Kells Notes from Ginny: An Archeology Women, Wilderness, & Writing
One letter survives between my grandmother Elma and her cousin Leila, postmarked from Mexico City (circa 1949), the last thread connecting the heartstrings between two remotely-related but deeply intimate women. There is no clear genetic link establishing the kinship ties between Elma and Leila, but rather a heart line extending through family history like deep hidden roots.
It is said of the great sequoias, the majestic redwoods of Yosemite, that these mighty trees have thrived through history with the necessary suffering, the severe mercy of a strong and sustained burn. These redwoods endure not only from, but because of, the great fire storms visited upon them every hundred years! Only with cleanse of fire can these timeless trees break through the forest canopy and find the light and nutrients of their moist, densely shrouded environs.
My grandmother marked her life by the firestorms of her generation, the first of which was her own phoenix-like emergence from the flames of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake at the age of twelve.
The flames that devastated the California wine country, claimed the lives, homes, and vineyards throughout Santa Rosa, Sonoma, and Napa Valley through the first weeks of October 2017, also leveled the home of my cousin Charles Wilson, Lelia's only son. Recovering the missing, the more than forty souls, lost in what is now being called the greatest natural disaster in California's history, is part of the work of surviving. Leila's letters, photos, and memorabilia over which Charles once served as steward are no more. The evidence of the silken thread woven between the young lives of his mother and my grandmother is reduced to a single letter.
Taking account of what can be found and what will never be recovered reconfigures our imagination.
The stories that became our stories, the moments burned into memory, were scooped like ash and scattered between us, the survivors, my sisters and me, my cousin Charles, the few heirs my grandmother left behind.
Two years after the Napa fires claimed his home in Santa Rosa, my cousin Charles and I joined a cluster of distant family members for a rag-tag reunion in Napa in June 2019. We hiked together through the sequoias of Armstrong Woods on a misty summer morning with Charles leading the queue of somewhat ambulatory octogenarians and a few stray tourists looking for a willing guide. We spoke of my grandparents who worked together for the U.S. Forest service through the 1930s, telling the stories of my grandfather the robust outdoorsman clearing trails and my resilient grandmother serving as camp cook feeding the CCC crew. The California national parks had defined their lives from the very beginning. Earl and Elma had spent their whirlwind honeymoon in Yosemite soon after my grandfather returned from war-torn France in 1918, camping in their Model T beneath the lush fronds of the ancient redwoods.
Just a little over a year after Charles guided us through the gnarled path of memory, wild fires swept through the Napa valley once again, this time spreading through the great redwoods of Armstrong Woods and searing the forest trail briefly shared between us.
