UNITED STATES—Graydon Miller was lost again, that odious phase of ‘finding yourself.’ He really did like maps, to be sure. The first drawing he ever did as a gradeschooler was a pair of outlines of the State of Texas and Idaho, on a cardboard canvas that he painted and gave as a gift to his grandparents. Unlike the other cute drawing it never went on the wall or on the refrigerator, but at the bottom of a drawer as revealed when they cleaned out Grandma’s house.
“They must have hated it. They must have hated each other, at least part of the time.”
Miller’s imagination was fueled by somebody he talked to in a shopping center parking lot up in Washington state. Somebody with a flag with a Douglas fir on it. “What’s that?” he asked. Oh, that’s the flag of Cascadia. That’s something people talk about carving out their own country from British Columbia to Washington and Oregon. (In the conversation Miller give that rapport instinct and facial gesture to assure the guy that he, too, though Cascadia was the looniest thing he’s ever heard of). But it wasn’t, either. He was on a different trip now, one that would encompass triumph and sadness.
The border would follow four county’s southern lines, Marin, Solano, Sacramento, Amador and El Dorado, that would be where the line was drawn, and he held the outline in his mind’s eye. Solano County, Alex Solano, the other Mexicans called him a coconut: brown on the outside and white on the inside. Mom and Dad whispered about such things when they thought the kids were sound asleep.
Far from asleep, we were in a state of total receptivity: their whispered words mainlined straight into our consciousness sound awake as we lay abed with the new secret of sexuality. Racial identity, too, was like belonging to a club and the nature of clubs was to define membership and Alex Solano, in his own way, was denied membership by his own people.
Fast backward to 1954, a disgruntled Sergeant from the Guatemalan army, had caused a stir revealing the treatment of cadets at the nation’s top military academy, la Escuela Nacional. Juan David Castillo Guerra was now selling RCA television sets at a department store in the capital. That was where the Company agent, one of these guys who kept a buzz cut through the hippie times and looked so dorky before the buzz cut became a cool option again, tracked him down. Colonel Alberto Guerra fit the bill and passed his audition.
“He looks so Indian,” “he’s perfect,” purred one of the Dewey brothers. “Just the type that the populace would go for. “Alfred’s brother, John, in State cooed approbation, for the dark copper indio look of Guerra lent plausibility to the rise of a coup disguised as a revolution.
On the long windy roads as the sun sinks fast, you can see the gold coins of head lights coming down bright angled past the Douglas fir, official tree of Concordia… Yes! Concordia, that embraced all. All, ALL. . . . That was the place and the name. Graydon Miller knew in all his squeezed, zip-locked heart.
To be continued…
