Something under the bed...Part 2

For your viewing pleasure, Pacific Ocean Park in its early, prosperous days. It did not look like this when I visited.



In Part 2, we leave the ocean and climb into the San Bernardino mountains. Once again, I am with my grandparents. My grandfather, whose driving I came to recognize as being from the "accelerator/brake, accelerator/brake" school, was happy to go anywhere, everywhere; the more people in the car the better. (Wherever we would go, my grandmother brought along the picnic hamper with thermoses of goulash, Cornish pasties, sweet mixed pickles that she always served with pasties, desserts, I can't recall everything, as there was food for days, even if we were on our way, ultimately, to a restaurant. Stopping for a picnic was part of the journey - no wonder I came to equate food with love. And she expressed surprise when, as we arrived at our destination, I was queasy and had no appetite. None of the grandchildren was ever able to tell her that Grandpa's jerky driving made us carsick.)

Even now the roads to Lake Arrowhead are prone to rock slides and other perils. In the early 1950s I can imagine them as narrow, steep and fairly slow going; I know we had a vapor lock on at least one drive. On what was probably my first visit with them to the lake, my grandmother chose to tell me undocumented and harrowing tales of our destination. She said (and I haven't googled this to check so please accept it at face value) that Arrowhead was a man-made lake, an existing canyon that had been filled with water to create a recreation - and realtor's dream - spot. She said that many people had drowned there having become caught in the tops of trees which still stood underwater, left behind when the canyon was flooded. In my mind, she described the trees as almost reaching up and grabbing the unwary, wrapping them in their piney branches where I supposed their skeletons - or corpses - remained. I never put so much as a toe in that water and can picture myself becoming hysterical if anyone offered a boat ride. Murderous, submerged forests were added to the list of terrors. Since then I have had the repulsion/attraction conflict about water that covers once-inhabited land. Watching documentaries on the building of the Three-Gorges Dam in China, as villages and, perhaps more importantly, their cemeteries were taken by the rising tide, my thoughts went to ghost-controlled rivers and centuries of a way of life, now gone. The closing line of A River Runs Through It affects me still: "I am haunted by waters."

To be continued further.