Lake Berryessa
Sunday night, we decided to camp for two nights at Lake Berryessa since we were a little nervous about the crazy fast and high waters this year on the Stanislaus River and a storm was building in the Sierras. We were also looking for some sun, since it’s been overcast all of June in the Bay Area. Of course, the boys were in pursuit of fish. As we approached, the curvy, hilly highway 128 led us through a graveyard of oak trees that looked like emphysema victims. Aside from their charred trunks, only dry yellow grass and foxtails decorate the hillsides, making me wonder how did all those atmospheric rivers in spring miss this place?
We arrived and were given site 47 by the park attendant, which thank goodness, is next-door to two pit toilets, on a dirt road, adjacent to a steep hillside which would serve as the only safe direction for the boys to shoot arrows into which was an anxiety I had as soon as Finny‘s friend loaded them into my vehicle.
The ground consists of hardened brown dirt/gravel ground and weed-wacked yellow straw cut into perfect-sized dust-particulates to evade your lung’s elevator mechanism and lodge fully into their alveolar sacs, they also make a nice even coating onto your cornea. The milieu of microplastics and metallic shreds across sites 46 to 52 should make a fine confetti onto a canvas at MOMA.
However, there was no place to park a car or put down a tent. There was one leaf sprig of a sapling providing an arm’s width of shade that I quickly put my camp chair underneath. The boys helped me open up our orange tent and immediately got inside and onto their smartphones. I sat in my camp chair for about five minutes and tried to imagine how I’m going to make the next two nights into a sliver of pleasantness. So I get back into my car and drive over to the attendant and see if we can move our campsite to one of the empty ones located at the lake. She was very amenable to this and let me pick site 22, a good spot for the boys to dip their fishing lines in the lake and a couple of trees for me to steer clear from direct UV. A moment later, a thought came into my head, “ Wouldn't it be so much more fun if we all had something to do with this lake besides murdering fish?” So, I asked her if she knows of somewhere I can rent paddle boards. Yep, she did. 20 minutes later the boys and I had turns on two. A very windy day, but it filled up two hours nicely and helped me get onto the water (and Finny’s friend Roman into the water twice).
The morning later, just as I was trying to see the redeeming qualities of Spanish Flat Campground, I bent over to touch my toes and spotted one: a sparkly, baby pink acrylic finger nail. I wondered how such an exotic specimen ended up lying under my feet on this pile of dirt and gravel? Did someone get tired of it mid-beer and scrape it off like an ex-boyfriend? Or, was it a cougar-on-cougar brawl? Hopefully the human made it out alive.
Just then, the person who was blaring “Ride Sally Ride”, “Baby Got Back”, and “Enter Sandman” last night until 1 AM (and then cranked up their generator promptly at 7AM), just drove 60 meters down from his campsite to stuff a 6-person tent into an already bulging dumpster parked across my campsite. I’m sadly not the type to run up to my fellow generation Xer and coach him on the many better places to upcycle his tent. My introverted-self has once again failed my wanna-be presidential-all-good social accountability self. I was a tad annoyed and a tad tempted to steal off with his tent’s poles poking from each side of the dumpster; my tent’s poles have not seen elastic like that since 1999.
Despite the boating life evening fanfare, at 9AM the lake is placid glass. The sun has not yet shone. The cloud cover keeps 14 year old boys locked into their Call of Duty mid-morning dreams.
The solitude is cut short by our neighbor family that has begun to stir about. “I’m going to tell dad, “Baba!!!!” bleats a girl, swinging dizzyingly way up into an alder tree on a camping hammock. Her brothers, Mohammed and Ghazi are sticking sticks in the lake, and capturing paper plates that have floated downstream from the guy who donated his tent to the dumpster. “Shut up, Ghazi”, Baba, replies.
Last night, the oldest sister, (maybe 9 years old?), saw me walking around the hillside, looking for firewood. She walks over and tells me, “We have a ton, I can bring you some!” 6 seconds later, four munchkins are running into our campsite with a full bottle of kerosene. “Here you go!” exclaims the girl. “Just pour this on a few pieces of bark, and it will make a big fire for you!” I thanked her profusely, but declined the offer, saying, “we prefer just wood”. A moment later, they return with a 7 foot long dead trunk. The oldest boy, Mohammed, thrusts one end of the trunk straight into the flames. I say “thank you”, again, “but we can’t stick a whole tree into our campfire.” So he pulls it out. Luckily, it has not caught. The four siblings carry off the trunk. Together, they lift it up, and propel it onto the dusty gravel. The little girl, who is around eight or nine, lifts up the trunk one more time and smashes it down like John Cena, yielding an amazingly perfect log for our pit. Success!! She reemerges over the fire and without permission plunges it into the dying orange flames. Enormous smile shining on her face.
The two little boys, around five and six, begin chasing Finn and his buddy, trying to capture a frisbee with a blinking light that they tease over their heads. The two sisters, a couple years older than the boys with dangling black curls join in as monkeys in the middle. In one harrowing attempt, the youngest girl leaps up to catch the frisbee and lands against Finn with three fingernails slicing into the milky soft flesh between his bicep and brachialis. Finn screams obscenities he would have been promptly fired for if he were their camp counselor. Two hours later, Finn loses all control. Despite his convincing life threats towards them, the two little boys and their two older sisters all break into his and his friend’s tent, from both entrance points. The father, uncle, mother and grandmother of the children remain unbothered, seated around their campsite putting back Kirkland bottled water while Finn screams for his own life.
Next morning I am chillin in my camp chair. I detect a spit or two of rain on my frizzy head. A splatter, no, this is starting to come down. I think, “Oh good, this place really needs a wash.” I spot the dad of the children strapping a large rectangular box on top of their SUV. The mother and grandmother are somewhere undercover while the four siblings swing from branches and run circles in the rain. Now in my tent, the splatters from the rain are a soothing clatter. I lie down to enjoy the symphony but the splatters are now pounding, and I feel persistent wetness on my right foot. So much for all of the forever chemicals Greg sprayed on the fly about 20 years ago. All the rain is piercing through, and pretty soon I have to escape. Luckily, just as I do, drops slow back to spit. I peek around. Two dudes in hoodies are fishing from a row boat across the land bridge. They are not exchanging words. The jet skis and party boats have all been put back on trailers and returned to their garages.
Our camp neighbors have also departed, but left plenty of traces to remember them by: yellow plastic shovel, four borrowed life vests, six smashed plastic water bottles, and 14 plastic water bottle caps, half eaten peach, marshmallow, used sponge, white plastic netting, several sheets of fabric softener.
Finn and his buddy are now awake and glued to their glass devils inside their tent, watching other people fish instead of them. I reflect on how Finn amazingly won at Farkle for the first time last night, despite still practicing his theory of never not taking a roll. It of course, benefited him that we, he, only made it through three rounds of dice throws. They are exhausted from an evening of tormentation by the four siblings - payback is a beautiful thing.
At noon on a Monday, Spanish Flat is, well, flat. No more gas to burn and only us and three other campers are here out of about 50 or so available sites. Three geese sail over to our beach with three and two goslings in tow. A buzz buzz buzz in vibration that is not a yellow jacket or a bumblebee, but a hummingbird, has wandered into the green alder leaves above my head. Three sweeping swallows dive bomb for a drink. And no one‘s around to mind me taking little jogs through campgrounds 20 through 50, a nice circuit to recirculate the blood in my legs.
And what did we leave behind? A pile of glistening black glass. At first glance, might be chunks of obsidian: black shards of all different shapes, long and sharp, broken window glass, with amber highlights seen through the thin ebony flakes, red edges, opaque in their middles. Rather, a sugar cube experiment the night before, in a severed sprite can over the campfire. It oozed and goozed a black caramel, a visual delight for the four little children who visited our fire pit. The first thing Finn and Roman did when they emerged from their tent was to spill over the black glass on the end of a picnic table, black crystalline powder, no doubt toxic to breathe in.
I begin to roll poles inside tent flaps, and Finn’s friend declares “He’s got one!” Finn‘s face is beaming with triumph as a skinny silver fish (dare I say minnow) dangles from his line. “Is he a keeper?” I ask him. “Yes!” He is certain of that. Both boys are shaking with adrenaline back at the pursuit. I let them go at it for another 30 minutes while I stuff camp gear into the back of my car. Two goslings and one mama nibble grass undisturbed next to them as the boys remain fixed on the movements of the water’s surface. Then we wave goodbye to Spanish Flat and meander around Lake Berryessa for another view, driving past all of the dead oak trunks once more. The boys are silent most of the way back, perhaps exhausted, or, more likely, out of practice with conversation since YouTube fills this void for them most of the time. As the bars begin to come back, the car fills with shooting sounds and fishing tutorials once again. Back to the comforts of civilization.
