Things I Didn't Know I'd Love About Winter

Waking up to two feet of snow.

That's my front yard below, with the gorgeous snow-covered White Mountains (called white even when there's no snow, of course) in the background. Crowley Lake is snowed and iced under, so the usual blue strip (lavender, sometimes, at sunset), doesn't exist.



Digging my Honda Civic out from two feet of snow.

Even though I can't drive the Civic until I learn how to put the cables on the front wheels (somehow I avoided that last winter, due to my purchase of the Ford Bronco, which is currently in the shop), it's still empowering to dig it out. Plus I'm told it's better not to let a car sit around with more than a foot of snow on it - hurts the axles, suspension, and what-not.





Digging a Yukon loaner car out from two feet of snow after digging Honda out.

Which is another thing I love about winter here in Mammoth: neighbors who help each other out. Bea arranged for me to borrow our mechanic's car while he's figuring out why the 1987 Ford Bronco I purchased from him last year for snow days, doesn't always start in the morning. Because that's what I DON'T love about winter: having to ask Bea to help me jump start the Bronco every cold morning after digging it out from two feet of snow.



Watching dogs romp in freshly-fallen snow, especially before any of the roads are plowed and it all seems so virginal.

That's Fly, my neighbor Bea's adorable border collie. She was trying to tell me that she really wanted to help me dig out the Honda, and realized that my back might start hurting if I didn't stand correctly while I was shoveling (i.e. doing it from the legs, not the lower back!).



Knowing that my neighbor, Bea, is shoveling out two feet of snow from my front door and hers while I dig out the cars.

Bea is the most amazing neighbor, friend, and landlady I've ever had rolled into one. Which means: the only amazing neighbor, friend and landlady I've ever had rolled into one! Which is a thing I love about Mammoth in all seasons. But last winter, she taught me everything I know about how to make it through the winter - like don't put the emergency brake on or it will freeze, lift the windshield wipers up or they will freeze, don't allow the red and black parts of jumper cables to touch or you will fuck it all up, leave keys in the car in case others have to move them, etc. She's tough and practical, plus she's a great cook and has really good taste in books which she loans me because she knows she'll get them back. (Which is another thing I love about winter: trading books!)



Looking forward to figuring out how to snowshoe in this gorgeous landscape when we have even more snow.

Right now, I admit one thing I don't really love about the winter is that I can't just get out there and walk in it. It's too deep for that, but not yet deep enough for snowshoeing or cross-country skiing. We need another storm!



View of snow in pines and the solitary ski-lift chair in the front yard, with McGee Mountain beyond.

One of these mornings, I'm going to put tracks in that snow-covered front yard so I can sit in the ski-lift chair despite the cold and snow and look out over the gorgeous views with an ice-cold Stella Artois in my hand and drink to the beauty all around me.

Mammoth's German emigres reflect on the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years later

My good friend Bea Beyer, on the porch of her Eastern Sierra home

German-born residents have a variety of memories of a divided Germany after World War II, but none could be called fond.

Bea Beyer, born in Berlin in 1941, said the wall existed long before the barbed wire fence went up overnight on Aug. 12, 1961, dividing the communist Russian zone from West Berlin.

“From the time they divided Germany between east and west, there was an ideological and emotional wall. It just wasn’t physical yet,” Beyer said in a recent interview.

Young as she was in those years, Beyer still recalls seeing people shot and killed as they tried to escape to the American sector. “That division existed in spades before the wall was built. It was very scary.”

She and her young parents escaped to the west on the Berlin Airlift in 1948.

By the time the wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989, it had cut East Germans off from their family, friends, country and the rest of the world for 28 years.

Its fall 20 years ago today heralded a worldwide celebration of freedom. “I was amazed and elated,” Beyer said. “It was up 20 years too long.

Beyer returned to Berlin in 2002 for the first time since her birth and saw portions of the wall that were still standing. “It was all so familiar to me. I didn’t remember specifics, but I felt like I knew I’d been there before.”

Indeed, she had. “After the war, life was hell. Germany, east and west, was very poor. You had to hang on to whatever you had because you couldn’t replace it.”

Emigration to the west was very difficult. The family was fortunate because Beyer’s father, Walter, commuted to a job in West Berlin. His work permit and friendships with American officers enabled him to arrange escape from the communist sector in 1948. He had found an emigration sponsor in Joe Laufer, a Jewish lawyer who participated in the Nuremburg trials.

On the day of the family’s departure on a streetcar into West Berlin, Beyer recalls they had to appear as if they were just visiting relatives. She was not even allowed to take a favorite teddy bear (today she has dozens).

The sobering lesson of the Berlin Wall, she says today, is that many other walls still exist across the world – in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the one currently under construction at the Mexican-American border: “Walls to keep somebody out and somebody in, whatever side, it doesn’t really matter. It’s that politically we erect walls, and somehow think that’s okay.”

After living in West Germany for several years, her father found work in the film industry in California and the family came to the States in 1952.

Marriage is what brought Beyer to Mammoth in 1971. “I married this Austrian, and he wanted to come to the mountains,” she said.

Marlene Fiebiger and her husband, Dieter, never knew life in East Berlin, but she remembers all about the wall.

“That was something nobody ever agreed with – a divided Germany.”

She and her husband Dieter married in West Germany and emigrated to the United States with $210 to their name in 1958. The fall of the wall means freedom, she says unequivocally today. “It’s Germany again, where you can go wherever you want to go, and you don’t have to sneak in or out.”

Though the Fiebigers didn’t have relatives in East Germany, they had many friends there whom they didn’t see for years after the wall went up.

“Americans, they don’t know what it means, to be next door to a communist country,” she asserted quietly, as a matter of fact.
“Like if I say our president is a jerk, big deal. But if you said that at that time in East Germany, and somebody squealed, you would be in jail. You couldn’t even trust your neighbor or your relatives, because there might have been somebody who was influenced by communism and squealed on you. You were always under suspicion, you always had to look left and right. And the living conditions weren’t good. You were not free.”

The couple moved to Mammoth in 1973 after living in the San Fernando Valley. “We came up here camping and we decided to move up here and open up a repair shop – the Alpine Garage.”

Werner and Marianne Launspach lay claim to being the longest-standing German emigres in Mammoth. They arrived in 1964. “We are almost locals,” quipped Werner in a phone interview.

The couple visited the Berlin Wall just before it came down, but because they were American citizens by then, they felt somewhat on the outside. But the German people were clearly excited about it.

“The wall was intended originally not to let people out anymore, because people in East Germany tried in droves to get to the West,” Werner said. “It was guarded so people couldn’t get out. It was like a prison there. It was just dominated under the communist regime for over 30 years, and then when the wall finally came down, came the rude awakening.”

The two Berlins became showcases of two economic systems: communist and capitalist. After the wall fell, the eastern mark was also demolished. The people of East Berlin felt the pressure to live like West Germans, but did not have the financial resources to do so.

“They had to work themselves up to that standard of living,” Marianne said. “Before, they had all the money in the world, but nothing was in the stores before the wall fell. Now, all of a sudden, they could buy everything in the stores, but they didn’t have the money. It was a real shock.”

Twenty years later, Germany is still subtly divided. “There’s still tax for East Germany to build it up – to bring it up to Western standards. And I think the West Germans didn’t like that at all,” Marianne said.

“We always loved the mountains – in Germany, too – but we never had a chance to make a living in the mountains,” Marianne explained.

They came up to ski in Mammoth from their home in Long Beach and they fell in love with it. Werner found work as an electrician on the Mountain. “At that time, you know, they were just building Chair 4,” Marianne recalled.

San Francisco Quake, Twenty Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today, I was on the streets of San Francisco in the heart of the Financial District when the 7.1 quake struck at 5:04 p.m. Later, the Ferry Building clocktower, its flagpole tilted to one side, would record the exact time for weeks.

It shake-rattle-and-rolled for a good 15 seconds, which felt like 15 minutes.

At first I just thought the guy walking in front of me on Pine Street was drunk. I still weirdly recall the pattern on his wool sweater. I thought it was kind of early for him to be drunk and staggering around.

Then I realized the ground was heaving, the way a ship would in rough waters. “Oh my God it’s an earthquake,” I thought.

I remembered the Sylmar quake of 1971. I had been a kid in bed, awakened by books flying off shelves, and I ran for cover in the doorway.

In 1989, however, I was on the streets of San Francisco surrounded by glass-walled skyscrapers. I could see the old 1920’s PG&E building on Market Street separating from the building next to it and slamming back into it with giant clouds of dust as windows shattered.

As adrenaline pumped into my system, I suddenly recalled telecasts from the Mexico City earthquake where old buildings just like those crashed down.

“I’m going to be crushed,” I thought.

I had a vision of giant sheets of glass slicing down from skyscrapers on both sides of me, including the backside of the 101 California building I’d just exited.

“I’m going to be decapitated,” I thought.

I had never felt violently exposed in all my life. I ran for cover at an ATM alcove on Market Street. Two other women were already there and the three of us huddled together babbling, “We’re going to die.”

And still the 15 seconds had not elapsed. Everything was still shaking and the buildings on Market were still separating and smashing back together with poofs of dust we could clearly see from the alcove. Then, with sudden terror, I realized the building holding the ATM could smash down and I prepared to die.

But, as suddenly as it started, the shaking stopped. Utter silence prevailed for a split second, then came screams and the smell of smoke, followed by sirens distant and near. Then people began either clattering by in swift panic or shuffling in numb shock. I turned to the two women in the alcove to say “wow, we made it,” but they had already fled.

I must have been in a state of shock myself because all I could think about was a cup of coffee. Miraculously, my favorite little cafe, Pasqua, was open just yards away. As I entered, the young man behind the counter smiled as if quakes happened every day (also in shock) and he made me a cappuccino, which arrived just as the power went out!

I wandered back to Market. I knew better than to enter the BART station to head for the tunnel under the bay to Berkeley: it would, of course, be down.

Then I realized if I’d left work earlier than 5:00 p.m., I would have been on a train stuck in the tunnel during the quake! I decided I was glad I was on the streets, scary as it was. I wasn’t trapped, on BART and I hadn’t been decapitated or crushed.

I was also glad I hadn’t been on the 36th floor of the 101 California tower where I worked at the Pettit & Martin law firm. My colleagues who had been all had to wander down 36 flights of stairs - some were stuck in elevators - after getting the fright of their lives swinging back and forth in the sky. The tower had been built on rollers to withstand a 8.0 quake.

They were universally white-faced as they emerged, including my boss, the unflappable Mary Shallman. We gathered in small groups to assess the damage and strategize. One of the partners heard that the Bay Bridge, a key artery in and out of the city, had collapsed. This, somehow, was more frightening to think about than the earthquake had been to experience.

Mary suggested we head up to her Nob Hill apartment on Stockton Street to see if we could get radio news about emergency ferry service. Seven of us walked up California Street, picking our way amongst glass and rubble. We could see brick buildings with facades ripped out, some dating to after the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.

Oddly, the radio provided no news of ferries across the bay, but waiting around soothed our adrenaline pumped agitation a bit. Eventually, I decided to go to the bay with Chris, a legal assistant who also lived in Berkeley. We headed down Bush Street. I carried my books and stuff in a Sak’s Fifth Avenue bag.

As we walked through Chinatown, I saw looters busting into stores and some eyed my Sak’s bag. I suddenly felt a new vulnerability: it wasn’t the Earth that was threatening me now, it was my fellow human beings. I had an eerie sense of how quickly even an apparently civilized city like San Francisco can fall apart suddenly.

Chris steered us hastily over to Pine Street and the Financial District, where it was eerily quiet. In the lobbies of office buildings, we could see small groups sitting against the walls, staring ahead at nothing, some with candles burning. They all looked as if they’d seen death. It was an apocalyptic scene, as if a nuclear bomb had exploded and deadly radioactivity hadn’t yet taken its course.

We kept going. We had faith that ferries would be running, even if the radio had been useless in telling us so. And indeed, hundreds of people had gathered at the bay. It took what seemed like hours to board a ferry packed with about 300 people who were either zombie-like or hysterically loud.

Everyone became silent, however, as we headed for Jack London Square in Oakland. The black-out allowed us to see stars we’d never seen above the City by the Bay. And then, hulking hugely above us, was the broken Bay Bridge. It wasn’t so dark that we couldn’t see where it had crumpled - a giant slab slammed onto the lower story of the bridge.

Later I learned that only one person had plunged to death there, which seemed like a miracle compared to how many more might have been killed. Later still, I learned of the deaths in Santa Cruz, the collapse of entire neighborhoods in the Marina District, and most shockingly, the collapse of the two-story Nimitz Freeway in Oakland where dozens were smashed in a monolithic concrete sandwich.

I was beyond grateful to be home sometime well after midnight, though it took days to get over the jumpy, racey-numb feeling I had. In the following months, I remember an exquisite sense of appreciating everything around me as if for the first time. I was never so grateful for my friends, family, and dreams.

And I made sure that one big dream came true three years later: I spent a month in Europe for the first time in my life. In Paris, the French loved hearing about San Francisco. “The most beautiful city in America,” they said.

I would have to agree. It is a phoenix that has risen from the ashes more than once in its storied history.

I live within the Long Valley Caldera!

Mono County can’t boast the tallest mountain (Whitney) or the lowest elevation (Badwater) as does its sister county Inyo to the south. But thanks to a restless caldera and a labyrinthine fault system, it does have some of the most fascinating geology in North America.

“It’s got the volcanos and the volcanic history and all the aspects of that. And then it’s got the mountains, which are basically the result of faulting,” said Terry Wright, an emeritus professor of geology at Sonoma State University who lives on a 10-acre spread in Benton for half of the year.

“Then, within the mountains, the rocks have an extended history that go back 500 million years which are a record of mountain building. There are rocks that first had to be formed to be built into the mountains.”

The main rocks of the Sierra Nevada stretch all the way in bits and pieces across to the White Mountains, which are the same geology as the Sierra Nevada, except the Sierra is more highly “scrunched,” to use Wright’s word, meaning metamorphosed (subject to heat and pressure) and deformed (folds and faults).

As if volcanic and faulting influences were not enough to create a sufficiently mixed bag, the Eastern Sierra from Bishop to Bridgeport is also marked by glacial moraine - visual evidence of streams of ice dating back tens of thousands of years.

Two terrific examples exist near Convict Lake (where, in addition, marine fossils have been found thousands of feet above today’s sea level) and Conway Summit near Bridgeport, where one of the oldest moraines sits on top of granite.

To put geologic time in perspective, Wright says that the span of one million years of geologic time is the equivalent to one week of our time.

The geologic drama begins at the Mono County Line just south of Tom’s Place on Highway 395. There, one drives up along the Bishop Tuff (which sits on top of the Sherwin Till, one of the area’s oldest glacial deposits). The Bishop Tuff is a pink slope formed 760,000 years ago by glowing hot magma that blew from within 4 miles beneath the earth in a cataclysmic volcanic eruption.

What’s left today is the Long Valley Caldera, a 10-mile-wide by 20-mile-long area which can be seen nearly in its entirely at the Crowley Lake Overlook further north. Driving a bit further north, Mammoth Mountain comes into view. It is a resurgent dome which was formed when magma leaked out after the main explosion and marks the western periphery of the caldera. To the east is Glass Mountain, made of obsidian.

View of Crowley Lake in the distance, from within the caldera near where I live in Long Valley!!!
But faults are what downdropped the whole area, Wright emphasizes. “Where the magma blew out, there was nothing left to hold the surface up, so it collapsed along faults.” Airborne ash from the eruption, which was more than 2,000 times that of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, blew as far away as present-day Nebraska.

Scientists have been monitoring geologic unrest in the Long Valley Caldera since a cluster of four earthquakes measuring 6.0 rocked Mammoth Lakes in 1980. At that time, they discovered that the core of the caldera was rising.

“Earthquakes are of two types,” Wright explains. “One is that they are related to faults, which is plate movement, and the front of the Sierra Nevada is sculptured along a series of faults.”

A spectacular example of Eastern Sierra faulting can be seen near McGee Creek, which was the epicenter of the 1980 quakes, near Crowley Lake.

McGee Canyon in the fall, pictured above

“The other thing that causes earthquakes is magma moving,” Wright continued. “That’s been the perennial question in Mammoth: Are we listening to moving magma or are we listening to faults moving?”

A visible geologic remnant from the 1980 quakes can reached along Highway 395 just before the geothermal plant and turn-off into Mammoth Lakes.

“Look over to the right beyond the hatchery and there’s a ridge. Down the front of this ridge as you look carefully, there’s a path, at the bottom of the path there’s a big boulder. This came down - was shaken awake - by the earthquakes in 1980,” Wright explains.

“Basically, it was a perched boulder. When it shakes, these guys are ready to go. This boulder is something that everybody sees if they look hard enough for it.”

The formerly perched boulder is in the area of numerous local hot springs (Whitmore, Hot Creek, and Little Hot Creek) - underground water heated by magma which still underlies the caldera - as well as natural steam vents, which drive the three geothermal powerplants nearby that produce about 40 megawatts of electricity in total.

“The water actually descends along some faults, and ascends along other faults,” Wright clarified. “What happens is water will percolate down, heat up, and come up through other faults. That whole system there is on a series of faults that continues to the north as the Mono Craters. They are basically eruptions of magma that have come up through faults.”

Thousands of feet up to the west, several places at Mammoth Mountain were discovered in the 1990’s to be emitting CO2 gas, including Horseshoe Lake, the site of a large tree kill. This is the southwest edge of the Long Valley Caldera. The gas comes from liquified rock, or magma, most of which is carbon dioxide and fatally poisonous if breathed in high concentrations. Tragically, in 2006, three members of a ski patrol died on the slopes of the dormant volcano while trying to rope off a geothermal vent (called a fumerole) there.

All of these circumstances indicate the presence of a restless caldera and increase the chances of an eruption, but at the same time, this type of unrest could endure for decades or even centuries.

According to a U.S. Geological Survey, an eruption is more likely to occur along the Mono-Inyo Craters chain (north of the Long Valley Caldera) that extends all the way to Mono Lake in the Mono Basin. The Mono Domes can be seen along Highway 395 north of the June Lake turnoff.

These domes, however, are not very explosive because most of the gas in the system erupted with the caldera long ago, making them gas poor. And they are geologically young - within 10,000 years, barely a second’s tick on the geological time scale of 4.6 billion years.

The Panum Dome off Highway 395 provides an especially good example of a combined rhyolite dome and cinder cone. A hike allows visitors straight into the crater where lava ooze can be seen.

Below, view from Panum Crater towards the Eastern Sierra.

The most recent eruption in the Mono-Inyo system occurred at the northern end at Paoha Island about 350 years ago.

Mono Lake, which comes into view near the Highway 120 turnoff into Yosemite, is a terminal lake in the Mono Basin, a watershed area fed by melting runoff from the Sierra Nevada. It has no outlet to the sea and remains geologically active because of faulting at the base of the Sierra Nevada as well as crustal stretching of the Basin and Range Province to the east.

Some scientists have said Mono Lake dates to the caldera eruption 760,000 years ago, but sedimentary evidence indicates that it could be the remnant of a larger, more ancient lake that once covered parts of Nevada and Utah, making it one of the oldest lakes in North America.

Wright agrees with this view. “The lake was being formed and was accumulating sediment as the Bishop Tuff took place. So that eruption doesn’t have to do with the formation of the lake, but it did erupt into the lake.”

Those interested in knowing more about the Eastern Sierra in its greater geologic context should check out two books by John McPhee, a Pulitzer-Prize winning geologist: “Basin and Range,” which explores the terrain from Utah to eastern California, and “Assembling California,” which explores the state’s faultlines from the Sierra Nevada through the central Valley to the coastal ranges and San Francisco. An easy-to read guide that includes eight stops in Mono County is “Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley” by Robert P. Sharp and Allen F. Glazner.

Thanks to Terry Wright, Emeritus Professor of Geology at Sonoma State University, pictured below, for his input on this article.

I wrote this piece for the upcoming special issue of "Portraits in Granite" for the Mammoth Times. I am not sure it will benefit or suffer from the editing process, so I've decided to post my original.

Born with a Broken Heart

On August 29, my mother will celebrate twice the lifespan that was once predicted for her by doctors at the UCLA Medical Center in 1955. She will be 80 years old.

She was born in 1929 with a co-arctation of the aorta (simply put, a broken heart), a condition first diagnosed by student health services at Los Angeles City College.

“It means that the aorta - the main vessel coming away from the heart - was constricted to the size of a pencil point, so the blood wasn’t getting through properly,” she describes today. “It was causing me problems - like nose bleeds and shortness of breath.”

In those years, she worked as secretary for Dean Paul Dodd at UCLA’s College of Letters and Science. He eventually referred her to Dr. William Longmire, then head of surgery at the newly-opened UCLA Medical Center.

The doctors that her own mother had taken her to for the nose bleeds as a child in the 1930’s had all said she would grow out of it.

“It could have been more serious in that age, but I was lucky. And because I wasn’t treated like an invalid, as many kids later on would have been, I played like a normal kid and climbed trees.”

So when Longmire saw the auxiliary blood system that had developed around her heart to compensate for the lack of blood flow, he was amazed.

“It’s a good thing I have half a brain myself, because I understood all these things,” Mom recalls with mirth.

Longmire recommended that she undergo a new procedure. With her condition, he said, she would likely never have children and doctors couldn’t guarantee her lifespan beyond 40 years.

“Can you imagine hearing that?” she says today. “I remember walking out of there in a total daze. I walked through the UCLA quad thinking my god, my god, what am I going to do?”

Bessie, her own mother and the grandmother I would never know, had died the year before of cancer. She was just 46 and my mother was only 24.

In 1955, however, my mother opted to have the surgery at UCLA. Fifty years later, she returned as a speaker at the medical center’s half-century anniversary celebration.

“I was one of their very first heart patients,” she says. “I would have had it sooner, but because of my mother’s health, I postponed having that surgery. Of course, I couldn’t get to those UCLA people until they opened in ‘55.”

Some people criticized her for being a guinea pig for the UCLA doctors.

“It was, after all, a teaching hospital at time and it still is. But I never thought of myself as a guinea pig.”

Five years after the surgery, my mother gave birth to me on Valentine’s Day - the day of hearts, as it turns out - and two years later, she gave birth again, this time to identical twins, my sisters Carolyn and Cynthia.

She who was once told she would never have children will celebrate her eighth decade of life on August 29 with her three daughters in the City of Angels where she has lived all her life.

Today I cannot imagine life without my mother, especially since I lost my other parent in my teens. I also cannot imagine what it must have been like for her to have lost her mother so young - and face soon thereafter a heart surgery.

But my mother is, as she says, a tough old cookie - and for me an enduring example whom I not only love, but respect and admire.

It wasn’t always that way, though.

Mom is very hard on herself for what she perceives as her shortcomings as a parent - and I admit that when I was a teenager, those were what I mostly saw. I blamed her for things I now see were well out of her control and certainly not her responsibility.

Through the years, I’ve come to see not the qualities I once wished she possessed, but the amazing qualities that she does - foremost among them, a deep and abiding capacity for love.

Today, she is my best friend.

“I doubt there are many people who could say they had an absolute saint for a mother,” she said for this column. “Unless it were I, because my poor, darling mother didn’t live long enough and she pretty much was a saint.”

But I don’t need a saint for a mother. I’m deeply grateful for the one I have. Happy birthday, Mom.

Life in Mammoth - Am I a Local Yet?

Well, I made it through a winter. Does that count? That's my place sometime last December, with the window to my loft studio above the garage on the far left. The views are spectacular.


I’ve been living in Mammoth for more than a year now and wonder if I can call myself a local. Is a year enough? Or must it be a decade? Really, must one have been born here?

I’ve asked some people to weigh in on this and the best answer I’ve received was a question: “Do you have a second job yet?”
Another good answer was: “Do you have a beater car for snow days?” Since I do (and I made it through the winter because of it), then maybe I am a local.

Except, I don’t think so - even though I live and work here full time, have forged some key friendships, and recognize many around town by name and am in turn recognized. There's a part of me that feels it could take as much as a decade to be a local.

In the beginning, I knew no one. I stayed with a friend of my editor for several days, then with the brother of a friend for several more while looking for an affordable place to rent. I even pitched my tent at Lake George for three nights during the limbo period between my former life in L.A. and the nascent one here.

Come to think of it, I did feel like a local when I camped at Lake George. The mountains and the hiking here are what drew me away from my previous home and, as John Muir once wrote, “Going to the mountains is like going home.” I always feel most truly at home on the familiar mountain trails here.

After my camping experience, I checked into Tamarack Lodge for six nights before moving into my first rental. As a result, I got to know most of the staff there, and whenever I return for a meal or libation, they make me very welcome. I definitely feel like a local then - and at Petra’s, my favorite watering hole.

But I would have to say it has been two women – my former colleague Stacey Powells and my neighbor Bea Beyer – who truly taught me what it means to feel a sense of belonging here. If I sometimes feel like a local, it’s because these two women have demonstrated how longtime locals network with each other and make newcomers like myself feel welcome.

From the minute I walked in the door of this newspaper, Stacey made me feel welcome. “Thank God you’re here,” she enthused with a broad smile and a warm handshake. That was before I knew how much her loud voice would annoy me while trying to listen on the phone.

It didn’t take long to discover that we share a similar sense of humor and, better yet, we’re roughly the same age, so we’re on the same life’s page, so to speak. Stacey’s the very definition of a gal with a heart of gold.

I marveled at her fortitude and grace in the face of a half dozen major life challenges in the one year I’ve known her, including cancer. Yet somehow in the middle of all this, she found time to include me in her inner circle of equally cool women friends.
Stacey is one of the most generous women I’ve ever known, not just in that respect, but in respects that would have killed other new, untested friendships – such as how she handled the awkwardness when her hours were reduced during the paper’s downsizing, not mine.

Then there’s Bea, from whom I rent a loft studio with spectacular views that have kept me here when I was tempted to flee. Calling her a landlady, however, would be too prosaic a word for this elegant, sharp, magnanimous woman who reads even more than I do and knows the art of conversation.

Bea is the quintessential example of a good neighbor. That means, among other things, that she shares meals and dinner parties with me (and I endeavor to show up with more than a bottle of Two Buck Chuck). She leaves small tureens of homemade potato soup or baked goodies at my door when I return late from town council meetings.

Most important, she shares her affectionate kitty cat with me, lets me take her adorable border collie for walks, and found me the 1987 Ford Bronco that got me through the winter, thanks to her friend Karl, then repeatedly helped jump-start it on icy winter mornings - almost entirely without complaint.

Lest I sound too treacly, however, the fact is that being a local - working and living here full time - also means dealing with the coarser aspects of community. As a writer, I realize there is no end to learning the big history of this small town.

But it helps me feel like I’ve made something of a meaningful contribution when, for example, Rusty Gregory - top executive dog at the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area - shared unexpected words of praise for what I wrote in my Cat's Clause column about my father last June (see this blog below).

“Courageous,” he called it.

And that’s pretty much how I feel about leaving a whole life behind to embrace my dream of living and writing in the Eastern Sierra. And for that, I primarily have to thank my editor, who made it possible by giving me a chance. Thanks, Diane.


My sister Carolyn, my niece Kate, and me at Minaret Vista during their visit in June.

Suicide - a Father's Legacy

I’ve been told that the majority of suicides in the United States occur in June, and my father’s was no exception.

In a cruel irony, the anniversary of his death falls on Father’s Day every seven years or so, but I don’t think he planned it that way.

The reality is that people who are suffering at that level of despair or clinical depression are not, as my mother was the first to remind me, in their right mind.

And my father’s mind, as evidenced by a track record of sparkling accomplishments, was a brilliant, sensitive one.

Although he was a successful attorney by profession, I’ve often wondered if he should have been a forest ranger as he’d once dreamed, rather than a lawyer trapped in a Los Angeles office and nightmare traffic. Oh, how he loved the outdoors.

I do know that if he had been in his right mind, he would not have made a choice of such radical permanence, and left the life and daughters he loved so much.

On that long-ago June morning in 1976, I frantically attempted to absorb all at once the fresh tragedy in my teenage mind in an immense effort to remain sane, saying to myself over and over: “You can handle this, you can handle this.”

Behind those words I knew that a whole future had been annihilated and that in fact it was going to be very difficult to handle the coming days, weeks, months, and years.

Heartbroken is too small a word to capture the sense of devastation.

I had an intense desire to make it okay somehow, to feel as if my life and my future had not been instantly and irrevocably shattered, that my heart was not broken.

But of course it wasn’t okay, and I had to survive somehow without shutting down. I could not conceive of a future without my dad, yet I had no choice but to begin.

Fortunately, until he became the ultimate absent dad, my dad was the ultimate loving one, so I have no dearth of happy memories to cherish in the wake of this tragedy, and it is those I choose to honor around this time of year.

It was he who introduced me and my sisters to the beautiful high country of the Sierra Nevada - to Tenaya Lake, pictured above, and Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park - he who took us horsebackriding in the Santa Monica Mountains, he who shared his love of folk and classical music (most especially Bob Dylan, Chopin, Bach).

In short, Jayme was a father who taught me how to live even as he suffered from a complex despair.

And so when people ask why he did what he did, I prefer to stir the dialogue towards the finer points of the man - his humor, his affability, his boundless curiosity. I have tried not to allow my father’s suicide to be the act that defined the whole of his life - either for myself or for others with whom I share his memory.

But it is a complex, challenging legacy.

The reality is that while the immediate emotional impact of my father’s suicide has waned, the devastating loss is one that will forever endure in my heart. One does not “get over” a suicide.

Nonetheless, time is the great healer. As the painful immediacy of grief has moved further and further into my past, I have learned that the heart does mend strongly in the broken places, that there is a corresponding hunger for joy, and that there may be a greater capacity for joy because the sadness and the loss have cut so deep.

I have had the emotional fortitude to wait out the darkest moments that life has thrown my way.

How I wish my father had.