When the truck left the farmland behind and started climbing hills, Greg’s anticipation peaked. But it would take another day and a half to get to Sunny Springs, ‘the nearest decent town’ that Ray had described, and where they were to meet the realtor with the closing papers for the land sale. They had long run out of conversation by that time, and received no radio signal. An edgy boredom had set in over Greg, too excited to sleep, too bored to keep his eyes open, when the rolling hills got steeper, and exposed the peaks of mountains in the distance. Over every sharp turn he expected to see the town, he sat on the edge of his seat for hours that way…expecting, waiting so long that when they finally climbed a hill and he could see the steeple of a church point up over the edge, he thought it could only be another deceitful tree limb, but descending into the town itself, he realized that his imagination was not creative enough to conjure what he saw.
The road they had come in on had opened up to what would be a 2-lane street had anyone striped it recently, with ample head-in parking had anyone a desire to visit one of the three open establishments remaining. This main street stretched for two blocks, and then narrowed down to continue its way east. The three open establishments created a triangle around the only intersecting road in the middle of town, a general store, a bar/restaurant, and a post office/city hall/ and apparently real estate brokerage before which they parked. As he stepped out and stretched his legs, Greg could see the unnamed crossroad degraded to a rutted dirt path past the main street blocks, with fresh truck tracks leading up to a house peeking out behind the trees on a nearby hill. Two other trucks shared the main street, one in front of the bar, and another before the store, and though he had yet to see any living thing, the town, though visually deserted, felt alive, Greg could hear the muffled sounds of conversation coming from somewhere, but try as he did to pin down the direction from where it came, he couldn’t. He attributed it to the fact the whole ‘town’ sat in a bowl nestling close to tall hills all thick with forest with the exception of the craggy mountain peaks to the east. Had the day not been cloudy, the hills would only allow sun to shine down on the street itself, with all establishments in the shadow of the woods rising behind them.
A stocky, middle-aged hairless man with glasses emerged from the post office as he had waited impatiently at the window for hours. “Mr. Michaels,” he said, approaching Ray with an extended hand. Ray greeted him and introduced Greg as his ‘cousin.’ The man shook Greg’s hand and promptly forgot his existence for the remainder of the exchange. He led them into a surprisingly messy room, for such a seemingly deserted place. The man looked none too neat himself, he had that heart attack waiting to happen look, sighing heavily as he fell into a creaky chair behind an empty desk with a small stack of papers on it, the corners of which he fondled nervously while explaining each page to Ray, who nodded and played the part of the businessman well, in Greg’s opinion.
Greg thought it wise to keep his mouth shut in comparison, so he strolled around the room, looking at things. There were mailboxes along one wall, and a table with disheveled papers along the other, the usual official forms and applications covered with a fluffy layer of dust. Ray had a few in his stack, building permits and guidelines. He wiped his hands on his pants after signing them. Not that these farm boys minded dirt, they were just used to a separation of place. Dirt was for the fields, but they washed up to go into the farm office or to town or dinner. Mountain life would prove different.
The paperwork seemed to while away the afternoon, so when he heard the sound of a vehicle outside Greg opted for a change of scenery. The truck once in front of the store was now making its way up the far hill. A short stroll down the block gave Greg an impression of what this place once provided, not too long ago by the looks of it, and what it still had. A lot of it just appeared temporarily closed; maybe they had a tourist season, who knows? The laundromat, for example, still seemed functional. The chiropractor’s office too looked ready for the receptionist to flip the sign to Open. He stopped before one closed storefront whose windows were papered with posters featuring a cute little bird perched on a twig and the words: Save the Amber Mountain Warbler, in large red letters. The bird had large eyes and a bi-colored beak that gave it a smiling look, a fan tail that stood straight up, and little wings.
From that storefront Greg proceeded to the other side of the street. To his relief this side too only looked deserted. Though every storefront had blocked doors, there was merchandise inside, and a handmade sign with an arrow hanging on each door directing customers to use the main entrance. Apparently this general store at the end had grown to consume all its neighbors, including, most essentially the gas pumps. He could see clothing, liquor, hardware, outdoor gear and even toys, in addition to the standard grocery items. The shop was closed, the proprietor must have owned that truck parked in front of it before. Peeking at the wares through the window, Greg felt his first pang of homesickness as he accepted the fact that he would never eat as well he had at home again. Dinner would come from cans until next summer at least. It didn’t look like this place even sold chickens.
Ray handed him the stack of papers when they returned to the car, topmost was a map.
“It’ll be dark in a couple hours,” Greg warned.
“He said it should take about an hour and a half to get to the start of the plot. We can camp there and then hike in tomorrow to the recommended build site, though I think we should build closer to the creek. We’ll see,” Ray said.
Greg located the build site marked with an x on the map, dead center of the trapezoid that marked the territory. It seemed a strange cut of land but he figured the creeks could have created the division. Not so, they discovered, rolling backward, wheels digging into the dust of the steep cliff that the old wheel tracks they called a road led over.
The aerial map served them no favors by flattening out the topography. They had to unhitch the trailer to make it over the hump. Cursing, grumbling and tired, they both shut up once on top, as they spied the first neon X sprayed on a nearby tree, marking the edge of their territory.
They cleared enough out of the trailer to sleep within it, and in the morning re-hitched it as so and tried the hill again. One more dump and a good start got them over. They then physically carried up the rest. Unhitching the trailer again to explore the troughs and grades they followed the road until it ended, along with their property, at the river, about a 20 minute drive. They could see the road continue on the other side though there was no bridge.
The plot sat upon a sort of plateau, with steep drops on the south and west, the river to the east, a creek to the north. But nothing in that area could be called flat, per say, their ‘plateau’ gradually sloped northeast, ending between the two waterways with another steep rise that climbed higher as another vertebrae in a spine that snaked east. A hiker’s trail near the center of the south ‘main road’ led to the ‘build site,’ a 10′ x 10′ clearing with evidence of a lean-to missing a tarp roof, a fire ring and a stump. The site proved a good place to make temporary camp, but in order to have a good gold dredging operation, they needed to situate the homestead closer to the waterways. Ray scouted out a site at the start of the rise that marked the northeast corner of his property, in close, but steep proximity to both waterways. They could see, from the corner of their property line where the hillside rose above them, that the river originated in the east, and took a elbow turn to avoid the craggy spine to run down the east side of their property heading south from there out. They couldn’t find the origin of the creek, they imagined it must have sprung from within or above the cliff which overshadowed them.
It took about a month to clear themselves a road to the new build site. Ray came up with a smart idea to preserve the temporary cap at the first build site to distract would-be intruders from the actual camp, so they built the road in such a way that it appeared to be the destination but then disappeared behind a rock and uprooted stump turned on its side. As the winter descended, the road became a painful reminder of wasted time as the men scrambled to build themselves a shelter sturdy enough to keep the weather out. They handled the entire project themselves, as they agreed that nobody but the two of them should know their address, just in case they struck gold and the word got out. Familiar with the construction of barns, sheds and the like, they had the capacity to build big, to get a roof on and dig a decent foundation, and they found Arnie at the general store friendly and helpful, always willing to find the items they needed if he did not already stock them. But they learned too late where their building knowledge fell short. We don’t know what we don’t know until we learn it.
Snow started falling in mid-November and by the end of January it engulfed their ramshackle abode. In February the roof collapsed and the men squeezed into the trailer, with all their equipment rusting under snow outside.
With nothing to do, they shoveled snow and plotted a better means of construction. Arnie recommended they consult a guy named Carver, who had helped build a number of the houses around here but who could only be located at the bar and you never know when. So they spent lazy afternoons at the bar, where they discovered, to their surprise, that a lot of people tucked themselves into those hills. The place was never hopping, but nearly every time they walked in they found a new face, and that one person was always eager for conversation, and the bartender/owner, Phil, liked Ray and Greg because it gave him some relief from all the people who came to jabber at him all day.
Most of the residents were retired loggers who liked to sprinkle catastrophe stories into their building tips, more tips about what not to do than recommendations of how to avoid such problems, and everyone had lots to say about the Amber Mountain Warblers.
“Hootin’ pigeons,” one old-timer said, “That’s what they are, were, and will always be, ain’t no Warblers. We’ve had hootin’ pigeons in these woods forever, if there were any old-timers left they would tell you that, but you get these city people hiking in here nowadays and they said they’re Warblers, just cause they look like this flatland bird called the Warbler, and suddenly they think they found a new species! If they lived here their whole lives like a lot of us done they would know the hootin’ pigeons are as old and as plentiful as trees, but just because these newcomers see them for their first time they think that they’re some rare breed of Warbler.”
The knowledge that they had a lot more neighbors than first observed failed to settle Greg’s nerves. That sense he first observed in Sunny Springs stayed with him up at their homestead, even in the winter, the feeling of something or many somethings or someone close by. Like the city apartment feeling with hundreds of humans buzzing through their lives around, he felt like that in the woods, except the beings didn’t have to be human. Though they had tramped around enough to know that their plot lay a good hour from any paved road, he felt a sense of occupancy surrounding him, laughing at them constructing their ill-fated home from the hills.
For some time he thought the wind rustling the leaves of trees caused that sound of distant conversation, until one morning, just before dawn, he awoke and grabbed his gun. He swore he had heard someone talking outside the trailer where he was sleeping, but when he peeked out the little window, though the lack of light could disguise anything an inch into the forest, the clearing they had made showed no sign of life. The ax was where he left it beside the log, and on its handle he noticed perched one of the Warblers. Just as he backed away from the window to lay himself back down he swore he heard it again, and bounced back up. He looked towards the Warbler, thinking that any human presence would have scared away the bird, but no, now there was another one perched on the log below the first, and just as he noticed this he heard it, slapped his thigh and laughed. He put the gun down, now amused, suddenly awake and watched the warblers as the sun rose.
“Yep, they talk to each other. My daughter used to like them, we’d feed them when she was little and she’d hold whole conversations with them,” Arnie said, after Greg told his story.
“That little bitch is the one who started it all,” said Carver, when they finally cornered him at the bar.
“Hey now there,” Phil piped in.
Carver ignored him. “Arnie sent her away to college and it was after she brought back some college friends of hers that suddenly all this Warbler nonsense started. No wonder you don’t see her around here anymore.”
“She went to college for business, she’s not an ecologist,” Phil said, “She manages a grocery store in San Jose I think.”
“It’s one of those fancy groceries, not like Arnie’s, not like a Safeway, one of those organic food places, and you know what kind of people go to those places,” Carver interrupted.
“…and she was just here for the holidays,” Phil finished.
The conversation had started when Greg and Ray mentioned that Arnie suggested they consult Carver for building advice. Carver didn’t seem to appreciate the referral, whipped some slander at Arnie and his prices, insulted his daughter and wife, who, truth be told, did have legs that looked like hams, and then continued, over the next two hours, to give them some solid advice sketched out on bar napkins.
The most valuable lesson opened their eyes to a breadth of options on the other side of the mountains. While Sunny Springs remained the closest town, Carver revealed that a two and a half hour drive east, a route that involved a few unpaved roads of questionable quality would eventually join to route 14 and drop them into Sage Springs, a popular tourist destination, which in addition to the spas and ski resorts, had a Safeway, a truck stop, and a number of building material resources.
This is when they discovered that Phil was actually a descendant of the family that founded both Sunny and Sage Springs. “Back in the 1800s, people thought the natural springs that we have here were good for your health,” Phil explained while on the topic. “Rich people would pay top dollar just to sit in these springs, so in 1840-something my family came to Sunny Springs to create a health resort. They built most of the old buildings still standing here. Then the gold rush happened and a lot of riff-raff took over the town and since they didn’t find any gold they remained poor riff-raff and trashed the town and scared away any rich people who might want to come to the resort so my family packed up, looked for another location and settled in Sage Springs at the tail end of the rush when you had more families coming from the east, so now being on the east side of the mountains really benefitted them, and that’s why Sage Springs is a resort today.” Ray found a kindred spirit in Phil, who moved from Sage to Sunny Springs to escape his pervasive family and strike out on his own.
A long dormant sense of comfort and salvation swept across Greg when they first descended into Sage Springs at the end of March. Everything looked clean and new, including the people, which led the two to head straight for the truck stop for their first decent shower in months. After spending double their budget in four hours Ray was itching to leave, and Greg reluctantly followed, with his eyes and mouth dry as sand from gaping at fresh from the spa girls all that time.