Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture - Softcover

ANDREW SCHELLING is a poet, essay writer, and translator. He works on land-use issues in the American West and teaches poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
JAIME de ANGULO was a cowboy, cattle rancher, horse tamer, medical doctor, psychologist, and linguist. A friend and colleague of Carl Jung, Henry Miller, and D. H. Lawrence, de Angulo was the author of Indian Tales and many other titles, all published posthumously.

Poison, by Way of Preface
Child, there are so many Coyotes. . . wise Coyotes, foolish Coyotes. . . that's just the way people are. There have been all kinds of Coyotes ever since the world began.
from Shabegok
Jaime de Angulo, a maverick self-trained linguist and ethnologist, California wilderness homesteader, novelist, and poet, died in 1950, over sixty years ago. His outsize figure lives on as a vivid presence though: in Northern California's rural districts, along the jagged Pacific Coast, east into the Sierra Nevada foothills, down to- wards Taos and Santa Fe, and in a great many backwoods households throughout North America. Once in a while citations of his work show up in linguistic journals. He accomplished quite serious studies, including detailed accounts of languages that have disappeared entirely. People who knew him personally, or who encountered others who knew him, are vanishing; but a tangle of pungent, often contradictory stories continue to get told. Tucked into the gnarled hills back of Big Sur, where de Angulo homesteaded on Partington Ridge a hun- dred years ago, residents know his name; few are likely to direct you to the house he built, or help you locate the elusive Jaime de Angulo Trail to the crest of the Santa Lucia Mountains.
Once you get onto Partington Ridge the snarl of unmarked deeply rutted dirt roads feels bewildering. In late April 2000, I managed to make my way onto the Ridge―hoping to see one more time his house and the rough-hewn little log hunting shack I remembered in the nearby woods. I found a lot of muscular madroña limbs covering roads powdery with alkaline dust, but couldn't get my bearings. Manzanita, poison oak, bay laurel, bright orange poppies climbing the sharp hill- sides. Redwood tips and ink-colored Doug fir in the twisted ravines.

One lone walker directed me away from the Ridge when I asked if he knew where I could find Los Pesares, The Sorrows. This is the name de Angulo gave to his ranch, homesteaded in 1916, and where he built a house in the early 1930s. The walker pointed five miles up the arcing, rocky, gorgeous coastline to where a spit of land covered with cypress reached into the glittering ocean. I could just make out a fancy house that had no business being there. This guy, taciturn, bearded, with ragged long hair, walking with a bludgeon for a stave, must have thought I speculated in real estate. Or believed my ques- tion a cover. I could have been a federal marshal. Everyone knew there was a lot of dope growing back there, back in the steep hard-to- penetrate hills. Between de Angulo's day and our own, the vaqueros― the buckeroos―of Spanish descent who'd first settled the coastline had given way to marijuana trimmers.
Anyhow, by the late 1990s, the road up Partington Ridge had been secured by a locked gate to protect the landowners' privacy. "The old-timers," Henry Miller wrote of the whole coastal hills region, from his own perch on Partington Ridge in the 1950s, "those with huge landholdings, are not eager to see the land opened up." It seems less likely than ever that the baffling web of dirt roads has helpful signposts, even if you do manage to make it past the locked barrier.
In Berkeley, where de Angulo made the other of his two long-term homes, the original Pacifica Radio station, KPFA, renews his repu- tation, maybe once every ten years rebroadcasting some or all of the nearly one hundred Old Time Stories tapes he recorded the final year of his life. De Angulo's broadcasts began shortly after KPFA went on the air April 15, 1949. De Angulo's distinct voice―English inflected by Spanish, his native tongue; by French, the language of his childhood; by Basque if he is to be believed about his ancestry; and by a couple of dozen California Indian tongues―has been a defining program. When I tuned into a full rebroadcast in 1984 the station ran two of the more or less twelve-minute segments back to back with radio recordings by another California folklore presence, Alan Watts.
A few years ago I wrote that dog-eared copies of de Angulo's book Indian Tales, the collection drawn from his old radio broadcast manuscripts, are household fixtures among California backwoods residents―taking their place alongside chainsaws, work gloves, and spare auto parts―necessities for people who think of themselves like de Angulo did, as "freedom loving anarchists," and who have developed skills of self-reliance with regard to their local resources. This statement may strike some as romantic; but I've been in a good number of households where it is true. Somebody is buying copies of the book― Indian Tales has been continuously in print since 1953, making its way from publisher to publisher. A few times it's appeared with a new preface. Howard Norman wrote one; so did Darryl Babe Wilson, the Achumawi or Pit River Indian writer.
The Northern California town of Arcata, home to Humboldt State University, sits on a small coastal bay or inlet with a number of Yurok and Wiyot rancherías nearby. The Big Lagoon Ranchería owns the Arcata Hotel on the town's main square. When I stayed there in 2005, the hotel had most of its original furnishings―very basic―though the dining room was now a Japanese restaurant and the lobby smelled of fish. I picture the hotel as one where de Angulo would have stayed on his fieldwork trips to the "Crane people." I also like to think under Yurok ownership attitudes have changed. One of de Angulo's early essays, "The Background of Religious Feeling in a Primitive Tribe," recounts an event painful to read―
"Some people think I have real power. There is lots of people around here think so. But I have no real power, I am not a doctor, I have only power for myself, that's all. I am healthy, I am never sick, but I can't cure people. No, I have never tried, but I know I can't . . ." That's what George Fox told me. I wanted to know more, but unfortunately the people of the hotel where I was stopping discovered that he had taken a bath in my room, and they made a scene to me while he was out at lunch. He never came back and I couldn't find him. I don't know, but probably he heard some of the dispute. He was sensitive.
Arcata has a high-quality shop for used books, the Tin Can Mail- man. On that trip up to Arcata I was browsing the Mailman's stacks, and pulled a volume from their superb section of California Indian studies. It was Herbert Luthin's Surviving Through the Days, a collec- tion of indigenous West Coast songs, narratives, and myths. I hadn't seen it before. As I returned the book to its slot on the shelf, a gentle low-pitched voice said, "That's a fine book."
I turned. A man probably in his sixties stood gravely behind me, hands behind his back. Full gray beard, loose ponytail, red and blue flannel shirt, blue jeans, wire rim glasses low on his nose, steady in- telligent steel-colored eyes. "Do you teach it," I asked, thinking he might be a professor at Humboldt State up the hill. "No, I just read it." I looked him over. The conversation could have ended there, but I thought what the hell. "I was flipping through to see if it held anything on Jaime de Angulo." His eyes didn't waver. His voice deepened just a bit. "I married my wife because she was reading Jaime de Angulo." To the literary folk in Nevada County, as well as north into Washington State's Ish River Country1; also to Indian scholars and writers around California, or for a thousand people from the Sur in the south, to Puget Sound up north―this kind of encounter perhaps sounds rather ordinary.
"Even their linguistic concepts seem to reflect the nature of the land they live in," de Angulo wrote in 1931, speaking of the Karok from whom he and his wife Lucy S. Freeland collected oral myths, recollections, and hunting tales in 1927. Karok lands wind upriver from Arcata, along the Trinity and the Klamath.
To all these stories, the strange Karok country forms a conspicuous background. The Karok live along the Klamath River from Happy Camp to above Weitepec. The river runs in a deep canyon between two walls of uninhabitable mountains. The settlements are close to the river, wherever there chanced to be a flat large enough to build a village. The mountains beyond provide only a hunting ground. The whole drama of Karok life takes place in a world of rivers and ridges. They move in terms of "up-ridge" and "down- ridge," "up-stream" and "down-stream," and have no concern with "north" "south" "east" and "west." Even their linguistic concepts seem to reflect the nature of the land they live in!
In his phonetic rendition of the first Karok story presented, for the direction ma'ruk, uphill, de Angulo gives this note: "one of the four directions, which replace the points of the compass in Karok, ka'ruk, up river; yu'ruk, down river; ma'ruk, up hill; ca'ruk, down hill."
You only need to pause a moment over the vocabulary to notice that the Karok are the upriver people, the Yurok the downriver.
It's not that intellectual life for the Karok, in their own language, takes no account of north, east, west, or south. It's that daily practical existence concerns itself with how the land actually folds into its contours. One reason for a book that inquires into Jaime de Angulo's work and the place it holds in Pacific Coast imagination is that his writings, as well as the legends that wrap him, seem to vividly reflect the particulars of the land. Rivers and ridges have their own lives, with metabolic pathways different from our own. Redwood trees, manzanita stands, Steller's jays, pine martens, and weasels also have their own metabolisms, their food sources, their dream life, all a bit different from ours. Not many ethnographers of de Angulo's day rec- ognized the real life of these "other people." That's why I speak of his writings as the real history of California.
Poets who caretake the lore of California's bioregions have resorted to de Angulo's work for this reason alone. In an era before printed maps, let alone a GPS, you could have used his radio broadcast tales to find your way from Pomo territory, up to Yurok and Karok districts, then east through Miwok and Achumawi land. A Ph.D. dissertation of the future would be for some enterprising hiker to use the Pacifica Radio tapes and map the specific river valleys, ridges, low passes, and redwood groves through which de Angulo's characters travel and in which they camp. Jaime de Angulo's field trips and friendship with Indians, from 1914 into the 1930s, provide an unparalleled set of writings for discerning the old ways of what today we call California.
While hundreds of technical volumes on California ethnography, linguistics, folklore, natural history, and indigenous lifeways have been published, many feel locked up in unfriendly scholastic language. Old biases have also kept people away from what is, after all, a bedrock literature for North America. California with its 100 or so native languages contains a wealth of old time story, filled with cultural information essential to a resident's survival.