Finding Queen Calafia

1. From the Memoirs of Dr. Meredith Osborne

What do the ramblings of an old woman, bound to a wheelchair and living only through her memories, have to do with you? Why, you ask yourself on the second page of this memoir, do I care about the nostalgic visitations to her childhood haunts? Her fantasies and dreams have become nearly indistinguishable from what really happened. Life is but a dream, kind readers, and there is no true history - all we ever have is a story. Please, you might say, don't bore me, and then you will turn these pages face down wherever you happen to be and check your phone. I understand.

It is always worth taking the time to learn about the world in a not too distant past, how things were done, the outdated customs, what has been lost or forgotten that is worth remembering, or who was forgotten but not lost. You could skip to the good part, where the story changes and the stakes are raised -- the point of no return, the battle, the resolution, the monsters and villains, of which there are many, and go back to your chores, your homework or your job, small talk and chatter. But I ask that you sit here with me for a while and indulge an old woman and remember that the old world was, in fact, newer.

I ask you to be patient.  Let me begin at the beginning.

I was told by my mother that I was born on a warm and sunny July morning in San Francisco, which I find unlikely. San Francisco summers are infamously polar. My mother, however, insisted that the breeze was warm and carried with it the scent of coastal sagebrush and cypress. As she gazed through the window with her newborn daughter in her arms, she recalled the skies were so clear that she could see straight out to the Farallon Islands. And so she named me Meredith, which means Sea Lord. Life is full of cruel ironies. I would come to understand that I was destined to be lord of nothing, let alone the wild, untamable sea. The life that awaited me was to be one of duty and obligation and not the high-spirited adventures I so desired.

There was always some glimmer of unrest reflected in my mother's eyes, as if she were a bird trapped in the shape of a woman. My father, on the other hand, was an entirely earthbound creature with a pragmatic nature and not prone to daydreaming. He was a civil engineer, and a serious man with serious problems to solve. Roland Osborne did not trouble himself with the naming of daughters. As for the naming of bridges and roads, nothing was more urgent than ensuring that one's legacy become bound to the timeless monuments of civilization. Bridges, towers, cities, roads, skyscrapers, dams...they all crumble to dust in time.

One of the "problems" that concerned my father was how to prevent fresh water that flowed from the Sierra Nevada from reaching the sea – that same sea over which I was destined, if only by name, to rule. I felt the sting of this. If I was to be ruler of the sea, I once told him, then all rivers west of the Rockies should eventually run towards my watery domain, unimpeded. He was not amused. "Dams, Meredith," he liked to say, "will come to represent California as the pyramids represent the power of the pharaohs. And the world would be better off because of them. So long as rivers run amok– meandering this way and that, undisciplined, squandering such a useful resource - then so will people."

Although the damming of California's great rivers did and still do play an enormous role in shaping California, I later learned that they also provided power to the engines of war and as agents of extinction, although I never told him this. He hoped one day that a bridge or a dam would be named after him. Sadly, this never was to be the case.

My brother Bill was born a year and a half after me into a much more promising future. We grew up in a big, drafty Edwardian flat in the center of what is still today a very posh neighborhood called Pacific Heights. We were attended in our early years by a strict, humorless governess with a wandering eye, just one of many as we did them all in eventually. A fleet of interchangeable servants whispered in the hallways about the affairs of the adults, but nobody paid much attention to either of us, so long as our demands upon the time and patience of the house staff were kept in check. I knew early on that Bill, freckled and cherubic with the face of an innocent, would get away with everything I could not, and so I enlisted him as my accomplice in each and every scheme I cooked up, even when the recipes called for a little pinch of calamity or a dash of narrowly averted disaster.