Where Strange Roads Go Down

We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down.

The days grow shorter and colder, darker and icy, and as the wind
whips across the sides of the mountains, blowing stinging snow into
the eyes and a vacuum of cold air is sucked into the lungs, the year
draws to a close high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California,
and in these mountains it can sometimes feel as if not just the year
is ending but the entire steep white world around us is frozen in
time; that  the Earth has spun an icy white cocoon in which it has
fallen asleep forever, neglectfully leaving us uninvited to its
hibernation and left shivering on the outside. In most of present day
California on New Year’s Eve the bars and nightclubs are filled with
drinkers and drunkards drowning themselves in the celebration of
another year lived and passed. On the following morning most will
awaken to make resolutions they will never keep, and with a sigh of
resignation go through another year just like the one ended. For they
have never yearned beyond the skyline.

But many in the mountains are here because of those very yearnings,
and so it was in the past. And when those years past drew to their
close there were indeed some who did drink to get drunk; some, but not
most. There were also those who drank to forget; some, but not many.
And there were some who also drank to ponder: How did I get here? How
did I start down this road? And so as this year draws to its close
perhaps you might offer yourself for a brief experiment. As you open
the door to the neighborhood bar for your New Year’s Eve drink, pause
for a moment on the threshold and close your eyes, take a deep breath,
then open them and step inside. If magic happens, which it sometimes
can, then you will open your eyes to find yourself in a ramshackle
Sierra Nevada saloon of a century and a half ago. You’re in a frozen
mountain town and the wind is pushing you through the door to find
relief in the relatively warm air inside.  For our purposes it doesn’t
matter which town, because on this night they are all the same. You
won’t see anyone you know in this saloon, nor anyone of whom you might
have even remotely heard. These people are all quite real, yet all
merely forgotten footnotes in the lives of someone else passing
through. They have all passed on many decades ago; but they have all
agreed to come here tonight solely for your edification, so try not to
stare. As you walk into the saloon you see a few tables gathered near
the cast iron wood-burning stove at the far end of the room which are
all filled with men playing poker. The heat from this stove doesn’t
spread very far, so they are all huddled close to gather what heat
they can. Those not warming themselves from the stove are mostly at
the bar, pouring liquid warmth down their throats with a steady
regularity. You decide to join them, and you walk slowly across the
buckled plank floor where clumps of scattered dirty sawdust cling to
your boots; you lean on the bar, nudge aside the spitoon on the floor,
and hook one foot on the scarred rail which runs the base of the bar’s
length. The bartender pours you a whiskey. You thank him, fish deep
into your pocket for some money, and drop a coin on the counter top.
He nods with a cursory acknowledgement and moves on. As your eyes
follow him you see a woman with long dark hair sitting by herself all
the way down at the end of the bar to your left. You stop your head
from turning because you don’t want her to think you are staring.
Instead you continue to examine her out of the edge of you eye. Her
skin is dark brown, but what you can see from her profile tells you
that she is probably of Mexican descent, not Indian. She’s wearing a
colorful dress, but even the edge of your eye can note that it’s worn
thin and frayed at the edges. It’s not much, but it’s probably the
best she has. And you wonder; why is she here?

She, too, holds that same thought in her mind. Her name is Maria
Aquila, and as she slowly twirls the shot glass in her fingers you
acknowledge that the remnants of youth’s beauty are still to be found
in her features if one looks closely. Indeed, she had probably been
very beautiful when she was young. It’s not that she’s old on this
night – maybe about forty. Maria did indeed come from Mexico, making
her way north to end up here in this bar in the Sierra Nevada, but
that journey had been twenty years or more in her past. Maria was only
a young teenager when her parents arranged a marriage for her.
Actually the arrangement had been mostly her father’s doing, and her
mother had quietly acquiesced. Her father, steeped in Spanish
tradition, had picked out a man whom he felt would be a profitable
match for her; a man to whom Maria felt not the slightest attraction
even though he had been entranced by her beauty. After expressing her
displeasure at the arrangement and receiving only harsh words from her
father in response, Maria ran away one night from the only home she
had known in faraway Sonora, Mexico. After several days alone of
walking a dusty road leading north she joined a group of men who had
heard of the wealth of gold to be found in California and were heading
north to the mines. She stayed with them for the next few months,
doing what was necessary along the way to ensure her safe passage with
these men across the border, through the desert, and into the
mountains, where she finally parted from her fellow travelers. At
China Camp she continued earning her living in the only way she knew,
closing her eyes and dreaming of the future and saving what little she
earned from the men who purchased her favors. Years passed. When she’d
had enough she moved to another mining camp and opened a saloon. It
was then the charm and personality which had lain dormant within her
for so long reasserted itself. Her establishment became a showplace,
all decorated in her favorite colors, blue and white. Even all the
beer mugs and shot glasses had decorations on them. She often tended
bar herself, with her beauty and charm more easily parting men from
their money than had her lovely and desirable body managed even in its
best years. But sometimes the memories just got to be too much for
Maria; the memories of home in Mexico; the longing for her family; the
touch of all those hundreds of groping hands on her body. And when
those memories overwhelmed her Maria instead became her own best
customer, sitting alone at the end of the bar, trying to drown
memories which would always float back up to haunt her. And she would
think of going back to Mexico, or at least of leaving the mountains
for someplace civilized like San Francisco; of finding a good man and
marrying; of living a happy and respectable life. For a time she could
believe this might really happen, but not anymore; not that now her
beauty had faded to a memory which only she could see. So now all she
had left was the dream and the drink to keep it afloat. One night
Maria left the bar blissfully drunk, stumbling down the street to her
room. The sheriff saw her and, as he had always had more than a little
bit of a frustrated lover’s crush on Maria, he went to her aid to help
her get home. Maria turned on him and cursed him, calling him a
variety of colorful names in fluent Mexican and Chinese. When the
sheriff protested that he was only trying to help; that he cared;
Maria drew a long knife from beneath her skirt and lunged at him,
aiming the blade for his heart. The sheriff caught her arm and they
struggled for control of the knife. In that struggle the blade turned
and sliced through Maria’s wrist, severing muscle and tendon all the
way down to the bone. As the blood flowed the sheriff was distraught
with guilt and carried her to the doctor’s office, where the doctor
bandaged the wound but could not repair the damage. Over the next few
weeks Maria’s fingers curled and then froze into a claw. It was the
end of her dream of finding and enchanting a man. She walked down the
road to the edge of town, gave up, and died.

You find that you have been staring at Maria without wanting to, so
you let your gaze continue past the tired woman at the end of the bar
and continue beyond her. At a table near the door through which you
just entered sits a woman all by herself. The bartender has just
finished refilling her glass and she has thanked him with a soft
‘Merci’. Her eyes catch yours as she raises her glass, and she gives
you a sad smile. You turn away, embarrassed, and empty your own glass,
wondering why she is so sad.

She’s sad because she’s lost the man she loved.

Her name is Madame Louie. No last name; just Madame Louie. She’s old
now, and most of her life was spent earning a meager living by taking
in the laundry of miners; scrubbing their filthy clothes in a tub
perched on a makeshift wooden platform in back of her run down shack.
She also grew flowers in her garden and sold bouquets to the bartender
at a saloon in Columbia; a man who felt pity for her. Some of the
miners in Columbia had begun to notice that gold dust was disappearing
from their cabins and their diggings when they weren’t around, and it
was happening frequently enough for them to begin to look upon each
other with suspicion. Finally that suspicion settled upon an old
French man who had a claim on the outskirts of town. So the mostly
Irish-American-British-German miners of the town descended upon the
poor lone Frenchman, trussed him up, and prepared to hang him from a
tree which had grown a conveniently placed sturdy branch. As a polite
formality they asked him if he had any last words, but this courtesy
was lost upon the old man as he neither spoke nor understood English.
So, with a collective shrug, they bound his hands behind his back,
tightened the noose around his neck, and prepared to kick the stump
out from beneath his feet. At this point Madame Louie burst into the
crowd shouting that the man was innocent. However, as Madame Louie was
known to be sweet on her fellow French ex-patriot, her protests were
not taken seriously and they proceeded to kick the stump out from
under the Frenchman’s feet, leaving him to swing in the breeze. Madame
Louie screamed and grabbed an axe and began swinging it in wide
circles, sending the men scattering. When she reached the hanging man
she swung again, slicing through the rope and sending him tumbling to
the ground, but still breathing. With a laugh and a curse from the
crowd a new rope promptly appeared and the Frenchman was hung again,
and again Madame Louie appeared with her axe, swinging wildly and
shouting at the top of her lungs, claiming his innocence. Again the
crowd scattered, and again the frightening French woman swung and
sliced through the hangman’s rope, saving his life. Again Madame Louie
was driven away. Again another rope was produced. Again the Frenchman
was hung. And then again, like a specter from Hell which could not be
banished, the persistent French woman appeared with her axe to save
his life. And again. And again. Though the Frenchman seemed to have
more lives than the proverbial cat, his neck by now was raw and bloody
from the repeated caresses of the hemp rope. But Madame Louie had
managed to keep the score somewhat even, and each of her attacks with
the axe had drawn blood from at least one man in this crowd with the
hanging lust. Finally, the mob gave up. To a man they acquiesced to
Madame Louie’s insistence that the old Frenchman was innocent and let
him go. Madame Louie was exhausted, but exultant. She had saved the
life of the man she loved. There was no medical assistance to be had
in Columbia, so she sent her love off to the nearest doctor, who was
to be found in Angel’s Camp. The doctor treated his wounds and he
lived, but he never returned to the town where he had cheated death.
Madame Louie had lost the love of her life; not to the hangman, but to
the ghost of fear; a thing Madame Louie could never wave off with her
axe. Her heart was broken.

There’s a kink in your neck; you’ve been tilting your head to the left
for much too long. So you angle your nose forward like a rudder
steering its course to find the bartender staring at you. This is
disconcerting; does he suspect you have dropped in to his
establishment from another time? Abruptly you point at your glass, not
remembering having emptied it, and he refills it. Again you roll a
coin his way and he wanders back to Maria to offer comfort. Now you
gaze to the right, and you’re surprised to see a man you hadn’t
noticed before; a black man sitting all alone at a table in the far
corner, away from the stove and the heat; as isolated as he can be
from all the other men in the bar. There’s a drink on the table in
front of him, but you can easily see that the amber liquid rises all
the way to the rim and it sits untouched. Instead the man is holding a
rope curled loosely in his left hand. In his right he holds the end of
that rope, hanging in a loop. He moves that loop slowly, as if he
wants to let it fly but is afraid to do so. Instead it just sways
gently back and forth; back and forth, and he thinks of what road
brought him here.

The black man’s name is Charley. Charley was a slave in Texas. When
the Emancipation Proclamation – enforced by the Civil War – freed him,
Charley chose to stay with the man who had owned him. The owner’s name
was McGee. When the Civil War ended, McGee decided that a change was
in order so he packed up his few remaining belongings along with what
family remained and headed to California. McGee wasn’t married, and
his family was comprised by his mother, his sister and sister’s
husband, and their baby. When they arrived they staked out a ranch and
began acquiring a herd of cattle. One day on the eastern side of the
Sierra Nevada Charley was helping McGee and his family move some
cattle and horses down the mountain and in to Owens Valley. McGee and
Charley were on horseback - Charley was a good drover and a capable
man on a horse, as well as having a reputation for being deadly
accurate when throwing a rope. McGee’s mother, sister, and the child
were riding in a wagon. When they came to a river the wagon couldn’t
make it all the way across and got stuck in mud. It tilted to one side
and then tipped over, spilling mother and baby into the rushing water.
Unbeknownst to them, a group of Paiutes had been watching the party,
coveting the livestock and looking for an opportunity to make off with
the cattle and horses. When the wagon tipped the natives saw their
chance. As McGee and Charley were intent on saving the family from
drowning the Paiutes charged, shouting and firing a volley of arrows
at the two men. Luckily the act of firing an arrow from the back of a
running horse was not one which was conducive to accuracy, so all of
the arrows missed their targets. McGee rode his horse into the river
and picked his mother up out of the water. Charley was close at hand.
He jumped off of his horse into the rushing water and lifted McGee’s
sister into the saddle, then handed her the baby. Then he gave the
horse a hard slap on the rump and sent it galloping through the water
to the far side, and safety. McGee turned and went back for Charley.
There wasn’t room left in the saddle with him and his mother already
there, so McGee shouted to Charlie to grab the horse’s tail and hang
on. But Charley just shook his head, and McGee now saw that the black
man had his rope coiled in his hand. Charley pointed to the horses
they had been herding, then waved McGee on. McGee nodded and dug his
heels into the horse’s flanks, wheeling him away from the empty wagon
and the faithful man who, he now believed, would rope one of the
milling horses and quickly follow. But then something went wrong.
Charley, the man who never missed when throwing a lassoo, missed. His
sailing rope fell into empty water, missing the necks of the nearby
horses which had offered the promise of escape from the rapidly
approaching Paiutes. There was no second chance. The horses were
quickly across the river and out of reach, and the Paiutes were upon
him. The Paiutes took Charley and left the others; they took him back
to their camp and they gave him a very slow, very painful death. Until
the very end Charley pondered on how his skill with a rope had failed
him on his very last toss.

Charley’s rope is still gently swinging, back and forth, back and
forth, and you look away, back at your drink, wondering: What really
brought these people here?

What brought these people here to the Sierra Nevada was the yearning
to go beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down. None of them
had ever read Kipling, but they were kindred spirits nonetheless. All
were tired of what they had, and the hope of what the unknown road
might offer was just fine with them. For most men who came to
California the road seemed somewhat clearer; for most of them, in
their minds, saw it paved with gold. But for women, blacks, Chinese,
French - these all found themselves isolated in a lonesome minority
and pushed to the fringe of mountain society. They had followed a
strange road because they yearned for something better that lay beyond
the familiar skyline, and they ended up in the Sierra Nevada
Mountains; thousands and thousands of them, unknown and unremembered
except, perhaps, as a brief footnote in the history of some place now
long gone. Yet it is those few who yearn, who follow their dreams
beyond the horizon; it is they who make history worth remembering,
even if they as individuals have long been forgotten.

We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town,
We yearned beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down;
Came the whisper, came the vision, came the power with the need;
Till the soul that was not man’s soul was lent to us to lead.

Rudyard Kipling – excerpt from: ‘Song of the Dead’