The Late, Great Golden State
by Leslie Carol Roberts
On this morning, clouds the color of faded denim pad the sky, a wintry San Francisco sky, and it is the perfect sky for the work that lay ahead. I put on some Dwight Yoakum, he of the Bakersfield sound, crooning about the late great, golden state. It was a day set aside to get my desk dug out from under heaving piles of ephemera, a never-ending story of my life. Me and my love for ephemera. I was halfway into a box called LCR High School when I came across a pink leather diary with a brass lock and tiny key and a larger scrapbook. California: Chowchilla, Fresno. It was overflowing with newspaper clippings, a flyer about tsunami threats in Santa Barbara, diner receipts. I had written in a calligraphic style on the cover, adding a large colon and in all caps: THE KIDNAPPING OF AN ENTIRE BUSLOAD OF SCHOOLCHILDREN. I sat on the floor of my writing room and gently eased open the cover.
It is July, 1976, and my sister Beth and I are standing in front of the soda machine by the Holiday Inn pool in Fresno, California. It is hot, clear, and the rough cement is heated to the point where we need to shift, foot to foot. The machine is unlocked and ajar.
There is a metal box screwed into the door filled to the top with change. No one is watching. Our white, two-piece bathing suits are dripping wet and in the arid Fresno summer they dry very quickly, much faster than at home in Maryland or at the Jersey shore.
Some fool has left this machine open, change box out for us to grab. I am just about to boldly grab a quarter from the pile of coins when the vending machine man rounds the corner behind us, straining to push a handcart of soda cans, Coca Cola, Fresca, Fanta, Mountain Dew. He doesn’t think I am about to swipe change and some sodas for later.
Instead he greets us merrily and assures us, setting down the handcart and wiping his brow, that the machine will be restocked soon and we can have the sodas we must really need on such a hot day. He wipes his face again on the sleeve of his shirt. The huge keyring that he left in the soda machine door gets snapped back onto his belt when the restocking is done. Jangling, he walks away.
It was a close call, this near theft. My sister has already walked away and is smoothing more baby oil on her arms. We are both determined to return to Maryland with real California tans, hair sun lightened, helped along by a product called Sun In.
I slowly walk back to the lounge chairs around the pool, whose rubbery plastic slats will stick to my skin if not carefully covered with multiple, small Holiday Inn towels, white with a green stripe stating the chain’s name. They are thin, stiff, and scratchy, these towels, but the effect is better than the plastic.
The Holiday Inn is the only motel my father will stay in when he travels for work. And he only travels for work, except when we go to the Jersey Shore. He takes all of us on work trips about once a year, interviewing people for the column he writes for The National Observer, a sister paper of The Wall Street Journal. We go to the newly built Disney World in Florida and we are greeted by groups of Disney staff, whom my father derisively refers to as “flacks.” We take the Amtrak Auto Train from Virginia to Florida and back and we are treated to steaks and extra sodas at dinner, my father telling us not to accept any other “perks.” So I come to know travel and vacations as a time when you are after a story, when you work as a writer. This lens about travel, the working and writing about everywhere you go, will have a profound effect on my life and my marriages and my kids. This working and writing about the world.
I stretch out on my lounge chair while Beth jumps back in the pool. She does not put her head under, instead treads water and squints. Her chair is surrounded by four Harlequin romances, books she consumes like air.
There is no one but us sunning and swimming at the Fresno Holiday Inn on this day, nor any of the days we are here. My mother spends the afternoons upstairs in the motel room with our two younger sisters, Amy and Jackie. They are four and seven. They still take naps. Beth is seventeen and I am fifteen, but I am very small for my age so I look more like twelve.
I put my hands behind my head and stare at the perfectly clear, blue sky. I have never seen such a deep blue sky in real life. Where we live in Maryland, at the end of the Monongahela Valley system, the sky is a bowl covered with dingy air, exhaust and industrial pollution. It hangs there all summer, occluding any idea of blue.
So. This sky is a true revelation. I am in Fresno and I have found the most beautiful sky in the world. Maybe this is where I will live one day, I think. If I am lucky. I will figure out a way to live in Fresno.
Fresno was not our intended destination. We flew across the country on a flight from Dulles Airport in Virginia to Los Angeles. We were staying with my father’s friends, the Judsons, in San Clemente, right down the beach from Dick and Pat Nixon.
About two weeks into this vacation, the call came from The Wall Street Journal: They needed him to head immediately to Chowchilla, a dairy-farming center in the Central Valley, 256 miles northwest of Los Angeles, one of many small towns in the Central Valley, one of the richest agricultural regions in the world.
A whole school bus of children had vanished without a trace.
So. We all piled into a rental car, turquoise with a white vinyl roof, a car one seat too small for the family. I made the trip squashed on top of a suitcase that was too large to fit in the trunk, headed for Fresno, the largest town proximate to Chowchilla.
When we got to Fresno, my father dropped us off at the Holiday Inn, then peeled out towards Chowchilla. My sister and I sat by the pool, watching our little sisters until they needed their naps. My mother sat in the motel room, fuming.
After the sun had set, my father returned with news, news that had not yet been printed or reported anywhere. There were many reporters in Chowchilla, he said — arriving from all over the world, television cameras, lights, microphones, and they had set up makeshift newsrooms in vans and cars.
He told us how he would call in his story to a secretary in New York who would transcribe his words, how reporters at the local newspaper cooperated with all the out of towners, how reporters generally helped each other.
I asked him about the school bus filled with children.
I think they are dead, he said, shaking his head. That’s what the FBI is saying off the record.
My eyes filled with tears. Dead! My sister Beth started to cry, too.
Ed! My mother half screamed. Stop talking to the girls like that.
My father looked at her and said, These are just the facts of the story. I can’t lie to them. This is truth, Barbara.
Then he went back to explaining as he made a scotch and water, using the bathroom as a makeshift bar, with the ice that I had fetched in the green plastic tub, a task of honor, as in, go fetch me some ice for my drink at the ice machine. He explained how the children had been at summer school, so they were a mixed lot of ages, from five to 14. There were brothers and sisters. There was one adult with them, the bus driver Ed Ray. The bus had been coming back to their school from a field trip at a local pool. Then it vanished.
My father opened his Samsonite briefcase and pulled out the day’s local paper, the Fresno Bee. The front page featured a photo of the Dairyland Union School District bus, spotted by an airplane on the edge of an almond grove, covered with bamboo in a dried-up slough.
It was just like the buses we took to school in Maryland. The black-and-white photo showed armed police officers swarming around the bus.
My father recounted how they found books and bathing suits and towels but no sign of the children.
No bloodshed, he added, responding no doubt to the look my mother gave him.
He also said that local residents were using citizen’s band radios to share information about suspicious activities.
We all walked to a coffee shop down the street for dinner, squeezing into a large, round, corner booth, with a high chair for Jackie. Everyone in the coffee shop was talking about the kidnapping.
I ordered a chocolate milkshake and waffles for dinner and my mother ordered a grilled cheese and a glass of milk. My father and Beth had hamburgers, my father’s a double and he ordered extra raw onion for it. The television was on and we all watched the news report coming live from the field.
Then it was announced there was breaking news and my father, through a large bite of onion and burger, told us all to pipe down, although I don’t recall us talking. The children had been found one hundred miles north in a town called Livermore. And they were all alive.
My father told us all to eat up. He was heading back to Chowchilla, now. As we rushed through our meal, the television reporter showed families gathered at the Chowchilla fire house, then talked to them: They told stories of how they found their children missing when they returned from work, seeing no peanut butter mess from after-school snacks, no sign the television had been turned on — the sets were cold.
The parents cried exhausted tears and clutched each other and as the news spread that the children were alive and fine their wailing rose and shifted to laughter and talk of God and prayers and thanks.
I started to cry, too. Found! I thanked God for their rescue. The children were alive!
My father calmly paid the check, hustled us into the too-small car, scooted us out at the motel, and again peeled out. He would be gone for a day.
I went to bed as told at 10 p.m. that night but had my pink transistor radio under the thin covers of a double bed, my younger sisters sleeping in my parents’ adjoining room; Beth read romance novels on the other bed. I affixed the single, cream-colored Bakelite ear bud into my ear and tuned into the AM news station.
With each hour, more information slipped out. How the children and their bus driver were put into a buried moving truck in a remote quarry. How they had been taken there by three white men, men who stopped the bus in broad daylight, then forced the driver to ditch it in the slough, and then they piled the kids and the bus driver into three vans. Then they drove around for 11 hours. Then they arrived at the quarry, where the children were forced to slip through a hatch into a space lit by battery-powered flashlights, lined with mattresses and a few snacks. Then, as the hours passed and the batteries died, they were left in the darkness. It was hot and dark. Children wept. The bus driver, whose pants had been taken by the kidnappers, and two of the older kids, were able to wedge open the hatch and eventually crawl out. The remote quarry had a night watchman. Then the children and bus driver were rescued and taken to a local military base where they were treated at the hospital.
The next day, we resumed our routine while we waited for our father to return. My mother fumed in the motel room. My sister and I played with the younger ones in the pool. We worked on our tans and read books. The entire time we were in Fresno, we kept that pink transistor radio with us by the pool and listened to the AM news radio. For those five days, Chowchilla was the first story at the top of the hour. I filled the time by creating blocks of activities: I timed myself swimming laps on my waterproof Timex watch. I timed myself sitting on the towel-covered chair. I wrote in my diary about the feeling of the cold pool water hitting my dry and hot skin after one block of 45 minutes in the sun.
My father returned, exhausted, late one morning, and laid down on his bed and slept for many hours. Other reporters from his paper had arrived to spell him. We could all resume the vacation. The next day, my father traded the turquoise rental car for a slightly larger white car and we headed west.
My parents wanted to drive north on famous Highway 1 along the coast, from Santa Barbara to Big Sur and then on to San Francisco. This drive was the first road trip we had ever taken as a family that did not end at the Jersey Shore.
At night, I would tune in to the radio, sitting on the bathroom floor with the door closed, listening aloud until Beth told me it was annoying, then switching to the ear bud. The tile in various Holiday Inn bathrooms was neither white nor beige, somewhere in between, and there was no rug on the floor.
The news remained centered on Chowchilla. I heard one sheriff talk about a tip they had that the kidnappers had modeled their crime after a novel called The Day the Children Vanished. I wrote all of this down into my pink leather diary, which had a small brass lock. I kept the key in my wallet. I wrote down how the families were not rich but they were good, hard working people. And I heard the FBI asked if they thought the kidnappers were psychotic. I did not write down the officer’s answer.
I don’t know how my parents chose the varied stops and highlights for the road trip — some were “first of,” — first Catholic Mission in this part of California. I read the various flyers pinned to the bulletin board while we waited for our table at a diner in Santa Barbara. There was a large, bright flyer advising people how to evacuate if the tsunami siren sounded.
The restaurant was right across from the beach. It was hard to imagine people could get away from a tidal wave, I mentioned casually to my father when we sat down, split between two booths, my mother and sisters at one, my father and I at a smaller table.
He looked at the menu shiny, ordered corned beef hash with two fried eggs and grapefruit juice and after I ordered buttermilk pancakes and hash browns, he said, oh god Leslie the tsunami warnings are planned to give people plenty of time.
When our heaping platters arrived, a stark contrast to the cereal and pale blue skim milk at my mother’s table, she looked over at my father and said, I thought we were on a budget.
My sister Amy then put down the purple crayon she was using to color the paper placemat and started to cry. I sliced strips into the pancake stack and then passed a plate to my sisters. See, we can share, I said.
After the meal, we started to walk towards the beach. But we were stopped by a group of Japanese tourists who poured off a large bus, floppy sun hats pulled down hard and cameras in hand.
One woman politely and slowly stated that she wondered if it was OK to take our photos? We were such typical California girls. Then, my sister Beth and I posed with groups that formed and shifted around us. Finally, my father called out thank you! in a brusque voice and waved for us to cross the road to where my parents and sisters were standing, waiting. But it had left an impression: They thought we were California girls!
The Pacific Ocean was a deep azure and enormous oil rigs dotted the horizon. The water was cold and the sand was dark and rough and unfamiliar. There were no people lounging on the beach. There was no smell of the sea. I asked my father why not.
He explained that the Pacific was considerably colder here than the Atlantic was in New Jersey and that the smell I associated with the ocean was actually the smell of decay, seaweeds, shells, fish. The Pacific was just too cold for that sort of decay.
He also explained that in 1969 the largest oil spill in American waters to date had taken place in this very channel — he pointed towards the rigs — out there.
Almost three million gallons of crude spilled into the sea. This was why the beach is so black, he added. Oil. (The 1969 Santa Barbara spill is now third on the list of all-time worst in American waters, trailing Shell Deepwater in the Gulf of Mexico and the Exxon Valdez in Alaska.)
Because it was big news and news was his business, my father then unfurled a list of statistics about the spill, a faculty that at the time I falsely understood most people possessed; that is, I grew up believing that most people were curious about the world and that they spent time understanding how it operated and having an opinion on its operation. This, of course, is false and has led to profound disappointment over the years but also a sense of extraordinary elation and fellowship when I discover people of the same mindset.
So. The Santa Barbara oil slick was 35 miles long and despoiled beaches as far south as Mexico. The spill also helped to rally the burgeoning environmental movement: Thousands of dead sea birds were photographed, beaks open, tongues askew.
My father lit his pipe and added, sensing our distress, but it doesn’t happen very often and we have gotten very good at cleaning it all up.
When we left the beach, when we went to brush sand off our feet with towels swiped from the Holiday Inn, my youngest sister, Jackie, started to cry. Her feet were covered with dots – black dots. It was tar, and it was on all our feet. My mother, who had not walked on the beach, instead sitting on a bench working on some needlepoint, instructed us not to put our sandals on, to sit still on the bench, and she would be right back. She walked towards some nearby shops.
We started singing rounds of row, row, row your boat to entertain the little girls who quickly forgot their feet and clapped chubby hands and laughed. We were good that way, as girls, we all got along.
My father smoked his pipe and sat in the car, windows open, sky bright and clear. We sat and waited for my mother for a long time. The radio was on, the news as always, and we could overhear conversations about the Chowchilla investigation.
The kidnappers were found after tracing a license plate number of one of the vans used in the crime.
The license plate number was recalled by the bus driver under hypnosis.
The kidnappers were college-age boys from Northern California, friends from a wealthy suburb of San Francisco.
When I said I was hot and tired, waiting, my father passed me a folded copy of The New York Times. It was a few days old.
The Chowchilla story was in the upper right side across an eight-column format.
26 Children Found Safe After Being Kidnapped from Bus in California.
At some point, my mother reappeared. She wore a new outfit, a brightly printed pink and green shift with three-quarter sleeves and bright pink sandals. She looked like a local. I presumed that was the point. She had her usual clothes, loose khaki pants and a Lacoste pullover, in a bag with a shop’s name on it. She handed me a brown paper bag with nail polish remover and cotton balls.
What she wanted us to do was soak the cotton balls and then press and push the tar off our feet. She worked on my younger sisters’ feet. My father sat in the car, periodically calling over, how is operation tootsie going?
When we were de-tarred, we drove to the next Holiday Inn. My mother, as we pulled into their parking lots, would say: Holiday Inn, where the motto is, we teach you to expect very little.
We followed the same routine, unpack car, go to room, my father would carefully unwrap the bottle of scotch he kept in his suitcase, send me to the ice machine, tell us to check out the scene and report back, ask my mother what time we were having dinner and where, and my mother would wander to the front desk and find out where there was a diner or a McDonald’s. Then we would all go for a swim, with my father staying behind in the room, smoking his pipe and enjoying his drink.
Between Santa Barbara and San Francisco there was a town my mother talked about very animatedly, a town called Big Sur. There was a hotel and restaurant she had read about, the Ventana, and she wanted to stop there for lunch. My father did not ignore or vote down this request, as he ignored and voted down many of her and our requests on the trip: Could we go to a drive-in movie? No. Could we stop and get some food? No. Could we change the radio station and listen to the Top 40 countdown? No.
But the Ventana was a yes and the day we were to go there, my mother buzzed around our room, pulled bright sundresses from our suitcases, pressing them, asking us to take care with our hair.
She carefully cleaned the little girls’ fingernails, brushed their golden hair and popped in plastic clips that had cows and dogs and kittens on them. Then we rode in silence to the Ventana.
The staff looked at our family and told us that because we did not have a reservation, they would try to set up a table on the patio. They said this after they initially told us there was not a place for us and my mother looked like she was going to punch someone in the face. Then my father said we had come all the way from Maryland to have lunch there. I imagine how we must have looked, in our sundresses, trip-soiled white sandals, chipped toe nail polish, the carefully arranged hair, my father in a rumpled Brooks Brothers seersucker jacket, his pipe clenched in his teeth, my mother looking tense in her frosted coral lipstick and bright pink Santa Barbara shift.
The table was on the patio adjacent to the indoor dining room. My mother muttered about how we were given an inferior table because they were traveling with children. She glared into the dining room. There are no children inside, she said. I knew it.
My father started doing a sell job on her, which usually worked. He was very charming and knew how to calm her down. It was better to eat outside in Big Sur than inside.
My mother looked less furious and simply disappointed, glancing furtively at the people sitting inside, the people talking and laughing, tan and wearing beige and white and gold jangly bracelets.
We got the menus and my mother scanned it. She and my father exchanged looks.
She then told us what we could have. Soup. We could each have a bowl of soup. The soup of the day was something called gazpacho, which my mother said was a great choice, a cold tomato soup.
We put our menus down.
Do not, she added, order iced tea or sodas. We are on a budget.
When the waitress came, my mother ordered soup for herself, me, and my sister Beth, inquired about some toast for the little girls, and then my father ordered a hamburger with jack cheese and avocado, and a beer. When he ordered the beer, my mother added that she would change her order to a half avocado filled with shrimp salad. She also ordered an iced tea. I wanted that, too, but I knew not to ask.
The waitress paused, looked at what she had written down on her pad and then she said that we were under the minimum per person, so we might as well order more because the check would reflect the minimum. The minimum was $5 a person.
My mother stiffened and raised her voice: We are not trying to beat the minimum.
I hated when she used that harsh tone with strangers in public places; it was bad to get it aimed at you at home but in public it was also humiliating. We all did. My father made a face at the waitress, a forlorn smile of sorts.
Beth kicked me under the table. Of course we were trying to beat the minimum. My mother always instructed us to order the cheapest thing on the menu, wherever we ate.
The waitress’ voice cracked as she told my mother there was no insinuation we were trying to beat the minimum. Then she called her ma’am, stood for an instant gazing at my mother, and backed away saying, let me give you a moment to consider. The mood was tense.
There was a brief moment of silence. Then my father asked for the menu back. My mother sat there, fuming. He looked down the menu and then asked me and Beth if we wanted something else. We chose guacamole and chips and Cokes. Then my younger sisters ordered strawberries. He stood and walked to the waitress and I could see he was apologizing. Did he slip her a bill, too? Perhaps.
When the food came, the waitress spoke only to my father.
Sitting at the Ventana, gazing out over the deep blue Pacific, eating guacamole and spicy gazpacho.
My father ate his burger and drank his cold beer and told us all it was the best burger he had ever had. He did this to soothe my mother. She always fell for it. The sound of his voice telling us all this was the best it could ever be — and we all believed him. My mother had softened by the time the meal was done, and she talked about how she had never had such delicious avocado. How all the food in California tasted so much better. Then she continued talking, a good sign the rage had passed, adding that it must be because we were so close to where it was grown, so we were getting it fresh from the growers. Not like at the Super Giant in Maryland.
After lunch, we went to Henry Miller’s home and my parents walked ahead holding hands, which was rare for them. They had met on a beach in New Jersey when she was 22 and he was 25. He was working for the editorial page for The Wall Street Journal and she was a secretary in advertising. It was 1957. They dated for six weeks, got engaged, and got married in a modest ceremony in Northern New Jersey. After a fast honeymoon at Nag’s Head, North Carolina, they were back in New York City working. Then they transferred to the Washington bureau, then they had four kids, then my father won the Pulitzer Prize. He was rarely home. She lived a life alone with her daughters in a remote suburban berg of DC, cleaning floors, exercising to Jane Fonda tapes, and working on needlepoint.
From Big Sur, we headed north again to San Francisco, where we stayed in a Holiday Inn near Fisherman’s Wharf. There was a large, brick cannery building there that had been converted into shops and restaurants. We wandered around the building — it was damp and cold and grey, summer in San Francisco — and my mother had chosen a restaurant called Tiger Lily for lunch.
We were heading to Alcatraz after the little girls’ naps.
I don’t recall where my father was that day; perhaps there was more work to do on the Chowchilla reporting. The story had not faded during the rest of the vacation.
The story had simply unfurled itself into my mind across the AM radio, through the single earbud while my sisters slept. I followed the story for years.
The men were going to be tried and convicted; they would grow old in jail.
The story evolved to focus on how brave the bus driver, Ed Ray, was to motivate the kids to crawl out of that tomb, where they all could have died. Why had the kidnappers’ done it? It was a scheme to raise $5 million in ransom, and the thinking was that California, with its $1 billion surplus, would pay for the children. Then the kidnappers would be rich. Or as one commentator said, even richer. Rich kids needing to be richer at any cost.
At the Tiger Lily, without my father in tow, my mother was in charge and asked for a table by the windows, as she had requested when she made the reservation.
When we were seated, she made a point of telling us to make sure we always called ahead for important meals. Or else you might be disappointed. I knew she was referencing the Ventana.
My sister Beth looked determinedly out the window, lips pressed together. The little girls colored, carefully choosing crayons from a massive stack, all sizes and colors, coral, lime green, sky blue. My mother looked incredibly pleased. She suggested we all have crab salads and iced teas. We agreed.
The little girls had the special children’s meals, tiny hot dogs and tiny French fries and chocolate milk.
I thought about all of the movies and television shows I had seen where people sat in restaurants in California, bathed in this same bright light and wearing bright prints and smiling and tan. From our window table we could see the Golden Gate Bridge. When the iced tea arrived, after we each added sweetener, we all lifted cups and in the case of the little girls, mugs, and clicked them together and my mother said, To the Golden State!
In recent years, living in Northern California, I have had my fascination with the Chowchilla kidnappers re-ignited. Two of whom were brothers and were paroled in the 21st century after serving a combined 120 or so years in prison. The brothers moved back to their mother’s home and one works for an architectural drafting firm and one takes care of the mother. They live on what we call “the Peninsula,” the wealthy suburbs south of San Francisco where they gestated their horrific scheme.
The third kidnapper took longer to get parole because he was discovered to have child pornography on his mobile phone in prison. The Chowchilla kidnapping is anthologized in crimes-of-the-century books and has been depicted in made-for-television movies. I have seen them all.
The town of Chowchilla has an annual day to recognize the bus driver, Ed Ray, who was a bona fide local hero, and lived the rest of his life as such, esteemed and lauded by his neighbors in the dusty, Central Valley town.
I brought up the trip to one of my younger sisters and she vaguely recalled the trip to California but had no memory of the Chowchilla kidnapping. What she recalled was sitting in the rental car, the one too small for the family and the luggage, and how she had been perched on top of a suitcase in the backseat, head wedged against the car’s padded ceiling, car barreling along the freeway.
When I saw the news that the last Chowchilla kidnapper made parole, I called my father who lives in an assisted living facility in Florida, not far from the house where my mother lives. She goes to see him once a week. He says he likes the assisted living place, how there is no TV in his room and he can sleep and sit in the sun.
I read to him how the two brothers had moved back into their mother’s home and one worked as an architectural draftsman, a skill he had learned in prison. The other one did not work and was said to be at home, taking care of the mother.
“Boy oh boy,” he said, without hesitation. “They were bad guys. Can you imagine what rotten souls they had? These children were not going to be found. Everyone would have died in that crypt they made if it were not for that bus driver.”
On that Friday, with the goal to parse or chuck ephemera, I found myself both weeping and laughing at my catalogue of that trip. For a long time, that version of California defined the place for me. When I moved to California many years ago with a boyfriend from San Francisco, returning home, I held that view and those flavors in my mind. The last time I went to the Ventana, it seemed almost hokey in its goals — to be both earthy and extravagant, to be both part of that extraordinary coast and entirely exclusive. The view, of course, was spectacular and the memories of my mother’s rage lingered briefly in the sun. The yellowed clippings from the Fresno Bee talking about the crime, the cocktail napkins from the Ventana and The Tiger Lily, with their dated fonts, snapshots of the Fresno Holiday Inn, the soda machine glowing like some benevolent god in an early evening gloaming. My sisters are in the pool, swimming in pale water illuminated by pool lights spread across the interior. None of them look at the camera. My mother is standing at the upstairs rail, watching. My father, of course, must be in Chowchilla. I close the book and rise up and stand and stretch and look out the window at the pale expanse of Pacific Ocean, a view that is wide open towards the West, and on this clear afternoon I can see all the way to the Farallons. The late, great, golden state.
Leslie Carol Roberts, author, research scholar, journalist, and photographer thinks about climate, ecologies, and narratives of place. In 2018, she founded the ECOPOESIS Project with two architects as part of the Architectural Ecologies Lab, exploring community building and made work around climate change; their ecological pandemic responses include How We Hear Now. A SCAR-HASSEG research group member, Leslie’s work includes “The Gigaton Ice Theatre: Performing Eco-Activism in Antarctica” a chapter in Performing Ice (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020.) She is the author of two books, Here Is Where I Walk: Episodes from a Life in the Forest (Nevada, 2019) and The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctic (Nebraska, 2008, 2011) and has worked in Australia, Antarctica, New Zealand, and Thailand. Leslie’s writing has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Fast Company, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Iowa Review, The Believer, and Fourth Genre, among many others. Her life was changed when she received a Fulbright and for this she is forever grateful. Her day jobs are as faculty at California College of the Arts, where she chairs the MFA Writing Program and in the Critical Craft Theory program at Warren Wilson College. Find more of her work here: https://www.architecturalecologies.cca.edu.