The Name Rock

 It was the summer of 1986.  An oppressively hot and dry air mass had settled over the southern part Humboldt County, California.  I recall the midday heat of that summer the way I recall the last time I opened the door to my convection oven at a time when whatever I might have been baking was ready to come out. You know that feeling, that experience of opening the convection oven at the end of a baking cycle.  You walk up to the oven, often beckoned there by the sound of whatever alarm you'd set for the baking cycle, and you open that door.  The roiling convection waves of heat hit you immediately.  I've almost always equated that experience of convection oven heat as a form of comfort, much the way one might experience the feel of a hot washcloth on the face.  While I almost always recall the memory of what I call ovenly heat, fondly, I never recall the summer of 1986, that summer of relentless convection, the same way.

With the convection oven, the heat begins to subside almost immediately after you hit that OFF button. I imagine that almost anyone can remember that experience of oven baking, of the heat rising up and at you, but there is one major difference between my ovenly experience and the heat of the summer of 1986.  Throughout the summer of 1986 there was no OFF button.  There was only the stiflingly, unrelenting, rolling waves of convection that baked the earth.

Mercilessly.

I remember waking each morning, thinking each day about how I was going to escape the heat of that oven.  Most days I would just give into it.  I learned how to be most handy with my mother's iron skillet.  In that heat, with the sun beating down, I'd experiment with frying eggs or baking cookies.  I discovered quickly that nearly anything I could bake in the oven, could also be baked on that skillet in the noonday sun.  

And now I remember.  I had one place to escape to.  The Eel River.

On those days when the heat hadn't robbed me of my capacity to think logical thoughts, I'd load that frying pan into my backpack, along with a few eggs.  I'd sling that backpack on, slip on my flip-flops and escape to the cool of the Eel.  I pretended that my spot along the river was a secret place, but it wasn't.  It was just a place that most people had forgotten about.  I liked it for several reasons.  In order to get there, you needed to traverse the railroad tracks at the northern end of town, just south of the railroad tunnel.  After scrambling over some large rocks, many of them only slightly larger than my thirteen-year-old frame, I came to a what appeared to be a dense wall of wild willow trees.  The willow trees grow close to the ground along the Eel River, and, in this case, formed a deceptive barrier along the river.  This was the first thing I liked about my spot.  Having walked past this spot many times during the winter, I knew the willow trees branches merely covered a long-forgotten trail.

Pushing through the branches of the willows, I'd quickly scamper through some bear grass along a sandy trail that ended at the base of a large jadeite boulder.  The willows grew up and around this massive rock.  Over the course of many decades, a number of names and initials had been carved onto its jadeite surface.  I would climb up and lay upon that rock, often with my backpack and frying pan next to me, frying eggs in the sun.  I'd lay my towel over the surface, moving about and reading each name or initial on that boulder, wondering if I knew the person who had carved their namesake into its surface.

The waters of the Eel lapped slowly along the edge of the rock.  It was quiet easy to slip into and out of the water at this juncture in the river.  So, that's what I did.  I alternated between swimming in the delicious cool of the river, and basking on the face of name rock.  That's what I'd heard people call it, Name Rock.  I'd enjoy my eggs and I'd wile away the afternoon there, pondering the initials of the named, of the forgotten, on the edge of the Eel.