How I Got Here: Willard Barnes

(left) Celia Barnes with her grandpa Willard in 1900 and again with Matthew and me 93 years later.

I can remember the exact moment. I was standing by myself on the hot sidewalk outside our house in California. I was 7 or maybe 8 years old and I wondered very simply- how did I get here? How did I happen to be standing here at this exact moment? What events happened before me to bring me to this place? I knew some things about my parents and my grandparents but nothing more. A few obscure stories told by by dad but beyond that our family story was fading fast.

Many times as a kid my family would go for weekend rides into the foothills east of Sacramento. Grandma Ruth (dad's mom) was widowed when I was small and she often join us. My mom would bring a picnic lunch. A few times our wanderings (for I really believe that my dad had no plan when we started out) we found ourselves out near the old gold mining town of Grass Valley. On one of the trips Grandma Ruth said that she had been born up there and we even visited an old man that was her cousin. He lived on an old run down family ranch. These little glimpses helped me a bit but it really intensified my curiosity: how and why here?

One night when I was an grown I called Grandma and asked her who her grandfather was. "Oh honey, I really don't know. You see he died before I was born." Grandma was the youngest of her two sisters and brother. What she didn't know was that I had just been to the National Archives branch is Seattle and had spent the weekend digging up our family bones. What I wanted from Grandma was some flesh to add to the skeleton. Stories of our family. Who they were. Something besides the numbers found on old census records and land deeds. More than dates and names. She knew a lot about our family of course but didn't know much about her Grandpa. Lucky for me, she knew who did.

Grandma's sister, who was "Aunt Celia" to me, was still alive and living in Sacramento. Born in 1899 she was a teenager when her grandfather passed. This was the connection I needed and it wasn't long before I was sitting in her living room with a tape recorder on the table asking questions. She talked and showed me ancient pictures that were stored in a huge box that she had brought up her ladder-like basement stairs before we arrived. She went on for hours and I thought could have continued all night.

She told how her grandfather, a poor little boy from Upstate New York whose father had died when he was young and had been sold into bondage by his evil mother. The boy named Willard was a "bond boy", she explained, who slaved away on a farm until he was of legal age.

Ent!! Well not exactly Aunt Celia. I didn't have the heart to tell her that this version of young Willard Barnes early years was a bit exaggerated in our passed down family lore. His father really did die about 1840 when he was small but Willard's mother didn't abandon him. She remarried and following the custom of the time his son became an indentured servant, early America's version of foster parenting. We will never know if young Willard was treated worse than all the other kids in house, but we do know that the Henderson's remained "shirttail relatives" of the Barnes clan so I like to think he was treated fine. And we know he was with his mother.

Digging through some library archives I found a newspaper ad from the mid-1800's of a type young adult Willard may have seen. "Come to the Gold Fields of California!!" it screams across the top. A map shows two water routes, one around the horn of South America and the other a short cut across the Isthmus of Panama by mule. I can picture him saving the ad, maybe even hiding it from everyone else in the house, and dreaming of the day he would be free to do as he pleased. Crossing to the other side of the country by ship and making his way to the gold fields was indeed dreaming big. And when he was old enough, 18 years, he packed his scant belongings, kissed his mother goodbye and started his new life by heading west.

He chose the short Panama route. Allister Cooke in his book "America" writes of the horrid conditions in Panama. The heat, dysentary and disease spreading mosquitos were awful. But he made it and boarded the steamer ship "Golden Gate" on the other side and headed north to San Francisco. He wasn't exactly a 49'er but in 1851 my family had arrived on the west coast.

He went up the Sacramento River and settled in the San Joaquin Valley. Knowing farming, not gold mining, his plan was to homestead in the valley and feed the miners up in hills. Things worked well for over 10 years. His farm on the Yuba River was perfectly positioned to serve both the mining camps to the east and the anywhere up or down river. That is until Christmas 1861. Willard, now married with two children, probably wasn't alarmed when the rain started. But it soon became clear that this was no ordinary winter storm. It rained for almost four weeks without stopping and most of the valley near the rivers was several feet under water.

His friends in the town of Linda looked for the Barnes family during the flood and couldn't find them. The local paper listed them as among the missing and the worst was feared. It wasn't until the waters receded that they were able to crawl out of a granary, a raised building that holds wheat or feed. The flooding wasn't exclusive to central California but ravaged the entire west coast. The town of Champoeg, near where I live now, was wiped out by floods in the same month.

Willard and family decided to rebuild on higher ground, away from the unpredictable river and closer to the mining towns where their produce would be bought. They found good land 30 miles to the east in-- you guessed it-- Grass Valley.

Willard had several sons who grew up and made their fortunes in bigger towns, followed by a couple of daughters who married locals and stayed in Grass Valley. Finally he had one last son in 1875. He must have been relieved to have another boy to help him out on the ranch and the boy may have felt some obligation to stay with his dad for as long as needed. But the boy, John Fayette Barnes, like his father before him on the Henderson farm all those years before, dreamt of something more. Something different. When Willard finally became too old to work the ranch, he leased it out to another family and moved into a spare room of his married daughter in the residential area of Grass Valley. His son John also moved to town and started a lumber business to take advantage of the explosive town growth. His first child he named Celia-- and now I sat in her living room.

Aunt Celia remembered walking over several blocks to visit her grandpa. She talked about how he would cut off a willow branch and use his pen knife to make whistles for all the kids. She said that she saw him get upset when he found that the man on the old ranch had cut down a favorite tree on the property. And she showed me a picture of her sitting on his lap when she was but a baby.

Willard died in 1913 at the age of 83 of stroke. He had gone outside to feed the chickens at his daughters home when she found him on the ground. He was brought inside and ate lunch while the doctor was being called saying "a Barnes can always eat." But he passed later that afternoon. Aunt Celia had made the name and numbers into a real person.

My grandma Ruth was born that next year and after World War I ended her dad's lumber business was no longer as profitable so John moved the family to the Sacramento where he worked as an architect. She later married Gerald Geiger and my dad came along in 1934.

Maybe everyone retains that memory of the moment of their self awareness. That unique time in our lives when we stop suddenly and are slapped with the most obvious of personal questions: how did I get here? That kid standing on the hot summer sidewalk in Rancho Cordova now has at least part of the answer. Great-great grandpa Willard brought me here by mule.

Training update: It probably makes more sense to do a few more weeks of base training. I need the strength and endurance. I got over 30 miles last week, I'll do 40 this week, then go for 50 and 60. That will give me 12 week of race specific training before Portland.