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Tu Hija Dice Adios
As far as I can remember, Fred was the dispatcher at Channel Islands National Park Headquarters when my dad started working there. I must have been ten or eleven years old, a newly burgeoning Park Brat. I don't remember him well: impressions of a smiling and slightly craggy brown face, iron-colored greying hair. But he always acknowledged me warmly and would say something like, "Hey, mija! How's it going?" It was a belonging thing during a time in my life when I felt like I didn't quite fit anywhere outside the tiny nucleus of family.
Anacapa Island, the part of the park where my dad initially worked, was a place for me. I liked to think I owned the island-- I knew nearly every inch of trail over its quarter square mile surface. I could race past the island's daily batch of arriving visitors climbing up the hundred plus stairs from the boat landing to the trail head, smugly superior in an eleven-year-old way to those interlopers. But whether I owned the island or it owned me, didn't matter, I had a place whose geography was as intimate as that of my skin. The island and the park headquarters were constants that remained through high school, but began to erode after I left for college and the Pacific Northwest.
Another little piece eroded away. Lung cancer. Hey, Fred, tu hija te falta.
(Please excuse the crap Spanish that I haven't used since freshman year of college, but it seemed fitting.)
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