I was up early to cut the grass before it got too hot. It was in the low 90s, not too bad yet, but the cooler it was, the higher the humidity. By the time I pulled the mower out of the shed, sweat had glued my T-shirt to my chest. A few feet away, I hit a fire ant mound. About fifty of the ornery insects bit me. I sprinted to the hose—a jet of water is the only way to remove them. Red dots marked the stings on my ankles and legs. In a week they’d turn into huge whiteheads and itch for another month.

I mowed the path that weaved through my naturescape field. Great patches of wildflowers were pressed down where coyotes had passed that night. Every spring a few yearlings searching for their coyote fortunes went through my field, but this looked like a mass migration.

Working along the fence, I watched bulldozers across the street “clearing” the prairie for a 1,500-house development. That explained the coyote refugees. It wasn’t just yearlings, but whole packs looking for habitat. It also explained the decaying coyote corpses hanging from my neighbor’s fence. When I moved in he’d said, “Only way to keep varmints out is to shoot ’em and hang ’em for t’others to see. Might even work on Californians.” Then he laughed and cuffed me on the shoulder as though he were kidding.

I decided to move away from California while sitting in traffic on Highway 24. My affection for Walnut Creek, the town where I grew up, had rotted—too crowded, too expensive, too few opportunities, too frustrating. The million-dollar houses on the hillside over the tunnel taunted me. Through the tunnel, an hour later, houses on other hills goaded me. No one living on those hills had worked harder than I had.

Why couldn’t my kid have a backyard and a dog?

I suppose it was genetic, that primitive hunger that drives yearling coyotes to leave the safety of their pack and make their own way. Or maybe it was the vapid stupidity of a native Californian spoiled by the beauty, the comfort, the benevolence, the generous plurality and innovative spirit of the Golden State.

In any case, 15 years later there I was mowing the grass on my country acre southwest of Dallas. The dogs stretched out in the shade.

With the grass cut, I went inside. My daughter, Heather, now a senior in high school, stared at her notebook on the couch, not writing or turning pages, just staring. She said, “I can’t even believe it.”

I said, “What’s up?”

“In science class a bunch of people said there were never any dinosaurs.” Her eyes opened wide. “Yeah! They said that God set the fossils out to test their faith.”

This sort of thing happens in the Bible belt so I wasn’t as surprised as I was disappointed. “How did your teacher handle it?”

“He had everyone who didn’t believe in evolution stand on one side of the classroom and everyone who did stand on the other.” She tossed her notebook aside and added, “I was the only one standing on the evolution side.”

Picturing Heather alone on one side of a classroom glaring across at her peers drowned my disappointment in a sea of pride.

Months later, flying back to California for Christmas, the plane ducked below a layer of clouds just over Mount Diablo. The mountain stood glorious and solemn in her winter green, her foothills sheltering carefully parceled suburbs. Just over Ransom Point—a modest peak named after my great-great-great-grandfather—Heather whispered, “The family mountain.” The plane banked into a turn toward SFO and I got a perfect view of Shell Ridge. When I was a kid I knew every cow path, every deer trail and every coyote den on that hill.

When we returned to Texas, we planned our escape: Heather applied to three U.C. campuses, I put our house up for sale and looked for a job in the Bay Area and an apartment in Mount Diablo’s foothills—the rent would be three times my mortgage payment in Texas.

The night before graduation, I worried. I went outside and looked at my 3br/2ba house on a wooded acre. Listed at $130,000, it still lingered on the market. How could I pay a Texas mortgage, Bay Area rent and Heather’s out-of-state tuition? The air was thick and warm. I walked up the street, trying to outpace the frustration creeping up my spine. I felt like I had that day on Highway 24.

A mile up the road, I stared at the street a few steps ahead, my neck bent and taut, sweat dripping from my brow. Then, under the only streetlight for miles, something caught my eye. An old black coyote, his tail broken and bent in the center, limped forward. He stopped a few feet away. His eyes reflected the yellow light and his ears pointed straight up. At first, it felt as though he were demanding I step aside, but then his ears relaxed and I got it.

A rush of exhilaration washed away my worldly frustration. That coyote knew better than me. His home is the Texas prairie, mine is the foothills of Mount Diablo. He cocked his head as though wishing me farewell and lumbered by, a step to my side. It resonated in my chest, bright as a sunset beyond the Golden Gate and loud as the Black Hole after a Raider touchdown. Home.

As though that old coyote had given his blessing, the day after Heather collected her diploma our house sold. We packed our stuff into a rented truck and headed west. We sang “Going to California” from Wichita Falls to Amarillo and “California Here We Come” from Albuquerque to Phoenix.

At the Arizona-California border a thundercloud poured pint-sized drops of rain, but only on the Arizona side. The sun was shining in California. We stopped, got out of the truck and, standing in California, looked back.

I turned to Heather and said, “Look at us, we are literally somewhere over the rainbow.”

——————————————
Ransom Stephens is a writer, physicist, public speaker and the author of Fade to Pink: From Goth to Graduation (forthcoming), the true story of a single father and his adolescent daughter. Visit him at www.ransomstephens.com.

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