Fess Parker

Fess Parker died.  And if you can't remember Fess Parker, fess up.  You're either too young to know who played Davy Crockett in the 1950s movies and TV series.  Or you're too old to remember anything.  Either way, you're probably not worried.  You don't believe in the Curse of Fess Parker.

Davy Crockett came at me on the big screen of the Fox Theatre in downtown Banning, California.  And it was, no doubt about it, the downtown, relatively speaking, to someone who lived in no town at all.  There was much to be said for residing in the scenic desert beyond the town, if you were an adult, but for a kid the experience was as raw as the desert winds that regularly blew down our TV antenna, which worked poorly anyway, and made the glowing screen of the Fox Theatre all the more impressive, not to mention, essential.  

And also made the intersection of Ramsay Street and San Gorgonio Ave. seem to a seven-year-old something along the lines of Times Square.  Where those streets crossed, Banning reached its urban intensity.  At some point in the late 1950s, the town even installed a traffic signal.  It was the only stoplight in a good 40 mile stretch of Riverside County, and its arrival marked a sort watershed moment.  The lights went from green to amber to red, and did so 24 hours a day, devoid of human intervention, right in the center of town, causing cars to stop and even to wait.  It was something to behold.

So was Fess Parker.  As Davy Crockett, he went at injuns, outlaws and other nogoodniks with a fervor and a success rate that one could only envy.  He wrestled wolves to defeat.  He grabbed two attackers at once, handily defeating both, never losing his cool or his coonskin hat.  The latter became a national rage, a must-have for any kid who was anyone, which I wasn't, being a doctor's son, holed up at the edge of town, and looking for love in all the wrong places.  Or maybe looking for life.  And shifting uneasily as Fess Parker went about his daring do.

I couldn't quite get into it.  Though Davy Crockett, on big screen or little, was a howling, foot-stamping, popcorn-throwing success.  Something about the films bothered me.  I liked the antics.  But it all seemed too fast.  Events crowded, one upon another, and although I never lost the plot, I lost the enjoyment.  Lost in the dark, I shrank into my seat, feeling foolish in the grandeur of the Banning Fox, all red velvet curtains and recessed lighting.  Even worse was a sort of sequel in the genre, 'Old Yeller,' another fast-paced adventure flick about a frontier dog.  Its breathless plot left me in the dust, confused and prematurely detached for an eight-year-old.  I had no words for such experiences.  With home life falling apart and everything sad and scary, movie plots were the least of my problems.  

At least, following her divorce, my mother did move to the beach.  The mornings materialized out of the fog in Santa Barbara.  From my mother's backyard, whales spouted en route to or from Mexico, their watery spurts as routine as the small boats that harvested kelp just beyond them.  On summer visits, I was far from the desert, far from small-town life and in a sort of cultural mecca.  Films and concerts and plays, not to mention almost daily trips to the beach.  Sometimes with my brother.  Sometimes alone.  I surfed with an inflatable raft, had a hamburger in the snack bar and stared at the occasional stingray flapping beneath me through the waves.  I was not alone, but lonely.  So my mother suggested Joe.

Somehow he got there.  Joe hailed from the same desert town but had miraculously escaped to Los Angeles.  Somehow he got himself to Santa Barbara.  Here the broken link in my chain of memory leaves a blank space.  Did he take the bus?  Did his sister drive him on her way to a pre-Europe meeting at the nearby university?  Whatever.  He was there.  He and I were going to the beach, flopping in the surf, reading and facing the future side by side.  In retrospect, we must have instinctively sensed a similarity of worldview, naturally ironic, incurably urban and Jewish.  But this is an adult insight.  At the time, we were what we were, hanging out on the beach, restless in our different ways.

Having been to summer camp, I had acquired barely enough outdoor lore to go adventuring.  The problem was where.  Santa Barbara was a town.  I was a kid.  But at Arroyo Burro State Beach, my eyes kept gazing up the coast.  I had a plan.  No, not really.  I had a dreamy plan, absent any real knowledge.  I was determined.  Time spent in the home of my distant, turbulent mother, saddened and disturbed me.  Besides, Joe was around.  We could tackle my plan together.  I explained my idea, my mother nodded and agreed.  I would call her at the other end, and she would meet me.  Meet us.  Joe and me.  No way I would do this thing alone.  No need, either.  Joe was game.  And one afternoon, we were off.

Moving straight up the coast.  Like Cortez.  Or Magellan.  Sir Francis Drake.  Explorer guys, Joe and I, walking straight up the coast, all the way from our familiar beach at Arroyo Burro, along the ocean and its cliffs, five miles, maybe ten.  To where the bluffs stopped and a coastal valley would open its arms to us, as well as the town's university, airport and budding northern subdivisions.

Quite splendid marching along the ocean, passing the high bluffs.  The beaches stretched on and on, wide expanses of empty sand.  The carcass of a rotting seal captured our attentions.  But only briefly, the haze of flies and the stench moving us on, not to mention the disturbing sense of death.  Why worry with so much ahead?  The sands widened, narrowed, widened again.  The bluffs rose.  I kept staring at the top, wondering if those were homes.  There was definitely something up there.  The neighborhood of Hope Ranch, known for its upscale inhabitants, big homes, trees and winding streets without signs.  From the beach, there was almost nothing to see, except for the occasional cabana erected at the cliffs' base, canvas flapping its stripes in the afternoon breeze.  A mile further, someone's private funicular railway inclined up the bluff.  People clearly came down to the beach, and did so in style, just not today.  Joe and I trudged on.

We rounded another bend where the cliffs moved down to meet us.  They created a narrow passage, a slim strip of beach so tight that the surf broke just meters away.  With the sands retreating to a sort of isthmus, Joe and I found ourselves climbing up and over the coastal rocks.  Increasingly wet rocks, it turned out, waves and spray battering to our left, westward in the general direction of, say, Honolulu or Yokohama.  This feeling of vastness, the oceanic feeling described by Freud, was gradually encroaching upon us.  There was more and more of it, wet, rolling and spraying.  It was the most obvious thing, the thing that separates the seafarer from the landlubber, the thing from which hundreds of California motels, restaurants and bars derive their names: the tides.  They were moving in.

Joe and I were moving up, scrambling along the base of the cliffs.  Hard to say about the tide.  How much did it move in and how fast and what was ahead of us?  Naturally, I had no map.  Mobile phones hadn't been invented.  No landmarks.  No sense of how much further we were going or whether the ocean would swamp us before we got there.  No sense in panicking, or, more exactly, displaying a sense of panic.  Which was rising like the tides.  No end, I could see no end to this, Joe and I moving north, the Pacific Ocean moving east, the latter being considerably larger, more indifferent and unpredictable than us, if one was to believe sea shanties.

I kept telling Joe to hurry.  Not that I could hurry any faster than he could.  But it seemed like the thing to do.  Hurry.  Outrun the tide.  Our progress kept slowing, saltwater advancing, we picking our way along rocks and slanting slopes, the sun descending in its leisurely summer way.  On and on.  Come on, Joe, hurry.  I tripped over a chaparral branch.  Hurry.  Another corner, and the sands widened, the cliffs opened and we came upon university kids sunning themselves across an estuary.  A Convair started up its piston engines at the airport.  Joe and I, giddy with survival, walked up the road to the terminal.  A man in a tie behind the United Airlines booth, and it was little more than that, gave me change so I could call my mother.  I told him about our hike.  Joe told him about getting stuck in the tides.  Oh, the man said, counting out his dimes, that's the Fess Parker estate.

We waited for my mom in the parking lot.  Fess Parker had tried to drown us, I was convinced.  I kept these thoughts to myself.  Fess Parker kept to himself, that was clear enough.  Although over the years, he put his name on several Santa Barbara hotels and his signature on countless land deals.  He was briefly an actor, perennially a businessman.  And what was I?  What I was on that day and every day since.  A survivor.