A Brisk Breeze Blows Home : Why Roberta Piazza Came Back to Kernville

When Roberta Piazza was a young girl hiking in the wilderness with her mother, she was often alarmed that Mother would walk right by a no-trespassing sign without a second thought. She’d ask about it, and her mom would say, “Darling, that’s for other people.”

It was a logic that took root in the child’s mind. The guiding principle of her life came to be: Inhibitions are for other people.

Her personality was always a bit large for Kernville. The little hamlet, famous only among fishermen, snoozes in the foothills of the High Sierra. Her parents had settled there in the early ‘50s and opened a motel and restaurant. But the area, scenic as it is, was not enough for such a human cyclone, and shortly after she graduated from high school at 16, she was gone. She went down the hill to Bakersfield. Within a year she was the weather girl on a local TV station. In just a few years more she was a news anchor. By the time she turned 30 she was situated in Fresno as a news anchor, producer and host of the weekend magazine show.

She also had a good set of ulcers. The expected gang of career anxieties were upon her, so she asked her boss for a month’s vacation so she could return to Kernville to think. That was a year ago.

I met her one crisp morning as I was checking out of the Pine Cone Inn. Owner Al Piazza was sitting in his empty cafe watching a football game on TV. He’s an easygoing guy, good company in the bar at night.

“Well,” he said, “if you want to know about this place then you ought to meet my daughter.” He buzzed her on the phone, and in a minute she was breezing through. Like the early winter winds that whipped through the pines outside, it was a brisk breeze.

After all these years of watching bright, vivacious women on the TV news, I must admit that I’d never before met one. She had a sharply sculptured face and high, full cheeks. Black hair fell in a shag over her shoulders, and her eyes were grayish blue, happy and huge.

We had barely eased into our seats before she was lit up with ideas. “Let’s go for a Cook’s tour,” she suggested, and a moment later we were bouncing down the road in the family truck. “I traveled the world,” Roberta said, “but I always kept coming back to Kernville. There’s just some kind of healing energy here. When I returned, I did nothing but walk up in these mountains for a month. Then I realized I could never leave.”

One hundred and forty miles north of Los Angeles, across the Mojave Desert and up into Walker Pass, are the southernmost foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The mountain range continues north for 360 miles before tailing off past Mt. Lassen. At the southern end of the Sierra is the green blanket of Sequoia National Forest, where the big trees are king and the Kern River is queen.

The Kern begins in underground streams and melting snows and wends through steep granite gorges and valleys until it comes to Isabella Lake. Before 1948, there was no lake, only high-country meadows surrounded by mountains. Then the flood-control dam went up, and the L-shaped lake appeared and covered the towns that are now referred to as Old Kernville and Old Isabella. In early winter, before the snows, when water is at its lowest, the skeletal foundations of old buildings can be seen along the long, flat shoreline. The Kern runs out the western edge of the lake and tumbles 50 miles down to the San Joaquin Valley.

In Gold Rush days, the hard settlements in the hills had such names as Whiskey Flat and Black Gulch. But the town of Lake Isabella was named after the Queen of Spain, who, the town fathers felt, was never fully appreciated for selling off her jewels to fund the explorations of Columbus.

Kernville, at the mouth of Isabella Lake, has been in existence only since 1950. It somehow feels much older, though, as if the little crossroads town is struggling to wake up from a hundred years’ sleep. Fishermen stand on the banks of the Kern by morning, and in the bait-and-tackle shops they can be heard exchanging the endless theory and divinations of their art. There has been an invasion of another kind of sportsman--the down-vest boys, the wind-surfers and the river-rafters--and certain resentments have arisen. But it’s not what you would call a range war. I don’t think it would be possible to build up a real good anger in Kernville, for any reason.

While the valley may be wrapped in a gentle, retiring air, Roberta was anything but retiring. Dozens of comic voices flew from her as she explained the delights of her stomping grounds. I was expecting perhaps a nine-minute excursion to the big trees and back, but after driving up the river and pointing out Salmon Creek Falls, she was motoring south again around the lake, pointing out finches and red-tailed hawks.

I had my heart set on seeing the big trees--it’s what led me to the area. But the hills were bare and rocky, and covered only with whitish-blue sage and the occasional string of hard-bitten live oaks. Clouds hung low, heavy with that damp chill that means just one thing: snow, and lots of it. The sun managed to beat through along one hill, and created a low, fat rainbow.

“Look at this,” she said. “In an hour it’ll look completely different. It never stops changing, this weather.”

The wind whipped up whitecaps on the lake, and red signal lights warned off boaters. We headed toward the lake’s southern shore, shadowed by a frosty wall of 6,000-foot-high peaks. We climbed over the splintered remains of the long-fallen Andy Brown ranch and flour mill, and dropped by the town of Onyx to visit the general store (“Since 1851”) and stand by the potbellied stove and admire the balm of Gilead trees that spread over the porch.

On the way back we drove past the Alexander ranch, where Bob Powers was loading steers in his truck to sell in Bakersfield. With 120 years of family history on this ranch behind him, Powers is a rancher / historian. He’s published five books of valley history. He stopped for a moment near the wooden fence to say that the price of beef isn’t so good now, but will be getting better. “That’s a good meadow out there,” he said, gesturing toward the fields of high, brown grass dotted with cattle. “It looks dry, but there’s good water down below.” Then, with a smile, he hopped the fence and went back to his cattle.

Roberta, of course, knew Powers, just as she seemed to know every one of God’s creatures in Kern County. “It’s too bad you weren’t here last week,” she said with real feeling. “We had such a party at the motel. A number of artists from around here and Bakersfield put on an informal showing in the afternoon, and after that we had a jam session that lasted all night. We had old country swing players, Zydeco, ragtime, mountain hillbilly and--everything!”

Her eyes shone at the memory. “I guess it’s one of my fantasies, to be like Gertrude Stein in Paris and have people up to my salon, and to introduce people who should know each other.” A look of triumph came over her, and she laughed. “I already can claim responsibility for one marriage and one business partnership.”

She did not have a single grudge against the reclusion of her hometown. In Kernville there is a roadhouse named Ewings. Roberta has had every kind of important event in her life happen at Ewings--and she still likes it.

“Living in a small town,” I grumbled, “it’ll keep you honest.”

“It does,” she agreed. “And I really like that.”

Before departing for the big city and all its illusions and alibis, I did want to see the big trees. No problem, she said, and cut off from Wofford Heights on the road to Alta Sierra. In not too many miles we were enveloped by sleet. We put chains on the tires and pressed on.

By the time we arrived at Shirley Meadows Ski Lodge, the snow was thick and steady. Visibility was no more than 50 feet. Dark, clumsy figures waddled over the hilltop as people got used to the first real skiing of the season. No child of mine, I thought, would ever be turned loose in this stuff. But there they were, wild moppets cheerfully pushing off into the dim gray wall of weather.

We walked up an isolated road, looking for hard ice to walk on so we wouldn’t sink in the snow. My face was wrapped in wet ice, and the wind was bracing. It wouldn’t do to complain, though, because Roberta was marching along happily.

Living in Los Angeles, I am as aware as anyone of winter’s bright clarity, and I welcome the season. The trouble is, I can never remember it once it has passed. My years on the East Coast are neatly sectioned off in my memory as, say, the summer of ’69 or the winter of ’73. Remembrances of California seasons jog my memories hardly at all.

And so I found myself pausing in the Sierra and staring up at the vast redwood trees that rose like pale green monoliths in the waltzing snowfall. It’s winter, I thought. And I’ll remember the winter of ’85.

Later that afternoon, Roberta was back at her job as the official greeter at the Pine Cone Inn. She’d play Trivial Pursuit with the customers to see who’d buy the next round.

Before checking out, I picked up the Gideon Bible to see if anything timely popped out. It’s an old routine; rarely does anything appear at first glance. This time, opening Judges, 18th Chapter, I saw this:

“When ye go, ye shall come unto a people secure, and to a large land: for God hath given it into your hands; a place where there is no want of anything that is in the earth.”