I have always associated this time of day with a certain nausea - too bright, too windy, the day as indifferent to our comfort as the night. The winds rise in the valley in the afternoon and the waves on the lake rise with them. What vestiges of the massacre might still be found, I have often wondered, if Pacific Gas & Electric, the lake’s more recent custodians, were to drain the water away again? What still bubbles up from the floor along with the fermenting fish-guts that sometimes slip from lake-bottom crawdaddy traps and rise to the surface like so many increate forms unapproved by our Creator? The boy escaped, only to be found shivering and near death decades later in a perplexed farmer’s barn near Oroville, from where he was taken away to be studied and prodded by the anthropologists at Berkeley. The lake was created in 1914 when Great Western Power built a dam and flooded the very same valley where, in 1866, the entire family of a young Ishi was massacred by the Indian hunters of the California State Militia. Nor is Manoral itself particularly sunny. To this day they are dotted with dark red-brown spots, indelible emblems of my own fragility. There was aways a certain dread I could not overcome during my long summer sojourns there, and this was only deepened when, at the age of eight or so, I split my chin on an iron bar in the attic, and rushed down the folding stairs, dripping my blood into their unvarnished wood as I descended screaming. This is not only because it was surrounded by enormous pines and shaded year round by their thick needles, and not only because the bats swarmed around above the place at night (insectivores, I was always told by way of reassurance). In truth I never found the place much of a “sunshine house” (and I find myself doubting, now, that that is even correct Swedish it should probably be “Solskenhus”). My grandparents, of Scandinavian origin, hung a sign that said “Solsken Hus” over the front-door (or the “back-door” as they called it, since a lakeside house’s front-door is the one facing the water, while technically the back-door faces the road). He would have been pushing forty by now, but I’ll always think of him as little. At the time he was working in drywall over in Red Bluff. The last time I made it was back in the summer of 2018, before the plague and before the war, after some weeks of pleading from my little cousin J***. My family and I -mom, half-brother, cousins- used to try to make it up there as often as we could, though for a long time it was hard for me, what with the distance. In 1947 my grandparents bought a cabin on Lake Manoral way up in Brumas County, at the source of the Leather River in the northeast of California near the town of Lester.
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