Of a certain age...

My grandfather Frank, my father's father, popped in to say hello the other day, and I was reminded how much I regretted not talking to him more about what life was like for him and Grandma Jo back in the early 1900s.

He used to write me long letters, many pages on both sides, in pencil on yellow legal paper, over the years because after about age 16, I rarely saw them when we moved from Long Island, New York, to Miami Beach, Florida. All I remembered hearing as a child was that they had many adventures traveling across the country from New York to California by train, steamboat, railroad and mule team. I didn't really appreciate the value of those letters, and they got lost along the way as I moved from Miami to Chicago to Los Angels to Tampa to Los Angeles to St. Petersburg and back to Los Angeles, leaving many things behind.

Sometime after he and my grandmother died, on a visit to New York with my sister for New Year's Eve, I was going through the attic of their home in the Bronx in the shadow of the Whitestone Bridge, and found a box of those yellow pages he never sent. Again I put that history away and didn't get around to opening that box until many years later after I moved to Mammoth Lakes, California in 2002.

When I finally opened the box and began reading his words, I dove into a rich history of the opening of the West to civilization. His resume began: "Research, Pioneering, Explorations, and Invasions by a young tenderfoot in and about the realms of the states of New Jersey, New York, California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania."

It began in 1905 at age 16, when he worked construction in the tunnels under Manhattan Island, from the East River to Long Island City for the Pennsylvania Railroad. By 1910 he was a surveyor for New York Central Railroad, laying out the track lines around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Every day after work, he got off the train and was greeted by a plaque quoting Horace Greeley that read: "Go West, young man. Go West and grow up with the country."

And so he did. He convinced his young bride, Josephine, a young woman with strong religious traditions and a sharpshooter with a 30-ought-six, to accompany him on this adventure. "Boarded the SS Mons SPRR Line. Steamer for New Orleans, Louisiana then via SPRR to El Paso, Texas and the Alamo, Texas and old Mexico - then on via SPRR Flyer to Los Angeles, California. The first sight to see in Los Angeles was the ruins of the Los Angeles Times Bldg. - explosion Sept. 1910."

Grandma Jo got a job as a switchboard operator in Los Angeles, while Papa went off with "a crew of 30 to 35 technical experts to invade and explore the Colorado River from Parker, Arizona to the Grand Canyon" by wagon train and eventually chose the site for and worked on what became Hoover Dam.

They spent their "first Christmas together with the Chemenuevi Indians trading and exchanging cans of tomatoes and evaporated milk for Indian craftsman products while learning to get along with them." She birthed and nursed my father and his brother between visits as he continued to survey hundreds of miles of interstate highways (I-8 and I-5) and railway lines, and for the construction of 246 miles of 300,000-volt high-tension transmission lines across the Tehachapi Mountain Range of the Angeles National Forest all the way to Palm Desert. He mentioned the sun shines 365 days a year and temperatures reach 130 degrees by midday.

There's so much more to tell - Indian encounters, working with Chinese laborers, an infestation of chuckwallas, floods and snowstorms, Grandma having to fire that 30-ought-six to chase the coyotes out of the campground - but fascinating as it all is, my point in telling this story is that in 1911, he found himself traveling a narrow-gauge railroad arriving in the town of Laws, near Bishop, California, in the middle of the water wars when William Mulholland was stealing the water rights from the farmers in Owens Valley to build his aqueduct to bring water to green the desert called Los Angeles. Papa was there with a survey crew to surreptitiously find a good place to build a dam.

That dam created Crowley Lake in the Long Valley Caldera, which resulted from a mega-volcanic eruption 760,000 years ago in the Sierra Nevada Range, south of the Cascades, at the base of Mammoth Mountain, where I sat reading about my grandfather's adventures - 100 years later.

My dog Spirit and I retraced his steps through the gorge, from where they put in at Tom's Place off a dirt road, which is now SR 395 to Casa Diablo, the resurgent dome where the Paiute used to hold sweat lodges and ceremonies, which still boils and heaves, threatening the town of Mammoth Lakes to this day. I walked in his footprints and probably peed on the same rocks that he did.

When I think about it, I experience those regrets about not having read his letters as a teenager and not asking him about his life when he was alive, and I wish my grandchildren would ask me about the history I lived through. Of course they won't ... but I won't just leave them a box of yellowed papers; I'm writing a book about my adventures through history.