Umunhum

Every so often, I’ll run across a news story like this, and I will immediately spend the next few hours Googling the words “Umunhum” and “Almaden,” absorbed in the discovery of other people’s words and pictures about a place where I once lived.

The words, although signifying the same place (Almaden AFS on Mt. Umunhum near New Almaden, California), hold very different meanings in my mind—“Almaden,” the designation for one of the worst episodes of my childhood, a dark place that birthed night terrors and murderous rages for the rest of my life, and “Umunhum,” the indifferent, mystic location high above the civilized world, a place populated by wild boars, Apollo capsules, UFOs, crazed albino families, forgotten hippies sheltered in immobile VW wagons buried deep in the back hills, pot farms, and lost pets.

“Almaden” is a place I can’t discuss, but “Umunhum” is a place of continual fascination for me, not least of all because it is a place I once lived that is dead, or dying; abandoned by all residents in 1980 and declared a public hazard due to its high concentrations of asbestos and lead paint; surrounded by intensely paranoid private property owners who swoop down on trespassers with threats of gun violence; a mountaintop capped with a sad, grey monolith visible for miles, crumbling beneath its own irrelevance and periodic earthquakes that further destabilize an already precarious collection of empty buildings.

It’s difficult to describe the feeling of seeing buildings, streets, homes in which you once slept overgrown by trees and brush, weeds poking up through cracks in roads on which no one travels, paint (toxic paint, at that) flaking off the building that you once leaned against for support as you peered into the twilight sky for a glimpse of a moving star, a capsule filled with Americans and Soviets clasping gloved hands and sharing Tang in orbit above you.

I’ve been to ghost towns and experienced the eerie thrill of kicking dust on some ancient home, wondering if anyone might still live there as a means of escape from the rest of the world. I’ve even been to a ghost town named after a dead relative, a man whose name was so memorably unique that it only seemed obvious to use it for the town itself.

But I’m still relatively young, certainly not old enough to have seen cities from my past fall to dust. The first home I remember living in has since been destroyed, mowed down along with its surrounding orchards to make way for a fast-food outlet and a tire store, along with their requisite parking spaces. But the towns and cities I’ve lived in still exist and, as far as I can surmise, will always be there. Except Umunhum. Umunhum is gone.



Of course the mountain will always be there and I imagine there will always be people who find its relative inaccessibility comforting. But the place where I lived, the Air Force Station (too small to be a “base”), has become a curiosity for mountain bikers and hikers daring enough to bypass the multiple warnings and barbed gates that surround it.

“Umunhum” comes from a Native American language that, fittingly enough, is itself on its way toward extinction. The word translates roughly as “place of the hummingbirds,” and the sound of the word in the mouth mimics the vibrato of the tiny bird’s wings. I don’t recall ever seeing any hummingbirds while I lived there; perhaps they got out early, before the infusion of toxins into their environment, before the invasion of rotating radar antennas, screaming military brats, or rowdy parties at the Officer’s Club.

There are times when I wish I had gotten out early, or had never arrived at all. It was a place that nearly destroyed my family, not because of any inherent danger in the place itself (other than its unique way of making one feel small and exposed; a dozen or so families huddled against the side of a mountain waiting for missiles to show up on green screens in dark buildings). Nor is Umunhum entirely at fault for the person I became after having lived there, a person easily lost in non-existent worlds, who flinches at unexpected noises like a war veteran, and who will be forever haunted by the visions (real or imagined) outside his bedroom window at night.

But there are aspects of Umunhum that I can’t imagine not having in my life—the way my valley-dwelling friends would look up at the mountain in disbelief when I told them I lived there, the way I taught myself to read in a bus filled each day with screaming teenagers and hung-over GI’s, the way it felt to rely on a community of less than 100 people for everything you needed.

So these things remain. And then I find the pictures some biker has posted on his blog, and it’s like looking at your best friend lying in a hospital bed, head shaved, tubes in his throat and veins, waiting for a switch to be turned, the plug to be pulled.

One day I will go back there. I will climb the gates and dodge the freaks and if the government-built duplex I once lived in is still standing, I will burn the rotting fucker to the ground, and I will hope the winds are high that day so the flames catch and the other buildings burn and the children’s park where I read Peanuts collections and Oz books aloud burns and the carport where I played “Kick the Can” burns and the Officer’s Club burns and the mountain itself is consumed by all the loneliness and confusion and anger and disease that was left behind by the stupid, clueless fuckups who once lived there. And then instead of watching the place die a slow, forgotten death for the rest of my life, I will be able to say that I killed it and that it deserved to die at the hands of someone who wishes he could forget he ever lived in such a hopeless, beautiful wreck of a place.

There is a picture of a hummingbird burned into my back. Its wings are poised in flight and will never rest.