My grandmother grew up in a town that doesn’t exist anymore. Kennett, California, in the Sacramento River Canyon. In 1944 and 1945 they finished Shasta Dam, and the river backed up and swallowed it whole. It’s still down there, sunk.
Her grandfather, James Smithson, was one of the great stagecoach men of that country. He ran stages from Redding north through Ashland and further into Oregon, and Jacksonville was a stop along that route. I have heard the stories and read the books about the day Black Bart stepped out of the brush and made him rein in his team. In those same years the Bilger family were Jacksonville’s leading merchants: hardware, county contracts, bridge fittings. Two families on one road. John Bilger arrived in 1856, and James Smithson was working that corridor by 1859. The Smithsons are my father’s side, the Bilgers my mother’s, so both sides of my family were on that same stretch of road long before they ever met. Walk into the Jacksonville cemetery today and you’ll find the Bilgers under a big tree, Italian marble obelisk, Masonic compass and all. I’d love to know if those two men ever shook hands. I bet they did.
But the story I keep coming back to is the summer of 1925. Beth was twenty-two, just out of the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Her fiancé had gotten her sister pregnant and married her instead. Her photo album from May of that year has one caption beneath a photo: Cinderella Loses a Slipper. And then, that summer, she and two friends and a mule headed into the backcountry of Yosemite. She called it her Very Merry Fairy Dream. She knew those forests and that valley, the sequoias, the light through the pines and the Ahwahnee, fifty years before I did. I came to Yosemite and felt what she must have felt. The place does that to you.
Art was infused in her. That’s the only way to say it. She didn’t think of herself as an artist in the classical sense. But she moved through the world like one. The photo journals. The Ikebana. The way she saw things, the way she dressed, the food she cooked. She loved to watch young people move and wasn’t the least bit critical of any of it.
Her granddaughter Stacy said it best: “She has always been my fairy godmother, my tinkling bell in the warm spring breeze. I always accepted that, never questioning, just knowing she was this special spirit who watched over me… she makes me want to be someone better, a more generous soul.”
She came to my wedding in 1988. At eighty-five years old, with a terminal illness, we danced. She danced like she was twenty-five. Whimsical. Light. The fairy dream still in her. She died later that year.
Which brings me to the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. McMenamins owns it now, right on Burnside, and it has one of the last floating dance floors in the country. Sprung underneath, engineered to move with the crowd. That’s the whole point. On April 13, 2014, my boys were at a Schoolboy Q show there. The crowd went so hard that a support beam under the floor cracked. They evacuated the building. Jan went and retrieved them. People still call it the night Schoolboy Q broke the Crystal Ballroom.
My grandmother probably never danced on that floor. But if she did, she loved it for sure.