The Logan Notebooks

The West

39 We read about daredevil priests, conquistadors in finned helmets and shin guards, fur traders selling otter pelts to railroad barons, Chinese laborers, gun-slinging good-natured whores.We rooted for abalone beads in old Indian midden heaps.We tidepooled, toeing anemone to watch them pucker. On Gold Rush Day, in bonnets and petticoats, boots and cowboy hats, with pie-tin props we panned for gold in sandbagged baby pools, traded fake treasure for a bowl of pta chili at the cardboard-front Saloon. On one family trip, a darkly tattooed man in a wife-beater forbade my sister and me to go anywhere near the open mineshaft. Mom heard dueling banjoes whenever he spoke, but we liked his soup.We hiked the High Sierras, learned to stanch a wound.We learned to swim out of riptides, how to pop a dislocated elbow back, vinegar a jellyfish sting, or better, not get stung in the first place, snapping like bubble wrap the air sacks in kelp washed ashore.We did the Pledge of Allegiance in English and Spanish.We did the Lord’s Prayer in English and Spanish. Jenny Chin and I ate our after-school wontons with ketchup. It wasn’t all bonfires and guitars, of course. In fifth grade, a girl from sixth grade was killed on the train tracks; in sixth grade, a jogger was mauled to death by a mountain lion. And I got the diagnosis I’ve still got, if worse now. But I also got my first kiss off a Mormon kid in front of Bob’s Donuts. I’m thinking about these things in the car, rocketing across the same Nevada wasteland where, at thirteen, my father taught me to drive. It’s studded with brothels and un-blown-up bomb-testing sites. My guy says, Yeah, but.You didn’t grow up in the Real West. the west ...