Steve Merlo: Drive to Buttonwillow brings back memories
| Thursday, Feb 02 2012 06:05 PM
Last Updated Thursday, Feb 02 2012 10:57 PM
Driving out to Buttonwillow the other day to visit some relatives, I decided to take a look at some of my old hometown haunts. Fifty years ago, the small agricultural community only had 1,600 or 1,700 residents (or so the sign said) and not all that many businesses. I think we had only a handful of streets --Main, 1st through 4th, Milo, Buttonwillow Drive, Dunford and a couple others whose names escape me.
Most of the people who lived there either worked in the oilfields, the surrounding fields or owned the fields outright, but I never knew anyone to suffer much in the way of class envy. All the kids went to either Buttonwillow Elementary or rode the bus to Shafter High, but all of us played sports together or just lived in close proximity of each other without many problems.
Black, white, brown or whatever, the color of our skin mattered not. We were friends, and our winning ball teams always reflected how well we got along with each other. I think that's why so many of the town's youths went on to much better lives -- the ability to get along and never having to look up or down their noses at anyone.
We visited each others' homes with innocent impunity and I don't think many people ever locked their doors back then. I still cannot remember ever knocking on many folks' doors when we went to see them, and usually just opened it and yelled to get their attention.
I grew up only a hundred yards from the county park, and always thought of that patch of county green as the gateway to growing up in the outdoors. The dirt canal where I spent so much time learning to fish flowed only three-hundred yards away, so it was no great feat to hop on a bike and go catch carp, crappie, catfish or bass. Across the canal's weir became God's country at an early age, because the fields beyond held lots of quail, doves, pheasants, ducks, geese, rabbits and other game that we pursued, and it was legal to shoot there.
I stopped and tried to remember what the old wooden weir used to look like. The PGE power plant had stopped pumping its coolant water into the ditch many years ago, and so most of the resident fish died. Only when the farmers received river or aqueduct water did the canal fill up; the short time the water flowed from the sources did not allow for gamefish to successfully spawn. The weir and canal are both cement these days and only a trickle of water remains. Over there, just a hundred yards from the weir, is the place where my Dad tried to sneak up on a huge gaggle of honkers before his sons spooked them.
The unused PGE Power House, now long gone, once sat only a half mile away from home. Unused for years back then, it became a large grain silo, and I can tell you we had a ball either hunting the hundreds of pigeons calling it home. We also did stupid things for fun like climbing the steel ladder to the 60-foot high roof and then jumping forty or fifty feet down into the stacked grain piles. We were lucky not to have broken anything, believe me. Today, the entire new plant covers close to a square mile of real estate and provides a nexus for many power lines coming in from the coastal nuclear power plants.
Across Wasco Way to the East, my friend Larry Johnson and I stalked rabbits with our .22s or roamed around looking for Native American artifacts. An almond orchard and a grape vineyard now cover most of what used to be sagebrush, but a small chunk remains today.
Driving to it, I saw the spot where Larry and I killed the giant rattlesnake and where I shot and missed my first coyote. Over there is where my grandfather Pietro, bless his soul, accidently shot me in the face while dove hunting, and then tried to say a big bee stung me instead.
I then walked over to the dry lakes part of the acreage. The Natives' firepots are still there, sitting on the taller mounds of earth where we used to sit and try to imagine what it must have been like to eke out a living in the harshness of the desert. We'd carefully glean the ground around them and usually come away with a bunch of beads or arrowheads. All I could find that day was a few bits of glasslike obsidian, an unnaturally occurring volcanic rock lending proof to the Natives' existence.
Everything's changed, that's for sure, but it's the same everywhere you go. But I am certainly thankful for having been lucky enough to grow up in that area.
