caitlin mohan

The Smell of Gold

Passing time on the Yuba River

M y son and I sit on a boulder in the Yuba River when he asks if the river

looked this way a hundred years ago. Since I have been visiting this same

place for the last forty-five summers and with the exception of a new wash

of gravel or a fallen tree that changes the depth of a hole, I tell him that the river will

remain the same. Probably.

The river’s granite boulders and jade waters teach firsthand how water takes the

path of least resistance. In fact, this small radius of my childhood, Highway 49

running past Nevada City over the south fork and up a dirt road, looks from a dusty

car window as it always has—a red earth, scrub brush landscape that curves away from

pressures of modern life even as it pulls the imagination back to gold miners and

a hundred years later to the rednecks, retirees, and back-to-the-land types.

What’s different today is that when I roll down the window a sirocco of marijuana

saturates the car—the new smell just beyond the road that will become the scratch-and-

sniff memory for my children’s recollection of this place.

When I was a kid, summer’s first swim began with my nose skimming the water’s

surface in an effort to rediscover that familiar scent of river, rock, dragonfly—whatever

it was that brewed Gold Country smell. My father, for whom ‘‘odors’’ were of para-

mount importance, a gateway to memory and feelings, taught me to register the smells

of Highway 49. He would hang his head out the car window, shouting into hot wind,

‘‘Can you smell it?’’ For a New Jersey transplant by way of Greenwich Village and

Berkeley, California was a land of Lotus Eaters. He never could get over the place and

the smell of (what was it?) witch hazel, cedar, manzanita—it drove him wild.

Yes, I could smell it, though we could never name the intoxicating elixir of plants,

animals, and dirt, for we were East Coast in origin, summer visitors and hedonists, not

scientists. We would leave the diagnostics to people like Gary Snyder who lived year

BOOM: The Journal of California, Vol. 6, Number 4, pps 62–69, ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X.

© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for

permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and

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62 B O O M C A L I F O R N I A . C O M

Late afternoon glisten, Yuba River.

round on the ridge and actually studied the super biodiver-

sity of California in general and this watershed in particular.

My father was a romantic and so to smell and to feel, void of

precise nomenclature, were enough—were everything.

Perhaps it was his sense of romance that brought my

father to purchase eight and a half acres and a cabin on the

Middle Fork. Its scrap-wood walls and buddy-taped electri-

cal wires called to his inner yearning for Walden. He was

an English teacher, so this wasn’t just a cabin; it was a sanc-

tuary in the way of Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House or Jack

London’s Wolf House—a place to slow if not stop time,

a place to shelter his kids from the crap of the world. There

was no TV, no phone, and for the first two decades, no

toilet or hot water. It was a place to play ping pong, eat

fudgesicles. It was a place to swim in the clear, moving

water that taught me most of what I know about force and

abeyance, and set my life’s course so that it feels sacrile-

gious to mention it in passing. It was a place to preserve

what was best in ourselves through reading, watching, and

talking under the stars.

In 1972, people were doing this sort of thing. We weren’t

the only people who had copies of Whole Earth Catalogue

and Shelter magazine, which reprinted today can be found

on any earthy boutique shelf in Nevada City. Perhaps

sparked by his particular desires to escape the harangue

of Berkeley politics and soothe his marriage, he was fueled

too by the larger Californian and American consciousness

to get back to the land—or get back to something. As a kid,

I saw this idea on the cover of The Band album, in a group

of musicians who looked as if they had crawled out of

a mine shaft in patina leather. What were they digging for?

I saw it in the films like Easy Rider and Sam Peckinpah’s

The Ballad of Cable Hogue—individuals leaving home, set-

ting up watering holes in the middle of the desert, always

with dirt-encrusted beards. I heard it in Joni Mitchell’s

directive to ‘‘get back to the Garden.’’ And so the Gold

Country, like places of the imagination across time,

became an El Dorado for those traveling from something

to something, and ultimately looking for a return to Eden,

even as they looked forward to the precipice of enterprise

and fortune.

For a while, the cabin became a halfway station for such

dreamers. One Thanksgiving, a family friend, Bob O’Gar-

bage, as we lovingly called him, rolled up from Virginia in

a 1954 pearl-gray Mercedes with his family; he left two years

later wearing nothing but a pair of lederhosen and his long

beard, and carrying a staff. Bob worked sporadically at the

mill; his wife, Blanch, would bathe the kids in a horse

trough; and we all had great times together on the week-

end. During this time, two parcels of land on either side of

the cabin were purchased—one by a Southern California

contractor who was rumored to be a Republican and the

other by his handsome Paul Bunyan nephew who built

a Shwartzwaldian zendo in homage to Yogananda. Both

of these men loved the land, raised their families, and

earned legal livings. Their eventual schism has always

stood vaguely iconic of the larger cultural splits that infuse

menacing energy into the region: rednecks vs. hippies,

meth heads vs. pot heads, retirees vs. entrepreneurs, and

perhaps now a subdivision: certain types of growers vs.

other types of growers.

In the eighties, we rented out the cabin to a parade of

seekers: a roadie for Supertramp and a less savory family

who made a lab of the kitchen with dusty jars of thick mys-

tery and pot galore. We knew they were not part of the

Edenic dream when their youngest, a forest troll of about

four years old, came running out of the cabin as we rolled

up, and yelled, ‘‘Dad, fucking Mohan’s here!’’ This in con-

trast to our gentlest renter, Carl, with spritely laugh and

guitar, who loved the land, planted a vegetable garden, and

wrote a song called Hot Shit in Mexico (a local favorite at the

time), and whose refrain ‘‘Hot shit in Mexico, paraquot shit

in Mexico’’ reminds us where California’s dope used to

come from and why there is a market for organic product.

All of the cabin dwellers smoked their share of mari-

juana. With the exception of Carl, who later set up a teepee

on our land and may have had a single plant for his own

personal use, none of them were growers. Now, however,

everybody’s growing it. Goat people with dreads coiled

around their heads, wearing loin cloths, smoking joints the

size of corn cobs with names like Star Compost are doing it,

and people like our neighbors, who tired of the excess and

pace of the Bay Area are doing it. We couldn’t ask for better

weed-growing neighbors: educated, ethical, and organic.

They are kind people with refined interests who do not

smoke their product.

Perhaps some who come to the Gold Country today to

live share that dream of living off the land, escaping the rat

race, and absorbing the wisdom of the river like Siddhartha.

But people have always come here to make money mining

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gold, logging trees, and now growing pot. And so the ques-

tion arises: What is California dreaming? Are these pursuits

a means to an end? Is gold still and always the dream? Or, is

the work itself the dream: the mining, the logging, the grow-

ing? Just months ago, the parcel belonging to the Republi-

can uncle was sold to an investor who employs a property

manager and farmer. The wooden fence that once corralled

a horse is now six feet tall and possibly electrical. We met the

hired farmer—a county native—yesterday, the nicest guy

who’s traveled the world only to come home. I wonder if

his California dream is growing marijuana for somebody

else or if he is still searching.

With both properties on each side of our cabin owned by

growers, my summer cabin is the cream filling in a cannabis

Oreo. I am caught between accepting this latest gold rush

economy as the antidote for a historically poor area and

feeling protective of the land. Not all growers are as ideal

as my neighbors; many use harmful fertilizers, leave the

land worse for wear, and lure cartel types to the area. All

growers siphon from the watershed, and most don’t pay

taxes on their crops. But I am also protective of a time when

people came here to get back to the land and not for the sake

of profit, when people believed we had strayed from Eden

but ultimately belonged to it. Of course, these are sentimen-

tal notions from a summer visitor who has never had to earn

a living in an area that offers few options. And, California

dreams are so close to California schemes it is often difficult

to tell which is which.

Today on the rock, my son asks if the river looked the

same a thousand years ago, and this is where I am stumped.

That’s a long time for anything to endure, let alone remain

unaltered; but if anything around here will remain, I hope it

will be the river and that its water will not become the next

form of gold, though of course it already is. I think of how

just yesterday at the Nevada City library we learned who

might have been the first people here. When we touched

the computer display, a song of the Nisenan tribe came out

of the kiosk, causing me to wonder why it took me forty-five

years to learn this name. Most of the history of this tribe is

unknown and misunderstood by those who live near and on

Joy in granite, Yuba River.

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their tribal land. The stories of recent, successful financial

enterprise have masked their past, just as the odor of weed

now covers what I recently learned is a major herbal ingre-

dient in the air of my childhood: mountain misery.

Though my own fourth-grade education favored con-

structing sugar-cube missions over studying California

Indians, I learned a potent lesson in California history by

visiting Malakoff Diggins, now a state historic park in

Nevada City that preserves California’s largest hydraulic

mining site. The eerie lunar landscape—hills blasted bare

as skin by massive water hoses between 1853 and 1884—

told me of a one-sided relationship between the miner and

his environment. The nearby settlement, more of a ghost

town than an historical site, appeared to have been left in

a hurry or simply wandered off from. In the 1970s, you

could simply press your nose against the window and peak

over the pharmacy bottles to spy a woman’s shoe in the

middle of the silty floor, sitting there as if she couldn’t find

it but walked out the door just the same. You could wander

into a leaning barn and see, or perhaps imagine, a noose

swinging from the rafter, not unlike the make-shift gallows

some miles up the North Fork, which hosted the only

female hanging in California—Juanita—in 1851. At least

the gallows had a crude plaque bearing meager details that

belie a story of racism and sexism made obvious with

hindsight.

But Malakoff Diggins was just another place, leaving me

to wonder what we Californians make of our own history.

Perhaps our history is too recent, too dredged in profit

rather than ideals to have warranted in the 1970s, a mere

125 years from the Gold Rush, a cordon rope, a plaque, or

tour guide with a badge. Perhaps California, like a child, did

not have the perspective that comes with a more critical

contextual awareness to take itself seriously enough to see

itself as a historical subject.

So too, it has taken me a good chunk of my life to inac-

curately, incompletely define the smell of this country,

partly because of my own ignorance but also because the

smell of the Gold Country isn’t only about plants and ani-

mals; it’s about the residue of the human endeavor that is

palpable in the great piles of mossy boulders that Chinese

miners pulled from the Yuba River that now sit on the

roadside without ceremony or documentation. The smell

is edible apple trees in the orchard, planted an unknowable

number of years before my family bought the land, and

which survive without irrigation or pruning. The smell is

audible in the hush of rapids, momentarily drowned out by

the motorcycle shifting into high gear on Highway 49. I sus-

pect every California region from the county of Jefferson to

the Imperial Valley provides a synesthesia of evidence to

classify particular landscapes, histories, and endeavors, but

I wonder if this Gold Country smell isn’t somehow more

potent than it is in other areas. I wonder if the heart-cleaving

beauty of the area coupled with a desperate drive to unearth

a living hasn’t made love of this place more hard won. If

California is, in the words of Wallace Stegner, ‘‘like the rest

of America, only more so,’’ then perhaps the Gold Country

is like the rest of California only more so—the unofficial

capital of what the state is about—the always changing

dreams, which following complicated labor, birth the next

reality.

But odor is not a competition. California doesn’t need to

compete with itself to define its character. The state is too

diverse to characteristically identify with science or fiction;

likewise, it remains impossible to name the smell of the

Gold Country. So, I am not surprised when I ask my son

as we sit on the rock what he thinks he smells and he says he

doesn’t know. I instantly flash on a Gary Snyder poem that

intimidated me with his authoritative chronology of the

Malakoff Diggins area, citing millions and millions of years

of evolution. That poem, ‘‘What Happened Here Before,’’ is

one that still appeals to me for its allegiance to defining

place using the names of plants and animals while imagin-

ing the erstwhile lives of miners, Indians, tax assessors, and

a prophetic blue jay who screeches in response to the ques-

tion of who we are: ‘‘We shall see / Who knows / How to be.’’

The computerized kiosk at the Nevada City library emitted

a Nisenan song, but it cannot produce the smell of the Gold

Country, although I recently came across liquid soap in that

aforementioned earthy boutique bearing the name Yuba. Its

admirable but inadequate attempt to capture the river’s

essence displays that no amount of technology will allow one

to push a button and smell from the car window those first

hits of red earth, stonefly, and mountain misery—odors that

are now absorbed into the marijuana growing just feet from

Highway 49.

I wonder what the Highway 49 smell will be when my

children are grown, if they will bring their own kids here in

the summer. I wonder if they will keep the TV, phone,

computer, and other technology out of the cabin as we have

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done in hopes that without these distractions we can read,

play ping pong, and eat fudgesicles. What will be the new

industry of their time? The one that takes the path of least

resistance. What will be the latest technological distraction?

Will they have the inclination or grit to tell their kids to turn

it off, crawl into bed, and inhale that Gold Country scent that

travels through the screen window, the one we can never

name that leads them to dreams of the river? B

Note

All photographs by Conny Heinrich.

Leaning toward the past.

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Yuba Green.