There’s a tug to remember our own childhoods of easy days. : A Little Bottle in the Desert

The paper is yellowed and crumbles easily into dust if carelessly handled. The pencil writing is faded and often difficult to read.

Many of the notes were in fragments when Philip Holmes found them, and had to be Scotch-Taped together in order to restore the essence of their contents.

But when they were, some outings lost in time began to emerge.

Forty-one years is not all that long ago, I suppose, and the chronicles of a family’s picnics in the Joshua forests near Gorman are not exactly the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But something delicate and touching comes drifting back through the musty decades and, when placed in the context of war and social revolution, the notes become an innocent, yet oddly powerful, commentary on the endurance of the human spirit in even the most terrible of times.

The notes were in a small bottle that once contained Horlick’s malted milk tablets. Holmes discovered it last week while hiking. The bottle was half-buried in the desert. He opened it, saw the notes and realized that, as he put it, “this was something to care about.”

Phil and his father spent half the night in their Woodland Hills home piecing the messages together, and what emerged was a gentle history of small family pleasures that began in 1944 and ended in 1952.

They thought I might be interested. I was.

“Lottie and Freeman,” the first note says. It is dated April 27, 1944. World War II is in progress. London and Berlin are in flames. D-Day is little more than a month away.

We begin to meet a close and loving family that later notes identify as the Crandalls. Despite the size and horror of distant events, theirs is an oddly innocent age. Family is important. Marriages last beyond the weekend. Summer nights are made for walking.

There is a compelling sweetness to life on the quiet edges of a world at war.

“Lottie and Freeman. Bernie, Joel and me.” The year: 1945. Franklin D. Roosevelt dies. The United Nations is created. The Atomic Age is born. The note says: “It is raining.”

Later, impishly: “The way to the hiding place is this: Past the camel’s knee/In the broken tree/Are the names of the/Sweethearts three.”

Then 1946. The world is trying desperately to recover. Atonement is in the air. Nuremberg exacts its punishment. Winston Churchill warns of communism’s Iron Curtain. “Ma and I ate dinner here today in the car,” the note says. The first American missile is built. Through all the cataclysmic wrenchings of war and warnings, the notes reflect life’s fullness through the eyes of Lottie May Crandall when she writes, “All is well. God is good.”

The day is Thanksgiving, 1947. The morning is misty. One can see her standing on a desert hill, looking eastward to where the sun is an orange blur through the damp fog.

She gazes at a terrain of slopes and quick rises and then turns from the vista to write: “Pa and I came up the ridge to eat lunch and find our notes. They are OK. But they are clearing up the Joshua forest so fast. It may be gone in time. . . .”

The ‘40s pass, the ‘50s come. Korea, the Cold War, Joe McCarthy, the hydrogen bomb, tranquilizers, the birth of the civil rights movement. America sings, “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.”

“Ate lunch at Tumble Inn campground on the old Ridge Route. Hid notes by the stone steps. That’s all. Goodby for now. Joel Crandall, Murl, Bernie, Freeman, Gary, Grandma.”

I’m not sure why I am moved by observations that emerge from the past like candlelight from the distant darkness. I suppose it’s because there’s a tug to remember our own childhoods of easy days on sunny hillsides, of family rides through fields, now built, once lighted by the glory of nature’s colors.

“This is the first time I have ever been over Spunky Canyon. We are enjoying the wildflowers very much. Came with grandma and grandpa. Joel Crandall.” April 5, 1952.

Then: “We three. The first in ’53. Bernie, Joel and Murl. Well, here I am again. Past the camel’s knee in the broken tree. Am having a very good time.”

The last note says simply: “April 3, 1954. Lottie, Bernie, Gary.”

Phil and Les Holmes had to know why the outings ended. A search through telephone books led to Sun Valley’s Jackie Warwick. Murl was her father, Gary and Joel her brothers. All are dead. So are Grandma and Grandpa. Time passes. Lives end, lives begin.

Bernie is Jackie’s mother and still lives with the memory of those weekend outings in the Joshua forest, where the sun rises over the desert mountains.

Jackie says they just wanted someone to know they had existed. They wanted to leave a history.

The Crandalls might have accomplished more than that. Jim Croce once sang, “If I could save time in a bottle. . . .”

In some small way, through images evoked by faded words on brittle paper, they did just that.