PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Home W/Vu--of Dust and Grit and Creeping Oblivion

The view from Meryl Adams’ window is of earth and scrub. The trees are dry, shriveled and bare with age, as, indeed, is she. It is a landscape against which man must have wrestled with his hands. Its stillness marks the absence of machinery.

Her neighbors in the Antelope Valley--the new, view-lot, ranch-style neighbors--have put down pretty lawns and picket fences, sprinkler systems and perfect driveways. They have buried the land, rendered it invisible.

Her father planted the trees around her house 70 years ago. There was no water then; he carried it from the creek, way down the valley road. Some of the trees are dying, their cycle over. His windmill is down in the yard; the tools in the shed are layered with gray-brown dust. There is a sense, in this faded monotone, of life receding, being burned off, drawing into itself, stripped of decoration. At life’s core, Meryl Adams looks out over the past. Her past, and ours.

What she has known and what she sees is in her mind, her spirit. When she drives into town to pick up her mail, people pass obliviously. In their nostalgia for the past--in their worn jeans and make-believe boots--they miss the past itself. Just another old lady, back bent and crippled out of shape, face vanishing into age.

Few seek her out. The phone rarely rings. Days pass in silence when she talks to no one but the ghosts and pictures of those who built this valley, the friends of her youth. Some people know: Somehow 500 copies have been sold of “Heritage Happenings,” the handsomely bound book that is her record of the valley.

She paid for the printing herself. It is her testament: pages of photographs and stories, of families traced from the early pioneers, of tragedies and celebrations, heroes and heroines, young once and long dead. She spent seven and a half years on it, tracing to Kansas, Michigan and Illinois those who came from other lives--teachers, ministers, farmers. Friends died during the book; it brought others back to her. Sons, nephews, nieces, of old chums and her own kin in Kansas.

Many sent photographs. Her small house is crowded with them. She must have kept everything, always. Over there are photographs of her first trip to Kansas in 1919, the car stuck in the mud along dirt tracks, her parents young and hardy, her own body upright, all legs and arms.

Her father built their house. It is empty now, but the cupboards she put in herself still open perfectly, the doors slide smoothly. She used her grandfather’s tools when she worked on the house; today, the hammer is so heavy that her 80-year-old hands can hardly hold it steady. Her mother lived in that empty house, sat on the porch watching the wind across the brush. Meryl Adams’ own house came later, a few wooden rooms on a patch of dusty earth.

She never complains. She cries for the people she has lost, for the world of which she is guardian disintegrating around her--silent, lonely tears. In her world, people lived in their fathers’ houses, neighbors knew the shape of one another’s lives. “I can go to town,” she says, “and not see a soul I know anymore. Imagine that, imagine that.”

It is the cruelty of age, of life drawing in, of its being taken away bit by bit. The television went out about eight years ago. “All my radios finally gave up the ghost.” She had to let the three greenhouses go, her pride of violets and gloxinias raised from seed. But in this still, enclosed world, shut away along the rutted track, she has met again all the large, life-filled characters of her young years. The living room is full of them: on hay wagons, building farms, standing by horses and burros, going to church.

In the corner is an organ. Her mother played it at her wedding. She was 49 when she married; it lasted a year. She had known him all her life--what heartbreak must have been here once. An only child, no children of her own but years with others’: working for the Girl Scouts, teaching handicapped children, running the Post Office (“you soon learned who not to ask ‘how are you today’ ”). She has it all--the letters in ribbons, the mementos, the invoice for her father’s first car.

In one box are post cards, fan letters during the four years she sang on the radio in Texas. What happened to those listeners from Weatherford and Thrall--the “steady listener” who wanted “Abdullah Bul-bul Amir,” the Kirkpatricks who wanted “O’er the Billowa Sea”? The Depression years, history now, life to this spirited figure with the passion still of curiosity and affection.

And in the dry, bare 95 of the desert, in this old house invisible to the newcomers, Meryl Adams remembers the ‘30s, the days on WFAA, and starts to sing: “I run the old mill here in Reubensville, my name’s Joshua Ebenezer Frye . . . .” Rhythm, energy, beauty: Her face is full, her eyes gleaming, Meryl Adams reaches across the years. Feet stamp, fingers drum in time--oh, what a party those dwellers in Rancho Caballeros view-lots are missing.