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.
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