A Land Where Childhood Still Lives

The road turns off Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu and heads into the hills. Right there, where it leaves the ocean, it looks almost as it did decades ago when I sat in the back seat of our large red station wagon, behind my father’s head. On the right is an empty field--the same, except that a riding ring used to be there, the site of the occasional horse show. At one event, I met Raymond Burr, told him how much I liked him in “Godzilla,” and how I thought he was very smart to win all his cases as Perry Mason.

Every Saturday, we would go to our ranch in Agoura, spend the day, and drive back as the sun was falling into the sea. At the first rise in the road, I collide with the memory of what used to be there, before Pepperdine: a mountain--green, sloping, echoing often with the calls of coyotes. One day, as we approached Las Virgenes Road, I looked out the window at amputated land. It was my first experience with man moving a mountain. Not in the biblical, metaphorical sense, but actually just chopping it off. I was baffled, wounded by the ugliness of such cruel surgery.

“Why did they do that?” I asked my father.

“They’re going to build a college,” he said.

“But it was a mountain,” I remember answering, as if that should have been enough to ensure its survival.

What used to be our ranch, Yearling Row, is now part of Malibu Creek State Park. The fences that my father built are gone, as are the jumps he built from phone poles. But he’s there. My childhood is there, rushing past me even before I reach the property itself.

Once past Pepperdine, the road looks like it always did--a winding two-lane mountain road with rock cliffs on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Many cars have gone over that edge; some lived through it.

The road itself has a history. There used to be a man who lived in the ravine far below it. He looked like Jesus--long hair, a beard, robes tied with rope. One man whose car went off the road, who miraculously survived, awoke from unconsciousness and thought at first that he hadn’t lived; he was staring up at Jesus, pinned against the blue sky.

“Oh, no. Not yet,” the man reportedly said. “I’m not ready yet.”

He had seen the hermit. My father loved that story; it didn’t take much coaxing to get him to tell it.

The tunnel along Las Virgenes also has a history: “The Pink Lady.” Someone--it was later discovered to be a woman, lowered by rope--painted a large, naked pink lady above the mouth of the tunnel. No matter what methods were used to cover her up, within days, she’d bled through. We’d play guessing games along the road as we approached the tunnel. “Do you think she’s come all the way through yet?” We’d cheer if she had. The city was always trying to conceal her. It was a mysterious battle. No one could figure out why she wouldn’t stay covered, how she defied paint, cement wash, and whatever other substances were slathered over her. I suppose they eventually sandblasted her because all that’s left now is a ghostly shape, a cloud of pink on the gray rock.

The entrance to what was our ranch is now the entrance for the park rangers. But they’re nice enough to let me use that road, apparently recognizing my need for nostalgic continuity. Eucalyptus trees still shade the barnyard. The hay barn and the covered stables remain, but our ramshackle ranch house, built with no foundation, is long gone. Tall grass and mature trees have made it difficult to outline where the house sat. Yet in my memory it’s so vivid, I think that if I close my eyes and then open them, it will be there again--the wooden steps, the chipped paint, the rope swing hanging from what was then the tallest tree in the yard.

It’s that way with every trail I walk along, on this land where my childhood still lives. My eyes see that the duck pond is smaller, more shallow. Yet my inner vision sees it as it was, a body of water the size of a swimming pool, with a canoe tethered to a wooden plank. In the rainy seasons it was even bigger, and ducks were safe from predators at the center.

I hike to the hill my father and I used to gallop up. It’s hardly a hill at all, just a gentle rise, and the trail he cleared is overgrown. But I stand in front of it and hear horses’ hooves pounding the dirt. I see my father ahead of me, leaning forward as he gives his horse more rein. Across a nearby field, I see the ghosts of low, telephone-pole fences, where I learned to jump a horse. The field is now covered with wildflowers; there are no jumps, but my memory refuses to dim.

“If you’re afraid, the horse will know it,” my father would tell me. He always considered fear a waste of time.

There are other footprints on this land now, those of hikers and horses from nearby ranches. I see them near a shallow creek, but I’m caught in another time, more real to me than the present. My horse balked at crossing the water. Frightened, I wanted to get off and lead him across. But my father wouldn’t let me. “Just stay on him and talk to him, and let him know what you want him to do,” he instructed. Another lesson in not giving in to fear. It took about 15 minutes to get my horse to cross this ribbon of water that, now on foot, I leap across effortlessly. My father waited patiently on the other side, confident that I would eventually be able to control my unruly mount. He waits for me now, around bends in the trails, always with another memory, another echo.

Land holds onto memories. They live in the soil, send down deep roots. They hover on the wind, in the scent of eucalyptus and oak. The Indians understood this; ancestral land was sacred, defiling it was blasphemous. I missed this land during the few years I lived in Manhattan, yet it lived vividly inside me, often coming to me in dreams. I walk back to the barnyard and climb the now vine-covered steps to the swimming pool. It hasn’t held water in years, but looking down at the cracked cement, I see a small girl, splashing through the water, heading for the deep end where her father, tanned and smiling, waits for her.