In graduate school, at California State University-Fresno, Eileen Apperson began what was to become a longer creative non-fiction project when she wrote one short essay about the eradication of Tulare Lake, which was once the largest fresh water lake west of the Mississippi. She found that her classmates and professor had never heard of the lake, and she knew there were stories that needed to be told. As she says, “one thing led to another” and she wrote more essays on the topic. Soon she thought she had a manuscript about the valley she calls home and those who settled it. However, there was more needed before she would write the book she hoped to write.

She wanted to focus on the women of the area but had trouble finding them “because the stories and decisions are so much male-based.” Eileen says, “The manuscript does now, though, contain more of women’s connections. I am about ready to send out prospectuses to publishers. When I initially sent out the previous version several years ago, I received a few favorable responses from University of Nevada and Utah Presses, who asked for the entire manuscript after reading sample chapters. I did get two offers to co-publish which I decided to pass on. I also had a very early version of the original essay, ‘Los Tulares,’ published locally in the San Joaquin Review while I was a graduate student. I also read it at several conferences dealing with nature, place, and ‘western’ themes.

“Right now, even though I am ready to send the manuscript out again, I find it difficult because I keep discovering more stories, a more poetic phrase, a changed emotion when I go back and read it a ‘final time.’ Realizing that I wanted to include more of the women’s voices was an awakening for how I view this landscape, but with that came a lot of work and an uneasiness of whether or not I did it justice.”

Recently, Chris Beaver, an accomplished filmmaker (and no relation to Eileen’s great-great grandfather Henry Beaver), read the original of Eileen’s manuscript in the Fresno State University’s library as he researched a project concerning Tulare Lake. In the last 18 months, Eileen and Chris filmed on several occasions, and Chris is using the prose from Eileen’s revised manuscript as the thread to tie his film’s segments together. “I am quite honored,” Eileen says.

In this week’s article, Eileen recounts the process of writing about place in an essay originally presented at a reading she gave where she teaches, Reedley College. Her story is instructive for any of us with nonfiction book ideas born of our knowledge, life experience and inner reflections, especially about ancestors and the places we call home. The essay also shows the way in which tracing a personal history leads to connection to others and more personal stories.

At the end of the article, Eileen shares several excerpts from her manuscript.

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Searching for The Pattern of the Land
by Eileen Apperson

It is a project that began, as many larger works do, as a series of related or overlapping essays, a theme from which I could not break loose. I saw the role that place played in my family’s history become more evident and significant as each essay developed. For 18 months, I worked on the transitions between essays and refining the theme of place. I thought I had all but the first chapter — that crucial first chapter that would set the tone, introduce the people, and define the landscapes that followed.

I had documented family histories and the influence they had on the ever-changing landscape of California’s San Joaquin Valley. There were ship manifests, military documents, and census records showing the heads of households and the constant move west with each generation. There was the story of Henry Beaver, my great-great grandfather, who made the largest leap by crossing the Oregon Trail from Ohio, not once but three times from 1850-53. On the final trip he brought his family. Twenty years later they moved, for the last time, to the newly planted crops on the western edge of the Valley.

My great grandfather on another line, James Kimble Apperson, along with his brother and father, Francis, arrived in the region from Illinois near the same time. James Kimble’s mother died just before the journey, and his sister, Sarah, suffering from the same fever which took her mother, died en route and was buried somewhere along the Platte River. These men were determined, placing all their hopes on California. And here my family has stayed. Home, it had become clear generation after generation, was the place a crop could grow and a profit be earned. The fertile San Joaquin Valley was the grand finale.

In addition to family stories, I painstakingly chronicled the accounts of such men as William Brewer, a geologist who leapt at the opportunity of studying California after his wife and infant son died, the explorers and entrepreneurs John Fremont and Grizzly Adams, and mission site hunter Father Pedro Fages. I related what they saw in and envisioned for the valley. I recorded the building of an unsurpassed irrigation infrastructure, the eradication of Tulare Lake, the emergence of corporate farming, and the surge of subdivision developments. Still, after 15 chapters, there was something missing.

And that was more, it turned out, than the re-write of a few chapters could bring. The more I had formed my family stories and those men of power into prose, the more I felt disconnected. The histories I knew were male-driven and recorded. The women were silent on those pages. I dragged out a previously written essay about my own mixed emotions about being a woman in the Valley landscape, looking over crops that men sow. My feelings, at best, were ambivalent. Then, looking at a manuscript that on the surface seemed near completed, I began wondering how the women felt and how it compared to my own feelings, the feelings I had for a place that was chosen for me. Did the women ever feel they belonged? As the gender labeled nurturer, how did they care for this landscape and the alterations taking place as prairie became farmland, rivers drained, a grand lake eradicated? At what point did this place become home? I needed something that tied women to the land — this place that they joined their husbands in and worked, raised their families, and died in. An event that occurred when I was 10 years old became a starting place.

When my grandmother, Genevieve, was nearing her 90th birthday, my father drove us to the neighboring town of Lemoore, where Grandma was born in 1888. After weeping at the graves of her parents and grandparents, her tears were replaced with her nervous laughter as she had my father drive her to West ‘D’ street and stop in front of what would later be known to me as the Mooney House. “That,” she said pointing out the car window with a strong, steady finger, “is where I was first introduced to your grandfather. There, at that wrought iron gate.” Thirty years later, amid my need for further research, I found myself back in front of that gate after learning that the Mooney House was now the local museum.

Open by appointment only, it took several attempts to arrange a meeting at the museum. Bettie Viering had a commanding voice on the phone, so I was surprised to see a frail, older woman come to the door. She invited me in as if it were her own home. Before I could finish explaining who my family was and the project I was working on, Mrs. Viering stopped me and said, “Let me start from the beginning.” It was important for her to provide the story of the Mooney family, one daughter being the friend of my grandmother’s, I tried to interject.

She began with the story of what led the Mooneys to the San Joaquin Valley — a story similar to my family’s own. Room-by-room, artifact-by-artifact, she explained the historical significance, some possessions left from the Mooney family, others donated by other founding community members. There was a pride in her voice, as if it were her ancestral home and the clothing, photographs, and play-dolls belonged to her own family.

“At what point did you know the Mooneys?” I asked her after nearly an hour of the tour. Her response set me back and made me further question those ideas of belonging to a place, and, eventually lead my manuscript in the direction it should have been taking all along.

“Well, I never knew them. I only moved here three years ago.”

This place was not her “home” as it had been for me and yet she adopted it with a pride not often found even in people who live in one community for their entire lives.

“When did your family arrive, Dear?”

Without looking at her, I responded, “The 1870s. Their ranch was near the crossing of highways 41 and 198. It is a subdivision now.” The subject had finally shifted and I had the opportunity to tell her what I’d hoped to discover at the museum.

“What I am looking for is a way to connect these people, especially my great-grandmother to this place.”

At that, Mrs. Viering made a concluding nod as if she should have known all along, left the kitchen we were standing in and returned with a red and ecru quilt draped across both her forearms. She motioned me to remove the empty cans of molasses and plastic eggs displayed on the kitchen’s center table and she began unfolding.

“They called these community quilts and all the women from the town that worked on them signed them. This one was made in 1886. Let’s see if we can find your great-grandmother’s name.” Before she could finish her last sentence I had already spotted Katie Beaver written in red ink and then stitched over in tough, red thread. The quilt was a wedding-band design of crimson circles atop a white background, and within an edge of each circle, another woman’s name was written and stitched over in the same manner. At the time the quilt was completed, the town was just forming, so it mirrors the well-plotted pattern of the valley’s surface at the hands of people such as my family. Schools and churches were rising and commerce growing. The railroad had just gone through; horse-drawn plows tilled and cultivated the expanse of outlying grasslands extending the angular lines of the rails, while canals spread out from the winding river. The wedding band design would become a metaphor for the connections I came to write about, the relationships between people and land, family and place. The quilt’s once virginal white foundation is worn with time and use, some of the residents’ names faded more than others, but seeing it was a pivotal moment in my need to know how these women connected with their new home, my home, and sense of belonging. So many of these women, I had to assume, established their own part of this growing town, brought to this place by the dreams of their husbands or fathers, yet determined to make this place their own, with their names.

The manuscript is nearly complete now after I’ve uncovered many stories of strong women, women such as my widowed great-great grandmother, Margaret Watts Hays, who chronicled her life amid the Civil War and her 20-year-long desire to make the San Joaquin Valley her home. Amid the gatherings of the Kings County Club, women (my grandmother and her sisters among them), who although had left the place of their youth, continued to define themselves as belonging to this landscape. My hope is that my prose will read as more than a chronicle of the changing landscape spurred by men’s lives. It can become what it should have been all along — the links we make to a place, no matter how long we have lived there or what circumstances brought us. It re-examines my own connection to this place that I am determined to call home.

Great Grandma Katie left a bit of herself — an imprint, if you will. Mrs. Viering was doing the same. My hope is that in writing this manuscript so, too, shall I.

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Excerpts from Searching for the Pattern of the Land:

Excerpt from Chapter 15
I have within me memories of conflicting themes. As a child, the darkness and stillness around the farm at night actually frightened me. I fed the peacocks as they came to roost. The walk to the barn, flashlight in hand, was quick-paced. The return to the house became a run as I headed for the light of the back porch. In the winter, the wind blew the English Walnut tree outside my bedroom window, scratching at the glass and shallow balcony. As the wind blew harder, the stairs creaked, making falling asleep a struggle. I imagined the second owner of our housed, who has died there and whose funeral service was held on our front porch, climbing the stairs, turning at the landing, and ascending to my bedroom door where the stairs ended.

However, this was winter. There was comfort in the noises of summer where bullfrogs in the canal reminded me that I wasn’t alone since it was easy to believe no one else existed on such normally still nights, only a slight breeze coming through open windows near my bed. In recollect, in summer my appreciation for where I lived seemed to grow as I could play like friends who lived in neighborhoods could not. We flood irrigated our front yard, and while friends in town had swimming pools or were a walk away from the community pool, there was more enjoyment to be had in the four inches of water that gushed across our lawn. On the days the water did not come from the well in the vineyard, the water was pumped from the canal. I collected empty mayonnaise jars filled with tadpoles which I kept until they sprouted back legs, and then released them back into the canal. The usually sharp needles from the deodar cedars that hurt to walk on became a soft floating bed of mulch. The irrigation of the vineyard was almost as enjoyable. Icy water gurgling from each row’s pipe cut the powdery, sandy soil creating rich brown furrows of moisture, the light dirt of the burm looking as if it all could blow away from what lay below. Once wet, this filter-like soil made the best mud pies, feet sinking calf-deep into this perfectly unobstructed earth as each were mounded.

We replanted the back 33 rows of vines when I was seven. I don’t remember much about being seven, who my friends were at the time, or the daily presence of my brother and sister at home, but I do remember us taking out and replanting that vineyard. Following behind the vintage 1949 Ford tractor and wagon I threw on top what stumps, crossarms, and stakes I could carry and then, going back through, dropped off each new vine to be planted. It was early October, so with the forgotten Muscat grapes still holding fast to the vine, my brother, sister, and I had a rotten grape fight. I pegged my brother in the back of the neck as he drove the tractor, leaving sticky juice running down his back, staining his shirt, gnats collecting around his collar. It was a great victory for a little sister. I learned to drive that tractor a few years later. Still a lightweight, I had to raise myself from the seat and throw one leg over it placing both feet on the clutch to shift gears. Stopping, too, required all my weight plus jumping up and down pumping the brake, just missing the barn each time.

This is where I came when I broke up with my first boyfriend. This is where we walked, arms around my father, when grandma died. Any time I feel disconnected, this is where I go. Any time I need to withdraw, I take a walk in familiar surroundings. Like my father, I find comfort in the connection and familiarity of the land.
Excerpt from Chapter 17
We each perceive beauty differently. The millions of city lights seen from London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral are awesome. But the single falling star in my back yard, which my British friends had never seen because of their city’s nighttime glare, is more enchanting to me. I continue to look for the harmony in a landscape that has been transformed so dramatically from its natural self. The places of nature are now few and far between, like gold flakes scattered in a rippling stream. From the edge of a scraped irrigation canal bank we notice an egret slowly walking. To observe it in its unaltered setting, we must stretch through barbed wire and look past a farmer’s no trespassing sign and walk, if possible, the littered banks of the river. This current, man-made wilderness is more accessible, the place where we now see nature abiding on new terms whether it be along a bare ditch bank or in the narrow rows of a vineyard.

Now, my childhood memories are fond ones. There is a reason why that memory of re-planting our orchard when I was seven has remained so vivid. It is a moment of family and home and the connections to both.

Excerpt from Chapter 18
Talking with a distant cousin, we were trying to piece together the Apperson and Watt’s seemingly coordinated moves in the Sierra Nevada and valley, the families’ criss-crossing paths prior to James Kimball and Elfleda’s union in 1878 while still leaving large gaps in location and time. My cousin simply and prophetically said, “Find the land, and you will find our family.”

What is it that draws us to a place? I have often asked myself this while traveling down near desolate roads, only every so often spying a trailer or small shanty alone against the landscape. What makes us feel home and tells us we should stay?

What made my ancestors travel from Pennsylvania and Virginia to Missouri and Illinois, and then generations later go on toward Oklahoma and Kansas, and then finally to California? What was it that persuaded another side of my family to leave their homeland in Quebec and travel around Cape Horn to settle in northern California, and to then, a few years later, make the unsettled San Joaquin Valley their home? Why did my grandparents feel such a need to then leave this booming place to raise their children in the city, and why did my dad return?

I try to draw a common line between them all. For the most part, I am not left with the same answer twice. There were glintings of gold, promise of cheap land, a better price for cattle, and in my case, a father who longed for the feel of the land and a sense of home. Then there are those that came for the land, for the love of working soil and the satisfaction of watching something grow — and not just their crops, but communities and families as well. All these remnants brought me here to the place I will always call home.

I was raised with stories not just of family, as many people are, but also of landscape. The older I became, the easier it was to draw connections between the two. The land dictated how they built their lives whether it involved farming, mining, or commerce. These lives influenced each generation that followed. It is a rarity to be a fifth generation Californian. When I mention this fact to people, interested or not in the history of the valley or family, they act surprised. In the eastern states it is not so uncommon to live in one place generation after generation, but so many Californians are newly transplanted. California is still the place of promise. I feel fortunate to have these accounts of journeys, dreams, and visions passed down to me through my family, to tie me to this place and call it home.