Cheerios and Salmon Eggs

Lately, I have been keeping a box of Multi-Grain Cheerios in my desk drawer at the Bank. For a quick snack in the morning, I pour myself a bowl and add a handful of raisins. I admit that Cheerios are not your most exciting cereal. Not sweet enough to merit TV snacking, and not enough fiber to qualify as feel-good-about-yourself adult nutrition. But the taste does remind me that my go-to breakfast as a very young boy was always a bowl of dry Cheerios, mixed with a handful of raisins and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar (and no milk to make things soggy).

I ate this breakfast countless times in our Mill Valley home, to be sure. But, for some reason, the taste always takes me to a family camping trip at Duck Lake, in the Sierras near Mammoth Mountain. I was only four, I think, and the most notable part of our horseback journey to the camping spot was that my older brother, John, nearly fell to his doom when his girth slipped on a portion of the trail that skirted a high cliff. Fortunately, he stayed in the saddle as he dangled dangerously over the edge and our wrangler was able to get him sorted out. Those must have been exciting and tense moments – but I don’t recall a darn thing, as I was fast asleep on my father’s horse sitting just ahead of him in the saddle and cradled in his arms.

It’s funny how little we can remember of the earliest part of our childhood. It’s almost as if we must have had blinders on. I do remember eating my usual breakfast each morning in camp, served in the bowl with the picture of the bunny rabbits in the bottom. I also remember taking a bath in a galvanized wash tub, probably because that was so out of the ordinary. It was a rainy night and, of course, the water was heated up on the campfire first. The bottom of the tub felt gritty, because my mother used powdered laundry detergent to make things suitably soapy. An unusual adventure, to be sure. Actually, I kind of admire her for making any attempt to keep a little boy clean on a camping trip. Perhaps I was becoming too ripe to share the big tent.

Beyond the bathing incident, things get pretty sketchy. I remember going fishing at nearby Pika Lake. Or rather, I remember learning how to put the shocking pink salmon eggs on the barbed hook. I think I was supposed to only put one on. But it seemed logical that the more I put on, the better my chances of catching the elusive Rainbow Trout, so I crammed them on like little shish kebob skewers. The eggs smelled funny and made my fingers sticky when I fished them out of the jar, but when you’re four there’s always a pair of pants to wipe your hands on (maybe that explains the bath…). I also recall discovering that the leaves of the willow trees that grew near the shore sometimes had salmon egg-sized red insect galls. I thought they would be a swell alternative, should my salmon eggs run out.

Years later, my parents would also tell the story of how my sister, Kathy, and John went for a walk and she returned to camp alone, having inexplicably ditched her slightly younger brother. As my father hurried down the trail to find him, calling out his name and imploring him to stop, he could hear John rushing off in the opposite direction. All turned out well, but I was again oblivious of the drama that unfolded in the forest.

It’s a shame to have taken such a nice trip to what must have been a spectacular location and to have remembered so little. That is one reason I like to re-tell family stories to my daughter, Jessica, in the hopes that she will remember early childhood events, if not directly, then at least by osmosis.

I have read that people who have the misfortune to have faced certain death (and then the good fortune to have survived), often claim to have seen their lives flash in front of them, like a movie montage at the climax of a film. I do hope that’s true. I would like to revisit Duck Lake and see what I missed.

Vanilla and Pine

Vanilla is one of my favorite kitchen ingredients. I love the old-fashioned flavor it gives to waffles, cake frosting and whipped cream. But the scent also speaks of family trips to Yosemite National Park and precious time spent with my father, recently turned a remarkable 90 years old.

The sun hits the rough bark of a Ponderosa pine, releasing the very distinct scent of vanilla. My father and I look for a fallen pine cone on the ground, then take a sample of fresh needles and a piece of bark, usually found at the base of the tree, though sometimes surreptitiously pried from the living trunk. Finally, he shoots a Polaroid picture of our find, and our work is done – we have added another tree to our collection. The High Sierra sunshine warms my back, the crisp air fills my lungs and the sound of a Clark’s Nuthatch (always my favorite bird, since we shared the same last name and I found the word “Nuthatch” to be mildly amusing, in a middle school sort of way) pecking at a dead branch for insects reverberates across the slope.

Back home, we will take a piece of cardboard about fourteen inches by eighteen, layer a sheet of cotton borrowed from Dad’s orthopedic practice on top and then make an artistic arrangement of pine cone, needle cluster, bark sample, Polaroid photo and identifying label. The final touch is to cover everything with a sheet of sturdy shrink wrap, which gets taped on the back. I was always somewhat sad when the shrink wrap went on – it covered up the scent of the bark and the pine needles. Oddly, the final step was to put the newly-created display into a cardboard box in the basement.

I suppose, for my father, the point was to encourage me to study nature and learn to appreciate his beloved Sierra Nevada, home to John Muir, his hero. While I took eagerly to identifying evergreen species by their needle clusters, what really made my day was simply the opportunity to spend time with this man. My sister, the oldest, was naturally the apple of Dad’s eye. My brother, second in line, was the first-born son, destined to earn the Eagle Scout badge my father never achieved, and to be his rock climbing partner for many years. While I ended up being more like my dad in many ways, I seldom spent much time with him growing up. He was a driven leader – Scoutmaster, hospital chief-of-staff, Wood Badge instructor – and his hours were long.

When I was only four or five, I remember that all I wanted for my birthday was to spend an afternoon with him, catching pollywogs down at the creek (actually an open ditch next to the ball field). I got my wish and returned home with various unidentified creatures in jars.

Many years later I took my first Boy Scout camping trip to the Ten Lakes region in the Sierras. Everything was going swimmingly and my dad had promised that just the two of us would hike up to the ridge above the lake and spend the night there. I was really looking forward to that. Then, one of the older Scouts was caught drinking booze and acting up and my dad had to walk him out to the trailhead in the middle of the night to be picked up by his folks. By the time my dad got back, any hope of our side trip was dashed and, on top of my misery, I developed an earache. Such is the price of sharing your father with thirty other kids.

Fast forward a couple of years and I repeated my birthday request to have my dad all to myself again. We went camping on Mt. Hamilton, in the East Bay, where we visited the mountaintop astronomical observatory before stopping at a dusty campground halfway down the mountain. I can’t remember much of that trip, though the details should have been memorable. But forty years later, I am left with the memory that I did get to spend a special weekend with the most important man in my life – the man who taught me how to identify the Ponderosa pine by its vanilla bark.