One of our most frequent trips when I was a child was to visit my mother’s cousin, Isma, and her husband Tim in Taft, California. We would not have called this a vacation, because vacations were for people wealthier than us. But we did make trips, fairly frequently.
Taft is a small town on the south-western edge of the San Joaquin Valley. At one time it may have been a sort of oil boom town. When I went there as a child it was surrounded by deserted oil drilling rigs. It was before portable rigs on the backs of trucks were used. They had to build the tall wooden towers to drill. Some towers were still standing, some were fallen over. When you got near them the smell of creosote and oil was over-powering.
Isma (said: “is-me”, rhyming with “kiss me”) and Tim Fanning lived on the very edge of Taft, which, amazingly enough is still the very edge of Taft. Their “backyard” was the unobstructed desert. Tim Fanning worked for an oil company, maybe Standard Oil or Chevron. He was almost the stereotype of a grizzled desert rat, skinny, suntanned, hands with so many scars and broken parts it was amazing they functioned. I don’t know where Isma and Tim met. They had been in Taft long before my parents came to California. As best I can judge, Isma was about five years older than my mother, Trellis, but Tim seemed maybe ten years older than Isma. Trellis was always very close to Isma. Trellis called Isma her cousin, but I don’t know how they were cousins. (I suspect through the Harris side of the family, but I will have to check it out.)
When we traveled to Taft we drove in our car. It was a day there and a day back, driving. We always stopped at a restaurant in Paso Robles which had a tree growing in the center of the restaurant. I always anticipated that stop. It could be a warm drive because cars had no air conditioning. I would sit in the back seat with both windows open. We carried a cooler of ice water, and I would get a cup of ice water and a wash rag and make my own air conditioning with the wet wash rag and the air coming in the open windows.
When we were in Taft, Trellis always spent a lot of time chatting with Isma about family stuff. If Tim wasn’t working he and O.J. would go fishing on the coast (Pismo Beach, maybe?) or catch abalone. They would come back with lots of abalone shells. They also went out in the hills and hunted jack rabbits.
As a small child I mostly hung around the house, but when I got older I was allowed to head out into the desert and explore. There were deserted rigs very close by, and they were the most interesting places to explore. The sand was soaked with oil around where the drills had been, great for poking and digging, with thoughts of turning up another La Brea Tar Pit.
There was also a swimming pool owned by the oil company Tim worked for, and we went swimming there a few times. It was a real swimming pool, but, for some reason, the decks were wooden slats rather than cement. Very strange.
Isma had long hair which she parted in the middle and braided into two braids which she then wrapped across the top of her head. I loved to watch her brush her hair out at night.
But my strongest and fondest memory of these trips is that Isma and Tim had a screened-in porch across the front of their house, and I got to sleep on the porch at night. The had a swamp cooler on the house, and it actually may have been cooler inside the house than outside, but I loved sleeping on that porch. There was a simple metal cot with slightly scratchy flannel blankets. You could hear all the desert noises, see the incredible stars and smell the desert, even with an occasional waft of oil and creosote.
Isma called me “Tita-Beth” because when we first came to visit her that was the way I said my name (Aneta Elizabeth). She always called me that, even as an adult.
In the photos, I am probably two years old. I remember that dog, though not it’s name. I do not remember the doll.
June 29, 2021
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