Homebase

Homebase[2]

(Excerpts)

AILANTHUS altissima (A.glandulosa).

Tree-of-Heaven.Deciduous tree.All Zones.

Native to China.Planted a century ago in California’s gold country where it now runs wild….Inconspicuous greenish flowers are usually followed by handsome clusters of red-brown, winged fruits in late summer and fall….Often condemned as a weed tree because it suckers profusely, but it must be praised for its ability to create beauty and shade under adverse conditions—drought, hot winds, and every type of difficult soil.

—Sunset Western Garden Book[3]

He was frozen to death in the snow.

He was going to drown himself in the bay.

After searching for several days they caught the murderer.

Did they find anything in his possession?

They did.

He was killed by an assassin.

He tried to assassinate me.

He tried to kill me by assassination.

He is an assaulter.

He was smothered in his room.

He was suffocated in his room.

He was shot dead by his enemy.

He was poisoned to death by his friend.

He tries to kill him by poisoning.

He tries to inflict death by poison.

Assault with the intention to do bodily injury.

He took the law in his own hand.

He tried to deprive me of my wages.

I go home at night.

I have gone home.

I went home.

I abide at home.

I abode at San Francisco.

I have lived in Oakland.

—An English-Chinese phrase Book

Also， A Complete List of Wells Fargo & Co.[4]‘s

Offices in California, Nevada, Etc.,

Compiled by Wong Sam and Assistants, 1875.

Chapter One

I

Back in the early fifties, when I was four, my father and mother drove from Berkeley to New York and back.The sound of the car’s little engine is still buzzing and working away in my head.My sense of balance comes from lying asleep in the back seat of that car, my unsteady heartbeat comes from my father’s night driving and my watching the chaos of passing headlights floating by on our car’s ceiling and gleaming taillights reflected and distorted in the windows.In those nights, sleeping in the back seat of my father’s car, I heard conversations my mother and father had, saw places I visited later, and remembered it all when I started driving.And the places I’ve never been to before were dreams, were whole conversations my father and mother had.

I will eventually travel to all the places I’ve dreamed about.I will meet my friends and know them as if I’d known them all my life.

I was named after my great-grandfather’s town, the town he first settled in when he came to California from China: Rainsford, California.Rainsford Chan (Chan is short for California).Rainsford doesn’t exist anymore.There’s no record of it ever having existed, but I’ve heard stories about it.I’ve spent many days hiking and skiing through the Sierra Nevada looking for it.I’ve never found exactly where it was, but I’m almost sure I’ve seen it or passed by it on one of those days.I recognized it from a hill.It was one of those long, wide Sierra meadows.A place of shade.The sound of a stream reaches my ears.Dogwood trees make the place sound like a river when the breeze moves through the leaves.

My father knew all his grandfather’s stories about the town or towns like it.Stories of how they survived there， of how they were driven out of the west and chased back to San Francisco.As they rushed back across the land they worked on， they burned their letters， their diaries， poems，anything with names.My father never told me these stories.He died too soon.He only taught me to sing “Home on the Range”[5] and I’d teach him the songs I learned in school.But I knew all his stories because my mother told me all his stories and later I found stories he had written down and put away in an old shoe box.

The year before his death we moved from Berkeley to Guam.In 1956 my mother called the dirt road in front of our house on Guam “Ocean Street,” and gave the only house on that street the number “25.” We began to receive mail there from home.I was six and until we had moved to Guam I remembered only a few isolated events out of my childhood in Berkeley, where my parents were students.When we returned to Berkeley in 1957, Father was dead.And I remembered everything.

In 1956 my father taught me to sing “Home on the Range” on that island in the Pacific Ocean.Standing there in the heat of an ocean lagoon, I sang out for my father about our home on the range and my friends the buffalo and antelope.The sun was shining, it was raining, and the steam of the humid day filled my lungs.The waves washing up on the edges of the lagoon made the green grass seaweed between my toes.

I must have been calling my father "Bobby" for a few years before we arrived in Guam, but it was there that I actually remember for the first time calling him by that name.I had given him that name when, as a baby, I mispronounced “Daddy.” That wasn’t his real name, just my name for him,it made him the object of my play, a friend I learned my imagination from.When we lived on Guam, I got the last good look, the last clear view of my family at the age of six.On Guam, my world was a boy’s paradise and I remember all of it and its memory is constant.In 1956, World War II was still on for me.If I dug beneath the fallen leaves and loose earth near the base of the tree, I always found gleaming brass bullet casings.And there was a fighter jet in the woods behind our house.It was a world of real aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, bombers, sunken ships, and palm-lined white sandy beaches.At night the humid animals of the day, the lizards, insects, and rodents, made a zoo of noises in my sleep.

On this island, the tropical night still hisses its hot breath against my ears.The day must cool into evening, Father.When you and I sat on the front porch, there was no movement to cool the day.I followed my father into the jungle behind our house, the boondocks, the name itself was myth and legend.The enemies of all our life were hiding in the grasses, behind the rubble, a jungle of blood.I knew Jap soldiers were hidden away in the tunnels against the hill, still fighting the war.The terror of my childhood was a crashed and charred fighter-jet lying mangled amid the roots of the trees.Some nights I woke thinking I heard that jet crash into the trees with a noise so great that I knew it was a dream noise—it makes me deaf, but the dream still goes on.In the faint light of that humid night the fighter glowed, lifted itself in my eyes like silver smoke, and brought the taste of metal to my tongue.And I could not stop myself from peering down inside the cockpit, feeling the metal still warm from the burn, reaching down through the broken glass into that old air to brush away the smoke, and finding the broken body of a ghost.

When my father was a young man he tried to climb Mount Shasta in California’s north gold country, but was defeated by the wind rushing down the mountain face.My father said the wind was always the conqueror, not the cold, or the snow, or the heat, but the wind that makes you deaf, numbs your touch, and pushes blood into your eyes.

My father was sleeping in a stone cabin at the foot of Mount Shasta and was awakened by the sickening smell of rotting wood and the muted voices of Chinamen.His bed became soiled with the breath of poor men.He was getting sick in the pre-dawn night when a voice spoke to him, “Do you know me?” a woman asked, touching his ears with her hands.

“Yes,” he lied, seeing the dim outline of her naked body.His eyes filled with smoke.He tried to breathe.The wood of the room smelled like burning dust as he reached for her.

“Are you afraid of dying with me?” she asked, drawing his hand to her stomach, putting her moist mouth in his ear, making him deaf, his throat ached for the moist moss of trees.

“Yes,” he answered, knowing she was the nightmare that made China the bitterness of his grandfather’s and father’s life.He heard her heart beating in his stomach.He left tears on her breast.

In all the days I visited my father in the hospital when he was dying, I don’t remember a single day in detail.I do not remember what I was doing when he died.I do not remember what day he went into the hospital, how many days he stayed there.What time he died.I never asked.I just knew one day in spring, 1957, it was all over.All I had left was a pile of pictures and some clothes my mother put away for me to wear when I got big enough.

My father is twenty-eight years old in the photo I carry of him.I remember him like that.He is seated in a wooden chair on a lawn somewhere, his legs are crossed, he is looking to his right.It is a settled look and if I try there’s an ambitious feeling to the photograph.Perhaps that’s because I’m his son.He is wearing a white shirt, dark V-neck sweater, heavy wool pants, checkered socks, and black shoes.The table at his right is also made of wood.It looks like a wooden box standing on one of its sides.There are heart-shaped holes cut in the two ends of the box table.A folded newspaper separates two empty coffee cups on the tabletop.A stone wall behind him divides the photo in half.Long-leaf bushes spill over the top of the stone wall behind him.He is not yet a father.He will not be a father for four more years.

My father will always stay the same in that picture.April, 1945.And when I am twenty-eight we will be the same age.It is dangerous to honor your father.It is hard to really love your father.It is easy to respect him.When you are the same age, or even when you grow older than your father,like growing taller than him, your love changes to honor because you yourself would like to be honored.I must simply love him.When a son takes a risk of love, he naturally loves his father.He commits himself to his father.It is a dangerous risk.

In three more years we will be the same age and I will have been to all the places my father had been.

I remember you, Father, now with urgency.It is night and I am more like you than I have ever been.I hear the same sounds of a tropical night,the clicking of insects, the scrape of a lizard’s claws on the screen door.Tonight I remember a humid night on Guam when I held your forehead in my small hands as I rode on your shoulders.My hands felt your ears, the shape of your chin, and the shape of your nose until you became annoyed and placed my hands back on your forehead and shifted my weight on your shoulders.It is April.

When I was a boy, my father whispered to me from his hospital bed,“Rainsford, I love you more and more.” He cried and I thought he was singing.He was a father to me even when he was dying.He said, “Fathers should confess their youth to their sons.Confess the lovers of their youth.”

My mother kept my father’s love letters to her.I found the letters in an old box.I saw my mother and father in their youth.I see them as I see myself now.They are the celebration of strength for me.

I was left a father to myself after my father’s death.When a son or daughter dies, the parents have another or adopt another child to raise and love.When a family loses a beloved dog, they go out and buy another quickly before the self-pity replaces that life.When a father dies, there is only violence.I am violent.I commit myself to love, saying it is there, but never going further to grasp loving.My real life eludes action.It leaves me a father to myself.

My mother died eight years after my father and it was then that I realized I was my great-grandfather’s son and I knew why the label of orphan meant nothing to me.My great-grandfather had begun a tradition of orphaned men in this country and now I realized I was the direct descendant of that original fatherless and motherless immigrant.Now there was a direct line from the first generation to the fourth generation.I was not hampered by the knowledge of China as home.The closest I had come to China was my own mother, who was the daughter of a Chinese dentist,schooled by private tutors in Tientsin in English and Chinese literature,French, piano, ballet, and painting.She married my father in 1947 when she was a student in painting and he was a graduate student in engineering in Berkeley.His life had been the opposite of hers, and the realm of his history and tradition did not resemble hers in any way.But in America they were expected to notice each other and, in fact, to know each other.He was working as a dishwasher at the Blue and Gold Cafeteria when he did notice her, and he dismissed her with his own form of racial arrogance.His traditions and history were deeply rooted like scars, and he remembered only the bitterness of his father and grandfather, and he cultivated his sensibility from the lives of those lonely men.And he noticed her that day simply because she was the same color as he and she was good-looking.They did not meet again until she took a course in drafting, and he was the teaching assistant in the class.When they first met, she spoke to him in Chinese and he told her he didn’t understand Chinese.

“You do not understand Chinese?”

“Nope.”

The way he said “nope” was all she needed to prod him.She seemed to know what annoyed him.Young Chinese girls from China annoyed him.She was talking to the side of his face.When a man says “nope” it was time to move on, and my father was looking off into the distance, ready to move.She was slowly moving her head, then her shoulders, trying to make him look at her when she spoke.

“You were born here?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at her, then looking away at a point in the distance.

“What generation are you?” she asked.Then she added, looking away from him at the same point in the distance, “I have an uncle who came from China to go to school in Pennsylvania and became a dentist in 1917.”She paused, feeling him looking at her.“And another uncle who was a Methodist minister in California in 1850.” It was a look of impatience.

“I’m third-generation Chinese,” he said quickly.

“You are not Chinese.” She caught him saying the word “Chinese” a little too forced, like a lie, just to dismiss her questions.And when they looked at each other finally he was half smiling and she was dead serious.She tested his patience.

A few months after they were married, my mother received a letter from her father telling her that China was closed to her, that it was no longer her home.She was now orphaned to this country and to my father.It would still be a few months before he told her about his history and the lives of his grand-fathers because, among other things, he had to teach her how to cook.

When I started driving, I used to drive around at night through the hills, through empty streets, just drive around at night to keep from thinking about the pursuit of my own life.To keep from settling down into the dreams of Father and Mother.But in the end my life was nothing unless I pursued their lives, pursued the life of my grandfather, my great-grandfather.I mirrored them at the beginning, shaped everything behind them, told stories about them to myself, read yellowed letters from one to another.I knew more about them than they would have revealed to me if they were alive.I knew more about the love of my father for my mother than most sons know.

Ⅱ

I am the son of my father, my grandfathers, and I have a story to tell about my history, about a moment in the Pacific when I heard myself saying “ever yours.” “Ever” is a word that moves like a song, exposing the heart in its tone, never hiding, never patronizing.The word speaks directly,creates form, and has its own voice.

Great-Grandfather built the railroad through the Sierra Nevada in difficult seasons.Night was a time of peace.On warm nights Great-Grandfather would move away from camp to sleep, away from the night workers.There was a river nearby the camp, and farther upstream,the falls.He always walked beside the moonlit river at night, the cascading water glowing white with the reflection made his footsteps visible.And in the windless night he crossed warm pockets of night air, then cool dark spots, but as he moved closer to the sound of the falls, the night air became moist and only cool.His skin tasted the air.It was an uphill hike to the base of the falls and a steeper climb to the top, where he rested, looking down on the fires of camp.He climbed on large granite stones to reach the top of the falls.He began to sweat.The mist from the crashing falls soaked him and mixed with his sweat.The noise was relief from the railroad iron noise of the day.He rested for a moment, looking down into the river’s valley.The water appeared vague, uncertain, it became the sound of moonlight, rather than the sound of water rushing through the valley.The moonlit mist carved valleys out of the granite, not the river.The moon made sounds in Great-Grandfather’s eyes, made the mist from the falls look like gray smoke floating down the valley, washing out all the details of the canyon walls, losing its night walker in its movement, cooling his exhaustion, and leaving him dreaming a moan out of all his years of living.But he always woke from that easy rest, and demanded that the tradition he passed on be more than a dream and moan of breath.It was his own voice.

Great-Grandfather heard the last anger of his body in late summer, he craved for the violence of bare lighted rooms, that yellow glow to calm himself, that congestion of men without lovers, without families.He knew he was stuck here.In Wyoming, the thunderstorms moved in every day to bring afternoon showers.The raindrops made the dust rise from the ground,filled his nostrils with the smell of moist earth, he felt the ache in his body rise as the dust rises in the wide meadows.His giving in to America, here,was the violence of his soul and he felt it, chased it, and let it overcome him.After the rains, the humidity rose and moist air mixed with the dust the rain had raised.It was a good smell and he bared his chest to that air.

We do not have our women here.[6] My wife is coming to live here.We are staying.Nothing was sweet about those days I lived alone in the city， unless you can find sweetness in that kind of loneliness.I slept in the back of a kitchen by a grimy window where the light and noises of the wet city streets were ground in and out of me like the cold.The bed was so small I could hardly move away from my dreams.And when I awakened with the blue light of the moon shining in， there would be no dreams.That one moment when I wake， losing my dreams， my arms and heart imagining that she was near me moving closer and I float in her movements and light touch.But the blue light and the noise were always there and I would have nothing in my hands.

“I left for San Francisco one month before my brother.In those days,ships were bringing us in illegally.They usually dropped a lifeboat outside the Golden Gate with the Chinese in it.Then the ship steamed in and at night the lifeboat came in quietly to unload.If they were about to be caught, my people were thrown overboard.But, you see, they couldn’t swim because they were chained together.My brother died on that night and now his bones are chained to the bottom of the ocean.Now I am fighting to find a place in this country.”

My father and I used to drive down a dusty road on that tropical island singing “Home on the Range,” the dust pouring through the windows, collecting on the big furry seats of our Buick Super Eight.I followed him on his rounds, checking building sites, riding shotgun,wearing my Superman shirt and a white starched sailor’s hat, and carrying a replica of a long-barreled Colt that made my arm ache whenever I lifted it to take aim.And when my father got sick and we had to fly home, I thought of all those jeep rides we went on, running down a dusty road,holding yourself on with both hands, and when we stopped, the dust would catch us and get in my hair and the corners of my mouth.And instead of making you feel dirty, it dried your back.Before we left, mother pulled the Buick into the garage, scraping the side, pinning us in.I crawled out of the window and went for help.

Great-Grandfather’s wife was a delicate, yet a strong and energetic lady, insisting in her letters to Great-Grandfather to let her come and join him.The loneliness was overpowering him, yet he resisted her pleas,telling her that life was too dangerous for a woman.“The people and the work move like hawks around me, I feel chained to the ground, unable even to cry for help.The sun blisters my skin, the winters leave me sick,the cold drains us.I look into the eyes of my friends and there is nothing,not even fear.”

Upon receiving his letter, Great-Grandmother told her friends that she was leaving to join her husband, saying that his fight to survive was too much for a single man to bear.And so she came and was happy and the hawks had retreated.

She lived in the city and gave birth to a son while Great-Grandfather was still working in the Sierras building the railroad.He wrote to her,saying that the railroad would be finished in six months and he would return to the city and they would live together again as a family.

During the six months, the hawks came back into his vision.“The hawks had people faces laughing as they pulled me apart with their sharp talons, they had no voices, just their mouths flapping open in a yellow hysteria of teeth.” He knew that this was the beginning of sickness for his lover, he sensed her trouble and moments of pain, no word from her was necessary.“Your wounds are my wounds,” he said in the night.“The hawks that tear our flesh are disturbed by the perfect day, the pure sun that warms the wounds, I am singing and they cannot tear us apart.”

She saw the sun as she woke that morning, after waking all night long in moments of pain.The sun was so pure.She thought that this could not be the city, its stench, its noise, replaced by this sweet air.She knew that this air, this breath, was her husband’s voice.The ground was steaming dry,the humus became her soul, alive and vital with the moving and pushing of growth.She breathed deeply, the air was like sleep uninterrupted by pain,there was no more home to travel to, this moment was everything that loving could give and that was enough.She was complete and whole with that one breath, like the security of her childhood nights, sleeping with mother, wrapping her arms around her, each giving the other the peace of touch.There was a rush of every happiness in her life that she could feel and touch and as she let go, she thought of their son, and the joy of his birth jarred her and she tried desperately to reach out to wake, to hold on to that final fear, to grasp his childhood trust, but the smell of the humus, the moist decaying leaves struck by sunlight and steaming in her dreams was too much, and she was moving too fast into sleep.

Great-Grandfather had dreams and made vows to his son.“I shall take my son away from these hawks who cause me to mourn.My tears leave scars on my face.There is no strength in self-pity.I will take my son away and move deeper into this country.”

For Great-Grandfather it was not enough anymore to say he was longtime Californ’.[7] He had lost his faith in the land.He fell into deeper depressions， not from mourning his wife’s death， but from his loss of faith in the country.He had been defeated when he vowed not to lose ground to the harsh land and cruel people.

The country that accepted Great-Grandfather and his son now rejected them.He sent his son, my grandfather, back to China.The railroad was finished and the Chinese were chased out of the mines.They were allowed to live, but not to marry.The law was designed so that the Chinese would gradually die out, leaving no sons or daughters.

Great-Grandfather stayed in Wyoming.After the transcontinental railroad was finished, the men in the work teams were cut loose to wander through the West.Thousands of Chinese men had no jobs.Some moved to other parts of the country to build the railroad networks, others became migrant farm workers until the unemployed white laborers forced the passage of laws prohibiting the Chinese from working at certain jobs, in certain areas, and finally with the Exclusion Acts, restricting them from entering the country.The Chinese laborers were rounded up and taken back to Chinatown, San Francisco.And if they couldn’t be taken back to Chinatown to stay, they were buried where they stood their ground.Great-Grandfather was standing at the eastern edge of the mountains he had worked in, in every season and temperature, and he left a trail of friends lying in the mountains.Wyoming land was different from the Sierra, where he had started.

For Great-Grandfather and the other Chinese who worked through the Sierra seasons on the Central Pacific Railroad[8]， the one conqueror， the one element they feared the most was the wind.The wind did not bring death，but the dread of it in any season was even more powerful than the freezing nights of winter that stiffened the limbs of the sleeping workers， or the summer heat that caused men to pass out， or the fury of the lightning and thunderstorms.After a few hours， the wind makes them deaf， and after a few days of the strong wind， they begin to lose their senses.Hearing goes first， so they talk to themselves while they work， listening to their own voices， just to listen to something that is not the wind， they wrap cloth around their ears.But the wind never lets up.And at night the men can’t talk to themselves all night long， can’t sing in their sleep.So the wind interrupts their only peace with the loud noise of trees.Their eyes are swollen from the blood pushed into the aching veins of their sight.

Spring 1866

Spring begins in the Sierras with the first thaw in late February, early March.These are months of apprehension for us.Those who are not laying track forward through the mountain passes move back along the track we laid in the hard winter, going from camp to camp, finding the frozen bodies of our lost friends, lost to the winter nights.Men who couldn’t keep warm, or were caught in their sleep by the softly falling snow; thick snow that left us invisible by morning.

So we moved back along the tracks, picking up lost tools, lost friends.Spring was a time of mourning.We’d look for spots on the ground where the sun had melted the snow away and begun to thaw the earth.The ground was softer there, soft enough for a shallow grave.When we had walked back a winter season’s worth of track, we would remove fallen trees, straighten the track, clear avalanches.The mountains were in a great stage of flux in spring.There were mud slides and avalanches, snow losing its grip in the warming sun.The sound of the earth was a constant dripping,the huge boulders were stained with melting snow, and each day the warm seepage soaked into the frozen earth, and each day our footfalls sank into mud.

The creeks of ice water began flowing now.The land in flux brought back its sounds of birds, leaves, waters, the land began to breathe and melt.Hairy beasts began to stir, awaken.Life was wet, cool.The train began to rust.When the railroad is finished, I will ride back home on a flat car during spring, pay homage to graves, camps, the whole rising of the earth.

My father wrote to my mother, his lover, said, “Dearest darling,” like an old movie, an old radio show, out of the melodrama of their love before marriage.He sang it out in his mind as he wrote it down on the brittle onion-skin paper, “Dearest darling,” each letter, each word drawn down from a fine point of ink, drawn out to her so that the heart speaks, not the voice.He whispers as in a dream.

Dearest darling,

Having read your letter of Jan.8, my mind is rather mixed.My thought always follows your words which you told me in your last letter.I don’t know how to handle this if you really feel that way.I don’t know even how the world seems to me if I lost you.Darling, don’t think that way.It is no good for the both of us.

After I read your letter I went out to take a walk.I thought the cold air would do a little good for me.I staggered along the stone paved road.I did not know which direction I should go.I just followed a man whose name I did not know.I walked through the crowded streets.The darkness.I went into a restaurant finally.I drank a bottle of wine.I am not a good drinker.A bottle of wine is too much for me.All I wanted was to forget the present moment.Yes, it really did it.The earth went around before my eyes.I could feel it.I saw the jupiter.

I shall sail homeward at the end of the month.

I saw him out there in the street.The jupiter was a vision of the heart,it was one man’s love.

Summer 1866

Summer was the violent season.Everything was routine, every day was routine.And this dullness was what I reacted against, felt it overcoming my spirit, I let the days ride me.The heat made me sweat, and the sweat mixed with the dust we raised.I cannot tell you what we did each day, except to tell you what we did during the season.We laid more track than in other seasons, we cut more trees, we cleared more ground,built tunnels faster, while we grew weaker and weaker.

In 1866 I discovered the sound of granite rock breaking away.We had reached a solid granite buttress and we chipped, blasted, and drilled at the rock day after day.I lost sight of the color of the day in the sun’s heat reflecting off the gray granite mountain.We drilled at the rock until we heard a first warning, a low crack, almost a moan, short, quick, that could be heard even in a wind.If you were beneath that sound, that was your signal to move out of the way.The next sound was the shifting scrape of the granite block.The sun saps your energy, tires your muscles faster,facing the sun’s glare in the granite rock, the sun’s heat weakens your eyesight, but your hearing is centered on that dull sound of a shift, a scrape,just before the granite boulder breaks away from the cliff.It shatters the air with its bulk, hitting the slope a few times in an unobstructed fall toward the river, sometimes snapping off the tops of trees that stand in the way of its fall.There is so much force, weight, and destruction in its movement,yet that whole process occurs without any sound until it hits the river, and even when we see the splash, the sound doesn’t reach us for several seconds.Then the sound is disconnected from the whole event.The granite laid bare by the part that broke away reveals its coolness.The air of its cavity smells old, still cold from its glacial years.

When they died, I needed more than my fifteen years to carry me through.There is more violence in forgetting at fifteen.I wanted to go out into the street, walk, drive, run, do anything to forget my love, not their memory.My father’s love for my mother grew the longer they were separated by his job and her schooling.In a dark room at night I discovered the letters, blew dust from the envelopes, inspected the stamps,the date, the handwriting.My father spoke to a page, said what he wanted to say to his lover without embarrassment, without hesitation.Again he called her “Dearest darling” in his next letter, when I never heard him call her that in person.He spoke bravely to her heart, as he spoke bravely to their son twenty-five years later in a room alone.

Dearest darling,

This is the fourth letter I sent you from the beginning of the year.I have not heard from you for a long long time.How are you getting along? I hope you had a fine new year’s celebration.Remember when we danced all night long at one party a few years ago? I was not a good dancer but you taught me how.I don’t think I am a good dancer now.I don’t know what I would do if we were invited to a party now.I lost a chance to learn dancing in my school days, because I was always playing ball.If I am not too old now, I hope I can learn to dance from you.

Enclosed is a snapshot which was taken a few days ago.It was in the evening of a winter day.It was unusually cold, you could feel it in the wind.You could see it in the trees and the natural colors of Wisconsin.Behind me is an old style 5-span bridge.It reminds me of a spot back home where we swam and dived into the cool lake.Those happy hours and laughter are still vivid in my mind.I shall leave here soon.

I feel lonely, darling.I keep myself busy, and try to forget my home and you and all the things of the past which make me lonely.

Sometimes I can’t help thinking about those happy times and I feel so lonesome.

I will be home soon.

My letters will start somewhere in the Mariposa Grove of redwood trees, Big Trees, Yosemite National Park, where my father brought me and my mother and aunt and uncle.We camped there in the giant shade of those tall trees, counted steps around the base of those trees, drove through the tunnel redwood tree.My father took pictures of me in the driver’s seat of that old black Ford.The car was parked in the giant opening of the tree tunnel, and I was standing on the seat with my two hands up high on the steering wheel, my mother was waving from the opposite window at the camera.And in the letter I will write I return there now, renew an acquaintance with cool earth, the smell of brown redwood leaves scattered on the forest floor.I will remember how my father showed me the stump of a once giant redwood tree, showed me its rings of growth.Like a blind man, he made me run my fingers over each year grain to feel the year of my great-grandfather’s birth, my grandfather’s birth, his own birth, and my birth.Out of all this I will see dreams, see myself fixed in place on the land,hear stories my father taught me.

Late Summer and Fall 1866

Late summer and fall were other seasons of change.Unlike spring,when the land is in a state of flux, late summer is the season when the air above the land changes.The weather rides over the land and for an instant brings relief to our sunburned backs, our aches from the heat, and our parched throats.The weather is mild and cool for an instant.The days grow shorter.The sunsets are more radiant, the mountains turn a brighter purple and red-orange when the sun begins to set.There are breezes and the dust of summer subsides from the air we breathe.The air grows moist at night.There is more dew at morning when we wake.The hint of water returning to a dry land, to the dry smooth stones in the creek.The clouds pass over our heads all day long in a steady parade of shade and light.

Then, as the days move from summer into fall, the clouds build up instead of passing overhead, build up against the mountain peaks that surround us, and the air grows heavy.Then we have thunderstorms in the afternoon, sometimes lingering into early evening, but it is relief to us, this short rain, it cools us, ends the long season of dust and heat.But it is a warning of winter.And we look ahead, all of us, down the long Sierra canyon to see where we’ll be when winter hits us; we look until the sun moves lower in the sky and its rays wash the valley with light.Birds escape easily out of the canyon, flying south.Hairy beasts search for food in preparation for their long sleep.The movement of the land comes to a stop.Only the sky moves overhead, scraping the peaks in the afternoons.The sun is low to the ground.The days are shorter.We look again down the valley.There’s no way home without walking out of the mountains.The train stays with us.Its soot clouds the sky.

Winter 1867

I spent a winter working on the summit tunnel.Stopped at the summit by more granite and another winter, we had to move trains, rails, tools overland, over the summit, and begin work on the other side while some of us labored at the tunnel.In 1867, the summit tunnel at Donner went into its second winter.I remember every day of winter.

The wind burns my face, throwing hot coals of ice against my skin,the ice wind that strips bark off trees.The white blurs my sight, absorbs all sound around me.I can barely hear my friends talking to me, my ears ache when they do.At night we fear the snowdrifts that cover us up while we sleep.The snow builds up in winter until we climb higher and higher on it,away from the earth that we labor at, carve at, beat our fists against, an immovable granite wall.So that winter we dug out a snow cave that led to the dark summit tunnel.We ate, slept, worked in that ice corridor out of reach of the sharp talons of the wind, but the cold still penetrates us all season long.Outside, needing firewood, we top trees sticking above the snow.The wind butchers my flesh, makes my whole body a wound, and my body’s heat rushes to my face and hands to fight back the numbness,but only succeeds in melting the snow that is blowing into my face, and the water is turned to ice.The wet penetrates my skin, my entire body, like pins and every step requires so much effort I hold my breath, tighten my muscles and lift one leg forward, take a breath, and follow with the other leg.

The avalanche is a natural process, a natural occurrence in winter, just as a forest fire was a natural process before man ever stood up and walked around.The fire burned for days, weeks, months down to the edge of the lake, ocean, or desert.It cleansed the earth, and spring still arrived, and began working out of the fine ash.And when the snow gets too heavy for the mountain to hold, it breaks loose.Unlike the granite, the snow’s sound shakes the ground, thunders down the trunks of trees, into the ground.Then the whole canyon is filled with its sound as it rips firmly rooted trees out of the earth, breaking others at their exposed tops, grabbing hold of boulders as large as railroad cars to race with them down the canyon walls,the whole slope transforms its expression into a watch until the mass hits the canyon bottom, shaking the frozen roots of trees, the fine bones of prehistoric beasts, lost ocean life.Then the whole canyon shifts into a fall,making rubble of its whiteness.

My strength, our strength combined, is nothing against this season.It is a selfish season.Each of us fights individually against the cold, working harder at night than during the day to fight off the cold of sleep.Each night I lie down exhausted, beaten, defeated, my hands and fingers numb and bleeding from moving cold granite, and the cold wetness covers my body and penetrates my bones as I fall uneasily into sleep.The last energies of the day we save for the night, for a restless sleep.And in the middle of winter, deep in the summit tunnel when the season is at its coldest and stormiest, we work at night and sleep during the day to keep from dying at night in our sleep.So for a few hours during the day, if the sun is out, we go outside and sleep soundly in the sun’s brief warm light, baring our wounds to the warmth.

Winter is a season crueler than the men we worked for.All our energies are directed against the winter and to staying alive to greet the first thaw and perhaps the end of the railroad line.And finally, when the railroad is finished, I do not want the seasons to run over my back, letting the days and nights, the weather ride me, break me.I will find a piece of land to work where I can remain in one place and watch the seasons ease on that place, root down in this difficult soil, and nurture my land.

I want to give all the moments of my life the names of places I have been to before, categorize them so that I can lift them out of my memory,find the steady pulse of my life.Root down my life into the names of places.When I’m on the road at night I dream of places I’ve never been to before,I found places where my dreams joined like arteries out of the heart thick with blood, where my heart pulls at my breath.

Chapter Five

I

My grandfather’s island is Angel Island.It was there that he almost died and that makes it his island.

There are two islands in San Francisco Bay which contain ruined buildings with doors four inches thick.The islands are Alcatraz and Angel Island[9]， Alcatraz is a National Park and Angel Island is a California State Park.Both were places of great sadness and great pain.

During Christmas 1969, an Indian man in whom I saw my grandfather showed me my grandfather’s face.

I am inclined to believe in ghosts because islands in California are places of waiting and the waiting is what destroys people.

I saw the man that Christmas while I was leaning on a four-inch-thick door that led to an isolation cell.I was facing out into the main corridor of the cell block on Alcatraz.Behind me, inside the isolation cell, were two women sleeping in sleeping bags laid on top of newspapers on the concrete floor.I was shivering and felt cold and damp all over.The cold moved in on me through the concrete and the salt air etched its way through my skin, attacking my bones until they ached.Each night for the last three nights I woke up and wandered into the corridor to sit near a kerosene lantern with a few others believing light had something to do with warmth.And each night I noticed the old man sitting against a wall between cell doors.He was smoking as usual.We never spoke.As I seated myself on a piece of newspaper, he stood up and walked over to me and stood over me holding his enormous wool jacket in his hand.

“You know, people say I look Chinese,” he said.

I nodded a little trying to shake off the shivers.He held out his jacket.

“Oh, ah, no.I’ve got a jacket on.You probably need it.”

“Take it off and sit on it and put this one on.”

I did what he said and he sat down next to me.I moved over to make room on the newspaper.Both of us leaned against the wall and faced out into the corridor as we spoke.The jacket was about ten sizes too big and smelled of cigarettes.

“People say I look Chinese,” he repeated.

I looked at him in the dim light.He did look Chinese.“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Acoma.”

“Lots of Chinese in New Mexico?”

He started laughing and lit up another cigarette.“Where are you from?”

“Berkeley.”

“Where are you from originally?”

“Berkeley.”

“How long you been here?”

“Three days.”

“No.How long you been in the United States?”

“All my life.”

“You mean you ain’t born in China?”

“What do you mean？ Don’t I look like I come from Gallup[10]？”

“You ain’t Navajo[11].You Chinese.You like me.”

“You ain’t Chinese, though.”

“My ancestors came from China thirty thousand years ago and settled in Acoma Pueblo[12].”

“Is that why you look Chinese?”

“Naw, my grandfather was Chinese.”

“Your grandfather was Chinese?” I turned to look at the old man and tore our newspaper.

“He wandered into New Mexico and married a widow before anyone knew he was Chinese.” He crushed his cigarette into the floor and smiled to himself.I was looking at his face more closely.He started chuckling then turned to me.“You pretty lucky”—he pointed into the room I was sleeping in—“to sleep in isolation with two women.”

“Oh, they’re just friends from school.”

“That one, Sandy, the Nez Percé, looks Japanese.”

“Yeah, me and your grandfather ...”

“What does she call you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s your name?”

“Rainsford.”

“Rainsford?”

“That’s my name.Rainsford.”

“Sounds like the name of a town.”

“It was.My great-grandfather lived there.”

“It was in California?”

“Did you ever hear of it?”

He appeared to think carefully for a while.Then he said, “We used to call it Ah-Caht-Cho.”

“Ah-Caht-Cho? What does that mean?”

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“Huh?”

“What are you doing here? This isn’t your battle or your land.”

“I’m part of this land too.”

“You should be out looking for your place, your home.This is part of mine.” He paused for a moment to take another cigarette out.He couldn’t find a match and put the cigarette back into the pack.“If you came here because of the two women, then you’re as smart as my grandfather.But you got your own land to find.”

“But I live here.”

“That’s what I mean.This is your country.Go out and make yourself at home.” The man chuckled to himself.Then took a breath like he was going to let me in on the joke, but he only chuckled again.“You know what my grandfather did for a living?”

“The Chinese one?”

“Yes.”

“Railroad worker? Miner?”

“No.He was a bone collector.”

“A what?”

“A bone collector.”

“He collected bones?”

As the old man nodded he looked in the direction of a young man carrying a rifle and walking toward us.As he came nearer the old man asked him for a light.He stopped and drew out a small box of matches and tossed them to the old man saying, “Here’s a whole box.Keep warm.Merry Christmas.”

“You said your Chinese grandfather collected bones.What kind of bones?”

“Chinese bones, of course.”

“ ...of Chinese?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

The old man nodded his head again.Then he said, “Haven’t you ever heard of the bone collectors?”

I shook my head.

“You know what a tong[13] is？”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you’re Chinese?”

“I’m as Chinese as your grandfather.”

“Well, in my grandfather’s days the tongs hired men like him to travel around looking for the bones of dead Chinamen so that the tong could send them back to China.”

“What was your grandfather doing in New Mexico?”

“There was some Chinamen there ...a graveyard somewhere and my grandfather went around asking people who might have known them, you know, known their names.Probably some Indian bones got sent back to China by mistake.” He laughed and brought a hand down on my shoulder.

“Well, you Indians came from China thirty thousand years ago.”

“Yes, you might be right.” He took a drag off his cigarette and then crushed it out on the floor in front of us.He looked up and pointed at the walls, “Look at this.These things we’ve painted on the walls, claiming this piece of land.” He paused for a moment.I was feeling warm now, even tired and drowsy.“It’s funny how people write on walls.Most times it’s a desperate and lonely job.Look inside some of these cells.”

I was letting him talk, his deep voice almost making the air warm and dry.

“There’s an island,” he said, “next to this one, you know, where they used to keep prisoners of war and Chinese.Some of the buildings are still standing.I wonder what’s written on those walls.”

“Chinese were kept on Angel Island?”

“You didn’t know that? I’m more Chinese than you are.I said before you got to find your own land, you know, where your people have been.Like Angel Island, like Rainsford, California.”

“Where is Rainsford, California? Do you know where in the Sierra?”

“You better get some sleep now.We’ll talk tomorrow.”

I went to bed and forgot to take off his jacket.When I went back to the door, he was gone.I laid it out like a blanket over me.I slept soundly.I dreamed my father and I were walking through a forest of redwood trees.I talked like my father, I laughed like him, I smelled like him.And I knew then that I was only my father’s son, that he was Grandfather’s son and Grandfather was Great-Grandfather’s son and that night we were all the same man.

I dreamed all this underneath the wool jacket, not knowing the old man had made up the name “Ah-Caht-Cho” after someone’s nighttime sneeze that echoed in the cell block while we were talking.

It was barely light out when he came to get his jacket.He woke me with a gentle nudge.“Rainsford,” he said, while lifting the weight of his jacket off me.When I opened my eyes, he bent over to look me in the face.“Rainsford, an island is the saddest kind of land there is.”

Ⅱ

“Drifting alone in the ocean it suddenly passed autumn[14].”

—Angel Island

Now after seeking out all the wrong names to call myself, I’ve been to those places that can destroy me, I’ve felt those places overcome me without violence, only my own dreaming brought it on until I was able to say that I am violent and I sought out those places, making them mine.

Now I know that my grandfather’s land was an island.He was born in San Francisco but his father, my great-grandfather, sent him back to China for safety.It was 1917 when he came back.And in 1917 Grandfather’s island was called Angel Island.

My grandfather’s land sits in the middle of San Francisco Bay directly in the path of the fog that flows in from the Golden Gate.The fog meets Angel Island and moves around it to hold it and silence it.When the fog lifts and retreats to the sea it will often leave a halo around the peaks of Angel Island.

On the north side of the island, at Winslow Cove, there is a building called P-317—the U.S.Justice Department Immigration detention center for Chinese immigrants.A chain-link fence surrounds the building.All the windows are broken yet the frames for the small panes of glass are still in position.Some windows are half open.

There is a movement about the place that gives off sound like sleeping gives off dreams, like a haunted house moves people to realize that life still exists within.The sounds I heard as a child in dreams made me deaf but never woke me.Hearing voices wakes me.

I have to bend back the fence to get near the building.I walk through and release the fence and it springs back into place and rattles against the pole that holds it.There is broken glass everywhere, even on the stairs leading to the door.After I make my way past the sounds under my feet of old wood rotten from the ocean air mixed with breaking glass, I am standing at an open door looking in.

Ⅲ

Once inside, you will see that the room is lit with bare bulbs hung from the ceiling.You will see that the room is filled with men, women, and children.There are two lines—men and young boys in one and women and a few very young children in the other.An officer stands between the two lines.Behind a large counter there is an officer for each line.There is some shuffling but no talking except for the two officers behind the counter.You will see that we are dressed in drab jackets, some men are wearing long coats with black pants underneath, others are wearing regular work clothes,and many are wearing flat-brim black hats.

You will know why you’re standing in line with me.I am my grandfather come back to America after having been raised in China.My father is dead so I’ve had to assume someone else’s name and family in order to legally enter the country.All this information about my new family has been memorized.All my sons after me will have my assumed name.

I was not allowed to ever leave the building， even to go outside.Husbands were not allowed to see their wives or children who were kept in another part of the building.We ate in different shifts.There were riots in the mess hall and the main building.We had given up everything to come to this country.Many were former citizens.If you ran your fingers across the walls at night in the dark， your fingers would be filled with the splinters of poems carved into the walls.Maybe there is a dim light to help see what your fingers feel.But you can only read， “Staying on this island，my sorrow increases with the days/my face is growing sallow and body is getting thin，[15]” before your fingers give out following the grooves and gouges of the characters.

Sometimes the morning will show you someone has hanged himself in the night, someone who could no longer bear the waiting, or the interrogation, or failing the interrogation—someone waiting to be sent back to China.Everyone knows how to hang yourself.There are no nails or hooks high enough to hang a piece of cloth from and leap from a stool to a quick death.There is only one way—to tie your piece of cloth on one of those big nails about four and a half feet off the floor, lean against the wall to brace yourself, and bend your knees and hold them up off the floor.Then your bones will be collected and placed on the open seas.

Ⅳ

I have memorized someone else’s family history, taken someone else’s name and suppressed everything that I have chronicled for myself.The questions begin in the Interrogation Room.It is a room blocked off from the light.The windows are painted black.One immigration officer has a list of questions in his hand and the other has a file folder in front of him with the data given by relatives years ago.

Question: How large is your village?

Answer: It has fifty houses.

Question: How many rows or houses are there?

Answer: Ten rows.

Question: Which way does the village face and where is the head?

Answer: It faces east and the head is south.

Question: Where is your house located?

Answer: Second house, third row, counting from the south.

Question: Do you know who lived in that house before your family?

Answer: I do not remember.

Question: How many houses in your row?

Answer: Five.

Question: Do all of the houses in your row touch each other?

Answer: None of them do.

Question: How far apart are they?

Answer: About six feet.

Question: What were the sleeping arrangements in your house when you were last in China?

Answer: My mother, all my brothers, and I occupied the south bedroom.

Question: How many beds are in the south bedroom?

Answer: Sometimes two, and sometimes three.

Question: Please explain that statement.

Answer: When the weather gets warm, we use three.

Question: How many steps lead to your front door?

Answer: None.

Question: Is there a clock in your house?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Describe it.

Answer: It is wood on the outside.It is brass with a white porcelain face.It has brass numbers.

Question: Where did your mother buy provisions?

Answer: She buys at the Tin Wo Market.

Question: How far and in what direction is that from your village?

Answer: One or two lis west.

Question: How many of your brothers have attended school?

Answer: All my brothers.

Question: Did they attend the same school with you?

Answer: Yes.

Question: When did your youngest brother start school?

Answer: The beginning of this year.

Question: When did your oldest brother start school?.

Answer: When he was eleven years old.

Question: When did you quit school?

Answer: I attended school for six months this year, then I quit.

Question: Who told you to quit?

Answer: My mother.She told me to prepare myself to go to the United States.

Question: When did you first learn that you were to come to the United States of America?

Answer: About the time my mother told me to quit school.

The officer asking the questions stops for a moment.He puts down the paper he’s been reading from and draws out a tobacco pouch and begins to roll a cigarette for himself.He rises from his chair and goes to the window.He licks his cigarette and draws a match out from his pocket and lights his cigarette.The second officer has stopped writing whatever he was writing and puts down his pencil.The first one begins scraping the black paint from a small section of the window.He pulls out his pocket knife, unfolds it, and continues scraping until he has a small peep hole.“It’s a nice day outside,” he says to no one.The room fills with the cigarette smoke.He continues to look out the hole in the window and absent-mindedly is folding and unfolding his pocket knife.“Where does your mother receive her mail?” He asks with his back still turned to me.

“I don’t know.”

“Who goes after the mail?”

“My mother.”

“Where do you suppose she goes to get it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Describe your mother.”

“She is medium in height and slim in build.She has black hair.She is exuberant, graceful, and stubborn.” I see her on no particular day in my mind.Her hair is set in a fashionable wave.She always wore red lipstick,not brilliant red but a darker shade.She used eyebrow pencil even though she didn’t need it.She was always looking at her clothes to see if everything was in place, picking lint off, brushing her hand over the material as if to smooth out a wrinkle.She was doing that now as she crossed the street.She had extravagant taste in clothes, not flashy, but suits made of Italian knits, cashmere sweaters, elegant slips.

“Does your mother wear any jewelry?”

“Yes.”

“Describe it.”

“It is a dark green jade bracelet.She wears it on her right wrist.I can hear her working around the house when she has it on because it knocks against everything she touches.I’ve felt it touching my skin many times.”

The officer turns from the window to face me.He steps toward me,but I do not see him move toward me.I’m gazing out of the small hole he’s carved in the window.

“Have you ever seen a photograph of your father?”

“Yes.Yes, it was taken on a day like today.He is seated in a wooden chair on a lawn somewhere next to a wooden table with a heart-shaped hole ...” I see my father sleeping on a cot.It is night and the air around me is brilliantly cold.There is snow outside.

Then the poor men filled the island with their smells, filled the yellow glow of the bare light in the building.Their fists rose like clubs.When I smelled the rotting wood of the building, I rose with them.I moved with them through the barracks, screaming at the doors until the taste of metal came to my tongue.We beat at the steel doors until they broke loose from the wooden building.Then water came rushing in, pushing us back.Ocean water from a fire hose pushed at us until we were all huddled in the corners of the bunk room.The doors closed again.

After the riot of blood, a man was beaten and thrown into isolation.And beaten again and again until I could hear his flesh break like glass,cutting him deeper and the salt of his sweat moved like dark worms in his wound.

On days like today, the glass is merely under my feet and I pick the pieces up like I’m collecting bones.This is my home base, my Rainsford,California.I place the glass in a small pile on the floor and rise up to the window.On days like today, I will remember the time I took the rotting wooden windowsill in my hands and tore it to shreds.It crumbled like bone marrow.The window is open.

On days like today, I hear someone moving through the chain-link fence, something she’s wearing strikes a note on the fence post and as the vibration fades away, she moves through.

Chapter Six

This chronicling of my life should be given the name of a place.A place for friends, family, and lovers.A place I can see all the way home.A clearing full of sun.A stronghold that doesn’t keep me in but pushes me away from it and makes me survive.And today, after 125 years of our life here, I do not want just a home that time allowed me to have.America must give me legends with spirit.I take myths to name this country’s canyons, dry riverbeds, mountains, after my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.We are old enough to haunt this land like an Indian who laid down to rest and his body became the outline of the horizon.See his head reclining, that peak is his nose, that cliff his chin, and his folded arms are summits.

I name a canyon after my father as if he were five hundred years old.There is a whole nation there and the legend says that the ocean was my father’s lover.Her spirit rides into the canyon at night like the sound of wind, yet there is no movement, only the dignity of his loving.

In this canyon I heard my great-grandfather walking through the deep white sand.His walking was like short breaths of wind that stopped at my ears.Then I was in Reno waiting to take the train home to San Francisco.It was 1875.“Enough time,” said Great-Grandfather, “to see legends.” I said the names of stations and towns like prayers, as if they belonged to me: Reno, Verdi, Essex, Bronco.We moved into California and passed Boca, Prosser Creek, Proctor’s, then into Truckee.Out of Truckee along Donner Creek, we ascended the side of cliffs, above canyons to Donner Summit, 195 miles from San Francisco.There were no legends there, only the winters and the deaths.“My bitterness,” Great-Grandfather said, “is not myth or legend.”

Down into Summit Valley, and along the canyon walls I saw myself running down the rocky sides of that canyon as fast as the wind moved down through the tops of tall trees.I came running down into a meadow of new grass that had my mother’s fragrance.There were prayers here that meant “home.” Down toward the Sacramento Valley, the train does not stop unless signaled.We are buried in every town: Cascade, Tamarack,Cisco, Emigrant Gap, Blue Canyon, China Ranch, Shady Run, Dutch Flat,and Gold Run.

One day in early spring here, I skied down into the north fork of the American River.It was a cold day.I was coasting downhill into a canyon.My narrow wooden skis made a clattering noise whenever I crossed patches of ice in the dark shady spots.I picked up speed passing from shade to light between trees.My skis were clattering, flexing, and shuddering over large sections of glare ice until I broke into an open treeless slope.I was skiing through soft powder snow and there was just the faintest sound of my gliding, like Great-Grandfather’s walking through sand.

“All of us,” Great-Grandfather said, “will rise up to greet you.”

I gathered speed down this slope and heard only the air pass by my ears until the cold day made them ache.When I stopped for a rest I shook the snow from my pants and boots.I stamped my skis into the soft powder and heard my father’s voice.He called me by my nickname.And I started off again down my father’s canyon to claim this river for myself.My father is in every canyon I’ve journeyed into in the West.

I could not see the river when I got to the edge of it.It had tunneled under the snow.Only its muffled sound told me where it ran.I poked a hole through the thin crust of snow with my ski pole and saw the dark swift water beneath me.

The train passed Clipper Gap, Auburn, Newcastle, Penrhyn, Piño,Rocklin, Junction, Antelope, Arcade, and Sacramento, ninety miles from San Francisco.It is a smooth ride all the way home now through Davisville, Tremont, Dixon, Batavia, Elmira, Fairfield, Army Point,Benecia, Port Costa, Valona, Vallejo Junction, Tormey, Pinole, Sobrante,San Pablo, and Oakland.And home where I remembered all these names and repeated them down in Aquatic Park in Berkeley.I remembered my father sitting in the back seat of our car, while I stood on the front seat counting and naming the boxcars that passed by the factories.I have memorized all these towns and stations.Each town is a day in a journal, an entry in a diary, a letter, or prayer.And down in my father’s canyon near Gold Run, where I made a journey out of the day, where I have found a stronghold, where I sang, prayed, and wrote: “We are old enough to haunt this land like an Indian who laid down to rest and his body became the outline of the horizon.This is my father’s canyon.See his head reclining!That peak is his nose, that cliff his chin, and his folded arms are summits.”