Tracks Along the Left Coast by Andrew Schelling

Author:Andrew Schelling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

THE SEÑOR OF THE BRUSH

An acre of camp-fire refuse twenty feet deep.

“FIVE THOUSAND YEARS”

JAIME DE ANGULO would take his trash from the Big Sur ranch and dump it over the edge of the hill. It spilled down in a long glittering chute. You could, according to his daughter, see it from the coastal highway below. When the Big Sur writer Lillian Bos Ross wrote a portrait of de Angulo for Big Sur magazine in 1949, one of the details she used to introduce him was that he’d built his house on an old Indian midden heap. It is unlikely the Esselen Indians along the rugged coastline would have had much of a midden on a ledge perched that high up, 1,600 feet above the ocean, on a slope that pitches at a forty-five-degree incline. The trash was his own. “Jaime was not an environmentalist!” his daughter says.

Ross may have heard misleading accounts of the midden location. The story could possibly go with Nancy and Jaime’s house in Berkeley. But that house was not atop a midden either; it sat on land originally owned and sold to Nancy by the severe architect Bernard Maybeck, who wanted to keep tight control over properties he sold, back on a twisty hill road, Buena Vista Way. Maybeck tried to specify what materials his buyers could build with, and how their windows were situated. City dumps, or the Indian middens that preceded them, lay far below the hills, on the Bay’s shifting edge, where Codornices, Strawberry, Derby, Temescal, and other local creeks drain into the Bay.

Likely as not, Ross’s story came about because one of de Angulo’s earliest literary pieces, “Five Thousand Years,” is a meditation on a midden or shell mound in Emeryville, a little township that sits on the East Bay mud flats, tucked between Oakland and Berkeley. “On the shore of the bay, across from San Francisco, where the Saklan once lived and hunted and fished and dug clams and sat around their camp fires, they are digging away one of the big shell mounds with a steam shovel,” de Angulo’s essay begins. Emeryville still regards the old shell mounds as part of their civic history—in fact the town has not been able to ignore the mounds’ presence—a contentious history that has pitted landowners, developers, industrialists, anthropologists, Indians, and city planners against one another at times.

Emeryville has a major commercial access road named Shellmound Street; it leads you to a sprawling disastrous shopping mall. If any further digging for construction is to occur, a trained observer would now be brought in, a specialist in forensic archaeology just in case there turns out to be a burial. It was different in the 1920s when de Angulo wrote his piece. “Sometimes the steam shovel crunches into a skeleton to the delight of the anthropologists who come here every day to watch for discoveries.”

He was writing about one of a complex of five or six mounds that sit at the mouth of Temescal Creek. The largest mound grew to sixty feet deep and 350 feet across.

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