telling him that setting foot in that campground was akin to approaching Charon on the bank of the River Styx and asking him to row you over to the underworld without paying the due fare. It just couldn’t be done; it was an affront to the unspoken order of life and death. You kept dad’s ashes in the state-issued, hermetically sealed box for years without knowing what to do, once even tried to take them on a backpacking trip to the Sierras to scatter them as far upstream as you could but realized two days into hiking that the blade on your Swiss Army knife wasn’t sufficient to cut open the embossed plastic. His ashes came home with you again, which was sort of a relief, but the kind of relief that’s more delay than resolution. When you grieved, it was for him, of course it was, for the chemistry gone wrong, for the incorrectly titrated comforts that he relied on, for the unspeakable image of the futon that he placed on the floor of his laboratory before lying down and breathing in the nitrous oxide. And you felt this other type of lament welling up in you, something impossible to contain in a single body, something that was meant to be held simultaneously by humans arranged in a circle, those circles surrounded by attendant animals, then all the beings, sentient or otherwise, completely surrounded by the endless concentric circles lifted or scratched or eroded or rooted into the land. You didn’t know what to do with a feeling this big, had never been given any tools of understanding other than weed and academia and an annual camping trip; once you’d been given cold, hard cash as proxy for the unsayable. You waited ten years, kept his remains in each closet of each apartment you inhabited in your twenties and thirties, but in archeological time that’s almost nothing, it’s like a single grain of sand getting sucked into the mouth of a fish and then immediately spit out again, it’s like one blink of one eye from one single person in the entire history of people opening and closing their eyes; shit, in the whole history of creatures having eyes in the first place. And when you looked at it this way something shifted, caused you to call those kids you hadn’t seen for a decade and you invited them to bring their kids and their Subarus and their labradoodles to Kirk Creek one more time. You made sure to bring a hacksaw too, and a burned CD of all the classics. You stayed sober. In the morning, wearing supportive footwear and your own small child on your back, you led the improvised processional down the rocky path to the beach. You wondered as you walked, who was this Kirk that got a creek named after him, and who were those fathers that were immortalized in the name of a forest, and why does a forest even need a name in any language to make it into something worth protecting? You didn’t ask these questions out loud or say anything at all as the waves dispersed the ashes among the sea anemones and kelp, as the creek mixed with the Pacific and carried ribbons of your parent out past the shallows. You saw the otters, a small family of them, watching the ritual and riding the swell. You knew there must be something bigger than a camping trip conceived by three heartbroken chemists in the seventies orchestrating all this, and even if you didn’t know what to call it, or how to ask your ancestors where it came from or where it was going, and even if you were breaking the law by depositing human remains on federally protected land, and even though you knew, you knew, that the mythology written by your family ignored the ghosts that already called this ravine home, you let yourself feel the ancient relief that comes with returning kin to the earth through a body of water. You took off your shoes and stood in the sea, let yourself step into the fluid chemistry that some people call God. You let yourself, for just a moment, feel held by everything, and all it took was lifetimes.