Monkey Flower by Mira Skalkottas

When my mother and I first moved to Ojai, we lived in a cabin up Sisar Canyon. We had been nomads, living briefly in Athens, Greece with my father, then in Oakland with my Aunt Melissa, then in San Rafael with my mom’s beautiful friend Cordy, and finally we left a hard neighborhood in Los Angeles. My mother wanted to find a place where I could start school and get away from LA where I had asthma, and people had told her about Ojai, a couple hours north of LA, in that part of California where the coastline makes a sudden east-west bend, where Chumashan peoples lived for thousands of years before Spanish rule, before being part of independent Mexico, before American settlement and annexation. 

The cabin is in Upper Ojai, a kind of mesa of orchards and ranches up Denison Grade above Ojai Valley. It is up a rough-paved road into the mountains, off an even rougher dirt road covered in oak leaves, past a gate and over a wooden bridge, wedged into the shrubland of the mountainside. It is dinky. 

In my memory it was a roomy cabin. But when I hiked the three miles up the mountain last summer to find it again, over four decades later, it had shrunk to toy-size. It seemed impossible, the way something that has long existed in memory in watery form seems when you meet the real thing again in all its detail, cinder blocks, corrugated metal, mismatched windowpanes. That it was the only structure in the area not to burn down in the Thomas Fire two years ago added to its mythic unreality. The cabin looked like it had blown in from a shantytown, a patchwork lean-to a lost hiker might stumble into. In fact, a lost hiker did stagger into our yard one time, dehydrated, faintly calling for help.

The cabin was unlocked, and my sister, who had come with me on the hike, and I walked inside. The woodburning stove was still there, the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a deep farm sink and hot plate against one wall. Today, I could walk from wall to wall in three strides. “You were hip before hip existed,” my sister says in the era of the tiny home. My six-year-old self didn’t see anything romantic about it. 

We had to go to the bathroom in the woods. Showers were cold under a hose. “You hated it,” my mother tells me when my sister and I return. She is Nana now, settled in a house in the valley with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew. Back then, my mom wore her hair long. I remember her in billowy cotton tops, bellbottom pants, and clogs that clomped over that cabin floor as she made sautéed beets with Monterey Jack cheese melted on top for dinner or peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches for lunch. 

I had people fear in the beginning. The first day of first grade, Juli bounded over to me, one year older, a grown-up 2nd grader. “Hey, you have the same ring as me!” When my mother told me to go to her house after school, which was at the head of Sisar Road, right next to the school, I sat on the front porch, too shy to go in. After twenty minutes, she burst out the front door, melted when she saw me, and blurted out, “Hi!” She’s been an older sister ever since, her home a second home, with her Sicilian mom, a place of laughter, openness, and ease. 

In the very early days we had a car, but the steering shaft broke as we were driving down the canyon, and after that I had to walk to school or bum a ride. The road down the canyon wound through the chaparral-covered hills, past yucca plants, gnarled oak trees, boulders, wild mallow and buckwheat. Overhead, invisible that close but towering above the whole valley, was the giant Yoda of the Topatopa Mountains. 

Coyotes roamed through the sage-filled mountains. Rattlesnakes were a constant worry. Sticks that looked like them made me skirt a wide berth till I was sure. The road crossed Sisar Creek twice and eventually stopped winding and ran straight into the rough paved road that leveled out next to Summit School on the right and Faye’s Place on the left, where we ordered lunch on Fridays. Faye would drive over in her station wagon, open the hatchback, deliver brown sack lunches of corn burritos and fries.

If I got up early enough, I could hitch a ride with Mr. Boyd, our nearest neighbor and landlord. He and his wife Karen lived in the big house up the canyon. He would jangle by in his blue VW van, honk his horn, and I’d run out and bounce around on the front seat without a seatbelt as we tambourined down the canyon.

Sometimes I had to walk though, and I would find a monkey flower for the road. Someone had told me the Chumash believed these flowers protected walkers from harm, so I always looked for one right away and carried it like a flower girl and walked as fast as I could until I was all the way down the mountain and seeing the first houses and cars and my heartbeat slowed down. 

There was safety in movement, I felt that that early on. If I was moving, I always had less far to go, an exercise in the constant passing of time that was comforting. I read nature and felt its slow time, even as I raced through that grandness. I was scared and comforted at the same time, as if the compound that is courage includes fear. 

Also known as sticky or orange bush, monkey flowers are native to the southwest US, growing all the way from southwestern Oregon into Baja California. They are pollinators, so bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds love them, and they are a hardy plant, capable of growing even in soil types that other plants find difficult. 

I don’t remember who told me about monkey flowers, and I haven’t been able to find anything about the Chumash belief in their talismanic power. I do know that they used the flowers as poultices, as they did mugwort, yerba, yarrow, and poppies, to treat minor wounds or rashes from poison oak. My child mind may have turned healing properties into magical powers. No matter, their creamy color was like a lantern I carried as I walked the three miles to school in the early morning fastnesses.

At school we read a book called Badger Claws of Ojai, about a Chumash boy who had to walk a mountain alone, spend the night alone, and trap a bear alone, and this is how he was initiated into adulthood. Later we moved down the mountain, my mother married, we got a new car, and I was able to catch the school bus. I got into a good private school in the valley. I took a gap year and traveled and went to college. I lived and worked in Russia, Turkey, France, Greece, Switzerland, and Morocco.  

The fear of the canyon road is long gone, and the fear of the shingle cabin, the bare light, my feet black from running around outside, tics in my hair, my mother’s clogs, the beets for dinner. “I was never that poor,” my sister-in-law tells me. But that’s how it was in the early days under Topatopa Mountains, creating a watermark or apprehension of beauty of the canyon walls, the dirt road that runs through them, and the resilient flowers that grow in them. 

I didn’t see any monkey flowers on my recent hike to the cabin, but this is because they go summer deciduous. This is how they are drought-resistant, keeping their reserve of strength to later bloom.

A native Californian, Mira Skalkottas currently teaches Creative Writing and English in the International Baccalaureate program at the American School of Marrakech, where she lives with her daughter. She has previously published in Paris Lit Up, The Bastille journal, and the Wilderness House Literary Review.

4 August 2022