Embarrassing Shutout--Grandsons Win Going Away

After a side trip to the ghost town of Bodie on our fishing adventure in the Sierra, my son, two grandsons and I drove down to the shore of Mono Lake to see the tufa. Mono Lake is 700,000 years old. Salts and minerals washing down from the Sierra have made it more than twice as salty and 80 times as alkaline as the sea.

Mark Twain wrote, with a slightly sexist bent, “Its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwoman’s hands.”

The tufa are grotesque fairy-castle limestone towers that rise as high as 40 feet above the lake along the shore. They are formed by calcium-bearing freshwater springs bubbling up through the heavily carbonated alkaline lake. The tufa used to be underwater, of course, but as the level of the lake sinks, they emerge. Since 1941, when the city of Los Angeles tapped into streams that feed the lake, the tufa have risen 40 feet above the lake--like a measuring rod of Los Angeles’ greed for water.

I have lost track of the days. We stayed at the Owens River Ranch four nights. Casey caught five fish, Trevor caught one. My son and I struck out.

We had fresh trout for dinner two nights. We decided to bring the remaining two fish home to my French daughter-in-law. On the last night we had Italian meatballs and vermicelli in a sauce prepared by my son’s mother-in-law. There is much to be said for Italian cooking.

After dinner the boys toasted marshmallows in the iron stove and ate them in sandwiches made of graham crackers, marshmallows and Hershey’s chocolate bars. How do children ever survive the appetites of childhood?

Casey beat me at Scrabble, 286 to 200. My son challenged my use of the word ken , but it was none of his business. He wasn’t playing.

We had put our breakfast scraps on the ground outside the back door that morning. By dinner time they were gone. My son said it was the birds, but I thought the scraps were too big for the birds. “It was some furry mammal,” I said. We never found out.

I hadn’t really pulled my oar during our outing, but I did sweep the linoleum floor of our cabin on the last morning. We had had an orgy of pancakes, bagels and bacon and eggs for breakfast, which the boys supplemented with heaping crunchy bowls of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cereal.

It was a pleasant drive home through Owens Valley. Above Lone Pine we came to Manzanar, site of the camp in which thousands of Japanese (most of them American citizens) were incarcerated during World War II, without due process, and at the sacrifice of their homes and livelihoods. Nothing remains of its structures but foundations, a cemetery and stone gateposts, on one of which a bronze plaque states the stark facts of that shameful chapter in our history. Stripped of its temporary structures, the land seems to be trying to recover its natural beauty. The snow-capped Sierra towers above it to the west, as if nothing had happened. At least one can say that the prisoners had a good view of the natural wonders of the country that had betrayed them.

In Lone Pine I picked up a copy of “On Location” (The Holland House) by David Holland, a review of the many Hollywood films that have been shot on location among the rocks and canyons between Lone Pine and the Sierra.

Here’s where Roy Rogers made his first feature; where Johnny Weissmuller courted Jane as Tarzan; where Errol Flynn, Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. did their heroics in “Gunga Din”; where Humphrey Bogart ran from the cops in “High Sierra.” Its picturesque formations, with Mt. Whitney rising in the background, are burned into the American consciousness.

On the home stretch we sped through Lancaster and Palmdale, dismayed by the vast tracts of new houses that crowd the highway. In the late afternoon the freeway from Los Angeles was almost bumper to bumper with the cars of commuters going to their desert homes.

When I got home I checked my Webster’s New World Dictionary for the words that had been challenged in our Scrabble games. I had challenged Trevor’s orbed . It is indeed a word, an adjective. I had also challenged Casey’s rive , though of course I was familiar with riven . How could I have doubted rive ? Casey had challenged my use of ken , which I said was a Scotch word meaning know.

I won that one, but it was little solace for three straight losses to my grandsons.

Besides not catching any fish.