Continued from last week... The rustic circumstances of my birth were not really due to a lack of resources or availability of modern methods. Indeed, my oldest brother, Jim, was born in a hospital in the foothill town of Grass Valley in 1930, twelve years earlier. Calvin was born in Seaview, Washington. I think my birth in my mother’s childhood home, in the same bed that had welcomed her and my grandparents’ other four children, was simply a matter of my mother’s choice, probably determined by familiarity and comfort. How fortunate to count the doctor as a close friend and to have your own mother as a trusted midwife. But along with that choice was the fact of the remoteness of our town. Sierra City marks the gateway to the Lakes Basin Area of Sierra and Plumas counties, often called The Lost Sierra. Forty pristine lakes, ranging from a pond you could skip a stone across, to the islanded, lagooned, and often white-capped expanse of Gold Lake, nestle in glacial cups and terraces below the chiseled alpine chunk of the Sierra Buttes. The lakes, the forests, the mountains, the wildlife, and the mining industry had bound my mother’s family since the time both sets of her grandparents had arrived at the end of the Civil War. The wild geese element of the story of my birth is a reflection of that tie. The family legend of how I came on the scene speaks eloquently to me of the immediate world in which I simmered up. It reveals my brothers’ inherited hook-up with the natural world and its mystery and importance in our family’s lives. It reveals my grandmother’s solidity and essential nurturing character and how meaningful my birthdate was to my family. To mountain people, the first day of spring has great significance: the spring equinox marks the point at which there are as many hours of daylight as there are darkness, and even though that wasn’t the reality in our mountain valley because the mountains both detained the sunrise and hastened the sunset, still, there it was, winter was on its way out. Spring has such significance in the mountains because the rebirth it brings about is both so anticipated and so evident in contrast to the depths of winter. Finally, it lets me know, that because I was welcomed into my family in the same brass bed that had welcomed not only my mother but her four siblings, my birth on March 21st, the first day of spring, 1942, in the midst of World War II, was heralded in my family as a sign not only of hope and rebirth, but of continuity. Mountain Springs can be purchased at the Downieville Historical Museum, Sierra Country Store in Sierra City, Bassett’s Station, Graeagle Store, or directly by emailing lcrosen@yahoo.com.
Lydia Cartwright, age seventeen