Every family cultivates a culture and lives by its own strangeness until the strangeness turns normal and the rest of the world looks a little off. The Atleework children are alone in the world with this name because our parents made it up. Who needs a hyphen? Robert Atlee met Jan Work and there you have it. Our parents kept their respective last names, making us the only three. We’re difficult to pronounce—AT-lee-work, somehow endlessly bungled—and embarrassingly easy to look up online. We got to know life without television, our only radio the valley’s beloved country-western, thirty minutes from any town, a day’s drive from what might be considered a city under, or at least in the shadow of, a series of large rocks.
Once, the five of us posed for a Christmas card photo, perched in the branches of our apple tree. The next year our parents put us in matching plaid shirts, we three Atleeworks looking like miniature lumberjacks, and the year after that we all sat on the sofa in plastic pig noses. At my middle school graduation, girls walked between rows of folding chairs in the gymnasium wearing leis of purple orchids while I carried a single orange blossom Pop had heisted from the flower bed in front of the school.
In our living room Pop hung a trapeze. We dangled from our knees. We bounced off the couches. We flew.
Our family matched the strangeness of the landscape my parents had chosen: uneasy, not a level place of right angles. Owens Valley clutches four little towns that line a single highway. With a population of about twelve thousand, sprawl and all, Bishop is the only incorporated place in Inyo, a county larger than New Jersey. A tourism website lists Inyo County attractions: deserts, martian landscapes, mines, abandoned cemeteries. Ten thousand square miles lie mostly free of humans, because, as the historian Marc Reisner tells us, California has a desert heart.
My father’s map company is just him and his friend Mike and sometimes my brother or sister or me. He merges his knowledge of the landscape with the technical skills of a cartographer. sierra maps name tag pinned to his delivery shirt—blue, button up, short sleeved with a crinkled collar—he drives his van up and down the Eastern Sierra to the places that serve the birders and climbers and skiers and hikers and campers streaming by: ranger stations and mini-marts and outdoor gear stores on a two-hundred-mile corridor from Pearsonville to Bridgeport.
His maps show mountains and a flat valley floor. They suggest the crests of the foothills, ubiquitous granite, and the pale pinkish hunks of igneous rock called Bishop Tuff, sooty with desert varnish, produced during a prehistoric eruption that determined the shape and character of this place. They can keep a tourist from succumbing to a poor sense of scale in wild country. Spread on a table or over a lap, my father’s map of the Eastern Sierra quilts together wilderness, national park, national forest. At the northeastern corner, black dashes form the state line, dividing Esmeralda and Mono Counties, where the Boundary Peak Wilderness of Nevada gives way to the White Mountains Wilderness of California. Near this border lies Mono Lake, Paoha and Negit Islands afloat in the big blue round.
The names of the streams and peaks call to be arranged into stanzas, full of rhyme and alliteration: Sand Canyon, Cardinal Pinnacle, Cottonwood Creek, Blind Springs Hill, Sherwin Crest, Round Valley, Onion Valley, Bear Creek Spire, Mount Starr. There are first names for these places, too. The Owens Valley Paiutes spoke a dialect used nowhere else in the country. Say it PIE-yoot, and know that these are the people indigenous to the valley, who first called themselves Nuumu. They called Mount Tom “Winuba.” Many still call Owens Valley “Payahuunadu,” the land of flowing water.
Some places my father nicknames. There’s Robert’s Ridge, where Pop’s hot air balloon snagged in pines, the basket swinging over the ground, and he toted a passenger, an eighty-five-year-old woman with a pacemaker, down a steep pumicey slope. “She weighed eighty pounds,” he remembers, “and I just carried her on my back like a backpack. She said it was the most excitement she’d had in twenty years.” There’s Mount Dave, after Pop’s hot air balloon partner, where snowmobilers toss old helmets into a dead tree, and Will’s Peak, nicknamed after a Swall Meadows neighbor killed in an avalanche on Mount Tom. Up a canyon to the north, he’s called a peak after Jan.
In the photo albums Pop rescued from the redwood house, Mom naps on a lakeshore while we Atleeworks cover her to the neck in sand. She holds a piñata strung from a pole, a dinosaur fluttering with strips of green. She crawls through dirt and sagebrush on all fours, teeth bared in a snarl, an earnest bear. She climbs an apple tree. She lies back on the granite slope of Lembert Dome as she might stretch on a sofa, a wadded sweatshirt pillowing her head while we sprawl around her. She puts her arms around my waist and leans into me beneath a wall of red stone. She sits behind me on a yellow plastic sled, and we careen.
She used to make a little creature with her hand, her index finger the head and the rest the legs, which scurried around, talked in a high voice, and entertained me for years past the point that this should have been embarrassing. We called the creature our Little Bug. Oh, hello, Kendra! Little Bug cried. Will you be my friend? Will you take me with you on all your adventures? And I leaned down and whispered, as if only Little Bug could hear me, yes, yes, yes.