Dirt

Written Fall 2002

In the Ninth grade my family and I moved from a nice sophisticated city to a filthy town that I would have described as one street, old and dirt. How could I deal with living in such a place?

I grew up in Redlands, California. It’s an old classy city with a lot of historical sites. The street that I lived on was Casas De Leon, a friendly cul-de-sac; I moved there when I was about five years old. There were a lot of kids about my age that I could play with. We would ride bikes and play hide and go seek. During my elementary and junior high years I had two really good friends, Kaylynn, my best friend, and Allison. We had a lot of fun together. I remember the three of us got together and we decided to make a fort out of an orange tree in the backfield behind our houses. Using the donations of wood from our friendly neighbors, we made an awesome fort. It had a bridge going across the ditch by the tree, stairs, and old sheets as walls. It was a nice fort, until a mean lady that owned property near our wonderful fort, tore it down! But that was alright because we could do other things, like making up a new game or playing old ones, hide and go seek being my personal favorite, or another thing that we could do was ride our bikes to the grocery store down the street and buy candy.

I loved my neighborhood. It was one of those neighborhoods that you would see on family television, it was the kind neighborhood where if a lady saw that one of her neighbors were outside, she would go out of her way to go outside and greet them. That’s how nice everyone was. I loved it when all of the neighbors got together at that yearly block party that would occur just before school started. At the block party neighbors would catch up on events that they might have missed, over a nice glass of lemonade and a brownie on the side, while kids with ice-cream covered faces would run around in their wet bathing suits. But before all that would happen, there would be the much-anticipated talent show. I remember one year Kaylynn and I did an act together to the song “Pretty Woman.” She, being dressed up like a boy with a mascara-made beard and moustache, lip-synced to the song. While I, dressed up as Julia Roberts, with the big red hair and gobs of make-up, strutted around her throughout the whole song. I would pretend to not notice her character, until the end when I chased her throughout the whole audience. We got a lot of laughs that afternoon.

Well, the summer before my ninth grade year, my mom’s health wasn’t doing to well. You see, my mom has had a bad asthma condition, and that summer it happened to get worse. Sometimes my mom wouldn’t be able to breathe that well and would start to wheeze; it was awful. My mom said that it was because of the smog and that the only way to help it was to move up to a higher elevation. I couldn’t believe it. Move, from my home, but where? My mom and my step-dad, Elery, were thinking about a city right next to Redlands, Yucaipa, which is in the low mountains.

Now Yucaipa isn’t a nice old town with a lot of historical sites. It’s a “Hicksville” town that runs on, basically, one street, Yucaipa Boulevard. Along the boulevard one will find old run down buildings, which look like they could fall over if somebody sneezed wrong. One could imagine a bunch of hicks dressed in dusty overalls walking around barefoot in their dirty town. Yucaipa was dirt; at least that’s how I saw it. When I was a kid, I hated going to Yucaipa. I remember when I was about 12 years old we would have to go there to pick up my sister from Girl Scouts. I would go with Elery, as he would drive up the boulevard, to this big Baptist Church. While he was driving, I would look out the window and wonder why the entire town looked like it was built on one street. Then I would look at the old run down, paint chipped motels, advertising their pride and joy of color T.V. I would also look at the small “Hicksville” stores, which I imagined sold old auto parts for a dollar. Then I would look at the fields of just sticks and dirt, and say, “Yucaipa is so boring!!!” I couldn’t see how anyone could have fun living there.

Well, in ninth grade I enrolled into Mesa Grande Academy, a school near the place where we were going to move. It was a small school, and it wasn’t anything that I wasn’t used to. However, there were a few things that I wasn’t used to, like the school having a lot of flies, yes flies. I remember thinking it was disgusting to go into the bathroom and have them flying around in circles above my head. If that wasn’t enough to gross me out, in the morning I would be greeted by this awful smell. To me it smelled like bird poop and kitchen cleaner. When I asked what that horrible smell was, I was told that there were chicken farms practically surrounding the school. Yuck! I couldn’t believe that we were going to leave Redlands to be stuck with this!

We finally moved to Yucaipa in November near Thanksgiving. It was a nice house, we had a beautiful view of the mountains, and we could see the stars at night, but that didn’t mean it was my home. I remember once I woke up thinking that the light outside was the light in the hallway of my old house, so I would feel like I was in my old room again, but I would be upset to realize that I was in my new house, not my home. I missed my home, my room, the color of my pink walls and the big window seat that would let light in during a sunny day. I wanted to move back.

I guess that I am not telling you the bright side. I did get used to my smelly school and I made a friend or two down the street. But towards the end of the year I felt a little depressed. I wanted to go to Arrowhead Christian Academy, the school that I was supposed to go to in Redlands, which was cleaner and smelled nicer than Mesa Grande. I also felt that I didn’t have real friends; I mean sure I had a few friends that I hung out with at school, but private schools are so small that if “you aren’t ‘in’ then you are ‘out,’” there isn’t an in-between. So that meant that I would only have one or two friends that I would only hang out with at school. One of my friends, Michelle, lived in Palm Springs, which was about forty-five minutes away, so we would never hang out after school. My old neighbors lived twenty minutes away so in order to see them I would have to get a ride from either my mom or my friend’s mom if either one was available. The kids down the street where sort of immature for me, so I wouldn’t really bother hanging out with them. All in all, I felt alone.

I talked to my oldest sister, Julie, about it and she suggested that I should try out the public school, Yucaipa High School. She told me that when she went to public school she noticed that the people there were a lot nicer than in private school. She told me stories about going to football games, dances, and meeting new friends. I thought that sounded fun, I was sick of being around snobs, and what a better way to be freed from them? So I talked to my mom about it and she was kind of hesitant about it, because of the stereotype of public school being a bad place were the students have spiked hair, a nose ring and a cigarette between two of their fingers. Julie and I convinced her that it wasn’t like that and she finally agreed.

After I started going to Yucaipa High School, my feelings about Yucaipa changed. When I went to Yucaipa High, everyone there seemed so nice an inviting. I got to know a lot of people, and it turned out that some of the people that I met there lived really close to me, that they were practically my neighbors. I joined the swim team with one of my neighbors and that got me really involved with the school. My senior year I stayed on the swim team and became really close friends with a teammate, Melissa. She was in a band, The Let Downs, with my boyfriend (and best friend) Mark. Melissa gave me the ‘high honor’ of being the band’s Groupie.

I joined this huge youth group at First Baptist Church of Yucaipa; that same big Baptist Church that I had dreaded driving to. I really liked the youth group and I really got to know my youth pastor, Ron. He made a big impact on my life; in the way he showed Jesus’ love. I got really involved with the youth group by doing activities, and going on trips with them. Through those trips I got to know my friends, and my boyfriend a lot better. I was also able to build new friendships. I had fun with my friends and I realized that I have plenty of friends that I would have never met, if I had stayed in Redlands. The cool thing was that they would let me be who I wanted to be, and they liked me for who I was. I didn’t have to try to fit in.

I got to know more people in that old town. Suddenly that old dirt town didn’t seem too much like dirt. I started to love that town, everything about it started to make me laugh, from the old couples holding hands, to the hicks down the street, to the homemade speed limit signs, and to the woman fixing her car in a big white shirt and a green bathing suit. I even started to appreciate the old run down, paint chipped motels, my favorite being the Yu-Cal Motel, which is a pride and joy in the town, because it has HBO. I noticed that the small “Hicksville” stores weren’t as despicable as I had imagined, and the fields of sticks and dirt had a sort-of beauty to them.

Whenever I go back to Redlands and pass by my old neighborhood I see how much has gone down hill. Whenever I see my best friend of my younger years, I notice that she has changed dramatically. I realize that we went our separate ways. I was sad to hear that families were spilt up, and that some moved away. I also heard that the yearly block party was said to not be the same anymore. Everything seemed to have changed. It seems to me that I “got out of there” just in time. How could I ever consider moving back?

My attitude changed when, I finally realized that Yucaipa was my home; all that I had to do was to see that it was a fun “Hicksville” town, not a boring one. I learned to appreciate what I was stuck with. I also learned that even though Yucaipa is just “dirt,” there is something in “dirt” that made me love it.