Come a Day in April

1980 was a horrible year. Unemployment had risen to 7.1% and the prime
lending rate had climbed to an unheard of high by April 2nd in that year, of
fully 20%--and that was for the 'preferred' clients.

Everyone was scared. This was close as we had come to the disaster of 1929
ever since 1929. It was making me paranoid as hell, causing me to think
things like, "Do I want to be stuck living in this city full of people
freaking out all over the place as things really begin to deteriorate even
worse than they already have, or . . ."

Damn, but it was a dark vision, as now I come to see it again for what it
was at its greatest intensity of dread back then. Only the year previous I'd
had me a nice little electronics business going, growing, getting better as
my knowledge of what I was about improved. My wife had a nice perch up in
Torrance at one of Southern California's biggest Savings and Loan
associations. She was then in the loan department and had been one of about
twenty other officers and clerks working there until, come a day in April
when the prime rate had hit the 20%; this was to find my girl, i.e. she and
her supervisor for the last two people left employed up there on the second
floor. For the two weeks previous, the only thing she'd been going to work
for was to share duty with her boss, taking turns at answering the PBX.

1980 was just really nothing more than the ultimate culmination of the whole
lousy, gone back to totally square since the death of the 60's decade that
now was here to be put finally to an end--but it wasn't going easy. For the
first time in the five years we'd lived in San Pedro since moving down the
peninsula from West Hollywood, it had actually got to the point that bullets
were zinging past our bungalow's windows and ricocheting off the sidewalk
outside our door. It had used to be a half-ass nice, working class
neighborhood of Yugoslav shipbuilders and Irish merchant sailors, Italian,
Greek and Yugo fishermen till the change had set in, to let the drive-by
begin with a hail of red-hot midnight lead slamming into the house and car
of the pimp and dope dealer who just of late had moved in to the little old
one story clapboard hacienda next door.

I told my baby it was time to go, that she should quit her job, such as it
was now that she'd been booted downstairs to the savings floor; that I would
sell my business, and on so much as we could cobble together from the sale
of all our household furnishings and worldly junk we would invest it all in
the very best camping gear we could lay hold of and head for the hills, get
out of Dodge while the getting was good.

Despite all her arguments to the contrary, I was adamant! There was no way I
was going to stand by and see her subjected any more to the horror of all
that was going on there just outside our door. She knew it was right, scary
as the whole new proposition did nevertheless seem, even so, bless her
heart, she loosened her grip on the rein and gave me my head.

For all those years that we'd been living in and around L.A., our one
supreme pleasure had been getting out of it come vacation time. Then, for a
week of relief from the sleaze, the stink, the smog and heat, we'd pack up
and strike out across the broad plain of the San Joachin Valley toward the
southernmost rise of the Sierra Nevada. Off there some two hundred miles
east of L.A., the canyon of the Kern River debouched to the valley some
miles below Bakersfield through a vast expanse of grapevines, oil wells, and
last, not least a sea of river round granite boulders.

Upon following up through the canyon, the road eventually comes out at the
summit in the Walker Basin to the site of a large reservoir name of Lake
Isabella and the little town situated below the dam there of the same name.
And above that to the north is where the crystal emerald beauty of the Kern
River flows in to make the lake, with all its bounty of big Brown trout and
the native ocean run steelhead, now landlocked beyond the dam to have become
the lively leaping tribe of lovely Rainbow trout which there also thrive.

This was the country, as you continued on up into the tall rugged forest of
pines and fir above the lake that made all the year long efforts of survival
in L. A. the dear price you simply had to pay for the one week per year when
you were finally permitted to come alive; arrive back at life as somehow you
seemed to recall it from somewhere, way back down in the instinctual memory
bank of your chromosomes.


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