This is an excerpt from my novel, The Pleasure Palace, a sometimes-bittersweet romantic comedy set in the fictional town of Santa Verde, California. The town is quite transparently inspired by Santa Cruz, where I have lived for over forty years.

This book is about the way love serves as a mirror which reveals people in all their beauty, awkwardness, silliness, and courage. I've chosen characters whom I hope reflect that: people in friendships, new relationships, long-term partnerships, marriages, and those still grieving a loss.

One of the main characters, Tansy Wilder, is a writer working on a memoir about her childhood. Chapters from her book precede each of The Pleasure Palace's main sections. 

Tansy, along with her sister, Rondi, grew up in a (fictional) part of Northern California called the Julia Bell Wilderness, ten miles away from Porter, the nearest town. Their father, Rick, has been a single parent since Tansy and Rondi were preschoolers; their mother, Annie, died suddenly. Annie was a twin to one of the characters in this section, whose nickname is Bliss. Bliss and Annie grew up in Quebec.

Rick is an ornithologist and runs a rescue center for owls and other birds of prey. The rescue center and family home are on the same property. Rick has an on-site clinic to care for injured birds.

I want to add that I wrote this chapter while evacuated from a forest fire in August of 2020.     

                                                              

The principal characters in this excerpt are:

Tansy Corvus Wilder

Rondi Cygnus Wilder (Tansy's sister)

Rick Wilder (their father, a widower)

Aunt Bliss (Tansy and Rondi’s aunt)

Uncle Joe (Bliss’s husband)

Annie (Tansy and Rondi's deceased mother, mentioned. Annie and Bliss were fraternal twins).

Tansy Wilder narrates this scene, which is a chapter from her memoir. 

One August night, a few months before I turned eleven years old, a relentless dry-lightning storm raged over the Julia Bell Wilderness. No rain fell from the sky, only blinding silver light followed almost immediately by thunder. About an hour into the storm, the power went out, which meant that the well pump to the house also stopped. Papa assessed the situation, decided it was too dangerous to run out in the lightning storm and start the generator. I didn’t worry; he kept a large water supply on hand, containers in the house and in all four sheds on the property. 

We lit the house with candles and kerosene lamps; I liked in particular the one my father always placed on the kitchen table during electrical outages. He poured tinted kerosene into the lamp’s cut-glass well; blue was my favorite and he used that tonight. A brass key controlled the wick and he showed us how to lower the flame so the lamp gave off a soft and peaceful light. 

For dinner, we ate apples, saltines spread with peanut butter, and whatever else we could scrounge without opening the refrigerator door and letting the cold air out. Whenever lightning flashed, I could hear my father cuss under his breath. He knew well what disaster those crooked bolts could spark.

We played four rounds of Go Fish after dinner. Papa wasn’t much good at it and lost every time. I thought that a curious thing because he often raked in a pile of chips when the neighbors came over to play poker. After a while, he told us it was bedtime and gave us both a flashlight and a small dry-cell lantern.

“But what if I can’t sleep?” I said.

“Just rest then, or read a book. The lantern's got a fresh battery, it should be bright enough. Don’t light any candles. I have to call the ranger station, check out a few things.” 

“The birds will be okay, right?” I asked. Currently we were rehabilitating a Cooper's hawk, two barn owls, and an ill-tempered crow. Yesterday, we'd taken them from the outdoor flight cages and into the clinic's smaller ones when the weather predicted dry lightning. Still, I felt scared that a bolt could somehow get in and sizzle them up like a flock of cartoon turkeys. Papa said they’d be fine.

When I got to my room, I latched the window, then pushed my bed away from it as far as I could, an effort because of the heavy wooden frame. Papa had warned us about being near windows during a lightning storm, but I had a bigger concern. A few months ago, Rondi and I sneaked out of bed and perched at the top of the stairs, pretending to be mountain climbers who’d summited. It was the best place for spying, too, and that night we were particularly lucky: Papa, Aunt Bliss, and Uncle Joe sat in the living room downstairs, drinking Old-Fashioneds and playing cribbage.

As usual when the drinks flowed and the conversation grew lively, they started to howl with laughter as each person contributed details of an obviously well-told story, this one about my grandmother. Apparently, when Grandmere was a robust young woman, she labored mightily during a fierce storm to give birth to my mother and Aunt Bliss. Grandmere had hollered to the midwife to crack open a window; she needed air.    

Without warning, a sphere of ball lightning no bigger than a piece of cotton tumbled over the windowsill. The ball lightning struck Grandmere smack dab on her rear end, the midwife having hauled her up into a squat because—unlike Bliss, already tucked in a pink wicker cradle, looking on as she daintily sucked her thumb—my lazy mother refused to emerge, so the midwife wanted gravity to take over. The lightning only startled Grandmere and didn’t hurt Mama at all, but definitely encouraged her: she popped right out. Mama then squalled for over an hour as if protesting the inconvenience of it all. 

“And that, my friends, is the reason Annie claimed her hair was so unruly and mine stayed flat and straight. A hefty dose of prenatal static electricity,” Bliss said. Uncle Joe bust out a guffaw; my father said they should raise their glasses in honor of Grandmere and her ordeal.

When I got up the nerve later to ask Aunt Bliss about that, she laughed and said it was a bunch of baloney and a figment of my mother’s silly imagination, but I suspected it was true and Aunt Bliss simply didn’t want me to think of Grandmere squatting in such an undignified position.

No matter what, I figured even if I shut the window, lightning was tricky and I didn’t want some weird scrap of it to come in and swat me too. I re-checked the window and settled under blankets. The wind picked up as thunder rolled and rolled; pine cones rattled away over shingles. Every now and again, branches thudded onto the roof, making me fearful of an entire tree coming down. I slept beneath the covers that night.

Next morning the lights clicked on and the well pump groaned back to life. Papa kept an eye on the scattered smoke plumes rising over the ridgeline just a few miles away. He put his pick, shovel, rake, and leather work gloves by the door in case of hot spots near our house. Lightning fires could smolder for a long time until they exploded to life. Except for a couple of Forestry Service engines parked in a shed near the ranger station, the closest trucks were in Porter. Uncle Joe, Papa, Aunt Bliss, and our neighbors always banded together first to start working the occasional grass fires. 

“You can’t just loll around waiting for the cavalry,” Papa had once told us. “Whole place could go up before the trucks got here.” But I grew cold with fear when I looked out the laundry room window and saw orange flames flare up on the ridgeline. If the fire moved down the mountain and barreled towards us, a small group of people wielding wet blankets and garden tools could never fight it. I turned and ran through the house to find my father.

He’d already seen the fire. He sat at a desk in the small closed-in porch behind the kitchen, speaking in an urgent voice to the ranger and fire station via phone and radio. I heard him say to whomever that the fire was likely to spread and we had to evacuate the birds, now. 

Aunt Bliss and Uncle Joe walked into the kitchen. Since they lived so close to us, they probably had seen the fire when we did. All of us moved quickly to a storage shed near the flight cages, took out transport carriers, grabbed leather gauntlets. Then quick to the clinic, not a minute to spare. We could hear the birds rustling around in the cages; they always sensed danger, grew scared and restless.

Everyone put on gauntlets and set to work putting each bird into its own transport carrier; the crow put up an unholy fight. We took the carriers to Papa's truck and helped him slide them carefully into the camper shell. Then Rondi and I dashed again to the clinic, filled a small cooler with ice cubes, loaded in bags of frozen mice and chopped meat, carried the cooler out together and shoved it onto the rumble seat of Papa’s truck. 

The sun glared like the eye of an angry red devil through increasingly smoky air. Rondi and I began to cough. Papa barked at us to get into the truck and we piled into the front seat. He told us to get bandanas from the glove box and cover our noses and mouths. Papa had already wrapped the lower half of his face in a bandana stenciled with the logo of Porter Hardware and Propane. When he pulled the bandana away and rolled down the window, I thought I could hear the approaching fire.

“Haul ass!” he bellowed to Joe and Bliss, already revving their truck behind us. He pulled the bandanna back up and gunned the engine, racing down the highway in the opposite direction of fire trucks emitting an ear-splitting wail.

We brought the birds to the animal hospital in Porter where they could be safely housed. Papa stayed with them; he told Joe and Bliss to take us over to the cafe and get something to eat, bring bring back a cold beer for himself and a couple of sandwiches. We ended up eating on benches outside the animal hospital because we reeked of sweat and smoke.

It took a week and a half for ground crews and air tankers to quench the fire; it scorched over five thousand acres of ridge, but never reached our house. During that time, Joe and Bliss took a room at the Motel 6, and we stayed with Mark, the local veterinarian, his wife Odette, and their two daughters, Lindy and Suzanne. The girls owned a big clutch of Barbies and dozens of Barbie outfits, but only one Ken. We wed every Barbie in turn to that Ken, since all the Barbies had individual wedding gowns and it seemed important to create a ceremony for each. Papa commented that Ken had better be nice to all those wives, because that much alimony would land him in the poorhouse.

When we finally got the all-clear and transported the birds back to the house, I thought they seemed grateful to get back into the flight cages; they soared right up to their perches. And I had never been so happy to see our house again, miraculously untouched by fire. 

After the wildfire’s embers cooled enough, Native Animal Rescue workers came to pick through the burn sites. Their white trucks pulled up in the driveway every few days. Inside the trucks, the same type of carriers we used, and inside those carriers, raptors with scorched plumage, with deep or shallow burns, some dead on arrival.

The stomach-turning smell of singed feathers filled the clinic’s three rooms as Papa and two interns from the University of the Cascades worked on the birds. One afternoon, after the interns drove into town to take a well-needed break, Rondi and I helped Papa clean up the clinic. A man from the rescue service walked to the door with a transport carrier containing a red-tailed hawk. As he opened the carrier, Papa shooed us away from it, but Rondi and I caught a sickening glimpse of a third degree burn right through the hawk's side. Papa told us to go back to the house, he needed to concentrate. 

Aunt Bliss had come over and cooked my favorite lunch, bright orange macaroni and cheese from a box, but Rondi and I could only manage a few bites after seeing the injured hawk. When we finished, Bliss told us to “occupy ourselves usefully.” She meant go read or clean up our rooms. Rondi and I went upstairs and tried to put together an odd puzzle featuring hens and kittens, but soon grew bored. Rondi grabbed a book and I strolled back down to the kitchen.

My aunt stood at the counter packing up Papa’s ancient steel lunchbox. The big dent in its side came from the time he went on a research trip to the Grand Canyon. Just as Papa settled down on a large, flat rock and unwrapped a tuna fish sandwich, the lunchbox slipped off the rock’s edge and headed straight for the Colorado River. Luckily, a boulder broke the fall. Papa hiked down to retrieve the lunchbox and declared it perfectly usable. The only damage was the dent and the fact that you had to give the lid a good slap to get it to line up with the latches. Aunt Bliss was in fact doing that very thing now. She looked up.

“Tansy, would you take this out to your dad? He hasn’t come in all day and I suspect he’s pretty hungry.”

She handed me the lunchbox and thanked me; I headed out. My father would likely be in the room where he did examinations and surgeries. I planned to put the lunchbox on the small table outside the door, alert Papa, then hightail it out of there. I didn’t want to see the wounded hawk again. 

When I reached the door of the surgery, I saw the man from Native Animal Rescue sealing a carton of heavy waxed cardboard. I felt sad; though the injury looked awful, I’d hope the hawk might make it. Still, I knew Papa’s rule, written in stone: it was cruel to let a hopelessly injured animal suffer. My father stood at the metal examination table, dropping an empty syringe into a sharps container. He stripped off his plastic gloves, brushed back a lock of his black hair, and glanced over his shoulder at me. I held up the lunchbox.

“Thanks, Tansy. You can put that out on the table. Appreciate it.” The rescue worker hefted the carton, said it was a shame, that was a beautiful hawk; Papa and I agreed. The man took the carton away to hand it over in town to Fish and Game.

Papa went to the enamel sink and washed his hands. 

“You might want to look at the long-eared owl. She’s up and about,” he said in the soft voice that signaled he was tired.

I went into the side room and walked up to the cages, whispered nice words to the sharp-shinned hawk and the owl, the only birds who’d survived so far. The hawk looked bright-eyed and alert, and the owl sidled along on her perch. Those were good signs.

Just as I re-entered the surgery, Betty, a rescue worker familiar to us, brought a carrier in.

“Got a few more for you, Rick,” she said. “Sorry. We found them about an hour ago.”

My father put on another pair of plastic gloves. I wondered why there was only one carrier if the woman said “a few.” Papa and Betty unloaded three small towels and gently unwrapped them.

“Aw, shit,” Papa said. I edged near and my heart began to pound, because I saw these were Porter Gray owls, a female and a male with ugly raw patches showing through silvery plumage. The last towel held four small owlets, their downy coats singed right off. He checked them at length, said there was no way, their injuries were not survivable.

Until now, Papa felt confident that that the fire hadn’t reached any Porter Gray nesting sites. He’d helped to bring back the species from extinction by joining, and in a few years, directing a captive breeding program at the University of the Cascades. They’d captured twenty owls as a breeding group; Papa estimated at the time that perhaps twenty more still remained in forest habitats. Though the Porter Gray owls proved hard to breed, their numbers eventually went up and they had started to be released back into the wild over the last two years. They were still what Papa called “critically endangered,” and likely to remain so for a long time. Papa was proud of the breeding program, called it his life’s work, hated the logging that had destroyed so much of the old-growth forests where the owls had once thrived. 

“Do you know if these came from the same nest?” he asked Betty.

“We found them all together,” she said. “Three-quarters up a Doug fir. It looked fine until we inspected it. Core was nothing but smoldering embers. Luck of the draw that we noticed the owls at all.” Porter Gray owls were secretive, sought out hollows deep inside trees. The loss of even a few owls meant a big setback; a mating pair and chicks, even more. And I knew without asking that the fire had probably taken others.

"Listen, can I bring them in tomorrow?” he asked. “I want to record their injuries.” Betty agreed and left the room. After a time, I could hear her truck start up.

My father asked me to get specimen containers. I brought them over and stood next to him, saw the female owl open and shut its beak once; the owlets and the male stayed motionless except for the rise and fall of their chests as they took tiny sips of air.

“Stay with them for a minute, Tansy,” he said, then went to the glass-front cabinet which held medical supplies; he filled syringes, came back, and put them on the table. 

“You can go back to the house now; I’ll be in soon,” he said. I had seen the procedure once before and told him I wanted to stay. He’d often said to me, when I couldn’t figure something out, just take what you think is the next best step. Standing next to Papa seemed that way.

“You sure?” he said. I nodded.

“All right, then.” 

He sat down in his chair, slid his left hand under the towel beneath the female bird, made little soothing sounds as he pushed a delicate needle into its flank. He worked the row, being particularly gentle with the fragile owlets. After making sure the owls had slipped away, he labeled each container, put the owls inside one by one, shut the steel lids tight. 

Papa asked me how I was, seeing all that. I thought myself hollow inside but there was a heaviness, too; I told him I didn't quite know how to describe it. He said he’d talk to me about it more after supper. Then he rolled back his chair, took his gloves off, slapped them angrily on the table.

“Tansy, I need some time to myself,” he said. “Got to take notes.” I hesitated, thinking he was somehow mad at me. He noticed and took me in his arms for just a moment.

“That’s my brave gal,” he said. “Now scoot. I’ll be in later.”

I walked out through the surgery's open door, but looked back after I crossed the threshold. My father sat with his back to me beneath the surgical lamp, staring at the scarlet container holding all the syringes he had used that week. He took in a ragged breath, let go with a sharp exhalation.

“What a goddamned pisshole world this is,” he said to empty air, then grew quiet, and still.

I knew when my father’s silence was not really silence, so I headed for the house, leaving him to gather himself unto himself, as he liked to say, in that harsh white light that surrounded him like a circle of unsparing grace.

Tansy Corvus Wilder

Notes From a Childhood Among Owls