Kiddie Season

As I get older, I appreciate the cycle of the seasons more than I ever have. As a child I knew only two seasons: cold (school) and warm (summer vacation). But now I appreciate the subtle shadings of the lengthening day as spring ripens into summer, the trees' gentle preparation for sleep come autumn, the dry, dusty sweet-smelling meadow grass of high summer.

And I've learned about the seasons that never made it into the almanac. Rain season, for example: in California, both cherished and hated. Also sunshine-and-wind season and its close companion, pollen onslaught season. Not to mention skunk season, bunny season, t-shirt season, prom season, tourist season, hairy backpacker season, teenage hormone beach party season, wildfire season, and more. There's a regular time of the year for each of these.

Right now? It's Kiddie Season. With a vengeance.

Kiddie Season is that portion of the year when your children transition from one state to a new, more complicated, hopefully more mature state. It takes place around September, that month when the kiddies conceived two winters earlier -- probably on a rainy night when there was nothing better to do -- become full-fledged toddlers and begin to make their parents' lives hell. And the parents have to figure out how to cope. Often, they take classes.

At this moment, on a Thursday night in September, I'm sitting in a meeting room at St. Bob the Informal's Presbymethertarian Church. Rhumba's teaching a class and I'm her moral support. Usually the class has the place to itself. But tonight we found the church overrun by bawling, crying, whining tiny tots and their parents.

I watched the parents attempt to wrestle the kids into the arms of a squad of sturdy babysitters so they could leave for a bit and attend some sort of class. The kids fought and resisted and screamed like the hardcore prisoners-of-war that they were .

"What's the class?" I asked a brisk gentleman with a clipboard.

"Positive Discipline for Children," he replied amid the screams. I retreated to the conference room, but they're still screaming out there.

I do appreciate kids. They're our future. Our crying, mewling, screaming, undisciplined, future, excreting vile substances and biotoxins from every poorly-controlled orifice. God bless 'em. And God bless their parents, too. Better them than me.

Kiddie Season's also the time when school starts and your growing spawn have to adapt to a new school, new teacher, new friends, new responsibilities. And you have to adapt to their adapting. And it's during Kiddie Season when 15,000 undergrads return to UC Santa Cruz, including 3 or 4,000 freshmen. All of Santa Cruz becomes a vast coming-of-age play-pen for the university's young charges.

Last Friday was Move-In Day for dorm-dwellers at the university, and the hordes of offloading parental unit vehicles clogged the West Side traffic flow all the way down to Mission Street. That evening downtown was full of demi-adults: full-grown, but with unformed features, like giant embryos. Some wandered the streets in packs, while others still walked in formation with their family units: mother, father, and occasionally a younger sibling.

On Move-In Day evening, such families jam downtown restaurants like El Palomar -- booth after booth of family membes all focusing their attention on the Chosen One who will now go off to Learn and Have a Career and Not Be A Complete Idiot, Thank You.

In just the few days since then, the students have spread out into the community and taken part-time jobs. That's why the kid behind the counter takes twice as long as usual to make your sandwich this week, or the cashier at the natural food store can't make her cash register do what it's supposed to. Bear with them, they're still learning.

The business I work for hires college students for various jobs, and the interviews are going on now. They leave the doors to the conference room open, and I hear every word. And trust me: if you want to believe the world is going to hell, you need to listen to an eighteen- year-old college frosh respond to job interview questions. Truth be told, I was exactly that clueless when I was their age, and so were you. It's just too depressing to remember, so we try not to.

Yep, it's Kiddie Season all right. And thanks to the university, Kiddie Season in Santa Cruz is nine months long this year and every year. The kiddies will always be with us, and they have a lot to learn while they take their classes and brew our coffee and wait our tables and cross the street without looking both ways; and while they drive like idiots, chase after sex and figure out what to do once they catch it, and, last but not least, have long ludicrous arguments about the meaning of life in coffee houses.

But what I want to know is this:

Is it too late for positive discipline?

Caution: Flammable

The other day Rhumba and I were driving home from work when we heard something growl. Loud. Through the trees overhead I spotted a flash of white in the sky, and then there it was: a big old military-surplus propeller plane, flying low and slow. An air tanker.

The tanker went away, came back, and went away again at a regular interval. It was orbiting something north of us, out toward the country. Something we couldn't see. But we could hear the whopwhopwhop of heavy helicopters in the distance. And, finally, the scream of sirens. A fire engine sped past. A minute later, another one.

We channel-hopped around on the car radio, but the disk jockeys and news channels told us nothing. So we gave up, went home, and life went on. The next day we learned that there'd been a small fire in the Pogonip, a hilly and wooded square-mile of city-owned park at the edge of town.

When I say "park," don't imagine pretty little gravel trails and clean restrooms and friendly rangers and convenient parking. The Pogonip is a more-scenic-than-usual hunk of central California coastland in summertime : steep hills, with clumps and groves of oak and bay and other dryland trees interspersed with pretty meadows and a lot of hiking trails. And that's it. The cash-strapped city of Santa Cruz has maybe half a ranger to look after the entire operation.

So homeless people camp in the Pogonip. Not your can't-make-the-rent-and-nowhere-to-go homeless. No, more the damaged-by-life-and-can't-get-straight homeless. The guys who, for one reason or another, don't play well with others.

That scruffy, bearded old-before-his-time guy panhandling on Pacific Avenue probably lives at a camp up there. Why not? Pick an obscure corner of the Pogonip, and the occasional hiker or the half-a-ranger may never find your spot. And it's convenient: the city homeless service center is right nearby, and downtown Santa Cruz isn't far.

So nobody thinks much about the homeless in the Pogonip -- out of sight, out of mind. Everybody's happy. Until somebody leaves a campfire smoldering and a spark makes the leap to a clump of dry vegetation and you've got a grass fire on your hands. That's what had happened that day when air tankers orbited overhead.

Fortunately the fire was small; the day, cool and moist; and the wind, non-existent. The fire didn't spread much, and our local firefighters -- as stalwart a group of blue-uniformed adrenaline junkies as you'll ever find -- put it out in a decisive way.

But...we were lucky. Just two or three months ago a couple of hundred acres burned up that way. And 4,000 acres burned a few miles further on and a week or two earlier, higher up in the same mountains. It hasn't rained in Central California since February. The ground is dry, the streambeds are dry. The annual grass and brushes are all dead and brown and dry.

We're entering high fire season; the right combination of east wind, dry grass, and heat wave can burn entire cities. Remember Oakland, in 1991? Remember, oh, three months ago, when dry lightning strikes set hundreds of fires across the state and smoke darkened the sky? Like that. Only, this year, even drier than ever. The right wind, a lightning strike, even a dropped cigarette butt. And who knows?

So this evening after work I drove over to the gym for one of my increasingly rare workouts. And my gym happens to be on the edge of the Pogonip, in the same industrial neighborhood where you find the homeless shelters. I pulled up in front of the place, got my gym bag out of the trunk and headed for the front door. Which was blocked by a trio of gym rats who were staring up at something behind me. I turned around.

Across the street, the hill was on fire.

Behind a sparse row of modest warehouses and office buildings, flames danced under the trees at the top of a long, grassy slope. I could have hiked up there in five minutes -- if I was a raving idiot.

The fire grew visibly in the space of a couple of minutes. In the distance, one siren after another found its voice and began to wail. But no firefighters had arrived yet, at least not to this side of the blaze.

"I... don't think I'm going to start my workout right away," I told the gym rats. Who nodded wisely. We stood in front of the gym and made small talk and watched the fire burn. There is something between humans and fire. Not necessarily a good thing.

Suddenly the street was -- well, if not full, at least populated with a lot more bodies than you'd expect at an industrial park at eight in the evening. All looking at the fire. There were wild shouts: "It's coming this way!" "It's going to burn right down here!" "It'll be here any minute!"

In that neighborhood on any given night, you can find eight or fifteen old vans or motor homes on the street with people living in them. It's one step above camping out. That's where the people had come from. After a few minutes they disappeared again. And down at the end of the street, up against Harvey West Park, I heard engines start, and the sound of heavy vehicles pulling away.

The gym rats went back inside, but I stayed outside and watched -- not ready to turn my back on the fire and go inside, nor ready to leave the neighborhood and go about my business. And sure enough, after a few minutes I spotted the bulky shapes of fire trucks trundling up the slope a little farther to the north, where the grade was more shallow. White and yellow lights flashing, the fire trucks finally pulled up in a line at the top of the hill, between the town and the fire.

And that's when I went into the gym and did my workout. Because this is modern, civilized life. When the fire trucks show up, we know it'll all be taken care of. It's an article of faith. And when I emerged from the gym an hour later the flames were out. All that flickered at the top of the hill were the lights of the fire trucks standing sentinel against any further outbreak.

Tomorrow we'll know: it was another untended campfire, or a carelessly-discarded cigarette, or a fire-cracker, or the heat of a motorcycle muffler. Or, something. Because the hills outside Santa Cruz are full of people -- not just homeless, but hikers, college students, workers, pagan circle-dancers, mountain bikers, and more. And dead, dry brush is everywhere. And fire season is here.

We were lucky again. The gym rats and I had watched the pall of smoke rise close to straight up; there was little wind to drive it. And humidity's been high, and temperatures cool. And the firemen were there, and there were enough of them. We caught all the breaks. We were lucky. But we won't be, always.

I drove across town to Shopper's Corner because Rhumba had gifted me with a shopping list. And as I loaded the toilet paper and tomatoes and black-eyed peas and yogurt into the back of the car I watched the heavy traffic swirl by on Soquel Avenue, entirely oblivious to a fire at the very edge of the city. Life goes on, as usual.

Until it doesn't.

Postscript, 8/17: According to the local paper, a total of three grass fires broke out in that same neighborhood last night, all within a hour of each other. The one I saw was the largest. The fire department says the fires were "suspicious."

In Memory Of

Halloween's come early this year. Be warned:

The intersection of Soquel Avenue and Capitola Road lies on Santa Cruz' eastern border. It's one of the busiest corners in town.

People heading east on Soquel Avenue veer right onto Capitola Road to head out to the retail pleasures of Capitola Mall, a couple of miles further on. Or they continue straight on Soquel to head out to the hospital district, a clutch of big-box retail stores, and on to Soquel Village, the community college, Aptos and beyond.


At this intersection, at the bottom of a small hill, sits a drab little strip mall whose few claims to fame include Jeffery's coffee shop, a tortilla bakery, and a kidney dialysis clinic. A grove of trees up behind the shops adds a welcome touch of green to the scene.

Thousands of cars pass by every day at 30 mph, shooting the timed lights if they can manage it at all. And most of them don't know what's beyond those trees.

This is:


Say hello to Holy Cross Cemetery: a 19th-century Catholic burial ground full of Irishmen and Italians who born 100, 150, even 180 years ago. They came to America to make a life, stayed, and eventually found their deaths. So in the 1870s, the Catholic diocese acquired a piece of countryside with meadows and gentle hills and vistas a mile or two outside of town. And the faithful came and buried their dead for decade after decade.

By the 1940s, Holy Cross Cemetery began to run out of room, so "new" Holy Cross Cemetery for Catholics was established by the local Catholic Diocese a couple of blocks away; to this day, the lawns and grounds at the new Holy Cross are clipped and manicured, the graves and masoleums clean and bright, the roads well-paved; and there's security.

And the original cemetery became "Old" Holy Cross. Major maintenance halted. Oh, some things are still taken care of: somebody comes by periodically and clips the grass -- the fire department would have the Diocese's ass otherwise, I suspect. And there isn't much litter, either.


As the old cemetery slumbered, urban life spread out to it, around it, and beyond. Somebody built a high school nearby, and a medical center, and shops. And up above the junction of two four-lane boulevards that had been quiet country roads, sits a little sliver of the 19th century countryside that preceded all this.


And, unmaintained, the cemetery's paved paths crumbled away, the slabs over many of the graves cracked and sank and tilted, and time blurred the stone inscriptions. Generations of vandals, with no one to stop them, toppled elaborate monuments, knocked the tops off stone obelisks, shattered gravestones into pieces, and more.


A few of the old families who were still strong in the community -- and had the money -- moved their dead to the new Holy Cross Cemetary, or elsewhere. The empty crypts -- well, people find other uses for them now.

But mostly, the old plots stayed put, and today a few families still put flowers on their ancestors' graves and try to keep things tidy. I find some interest in the fact that, though you and I can no longer read the inscription on the gravestone below, there's still someone around who remembers who's buried under it, and cares:


But most of the plots and graves have no one to watch over them; the families of the dead died out or moved on. And of course fancy monuments only stay intact as long as someone's guarding them. The ancient Egyptians, with their love of tombs, knew all about that problem; then as now, there's always been a problem with funding for long-term upkeep -- when "long term" means "forever."

For that reason, the Neary plot always catches my eye. No fancy obelisks here, no raised headstones, nothing that sticks up, nothing vulnerable: it's a veritable bunker, low to the ground, streamlined, well-founded and near-impervious to vandalism. I've seen no flowers on these graves, no sign of tending by reverent descendents; but the Neary plot is as sound as the day it was put in.


Graves tell you a lot, and the inscriptions on the Neary plot say that the Nearys probably fled Ireland around the time of the Irish Potato Famine -- again probably, so that they wouldn't starve to death like over a million of their countrymen. They made it to Santa Cruz and did well. The family name's still known in this town.

The Neary plot tells me what the Nearys knew: that life is hard, and death is harder. And you can't count on help for either. So the Nearys built their monument to stand up to the long haul on its own, without help. Is it pretty? No. Will it be here in 200 years? If anything else is, probably. It's a fitting monument for a family of -- whatever else they were -- survivors. Even in death.

Yes, graves tell many things: the name of the dead, how old they were, where they were born, where they died, how people felt about them (or said that they did) and the details of their lives -- those that the survivors cared to disclose.


A teenaged boy dies at 16, 140 years ago, and his parents mark his grave with a message for the world: that he was dear to him, that they hoped his soul would rest easy. For all we know, he was a bully, a coward, liked to torture frogs. But 140 years later, the stone is still here, mossy and battered, its memorial inscription sharp and readable in the sunset light. And it conveys a forlorn dignity which the young man may or may not have merited.

And all this is understandable, because cemeteries are about the survivors, not the dead. It's is not dead bodies which loom large in a cemetery, but dead hopes, the remembrance of loss, echoes of hope through religious belief that made life bearable for those who had to go on alone.

And lies. Those who concealed cruelty or lust or greed behind a respectable exterior continue to do so after death with the help of the survivors. On a gravestone, no one's ever a wife beater, a thief, an adulterer, or even just a wretched person. Everyone's missed, mourned, and bound -- it is hoped -- for a better place.

Hope, fear, shame, grief, resignation, pride -- and love: these emotions hang like mist above the shaggy trees and crumbling monuments of Old Holy Cross, 40 years after its final burial took place. The coffins and bones and headstones are little more than focus points for the feelings of the bereaved.

It's not the dead who haunt this graveyard, or others, but the sentiments of the people who buried them there -- and then vanished into history. Old Holy Cross is the vast, pastoral journal in which they all scrawled their feelings. And which lays open, pages fluttering in the wind, for your respectful perusal.


(Postscript: In retrospect, I realized that at least some part of this entry was inspired by the short story "Was It a Dream?" by Guy De Maupassant. I commend to you this story, about a cemetery that is haunted in a very odd way -- follow the link to read it, it's not long. De Maupassant was one of the great storytellers of all time -- and a titanic cynic.)